The Light and the Dark (3 page)

Seeing her in her own family, one felt most of all that yearning and the strain it caused. In the long drawing-room that night, I looked across at her husband and her daughter. The Master was standing beside one of the lofty fire screens, his hand on a Queen Anne chair, trim and erect in his tails like a much younger man. He and Lady Muriel exchanged some words: there was loyalty between them, but no ease. And Joan, the eldest of the Royces’ children, a girl of eighteen, stood beside him, silent and constrained. Her face at the moment seemed intelligent, strong and sulky. When she answered a direct question from her mother, the friction sounded in each syllable. Lady Muriel sturdily asked another question in a more insistent voice.

The butler called out “Mr Calvert”, and Roy came quickly up the long room, past the small tables, towards the group of us standing by the fire. Lady Muriel’s face lightened, and she cried out: “Good evening, Roy. I almost thought you were going to be late.”

“I’m never late, Lady Muriel,” said Roy. “You should know that, shouldn’t you? I am never late, unless it’s somewhere I don’t want to go. Then I usually appear on the wrong day.”

“You’re quite absurd,” said Lady Muriel, who did not use a hostess’ opening topic with Roy. “I wonder why I allow you in the house.”

“Because you know I like to come,” said Roy. He knew it pleased her – but each word was clear, natural, without pretence.

“You’ve learned to flatter too young,” she said with a happy crow of laughter.

“You’re suspicious of every nice thing you hear, Lady Muriel. Particularly when it’s true,” said Roy. “Now aren’t you?”

“I refuse to argue with you.” She laughed happily. Roy turned to Joan, and began teasing her about what she should do at the university next year: but he did not disarm her as easily as her mother.

Just then the Boscastles entered from one of the inner doors. They were an incongruous pair, but they had great presence and none of us could help watching them. Lord Boscastle was both massive and fat; there was muscular reserve underneath his ample, portly walk, and he was still light on his feet. His face did not match his comfortable body: a great beak of a nose stood out above a jutting jaw, with a stiff grey moustache between them. By his side, by the side of Lady Muriel and Joan, who were both strong women, his wife looked so delicate and frail that it seemed she ought to be carried. She was fragile, thin with an invalid’s thinness, and she helped herself along with a stick. In the other hand she carried a lorgnette, and, while she was limping slowly along, she was studying us all with eyes that, even at a distance, shone a brilliant porcelain blue. She had aged through illness, her skin was puckered and brown, she looked at moments like a delicate, humorous and distinguished monkey; but it was easy to believe that she had once been noted for her beauty.

I watched her as I was being presented to her, and as Roy’s turn came. He smiled at her: as though by instinct, she gave a coquettish flick with the lorgnette. I was sure he felt, as I had felt myself, that she had always been courted, that she still, on meeting a strange man at a party, heard the echoes of gallant words.

Lord Boscastle greeted us with impersonal cordiality, and settled down to his sherry. The last guest came, Mrs Seymour, a cousin of Lady Muriel’s who lived in Cambridge, and soon we set out to walk to the dining-room. This took some time, for the Lodge had been built, reconstructed, patched up and rebuilt for five hundred years, and we had to make our way along narrow passages, down draughty stairs, across landings: Lady Boscastle’s stick tapped away in front, and I talked to Mrs Seymour, who seemed gentle, inane, vague and given to enthusiasms. She was exactly like Lady Muriel’s concept of a suitable dinner partner for one of the younger fellows, I thought. In addition, Lady Muriel, to whom disapproval came as a natural response to most situations, disapproved with particular strength of my leaving my wife in London. She was not going to let me get any advantages through bad conduct, so far as she could help it.

Curiously enough, the first real excitement of the dinner arrived through Mrs Seymour. We sat round the table in the candlelight, admired the table which had come from the family house at Boscastle – “from our house,” said Lady Muriel with some superbity – admired the Bevill silver, and enjoyed ourselves with the food and wine. Both were excellent, for Lady Muriel had healthy appetites herself, and also was not prepared to let her dinners be outclassed by anything the college could do. She sat at the end of the table, stiff-backed, bold-eyed, satisfied that all was well with her side of the evening, inspecting her guests as though she were weighing their more obvious shortcomings.

