The Balliols (38 page)

“And this is going to be my home,” Ruth thought.

As the car swung out of the main drive into the carriage drive the front door opened and a tall, stooping, grey-haired figure came out on to the steps. “That's the old boy,” said Victor.

Ruth had been curious rather than anxious about the reception that she would receive from her future father-in-law.

“There's nothing for you to worry over,” Victor said.

“I'm not worrying. I'm wondering. I can't be what he
expected. I can't be what he really wanted. Will he ask lots of questions?”

Victor shook his head.

“He's not that kind. He takes life as it comes to him. He… “Victor paused, his forehead furrowed. “It's hard to explain. I've known my father so long that I can usually guess what he's going to do. I've no idea why he does it. I've never known what he thinks. I can assure you of this: that there'll be nothing of the heavy father.”

There wasn't. He stood at the head of the steps, a half smile on his lips. As Ruth came up the steps towards him he leant forward, stretched out his hands, rested them on her shoulders, bent down and kissed her cheek. His face was pale and lined. As it bent to hers, Ruth was reminded of a moth wing when the down is brushed from it; when you see the veins dark against a surface that you are surprised not to find transparent. His kiss was like the contact of a cool, smooth pebble. She was aware of a smell; an old man's smell, like the bouquet of certain sherries; a faint mustiness. He took her hand in his.

“It is my privilege to lead you across the threshold.”

It was cool and dark inside the hall. Sombre portraits in browns and sepias hung against oak panelling that stopped less than a foot below the moulded ceiling. A tall clock was ticking; in the large marbled fireplace was a framed strip of purple tapestry.

“The period that built this house was afraid of sunlight,” Huntercoombe explained. “They faced their houses east and north. They said that the sun bred disease. Perhaps it did, since they kept their windows shut. The rest of the house is more cheerful.”

He took her round the house, not in the manner of a guide who makes an inventory of historical associations, nor in any sense of personal pride, a saying “This is something remarkable and I own it.” He took the house for granted; assumed that she would. He pointed out certain things less because they would be of interest to her, than because it was necessary for her to be aware of them. He knew the house not as a museum exhibit but as a place that had been built to live in.

It was in that way that such a house should be shown. Tavenham had none of the quaintnesses, the unexpected recesses, thicknesses of wall, turns of passage, uncovered beams, low doorways, unearthed windows, that are the proof of different periods, of renovations and additions, of a long and changing story. Tavenham was not like that. It was of a piece; built in one period by a man who knew his mind. The home for two centuries of men who had accepted that
tradition, approved that taste. The broad staircase, the wide passages, the high walls, the solid window-frames, the elaborate ceilings and fireplaces gave an air of solidity; like the broad avenue of chestnuts did. The men who had built this house had known what they were about.

That afternoon Victor took her over the estate; showed her the oast-houses and the hop-fields, the wood that in February had been thick with snowdrops; and in another month would be a lake of bluebells. The trout stream with its yellow bordering of primroses and jonquils; the paddock where he had learnt to ride; where he had practised brassie shots.

“I used to play with the stream in front of me. If I played a bad shot I probably lost the ball. I had only enough money to buy six balls a week. I don't believe that I've ever really enjoyed the game since I passed the ball-losing stages.”

The hour's walk had not taken them much farther than the dower house.

“I had no idea you had as much land as this. I must be marrying a very rich man,” she said.

He laughed.

“You'd be surprised if you knew how much of it was let off to other people; I don't believe even my father knows how many mortgages there are.”

He took her through the village. “Nominally, we own this.”

It was a small nestling village, an affair of one main street flanked on the one side by a row of hygienic, modern unprepossessing cottages. On the other by rambler-covered, picturesque, insanitary, thatch-roofed, uneven-windowed amalgams of beams and mortar. At its far end was a square-towered church with the moss-stained roof of the vicarage showing beyond the cemetery. There was only one shop. It served as a post office and recruiting station. A Union Jack was hung across its window. There was no other sign that history had disturbed the village.

“The war seems a long way off in a place like this,” he said.

“There's a good deal else that seems a long way off,” she answered.

