The Cardboard Crown (18 page)

‘That started it. Diana was furious. She never forgave Algernon and was very glad when he became a tobacconist. She brought Wolfie in and bathed his hands, and bandaged
them, and invited him to stay to dinner, and afterwards Sarah took Mildred along to see Mama, and they were left alone. In a fortnight they announced that they were engaged. A week after that Alice arrived from England. She was always very quiet and patient, whatever happened, and tried to reason with anyone she thought was behaving badly, but this time she was really angry. She gave it properly to Sarah, who although she looked shifty and guilty, had a gleam in her eye that showed she was pleased to have got under Alice’s skin. Alice said it was ridiculous, impossible, and she wouldn’t hear of it, that Diana was too young to marry anyone, let alone a penniless German music teacher, but she made the fatal mistake of calming her anger and beginning to reason about it. Also Austin didn’t mind him so much because he helped him play his bassoons, and he was a ‘von’. He said his cousin was a baron with a castle somewhere or other. I looked him up in the Almanach de Gotha. I did find the name Flugel but I couldn’t find Wolfie, but they don’t give the whole crowd like Debrett.’

Again the Langtons’ kind hearts or their Australian tolerance betrayed them. In England there would not have been a moment’s hesitation. Wolfie would have been forbidden the house and Diana packed off to an aunt in Aberdeen or Penzance. But here, as Arthur said, they began their fatal discussion, while Austin was always inclined to look with favour on the waifs and strays of old families, as a man who is fond of antiques but has little money, will buy a worm-eaten Chippendale chair.

While all the furious argument was going on, mostly between Alice and Diana behind the scenes, Wolfie still
frequented the house with the perfect self-assurance of an accepted suitor. Nearly every evening he played to the family after dinner, if there was no other engagement. He had round child-like eyes, soft mouse-coloured hair, rather like a baby’s, and a round full face which quivered when he played with emotion. When I was first aware of him he had coarsened, but he must have been quite attractive in the early twenties when Diana fell in love with him. He was very sensitive, but only about his own feelings. Arthur said that Diana was not in love with him at all, but only with the Moonlight Sonata and the other music which he squelched out for her. Arthur himself was very musical, but he attacked Wolfie for being too musical as he was envious of his greater ability.

Then the family made the even greater mistake of beginning to be amused by him. Alice sent up to Westhill for Steven to come and support her in her stand against the engagement. Steven came into the drawing-room at Alma Road and found Wolfie whom he was supposed more or less to kick out of the house. Wolfie rose, clicked his heels, bowed very politely, and with a beaming smile called Steven his brother, and Steven laughed. All the rows went on behind Wolfie’s back. Alice writes:

‘This afternoon I had another talk with Diana. She was quite irrational and obstinate. She said that we were a dull provincial family and that Mr von F. was an artist and came from the great world of European culture. I was astonished as, apart from the fact that he has no money and I think would be very selfish, the very reason I don’t want her to marry him is because I want to introduce her to that world. I said something of the kind. Diana was rude and said I didn’t
understand the artistic temperament. It was useless to continue the discussion. Diana is either rude or else she cries. I am afraid that it is a mistake to bring up children in Australia if later one wants to take them into the world. Now that we have Waterpark and adequate money, she would have exceptional opportunities in Europe. It is bitterly disappointing.’

But still Alice held out. Austin was inclined to give in. He was not ambitious for his daughters, was not concerned about money, and was grateful if they managed to find husbands from what he called ‘real’ families. He said that they could let them have an allowance to live on decently, though of course Wolfie would have to give up teaching music, except the bassoon to himself.

Alice did not mind using her money to benefit the family, or for such things as the restoration of Waterpark, but she had no wish to reduce her income to enable her daughters to make unsatisfactory marriages. Also she was certain that if Diana who was only eighteen, could recover from this infatuation, she would make a happier marriage under other conditions, and have a much wider and more interesting life in every way than in a suburban villa with Wolfie.

Suddenly Alice gave in. Nobody knew why, and I only discovered the reason a few weeks ago, when I was reading her diary for that year. One evening Alice, Austin and Diana were sitting listening to Wolfie playing the piano. Sarah and Mildy had gone to a lantern lecture on Chinese missions. Diana’s eyes were dark with weeping and fixed on Wolfie, who himself did not show any signs of anxiety or wastage. At the height of the crisis he said: ‘I eat and sleep well.’ He
had paused at the end of a piece of music, and then he began to play the Chopin Prelude in G Alice wrote:

‘I could hardly bear it. I felt as if my nerves were the strings of a violin which was being played. I nearly cried out to him to stop. When he had finished I signed to Diana to follow me to my room, and I told her that I would no longer oppose her marriage to Mr von Flugel. Her face was so wonderfully radiant that I had my reward. She embraced me and we both wept. I do not know whether I deserve my reward. I gave way to the feeling that all love is good and must not be opposed, and that is not sensible. I then sent Diana for Austin and told him that I would agree to the marriage. We all went back to the drawing-room, and Austin said in that gruff way he speaks when he is shy: “It’s all right. You can take her.” Mr von F. stood up and bowed very low and said: “Then I understand that Miss Diana is now my affianced.” ’

After this Alice began to call him Wolfie. He was completely accepted into the family, perhaps rather like a favourite dog, in a way that Uncle Bert never was. Although the latter was our financial salvation Alice always called him Albert. I think it was because they recognised, though quite unconsciously, that Wolfie was on the right of the
pale
. On the other hand it may simply have been that the name ‘Wolfie’ amused her, while plain Bert suggested a Cockney.

Austin was impatient to get back to England. Cousin Thomas was ninety when he died. If only he had been obliging enough to have died five years earlier, the lives of my aunts might have been entirely different. Mildy would not have received her psychological shock, while Diana
might have married anybody, possibly Dilton himself, and to the horror of Colonel Rodgers have filled the county with singing birds, with art and poetry and music. It is hard to imagine Aunt Maysie married to anyone but a rich business man, but it might have been a Bristol wine merchant. As it was, Cousin Sarah made cheap, nasty and hurried arrangements for Diana’s marriage to Wolfie, about which Alice was increasingly unhappy. She could not take any interest in the preparations, and left them entirely to Sarah, who had a punitive attitude towards the wedding. Sarah, from the muddle of her mind, always picked out the malicious and the righteous by which to direct her actions, even if they were incompatible, but here she could reconcile them. She liked to humiliate the Langtons, and she thought that Diana did not deserve a grand wedding as she was opposing her mother’s wishes, so her malice and her conscience combined to help her to provide a wedding breakfast like a Sunday School treat. The whole thing was such a disappointment to Alice that she could not give any heart to buying Diana’s trousseau, and even the wedding dress was rather poor.

Alice was thought to have behaved rather meanly about it, and years afterwards Diana rather sadly confided to me that she had felt humiliated as a bride. Perhaps Alice was tired of being onion woman to the Langtons, who hung so heavily onto her skirts and did not even want to ascend into loftier regions, and decided to shake one off, though it was strange that she should choose her favourite child. But we always turn with the greatest bitterness against those whom we love when they fail us. Even so, she did allow Diana five hundred
a year, which in those days was a comfortable middle-class income, and no one gave her any credit for that.

This marriage caused a sort of general post or mad tea-party in the family. Alice could not bear the thought of returning to England with only Mildy, when she had expected to have Diana. After a great deal of impatient discussion, it was decided to uproot my parents and take them back to Waterpark. My oldest brother Bobby had been born here at Westhill. It was thought that he should be educated in England and brought up in his future inheritance. My mother was only too glad to go to England, which she had never seen, and to escape the loneliness of Westhill. The family, as much of it as could be saved, was in the process of being re-Anglicised. And yet they were stretched across the world. Alice could not have contemplated separating herself for good from the two daughters to whom she was most attached.

Wolfie, of course, was ordered to give up music-teaching. He and Diana were sent to Westhill in place of my parents, and he was told that he could earn his living farming the place. Perhaps Alice’s conscience pricked her before she left, as she sent them up a concert grand piano to replace the upright walnut instrument with a ruched-silk and fretwork front, which was all my mother had. As against this she sent up Cousin Sarah, and here we are faced with another of these incomprehensible facts of history. To send up Sarah to keep house for a honeymoon couple is an action one can only think of as conceived in the heart of the foul fiend. It was presumably because the house in Alma Road was being given up and there was nowhere else for her to go. Austin, perhaps more confident now that he held property in his own right,
flatly refused to have her at Waterpark. Again, though I emphasise the black, dismal character of Cousin Sarah, it does not necessarily mean that she was as I describe her. I only state how she appeared to me. Undoubtedly to many people Cousin Sarah was a self-sacrificing Christian gentlewoman. Whatever she was they imposed her on Diana, while Mildy, whining and reluctant, was led aboard the P&O liner, and a horde of relatives, whose names I have not yet mentioned, waved from the Port Melbourne pier.

Alice began to be aware of the germ of evil fortune inevitably concealed within the good, at any rate in her own life. Times which she had thought were entirely happy, like the first months of her marriage, or the night by the Fountain of Trevi, turned out to be fools’ paradises. Now she could not free her mind from anxiety for Diana, living with Wolfie and Sarah at Westhill. She wrote:

‘We should never let a subsequent evil spoil the memory of a good we have known. If we have loved someone who later proves indifferent to us, we should remember the time of that love in all its freshness, and not let the mistrust which followed impair that memory. When we see the
autumn rose trees, with a few discoloured and frost-bitten blooms, we do not say that because of these the summer roses were worthless. As we grow older we become to some extent different people. I must separate the memory of the children at Westhill from whatever they may become later.’

Yet it must have appeared to everyone that at this time Alice was at the height of good fortune. Her large income was still increasing with the land boom, which enhanced her position as Mrs Langton of Waterpark. It may appear that Alice was too much concerned with social position, but it is humbug to pretend that most people are indifferent to their status in the world. Alice may appear socially ambitious, because the social ambitions of today are different. In another fifty years people may angle to be seen in the society of commissars, and boast that their grandparents had been presented to Stalin, while the commissars will most likely have coronets or some equivalent on their motor cars, and their footmen’s buttons. After the slaughter, the purges and the concentration camps, the eternal patterns repeat themselves. Alice only wanted to fill properly the position in which circumstances had placed her, and to see that her children had and used all the opportunities available to people of their kind. She was not primarily concerned with importance, but she wanted to be in the society where she thought she would find the better qualities of mind and manners.

She could not put away from her the thought of Diana living with Wolfie and Sarah at Westhill. There are repeated references to it, and when she had taken Mildy somewhere, to a lawn-party at Dilton or to an opera in London, she often writes: ‘I wish I could have had Diana with me.’ This was not
simply that she would have liked to appear with a presentable daughter. The thought that Diana might be unhappy was with her like an incessant dull pain. She visualised Westhill looking its worst, and Diana shut up there with Wolfie surly and selfish, and with Sarah’s dingy housekeeping. It seemed to her that she was now for the first time experiencing an old person’s sorrow, which so often lies in seeing the failure of those whom we love, rather than in our own personal griefs.

Fortunately Alice got on very well with my mother, who was no discredit to her. She had the Byngham aplomb, and good connections in England and Ireland. She was also of course a second cousin of Damaris, Aubrey and Ariadne, and though these were not viewed with great favour in the neighbourhood, they were far from being a bourgeois association. Even so my mother did not give Alice the same satisfaction as if she had been her own flesh and blood. Mildy, the only daughter she could produce, was frankly not presentable, either at Court or in the Waterpark Vicarage. Her silliness and her twang were appalling, and she often gave voice to those improprieties which are uttered by old maids in their innocence of double meanings. At the same time one was not quite sure that she really was unaware of what she was saying.

Alice sent her to an elocutionist in London to be cured of her flat vowels. She came back with an extraordinary articulation, which was neither Australian nor English, nor any known variety of speech. Whenever she had to say ‘cow’ or ‘house,’ she went through contortions of refinement, and she produced sounds like ‘caoo’ and ‘haoose’. Also the elocutionist taught her text book idioms which were not used by gentlepeople. Fortunately when she returned to Australia
she abandoned these efforts, though on special occasions she would revive them. We used to mimic ‘Aunt Mildew’s English voice.’

During these years at Waterpark they appear, until towards the end, to have led a quiet country life. Two of my brothers were born there, Dominic, a few months after they arrived, and Brian two years later. Bobby, the eldest, was Alice’s favourite, and she frequently tells little anecdotes about him. Mr Dunn, a neighbour, came to ask if he might fish in the garden stream. Bobby said:

‘You mustn’t catch Charlie.’

‘Who’s Charlie?’ asked Mr Dunn.

‘He is our private trout. He comes and talks to us.’

‘What does he say?’

