The Thinking Reed (42 page)

She said, “I know,” and thought of Adrienne and Elise, of the laundress and Monsieur Claude Issot. Her face became convulsed as she thought how badly Marc would fare at the hands of the caricaturists if the tide of scandal flowed so far. She asked quickly, “How did you first start thinking of things like this? How did you first get discontented with the way you lived?”

“It was living in the shadow of my grandmother, I think,” said Alan. “She was the famous Marchioness of Nunchester. I can’t tell you how horrible she was.”

“I’ve seen portraits of her,” said Isabelle.

“I bet you have,” said Alan. “Thousands, and all vilely flattering.”

“So are mine,” said Isabelle.

“No, they’re not,” said Alan. “They make you infinitely less beautiful than you are. But you’re right. They did fake you in an attempt to do you proud. They try to make you the maximum achievement of the prevailing fashion.”

“I hate it,” she said. “I hate it. It would be such bad training for me if that were what I wanted. I’d be told I had succeeded where I hadn’t.”

“Don’t I know it,” said Alan. “Over in England the most exclusive galleries gave me shows when I didn’t know the first thing about painting, just because all my own lot could be depended on to turn up and behave as if I were a real painter.”

“By the way, are any of these pictures yours?” asked Isabelle.

“I say, that is nice of you,” said Alan. “You’re a polite child. No, they’re not. That’s a Derain, and that’s a Picasso, and that’s a Dufresne. My own efforts I keep up in the studio, on the top floor, I’ll show them to you afterwards. But to go on about my grandmother. She was utterly awful just for this very reason that we’ve been talking about. She’d been flattered all her life, not only by painters, but by everybody. She was revoltingly rich in her own right, and all her life she’d never had the smallest discipline. I don’t think she did drink, but she looked exactly as if she did. Her face was swollen and bloated with getting her own way and never exercising any self-control.”

“It stands to reason that that is what would happen to one if one went on till one was old,” said Isabelle. “It makes life one long debauch of vanity. But didn’t having children do her any good?”

“Why should it?” said Alan. “She had the physique of a Guard’s sergeant-major, and the minute they were born they were handed over to Nannies. After that she judged them on their points. If the girls married well, they scored, and if they didn’t, they were out; and if the sons did well in politics or the services they scored, and none of them dared do anything else. My own father was a huge success, he’s a general and he’s always being terribly worried about India in the very best company. No really first-class publisher would accept a diary unless it had at least one entry running, ‘Met Fitz Fielding, he thinks the news from India very grave.’ No, I don’t think the mere physical act of maternity could have done anything to her. Why should it? It’s not having children that’s good for people, it’s the way they live with them.”

“Yes,” said Isabelle.

“But I’ve theories about that,” he went on. “I think it is a disgrace and not a merit to have children unless you bring them up not to grab and lose their tempers and smash things.”

“Yes, yes,” said Isabelle.

“Well, to get back to old Agatha. She was the nightmare of my life when I was a child. We had to spend at least three months down at Gormont House every year, and I hated it from the time I could notice things. She bullied the servants, she bullied her family, she bullied her guests. I shall never forget how one June Sunday at luncheon she carefully waited till there was a hush in the conversation, and then leaned forward and very coldly and clearly insulted a girl of seventeen about the way she was eating some strawberries. ‘You will either stop eating those strawberries in that disgusting manner or leave the table.’ God, I can hear her saying it, and see the tears rolling down the girl’s cheeks. There was nothing in it of course, the girl was eating her strawberries in some perfectly normal way. It was just the old elephant trumpeting.”

“One can fight that sort of woman,” said Isabelle. “But it is so bad for one to do it. One learns her kind of technique, and there’s no sort of external discipline working on one to make one use it for civilized purposes. The victory is simply to the strong. It’s an overwhelming temptation to become a brute oneself.”

“Yes, you could be pretty fierce,” said Alan.

“I know,” said Isabelle. “But why do you say that? Does it show?”

“No, not at all,” said Alan. “I only know it because once or twice at Le Touquet I saw that Poots woman limping away held together with bandages. But that was holy work, of course. You were superb.”

“Go on telling me about your grandmother,” said Isabelle.