So much else that she could scarcely measure it. The whole of her life as she had lived it, very nearly. For all the West country stock that lay beyond her, she had been brought up as a city child. Her first memories were bound up with city life; its sights and sounds; pavements; traffic; machinery: with those aspects of beauty that
are the particular property of the townsman; the morning in May when the plane trees in the squares show a sudden emerald; the glitter of lamps on shining streets; a winter sunset seen through bare boughs across the Park. The countryside was associated with holidays, excursions, week-end visits. It had for her the same kind of unreality that city life has for the countryman: something to be enjoyed and left; not to be taken seriously. Ruth had taken London to be the axle round which English life revolved. She had seen England in terms of city life; so standardized and yet so individualized; where everyone looks alike, dresses alike, does the same thing, echoes the same opinions; yet where in actual fact everybody stands alone, fighting a solitary battle for his independence. Ruth had pictured her future in such a world—though she had never so phrased the problem, nor indeed been consciously aware of it—as one of self-assertion, self-fulfilment, self-realization; a getting of one's own way as far as was compatible with the obligations one inherited towards one's family and friends, towards the world of which she had formed a part.

That too was how she had seen her country. But now, walking across the land that one day was to be hers, among these villagers whose welfare would be her concern, she had a feeling of another England that was neither less nor greater than, but was the complement of the England that she had known. A world where everybody looked different, where the postman, policeman, farmers, gentry, grooms who made up the sum of the village were distinguishable from one another at a glance; yet were in fact part of a corporate life. They might be separate and individual, but there was a sense of interwoven interests of which the Londoner was scarcely conscious. Things were different here. People were different. Even Victor was not quite the same. The tweed coat and grey flannel trousers for which he had exchanged his uniform were a symbol of another change. He seemed to have put off something. As he was more at ease physically, so was he more at ease mentally; relaxed; as though he were back where he belonged. Before, she had seen the country from the outside, through the eyes of a Londoner seeking relaxation and rest from London life. She saw it now from the inside through the eyes of a countrywoman, for whom the country had a corporate existence of its own.

And this was going to be her world, in part.

She had thought that having a large place in the country would be like having a week-end cottage on a grand scale; that you would escape from London but continue a London life in a setting of calm and quiet. But it wasn't going to be like that. She would be living
a different life. When Francis had made his joke about his brother-in-law Lord Huntercoombe, she had laughed to herself, since she had never pictured herself as the Viscountess Huntercoombe, only as Victor's wife. She saw now that Francis had been closer to the truth than she had been. She was going to be something more than just Victor's wife.

That night as she sat at her bedroom window, the lamp turned out so that no lighted window might be held by the constabulary as a signal to hostile aircraft, looking out over the shadowed parkland, an emotion that she had not felt before made her heart tender, so that she would have found it difficult to speak. It was an emotion that she would have hesitated to describe as patriotism, that her childhood would not have recognized as patriotism, but that went deeper than the excitement she had felt during those first war weeks, when she had stood with shouting crowds, when she had torn open the papers with eager fingers to read the last press bulletins, when martial music had filled her with a sense of pride, a resolve never to admit defeat, a resentment that she could take no more active part than the washing of dishes, the cutting of sandwiches, later perhaps the driving of a car. The emotion that she felt now was of a different order.

Looking out on to the broad avenue of chestnuts, planted over two centuries back by a man who had looked far enough ahead to say “My great-grandchildren will look on this,” she realized for the first time fully what it was that the men in France were fighting to preserve. The tradition and dignity of English life; a tradition and dignity for which Victor was offering his life, which she herself would be continuing in the child whose heart she would feel in a few months beating beneath her own. In London she had not realized that. It had been there, but she had not recognized it. Here, easier to discern, was the manifest symbol of that force behind her country's life that gave her pride of race. She was not just one woman, marrying for personal happiness, islanding one moment of happiness against a rising storm. She was one of many carrying the past to meet the future. In her case a past whose nature she had only now for the first time recognized; the obligations and responsibilities, the pride of service to which by her especial privilege she was to be especially privileged. She and Victor were no longer just two people.

