A Dark and Distant Shore (89 page)

‘Well, yes, I do. I believe it to be responsible for a great deal of expenditure by people who can’t afford it, and productive of much domestic discord. And there can be no doubt that it is exceedingly bad for the constitution.’

‘Stuff!’ exclaimed Magnus. ‘Have you been listening to those teetotallers? Queer in their attics, every last one of them.’

Isa Blair’s prim voice emerged from lips no less prim, but she was pink with annoyance.
‘My mama
subscribes to the National Temperance Society.’

‘Hah!’ Magnus erupted, but before he could annihilate the girl, Peter Barber interrupted. ‘Come now, Uncle Magnus,’ he said in his usual measured tones. ‘You should not allow yourself to be blinded by your own lifetime’s preferences, you know. There is much to be said in favour of temperance, and more in favour of total abstinence. I should not be displeased if Ian chose to ally himself with either branch of the movement.’

‘Oh, wouldn’t you? Well, I tell you here and now that I would! And don’t be so damned magisterial, either!’ His approval of the Barbers seemed to be suffering a reverse.

None of Peter Barber’s face muscles actually moved – not the eyes, nor the somewhat bony nose, nor the lips half hidden between moustache and goatee beard – and yet somehow his brow deepened, as if his already receding hair had moved back an inch. Everyone except Magnus could see that the philosopher was ruffled.

Tartly, Grace raised her voice. ‘I am surprised Uncle Magnus hasn’t discovered Mr Soyer’s Gastronomic Symposium. I believe it has something called an American bar that serves a number of stimulating beverages with names like sherry cobbler and mint julep and brandy smash!’

‘Just so, miss!’ her uncle snapped, the sarcasm passing right over his head. ‘Why should I have to trail all the way across to Gore House to be offered foreign rubbish like that, eh?’

Shona, not before time, rose and gathered the ladies together with her eyes, and then Drew, to Magnus’s disgust and Perry’s relief, allowed the port to circulate only twice before saying, ‘Shall we join the ladies?’

Perry estimated that in another fifteen minutes or so he and Francis could decently take their leave. They were going out of town in the morning, and had to be up early. As an excuse, it had the merit of being true.

In the drawing-room, as they entered, Juliana was saying, ‘How I should love to go to India. Vilia could scarcely tear me away from the Indian exhibits. Wasn’t that howdah unbelievably gorgeous? And the other trappings on the elephant, so rich and majestic!’

Gideon, a trifle above par, chuckled and said, ‘You know where the elephant came from, of course?’

‘No.’

‘The museum at Saffron Walden, in Essex. The committee had a terrible time finding one the right size and shape.’

There was a general laugh, but Juliana said stoutly, ‘I don’t care! It must have come from India once. I should love to see real live elephants, with their trunks waving, and rajas riding on them.’

‘Wearing all their jewels, of course!’ It was Lavinia, caustic little monkey.

Gabrielle came to the rescue, showing a considerateness Perry wouldn’t have expected of her. ‘Do you want to go to India, Juliana?
Vraiment
?
’
Her accent was charming. ‘I think it is most brave of you. I read somewhere that one calls it the graveyard of the British because so many die there, and quite young, also.’

‘Rubbish!’ said Magnus. The French had always had their eye on the East Indies, and Britain had sent them about their business. ‘Stuff and nonsense! No more dangerous there than it is anywhere else.’

Lizzie, who hadn’t spoken a word all evening, suddenly said in a soft, expressionless voice, ‘The mediaeval court was pretty, too.’ A strangely passive child, Perry thought, with promise of great beauty in her small, regular features, stately neck, and mass of copper hair. An empty vessel to be filled, a silent instrument to be played upon? It depended on whether the passivity covered a natural reserve – or a nothingness. It was hard to tell. No one, not even her father, had paid any attention to her for hours.

But now, Guy Savarin gave vent to an unexpected and penetratingly Gallic ‘Ah!’ and bent on her the look of one who had found his soulmate.

‘Don’t do that!’ said Magnus testily. ‘Can’t stand fellows who go ooh-ing and aah-ing all over the place, frightening people out of their skins!’

Guy ignored him. ‘
You
found the mediaeval court a revelation, also?’ It wasn’t quite what Lizzie had said, but a glow came to her eyes and she gave an infinitesimal nod. He made an expansive gesture, leaving his hands extended, rather like Atlas waiting to catch the world when it was tossed to him. ‘Such perception! Such feeling for beauty! You have a soul, Lizzie!’

