The Cardboard Crown (16 page)

It was inevitable then that about half of the Bynghams should secure by their marriages financial lifebelts which kept them afloat in the deluge which followed their father’s death, though they certainly had not married for money. They were far too impulsive children of nature for that. And yet as I write this chronicle I cannot help being a little startled at the number of my relatives who have lived on their wives. Even this shocking custom had its merits, for however greedy they may have been about money they did not regard it as sacred. They grabbed at the golden calf but they did not worship it, like the bourgeois who sees in cash the condensed holiness of his labour. They were possibly parasites, but not idolators. Austin did not merely live on his wife. He allowed half his children to be clothed, fed and educated at the expense of his mistress’s husband, though he did give them holidays in the country. This was not so unjust as it appears, as in return
Percy Dell had the satisfaction of boasting about his sons, which he could never have done if himself had been their father.

To return to the Bynghams. I only just remember Kilawly, that is the interior, and not with any accuracy, but I imagine it as a place where there was always some form of hospitality in evidence, where on Sunday mornings after Church my grandfather sat on the Gothic verandah sampling sherry, where young people carrying tennis racquets and croquet mallets streamed in and out of the French windows, where at night the long dinner table, often with twenty-four guests, was like an illustration from Mrs Beeton, and where later in the drawing-room my grandmother dispensed tea from that colossal florid pot, while from the wall above her the full length portrait of the sinister duque de Teba, a little bewildered at finding himself in an Australian colony, stared gloomily down on the festive scene, and possibly with envy of the apple cheeks of his great-great-grandsons. That portrait came to my mother and was at Westhill, but once when we were in England, a lamp fell over beneath it, and the flames blistered it out of recognition. Cousin Sarah was in charge of the house, and no one believed it was an accident. It was the frame of this picture that I found in the stables, and used for Dominic’s ‘Crucifixion’.

When my grandfather Byngham died, those of his sons who had not secured lifebelts in marriage, found themselves with no means of keeping afloat in the society of which they had been unconsciously brought up to regard themselves as the cream. I remember some elderly relative, perhaps Arthur, warning Dominic that when a gentleman sank socially he did
not just stop comfortably at a middle-class level, but went plumb to the bottom. It might be said that we belonged absolutely to the middle-class. I also remember hearing a duke’s daughter who had married a baronet say ‘we middle-class people.’ This of course was a silly affectation, but she meant that she was not, like her mother, Mistress of the Robes, and did not, like her father, own four castles. All the same I do not think it is accurate to call the landed gentry middle-class, even if they have small incomes, as the middle-classes are essentially of the towns, burgesses, bourgeois. Recently some Left critic described Jane Austen as the great novelist of the middle-classes in her period. It is doubtful if she ever heard that label, and it is a quite inaccurate description of the people with entailed estates of whom she writes. The idea is to blot out the memory of these people, and to make the far less admirable bourgeois capitalist the opponent of the Communist revolution. It is an intentional falsification of history, and as a certain amount of social history, and possibly its falsification, is inevitable in this story, these remarks are not irrelevant.

The fact that the Bynghams did not come at all from the middle-class—the Langtons were much more mixed up with them—explains, I think, why those of them who had no money did not just descend a little way. It was as if they were in a runaway lift which would not release them until they reached the bottom and walked out amongst the tobacconists and fishermen. I am sure that even Arthur, if he had not had a lifebelt from Damaris, would have sold hyacinths and narcissi at the street corner, before he would have gone into a bank.

I do not think this tendency when sinking socially to bypass the middle-classes is peculiar to my relatives. One finds very few of the aristocracy in middle-class professions. Peers’ daughters may keep shops, but one seldom if ever hears of them as Newnham dons. They cannot either become that refined upper-middle-class which is met in the pages of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. These people are distilled from several generations of Quaker merchants. At first they seem far nicer, far more interesting and intelligent than the landed gentry as they sparkle round Cambridge and Bloomsbury, but then one finds that they are all suffering from spiritual pernicious anaemia. The aristocracy lives from the land, the peasant lives from the land—they are akin. Their blood is nourished red from nature, and the flesh and the spirit are one.

The above may be largely quartz, but it contains enough golden truth to explain why my uncle John, finding himself at twenty-two cast on the world with three thousand pounds, and having no envy of the social position he would have had in a bank (and anyhow he could not add up) went straight off to Mallacoota and bought a fishing boat, and there he lived all his life, healthy and happy and free, sailing and selling fish. We loved going down to see him, and he always gave us half-a-crown each, with a most endearing shame-faced gesture because it was not a guinea. We were very proud of our uncle who was a fisherman. We were also very amused though not so proud at the idea of our uncle Algernon Byngham who also had gone down the social lift, bump to the bottom. He went as a jackeroo in Queensland, but he was thrown from a buckjumper and broke his leg in a way that made it impossible for him to ride again, so he spent some of his three
thousand pounds in buying a tobacconist’s shop in the local town. He married a very kind barmaid who put on his trousers for him every morning because of his gammy leg, but mercifully, from the snob point of view, they had no children. The only person of that generation who deplored these occupations was Horace Dell, who after he had passed through Mallacoota said: ‘I saw John Byngham but thought it wiser not to speak to him in case he should claim relationship.’ The others, the Bynghams and Langtons were like myself and my brothers rather amused, and the former referred almost more than was necessary to ‘my brother the fisherman at Mallacoota’ and ‘my brother the tobacconist at Bungaroo.’ This was a sign that Australia had already begun to affect them. English people are more reticent about relatives in humble positions, as also are Australians on the upgrade. It is only English gentry in Australia who, at first secure in their position, imagine that they need take no precautions to sustain it. The Langtons possessed by an endemic levity, threw away their advantages almost with hilarity. They could not resist provoking the shocked expression of a parvenue when they told her about Uncle John. They would not have done this in England, because there they took the social hierarchy quite seriously.

This was all far ahead of the period I am treating, that following Alice’s second return from Europe. Then there was no sign of the Byngham decline. It is hard to imagine these nine uncles of mine as boys, perhaps because they were always boys, little different at sixteen from what they were at sixty. Their vitality must have been overpowering. Their boyishness made them choose occupations like a tobacconist’s
and a fisherman’s. If their parents had returned to Ireland they would like most of their relatives have been sent automatically into the army, which is above all things a boy’s profession. At home was the machinery, apart from matrimonial lifebelts, to keep them afloat. Their cousins in Co. Sligo still miraculously go to Eton and have commissions in the Irish Guards. Again their boyishness was what made them so attractive to women, who love the idea of mothering a boyish husband, not boyish in physique but in simplicity of mind. How Aunt Mildy would have loved one! There they were, only a mile away, nine of them, the closest friends of her brothers, always in and out of the house, but she could not secure one even, as Arthur said, for ready money. Badly as they were in need of lifebelts, they would not use her girdle of chastity.

The lives of these young people were probably much the same as our own a generation later. At Westhill in the holidays they went for picnics, they ate a great deal of fruit, they killed an occasional snake, they bathed in the dam, they twice fought small local bushfires, the girls bringing buckets of cold tea to the sweating, blinded boys who were beating out the flames, and they spent half their waking days on horseback. A being arriving at Westhill from another planet would not have known which species owned the place, the humans or the horses. There is a long passage which leads from the lobby where now hang the portraits of Alice and Austin, round a corner to the entrance hall. When the cavalcade of carriages, carts and assorted escort arrived back from a picnic, the younger children rode their ponies in at the front door and down, out through the lobby, into the stable yard. There were domestic protests against this custom, but it was
amusing, and no Langton could resist anything that made him laugh. Ultimately it made them weep, and if it had not been allowed the fate of our family might have been very different.

Austin was always surrounded by half-a-dozen young people, either Bynghams or his own children, Langtons and so-called Dells. They helped him harness horses in odd formations. Sometimes he put the boys up as postillions and they drove round the countryside, blowing the coaching-horn. He had a hobby of learning to play odd musical instruments, and in that room at Westhill, where Aunt Mildy was born amongst the blowflies, and which is now the chapel, he kept an assortment of bassoons and shawms. One day the boys concealed a number of brass instruments under the seats of the drag. When they set out with six horses and Austin blew his coaching-horn, they produced these trumpets and responded with hideous groans and blasts, and the horses bolted. Happenings of this kind seem to have been frequent and to have added considerably to the gaiety of their lives.

