The Cardboard Crown (22 page)

Helen thy beauty is to me
As those Nicean barks of yore …

‘He went on to say that every good thing must have traces of past good things in it. “Arabs” he said “are the best coffee-makers. They leave the grounds of the last brew in the pot, and make the fresh coffee on top. In Europe we have all the grounds from the beginning, especially in Rome.” He paused, and then he said: “Friendship is best when it contains the traces of early love.”

‘I felt that he meant this to apply to us, and also that it was exactly the right expression of our relationship. He so often hits on this true note, which makes it such a pleasure to listen to him. He said that it must be disintegrating to be drawn in two across the globe, and that I should integrate myself in Rome. On the way back to the hotel we passed a shop with some Russian wooden toys. There were some little figures that came in half, with a smaller one inside, and others inside that, six in all. I bought one for Diana’s little girl. In the evening he had to dine with some people. He did not want to go, and said he would have put it off if he could. I had just come up from dinner when a waiter brought me a bouquet of yellow roses and an envelope from Aubrey. It contained only these verses:

Alice, your beauty is to me
As those strange Russian wooden toys
Which come in half, and then we see
A smaller size of painted boys.

For with my mind I can discern,
Beneath your stately woman’s guise,
That other who my heart made burn
With light you kindled from your eyes.

And so I have two friends in one,
First love within the friend I see.
And no one knows, but I alone
How doubly dear you are to me.’

Between the leaves of Alice’s diary for this day were some silky brown petals. There is no further entry until:

‘
6 Octobre
. Vendredi. S. Bruno. I have neglected my diary for the last few days as there was nothing to write. I do not mean that I have been dull. I have been so happy that there was nothing to say except to state the fact. It seems to me that we have reached exactly the right degree of friendship. A.’s quaint little poem expresses it perfectly. We have gone about together with complete mutual understanding of the nature of our friendship. It is cool and sensible, and yet it is richer because of our former feelings. I am writing this tonight because I want to remember what A. said this afternoon. We were sitting in the Medici gardens at the end of one of those long box alleys. He was talking about limitation and freedom in love and friendship. He said first of all that love should not be labelled. He said it was right that we should love our husbands, parents, children, etc., but that modern society had laid down too exact rules as to the degree to which we should love them. It said that we should love most those most closely related to us. It might work like that, but it
might not. If one’s love of a friend enhanced the quality of one’s life, that was enough justification. There was no need to label it. Too many things were labelled, especially in human relationships. He went on to speak of the proper physical expression for different kinds of affection. For some a handshake is sufficient, for others a linking of arms, and so on through varying degrees of demonstration to complete intimacy. I think that he was trying to reassure me about the propriety of our being together, and to emphasise that he would not destroy the balance of our relationship by pushing it too far. He certainly does enhance the quality of my life. I hope I do the same for him. I think I must or he would not want to spend so much time in my company.

‘
9 Octobre
. Mercredi. S. Denis. We had arranged not to meet until luncheon today, but I went out to do some shopping and ran into him unexpectedly, coming out of the Bank of Rome. He was looking rather serious, but when he saw me ses yeux étaient pleins de joie, et pour moi les étoiles chantaient.’ Here Alice’s writing becomes much smaller. ‘I don’t know whether I have suddenly gone off my head. If I look in the glass it ought to restore me to sanity. I have five grandchildren. But I almost feel that the situation of twenty years ago still exists. It is natural that I should have the same feelings for him. He is nicer than ever—a little grey and lined, but with so much kindness and intelligence in his eyes. And yet I feel that he is sad. Could it be because of me that he has not married? Or am I crazy? These things do happen. Why did he come to meet me at St Peter’s? Why does he fill my room with roses? Why does he talk so much about love and friendship? I know it is possible to mistake mere good nature
for something more, but I must believe the evidence of my senses. I must also remember that there’s no fool like an old fool. Whatever I feel I must behave with dignity. I feel as if I were in a wonderful dream. Had a letter from the secretary of the Commercial Bank saying my £900 would be available in November.

‘
11 Octobre
. Lundi. S. Julien. Aubrey had to go to Florence today to see Mrs Dane, I think on some business matter. I was not dull, knowing he is coming back tomorrow. I went to the Baths of Caracalla to see if I could find the mosaic pattern which Lady Langton had copied and worked for her dining-room chairs, but could not find it.