‘He says: “I don’t know how you can stand about up there with a dry skin. It would set my teeth on edge.”‘ Alice adds: ‘Bobby enunciates his words beautifully.’

In the summer they drove about the country side in the wagonette, or in that landau, which now, entwined with brambles, is rotting in the shed below the stables. Sometimes they went to lawn-parties, or to Henley or to Cambridge in May Week to see George. They were unlike ordinary English country people in that they were always ready to go anywhere to see any new or any very old thing. In the ancient home of their family they remained sightseers. In the winter the men hunted and the women often drove to the meet. Once or twice my father was thrown through his horse swerving at a jump, and once ‘Austin came home with the tights, a form of cramp.’ Sometimes they went shopping in Bath, or up to London to see a play or Mr Whistler’s pictures,
but all through this pleasant
andante
existence, came at regular intervals the upsetting discord of Sarah’s letters from Westhill. Pages of thin angular writing told of Wolfie’s misdoings. When he found that the cows had to be milked twice a day, he sent them down to Burns the farmer, and either Sarah or the maid-of-all-work had to go down to fetch the milk, very heavy two-gallon cans so that there would be some to set for cream. Wolfie said: ‘There must be cream. It is nice.’ He did not do any work on the place. He paid one of the young Burns to mow the lawn, otherwise the garden was a wilderness. Sarah was doing her best to keep the weeds down, but she had enough to do indoors. The bottom paddock was full of thistles. Rabbits were everywhere. One could hardly gather apples in the orchard because of the brambles that tore one’s skirt. It sounded as if the place were reverting to a wilderness, to much the same condition it was in when I took it over last year. There were also hints that Wolfie was filling the house with drunken and immoral friends. The final authentic touch of squalor was when Sarah wrote: ‘Yesterday he did not even go for the mail, so I did not know that the parcel from the Mutual Store was at the station, and I was relying on some tinned herrings for tea.’

Diana in her letters made no mention of this. All she said about Wolfie was that he was busy composing. Alice tried to find signs of unhappiness or loneliness in her letters, could not do so, and then thought that perhaps Diana was concealing her wretchedness because she was too proud to admit that her marriage was a mistake. Alice discussed it with Austin, and asked what they were to do about the apparent wreckage of Westhill, but as all the information they had came from
Sarah, Austin was prejudiced against it, and said: ‘That damned jinx is making it up.’

After Christmas 1890 Austin was not very well. He said he did not want to hunt any more that winter, so early in January they all went off to Biarritz. Here Bobby made two interesting contacts. He spoke to an aged groom, who had held the Duke of Wellington’s horse in the Peninsular war. He also attracted the attention of a Princess Frederica, presumably royal, as she had with her a lady-in-waiting called Countess Braemar, whom she sent to ask Bobby and Dominic, the latter aged three, to an entertainment of performing dogs, at which Dominic was sick. The next day Princess Frederica herself called to ask how he was, and she showed herself very friendly to Alice, who thus, for the six weeks they were at Biarritz, found herself in exalted company. Alice very much enjoyed this society, and she gave a grand dinner party in a private room at the hotel, which she considered a great success, but again the perpetual fly was in her ointment, and at the end of the long description of her party she writes: ‘If only Diana could have been here!’ For the whole evening she was haunted by the thought of her beautiful daughter having ‘high tea’ with tinned herrings in a ruined house.

The next day she heard that Diana had given birth to a baby daughter at Westhill. She was filled with a dreadful pity. She remembered the birth of Mildy, the blowflies, the heat, the lack of proper conveniences. It was intolerable to think that Diana had gone through the same thing. The contrast between that room at Westhill and the parties with princesses at Biarritz was too painful to contemplate. Alice went to
Austin and said that she was going across to Marseille to catch the next ship to Melbourne. The rest of the family went on into Spain on a somewhat morbid pilgrimage to the Castle of Teba. Bobby and Dominic were taken into the sinister crypts of the chapel, but not on that occasion told of the idiosyncracies of their ancestor. It was I think during this trip, but as Alice had left the party I am unable to verify it by the diaries, that the Empress Eugénie saw my mother, asked who she was, and finding she was some kind of kinswoman invited or commanded her to luncheon, so that in those early months of 1891, the family soared to the highest social levels, not alas to remain for long. On the other side of the world Uncle John had already bought his fishing boat. Our family appeared to live on a social see-saw, up in Europe, down in Australia. Noticing this I have spent most of my life in England, but with me it did not seem to work properly. I did not even have the satisfaction of sinking to the bottom, with matey contacts with tobacconists and fishermen.

