Writing on the Wall (18 page)

The discussion in
Manservant and Maidservant
has been provoked by George, the footman, who has just left the room. The equality with his master so ardently, even criminally desired by George is not a natural thing, and yet everyone, starting with George, feels that his desire for it is natural. For if it is not natural, where did it come from? He was not taught it in the workhouse; nor did he derive it from reading. George does not “know his place” and cannot be taught it by Bullivant, the butler, by Mrs. Selden, the cook, nor by bitter experience. The one thing George has learned in life is to know better than to “know his place.” It does not advance him to know this; it does not make him a better footman, certainly—nor a better human being than Bullivant, who has found his place by knowing it. It just makes him different. A problem. The natural man in George is a criminal, in the same way that the natural child cropping up in Horace’s offspring is a parricide. It is Horace’s fault, of course, that his children wish to kill him, but it is not Horace’s fault, really, that George grew up in the workhouse. Nor George’s. It is Society’s fault, but perhaps not altogether in the last analysis, since Society did not make him illegitimate; his parents did. George is a Jim Crow. A natural thing, like the jackdaw in the chimney (or the dead mouse brought in by Plautus, the cat, in
Mother and Son),
spreads consternation in civilized society, which does not know what to do with it—it is there but it does not “belong.”

The question of equality is seen from another angle in the kitchen. “We cannot choose our walk in life,” says Bullivant dryly, “and there would be many fewer if we could.” The cook draws a different moral, excusing Miriam, the maidservant, for her unwillingness to share things. “It is the orphanage routine. Things would be communal beyond the natural point.” The cook does not specify where the natural point would be. That is the mystery.

The omnipresence of servants in Compton-Burnett is a chronic reminder, like a cough, of the fact of inequality. Their function in the books is to testify that they are
there.
Like witnesses in the box in a murder trial, they bask in the unaccustomed limelight—they are having their day in court. One thing they will never do is to pretend to relish their employment. They are not just commentators but living comments. Being in service has not always brought out the best in them. Below stairs, in the nether regions of the servants’ hall, there is a ceremonious class society presided over by the infernal butler and his queen and ally, the cook, who are at liberty there, when not summoned by a bell, to devil their subordinates and conduct an antiphonal dialogue, sonorous like prayers and responses, over their subordinates’ heads. It is some compensation for being a servant that there are others still lower on the scale. But not enough—something the cynical George sees clearly and that explains his lack of incentive to better himself in his calling. A servant is a servant, as he reminds Bullivant.

The servants below stairs and the children above stairs are the weak in the social structure, which in the case of children is also the natural structure. It is natural that children should be weaker than their parents, and it seems to be natural too (at least it is taken for granted) that those who have the shortest legs should have the most stairs to climb. Like the servants, the children are the first to feel the pinch of economy. Saving begins above and below stairs, where it does not show. No one questions the principle that children and servants should have inferior food, just as no one questions the principle that food in boarding-schools should be wretched. Decent food, apparently, does not need to be “wasted” on people who are naturally hungry. The principle obtains in the kitchen too where the younger servants, who work the hardest, receive the scantiest rations.

The concern with “place”—
i.e.,
where you belong, as though it were a physical space—seems to require that no one should put himself in anyone else’s, even in imagination. It is too risky. Except among children and the women who take care of them, fellow-feeling is extremely rare in Compton-Burnett’s characters. Those who show it are generally those who have no place of their own. It is an unusual mother, for instance, who shows imaginative sympathy with her children.

A repeated humiliation the children undergo is to be made to wear old, out-of-fashion, pieced-out clothes for festive occasions. The “best dress” of a Compton-Burnett schoolgirl (like that of her schoolmistress), instead of being a covering, is a sort of nightmare nakedness—a public exposure of lack of means. Clothes are important in Compton-Burnett, though their exact cut and material (except Miss Munday’s satin in
More Women than Men)
is left to the reader’s horror-struck imagination. Far from being appearance, they are brute reality. You can lie, as a school pupil in uniform, about your home circumstances, but your best dress, when you are forced to put it on, tells the true story.

