There Came Both Mist and Snow (2 page)

The situation has its odd visual aspects as well. At night there is Cudbird’s new neon sign. Standing on the terrace of the house one sees it just over the ruined tower. For a second there is darkness and the outline of the tower is barely visible against the dull glow of an urban sky. Then miraculously in the dark a great bottle leaps into being; this tilts itself like some crazy constellation in the heavens; a hundred flickering electric bulbs stimulate the issuing beverage; the tower, cupped like a goblet below, receives the beery deluge. Thus does Horace Cudbird, a latter-day Ganymede, place cupbearer to his own obscure gods.

After dinner, guests unfamiliar with this spectacle will go out to the terrace and watch it for minutes on end. The thing has undeniably a certain bizarre beauty of its own. And down among the ruins Cudbird’s sign produces more subtle effects. Here the monstrous bottle itself is invisible and one is aware only of a rhythmical succession of soft reflected lights playing over the crumbling walls and amid the shadows. First comes the suggestion of an acid green – a skin of light which furs the massive masonry like an aura; the bottle has lit up. Next, rose-coloured shafts pass across the ruins like fingers up a keyboard; the city is being told in giant’s lettering that Cudbird’s Beers are Best. Suddenly the world lurches, wheels, circles; in a series of jerks the bottle is turning on its axis. And then a dull amber flood falls like a low curtain; for a moment the Priory floats in a rippling sea of ale; then for seconds, and before the bottle again lights up, darkness reigns. It is in these seconds of inactivity, while Cudbird pauses between libations, that the effect is strangest. For in the darkness and by some trick of the retina these shadowy phenomena rapidly and confusedly repeat themselves; the mind is momentarily distracted between a flickering creation of its own and what it knows actually to lie immobile before it. A distinctly uncanny effect results. The Priory servants used to be fond of taking their sweethearts ‘to see the ruins’; since the sign went up it is in the other direction that one has to remember not to walk at night if one would avoid embarrassing encounters.

This fiery flagon by night, the city’s pall of smoke by day, the uproar which slackens only in the small hours of the morning: these make the setting, the foil, the frame for my cousin Basil’s very beautiful home. The Ropers are artistically gifted – I acknowledge that it is from their side that I get such talent as I possess – and for generations they have applied to Belrive a taste which is conservative but never inert. As a result the place has that air of immemorial grooming which one associates with some of the great houses of England. The gardens are formal without being uneasily exotic; they do not, as some overwrought gardens do, call for other than a northern sky. The park is full of unobstructive artifice, a margin illuminated in a hundred greens around the warm but sadly soot-stained stone of the ruins. The house in its exterior aspect is at once old and immaculate; it speaks of those two excellent things, continuity and a sound balance in the bank. Inside, one moves amid the blending and contrasting tastes of a succession of cultivated owners; there is that effect of a mild conflict of personalities within an acknowledged tradition which makes a house alive. In short, I find Belrive a most satisfactory place. And turning up the drive on the day this chronicle opens I found myself meditating, against the background I have now sketched, the slightly problematical figure of its master.

Basil Roper, the seventh baronet, was at this time a man in the middle fifties, a bachelor, famous, and just coming to the realization that his career lay for the most part behind him. An explorer and mountaineer, he knew that never again would he stand so high above the sea as he had stood. At fifty one can climb to twenty thousand feet, perhaps to twenty-five thousand. Thereafter one’s job is at the telescope and with the stores. The ultimate spires and pinnacles of earth will yield only to the faultless mechanism of a young man’s heart.

Basil, like most climbers, had no single passion for altitude; he could get as much from the Central Gully on Lliwedd, a day’s run from London, as he could from the traverse of some monstrous rock face in the Himalaya. Nevertheless the heart, as it has its tether as a piece of mechanism, has, as a principle of life, its goals. One of Basil’s goals had been going very high indeed; the possibility had slipped away, and with it some tension which it was not perhaps easy to do without.