She began by taking charge of the conversation herself. “Mr Eliot was putting forward an interesting point of view before dinner,” she said in an authoritative voice, and then puzzled us all by describing my opinions on Paul Morand. It seemed that I had a high opinion of his profundity. Joan questioned her fiercely, Roy soothed them both, but it was some time before we realised that she meant Mauriac. It was a kind of intellectual malapropism such as she frequently made. I thought, not for the first time, that she was at heart uninterested in all this talk of ideas and books – but she did it because it was due to her position, and nothing would have deterred her. Not in the slightest abashed, she repeated “Mauriac” firmly twice and was going ahead, when Mrs Seymour broke in: “Oh, I’d forgotten. I meant to tell you straightaway, but that comes of being late. I’ve always said that they ought to put an extra light on your dressing-table. Particularly in strange bedrooms–”

“Yes, Doris?” Lady Muriel’s voice rang out.

“I haven’t told you, have I?”

“You have certainly told us nothing since you arrived.”

“I thought I’d forgotten. Tom’s girl is engaged. It will be in
The Times
this week.”

The Boscastles and the Royces all knew the genealogy of “Tom’s girl”. For Mrs Seymour might be scatterbrained, but her breeding was the Boscastles’ own; she had married a Seymour, who was not much of a catch but was eminently “someone one could know”, and Tom was her husband’s brother. So Tom’s girl was taken seriously, even though Lord Boscastle had never met her, and Lady Muriel only once. She was part of the preserve. Abandoning in a hurry all abstract conversation, Lady Muriel plunged in with her whole weight. She sat more upright than ever and called out: “Who is the man?”

“He’s a man called Houston Eggar.”

Lord Boscastle filled the chair on his sister’s right. He finished a sip of hock, put down the glass, and asked: “Who?”

“Houston Eggar.”

Lady Muriel and Lord Boscastle looked at each other. In a faint, tired, disconsolate tone Lord Boscastle said: “I’m afraid I don’t know the fellow.”

“I can help,” said the Master briskly from the other end of the table. “He’s a brother-in-law of the Dean of this college. He’s dined in hall once or twice.”

“I’m afraid,” said Lord Boscastle, “that I don’t know who he is.”

There was a moment’s silence, and I looked at the faces round the table. Lord Boscastle was holding his glass up to the candlelight and staring unconcernedly through it. Roy watched with an expression solemn, demure, enquiring: but I caught his eye for a second, and saw a gleam of pure glee: each word was passing into his mimic’s ear. By his side, Joan was gazing down fixedly at the table, the poise of her neck and strong shoulders full of anger, scorn and the passionate rebellion of youth. Mrs Seymour seemed vaguely troubled, as though she had mislaid her handbag; she patted her hair, trying to get a strand into place. On my right Lady Boscastle had mounted her lorgnette and focused the others one by one.

It was she who asked the next question.

“Could you tell us a little about this Dean of yours, Vernon?” she said to the Master, in a high, delicate, amused voice.

“He’s quite a good Dean,” said the Master. “He’s very useful on the financial side. Colleges need their Marthas, you know. The unfortunate thing is that one can never keep the Marthas in their place. Before you can look round, you find they’re running the college and regarding you as a frivolous and irresponsible person.”

“What’s the Dean’s name?” said Lord Boscastle, getting back to the point.

“Chrystal.”

“It sounds Scotch,” said Lord Boscastle dubiously.

“I believe, Lord Boscastle,” Roy put in, seeming tentative and diffident, “that he comes from Bedford.”

Lord Boscastle shook his head.

“I know his wife, of course,” said Lady Muriel. “Naturally I have to know the wives of the fellows. She’s a nice quiet little thing. But there’s nothing special about her. She’s an Eggar, whoever they may be.”

“She’s the sister of this man you’re telling us about,” Lord Boscastle remarked, half to himself. “I should have said he was nothing out of the ordinary, shouldn’t you have said so?”

His social judgments became more circuitous the nearer they came to anyone the company knew: Lady Muriel, more direct and unperceptive than her brother, had never quite picked up the labyrinthine phrases with which he finally placed an acquaintance of someone in the room; but in effect she and he said the same thing.

Mrs Seymour, who was still looking faintly distressed, suddenly clapped her hands.

“Of course, I’d forgotten to tell you. I’ve just remembered about the post office place–”

“Yes, Doris?” said Lady Muriel inexorably.

“Houston’s a brilliant young man. He’s in the Foreign Office. They said he was first secretary” – Mrs Seymour gabbled rapidly in case she should forget – “at that place which looks after the post, the place in Switzerland, I forget–”

“Berne,” Roy whispered.

