Time and Time Again (32 page)

Though still clear in mind, Havelock was weakening physically, and there came a time when he could put words on paper with less trouble than he could speak. This meant that one of his favourite pastimes was still available, and Charles often found him busy with the anthologies, composing new parodies of chosen poems. Some of his efforts were obscene or scatological in an earlier manner, but an increasing number were respectable, and a few were rather charming. On a September evening soon after Gerald had gone to school Charles came home late from a meeting and found Havelock bent sleepily over some pencilled pages. One, to his surprise, was in Gerald's handwriting--it was a poem the boy had learned at school in America--Joyce Kilmer's 'Trees'. Apparently he had told his grandfather about this and had obligingly copied it out for him, and now Havelock had been at work on it. Charles would not have disturbed him for conversation but the old man opened his eyes and pointed to his effort. 'Just imagine,' he muttered, slurring over the words with difficulty, 'they made him learn it by heart over there. It's not a bad poem, but it's not as good as all that. . . . Now read what I've made of it.'

Charles read:

I think however well you know 'em

Trees aren't as lovely as a poem;

No majesty of palm or pine

Can rival Shakespeare's mighty line,

Or grandeur of the sylvan glade

Equal the spell that Wordsworth laid;

Nor even in the Yosemite

Where tops of trees are out of sight

Can you find fairer things or finer

Than in the verse of Heinrich Heine:

Trees have been here since earth began,

But poems only came with man.

'Very pretty,' Charles commented, and might have left it at that had he thought twice. But it had been so long his habit to deflate Havelock gently whenever the occasion offered that even now he could not forbear to add: 'I'm afraid trees haven't been here since earth began, but they came earlier than mankind, so perhaps your point holds. Another flaw is that the last word of your seventh line isn't pronounced "Yosemite" to rhyme with "sight", but "Yosemmity", with the accent on the "sem".'

Havelock looked considerably put out. 'Oh? How do YOU know?'

'I've been there.' (He and Jane, en route to South America, had once travelled from New York to San Francisco and visited Yosemite on the way.)

'You have, eh? You've really been all over the place, haven't you?' Havelock went on, with a touch of irritation: 'So it's Yosemmity? Well, we'll just have to change lines seven and eight, that's all. But not now--I'm too tired. . . . You might give it a thought yourself, Charles, if you have time--you're a clever fellow. . . . I want to send it to Gerald with my Sunday letter.'

Havelock was already half-dozing and Cobb waiting to put him to bed. Charles said goodnight and went to bed himself. An hour later, while he was reading a detective story, an alternative couplet occurred to him:

Nor even in remote Yosemite

Where trees uprise to an extremity . . .

He didn't think much of this, but as there seemed no possible rhyme except 'extremity' it might well be as good as could be got. On the kind of impulse to please his father which came most often when they were not together, he tiptoed into the adjacent room, found him already asleep, and also the pencilled poem on the table beside his bed. Charles inserted the change, then went back to his own bed. But now he was wide awake himself, and vagrantly, with the theme of trees still on his mind, he thought of the trees so far from Yosemite and so much smaller, the little trees in Linstead, all planted by hand, the trees in Ladysmith Road that Mr. Mansfield had chosen, loved, and watched as they grew, and Mr. Mansfield himself, who would doubtless, given a choice of poems as well as trees, have preferred Joyce Kilmer's idea to Havelock's . . . Oh, the laburnum trees . . . He could not sleep for thinking of them, and of faces under their yellow blooms, and of the days and nights of his youth. . . .

In the morning Havelock was weaker and stayed in bed, but he had already seen the new lines and approved them, 'That's fine, Charles, that really does the trick. Now I can send it off to Gerald. . . . Thank you, Charles. Thank you very much.' His eyes began to moisten, but this happened frequently now, with or without an emotion. 'Thank you, Charles,' he said again. 'You're not only a clever fellow, you're a GOOD fellow.'

It was not quite the last conversation they had, but it was the last of the parodies, and Havelock's letter to Gerald enclosing it was the last of his letters to anybody. He did not get up again, and after falling asleep as usual one November night he was found by Cobb in the morning, half smiling in death, with no signs of distress or of a final struggle. 'One of the things you rarely see,' the doctor commented.

Charles visited Gerald at school to tell him what had happened, and the boy burst into tears with more display of feeling than Charles had yet observed in him--and much more (from what Aunt Birdie had said) than when he had learned about his mother. Perhaps it was because he was now older and the loss was more recent. Or perhaps, Charles had to admit, Gerald had been Havelock's last conquest--the last and by all odds the most innocent. Proudly the boy showed his father the poem and the letter--a really delightful letter, warm and lively and humorous. It also contained a postscript to which Gerald naturally paid attention--a promise to give the boy 'the gold watch that the Shah of Persia gave me'.