A man who has served an idea makes only an uneasy retreat upon practical affairs. But from youth Basil had been a scientist and he had his finger now in a number of pies – of those immaterial pies of the mind at which a man may stir to his heart’s content, disturbing nobody and without a fret or fuss. Into geographical speculations he could step like a man entering the solitude of an arctic tent. To explore with a hammer among the rocks the barren aeons of the earth gave him much the same satisfaction, I believe, as a physical vista of inviolate ice and untrodden snow. For such austerities I have myself small taste; I prefer the peopled earth – the field full of folk. Nevertheless I like to understand the ascetic type, and driving up Basil’s avenue I made my yearly resolution: to study my cousin once more with professional standards of assiduity. This perhaps has its forbiddingly austere ring. But the imaginative writer is far from living on air. He has to apply himself to his fellows very much in the spirit in which Basil was wont to apply himself to archaen schists and eruptive rocks.

My taxi rounded a bend and the little park came into full view. It occurred to me what a remarkably valuable property it must be. Only the day before a friend had shown me a beautiful gold goblet recently excavated from some Viking hoard, an object of very considerable intrinsic worth which was yet far more precious in its character as a museum piece. Belrive was rather like that. Its position in the industrial district of a town by no means suffering from stagnation or depression must surely render every acre worth a large sum of money; at the same time it possessed high value in another and indefinable currency, that of antiquarian or sentimental regard. I recollected that Basil’s care of the Priory had always been scrupulous – but how strongly, I wondered, did he feel the responsibility of such a heritage? It came to me with something of a shock that my cousin cared nothing for the past. Or nothing for what I call the past. He would have been just the man to write that sort of outline of history which includes a great many illustrations of mammoths and pterodactyls and which relegates man to an appendix. Perhaps this sally is a little unfair. I realized that there was nothing vulgar or half-baked about Basil’s historical sense. It was simply that human institutions of a sort with which we have any connection did not interest him. To certain remote and swarming cultures – Sumerians, Babylonians, and the like – he gave, I believe, a sort of field naturalist’s attention. But at the point where real history begins – the coming of the Dorian Greeks – his interest left off. And the chronology which really held his imagination and engaged his intellect was of the sort that reckons its years by the million. Just what value, I wondered, did Basil set on a twelfth-century ruin, or on ground which ancestors had owned ever since they had successfully stolen it nearly three hundred years ago? The Tudor age must seem to Basil the merest yesterday. I glanced from my taxi and saw the iron skeleton of Cudbird’s sign just dipping behind the Priory tower. To Basil these must appear virtually contemporaneous constructions. And for the first time it occurred to me to speculate on the legal position in regard to Belrive. Was its owner entitled to do what he liked with it? Or were at least the ruins in some way protected from possible caprice?

These reflections were interrupted by a squeal of brakes and I was astounded to see Wilfred Foxcroft skipping hastily to the side of the drive.

Wilfred is a cousin of mine. Most of the people in this narrative are.

I was astounded to see Wilfred; I got a further shock when he turned towards me and waved what was distinguishably a revolver. The taxi drew up, and despite its doing so merely because I had tapped on the glass I could almost have believed myself involved in some incident of banditry. Wilfred opened the door, climbed in, and tossed his weapon carelessly on the seat. ‘I hope,’ I enquired, ‘that it isn’t loaded?’

My cousin laughed, at the same time sitting down so heavily that I felt myself bounced towards the roof of the cab. ‘My dear Arthur,’ he said, ‘you understand the principle of the Verona drop?’

‘Emphatically not.’

‘The Verona drop is a fragile bubble of glass which, under certain conditions, will resist a sharp blow with a hammer. What is called the safety catch on a rifle or revolver embodies just the same principle. A bump or joint’ – and Wilfred tossed the revolver to the floor – ‘merely increases the security with which the whole mechanism is locked.’

