The Complete Stories (28 page)

  As I expected, I was my father's sole heir. Besides the house and its contents I inherited £2,000 in an insurance policy which my father had taken out at the time of his marriage and, without my knowledge, kept up ever since. An injunction, in the brief will, to "provide suitably" for the servants in my father's employment, had already been obeyed. The Jellabys had been given £250. It was clear from my father's words that he had no conception of what a suitable provision should be. Neither had I, and I was grateful to my uncle for taking responsibility in the matter. For their part the Jellabys had expected nothing. My father, as long ago as I could remember him, was accustomed to talk with relish of his approaching death. I had heard him often admonish Jellaby, "You have joined fortune with a poor man. Make what you can while I still have my faculties. My death will be an occasion for unrelieved lamentation," and the Jellabys, in the manner of their kind, took his words literally, kept a keen watch on all sources of perquisite, and expected nothing. Jellaby took his cheque, my uncle said, without any demonstration of gratitude or disappointment, murmuring ungraciously that it would come in quite useful. No doubt he thought no thanks were due to my uncle, for it was not his money, nor to my father, for it was no intention of his to give it. It was a last, substantial perquisite.

  The Jellabys had been much in my mind, off and on, during the journey from Fez. I had fretted, in a way I have, imagining our meeting and a scene of embarrassing condolence and reminiscence, questioning the propriety of removing them immediately, if ever, from the place where they had spent so much of their lives; I even saw myself, on the Jellabys' account, assuming my father's way of life, settling in St. John's Wood, entertaining small dinner parties, lunching regularly at my club and taking three weeks' holiday abroad in the early summer. As things turned out, however, I never saw the Jellabys again. They had done their packing before the funeral, and went straight to the railway station in their black clothes. Their plans had been laid years in advance. They had put away a fair sum and invested it in Portsmouth, not, as would have been conventional, in a lodging house, but in a small shop in a poor quarter of the town which enjoyed a brisk trade in second-hand wireless apparatus. Mrs. Jellaby's step-brother had been keeping the business warm for them and there they retired with an alacrity which was slightly shocking but highly convenient. I wrote to them some time later when I was going through my father's possessions, to ask if they would like to have some small personal memento of him; they might value one of his sketches, I suggested, for the walls of their new home. The answer took some time in coming. When it came it was on a sheet of trade paper with a printed heading "T. JELLABY. Every Radio want promptly supplied for cash." Mrs. Jellaby wrote the letter. They had not much room for pictures, she said, but would greatly appreciate some blankets, as it was chilly at nights in Portsmouth; she specified a particular pair which my father had bought shortly before his death; they were lying, folded in the hot cupboard.....

  Uncle Andrew gave me the keys of my father's house. I went straight there from lunching with him. The shutters were up and the curtains drawn; the water and electric light were already cut off; all this my uncle had accomplished in a few days. I stumbled among sheeted furniture to the windows and let in the daylight. I went from room to room in this way. The place still retained its own smell—an agreeable, rather stuffy atmosphere of cigar smoke and cantaloupe; a masculine smell—women had always seemed a little out of place there, as in a London club on Coronation Day.

  The house was sombre but never positively shabby so that, I suppose, various imperceptible renovations and replacements must have occurred from time to time. It looked what it was, the house of an unfashionable artist of the 1880s. The curtains and chair-covers were of indestructible Morris tapestry; there were Dutch tiles round the fireplaces; Levantine rugs on the floors; on the walls, Arundel prints, photographs from the old Masters, and majolica dishes. The furniture, now shrouded, had the inimitable air of having been in the same place for a generation; it was a harmonious, unobtrusive jumble of inherited rosewood and mahogany, and of inexpensive collected pieces of carved German oak, Spanish walnut, English chests and dressers, copper ewers and brass candlesticks. Every object was familiar and yet so much a part of its surroundings that later, when they came to be moved, I found a number of things which I barely recognized. Books, of an antiquated sort, were all over the house in a variety of hanging, standing and revolving shelves.

