The Cardboard Crown (23 page)

Six weeks later they were back at Westhill, the bolt-hole. They had first spent a week in Melbourne. Alice is seldom illnatured in her comments, and one can only guess her feelings from what she does not say on arriving at the final goal of that trek which began with the flight to Brittany fifteen months earlier. Austin met them at Adelaide. ‘The children remembered him quite well.’ Who could forget him? Mildred, dressed more for a garden party, than for Port Melbourne pier at ten o’clock in the morning, met them there. They drove through a pouring shower and a cold wind to Lady Langton’s house in East St Kilda. In the evening Arthur gave a family party to all the relatives to welcome them back.

‘It wasn’t a success,’ he told me. ‘Alice had been away so long that all the untravelled relatives expected her to put on airs—a thing she never did in her life—but she was a little depressed at the sight of them, and by God, I don’t blame her. Your mother and Diana, with all her high-souled rot, did look and behave like ladies, but you couldn’t say the same for Mildred, and even Maysie had become very bourgeoise. If women are happily married they just become second editions of their husbands. Mildred and Maysie weren’t by any means the worst. There were some ghastly Mayhew wives, and Walter’s girls had that provincial refinement which considers
le monde qui s’amuse
vulgar, like University people and New Zealanders. They looked at Diana as if she were a barmaid. Diana did provoke them with her Paris clothes and her air of bewilderment. Then Hetty was there looking like the proprietress of a Methodist
maison tolerée
, with her pugilist’s shoulders and her jutting jaw, and her black opaque eyes. I didn’t ask her. Mama did, but it was sheer effrontery for her to come. Nobody talked of anything but the financial crisis. Alice must have felt inclined to go upstairs and burn her cheque-book. She had just come back from years spent in the most beautiful and interesting places in Europe, but no one would let her utter a word. They were determined that she should not be allowed to patronise them. As if she wanted to!’

Alice only makes a brief reference to this party: ‘A great many relatives present. They all seem to have lost money. Percy Dell asked me to lend him £45 for two months. I said I would. His son Horace looks very unpleasant. It is strange to be here.’

The captive seagull had been away too long. Not only had it become suspect to the flock, but the flock itself had become alien to the seagull. Before they came up to Westhill she filled in the last page of that diary with the French headings. It must have been like using the last jewel of some precious chain of which the principal stones were lost.

‘
31 Decembre
. Dimanche. S. Sylvestre. Went with Austin to the new cathedral. I do not like it at all. It is so hard, striped and confused. No repose for the eye anywhere. They should whitewash it and hang up some good tapestries as at Arles. It needs softening. Sermon on the financial difficulty and trouble of this past year.’ As she listened to this financial sermon in the new striped cathedral, did she find that it was the heart and not the eye for which there was no repose, and did she try to imagine that she was in the duomo at Milan, or in Santa Croce, or in St. Peter’s where the cardinal walked in procession in his petunia cope, and Aubrey waited outside between the colonnade and the fountains?

Everyone but the Flugels came up to Westhill. Alice behaved rather like a modern government in times of crisis. Her own income was halved so she halved all the allowances. It was theoretically just, but it was disproportionately hard on Wolfie and Diana, who had nothing else to live on, and who for the past two years or more had been used to having their living expenses paid for them. They took a tiny wooden cottage in Balaclava, where even Diana’s Paris clothes and diamonds did not give her much chance to patronise her cousins. They were so poor that their poverty became a legend in the family, and though later they were quite comfortably off, the Craigs always pretended to believe that
they had not enough to eat. Wolfie had to begin music lessons again, but after the boom he could find few pupils, and for awhile he did actually tune pianos, though he said: ‘It is not good for a composer to tune pianos.’ Arthur when he told me this, had been guilty of that subtle form of falsification of history which consists of giving wrong dates to true events. When I questioned his statement he was ashamed to insist on the point.

It is strange that Alice allowed her favourite daughter to become so poor. History again becomes irrational. Her too rigid sense of justice may perhaps have prevented her from treating Diana differently from the others. She may have been rather disgusted with the selfishness the Flugels had shown in London and elsewhere. Or is it possible that she had not forgiven Diana for hurrying her back from Rome to Lucerne, two days before it was necessary?