It was a knowledge that made her see him in a different, tenderer, more intimate way. She had before seen him in terms of glamour, of excitement, of her spirit's need to give. She saw him still as that; but as something more: as the sharer of a destiny, of the life which
this house symbolized. She was separated from him now by the distance of half a corridor. There was no reason why he should not have come to her room that evening. No one would have heard or known. She had waited, listening, relieved as the moments passed that he was not coming; happy that he had felt as she had done. She would have had no argument with which to meet the scoffer who would have said, “But what difference can the fact that you're to be married in two days make?” But it did make a difference: here. She was glad that he had felt it too; that he was leaving her this one night to sit and brood.

For it won't come again, she thought. This feeling that I have now, will get blunted, will get pushed aside, elbowed out. I'll forget it for whole months on end. But it will be there, since it's existed once. It'll be there. And I'll come back to it. It'll be a secret strength. Because I've felt this way once, I'll be able to meet obstacles that would have overthrown me. It'll.…

She paused; seeing with the eyes of vision the tests that must lie ahead. However life went, it would be difficult. But it'll be real. It'll have direction. It'll have significance. It'll never be meaningless again.

Usually our personal lives are the framework on which we hang the facts of history. If someone asks us about an election, a strike, a monetary crisis, a Wall Street scandal, a South American revolution, we fix the event by a reference to some private memory. We say, “Yes, let me see, that would be just after so-and-so's marriage; after that uncle's death; before the place in Hereford was sold.” That is how usually it is. During the war that process was reversed. We date things that happened to us personally from the headlines that on that day, through that slow-passing week screamed their bulletins in heavy-leaded treble-columned type.

On every adult memory those four years inscribed a diary; so that we can place no matter how casually recalled a date with reference to some battle, some political crisis, some scandal or other about spies, munitions, ration cards. If anyone were to say to us, “Can you remember when you met him first?” we do not reply as we would for any other period. “Oh, somewhere about 1925, I think.” Everything that happened during those four years is cut so deeply upon our memories, that we can remember on our way back from that first lunch, opening our evening paper and reading splashed across an entire page: “The Fall of Warsaw.” We can place the date: Galicia, August, 1915.

For Edward Balliol, a spectator of those years, the events of those years in his home, in his office, among his friends, events more varied and crowded than his life had known since early manhood, were pigeon-holed by the experiences he shared with an entire nation. Neuve Chapelle. The munitions scandal. Loos. Serbia. Lowestoft. The Somme. Asquith's fall. The Peace proposals. The Russian revolution. … It was on such a framework that he was to arrange in retrospect his memories of Ruth, Hugh, Francis; of Jane and Helen; of the changes in his staff. On no framework less surely built would he have been able to keep separate and distinct the pictures that followed one upon the other more like a kaleidoscope than a cinematograph.

When he had sat reading
The Times
' review of 1907 at the end of his first children's party he had imagined that 1914 to 1920 would see the slow flowering of plants coming now to bud. He had
pictured that Ilex would be the background for a cycle of change and progress, ordered, assured, rhythmic; as far, anyhow, as his own family was concerned. On the contrary, it was the very symbol of disorder; with the hall invariably littered with luggage, either Hugh's or Ruth's; with a telephone installed and its bell ringing incessantly; the pad at its side scrawled over with messages he did not understand from people he did not know; with the hours of meals constantly altered to suit an unexpected arrival or departure; with the quality of the service altered, since young women found they could be employed more remuneratively as farm labourers, ‘bus drivers and munition workers, servants became hard to get, harder to keep, and almost impossible to endure. Balliol never knew when he would see an unfamiliar face glowering at him above his morning tea, any more than he knew whether he would find Hugh or Ruth in the drawing-room breathlessly waiting for a snatched meal or a bath, before they dashed back into London or to catch some train. Helen, busy in the nursery with dolls, her alphabet and multiplication tables, and Francis, recounting on his way to school the last rag perpetrated upon “Musty”, alone maintained the tradition that eight years back he had fancied himself to be maintaining.