Lizzie, overcome, began to blush, and Vilia, sharing a peculiarly hideous tête-à-tête double chair with Mrs Armstrong, remarked prosaically, ‘We all have souls, Guy. Why should admiration of Mr Pugin’s Gothic fantasies be proof of it?’ And
that
was deliberate provocation, too, Perry thought. Poor Magnus.

It was all the encouragement Guy needed. The words came tumbling over one another, and even if sometimes his listeners had to be nippy with their French, there was no mistaking what he was trying to say. Design was,
évidemment,
a matter for the artist, who was not a menial or a drudge, but something between craftsman and priest, with beauty and truth as his gospel. Design such as this was to be seen nowhere in all the Great Exhibition except in the mediaeval court. Everything else, every other thing
sans exception,
was coarse, vulgar, barbaric, because it was made by machine and designed –
mon Dieu!
–
by menials and drudges working with sham materials and sham techniques. Carpets in imitation of the Persian, machine-woven by men who had never studied a leaf or a tree, skins of precious metal plated on to common iron by machine-minders who derived no more satisfaction from working with gold than they would have done with brass...

There was a great deal along these lines, and at last it became too much for Drew. ‘Now, see here, Guy!’ he objected, his colour high. ‘There’s nothing wrong with what the machines produce. Dammit, very few people can afford real Persian carpets or real gold plate. Why shouldn’t they have something incomparably cheaper and almost as good? It’s all very well for you artistic johnnies to claim that things were better in the fourteenth century, but a fine pickle we’d all be in if we were still stuck there!’

Guy, drawing a graceful hand over his flowing amber mane, said, ‘But you do not understand. The machine will be the downfall of true aesthetics – do you have that word in English? All this elaboration comes from ignorance and insincerity. What the machine produces is incongruous, whereas the artist finds inspiration in natural truths – in mountains and lakes and flowers – and in the beauty of the work his hands have wrought.’

Magnus’s mouth was slightly open, but Vilia didn’t make the slightest effort to change the subject. It was clear to Perry now that she was encouraging the boy to display the whole range of his ill-digested views on art and taste, and give voluble tongue to that rather tired philosophy of art for art’s sake that was bound to offend anyone who prided himself on being a plain, down-to-earth sort of fellow. Like Magnus. What was she up to? Wilfully upsetting the old boy, to pay him out for being so recalcitrant about coming this evening? She was certainly succeeding. Magnus was getting angrier and angrier.

Perry watched her from his seat across the room. The disquieting glitter that had been in her eyes when the evening began was long gone. She was perfectly cool now, and still perfectly groomed although the evening was uncomfortably stuffy. Her colouring, after the richer middle years, had returned to the almost ethereal pallor that had marked it in her youth. Perry’s vision suddenly blurred, and he saw her as if she were a drawing of the girl he had first fallen in love with, a delicate sketch, defined and yet faintly blurred, in chalk and pencil on softly tinted paper. A foolish conceit. There had been such warmth, such a capacity for love in her then. Had it gone – all of it?

The crisp voice said, ‘But to come back to Mr Pugin, Guy. I think even he has not hit the true Gothic note. Indeed, if you wish to become a real artist, I believe you must come and spend some weeks at Kinveil to study the mediaeval at first hand.’

It verged on the brutal. Magnus almost choked. And then Theo, who had shown every sign of enjoying Guy’s torrential eloquence, contributed his mite. ‘What an admirable suggestion,’ he drawled. ‘And not only the mediaeval, but a positive cornucopia of – er – natural truths, I think you called them. Mountains and clouds and things.’

Perry found that, little though he cared for Magnus, he couldn’t go on watching him rise to every fly that Vilia and Theo chose to cast. Whatever they were up to, Perry didn’t want to know.

Abruptly, he stood up. ‘Come, Francis. I hope you will all forgive us, but we have to leave for Brighton very early in the morning. Shona, my dear, thank you for a delightful evening.’ His glance travelled, smiling, round the room. ‘We sail on Monday and I guess we won’t see most of you again. So we will say not only good night, but goodbye.’

Goodbye, Vilia. My heart’s love.

And then, as three times before, he walked away from her.