  I opened the french windows in my father's study and stepped down into the garden. There was little of spring to be seen here. The two plane trees were bare; under the sooty laurels last year's leaves lay rotting. It was never a garden of any character. Once, before the flats came, we used to dine there sometimes, in extreme discomfort under the catalpa tree; for years now it had been a no-man's-land isolating the studio at the further end; on one side, behind a trellis, were some neglected frames and beds where my father had once tried to raise French vegetables. The mottled concrete of the flats, with its soil pipes and fire escapes and its rash of iron-framed casement windows, shut out half the sky. The tenants of these flats were forbidden, in their leases, to do their laundry, but the owners had long since despaired of a genteel appearance, and you could tell which of the rooms were occupied by the stockings hanging to dry along the windowsills.

  In his death my father's privacy was still respected and no one had laid dust-sheets in the studio. "Too Big?" stood as he had left it on the easel. More than half was finished. My father made copious and elaborate studies for his pictures and worked quickly when he came to their final stage, painting over a monochrome sketch, methodically, in fine detail, left to right across the canvas as though he were lifting the backing of a child's "transfer." "Do your thinking first," he used to tell the Academy students. "Don't muddle it out on the canvas. Have the whole composition clear in your head before you start," and if anyone objected that this was seldom the method of the greatest masters, he would say, "You're here to become Royal Academicians, not great masters. This was the way Ford Madox Brown worked, and it will be a great day for English art when one of you is half as good as he was. If you want to write books on Art, trot round Europe studying the Rubenses. If you want to learn to paint, watch me." The four or five square feet of finished painting were a monument of my father's art. There had been a time when I had scant respect for it. Lately I had come to see that it was more than a mere matter of dexterity and resolution. He had a historic position for he completed a period of English painting that through other circumstances had never, until him, come to maturity. Phrases, as though for an obituary article, came to my mind—"... fulfilling the broken promise of the young Millais ... Winterhalter suffused with the spirit of Dickens ... English painting as it might have been, had there not been any Aesthetic Movement ... the age of the Prince Consort in contrast to the age of Victoria ..." and with the phrases my esteem for my father took form and my sense of loss became tangible and permanent.

  No good comes of this dependence on verbal forms. It saves nothing in the end. Suffering is none the less acute and much more lasting when it is put into words. In the house my memories had been all of myself—of the countless homecomings and departures of thirty-three years, of adolescence like a stained tablecloth—but in the studio my thoughts were of my father and grief, nearly a week delayed, overtook and overwhelmed me. It had been delayed somewhat by the strangeness of my surroundings and the business of travel, but most by this literary habit; it had lacked words. Now the words came; I began, in my mind, to lament my father with prose cadences and classical allusions, addressing, as it were, a funeral oration to my own literary memories, and sorrow, dammed and canalized, flowed fast.

  For the civilized man there are none of those swift transitions of joy and pain which possess the savage; words form slowly like pus about his hurts; there are no clean wounds for him; first a numbness, then a long festering, then a scar ever ready to reopen. Not until they have assumed the livery of the defence can his emotions pass through the lines; sometimes they come massed in a wooden horse, sometimes as single spies, but there is always a Fifth Column among the garrison ready to receive them. Sabotage behind the lines, a blind raised and lowered at a lighted window, a wire cut, a bolt loosened, a file disordered—that is how the civilized man is undone.

  I returned to the house and darkened the rooms once more, relaid the dust-sheets I had lifted and left everything as it had been.

  V

  The manuscript of Murder at Mountrichard Castle lay on the chest of drawers in my club bedroom, reproaching me morning, evening and night. It was promised for publication in June, and I had never before disappointed my publishers. This year, however, I should have to ask grace for a postponement. I made two attempts on it, bearing the pile of foolscap to an upper room of the club which was known as the library and used by the elder members for sleeping between luncheon and tea. But I found it impossible to take up the story with any interest; I grew peevish about the time sequence, and half inclined to scrap all I had written and start anew; the murderess had had too much luck on the morning of the crime and the police were being unnaturally obtuse; they had reached a stage in the investigation when they must either tumble to the truth within six pages or miss it forever; I could not go on piling up clue and counterplot; why should not the wrong man get hanged for a change or the murderess walk in her sleep and proclaim the whole story? I had gone stale on it. So I went to my publisher and tried to explain.

  "I have been writing for over eight years," I said, "and am nearing a climacteric."

  "I don't quite follow," said Mr. Benwell anxiously.

  "I mean a turning point in my career."

  "Oh, dear, I hope you're not thinking of making a contract elsewhere?"

  "No, no, I mean that I feel in danger of turning into a stock bestseller."

  "If I may say so in very imminent danger," said Benwell, and he made me a kind of little bow from the seat of his swivel chair and smirked in the wry fashion people sometimes assume when they feel they have said something elaborately polite; a smile normally kept for his women writers; the word "climacteric" had clearly upset him.

  "I mean, I am in danger of becoming purely a technical expert. Take my father —" Mr. Benwell gave a deferential grunt and quickly changed his expression to one of gravity suitable to the mention of someone recently dead. "He spent his whole life perfecting his technique. It seems to me I am in danger of becoming mechanical, turning out year after year the kind of book I know I can write well. I feel I have got as good as I ever can be at this particular sort of writing. I need new worlds to conquer." I added this last remark in compassion for Mr. Benwell, whose gravity had deepened to genuine concern. I believed he would feel the easier for a little facetiousness—erroneously, for Mr. Benwell had suffered similar, too serious conversations with other writers than me.

  "You've not been writing poetry in Morocco?"

  "No, no."

  "Sooner or later almost all my novelists come to me and say they have written poetry. I can't think why. It does them infinite harm. Only last week Roger Simmonds was here with a kind of a play. You never saw such a thing. All the characters were parts of a motor-car—not in the least funny."

  "Oh, it won't be anything like that," I said. "Just some new technical experiments. I don't suppose the average reader will notice them at all."

  "I hope not," said Mr. Benwell. "I mean, now you've found your public ... well, look at Simmonds—magneto and sparking plugs and camshaft all talking in verse about communism. I don't know what to do about it at all..... But I can count on your new novel for the autumn?"

  "Yes."

  "And we can list it as ‘crime'?"

  "Certainly."

  Mr. Benwell saw me to the top of the stairs. "Interesting place, Morocco," he said. "The French are doing it very well."

  I knew what he was thinking: "The trouble about Plant is, he's come in for money."

  In a way he was right. The money my father had left me and the proceeds which I expected from the sale of the house, relieved me of the need to work for two or three years; once the necessity was removed there was little motive for writing. It was a matter of pure athletics to go on doing something merely because one did it well. This tedium was the price I must pay for my privacy, for the choice, which until lately had been a matter of special pride with me, of a trade which had nothing of myself in it. The heap of foolscap began to disgust me. Twice I hid it under my shirts, twice the club valet unearthed it and laid it in the open. I had nowhere to keep things, except in this little hired room above the traffic.

  As I returned from seeing Mr. Benwell, the club secretary waylaid me. Under Rule XLV, he reminded me, members might not occupy bedrooms for more than five consecutive nights. He did not mind stretching a point, he said, but if a member from out of town applied for a room and found them all engaged and wrote to the committee about it, where would he, the secretary, be? I promised to move out as soon as I could; I had a lot to attend to at the moment; perhaps he had seen that my father had just died. We both knew that it was unfair to bring this up, but it won me my point. For the time being I had lodging—a bed, a washbasin, a window in St. James's, a telephone, space enough for a fortnight's wardrobe. But I must start looking about for something more secure.

  This sense of homelessness was new to me. Before I had moved constantly from one place to another; every few weeks I would descend upon St. John's Wood with a trunk, leave some books, collect others, put away summer clothes for the winter; seldom as I slept there, the house in St. John's Wood had been my headquarters and my home; that earth had now been stopped and I thought, not far away, I could hear the hounds.