‘
12 Octobre
. Jeudi. S. Donatien. The situation
is
the same as it was twenty years ago. My reason tells me it is impossible, but my heart denies my reason. What can I do? Nothing of course. Imagine what all the family would say, with their strong sense of the ridiculous, if I were to elope again, thirtythree years later. I have no intention of doing so, yet I cannot deny that if A. asked me to, it would not be easy to refuse. I am sure I would refuse. I am not a fool. I am a fool in my mind. And yet how can I say I am a fool when, because of my feelings, every moment of the day brings me intense delight! Theosophists or some people of that kind, say that when two people are strongly attracted they have met in a previous existence and have been looking for each other ever since. It is like that with A. The moment I saw him, over twenty years ago in the Campo Santo in Pisa, I was
aware
of him, and again at the meet at Boyton immediately I saw him the day seemed brighter. How can I express properly sentiments which would only be decent in someone thirty years younger? What would
I think if I heard that, say, Hetty Dell had emotions like mine? I would recoil in contempt and derision. (Perhaps she may have!) I am sure that A. is very fond of me but his emotions are not stirred like mine, that is because he is still an attractive man and I am a middle-aged woman. It would not be natural for him to feel for me what I feel for him. Everything he says emphasises the proper degree for a friendship like ours. Even his quaint little poem, delightful as it was, was
cool
in tone. It spoke of past love. I have only a few days longer in Rome, during which I should be able to conceal my feelings, and at any rate they need not be labelled. Si je pleure dans ma chambre, personne le sait.

‘
13 Octobre
. Vendredi. S. Géraud. Late this afternoon we were walking along the Via Babuini when we saw in an antique shop a little marble statuette of two cupids struggling over a heart, one trying to stamp on it, the other to prevent him. I admired it and A. went in and bought it for me. He said it was a farewell present as I leave on Monday. I am delighted with it. He told the man to send it at once, and it is standing on my table now. We went on up the Spanish Steps to Trinita dei Monti, where we sat on the balustrade, and looked down on the golden mists of the evening, rising round the domes. He likes sitting up on places like this. So do I. He recited a few lines of some poem which begins: “When the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles …” He asked why need I go so soon. Couldn’t I stay another week? His tone was different from usual. I was sure that he was going to make some proposition. I wanted him to do it and at the same time was nervous lest he should. I said that I had many things to see to, and I mentioned for the first time that we had lost
a great deal of money. He stared at me and then he laughed. I was very surprised and hurt. He immediately apologised and was very contrite. He said: “Please forgive me. I was not laughing at your loss. It was at something quite different that occurred to me at the same time. You know I would not dream of laughing at your misfortune. I would rather never laugh again.” He was still smiling faintly, but he was so concerned that I forgave him. He came back to dine with me. At the hotel I found a telegram from Diana saying that Laura’s baby was ill, and she wants me to return to Lucerne tomorrow, so I shall leave by the mid-day train. After that A. was très très gentil. At dinner he said quiet funny things to amuse me. It was very peaceful being with him, and yet I felt that something had happened, like a change of temperature. After dinner we went round to his apartment. He sat down at the piano and played a few things. He stopped for a moment. Then he looked at me with a smile of greater affection than I have ever seen, and he played the Chopin Prelude in G. I could not help the tears coming to my eyes, but I was very happy, as I knew that we had reached perfect understanding. We did not speak much after that. He walked back with me to the hotel and said: “Goodnight dear Alice. I’ll collect you in the morning.”

‘
14 Octobre
. Samedi. S. Calixte. In the train. I was packing all the morning. Then Aubrey came and drove with me to the station. He gave me his last bunch of roses. When the train was about to leave he said: “You must come to Rome every year at this time.” I said that I would if I could, but that Austin wanted us all to go out to Australia and I was not sure when we would be back. I see no reason why I should not go
to Rome once a year. He said: “Come back before next October.” Suddenly he said: “You haven’t thrown a coin in the Fountain of Trevi.” The train was beginning to move. I quickly took a coin out of my purse and gave it to him to throw for me. It happened to be a sovereign. I said: “Will that do?” He said: “It must. It must. Arrivederci!” I could only smile.

‘
15 Octobre
. Dimanche. S. Thérèse. It seems very lifeless back here in Lucerne. The baby has recovered after all. It was only Diana wanted me back to buy some music for Wolfie. Wrote a cheque on Frome for our P&O fares, also to Commercial Bank telling them to transfer the £900 when available to Melbourne. It is only a fortnight since A. met me outside St Peter’s. Wrote to Dolly Potts.’

The last chapter gives Alice’s account of what happened in Rome, but is it necessarily a true one? I do not mean that she deliberately falsified it. She was incapable of telling an untruth and she would have had no object in doing so. She wrote in her diary to preserve her memories. But she was obviously in a highly emotional state and afraid of making a fool of herself. She was not likely to see others clearly, or to read Aubrey Tunstall’s character accurately.

