What Happened at Hazelwood? (3 page)

Lucy Cockayne looked vague, which was her refuge on such occasions. George looked delighted. Of all his relations it was this little toad alone whom he at all tolerated. Indeed, he made a favourite of Mervyn. It was generally agreed that he would leave him the greater part of what it was his to dispose of: a personal fortune of very considerable extent.

‘And now it is for Timmy to carry on the tradition.’ Mervyn was off again with the largest innocence. His eyes travelled once more round the table – an inquiring and speculative eye. It rested for a moment on his aunt Grace and passed on to the accompaniment of the faintest possible shake of the head. ‘Willoughby,’ he said suddenly – and much as if an altogether different topic of conversation had struck him – ‘did you ever feel, as I have done, that it is a pity not to have a sister?’

Willoughby Simney might have replied to his cousin – only his father forestalled him. ‘Lucy’ – Bevis had gone a brick red and addressed his sister abruptly – ‘your boy ought to be birched. Eighteen or not, he ought to be birched.’

‘Whereas if I did have a sister’ – and with a skilful pause Mervyn swept in the attention of the whole company again – ‘she would have to be churched. A less painful experience, but equally embarrassing.’

‘Church?’ said Lucy absently. Whether she at all understood this indecent talk in which her brat was indulging I don’t know. ‘That reminds me. Wasn’t Mr Deamer here this afternoon?’

‘Deamer?’ said George sharply. ‘Fellow has no business coming about the place.’ He spoke much as if the vicar of Hazelwood was a dishonest gamekeeper whom he had turned away. ‘Unless to call on a sick servant and leave a tract. Owdon, are any of your people sick?’

‘No, sir.’

Grace Simney, who had so far not spoken during the meal, put down her spoon and looked directly at her brother. ‘George,’ she said, ‘the tract was meant for you.’

‘Was it indeed, now?’ And George sipped his sherry.

‘Yes it was!’ Grace’s voice was suddenly shrill. She was staring at Timmy with a sort of fascinated repulsion, and it was plain that her mind was swinging agitatedly between this ancient family scandal and some revelation of the afternoon. Looking at her one could see why Mervyn had shaken his head. She had not at all the appearance of one likely to become inadvertently the mother of a fresh generation of Hazelwood retainers. Grace is blanched and angular and faded. Intellectually able and full of nervous force, she became in her later twenties headmistress of a girls’ school. She is that still. But for years now she has regularly devoted her holidays to mild nervous illness. This always brings her back to Hazelwood – and her brother. And she was looking at him now with features drawn in anger. ‘Yes it was,’ she repeated. ‘Some girl in the village–’

Bevis, who had glanced round the room and seen that the parlour-maid was still present, abruptly interrupted. ‘Willoughby,’ he said, ‘I didn’t like the way you were hunching your shoulders this afternoon. It contracts the chest, my boy, and that means that you have to hold your breath or the aim goes nowhere. And you were having binocular trouble, too. Continuity of glance–’

‘A very
young
girl–’

‘–and uniformity of movement…’

Bevis is all for decency – which doesn’t mean that he is any more estimable than other members of the family. I would call him bluff, obtuse and unscrupulous; and he is secret where it is the Simney habit to be open. I don’t know that he much improved matters by starting this shouting match with Grace.

But at least he diverted Mervyn.

‘To me,’ said Mervyn, ‘Willoughby appeared to shoot well. But uncle George, too, it seems, can bring down his bird. Mama, let us listen to aunt Grace and plan for the moral regeneration of the village. Let us set up a Vigilance Society at the Hall and have uncle George and Owdon as joint patrons. And our excellent Willoughby shall be beadle.’

‘Be what?’ said Willoughby.

‘The rascally beadle who shall flagellate the fallen daughters of the peasantry. Just your line. And no doubt your papa will lend you a birch. As for aunt Grace–’

Willoughby lifted his sherry glass and pitched it in Mervyn’s face. Lucy ridiculously sprang to her feet as if to protect her darling boy, and her chair went over backwards. Grace had now lost all control of herself and was hurling at George whatever it was that Mr Deamer had come cautiously to insinuate. Bevis for some reason was bellowing angrily. And at the whole silly and disordered spectacle George was laughing heartily, as if he were an eighteenth-century backwoods squire in some rough-and-tumble novel by Smollett.