Death is a great test for the wardrobe. It is a proud moment when Mrs. Selden in reply to Bullivant’s question (“And have you mourning of a suitable character happening to lie by you?”) is able to announce: “I am in a position to appear in black from head to foot.” The trappings of woe are a grandiose proclamation, not only of financial status but of moral superiority. Mourning, like a bridal veil, dignifies the wearer and constitutes a sort of promotion.

More Women than Men
(which contains two practicing homosexuals and three practicing lesbians) is packed with clothes, mostly old. The only new ones are bought by the principals at weddings and funerals. The awful headmistress, Josephine, cannot resist a roguish allusion to “my sable form” when she appears among her teachers in the common room, conscious that her subordinates are still further humbled by the visible signs of her loss. Her husband, subtracted from her, has become an addition to her womanly charms. Her middle-aged coyness (“my experienced phiz,” “[my] mature form,” “my sable array”) puts a bold front on what would normally be liabilities. Her wretched teachers are
betrayed
by their clothes, but Josephine is a successful liar, and her sable array is the best kind of lie—one that does not resort to verbalization.

Her grieving for her lost consort is pure parade. But in fact no one really feels death as he should. The one who is capable of doing so is, unfortunately, at that moment beyond feeling,
i.e.,
the deceased. We can never be quite as sorry for the death of someone else as we would be for our own—this proposition is bedrock in Compton-Burnett’s thought. The dead man’s tragedy is that he is not there to mourn himself, since no one else can do it as well for him. And yet, as long as he is alive, a man cannot feel his own approaching death as real or probable. Indeed, the nearer it approaches, the more he disbelieves. So he is unable to mourn his own loss in advance, attractive as the idea seems.

Nature, our unnatural mother, has arranged that we shall all die. But to any one man, his death is an unthinkable injustice, something that should not be done to
him.
That no one can share his feeling—at least with the same bitterness and sense of outrage—seems to prove that injustice is universally condoned. Proverbially, death makes us all equal, but we could not appreciate the equity of this unless we were all to die at the same time. That, however, would leave no mourners—another unthinkable thought. Between the living and the dead, there is a gross inequality, even though the dead, like the poor, are believed not to feel it. There is a “gulf.” Death and life are a mismatched pair, the extreme example of incompatible opposites.

It is revealing that Anna (a blunt instrument) in
Elders and Betters
is able to speak of death as if it were an ordinary, everyday occurrence, which of course it is. She asks how her mother died, and when her father tells her that it was a chill that went to the lungs: “‘Well, what could be more ordinary than that?’ said his daughter, rising and hastening to the door on some other concern.” Looking back, the reader can see that this should have readied him for a murder. In the same book, the
abnormality
of death (for that is how it appears to a normal person) is keenly felt by the invalid Aunt Sukey, who has been given a short time to live. She cannot help noticing that no one in her family seems to want to know this. And it is true that they are embarrassed to admit that she may be dying,
i.e.,
that she is different.

In the opening scene of
The Present and the Past,
the children are playing near the hen coop. One hen is sick, and the others have begun to peck it—the One and the Many, the strong and the weak. The hen dies, but Toby, the three-year-old, does not understand finality. “Poor hen fall down. But soon be well again.” “Hens don’t mind dying,” lies the nursery-governess. “They die too easily.” The children are not totally convinced. “It was pecked when it was dying,” one of the older boys objects. “They always do that, sir,” says William, the gardener, with an air of offering comfort.

All Compton-Burnett’s books are concerned with Nature, Equality, and Death. That is what they are “about.” Nature is brought to the fore in
The Present and the Past.
In the ordinary sense of plants and animals. It is the only book where a gardener is found in the cast of characters; off stage, toward the end, there is a village flower show. Toby is strongly attached to William, who drinks beer. On the afternoon of the hen’s death, William, whom Toby is “helping,” finds a dead mole. “Well, everything dies in the end, miss,” he says to Toby’s sister, Megan. “It will happen to us all.” Being close to Nature, he is on easy terms with death. Megan’s face clears “at the thought of this common fate.” Because she is young, with a child’s fair-mindedness, equality makes it “all right.”