“Well, she was horrible,” said Alan, “and it wasn’t any delusion of mine, due to family feeling, though she was foul to my mother, simply because she wasn’t strong. I proved she really was horrible by looking into her public record, after I grew up. God, that woman! She owned some mines in the North and she fought several strikes there thirty and forty years ago. I read the reports of them, and you wouldn’t believe the cruelty and callousness and above all the greed of the woman. You’d have thought she was fighting for her last crust, not the miners’, from the way she carried on.”

“If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do,” said Isabelle, “we will have a most bloody revolution.”

“But there was a kind of spiritual edge, a kind of sharpened vileness superadded to the blunt brutality. She was an anti-suffragist, of course, but she got elected to everything she could, just so that she could have more people to bully, and, by God, the worms elected her, though she had no sort of claim to competence.”

“Wasn’t she able?” asked Isabelle. “There’s always a pretence that that sort of woman is.”

“Not a bit. She kept the estate solvent, but only by meanness,” said Alan. “She shot expenses down by gypping everybody. But I don’t think there’s any record of her ever having to make a decision and making it right. Well, once she got elected to some Council or other that had to appoint nurses who had to go round and look after children in the slums, and there was some talk of raising the wages of these women, who must have a dog’s life anyway, and give them ninety pounds a year instead of eighty. Do you know that that old ghoul had the ice to get up and say that if they raised the wages they would no longer get women with the missionary spirit!”

“I tell you, money is a poison,” said Isabelle. “Only wealth or some toxic condition like alcoholism could degenerate the brain to that degree. But, tell me, did you ever have a quarrel with this gorgon?”

“No, I didn’t,” said Alan, “because all the time she was alive I wasn’t sure. Everybody said, ‘Isn’t old Agatha marvellous?’ and carried on as if they liked it. I had a queer divided sort of feeling about her. She always had a morbid fascination for me. I used to stare at her for hours; she was gorgeous in a way, rather like Turner’s picture of the Fighting Temeraire being towed to its last home. As a matter of fact, since I’ve grown up, I’ve always liked the
femme maîtresse
kind of women, so I suppose she was really rather my type. Anyway I never wanted to believe in my own hatred of her, I half hoped it was something silly about me, like the feeling I had when I was small that the cupboard on the nursery landing was inhabited by cannibals. And really everybody else seemed to worship her. All the greatest men in England came down and stayed at Gormont House, and looked as if they liked it. Do you know, I’ve seen a Prime Minister and a Lord Chancellor and the head of an Oxford College sit round on the grass terrace at Gormont and listen for hours while the old hag talked bloodthirsty nonsense about Ireland, that would have been recognizably nonsense whatever your views on Ireland were, even if you thought Ulster Loyalists ought to be allowed to eat Catholic babies on Friday as a double insult to the Pope.”

“I think English society is perhaps particularly susceptible to the charm of insufferable old women,” said Isabelle.

“Well put,” said Alan.

“No,” said Isabelle. “It had too much the ring of something an insufferable old lady might say in youth. Your grandmother is terribly like what I might be in my old age, if I do not alter my way of living.”

“Rubbish,” said Alan. “But I know what you feel like, I’ve had just the same fear that I might end as a replica of my father. I’ve got the right shoulders for uniform, I did quite well in the army, and with my serious, Vandyke sort of face I would look terribly impressive if I worried about some British possession, particularly as I got older and went silver at the temples. Only I’d choose to be worried about some possession nearer England and with a better climate than India: say Malta.” He broke off. “I say, isn’t this pretty tedious for you, all this life and times of Alan Fielding stuff?”

“No, no,” said Isabelle. “And I love being here. It is so quiet.”

“I know, we’re getting that quietness which is better than silence,” he said. “It’s the slight, steady rain. The minute silvery sort of noise it makes kills all the other noises. Well, to get back to my grandmother. She got worse as she grew older. All my life she’d had a lover, a man with a face like a boat who took a strong line in foreign politics—if the Great War hadn’t happened, he’d have found another one for us—but she got terribly moral as she got too old for it, and she ran round the country treeing poor wretches of schoolmistresses or clergymen or district nurses if there’d ever been the slightest whisper about whether they had or hadn’t.”