From Arthur I only heard justifications of Austin, and Alice’s diaries only mention his activities and not his character. He was a very simple man and a very unhappy one, though he gave the appearance of being neither of these things. His simplicity led him into his relationship with Hetty—the mere gratification of an appetite. It also prevented him from extricating himself. In fact it was the whole basis of his character. It made him long for the happiness which he would readily have found in an uncomplicated married life. It made him prefer the society of children and seek that happiness in playing horses with the boys. He found a good deal of it
there, but when they played their occasional tricks on him, like blowing trumpets in the drag, although he cursed them in outrageous language, he was nearly on the verge of tears. He was always wondering who knew about himself and Hetty. He thought he must have many enemies, and so became suspicious. If he thought anyone was an enemy the things he said to and about him were appalling.

A self-important woman was brought by a neighbour to luncheon at Westhill, where life, owing to outdoor preoccupations and Cousin Sarah’s management was always something of a picnic. However on this occasion Alice had bestirred herself to see that there was very good food with civilised accessories. The guest thought she would indulge
le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire
, and ignoring the flounder cooked in cream and the quail, she said: ‘What delicious bread you have!’ Austin told the servant to take away her plate and to give her bread, and for the rest of the meal would not allow her to be offered anything else. The rude lady had tried to play the game with an expert. Austin understood much better
le plaisir aristocratique
which consists not as his guest had imagined in rudeness to someone whom it is safe to snub, but in a confidence so complete in one’s own values that one affirms them clearly, indifferent to the fact that they are incompatible with the ideas of a bourgeois society, and the pleasure consists in seeing the bewilderment of a conventional mind, when faced with an idea too generous, or a taste too eclectic or even an honesty too obvious for its comprehension. The Bynghams felt this pleasure when they talked about their brother the fisherman at Mallacoota. It is the pleasure of the
enfant terrible
raised to the highest level, not that Austin’s
level was always very high, especially when he was displeasing Cousin Sarah.

The above incident seems to indicate that eccentricity had already slightly debased the Langton currency, that this woman dared to be impertinent to Alice. Recently a young man in Melbourne said to me: ‘The one crime here is to be eccentric.’ He went on to explain that towns with names like Melbourne all have the same ethos, a kind of heavy Sunday luncheon atmosphere, and gave as examples Bournemouth, Eastbourne, Malvern and some others which I have forgotten. It could hardly be expected that the Langtons would flourish there. The repeating pattern, becoming more distinct as the years went on, seems to have been Waterpark, hunting, European travel, and then financial or some other crisis, and back to the bolt-hole, Westhill for some hard-up, easygoing fun. In these last years I myself have repeated it, probably for the last time, with the design grown very faint and wobbly.

Austin disliked Sarah, not only because of an instinctive temperamental opposition, but because he suspected that she knew the parentage of Hetty’s children. His suspicions were justified. She did know, but how I have not discovered. I have been told that women are able to divine instinctively any sexual relationship between people in their proximity. But if Alice could not divine it, why should Sarah? Alice was unsuspicious and satisfied in her life, while Sarah had all her frustrated senses alert, all her evil antennae extended to contact sin. It is even possible that Hetty was unable to resist boasting to her sister that she had achieved her ambition of the deanery schoolroom, as success loses half its savour if no one knows of it. However she acquired it, the knowledge
created in Sarah’s mind a terrible malicious confusion. She had to hold her tongue, because if she had ruined her sister it would have reflected on herself, also she would have had to leave Westhill and experience real poverty instead of that grey film which she tried to spread over the Langton’s prosperity. When she had to sit at the Westhill dinner table and listen to Austin’s Rabelaisian quips, she sometimes felt that she was in the presence of the devil himself, the personification of lust, the man who had ruined her sister—which was how she saw it—and could not even bridle his indecent tongue. Often with glinting, angry eyes she pushed back her chair and left the room, once exclaiming in muddled disgust: ‘Vulgarity I like, wit I detest!’