It was at this moment that Owdon, who had left the dining room a few minutes previously came in again. It was plain that something had happened. The man was ashen – and a mere vulgar family rumpus would by no means have taken him that way.

‘Your Ladyship,’ he said, ‘Mr Hippias has arrived, and Mr and Mrs Gerard with him.’

You had almost forgotten me, Gentle Reader, had you not? And I don’t think you realized that I am a woman – and Lady Simney?

But there it is; it is the widow of the late baronet who is telling the story – the unfinished and painful story which lies around me as I write. My name is Nicolette and I am twenty-eight – which means that I was twenty-six years younger than my husband.

You will wonder how I came to marry him. Or perhaps you won’t. After all as yet you know nothing about me. And you may be more interested at the moment in Hippias and Gerard and Joyleen, the antipodean cousins who are out there waiting in the hall while Owdon, strangely discomposed, mumbles to me of their arrival at that displeasing dinner table.

But if
you
are not disposed to wonder how I came to marry George I think I may say that Joyleen was thoroughly curious straight away. She is an ignorant little thing and as outlandish as her name. If you asked her to list the Seven Wonders of the World she would undoubtedly begin with Sydney Harbour Bridge and then get no farther. And if she wondered why I had married George I certainly wondered why Gerard had married her – or had been allowed by his father, Hippias, to do so. For I had gathered that the Australian Simneys were folk of the severest social sense. They were, in fact, pastoralists – a word which suggests robed and bearded persons living in tents, but which (it seems) is simply synonymous with gentry and applied to exclusively-minded folk living retired lives amid millions and millions of sheep. Hippias Simney of Hazelwood Park, New South Wales, was understood to be like that, as had been his father, Guy Simney, before him. And presumably young Gerard had been brought up in the same ovine environment. Perhaps in Joyleen he had been constrained to marry money. Or perhaps it was simply that she had got Gerard on the strength of her charms. She might be accurately described as the sort of girl who would be attractive to most men for a month or two before and a week or two after. I am bound to admit that I disliked her from the first – and you will notice how I tend to go off after her before she ought really to come in. Frankly, she was a bit of a last straw as far as I was concerned.

But don’t get me wrong. I’m not at all like George’s virgin sister Grace, inept at and condemnatory of the whole odd and inescapable business of the sexes. Joyleen didn’t wonder why George married me. She wondered why I married George. She saw that George was of the week-or-two sort – her own sort. And she saw that I wasn’t; perhaps you will presently see it too. At any rate, don’t be misled by this hard-boiled style. It just seems the only possible medium for such a narrative as this.

And now where have I got to? George has had Timmy Owdon, whose mother is a sixteen-year-old question-mark, in to wait at table. This has offended both his brother Bevis and his sisters Lucy and Grace. It has given Lucy’s beastly little son Mervyn an occasion for his nauseous wit and moved Mervyn’s cousin Willoughby to pitch a glass of excellent sherry at him. Grace, too, has been prompted to declaim in a loud voice about certain supposed performances of George’s in the village. Hard upon that has come the arrival of these Australians. And now they are going to cool their heels – the whole stupid scene is going to freeze into tableau – while I tell you, quite briefly, how I came to marry the middle-aged Sir George Simney.

My people have been actors and actresses for generations; indeed, since the eighteenth century they have been quite a substantial part of the history of the English legitimate stage. I was always proud of all this. Yet at sixteen, and looking at the stage, I somehow didn’t think much of it. It was all temperament and no brains, and there always seemed to be one emotional mess or another round the corner. I hate scenes, and scandals, and people who are everlastingly watching themselves in an invisible mirror. This took me away from the traditional family paths and landed me at Oxford.

But somehow after a time I didn’t think much of Oxford. I was the wrong sex for what goes on there. Young women who could get tense on cocoa and whose diet was a muddied amalgam of precocious pedantry and belated crushes just didn’t turn out to be my cup of tea any more than the little Emma Bovarys who were hopeful of careers on the London stage. I know that to view my college chiefly in this light was to miss the gracious and important part of it. Still, I just couldn’t see past all that. And I don’t pretend. At least I didn’t in those days.