Somewhat reassured, I reflected that Wilfred Foxcroft had not changed. Or his little habits had not changed. I remembered the jar against one’s spine which that same slumping down on a hard bench at school could cause. From his schooldays too dated the irritating trick of accompanying every act of communication with some fragment of useless lore; he had the mental habits of an industrious but unimaginative squirrel and his head was a lumber-room of Verona drops and similar debris. I have sometimes thought that his quarrel with Basil – that enduring mountaineering quarrel which made me so surprised to see him at Belrive now – was not unconnected with this turn of mind. Wilfred’s conversation was like an automatic machine: you dropped in some piece of conversation small coin and out came a dry biscuit – always virtually the same dry biscuit. And Basil’s was perhaps rather like a comptometer: you pressed the keys and could rely on the relevant factual analysis taking place. The two tendencies came sufficiently close to each other to be mutually irritating. This irritation, exacerbated by enforced companionship and by privation, had been responsible as I always supposed for the rift. But here now was Wilfred back at the Priory and it would be decent to express my pleasure in the fact. I did this as simply as I could. ‘Wilfred,’ I said, ‘it is delightful to see you here again.’

Wilfred tapped at the butt of the revolver with his foot until the barrel satisfied his sense of order lying parallel to the driver’s seat. ‘The suggestion of coming down,’ he said, ‘was a good one. A change at this time of the year is a capital thing. During the three winter months the incidence of common cold is nearly seven per cent lower in the provinces than in London.’

I looked at him curiously. The statistics were of no interest to me, but my attention was held by the turn of phrase which had preceded them.
The suggestion of coming down was a good one.
Wilfred was perfectly capable of talking the King’s English and this clumsy phrase was a deliberate ambiguity. Had the quarrel been made up on his initiative or on Basil’s? It was impossible to say.

‘Quite a family party,’ Wilfred was continuing. ‘Hubert and Geoffrey, Lucy, Cecil, Anne. I’m told that there are now only eight serious painters in England contriving to make more than four hundred a year. How lucky for you that people still buy books.’

‘Still
read
books,’ I corrected – taking an involuntary nibble at the biscuit as it shot from the machine. ‘Bankers, I suppose, are still in demand?’

Wilfred, a banker and a wealthy one, smiled complacently. ‘Hubert, of course, is doing well enough. The portrait commissions keep coming in. But Geoffrey, who hasn’t at all followed in his father’s tradition, doesn’t make a penny. It’s hard on that thwarted little tigress Anne. Do you know the price of a small prepared canvas?’ And Wilfred, although devoid as I knew of any interest in the fine arts, proceeded to a detailed estimate of the working expenses of a painter. This monologue the reader will not expect me to report and I shall attempt instead to give some account of those relations whom I now knew I was to meet at the Priory.

I must be forgiven if I do not here work out a family tree; it is a writer’s instinct to stick to prose, and in plain prose I think I can make everything clear. The eldest, then, of Basil’s generation of Ropers had been his sister Margaret. She had married into the wealthy banking family of the Foxcrofts and had two sons, Wilfred and Cecil. Wilfred had gone into the banking business; Cecil, whose bent was scholastic, was now the headmaster of a public school. Both were unmarried, and both in age within ten years of their uncle Basil.

Next to Margaret Roper had come Basil himself and a year later there had been born Hubert, the painter. Hubert’s only child, Geoffrey, also a painter, was now about twenty-five.

Youngest of Basil’s generation was Lucy, now the widow of a certain Charles Chigwidden, an unsuccessful barrister. Lucy Chigwidden is a novelist: perhaps I may be permitted to remind the reader that the term is an elastic one.

I am myself the only son of Basil’s aunt, Mary Roper; my relationship with Basil, Hubert, and Lucy is therefore that of first cousin. Anne Grainger, the orphan daughter and only child of my sister Jean, was now twenty-one. Jean’s marriage had been financially rash; she and her husband were drowned in a yachting accident when Anne was in infancy; the child had grown up under the legal guardianship of Wilfred Foxcroft, whose protégée she was now understood to be.

These paragraphs, I see, cannot pretend to be prose after all. But they are clear and suit the artlessness which this narrative must have; our exact cousinly relationships – though these are scarcely relevant to what is to come – may be worked out readily enough by anyone who is interested.

We were now nearing the house and I interrupted Wilfred to ask a question. ‘Hubert, Geoffrey, Lucy, Cecil, and Anne. Do I gather then that it is an unrelievedly family party?’

‘Just that. A nice old-fashioned Christmas. I am to talk climbs with Basil; Hubert is to start on a portrait of Cecil; Geoffrey and Anne are to make love; and Lucy is going to pursue you into corners and elicit your views on the interior monologue and on chapterization.’