The Red And The Green (3 page)

This visit, and a subsequent visit to his Aunt Millicent, had been urged upon him as a duty by his mother, although as he well knew she felt no particular affection for any of the people concerned. Hilda regarded ‘the family' as having an importance which, while she might not have used this language, transcended affection. She would not have professed actually to
like
any of her relations, with the exception of Christopher Bellman, Frances and her own brother; and even in these two latter cases there were cross-currents of a hostility very obvious in origin. Millicent Kinnard and Kathleen, as she now was, Drumm, aroused in Hilda, whenever they were mentioned, a particular sort of almost physical jerky nervousness. These two very different persons were, Andrew knew, in different ways a disappointment and a scandal to his mother. Stationed at important points within the family machine they simply failed to turn the right handles.

Andrew's father had been extremely though rather nervously fond of his half-sister, and this may not have endeared Millie to Hilda. He had also been devoted to Kathleen, though not in any way which could have caused rational annoyance to his wife, his gentle and complete devotion to whom had been a show-piece of the family. It was for Andrew felicitously axiomatic that his parents had been a happy united pair, and he was even now curiously conscious of his father's presence as a support to his mother and himself. Hilda's irritations with Aunt Millicent and Aunt Kathleen were more largely social in origin. Andrew was tolerantly aware that his mother was a fearful snob and that ‘keeping up with Millie', which was presented as a tiresome duty, was made considerably less disagreeable by the fact that Millie had a title. There was also the wealth, the splendour and what was left of the ceremony. But it was just here that Aunt Millicent failed.

Andrew could remember when he was quite small hearing a side-whiskered gentleman at a garden party saying to another, ‘I say, Millie Kinnard is rather fast, isn't she?' The idea seemed to please the gentleman, but Andrew's mother, who was standing near by, had indignantly hustled Andrew away in the course of the reply. There had never been, as far as he knew, any positive scandal connected with his aunt, but he was given to understand that she was a person who habitually ‘went too far', although whither it was she proceeded with unwonted celerity, overstepping what barriers, he never altogether discovered. Millie was of course known to hold rather progressive views on ‘the woman question', had taken a nurse's training, contrary to the family's wishes, during the South African war, and had managed to get herself briefly to the scene of action. She had, it was said, not mourned too long after her husband's death. She was rumoured to wear trousers and smoke cigars. She possessed and could fire a revolver. She had a great many gentlemen friends.

‘Millie has style' was the sort of remark which people tended to make and which Hilda hated to hear. For her, Millie's style was bad style and Millie's undeniable form was bad form. Andrew's mother was anxiously conventional and indeed regarded convention, which she preferred to think of as ceremony, as a fortress against all that she most feared. Perhaps in the end it was a fortress against her father's practical jokes. Aunt Millicent represented, just where one might have expected an access of strength, a dangerous breach in the defences. Andrew had chanced not to see his aunt for some years, since she had been away on his last visit, and his memories of her went right back to a scene in some summer garden where what seemed a pretty girl in a white dress, under the dappled shade of a parasol, had laughed at him, but not unpleasantly, making him laugh too. He felt a certain interest in seeing her again.

Aunt Kathleen was quite another matter. While Aunt Millicent failed through frivolity, Aunt Kathleen,
née
after all Kinnard, failed through dullness. Millie's form might be regrettable, but Kathleen was formless; and it was this, even more than the monstrous fact of being a Roman Catholic, which Andrew's mother held against her. The Dumay house in Blessington Street was shabby, disorderly, even dirty; and in this Hilda deplored a sheer lack of inherited discipline. ‘When you think of Kathleen's opportunities,' she would say as prologue to a denunciation. Nor could she forgive Kathleen for marrying Barnabas, and thereby confirming her benighted brother in a state of insanity from which he might otherwise have recovered. Hilda also resented, though for fear of giving it further publicity she never mentioned, the fact that Kathleen supported her husband financially. Barnabas, who had latterly been employed in the public service, gave up this work soon after his marriage to devote himself entirely to research. Hilda blamed his wife for what she regarded as his progressive demoralization, and when the drinking bouts began she would say, ‘It's all of a piece!': meaning Catholicism, Kathleen, alcohol, and the Irish saints.

As Andrew meditated rather vaguely in the cool April sunshine of that Sunday afternoon concerning his forthcoming visit to the Dumays, he was engaged in the task of fixing Frances' red swing. The swing, its wooden seat painted with a sort of peasant design of white hearts upon a scarlet background, had been ever since long ago a feature of the Bellman's much larger and wilder garden in Galway. That morning when he had been looking at a photograph album with Frances they had come upon a picture of her, a little girl with a big straw sunbonnet, sitting upon the swing, while Andrew in a sailor suit stood rather ungraciously by. As Andrew began reminiscing about the swing Frances had said that in fact they had brought it with them, it was somewhere around, and Andrew had said that of course he would fix it up forthwith. Then they had both fallen silent.

Andrew thought of and indeed referred to Frances Bellman as his fiancee, although nothing had yet been quite formally fixed between them. It was rather that an understanding, dating from somewhere very remote in their childhood, had gradually grown up, like a tall genie taking shape between them and joining their hands. They had been, on the many occasions when they had been able to be together, ‘inseparable' as children; and as soon as Andrew was ready to fall in love he fell in love with Frances, as if this were an inevitable and natural aspect of growing up. The frenzy of love had been calmed almost at once by the sense that he could not possibly lose her. There was already the security of a long attachment. He had felt no interest in any other woman although he had had his share of opportunities and indeed of flattering attentions.

He was sometimes surprised at the ease with which he had been immediately conducted into this congenial haven, and attributed it somehow to the same kindly gods who had made him the only child of happily married parents. Frances too was an only child, and this made her seem quite especially of the same race as himself. Andrew adhered to no general theories of a romantic nature concerning the importance of a stormy initiation into love, and particularly now, with the prospect of a return to the war opening before him like a black hole, he was prepared to settle gladly for a security in his personal life which seemed likely to exist nowhere else. France, not Frances, would lay his soul naked.

Andrew had never formally proposed, though he assumed that some absolutely explicit suggestion, such as the naming of a day, would be necessary before the ceremony could be performed. In a way he would have preferred simply to wake up one morning and find that Frances was his wife; and he felt sure that she felt exactly as he did. She accepted and completed his half-voiced assumptions about the future, and their conversations were like a song sung in snatches by persons who know their parts so well that they need only by a note or two suggest them. He knew that Frances understood him perfectly. That was why they had both fallen silent suddenly together when they were speaking of the swing, since a swing suggested a child. Andrew was still a virgin. Where Frances was concerned, two ideas were curiously enlaced in his mind, the idea of his first introduction to sexual intercourse and the idea of his death. The hours of both these events he pictured as flying towards him through the darkness like great scarlet darts; and although he did not doubt that the former would arrive before the latter, he sometimes, and especially in sleepless nights, thought that the latter might not come far behind. This returned his thoughts to what had made him and Frances suddenly silent.

The connection between the two ideas in fact went, for Andrew, deeper than anything suggested by the casualty lists. He profoundly feared the notion of the sexual act, and whenever he imagined himself doing
that
to Frances he felt appalled incredulity. This act, an act of terrible violence involving the destruction of both the aggressor and the victim, seemed something quite separate from his old deep love for Frances, and separate even from the uneasy excitement which he had felt during the last week at living in the same house with her and accompanying her as far as her bedroom door. It was as if the act in question would have to be committed in a clandestine manner, like a secret murder. He could not imagine it as a part of ordinary life, and as the scarlet dart flew nearer and nearer he had times of feeling most dreadfully afraid.

