The Cardboard Crown (7 page)
Waterpark was the magnet which drew my family back at intervals across the world, whisking them away just as they might have been thrusting their roots fruitfully into Australian soil. This distraction went on for four generations.
With Julian at last the umbilical cord is cut. Not only were the family themselves whisked backwards and forwards—to Westhill when they felt the cold, to Waterpark when they felt the heat and sighed for that restfulness in their surroundings which only comes after centuries when nature is utterly conquered. I write at a table which was once at Waterpark. Over the chimney piece is a portrait of a Langton in a green velvet coat and a wig which hung in the same position there, and in a tin shed down below the coach-house, tipped out years ago to make way for the first motorcar, is an old rat-infested landau, with brambles climbing up the wheels, which at one time, highly polished, with coachman and footman and shining bays, rolled through the Somerset lanes and along the elegant streets of Bath.
At the time of Alice’s first visit to Waterpark, it was owned by Thomas Langton, a cousin of Sir William’s. The entail had been broken and he had no children, so it was uncertain to whom the place would come next. Of recent years Thomas had kept up a regular correspondence with Sir William, and he was expected to inherit. The only obstacle was that he might die first. Austin had stayed there during some of his Cambridge vacations, but Thomas was not much taken with him. The invitation to stay was most likely due not only to hospitable impulse, but to the wish to have another look at Austin, to see how long Sir William was likely to last, and also to see how suitable was Austin’s Australian wife to become the future mistress of Waterpark. To Alice, arriving on a fine June afternoon after sixteen weeks at sea, it appeared the most desirable place on earth, far more a haunt of ancient peace even than when I knew it, half a century later. She writes:
‘We arrived here about an hour before sunset. There is nothing in Australia that has the quality of this place—a wonderful peaceful mellowness. Everything indoors and out is in harmony. The house makes one feel that it has a soul. We walked in the garden and the low sunlight slanting across the lawn made the old bricks a glorious soft, rich red. I have never before felt such strong emotions awakened by a place. I should have thought that these feelings could only be aroused by a
person.
It may be partly due to relief at being on land again.’
Then comes the first of those passages in tiny French, in which Alice only wrote when she was feeling grief or anxiety or intense joy, and did not want to betray herself at a first glance to some inquisitive person who might happen to come across one of her diaries. They are rather like scars on the record of her life.
‘A. est redevenu ce qu’il était,’ she wrote. ‘Pendant les dernières semaines, je craignais qu’il ne m’aimât plus. Quelquefois it était gentil, mais quelquefois, assis près de mon lit, il me regardait presque avec méfiance. Cet après-midi, quand nous avons quitté Hetty and M. Dell, il me semblait que le ciel est devenu clair. Peut-être était seulement qu’il n’aimait pas M. Dell, qui est vraiment ignoble. Et je crois qu’il commençait à détester Hetty. Mais pourquoi moi? Je prie pour qu’il reste sain et heureux dans cette très belle maison.’
They stayed there some weeks as it agreed so well with Alice and also with Sir William, whose health had not improved on the voyage. He was reluctant to move, and the Thomas Langtons appeared pleased to have them and urged them to stay. They were delighted with Alice, and when they
learned that she had money, and would be able to keep up the place, they finally decided to leave Waterpark to Austin. They could only leave the property. There was not much to go with it. So Alice, in addition to providing Austin with a good income, brought him ultimately if indirectly, an ancestral estate.
Austin now liked England much better than he had as an undergraduate with a small allowance. He added an interest in genealogy to that in horses. He drove about inspecting churches and tombs in the neighbourhood, and when he discovered a connection or colateral, he would call and ask them rather abrupt questions about their houses and their pedigrees. Occasionally he went to London by himself, as Alice was unfit to travel, and there was no point in her buying new clothes before her baby was born.