After all old Colonel Rogers did say that Aubrey, Damaris and Ariadne were bad hats. It is true that he called anyone a bad hat whose moral intelligence was above his own. But it was not only Colonel Rogers who spoke of them
in this way. They were a sinister legend in our part of the country, though this may only have been because they lived in Italy and did not hunt. Beyond this I know no more than any other reader of the parts of Alice’s diary which I have quoted, but I think that these show some internal evidence in support of Colonel Rogers’s view.

It is fairly clear that Aubrey was short of money. When Alice met him at Boyton he had come over to see his trustees. When they passed Keats’s house he said: ‘Trustees are horrid people.’ He did not entertain Alice lavishly as on her former visit to Rome. On the contrary he appears to have had a large number of meals at her expense. He did not go into society. This may have been due to the time of the year, but also to shortage of money, and it is even possible that his private life had damaged his reputation, though one does not know whether, or how much this would have affected his position in Rome at that time. Alice only saw a youth of sixteen when she went to his apartment, wearing the outsize livery of one of the footmen he could no longer afford. She thought that the pictures were not so good. Her memory was right. He had sold his Old Masters and also his gold plate, so he did not ask her to dine, only to tea. Certainly he did buy her the marble amorini, which are now on a table in the room where I am writing, and he did give her flowers, but she only mentions three occasions, not every day. He may have regarded these things as an investment. He went off in the middle of her stay to see his sister in Florence, probably to borrow money on his prospects of securing Alice, and to postpone a crash until he had done so. She had seen him looking serious as he came out of the bank on the previous
day. This may sound shocking, but people of his kind who find their position slipping are apt to do that sort of thing.

Aubrey’s sister-in-law Lady Dilton would have told him the previous year when he was in England, that Alice was now quite rich. He would not have heard of the boom bursting. Alice had been travelling about Europe for nearly a year without her husband who was in Australia. She had some of her family in Lucerne, but did not appear to be very much with them. He may have thought that she was far less attached than she was in fact, and that it would not be difficult to persuade her to throw in her lot with him, either just to share his apartment and restore his style of living, or even somehow to secure a divorce and marry him.

At the same time he wanted to be honest about it, and not to land himself in an intolerably false position. He was not physically attracted by women, and in those long talks he had with Alice, sitting about Rome on the sun-drenched October steps, he emphasised the validity of all love up to its proper degree. He was both justifying his own inclinations, and trying to explain to her that if they were to live together there were definite limits in his affections, and until she had grasped that he could not make his proposal. He did like her very much indeed. He had for her that affection which is the noblest part of love, but he had not the remaining part.

He must, on their last afternoon together, have thought that he had prepared the ground sufficiently to make his proposition. He had bought her, presumably with part of Mrs Dane’s loan, those vaguely symbolic amorini, though whose was the heart to be stamped on? He asks her to stay longer in Rome and at that moment she reveals that she is
no longer rich, and he laughs. He was laughing ironically at himself, perhaps with relief, as he could not have enjoyed the game he was playing. He was kind with the kindness which is possible to people without very strong feelings. For the rest of the evening he was extremely gentle to her, although still dining at her hotel. His intentions were no longer the same. The temperature had changed, as she noted. Perhaps in a quiet defeated way he was content to have abandoned his scheme. The air was purer. When at the train he asked her to come back every year he meant it, at least more than most English people who scatter those vague invitations so generously. There was this unusual affinity between their souls and their minds, but it could not have been complete unless her own soul had been in the body, perhaps, of the youth in the footman’s livery which was too big for him.

Alice never went back to stay in Rome, and one wonders whether Aubrey threw her sovereign into the Fountain of Trevi. In his financial state it would have been painful for him to do so, and to know that it would be fished out by some urchin as soon as his back was turned. Or is this too low an imputation? Is it not better to believe that the Fountain of Trevi does not always work?

In spite of the above it is possible that my illness, combined with Aunt Diana’s selfishness, saved Alice. If Aubrey had discovered, as he might have in another two days, that her income, though halved, was still about twenty times what he had left, he might have continued with his design. So I may now once more, and with greater complacency, invoke the ghost of my grandmother, receding into Paradise. Whatever I may be doing now, think what I did for you then, offering
the sufferings of that frail flower, my tiny body, to save you from dreadful scandal. It is true that I may also have deprived you of years of autumnal bliss, but does autumnal bliss of that kind happen unless there has also been a summer, not merely a single, distant spring day?

And by this infantile sickness I saved not only my grandmother, but the entire family from ruin. For if she had gone off with Aubrey he would certainly have squandered her fortune, as he had squandered his own. My father, uncles, aunts, cousins and their wives and children would have been left penniless, all fishermen and tobacconists. I, instead of buying brocade and aubusson for Westhill, would be selling daphne and boronia at the corner of Little Bourke Street. Aunt Mildy alone would have realised her ambition, as she lurked in a doorway or paced her beat nearby.