Equality does not make it all right with the children’s father, Cassius. He aims to be superior to the mole. A self-pitying man, he hankers to commit suicide in order to be the center of attention and to make his family sorry they have not loved him more. What deters him is that he would not be there to witness the general grief. Cassius’ dilemma is a ridiculous
précis
of the dilemma of anyone confronting his own extinction. Cassius proposes to eat his cake and have it. By simulating suicide, he provides for his own death and resurrection. It works, but there is a sequel. His family discovers the trick. Shortly afterward, he has a heart attack and goes into a coma; his butler, feeling that he is shamming again, does not call a doctor. Cassius dies, and everyone
is
sorry, but he is not there to see it.

Among Cassius’ other errors is the fatal notion that he can have two wives at once, his ex-wife and his present one. He also errs in treating his butler as a second self, which gives the butler, who is a humbug like Cassius, the false idea that he is a sort of junior brother to his master. This is a contributory cause of Cassius’ death, since Ainger, his vanity swollen by Cassius’ confidences, takes it on himself to decide whether a doctor should be called: Cassius’ wife is absent, and his old father yields to the butler’s judgment that Cassius should be taught a lesson. His suicide was meant to be a lesson to his family (like Hetta Ponsonby’s disappearing act in
Daughters and Sons)
, the motto being that if you try to teach a lesson, you may learn one. In a sense, after all, Cassius dies by his own hand; his false suicide contained a real death inside it, like a loaded cartridge, and his sole achievement is to manage to kill himself while being too cowardly to take his own life.

The past and the present are evidently opposites—in language mutually exclusive, in life not always. Unlike a dead person, the past
can
rise again and mortify the present—which may simply prove, though, that “past” was a misnomer. The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful. The substitution of a stepmother for a dead mother is an odious instance. It leads the stunned children to ask whether a dead person can be
replaced
—a shocking question to an innocent mind. Adults evade it. To the children, their real mother is both absent and present, present in the shape of a blank, where her place was. Missing someone in Compton-Burnett is always conceived spatially. When the space is filled by a new wife, is it the same space or is it altered by what fills it? If it is altered, what happens to the original space? Where is it?

There is no room for the dead in practical life or for the past either. That is why people try to suppress it. Yet the past, even when it consents to die, has a feeble sort of immortality owing to its persistence in memory, just as the idea of equality cannot be laid to rest once it has been thought of. This defective and inadequate immortality is a property of mind. It is attached most vigorously, by common consent, to works of art. Hence the books and authors in Compton-Burnett.

She is wryly, uncomfortably aware of belonging to a long-lived species, the family of authors, whom she looks on with that mixture of tolerance, dislike, hilarity, affection, embarrassment that makes up family feeling. Here, surely, is the reason the names of authors are fastened, so inappropriately, almost unkindly, on her characters (Dr. Chaucer and his niece, Miss Bunyan), as children are named for great-aunts and grandparents without being given any choice in the matter. She is not especially proud of her family tree; many of the old writers were not nice people, and they all profited from the advantage they had over ordinary men and women. Ordinary men and women “live on” in their descendants—a biological fancy that is not especially consoling. But authors have a double life and, in principle, a double chance of survival, through their brain-children, who will certainly outlive them (that is the vexing part) and may attain a fabulous age.

The poetical extracts sprinkled through her work are testimonials to this longevity. In
Darkness and Day,
the servants are ruminating in the servants’ hall. “‘To thine own self be true.’” “Who said the words?” a voice demands, and another voice issues, as if from a cave: “Deep things become dispersed.” In other words, the corpus of Shakespeare has been acting like a corpse—slowly decomposing and enriching the humus. His name may be lost, but the ashes of his work have been scattered abroad. Or, having rained down, he has been returned to Heaven in the form of a cloud, whence he redescends, repeating the process
ad infinitum.