The Bloody Wood (3 page)

Here, rather more clearly than in the loggia, one could hear the sound of running water. And here, too, that other and urban murmur from beyond the wood was indubitable. Marshalling yards and the clanking of heavy wagons over points, the miscellaneous traffic of city streets and suburban roads, sounds of industrial activity in factories where night shifts were working: all these went to produce this faint continuum that just touched the ear. Probably it touched the ears of the owls and the nightingales too, and they weren’t very happy about it. The owls would hold out longest; any summer, one felt, might be the last in which the nightingales would be guests at Charne. There was already ominous talk of a ‘development’, Appleby had been told, on the other side of the high road near the back of the house. That would finish the place as giving any illusion of rural solitude. What Keats called ‘the hum of mighty workings’ would have got hold, good and proper.

Dipping into the English poets was catching. Nobody had announced that the nightingales were singing round the convent of the Sacred Heart – although in one glade in Charne Wood there was a little artificial ruin that might stand for that: a few broken arches and the like, over which ivy and honeysuckle appropriately climbed. Appleby turned round and gazed at the house. Quite a different impulse had been at work there. It looked uncompromisingly permanent, totally removed from the ravages of time. The impression didn’t come merely from its solidity, or even from its being in perfect repair. Its proportions were refined; were, one might say, a kind of mathematics in stone. And mathematics we know to be the one absolutely enduring thing.

But if houses are to remain houses they must continue to be lived in. Appleby’s thought veered from these speculative ruminations into a more practical course. Who was going to go on living in Charne? There was no direct heir. During the lifetime of the present owner there never had been.

Nor, it seemed, had there been such an heir through several lifetimes before that. He remembered Grace Martineau as telling him – it had been in one of her mildly depressive states, which she seemed to have taught herself to mitigate through the making of confidences – that when she had married Charles and he had brought her to Charne she had scarcely expected to bear him a child. And, sure enough, she had never done so. Yet her expectation had rested only on a fanciful foundation. Already for three generations, it seemed, no child had been born in the house. Whether it had always been a Martineau who had been brought in to fill the gap, Appleby didn’t know. A man sometimes has to change his name as well as his residence when he takes over such a place. Judith would have the facts. He must ask her.

He found that he had come to a halt, and was looking down into one of the two great stone basins round which this garden, now forsaken, had been organized. There was no reason at all why it should not brim with clear water, support the delicate cups of water-lilies, afford adequate ooze and pasture for appropriately ornamental fish. Appleby suddenly saw that here was another gesture – unconsciously arrived at, it might be – by Martineau. A barren house.
Empty cisterns and exhausted wells
.

Bother the poets, Appleby told himself. He made to turn away, proposing to retrace his steps to the house – for no doubt he had been absent for as long as was civil. As he did so, he became aware that by the farther verge of the second basin – at noon, as it were, to his own six o’clock – stood the figure of Bobby Angrave. For a moment they looked at each other, oddly silent, across the two wide saucers of stone.

‘Hullo!’ Bobby then said. ‘What about getting a hose and filling them up? A nice surprise for Uncle Charles in the morning.’

‘It would take the whole night,’ Appleby said prosaically. Walking over to Bobby Angrave, he added: ‘And your uncle might not be all that amused.’

‘It would take a lot to amuse Uncle Charles at present, poor devil.’ Bobby didn’t stir from where he stood; he seemed fascinated by the great empty basin. ‘It’s all pretty grim, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I don’t suppose your aunt can hold on for long – or that one would wish her to.’

‘Can the old man? That seems to me the question.’

‘Your uncle?’ Appleby was surprised. ‘He isn’t ill too, is he?’

‘Good Lord, no.’ Bobby had given an impatient shake of his head. It was an irritable – and irritating – mannerism of his when he judged people to be not as quick as they ought to be. ‘The old boy has twenty years to go. And that’s just the point. How will he fill them, face them? They’ve been, you know, so fearfully close – Aunt Grace and he. The thing’s driving him mad.’ Bobby broke off, picked up a tiny pebble, and dropped it into the basin. ‘The parapet’s curiously low, isn’t it? An unnoticeable six inches. If it was full, in you could go in the dark and drown. As it is, you could break your neck.’

‘I hardly think so – though it mightn’t be good for an arm or a leg.’ Appleby glanced at the young man curiously. ‘Of course, your aunt’s illness is a tremendous strain on your uncle. But I don’t think he’ll go mad, or even in any way crack up. Somehow people don’t – or not until afterwards.’

‘Perhaps so.’ Bobby picked up another pebble, made to throw it, thought better of this, and dropped it on the path. ‘But – do you know? – I can hardly stick it myself. That’s why I made off just now, and took a turn in the wood. As for sitting down and writing a lot of damned Latin verses, the idea’s absurd.’

‘I think you ought to try not to take it that way.’ Appleby saw that Bobby Angrave was disturbed, and he obeyed an older man’s impulse in such cases to hint some lesson of maturity. ‘There’s always something to be said, Bobby, for just getting on with the job. Particularly if one can do it well, and if one likes it.’

‘I can do it well, all right.’ Bobby tossed this in contemptuously. ‘But what sense is there in such tricks – here and now in the twentieth century? Absolutely none that I can see. That classical stuff is totally irrelevant. It simply turns its back on all the significant growing-points of our time.’

‘I agree that there’s an argument there.’ Appleby had refrained from smiling at Bobby’s rather portentous vocabulary. ‘But why, in that case, are you turning yourself into a classical scholar?’

‘Because I have a bloody great hole in my head, sir. That’s why. A hole where the sums should be.’

‘The sums?’

‘The substantial mathematical ability without which no scientific mind can tick. That leaves, you see, Greek and Latin, along with the ridiculous parlour game they call philosophy, as the only royal road in the rat race.’

‘At least you’re on that royal road?’

‘Of course. My elegant Latinity, and what-not, will get me a fellowship – or into the Civil Service, absurdly enough, if I choose to go that way. But there’s nothing more to it.’

‘I see.’ Bobby Angrave, it seemed to Appleby, possessed, after all, a fairly substantial power of absorbing himself in his own affairs.

‘But that’s not the point at the moment.’ It was almost as if Bobby had divined Appleby’s thought. ‘Here’s a woman going to die – quite naturally, and when she is on at least the fringes of old age. There ought to be nothing to it. Yet I feel a kind of animal terror when I think of it. Do you know what I mean?’

‘I know what you mean by the animal terror.’

‘Does one go on experiencing it – after one has more or less had one’s life? Or is it something only the young really feel, because death would cheat them of so much more?’

‘They believe that death would cheat them of a great deal. But that may be an illusion.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Bobby gave his impatient headshake again. ‘But it doesn’t answer my question.’

‘I think it’s a matter of degree, in point both of frequency and intensity. But I’ve known very old people who were steadily and horribly afraid to die.’

‘We’d better go back to the house. This is getting morbid.’ Without waiting for a response, Bobby strode off towards the terrace. But within a dozen yards he had halted again, and waited for Appleby to catch up with him. ‘Do you believe in euthanasia?’ he demanded.

‘It’s hardly a matter for belief or disbelief. It’s obvious people ought to be got out of the world without intolerable suffering, whenever possible. And that may entail getting them out a little quicker than otherwise might be.’

‘There’s clearly nothing in being dead.’ Bobby was moving forward again, but slowly. ‘All the old commonplaces are right there. We cease to be fortune’s slaves, nay cease to die, in dying. And so on.’

‘Yes,’ Appleby said.

‘I suppose you’ve had a lot to do with death, sir? Violent death, I mean.’

‘I was up against a certain amount of it in the earlier part of my career.’ Appleby spoke a shade shortly. It must be something of quite recent occurrence, it struck him, that had excited this young man. He didn’t see why he himself should be drawn by it into chatter about death. But Bobby Angrave went on. This time, he might have been trying to talk philosophy with his tutor.

‘As to whether life is to be held desirable,’ he said, ‘the best opinions seem to differ. And, of course, mere death cannot be held either desirable or undesirable, since it is in fact not a state of being at all. Very well. Suppose that a killing disease – or suppose that a murderer – was coming at you. Would you have any rational ground for feeling resentment?’ Bobby paused briefly. ‘But perhaps,’ he added, ‘that is not a meaningful question.’

Appleby said nothing. This, he felt, was probably what Bobby’s tutor would have done. They had come to a halt again at the foot of the steps leading up to the terrace. The house itself was invisible except for its topmost storey. But there were several splashes of light which could come only from the music room. So everybody hadn’t gone to bed.

‘There’s nothing in
being dead
,’ Bobby Angrave reiterated. ‘Whether there’s anything in
going to death
, I don’t know. It may well always be wicked. Certainly it can confer no positive benefit, but on the other hand it can annihilate despair and pain – which in practice comes to the same thing. So much for being dead and going to death. Then there’s
dying
. Certainly there is something to that: the kind of terror we were speaking about, and disagreeable physical sensations stretching from discomfort to agony. Of course some people are said to look forward to the hope of a joyful resurrection. But we can leave that out.’ Bobby paused again. He was in the enjoyment, Appleby supposed, of the persuasion that he was now handling his theme confidently and well, so that a clear alpha mark would be jotted down for him at the conclusion of the proceedings. ‘And so,’ he went on, ‘we come finally to
being died on
. And that really does give one pause.’

‘As your uncle is now being died on, you mean?’

‘Just that, sir. It brings in the whole business of love.’

‘It certainly does.”

‘The cruel madness. May I fly that net.’

Appleby was startled. For now the young man was really speaking out of some vivid experience – experience more sudden in its impact than could have been his gathered perception of the present state of affairs at Charne. And experience surely, that was strictly traumatic, that might really wound or maim.

‘I’m not clear,’ Appleby said slowly, ‘as to quite what this is about. But I think that the cruel madness may really be in what you are saying and feeling. For it’s a denial of life to decline the richness of experience just because in the end there may be a bill to pay.’

‘People can do insane things, when in the net of love, passion, even affection. I
know
.’

‘For that matter, I know too. And I suppose one has simply to try to lend a hand.’

‘One has to extract some rational benefit from the mess.’

‘I can’t see that we’re talking about a mess.’

‘Well – say simply that one has to extract something out of the bizarre things people do. But I’m afraid I must be boring you frightfully, sir.’ Bobby produced this well-bred young man’s conventional deference and diffidence with his familiar faint irony. It wasn’t a quality for which there was much scope, Appleby supposed, in the fabricating of Latin verses. ‘In fact,’ Bobby went on, ‘we’re rather a boring crowd at Charne.’

‘I’ve never been in the least of that opinion.’ Appleby said this firmly enough to constitute a rebuke. ‘And at least you’ve made your way here in quite a hurry, surely? The Oxford summer term can’t be over.’

‘I cut out a week early. It’s one of the advantages of being a prize boy. The old gentlemen indulge you. The subject of the composition I’m working on, you know, is
Rus in Urbe
. I told our President that I needed immediate
rus
, and that another week of
urbs
would be fatal to my starting at all. He beamed approval and pressed my hand at parting. And here I am.’

‘And everybody is pleased.’ Since Bobby was now laughing, Appleby laughed too. Like most young men, Bobby Angrave could strike his elders as tiresome enough at times. But one of the tiresome habits of youth is judging it necessary to lay a kind of smoke-screen over their more generous impulses. It might well be that Bobby had cut short a thoroughly enjoyable term at Oxford in order to be with his uncle in this grim period. And he hadn’t perhaps known that his aunt was clinging to her habit of filling – or quarter-filling – Charne with guests.

‘What do you think of my cousin Martine Rivière?’ Bobby asked abruptly.

‘I haven’t had much conversation with her, so far. She’s clever, isn’t she?’

‘Yes – unlike that poor old thicky, Diana Page.’ Bobby began mounting the steps to the terrace. ‘I suppose Martine trundles Diana round as a kind of foil.’

‘I rather like Diana. As a matter of fact, you might find her–’ Appleby checked himself. He had been about to say ‘a good deal more responsive in certain ways than Martine is ever likely to be’. But if Bobby didn’t know this – he told himself – it had perhaps better not be put in his head. For there was a lurking ruthlessness in Bobby – the ruthlessness, and perhaps even the chilly sensuality, that goes with the theoretical mind. And Diana, after all, was very young. So, instead, he said lightly: ‘Is it Martine who has drawn you so quickly to Charne?’