Another consideration which joined the two fearful ideas together and made him confused and frightened about what was to come was a vague sense that people surrounding him, his family, perhaps society, expected him to make Frances pregnant before he was sent to the Front. An old aunt had practically blurted out something like this in his presence; and he divined some such thought in the mind of his mother, who was in some ways ambivalent about his relationship to Frances. This sort of dubious ‘survival', offered as a kind of duty, made Andrew upset in a rather self-pitying way which he usually avoided. He wanted to live and be happy with Frances himself and to be under no obligations of that sort to the human race or even to her. He felt too, in these moods, hustled, and more inclined to procrastinate about the whole business. However, the moods soon passed, swept away by his sheer tenderness for the girl and his increasing sense that this was the moment to settle his destiny, or rather to confirm a settlement which seemed to have been so felicitously made long ago.

Andrew's mother was very fond of Frances, but had sudden little sharp bursts of hostility towards her, as he imagined she would towards any girl that Andrew proposed to marry. Frances let them pass, shaking her head like a pony, which she in many ways resembled, and Hilda would at the next moment be especially affectionate. Andrew was exceedingly fond of his mother, sometimes he felt alarmingly fond of her, although she exasperated him extremely almost all the time. He disagreed with her views on everything and her ambitions made him shudder. He particularly disliked the social half-truths which she constantly told as a matter of instinct. She would imply that she had attended gatherings of which she had only heard, and when in Ireland would portray the glittering nature of her London social life in a way which amounted to serious misrepresentation. He flattered himself that he could observe with a sharp eye the world which so dazzled his mother; yet while he blushed for her vanity he could not see her as corrupted.

He had, in the past, felt a good deal of nervousness on the subject of whether his mother would think that Frances, an untitled, unfashionable girl, who had never even properly ‘come out', was good enough for him. He had gradually with relief become aware that Hilda regarded Frances as a rather special young person. He only subsequently realized that there was a particular reason for this. Christopher Bellman was extremely rich. Children are usually oblivious of any except the most evident differences in wealth, and Andrew had only lately acquired an adult awareness of how much, in that sense, particular men had ‘behind' them. He felt this awareness to be an onset of worldliness, especially when he noticed that such knowledge did in some way alter his view of people. But of course he had loved Frances and even wanted firmly to marry her long before he had apprehended her as an heiress. He was only thankful that this fact about her seemed to pacify his mother completely, who otherwise would certainly have been on the warpath in London in ways which would have greatly displeased him. He excused this covetousness in her, as he excused in himself a certain quiet satisfaction at the idea of marrying, quite accidentally, a rich girl: his parents had always been very poorly off and Andrew was just at an age to appreciate how inconvenient this was.

His prospective father-in-law, Christopher Bellman, was still a rather obscure and alarming figure to Andrew. He was constantly surprised to see how easily his mother managed to get on with Christopher. It was as if she simply failed to notice that he was a dangerous animal. It was indeed the spectacle of Hilda and Christopher gambolling together that most especially brought home to Andrew what seemed to him an adult insight: that someone can seem, and in fact be, quite different with one person from what he is with another. It was as if Hilda's mechanism was simply not designed to pick up a whole range of rays given off by Christopher, to which Andrew was sensitive and which led him to find Christopher ‘dangerous'. Andrew thought that it was also very adult of him not instantly to dub his mother, for that reason, deficient. But neither did he, as he would when younger have done, regard her as daring. He searched rather for irrational features in his own attitude.

Christopher was in fact English, though Irish by adoption through his wife Heather, and an Irish ‘enthusiast' in a way which sufficiently marked him as an alien. When younger he had worked in the Civil Service, first in London and then in Dublin, but had retired in middle life to devote himself to scholarship, wherein, Andrew noticed, he concealed his systematic seriousness under an air of dilettante trifling. He was an expert on the antiquities of Ireland and possessed a large library on the subject, destined in his will for Trinity College, Dublin. He was familiar with Gaelic, although he had never joined the Gaelic League and was hostile to the wholesale cultivation of the Irish language which had come to be, for many of his acquaintances, such an important political end. He knew a good many of what he called ‘the Irish Ireland mob', but kept aloof from all politics and controversy. Andrew judged him, though not always confidently, to be a cold man. Yet his pursuits were harmless, he was obviously very attached to Frances, and had always encouraged Andrew.