Neither Charles nor Cobb had ever heard of such a thing, but when Havelock's safe deposit box was opened, there it was, gaudy but undoubtedly gold--'presented to Havelock Anderson--September 10th, 1910'. Charles was still curious, and after some research discovered that Havelock had successfully represented the Shah in a claim against a London insurance company for jewels stolen from a Biarritz hotel.

Besides the watch the deposit box yielded other discoveries, including the most varied collection of worthless stock and share certificates Charles had ever seen. He had long known that his father dabbled in the market, but he had always assumed the existence of a solid preponderance of sound investments. Now it became apparent that Havelock had lacked financial judgment as he had lacked many other kinds; but what dreams he must have had, Charles reflected, riffling through the scrip of long-defunct enterprises concerned with everything from no-sag spring mattresses to unbreakable gramophone records! Even the cash obtained from the sale of Beeching had been thrown away in Japanese bonds on the gamble that Japan would stay out of the war. (And yet, Charles remembered, it was Havelock who had had the premonition that Beeching would one day burn to the ground, and earlier still, just after the First World War, it was Havelock who had scouted Charles's easy assumption of a lifetime of peace. . . . Perhaps Blainey's verdict applied as well, or at least as charitably, as any: all his life Havelock had been a rum fellow.)

After paying debts and taxes the estate was worth a few hundred pounds, no more. To Charles, who had enough of his own, this came as no personal blow or even disappointment, but it saddened him as a final symbol of his father's worldly failure. Of the spiritual failure that mattered so much more, he hated to think at all, because at times he wondered if this were an inheritance that had passed to him in part already. He was in a lost and lonely mood as he settled up Havelock's affairs. He had never been certain that his feeling for his father amounted to love, but he missed him far more than he would ever have thought possible.

Household changes followed inevitably. Cobb, now over seventy, had a handsome bequest in Havelock's will if only there had been money to pay it. Charles arranged for him to retire on a comfortable pension, since a widowed sister in Scotland was ready to share a home with him. Charles then gave up the Westminster house and was looking for something smaller when he was suddenly offered another diplomatic post. It was still only a First Secretaryship and in one of the less important European capitals, but he knew how few such jobs were available, with a whole crop of new men coming up on the heels of the older ones. Seniority was no longer the overriding factor, and bright youngsters were sometimes drawn now from other fields and pushed high on the ladder without ever having had to climb it. Charles did not think this bad, but he did feel (modestly) that it made the profession of diplomacy less attractive for a man like himself, and if he had been young again perhaps he would have tried something else. But he was not young, and here was a perfectly good First Secretaryship to say yes or no to. He said yes, even though it meant an immediate departure from London and missing Christmas with Gerald in Cheshire, where Aunt Birdie had invited them.

* * * * *

The years passed. Charles did pretty well, he thought, and heard privately that some of the sly ironies he inserted into his briefs and memoranda were passed round the highest circles for amusement if not edification. But he had better be careful. Wit was apt to be dangerous in English life; nine times out of ten the Gladstones prevailed against the Disraelis--and he was only a duodecimo Disraeli.

During this period the façade grew over the structure of his life in a thin crust of mannerism. He was aware of it, ruefully but with resignation, while memory reminded him of the danger. That memory was of the elderly professor who had taken him out for a breath of fresh air when he had collapsed over the desk on that hot day of his Cambridge Tripos examinations. Why, he had speculated then, did university dons grow up like that--finicky, desiccated, tee-heeish? Now he knew, or could guess; and the understanding was a warning. He found a corrective in thinking (as he could now without too much distress) of Jane, imagining her comments on this and that, hearing her voice exclaim, if he went too far in the dangerous direction: 'Oh, now, Andy, come off it!' Or she had said, as they went to a dinner party: 'If the Langlons are there, don't tell that story about the Dragoman and the Archbishop--you told it at the Nungessers' last year and the Langlons were there then.' (And it was a very amusing but long story which he told very well indeed.) Such things, among so many others, had made her a treasure; and he felt this absence every time he put on or took off his dress shirt. For those had been the moments, not the most important or profound in their lives, but the ones at which Jane had been most of all Jane--before or after a party.