One day Alice made an entry in her diary:
‘This morning Lady Langton had a letter from Hetty in which she announced her engagement to Mr Dell. The most surprising part of this was its effect on Austin. I have seldom seen him so vexed. He called Mr Dell the most dreadful names, not exactly swearing, but making up disgusting combinations of words at which he is very clever. Sometimes they are quite amusing, but I was glad that Mrs Langton was not present. A. says Mr Dell will be a disgrace to the family, of which he has recently become very proud. I am sorry for Mr Dell, though he is not attractive.’
To the further surprise and dismay of Lady Langton, Hetty wrote that she was to be married quite soon, within a few weeks of the announcement of the engagement. She explained that as Percy Dell had enough money for them to
live on if they were economical, there was no need to delay, and as she had no home in England except with her uncle, there was every reason to hurry on the wedding. Her uncle Mayhew was to marry them, so she asked if Sir William would give her away.
Sir William supposed he could not refuse, but he grumbled at having to make the journey to Datchet. When the time came he was not well enough, and he told Austin he would have to act for him.
‘I won’t give one of my relatives to that white maggot,’ growled Austin.
‘You can’t refuse,’ said Lady Langton. ‘It may not be a very grand alliance, but he knows how to behave himself, more or less. He’ll be quite a gentleman in Australia if they go back there. If they don’t we need not meet them. Personally I am relieved to have Hetty married to anybody, and would gladly give her away if I were qualified to do so. I would perform the duty as a thank offering.’ Again Lady Langton said without humour exactly what her husband would have said with a witty intention.
A few weeks later Alice wrote:
‘Austin left this morning to give Hetty away at her wedding to Mr Dell. He was very angry. I sent them a silver teapot.’
Arthur once said to me: ‘Apparently two nights of a honeymoon with Hetty knocked Percy Dell flat. He must have felt like a puny Hercules faced with the fifty daughters of King What’s-his-name. She had to take him to Switzerland to recuperate, though they said it was because of the cheap living.’ Arthur knew when he said this, that neither of the
reasons he mentioned was the true one, but he was at that time engaged in drawing red herrings across the trail of family scandals, and even of drawing further different-coloured herrings across the trail of the red ones. For quite another reason, which Arthur told me later, Percy Dell and Hetty did spend the first year of their married life in Zurich.
Late in September my father was born at Waterpark, and at the same time his grandfather became very ill, as if the new life demanded the extinguishing of the old. At the same time as his relapse Sir William was offered a baronetcy for his services in helping to found the colony of Victoria, which, because of some grievance in his sick mind, he refused. He had just learned that Austin was to inherit Waterpark, and he thought perhaps that was good enough for him, or that a new baronetcy would not enhance his ancient name. Arthur said he knew that Austin would always be flamboyant and that he did not want to make him more conspicuous than necessary. Alice was hurt at his refusal. She would have liked a title, both for herself and for the heir whom she had just provided. She thought that the offer could not have come at a more appropriate time. She was not stupid and she could not help realising, especially as the years passed, how much she did for the Langtons—how heavily they clung to the onion woman’s skirts. This one thing they could have given her in return was meanly withheld.
Perhaps it is a good thing Sir William refused. Austin as a baronet would have splashed himself about even more than he did, and attention might have been drawn to scandals which as it happened were largely ignored. My father, who was very retiring, would have been irritated by the
distinction, at any rate in Australia. If Dominic had been a baronet he would hardly have noticed it but his peculiar life would have had much more publicity. If it had come to me I should have felt frustrated, when, on Mrs Briar’s day out, I have to wash up. In my youth I used to be angry when I thought of my great-grandfather’s refusing this honour. Now I think that perhaps it was all for the best, especially when I remember that after me the heir would be a Queensland cousin with a frightful accent.
It is absurd to suppose that Sir William’s refusing the baronetcy had any effect on anything, and yet it did seem that by this gesture he had offended the benevolent gods. On the morning the offer came, good fortune appeared to be showering on the family. They had recently learned that Austin was to have Waterpark. An heir was born. Alice was recovering rapidly. Sir William himself felt a little better, and then there was this letter from the Prime Minister’s secretary. Sir William refused it, and put the process in reverse, turning the tide of fortune outwards. He may of course have been short of ready cash, and did not want to pay the patent fees, or to borrow the money from Alice.