“One might do that,” said Isabelle. “Any humiliation like age would be changed by this sort of destiny into avenging cruelty.”

“At last, thank God, she died,” said Alan. “She was fond, and if one wanted to regard the matter in a carping spirit, one might say over-fond, of grouse; fonder, anyway, than one dare be at seventy-four. There was a terrific flow of saliva from all sides. Admirals and judges and clergymen peers all sent in recollections of her to
The Times
and called her a
grande dame,
as if that were the French for old bitch, and said how wonderfully she had upheld the traditions of English aristocracy, which simply couldn’t be true, unless it is also true that that tradition of English aristocracy consisted of unbridled selfishness and stupidity and greed. They actually mentioned dignity in connexion with her, which was the last quality she could claim, either physically or mentally. I was staggered. But everybody said it, so I just went round thinking I had a blind spot and had missed seeing something rather good. Then the crash came, which knocked me out.”

“I can’t think what it was,” said Isabelle. “It can’t have been anything you found out about Agatha, because you already knew everything about her.”

“It was what I found out about everybody but Agatha,” said Alan. “You see, once she was gone, and the requiem chorus had died down, they all blossomed like the rose. My mother was a new being now that Agatha didn’t scowl at her as if she had sold the pass to the Socialists, just because she sometimes had to lie on a sofa. The butler looked twenty years younger, Agatha’s maid jumped at her legacy and rapidly went twice round the world, with the air of a soul let loose out of hell. The committees remained standing for two minutes in homage to the departed and then sat down and drenched the minutes in tears of joy. And the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor and the Master of Ballodham, all accepted invitations to Gormont Hall just as often as they got invitations, and they used to sit on the grass terrace almost visibly not regretting Agatha’s absence. In fact, every man jack of them had hated her just as much as I had. They’d known everything I knew about her, but they hadn’t given it away.”

“Because she was rich,” said Isabelle.

“Exactly; and because they were swabs and cowards and cadgers and spongers,” said Alan. “I didn’t like that, since after all they were my own kind. I suddenly woke up and realized that what are called nice people aren’t nice at all. They’re very nasty. They’ve got an unfair proportion of the world’s goods, and only a few wipe out that unfairness by what they do with their good luck. The rest of them want more, and they don’t care how they get it. They’ll close their eyes to any vice on the part of anybody who’s rich and who has a comfortable house they can go and stay in, or who can give them tips on the Stock Exchange. They are complete parasites, who can’t earn their keep. My father doesn’t know anything about India, really. Not a thing that would help to keep it or to make it more prosperous. All he knows is that the inhabitants are coloured, a fact that he interprets exactly as any old woman who has been no nearer India than a Gloucestershire rectory. His mind’s amoebic, because the world’s never demanded that he organize it into efficiency. He’s an old dear and so’s my mother, but they haven’t put anything into life. They’ve stood by while that old devil Agatha made girls of seventeen cry and tortured her maid and prevented slum nurses having decent meals and clothes and kept miners’ children on skim milk. I don’t like it, since this is the only life we’ve got.”

“I know, I know,” said Isabelle.

“And I can’t stand my own generation,” he said. “It isn’t their fault, of course. People like Agatha and my father and mother haven’t handed them on any principles, and they just barge about like a pack of monkeys. I hate the ones who still have money, even if they do their jobs, because they don’t see that the system doesn’t work as a whole and has got to be stopped. And I hate the ones who haven’t got money and run about trying to make a living and showing at every turn that they haven’t got as much fastidiousness as if they’d been born in a slum. I hate the men who sell silly shiny cars to silly men who haven’t got anything to do but dash about in them. I hate the women who sell silly clothes to silly women who have no plans except to take them off as often as possible.”

“Poots was horrible,” said Isabelle.

“Wasn’t she?” said Alan. “It seemed such an offense that she should be about when we first met. Yes, Poots is foul. Well, it was to get away from all the Pootses that I chucked the whole thing up and came over here and bought this house, and settled down to live on a little income I have, and what I made out of commercial stuff, posters and textile designing, and so on. And I’ve never regretted it.”