The household at Westhill for the next few years must have been extraordinary if Arthur is to be believed. Austin and Alice would have been happiest living like one of those Italian families, of which the different branches all occupy apartments in the same palazzo. Westhill was not big enough for that. Even so in the summer time it was always bursting with relatives. Beds were made up in the room for developing photographs, in the studio my father built, and even for odd young men in the loft above the harness room, while the Flugels occupied the spare cottage. On one Sunday the party from Westhill filled an entire side of the local church. The cooks were always leaving as the hordes of grandchildren invaded the kitchen. My father had built a forge where he did wrought iron work. According to Arthur anyone standing on
the lawn would hear, in addition to the crying of babies, the noise of hammering from the forge, of bassoons from Austin’s music room, of Wolfie at the drawing-room piano, and more distantly an irate cook raging at the children in the kitchen. Then from the stableyard of this slightly shabby house in the Australian bush would appear a grand carriage with blazons on the panels, driven by a groom in a bowler hat, or else a six-in-hand drag with delighted shouting postillions of seven years old.

This picture cannot be quite true, as all those sounds would not be heard from the same point, children of seven could not ride carriage horses at anything more than an amble, and myself and my cousin Deirdre von Flugel were both placid babies, and could not have been crying all the time. All the same there must have been some truth in it. Only the other day I called on a Miss Violet Chambers, a lady of eighty-three. She told me that she had stayed here in 1895. ‘It was such a happy house,’ she said. ‘There was so much life and fun there. Your grandfather was the most amusing man I have ever known. And the cherry plums!’ I came home and looked up the diary for that year, and found: ‘We all went to meet Vio Chambers at Narre Warren. Schmidt drove Laura and me in the landau. The rest went with Austin in the drag. He had harnessed six horses in a pyramid and was wearing a pink hunting-coat and a solar topee. The children rode their ponies. I thought Vio would prefer to drive with me, but she climbed up on the box beside Austin and blew the coaching horn. A hot but amusing day.’ The next day she writes: ‘Ernest Dell seems to be very taken with Vio. They spent the afternoon together picking cherry plums while we went for
a picnic. She is a little old for him.’ Is there another sad Dolly Potts romance behind this laconic entry?

Alice for the most part was contented with the lively and amusing, if occasionally freakish life at Westhill, with her interest in her grandchildren and in the attractions between the young people like Ernest and Vio. She imagined that the fates which shaped her destiny and her character had about finished with her, that her role was now one of a looker-on, or of the onion woman, stationary in mid-air, not ascending to Heaven but performing a useful and not too uncomfortable function in sustaining her large family at a good height above the infernal regions of poverty.

Austin clearly did not want to return to Waterpark, and when after she had been back a year and he showed no sign of changing his mind, she had the carriages, and also some of the furniture and pictures sent out from England. A lingering hope had died. One day she wrote:

‘Today the carriages arrived from Waterpark. I sometimes think I see what the pattern of our lives ought to be. I believe I saw it clearly when I was first married. It seems impossible for us to carry out the design. Circumstances outside ourselves or our own natures pull it crooked. I cannot think of one person to whom this has not happened to some extent. Are we only put into the world to see what the design ought to be? In another life we may realise the possibilities we saw. Yet the design for me was not impossible. It was only prevented by circumstances.’

A few days later she had ‘a very nice letter from Lady Dilton. She said we were missed at Waterpark and hoped we would return. Sometimes I feel that it is quite foolish if not
wrong to stay out here. We are amusing ourselves too easily. Lady D. said that A. T. had left his Rome apartment and had gone to live in Taormina. C’est tout fini.’

She could not think of Aubrey in any other place than Rome. If he was not there he was nowhere. Even at the meet at Boyton, when he laughed into her eyes, she saw behind him not the bare winter oaks, but the ilex trees on the Pincio, not the wide English pond, but the hanging water gardens of the Villa d’Este.

The fates had not finished with Alice. They had two more blows to deal her to reduce her to complete submission, to complete renunciation of the idea of any positive pleasure for herself, to the condition she was in when I first remember her, the white-haired old lady, the onion woman static in mid-air, bearing dutifully on her skirts the weight to which she was accustomed.