Alice had not let anyone in Melbourne know that she was on her way, as the letters would only have travelled in the same ship. She arrived in the morning, drove out to luncheon with Lady Langton and Arthur, and immediately afterwards took the train from Malvern railway station to Dandenong, where she hired a wagonette and drove up to Westhill. As they turned into the drive her sensations must have been much the same as my own when I arrived back here. She saw neglect on every side, broken fences, fallen trees, blackberries and thistles. But these things did not disturb her so much as her fear of what she would discover at the house. Would she find Diana in the same condition as the land, like one of those
‘cocky-farmers” wives who struggled bravely against drought and possibly drunkenness, with rough hands, bowed shoulders and bright but anxious eyes? The wagonette turned into the garden before the house. The flower beds were as Sarah had said, and the big lawn was so dry after the summer that it was hard to say whether it had been mown or not. The windows of the house were clean, but of course Sarah would see to that. It needed painting.

The door was answered by a cowed but clean-looking girl of about eighteen, who had a slight resemblance to Mildy, and Alice was reminded of the morning she had called to retrieve her from Mrs Hale’s. She felt the memory was a bad omen and she had a momentary feeling of despair about her daughters. It vanished as soon as she entered the drawing-room. Diana and Wolfie were so astonished and apparently equally delighted to see her that it was some minutes before she could take in what they or their surroundings were like, or recall the apprehensions with which she had driven up the hill. As far as she could see her fears had no foundation at all. Diana, far from appearing anxious and haggard, was blooming and beautiful, much better-looking than Alice had ever seen her. Wolfie too looked very well, a little fatter, a little emotional with fatherhood, kind and not at all drunk.

‘Where’s the baby?’ asked Alice, and was told it was asleep.

‘Who is it like?’ she asked.

‘Oh everybody,’ said Diana, airily. ‘It’s charming—like a doll.’

Alice enquired after Sarah.

‘I expect she’s gone for the milk. She’s always going for
the milk,’ said Diana laughing. ‘But never mind Sarah. You must hear some of Wolfie’s symphony. He only finished it the day before the baby was born. Wasn’t it amazing? All creation reached its climax at the same moment.’

Alice was not sure of the good taste of Diana’s remark, but she was so immensely relieved that she would not have minded what she said. Expecting some awful grey scene of disintegration she was delighted by their well-being and their cheerfulness. Then she noticed the drawing-room. Most of the heavy furniture had been removed, and there seemed to be a lot of blue plates, bamboo and peacocks’ feathers. The room was rather untidy, with sheets of music manuscript everywhere but it was not dingy. Diana had brought the aesthetic movement to Westhill. Alice commented on this but Diana could talk of nothing but the symphony. Professor Handley who was staying with them but was out for a walk at the moment with a Mr Pickering, said that it was equal to the work of the greatest modern composers. ‘Yes, it is very good,’ said Wolfie. ‘It will make me famous.’ Professor Handley and Mr. Pickering came in from their walk, the latter a young man with musical tastes, and after their introduction, immediately began to talk about the symphony. Mr Pickering in a low earnest voice told Alice it was equal to the best of Wagner, and Professor Handley in a loud voice said the same thing. Wolfie sat down at the piano, and, as much as he could on that instrument tried to give her some idea of it.

The evening meal was very peculiar. Sarah might try to make one of Alice’s Alma Road dinner parties like a Sunday School treat, but she could do nothing with Diana and Wolfie. They followed no pattern for her to wreck. If she
wanted tea with her dinner they did not mind. Wolfie had his beer, so teapots, beer bottles, ham and honey were all on the table together. The conversation when it was not about Wolfie’s symphony was about Aubrey Beardsley and the Yellow Book. Westhill was far more
fin de siècle
than Waterpark. Sarah sat through this bearing in her own mind the burden of all its wickedness. Wolfie and Diana were much too absorbed in themselves to care about Sarah’s private world. When for example, at the end of the meal, Wolfie said suddenly: ‘Now it would be nice to have a jam omelette’ Diana without looking at her said: ‘Sarah, darling’ and she went off, like a hypnotised Caliban to produce it. There was little wonder that she released her resentment in letters to Alice, though she hardly conveyed an accurate picture of their lives.