“Berne.” She smiled at him gratefully.

“How old is your Houston?” asked Lady Boscastle.

“About forty, I should say. And I think that’s a very nice and sensible age,” said Mrs Seymour with unexpected firmness. “I always wished my husband had been older–”

“If he’s only a first secretary at forty, I should not think he was going so terribly far.” Lady Boscastle directed her lorgnette at her husband. “I remember one years younger. We were in Warsaw. Yes, he was clever.” A faint, sarcastic, charming smile crossed her face. Lord Boscastle smiled back – was I imagining it, or was there something humble, unconfident, about that smile?

At any rate, he began to address the table again.

“I shouldn’t have thought that the Foreign Office was specially distinguished nowadays. I’ve actually known one or two people who went in,” he added as though he were straining our credulity.

While he thought no one was looking, Roy could not repress a smile of delight. He could no longer resist taking a hand: his face composed again, he was just beginning to ask Lord Boscastle a question, when Lady Muriel cut across him.

“Of course,” she said, “someone’s obliged to do these things.”

“Someone’s obliged to become civil servants and look after the drains,” said Lord Boscastle with good-natured scorn. “That doesn’t make it any better.”

Roy started again.

“Should you have said, Lord Boscastle,” (the words, the tone, sounded suspiciously like Lord Boscastle’s own) “that the Foreign Office was becoming slightly
common
?”

Lord Boscastle regarded him, and paused.

“Perhaps that would be going rather far, Calvert. All I can say is that I should never have gone in myself. And I hope my son doesn’t show any signs of wanting to.”

“Oh, it must be wonderful to make treaties and go about in secret–” cried Mrs Seymour, girlish with enthusiasm, her voice trailing off.

“Make treaties!” Lord Boscastle chuckled. “All they do is clerk away in offices and get one out of trouble if one goes abroad. They do it like conscientious fellows, no doubt.”

“Why shouldn’t you like your son to want it, Lord Boscastle?” Roy asked, his eyes very bright.

“I hope that, if he feels obliged to take up a career, he’ll choose something slightly more out of the ordinary.”

“It isn’t because you don’t want him to get into low company?” Lord Boscastle wore a fixed smile. Roy looked more than ever demure.

“Of course,” said Roy, “he might pick up an unfortunate accent from one of those people. One needs to be careful. Do you think,” he asked earnestly, “that is the reason why some of them are so anxious to learn foreign languages? Do you think they hope it will cover up their own?”

“Mr Calvert!” Lady Boscastle’s voice sounded high and gentle. Roy met the gaze behind the lorgnette.

“Mr Calvert, have you been inside an embassy?”

“Only once, Lady Boscastle.”

“I think I must take you to some more. You’ll find they’re quite nice people. And really not unelegant. They talk quite nicely too. I’m just a little surprised you didn’t know that already, Mr Calvert.”

Roy burst into a happy, unguarded laugh: a blush mounted his cheeks. I had not seem him blush before. It was not often people played him at his own game. Usually they did not know what to make of him, they felt befogged, they left him still enquiring, straight-faced, bright-eyed.

The whole table was laughing – suddenly I noticed Joan’s face quite transformed. She had given way completely to her laughter, the sullenness was dissolved; it was the richest of laughs, and hearing it one knew that some day she would love with all her heart.

Lord Boscastle himself was smiling. He was not a slow-witted man, he had known he was being teased. I got the impression that he was grateful for his wife’s support. But his response to being teased was to stick more obstinately to his own line. So now he said, as though summing up: “It’s a pity about Tom Seymour’s girl. She ought to have fished something better for herself.”

“You’ll all come round to him,” said Mrs Seymour. “I know he’ll do.”

“It’s a pity,” said Lord Boscastle with finality, “that one doesn’t know who he is.”

Joan, melted by her laughter, still half-laughing and half-furious, broke out: “Uncle, you mean that you don’t know who his grandfather is.”

“Joan!” Lady Muriel boomed, but, with an indulgent nod, Lord Boscastle went on to discuss in what circumstances Tom’s girl had a claim to be invited to the family house. Boscastle was a great mansion: “my house” as Lord Boscastle called it with an air of grand seigneur, “our house” said Lady Muriel with splendour: but the splendour and the air of grand seigneur disappeared at moments, for they both had a knack of calling the house “Bossy”. Lady Boscastle never did: but to her husband and his sister there seemed nothing incongruous in the nickname.