As ambition for herself faded, and then for her children, she transferred it to her grandchildren, and mostly to Bobby. She quotes his sayings more than any of the others. She hoped that one day he would reign at Waterpark, with all the best qualities of an English squire, but with extra adornments of wit and taste. She may too have dwelt with pleasure on the fact that he was not so very distantly related to Aubrey Tunstall.

But the day came when she wrote:

‘This morning I was gathering apples in the orchard. Bobby saw me and ran to help me. I was carrying them in my skirt and he said: “Grannie you will spoil your skirt,” and he went to fetch a basket. He climbed the tree and we gathered quite a lot and brought them in together. At luncheon Steven
told him that he might ride Pride this afternoon, when I went to Harkaway to take some plants to Mrs Daly. Pride is bigger than his own pony and he has not been allowed to ride her before. I have never seen a boy so happy. His eyes were alight with happiness and his face was so rosy with its clear and flawless skin. He looked really beautiful. We were all pleased and amused to watch him, and he said such funny things. I drove with Schmidt in the dogcart. Bobby rode beside us, and sometimes he rode ahead and called to me to see how well he could sit on Pride. When we arrived back here and had pulled up at the front door, I told him how his father and the other children used to ride their ponies into the house and out through the lobby to the stables. I wish I had bitten off my tongue. He said “I will do it” and he put Pride at the steps, but she shied, and he fell off on the gravel. I expected him to get up, as the children are often thrown, but he lay there quite still. I carried him into the house and laid him on my bed. Tom Schmidt galloped for Dr Rayner. Steven and Laura had gone out sketching and I sent Schmidt to look for them. The doctor came and said he thought Bobby had a fractured skull. He did not recover consciousness and died before Steven and Laura returned. They said nothing. I went out and left them in the room with him. I sent Tom into Berwick with a telegram to Austin who was in Melbourne.

‘The children do not understand what has happened. They are very quiet and trying to be helpful to us. When they asked where Bobby was I said that he had gone to Heaven. Dominic said: “When will he be back?” I said that he would see him there some day. Dominic said: “Can he see God?” and I said “Yes” because I am sure that his angel does behold
the face of the Father, as we are told. Dominic said: “I will ask him what He’s like when he comes back.” Brian patted my hand because he saw that I was upset. Austin arrived after dinner. He looked terrible.’

The above is an entry which I feel in a way that I should not have included, but Julian expressed surprise when I said that we were cursed. Even so this was a simple tragedy compared with what happened in later years. Or was it so simple? Was Bobby making expiation for one of the duque de Teba’s altar boys? We do not know, assuming a
damnosa hereditas
to exist, how it may work, whether the malefic stars strike the innocent natures from without, or rot the guilty from within. Bobby and Dominic, their two most evident victims, are buried in the same grave in the Berwick cemetery, the old man the younger brother of the boy.

Austin did not recover his spirits. He no longer took any pleasure in his horses, or in teaching the children to ride. He complained of feeling unwell, and got up in the middle of the night. He told Alice that he did not want to go on living at Westhill, and she agreed to take a house near Melbourne. No one suggested returning to Waterpark. Austin went off house-hunting the next day. Another historical mystery—Alice let him sign a lease without first seeing the house herself. There was a week of packing, and then some of the furniture, with more that they had stored in Melbourne, was sent to their new home.

I think it was at this time that I was moved into the nightnursery with my brothers, so that my mother would still see three sons sleeping there, and not be harrowed by the sight of an empty bed. Every night we used to sing a hymn, often
Bishop Ken’s evening hymn, which she told us was written at Heaven’s Gate, a wooded hill above Longleat, only a few miles from Waterpark. Often too we sang ‘Now the day is over’ which I think is beautiful in the absolute simplicity of its petitions, and its picture of the sleeping world. Perhaps these words of goodwill towards mankind, sung every night from his earliest years, awakened Dominic’s sensitive soul to its repudiation of the inhumanity of the modern world. Ten years or so later I was once with my mother at the evening service at Waterpark, when they sang Cardinal Newman’s famous hymn. Her eyes were full of sorrow and I was sure that the angel faces she had lost awhile were those of her children at Westhill, one through death and the others through growth and the inevitable changes in their natures. There was always too, in our ever
depaysée
family, the nostalgia for the other home, ten thousand miles away. In the Northern or the Southern Hemisphere there was no abiding city.