I didn’t pretend about Christopher Hoodless. I acknowledged to myself that I loved him from the first day we met. How these things come about I don’t know. It is said that an enduring and exclusive passion may be born of the fact that the shade or texture of a young man’s jacket unconsciously reminds one of some rug or blanket one used to suck in one’s cot. And certainly falling in love is irrational, and love itself is impersonal – impersonal even though in no other human relationship is it so certain that one particular individual is utterly indispensable and the other just as utterly out of court. This falling in love with Christopher is the chief thing that has happened to me, and the best. And yet I don’t understand it at all. As you will presently see, I oughtn’t to have done it. Instinctively, I ought to have sheered off. But there it was.

Christopher talked anthropology mostly, and how the University had never really acknowledged it as a science, and how the old descriptive anthropologies were not a great deal of good, and how it was futile to trace cultural affiliations about the globe looking for the Ark or the Garden of Eden. Only something called configurational anthropology (which I came to understand pretty well) was really getting anywhere, and there he himself hoped one day to do this and that. Christopher’s talk was on those lines. He was twenty-three, and had some sort of junior Fellowship or research scholarship, and was living half among undergraduates and half in a common-room with a lot of old men. It was in going from one to the other, so to speak, that he caught a glimpse of me and stopped for a good stare. That stare went on for some weeks. I saw that Christopher was very shy.

Christopher was shy and intellectual. He was also something not easy to express, but I think it might best be called the flower of courtesy – that in the most substantial sense the phrase will bear. He was all gentleness and strength. An obligation was absolute with him. For anything in which he believed in the sphere of social justice he would have dropped configurational anthropology in the waste-paper basket and stood and died in his tracks. If I had actors and actresses behind me he had a long line of aristocratic eccentrics and philosophic radicals. We got on well. It looked to me like a marriage made in heaven. I look back and it is a sort of dream: Christopher disengaging himself from mobs of young men and knots of old ones; Christopher anxiously choosing wine at the George; Christopher absently punting up stream from Magdalen Bridge and talking of the Mundugurnor and the Tchambuli and the mountain-dwelling Arapesh. The Cher became the Markham or the Sepek as he spoke. He had been living for his first substantial piece of field work. And that was what happened. One vac there was a letter. Christopher had gone to New Guinea.

Well, that was that. Christopher was not one to let you down. He would not have let down a beggar-woman for all the Mundugumor who ever hollowed out a canoe. He had decided that he didn’t measure up to me and walked straight out.

I walked straight out too. Within a week I was doing dramatic art. And if anyone had there and then wanted a young and rather beautiful woman to play the part of Death I just wouldn’t have needed any training at all. But of course it wore off – in a way. I had a great deal of hard work and one love affair. The love affair was bad – commonplace but bad, so that I don’t think I could so much as bear to commit a note of it to a private diary. But oblivion does in a sense take such things. I pushed along. In four years I was playing Cleopatra in a rather arty production of Shakespeare at a coterie theatre. That was quite silly, of course. But it caught the eye of what I must call an intelligent producer. There was to be a
Troilus and Cressida
built up round me for the West End. And I saw at once that there was nothing silly about that. It was my chance to join the family and shake hands with Kemble and Garrick. The play was running and an assured success when Christopher turned up. He had been at the theatre every night. And eventually he walked in on me and asked me to marry him.

By this time Christopher Hoodless was somebody too. When people talked of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead they sometimes mentioned him as well. Well, it seemed perfectly sensible. Brilliant young anthropologists do marry talented legitimate actresses. It is quite the sort of thing that happens. And in addition to being sensible it was delirious. All that. Dull sublunary lovers’ love didn’t seem to come in. And I just didn’t see anything sinister about this. I’d had enough of hasty sexuality in that one love affair.

Christopher still stared – and sometimes from so far away that I felt it was a good thing that distance lends enchantment to a view. He might have been the poet Grey meditating his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. When one gets to this point in a story there’s nothing like a little joke.