The Cardboard Crown (10 page)

After he had arrived back in Melbourne it did not take Arthur long to recover his spirits. The scene of his dreadful experience was far away, in another world, and so it became less real to him. There was no association here to recall it, and the whole incident had been too short to leave a very lasting impression. Also he could not fail to be aware that he had no further worries about money. Perhaps that was why some people spoke with reserve of Arthur’s marriage. They thought he should not have made on it. Actually he did offer to return Damaris’s income to Lord Dilton, but he would not take it. Not many of those who were so honourable on Arthur’s behalf would have made the same gesture of offering a few hundreds, all he had, to a man with many thousands a year. It also suggests that Lord Dilton knew his daughter, and thought that Arthur had earned the money by his experience. In later years, when the circumstances of Damaris’s death were forgotten, Arthur gained a perceptible increase in importance from being the son-in-law of a peer. He returned with his mother to their house in East St Kilda. He tipped Mrs Mayhew out to live with Hetty, and arranged the portières and objets d’art he had brought out from Europe. There he settled down to a life of ordered routine which he followed for sixty years, gathering every kind of moss.

Austin and Alice had postponed their departure to see Lady Langton whom otherwise they would have passed in the Indian Ocean. A few days after their arrival, Arthur and his mother came up to stay for a week at Westhill. One day
during this visit they were all going for a picnic to that creek where Austin and his younger brothers had bathed on the day they first came there. Lady Langton wanted to hear the bellbirds. Austin had driven the wagonette round to the front door to collect the party, but only Arthur was ready. Austin asked him to hold the horses while he made some fixture to the harness. Arthur who was still bubbling with lively comment on Melbourne and everyone in it, began to amuse himself on the subject of the Dells.

‘What beats me,’ he said, ‘is how on earth Percy Dell fathered those children of Hetty’s. They’re like young bulls. I only hope they have more intelligence than either of their parents.’ Austin looked annoyed and Arthur thought that the groom had made a mistake in harnessing the horses. ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘Percy isn’t really a man. I believe that among certain primitive creatures the male is just a bit of protoplasm, a piece of jelly that the female uses to fertilise herself. Percy is just Hetty’s piece of male jelly, and I don’t suppose a piece of jelly can transmit its characteristics to its offspring, so Hetty has a clear field in which to reproduce her own bovine charms.’

Austin, his eyes blazing, suddenly turned on Arthur.

‘Be quiet, damn you!’ he shouted.

At that moment Alice with Lady Langton and the children came out of the house. They stood amazed, as though Austin often growled at them, it was half buffoonery. None of them had ever seen him so violently angry. His anger passed almost immediately. He gave Arthur a curious glance, suspicious, shame-faced and quizzical, as he climbed onto the box and took the reins from him. No one referred to
the incident. The conversation was a little stilted until they came down the steep hill to the creek, and chose a site for their tea. While Austin saw to the horses, Lady Langton and the children went to gather twigs for a fire to boil the billy. Arthur stayed to help Alice to spread a cloth on the ground, and to put out the cups and the cakes.

‘Why was Austin so angry?’ asked Alice.

‘I have no idea,’ said Arthur. ‘It knocked me flat. I was being funny about Hetty’s enormous children. He says much worse things himself and he loathes the Dells.’

‘I don’t understand his attitude to them,’ said Alice. ‘He hates Hetty coming up so often to stay, and yet he won’t tell her not to. I suppose he was angry simply at the thought of them.’

Lady Langton came back with her hands full of long strips of dry bark, and they did not continue with the subject.

A month later Austin and Alice sailed for England and for eighteen months Cousin Sarah reigned supreme at Westhill. I have already given some indication of her character and may give more later on, when I come to my own contacts with her. At present I shall only mention her effect on Mildred, who was about six years old when her parents went to England. Although there were four children left behind, it was on Mildred that Sarah lavished all her affection. Hitherto she had been a pretty little girl nicknamed Moo. Sarah called her her own little girl, and changed her pet name to Mildy, which somehow stuck. She encouraged her in ways of nauseating sentimentality, and worst of all she did not correct the accent
Mildy caught from the servants. It is even likely that she encouraged her in this hideous twang, as she liked everybody to be humble. If she kept Mildy as common as possible, she would remain superior to her and able to retain her love. She would not lose her in a fashionable marriage. Sarah was not as unlike Hetty as she appeared on the surface. Her concentration on Mildy was fortunate for the other children as they were spared a great deal of unpleasant and mischievous attention, which even I, a generation later, did not escape when we stayed with our grandmother.

Arthur used often to talk about Sarah and Mildy, using his favourite illustration.

‘All the Mayhews were conscious of their behinds,’ he said. ‘Hetty was proud of hers, but Sarah tried to pretend she hadn’t got one. She used to hold it in and the effort made her hold her chin in as well. I used to feel I was ravishing her even when I shook hands, she was so modest about her fingertips. The real trouble of course was that Sarah taught Mildred to hold in her behind, but she only taught her to do it physically. In Mildred’s mind her backside was as prominent, rotund and provocative as ever, and this conflict between the way she held her behind and her intellectual conception of it nearly drove your poor aunt off her head.’

It may sound callous to go off to the other side of the world, leaving one’s children for so long, but it was a thing Australian women had to do if they were not to cut themselves off entirely from the country they called ‘home.’ Alice was certainly not indifferent to her parting with the children and she had thought of cancelling the trip at the last moment, but she hated any form of weak-mindedness, and she would
have endured far worse things rather than show herself as vacillating.

Owing to the delay in their departure, they did not arrive in England until August, instead of in the early summer as they had intended, when Alice had hoped to remedy the omissions of her last trip to Europe and to make a Continental tour. But after a week or two in London, they went to Waterpark, just before the cubbing and Austin said it was not worthwhile going away. It did not occur to Alice to expect him to give up any of the hunting to fall in with her wishes. The Thomas Langtons obviously wanted them to stay, and it would have been difficult to refuse people who had shown them so much kindness.

Alice enjoyed living at Waterpark, and would have been contented there if she had not wanted to go abroad, and if she had not missed her children. She gives frequent appreciations of the restful, dignified house with its well-trained servants, and yet she never made any attempt to reproduce this at Westhill. She thought it admirable in Somerset, but she also thought it would be out of place nine miles from Dandenong, and there she allowed Sarah to continue with her dismal housekeeping. She had perhaps better taste than the Langtons, but was less of an artist. Arthur, if he had had the money, would have set out with the enthusiasm of a stage manager to have reproduced Waterpark at Westhill, and the dining-room would have been congested with rosy-cheeked English footmen. I myself, eighty years later, with a succession of erratic and ill-natured ‘cook-generals’ still make desperate efforts to create here the atmosphere of an English country house, and for the benefit of young relatives who probably
think the whole thing ridiculous. We all try to recreate the conditions under which we have been happiest. I have been happiest in English country houses, so wherever I am I try to make that particular kind of snail’s shell. Alice, although she enjoyed every kind of cultured living, had been happiest in Australia, and so when there, was content with the Australian country ‘way of life,’ even Cousin Sarah’s version of it.

In the spring, when the hunting was over, she was determined at last to have some compensation for her separation from her children and for the patience with which she had endured the winter. Austin grudgingly took her to Paris. For him foreign travel was only associated with two wretched journeys, one taking his dying father to Rome, the other bringing his bereaved mother back.

Even in London he complained that nobody knew who he was. In Paris his anonymity was worse, whereas in Melbourne more than half the people he passed in the street were aware of his identity. He was a member of the Upper House of Parliament and of the best club, and he dined at Government House. These things may have been slight compared with membership of the House of Lords and the Athenaeum, and with dining at Buckingham Palace, but they put him on top of his own world. The only place in England where his self-importance was sufficiently gratified was at Waterpark. It may not have been such a wide recognition as he had in Australia, but it was more subtle. In Melbourne he knew that he was regarded slightly as a buffoon, and he played up to his reputation. At Waterpark the respect given him by the villagers extended to something beyond his personal character, so that he had a greater sense of security
there. He was one of ‘the family’ connected with this soil for six centuries, and neighbours of far higher standing than the most important people in Melbourne received him as one of their own kind.

After a fortnight in Paris, Alice with wifely duty followed him back to spend the summer at Waterpark. She often went up to London. At this time there are hints in her diary, very slight and not even strong enough to need concealment in French, that she was not very contented, and that owing to his selfishness there was not complete harmony between herself and Austin.

At the end of August they were both in London, at the rooms in King Street, St James’s, where they always stayed. Austin had half promised Alice to travel on the Continent in the early autumn, but now that the partridge shooting was soon to begin he was sulky about fulfilling his promise, though he would have kept it. Alice, however, had met two Misses Urquhart from Melbourne who were just off to France. She thought it would be better if she went with them, and let Austin return alone to Waterpark. He was obviously relieved when she suggested this.

On the morning when he had arranged to go down to Frome by a midday train, they were sitting together at breakfast. The retired butler who ran the house brought in their letters. Alice, seeing that she had some with Australian stamps, took them eagerly.

That evening she wrote again in her diary one of those entries in tiny French, which are like the scars on the record of her life:

‘Cette journée est la plus terrible, la plus épouvantable de
ma vie. Je ne peux pas croire que je continuerai à vivre. Tout s’est effoudré. Tout est ruiné. Je désespère d’avoir jamais une vie heureuse, même honnête et paisible. Ce n’est pas seulement l’avenir qui est sans espoir, mais les années passées sont devenues fausses et un rêve fol. C’est ça qui est le plus grand supplice. Je n’ai même plus de passé.’

She goes on to describe what happened at breakfast. She opened first the letter from Sarah as she knew that it would contain laborious but affectionate notes from the children. She read these and handed them across to Austin. She then turned to Sarah’s letter, and read aloud anything that she thought would interest him—there had been heavy rains, the camelias had been very fine this year, Maisie had begun riding lessons. Then she read out:

‘I suppose you have heard from Aunt Emma that Hetty has another boy.’

She felt Austin start and she looked up. He had dropped the children’s letters. He appeared upset.

‘That’s impossible!’ he declared.

‘It can’t be impossible, dear, if both Sarah and your mother tell us it is so,’ said Alice, surprised.

‘No one has mentioned it till now. We would have heard it was on the way,’ he muttered, angry and confused. He pushed back his chair and wiped his forehead with his table-napkin.

He gave Alice a glance, shamefaced and suspicious and left the room.

She put down Sarah’s letter unfinished, and sat for awhile, puzzled and apprehensive. She could not understand why he should be so disturbed. That curious glance he had
given her before he left the room reminded her of something. It was when they were going for a picnic at Westhill and they came out and found him shouting at Arthur. He had given that same odd glance, questioning and ashamed. She distinctly remembered that afternoon—the damp aromatic gully, the bellbirds. She had asked Arthur why Austin was angry and he said it was because he had poked fun at the size of Hetty’s children.

Hetty’s children!

Alice felt as if the blood was draining away from her head. When two people have lived in the closest intimacy for over ten years, each little movement and glance may tell more than a volume of words. He had told her clearly in that glance before he left the room, that Hetty’s children were his own.

The implications of this were too great for her to grasp all at once. The blow was too heavy. Her first impulse was to escape, not to see Austin again until her mind was clear. She had put on her bonnet as she had intended going shopping immediately after breakfast to make some last minute purchases for her trip on the Continent. She went quickly from the house, closing the door softly behind her. She hardly knew in which direction she was walking, but she found herself opposite one of the entrances to Hyde Park. She crossed the road and went in and walked for a long time across the grass. At last she felt tired, and coming to a bench she sat down to consider her position.

It must have begun, she thought, on the ship, when she was ill, in the first year of their marriage. When she realised this, that it had begun so soon, the tears streamed down her face. She tried to think how it had happened, even to find
some excuse for it. She was ill. She knew Austin’s strong appetites, what it would mean to him, after the first rapturous months of marriage, to find himself deprived of his young wife. And there at hand was Hetty, who had always wanted him, ever since she was a child in the schoolroom, and had snatched the cardboard crown.

Even so she could not understand how it had come about, and once or twice she thought it could not have happened, and that the whole thing was a trick of her imagination. She almost started up to return to King Street, to catch Austin before he left for Paddington and to conceal from him that she had held such grotesque suspicions. But she saw how it all fitted too well—his detour to Zurich when he should have been hurrying to Rome to help his mother. He would want to see his child, the baby which was supposed to be Percy Dell’s and premature. Hetty had gone to Switzerland so that no one should see how large and robust their ‘premature’ child might be. And this of course was the reason for her sudden marriage to Dell. As Alice sat there she was struck by new details of the whole sordid sequence, and shaken by fresh bursts of contempt and grief.

The entry in her diary for this day is entirely in French and deals largely with her bewildered emotions. Arthur provided a more detailed account of the affair, as I sat on his mother’s needlework chairs at another of those intimate dinners I had with him in the early 1920s, at his house in East St Kilda. I do not know why he told me, unless he thought that I was the most interested, and that family history should be passed on. It may have been simply that in his old age his love of gossip had grown stronger, his desire to startle more
imperative, and having less contemporary rumour to draw on, he plunged recklessly into the past. Or, and perhaps this is the real reason, he thought that gradually this story might leak through to me, and he wanted me to know, if I was to be the repository of family history, that his brother had not been wilfully cruel and deceptive to his wife. When the story had leaked through to the older generation, their condemnation of Austin had been savage, and linked with ridicule of his eccentricities, the bells on his harness, his noises on trumpets and shawms, his often outrageous wit, so that one might easily gather the impression that he was an immoral buffoon. Arthur wanted me to know that this was not a true impression. He may also have thought that I might hear malicious tales about himself, about Damaris and her money, and so see his generation as altogether discreditable.

He began by ‘throwing Hetty and Sarah to the wolves’. It is not quite accurate to say that he disliked them. He had had so much fun mimicking them that he had quite an affection for them; as if they were a literary creation of his own. He spoke to them kindly when he met them, and in his later years as we have seen, often met Hetty for luncheon. It was not conscious hypocrisy. He did like them when he saw them. When he did not the idea of them filled him either with hilarious ridicule or scorching indignation.

‘The thing about the Mayhews,’ he said, ‘was that they had no taste—at least the women hadn’t. The boys were nice gentle creatures and should have been girls, and Hetty and Sarah the men. In that family the natural order was inverted.’

Arthur was speaking at a time when ignorances were assumed which made this kind of remark possible.

‘The trouble was that though Hetty should have been a man, she could never have been a gentleman. But even if Hetty wasn’t a gentleman, Austin was, and I don’t know how they could have gone on like that. They say that being at sea has a certain effect, I must say it wasn’t my experience. I felt deathly. Of course …’ he looked at me sideways, and again asked: ‘D’you know about this?’ Again trying to make my voice sound indifferent I said: ‘No.’

We were back where we had been a few months earlier, when his disclosure had been interrupted by my answering the telephone to Cousin Hetty. Arthur had drunk most of a bottle of claret and now gazed meditatively at his glass of port. He was thinking more of past events than of me, and was not particularly aware of my identity.