The next morning he was not so well, the baby had a slight upset, and Austin returned early from the hunt, bespattered and gloomy like a large sulky child, and told them that his favourite hunter had fallen and broken its leg and had to be shot. A week later the doctor said that it would be suicide for Sir William to spend the winter in England, but neither was he fit to undertake so soon the long voyage back to Australia, and he said: ‘I’m damned if I’ll be buried at sea.’ The only alternative seemed to be for him to go to Naples.
Then another blow fell. Alice’s lawyers in Melbourne wrote to say that her mother, presumably instigated by the rackety Mr Drax, was bringing an action to recover from Alice most of her first husband’s estate and that he could not send any further funds until the case was heard. The lawyer did not think that Mrs Drax had much chance of winning but they had to be prepared. Fortunately Alice had enough money in her London bank to keep them for some months ahead. Even so the news was disconcerting to the household at Waterpark, and made them feel that the bottom was falling out of their world. Sir William was not rich. He said that he did not think it right for a man in his position to make speculative purchases of land, as Alice’s father had done. If he had been less conscientious I might now have been a millionaire.
The immediate result of the lawyer’s letter was a family conference on Austin’s earning capacity, which did not appear to be great. His father said that he should at once begin to read for the bar, even though the hunting season had just started. Thomas Langton suggested that as he had a degree he might take orders, then he could have the living after the present vicar, who however was only fifty-two. Austin did not respond very gratefully to this offer.
The discussion went on for a fortnight, when it had to be put aside as Austin had to conduct his parents to Italy. Part of Sir William’s illness was an affliction of the legs, and he often had to be lifted up steps and in and out of carriages. Austin was able to do this with greater strength and efficiency than the valet, and Lady Langton refused to go unless he came too. As his father’s life was in question he had
no choice, but Alice refers several times to his reluctance to leave her and the baby.
‘Austin grumbled a great deal when we were going to bed about his trip to Italy. He said that Herbert was as strong as a horse and could easily lift his father. Then he pretended to be a little boy and cried. He was very funny. He said that foreign countries were full of popery and that he’d be burned at the stake. I wish he need not go, but think he must.’
In the middle of October he set out with his father and mother for Naples. It was necessary for Sir William to rest frequently to recover his strength for the next stage of the journey. It took them a month to reach Rome, and Sir William refused to go any farther. It is doubtful whether he could have done so. The whole journey seems to have been one of those imbecilities which people commit when the gods are determined to destroy them. They settled in an apartment in a narrow street in the centre of the city. It had to be on a lower floor as Sir William could not be carried up many of the long flights of stairs, so that, though it faced south, the sun never reached it. He would have been better off at Waterpark, where the rooms drew all the sun there was, and the floors were not icy marble. Neither Lady Langton nor Herbert the valet could speak Italian. They were swindled and the food disagreed with them.
As soon as they were installed Austin hurried back to his wife and his horses. Thomas Langton occasionally made vague references to his reading for the bar, but no one seriously thought he should begin this before the end of the hunting season, especially as he had lost a month in taking his parents to Rome. He and Alice spent a pleasant winter with
their cousins, but a little subdued by the two Damocletian swords over their heads, the impending lawsuit and Sir William’s health.
In early March when the ash-buds were black in the hedgerows, and a few furtive daffodils bloomed in the sheltered but rougher corners of the lawn, the swords fell. Alice’s mother had been awarded two-thirds of the estate which presumably would be squandered in riotous living, so that Alice would not only suffer the loss of the money, but would gain reflected notoriety from the way it was spent. This was not as bad as it might have been. If they could no longer consider themselves rich, they were by no means penniless. There was no immediate need for Austin to take Holy Orders, or to dash off to eat his dinners at Lincoln’s Inn. Also Alice’s lawyers lodged an appeal.
At the same time they heard from Zurich that Hetty had given birth, prematurely, to a baby boy.