I was once at a detective play in London. At the end, when the villain was discovered and arrested, a woman in front of me said: ‘Well, I don’t believe he did it.’ Whoever reads this is at liberty to take the same attitude, to disagree with the author about his characters. As I have written earlier, if Mildred or Dominic had compiled this book, the story would be very different. Mildred would have magnified the bouquets to beds of roses, as in the novels of Mrs Glyn, while Dominic would have seen Aubrey as spending agonised nights of prayer, wrestling with his temptation. Perhaps we would all be wrong. Aubrey may simply have been an ordinary man of good principles, immensely enjoying Alice’s company, but as determined as she that their friendship should be above reproach, though nowadays it is unusual to contemplate such a possibility.

The trek began again, farther south, but first my father and Uncle George went back to Waterpark to pack up the smaller personal belongings left there. Alice must have intended to be away a year or so. Dust covers were put on the furniture and a caretaker and his wife installed. The way they drifted apart from this house is curious. When they left for Brittany a year earlier, there was no suggestion that they would not be back in a few weeks. A kind of spell seems to have come upon them, drawing them farther and farther towards the south in aimless wandering. They were like those peasants of whom Tolstoy writes, who suddenly abandon their homes and all that they have, to journey to ‘the warm rivers’ which exist only in their imagination. Alice was at least twice in Paris during this year. It would have been nothing to her to run across to England and see how things were at Waterpark. To be so close to one’s home and not to go to it is almost uncanny, like something that happens in a nightmare. When I read in her diary that Steven and George had gone to Waterpark, if only to pack, it was a relief, as if a breach had been made in some thick and maddening cobwebs.

There is no explanation of why they stayed away for so long. It was surely not cheaper to keep the whole family in foreign hotels, and I cannot help resenting the fact that I was allowed to be born in one, instead of in the ancient home of our family, in spite of my Venetian lace cap and Madame Miradoux de la Primaube’s bouquet. My parents, although nowadays in Australia they would be thought typically English, were Australian enough not to give the same importance to things of this kind, as people in whom tradition is quite unbroken.

It is possible that something had happened to make them feel uncomfortable at Waterpark. Did they think it a disgrace not to have signed Dolly Potts’s marriage settlement? Or had Austin said something outrageous to a duchess in the hunting field? As Australians they may have felt more under criticism than if they had been at Waterpark all their lives.

A Cornishman once told me that when he was a boy he caught a seagull, and clipped its wing so that it could not fly away. After a while the feathers grew and he forgot to clip them again. It flew back to its companions who killed it. In its captivity it had acquired some human taint which they sensed was hostile. My family were captive seagulls, both at Waterpark, and even more, as time went on, in Australia.

Again there is another explanation for this long absence. After they had ‘chummed’ Austin and Mildred to Marseille, they thought that they might as well stay in the South of France for the winter. Then, when the summer came, Alice could not bear to return to England until she had been to Rome. But she could not go to Rome in mid-summer, and Aubrey might not have been there. Perhaps only half-conscious of her motive, she planted the whole family at Lucerne, as a kind of chaperone in the centre of Europe, whom she could accustom to her innocent flights to various capitals, until on that triumphant day, the Feast of S. Izarn, she wrote to Honble. A. Tunstall, telling him she would be in Rome on Thursday.

However, at last, after five months, the party left Lucerne. Although the season was well over, quite a number of people came to see them off, this strange little contingent of colonials, who had settled amongst them, added myself to
their number, and now passed on. They stayed a few days in Milan and Florence where Bobby seeing a procession of young noblemen in evening dress, said: ‘Look at the waiters going to school.’ The next halt was Rome. My parents and the Flugels had never seen Rome and wanted to stay there. Alice with George went straight through to Naples.

It was a pardonable vanity. To have reappeared in Rome, accompanied by three children, a son-in-law and daughter-inlaw, five grandchildren, two nurses and three perambulators, would have been an intolerable anticlimax. After a week the family joined her in Naples, and they all went on to Brindisi, where she makes an odd little entry in her diary:

‘
19 Novembre
. Dimanche. Ste. Elisabeth. The
Arcadia
came in at eight o’clock this morning. I bought a fan, some silk caps and a picture and we all went on board before luncheon. Had a telegram from A. T. “Arrivederci a presto.” The last time I was here I had some chocolate in the hotel with Mr Rudyard Kipling.’

This name, suddenly unfurled like a Union Jack at the exit from an enchanted garden, closes Alice’s European experience for ever.