The party broke up soon afterwards. The younger ones all seemed to have enjoyed it inordinately, and even Lizzie scarcely stopped talking all the way home. She and Juliana considered cousin Guy the most romantic young man they had ever met.

Every part of Vilia’s body ached, with the dragging ache of muscles harshly stressed after long disuse. It required every shred of will-power she possessed to prevent the nervous shudders that racked her from becoming noticeable.

So many years of trying to convince herself that everything was over, and yet knowing within herself that it wasn’t. Or not for her. But tonight had shown her that, for him, it was. She had expected it, of course, and behaved distantly to him, and yet all the time she had been waiting – and waiting – for some sign, some spark of contact. There had been none. All he had done was look at her as if he were summing her up, and not greatly liking what he saw. So he had gone, and it was over. Over. This time the blade was finally withdrawn from her heart, and the torture at an end. Let the numbing scar tissue form soon, she prayed. Let me accept the knowledge, and learn to live with it.
Never again, never again.
The refrain from her childhood came back to her.

She was sick, relentlessly and repeatedly sick, all night.

When the girls came to see how she was in the morning, she said it was nothing. Just that the mackerel patties had disagreed with her.

Gideon couldn’t remember ever feeling so cold, not even at Kinveil. It was as much exhaustion, he knew, as the Crimean wind soughing through the holes in his tent, and the mud seeping up through the floorboards, and the fact that he had had nothing to eat since a hasty breakfast twenty hours ago. He didn’t want anything now, which was as well. No fires were to be lit, by order, in case the Russians mounted another attack. He thought of the poor devils of soldiers who had lived through today’s battle at Balaclava on dry biscuit and a single ration tot of rum, and were living through tonight on nothing at all.

He had finished his report now, and didn’t need a clear head any longer, yet it was with distaste that he poured out half a tumbler of brandy and tossed it back. He hoped it would warm him, but knew, too, that it would deepen the depression this hideous day had bred in him.

From the heights above Balaclava, side by side with Billy Russell of
The Times
he had watched with horror as a few hundred Hussars, Dragoons and Lancers had trotted under parade-ground discipline straight into the heart of the Russian army; 673 men armed with lances and swords against fifty-eight heavy field guns, four thousand cavalry, and nineteen battalions of infantry. By some miracle, almost two hundred had returned alive. The onlookers on the heights, tears pouring down their cheeks, had watched them staggering, limping, crawling back, a few dragging their bleeding horses with them. From the moment when the trumpet had sounded the advance until the last survivor reeled in, it had taken only twenty minutes. Someone had told Gideon that one of the French generals, watching, had commented,
‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.’
But wasn’t it? What was war, if not wanton, senseless destruction?

Until the charge of the Light Brigade, the battle had seemed quite unreal. The mists of dawn had dissolved to give a bright blue morning, clear and sharp, so that the valley had seemed like a toy landscape peopled by toy soldiers. From where Gideon had stood, a couple of dozen yards from Lord Raglan and his staff, the plain had looked as flat as a board, although in fact there were hillocks and ridges blocking the sight and impeding the hearing of the men on the ground. The watchers on the hill could see, dreamlike, thousands of drab-coated Russian cavalry advance in a great oblivious block to within a few hundred yards of where half their number of British cavalry stood, no less oblivious, clad in brilliant uniforms and heavy bearskins and glinting helmets. The air had been unnaturally still, so that there had drifted up quite clearly the champing of bits and the clink of sabres and, after a while, Sir Colin Campbell’s rich Glasgow accents rebuking the thin red line of his Highlanders when they seemed disposed to charge a body of horsemen that outnumbered them four to one. The thin red line stood fast, and the Russians withdrew, and the road to Balaclava was saved. Everyone on the hill had cheered except Gideon, too busy swallowing his pride in the Highlanders and his furious anger at the politicians who valued their lives so cheaply.

But then the Russians had begun to move the guns from a redoubt they had captured from Britain’s Turkish allies. Once, it had been a cardinal rule of war that the enemy should never be allowed to take the standard; today, every army felt the same about its guns. So Raglan had sent an order down to the plain instructing the cavalry to make sure of the guns, and there had been a mistake, and the cavalry commander, who couldn’t see the redoubt, had understood that it was the
Russian
guns that were meant. And so the Light Brigade had ridden to its destruction. And it had no longer been a toy landscape peopled by toy soldiers.