He did not get transferred to a more important post, and this made the prospect of an eventual Legation so dim that he quenched his hopes about it. It was not so much that he was past the age, meaning his own age, as that the age, meaning the post-war age, had in some sense passed him. It was hard but interesting to reckon why this was so, and he had a number of theories. Perhaps it was because in some frozen corner of the hierarchic mind there still lingered a breath of prejudice against him on account of that old misbehaviour of Havelock's. Perhaps it was because he did not know the correct people who were new, or the new people who were correct. Perhaps it was because at some dinner party there had been no Jane to stop him from being just too amusing about something or somebody. Perhaps it was because he dined out too often and knew too many people altogether. Perhaps it was because of the nickname, or the handwriting--which for some reason had tended to become even smaller with the years. Perhaps it was because he had been to Brookfield instead of Eton, or (in this new era of topsyturviness) because he had been to Brookfield at all instead of starting out with proletarian virtue from a state elementary school. Or perhaps it was simply because the world was changing. He had begun his career in an age when it was still an asset to a diplomat to be suave and witty and impeccably dressed; and he had lived into an age when the striped trousers and morning coat had become a symbol to many of all that was blameworthy for human ills, and when, perhaps because of this, generals and politicians and journalists were apt to take over from professional diplomats at every crisis. But the IGNORANCE of some of the

supplanters--politicians especially! How often Charles had had to explain to elected representatives in the privacy of the Foreign Office facts of history and geography that were more appropriate to the lower fourth! And he had once had contact with an M.P. of much volubility on foreign affairs who mixed up Colombia with the District of Columbia and British Columbia; and of this man, when he became also a director of a large industrial combine, a lady admirer exclaimed: 'Don't you think, Mr. Anderson, he's a splendid example of how far a man can get nowadays without any of the advantages of upbringing or education?' To which Charles was unable to resist the reply: 'Yes, indeed--except that you should perhaps have said "DISadvantages".' It was possibly incidents like this that did not help Charles to become an Ambassador.

He sometimes recalled what his old friend Weigall had said at Cambridge: 'You and I, Andy, are stuck in between--we weren't born at Chatsworth or Blenheim, nor did we starve in tenements or pick crusts out of gutters--we just come from country homes with bits of land and families that go back a couple of centuries or so. . . .' But when he reached as far as that in diagnosing his own case, a sense of proportion as well as of humour came to the rescue. For what if he had found, at the time when the matter cropped up, that Havelock had NOT been his father? Would he have cared much? He knew he wouldn't. Then where was his pride of ancestry, apart from his pride in what he could claim as ancestry? As for the bit of land, it was now a disused airfield, and as for the country home, it had been bombed and burned, and a score of young Englishmen (so he had been told) had met death in those old rooms with cards and glasses and billiard cues in their hands. To believe that blood mattered, in any sense that did not include theirs, was surely to be bloodguilty.

During one of his leaves in London his boss at the Foreign Office invited him to a small bachelor dinner at which the other guests were a Minister of the Crown, a famous historian, a millionaire motor manufacturer, and a soldier who had held a position in the Middle East that enabled him to refer to Pontius Pilate as 'one of my predecessors'. Conversation was at times brilliantine if not brilliant; it was also more pessimistic about the future than Charles found pleasant to hear--his own favourite pessimisms being of a much gayer kind. The Minister of the Crown complained of a lack of potential leaders among the younger men in government, the motor manufacturer said Coventry could not seriously compete in world markets with Detroit, the soldier said the Russians would reach the Atlantic in three weeks if they set their army moving, and the historian offered comfort in the reminder that both Greece and Rome were much more powerful in the inheritance they left to succeeding ages than ever in their own actual heyday. Charles said next to nothing. Over the port the Minister further remarked that one of the most popular of all errors was to confuse prophecy with advocacy, so that a wise man often refrained from saying publicly what he thought would happen lest he be widely supposed to wish it to happen. The historian agreed and said it would be interesting to collect a few prophecies from persons who could feel, as they made them, completely unhampered by such a consideration--if, for instance, a man could set down honestly on a single sheet of paper what he forecast for the next century, the paper to be signed, put away, and guaranteed hidden till the year 2050. The Minister replied that by a curious coincidence he would be laying the foundation stone of an atomic research plant the following week, and it had already been arranged to seal under the stone such miscellaneous articles as current copies of The Times, ration books, coins, theatre programmes, and bus tickets. If those present that evening cared to write a few lines as the historian had suggested (devoting not more than, say, ten minutes to the task), he personally would undertake to place them along with the other items. . . . The idea was taken up with an alacrity that soon became an absorption; rarely could an after-dinner argument have been so effectively launched and stifled. The butler brought paper, pens, and ink, the time was noted, and the six men began to write. As the least distinguished of the group, Charles knew his inclusion was only by courtesy, but this seemed to free him for a special kind of inspiration. He began as follows: