A Treasonable Growth Page 2

  ‘It is true what we hear—that you write?’ asked Mrs Winsley shyly. She cringed in her chair while a stout middle-aged maid rattled the plates together.

  ‘A bit. I haven’t really begun …’ He felt like a liar. Hoping to be and being were too-widely distributed states for the sort of unqualified assertion he had made at the interview. Mr Winsley didn’t help matters by rubbing his papery hands together and insisting, ‘Nothing wrong in that; we all have to begin.’

  His room was at the back. It was quite big. There were two long cold windows in one wall and the floor glittered with linoleum. A sparse rush mat by the bed skidded crazily when he walked on it. Their breath—Mr Winsley had followed him in, carrying the canvas bag because Darwin couldn’t be found—rode out on the frigid air in long sad plumes.

  ‘That fire’s simply splendid when it gets going,’ Mr Winsley said. He kicked it with the toe of his boot and the grey mantels fell forward in an atrophied honeycomb. “A shelf for your books—when they arrive.’ He banged a shiny primrose ledge.

  Then he turned to a majestic wardrobe with glossy doors and a romping pediment topped by a mahogany urn. ‘And your clothes in here. Well, Richard, I trust you will be happy with us.’ At the door he turned and said rather solemnly, ‘Tea is served in Big School, but you may like to come down at supper-time as it’s your first day.’

  Left alone, Richard held a match to the desolate grate. Nothing happened. The mantels clinked like dead cinders. By sprawling at full length on the floor, he found the meter which was under the bed. He pushed all the pennies he had in and when he struck another match was rewarded by a blinding boom which at once settled down to a comfortingly sibilant drone. He lit the light then hung his clothes up. In the huge mirror fixed to the gargantuan wardrobe he saw himself, darkish, squarish and, in a wispy moment of self-revelation, younger somehow than he imagined. And much, much poorer. He put everything away except the letter which said:

  Copdock House Preparatory School for Boys

  Stourfriston,

  Suffolk

  2nd December, 1938

  Dear Mr Brand,

  I want you to know how delighted I am with the results of last Monday’s interview. Discussing the matter after you had left, Mr Winsley and I came to the conclusion that it would be of the very greatest assistance to us (and possibly of help to you yourself) if you could come to the School at once. It would mean that you could make yourself familiar with our ways and so begin the new term in January …

  The letter then went on about other sundry details, including one or two oddments like ‘did he know that George Gissing often came to Stourfriston’ and that ‘swimming in the river was quite safe now’ and was signed, largely and blackly, ‘Freda Bellingham.’

  There being nothing else he could possibly do, he looked out of the window on to a large, surprisingly private, garden. Three ancient cedars linked their pyramidal darknesses together at the end of a lawn. Beyond the cedars, glimpsed through their trunks, were sagging tennis nets. Beyond the nets, a high, severe red-brick wall. The wall, because of its quite extraordinary height, hid most of the neighbouring houses. But buildings further away could be seen and the result was an architectural skyline balanced on a dull rose base which for those living in the back part of the School was lavishly decorative. It was an excellent view to have, redemptive and atoning. Richard traced the row of spires, gables and chimneys and felt better. He particularly liked the rear of the Corn Exchange, upon the roof of which sprawled a couple of heroic plaster labourers with their arms hugging sheaves and their hands clasping sickles. They became for him the crown of this bricks-and-mortar frieze as they stood there with their backs to him amongst the snowy pigeon dirts and chipped plaster stubble, two saffron Corins, circa William the Fourth. And the garden itself was nice, he admitted. Even in December. Even in the half-dark. But then he had always rather enjoyed Victorian gardens and gloomy evergreens. The latter were limitless—banks and tiers and thickets of them converged to make a truly formidable shrubbery. Laurels dripped and the clock on the parish church struck four. Down below, immediately below, sour flower beds lay in the tenuous grip of box hedging which, in spite of nearly half a century’s incursions by desolating boys, still wound itself crisply in the Tuscan formality with which Miss Bellingham’s father had originally contrived it. To the left was a purple glass conservatory. To the right, a muddy paddock with goal-posts. In a letter which he wrote at a small inkstained kitchen table, ‘a desk in your room’ Mr Winsley had said, he described all this to Quentin. Then he went down to tea.

  2

  A BOY might see Miss Bellingham a dozen or so times during his stay at Copdock, unless some persistent offence qualified him for a particular audience in the abundant terror of her room. Twice a year she showed herself publicly: in May when she walked between parents and sisters scattered over her lawn in the fickle sunshine to sit under the cedar, like Paris under Ida, to judge the annual attainments; and in December when she entered her mother’s old drawing-room, now Big School, to make a speech about Christmas and duty and love. Boys who remembered little else of their schooldays remembered Miss Bellingham, and more particularly than her decrepit presence even—her voice. Intensely loud and much accentuated, by some art it also contrived to be moving, sweet and very feminine. It even made them feel that something was missing when, later on, they made their own morose encounters with women. The mystery, perhaps.

  A visit to her was a journey to a goddess. Although she had adopted rooms in the servants’ quarters, there wasn’t a tread on the scrubbed deal stairs that was not hieratic. Parents with any qualms that this elderly blue-stocking might put into the heads of their quaking offspring ideas other than those needed as a foundation for the minor professions of country life, erred in two ways. The first because they had been conceited enough to imagine that anything remarkable should be hidden in such dull clay; the second that even if by some miracle it did, that the old, cold glance of Freda Bellingham would help to raise it up. The truth was she disliked boys. There was nothing perverse in her dislike, nor self-pity because she herself was maiden, nor was it because they spoilt all the best rooms of Copdock House, where she might have sat in peace if her money hadn’t run out. She simply had no use for sketches, roughs or anything in the making. What she demanded was a good full canvas, not to mention a reasonably gilt frame. To Miss Bellingham boys were embryo men and nothing more. They were incomplete and, she suspected, inhuman. For her their personalities didn’t exist. Their pain was an unpleasant snivelling. Their joy was a guffaw. They were nobbly green fruit bumping against the learned bough waiting for what seemed to her at times, endless summers before they were ripened. Like green plums, their skins might glow, but they remained essentially nasty.

  She sat now opposite Mr Winsley. They were carolling down below in the street ‘We Three Kings of Orient are …’ But there were a great many voices. ‘Is it a choir?’ she asked. She forced a hand behind an ear. Her ears were big, with brown, dragging lobes. Above their expansive, almost shameful nakedness, flared a bouffant mass of white and beautiful hair. Her fingers spreading down the arm-rests of her chair were the palest flecked gold and might have been, in the poor light, the carved rosewood terminals themselves.

  ‘I thought I was going to die today,’ she said. Her lids crept up like shutters and she trapped Mr Winsley in her glaucous gaze.

  ‘Oh don’t say it! You musn’t say it!’

  ‘Do you imagine at this stage one chooses what to say? These things happen to me so I mention them.’

  ‘But you are feeling better now?’ It was as much a statement of fact as a question.

  ‘Better? Worse …? I don’t ask myself those kind of things, Cadman.’

  She bent forward and smoothed the multifarious coverlets of rucked crochet which held her in the chair.

  ‘Did he arrive?’ she asked.

  ‘After luncheon.’

  ‘So he didn’t get any?’

  ‘Mi
nna waited.’

  ‘Minna!’ repeated Miss Bellingham disparagingly.

  ‘Do you know what she said today?’ said Mr Winsley. ‘“Why aren’t I ever given something to do?”—She meant she herself, you know!—I really think she meant it!’

  Miss Bellingham laughed too. Her lips fled back and showed darkness. It was the mirth of a mask. ‘You were a fool, you know, Cadman,’ she said, but without rancour. ‘I suppose Minna liked him?’ she added.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I suppose so—why not? He’s like all the rest, of course; he thinks he’s going to make a big bang in the world …’ Mr Winsley snuffled and passed a cold finger over the little delta of veins which ran down the tip of his nose.

  Miss Bellingham sank back into the buttony comfort of her chair. Her jaw worked slightly as it always did when she was absorbed in thought, grinding away with a gentle mandibular insistency. Mr Winsley watched her. He hadn’t sat. He now leaned against the cluttered bookshelves and swung one foot backwards and forwards with unconscious grace. A tall oil lamp with a blue glass stem threw a ball of light between them. Miss Bellingham’s lids, half closed, hid all her eyes. Once or twice she ran her hand up over the shawls in a stiff little clawing movement before she let it rest among her beads and once she turned and stared long at the jalousie fidgetting against the window.

  ‘I arranged that he should take the fourth and fifth for everything except maths and physics,’ said Mr Winsley. The silence irked him. It emphasized an existence beyond the limits of his knowledge, a delicious enfeeblement of blood and resolution which was the penumbra of the end. Those futile scrabblings of her fingers against the chair! The way she indulged dissolution! He could shake her. He hoped he wouldn’t be as selfish when his time came!

  ‘My dinner was cold tonight,’ she complained suddenly.

  ‘I’m sorry. Minna must see Ellen at once.’

  ‘Ellen—?’

  ‘She’s the new cook—the one we hired last week.’

  ‘Why do you say “we” when she’s obviously some inefficient slut that Minna found!’

  ‘But you did see her.’ Mr Winsley’s face grew owlish in his intensity to convey conviction.

  Miss Bellingham said: ‘They’re using the top landing again. I heard them. I won’t have it!’

  Mr Winsley could not explain. He read all along the top row of the bookcase opposite. The Psychology of the Poet Shelley by Edward Carpenter. Cities by Arthur Symonds … The Transactions of the Seldon Society … Marie Bashkirtseff … Octavia Hill … Leaves of Grass … Who’s Who 1911 …

  But Miss Bellingham was recovering. Her liveliness when she remembered it was huge. She jerked up now and tried to reach something on the table. Mr Winsley picked up letters, papers, pamphlets—a book to help her. ‘Allow me,’ he repeated over and over again, blind to how much it maddened her, this getting-in-the-way politeness of his that was only a damned nuisance. She dashed whatever he proffered from his hand. He let her do so with joy. Her sudden strength set his fears at rest. She found what she was looking for. It had slid down the side of the chair. She clutched it firmly, a broad white envelope exquisitely addressed to herself.

  ‘Paul is coming home,’ she announced.

  Mr Winsley was speechless.

  ‘In fact, he is home,’ went on Miss Bellingham. ‘He’s at Brown’s Hotel and will be coming down to Sheldon after Christmas. He invites advice. Here, see for yourself.’

  She threw the letter and it fell to the floor. Mr Winsley dived to retrieve it like an adipose gannet avid for the least information.

  ‘Is it a secret?’ he enquired.

  ‘Read it and see.’ ‘My dear Aunt,’ he read.

  ‘Or I might almost say, my dearest, dearest Egeria, if I were normally given to such excesses. I’m in London. Are you surprised? And will you be amazed when I tell you that I intend very soon to be found only at Sheldon? I’m miserable about it, of course—not for dear Sheldon but for being hurried along by all these armies, for being pushed out. It is generally believed in Sicily that it must come in the spring. I pray not and the British Government evidently believes not—or so people say on trains. But things are bad and I thought to come home now would be to do so less precipitously than later on. The Harveys have left too—in fact we all came together. It was terrible getting rid of things and packing things and saying farewell to the garden. Allessandro wept, I wept, Father Guiseppi wept—such a flood! But even if there isn’t a war, I think that the time has come to consider Sheldon. I’m fifty-three.

  Did I tell you we saw Hitler? It was at Mainz last October. But surely I would have told you. But it is possible I forgot, so here is the description once more. The general, all-over impression, as you might say, is mycological. A flocculent puffiness pushing out a policeman’s coat. The wonder is his voice, of course; harder than anything imaginable. And coming out of his soft little body, it’s as marvellous as flames spurting from a sponge. Do you remember a particular type once described as ‘common’? Well he is that. They roared and roared and I’m sorry to say that we almost did too. A roar is so infectious! We ached not to and ached at the same time to be sick. An uncomfortable confliction, you must agree!—but I mustn’t bore you.

  Is there a soul in your estimable employ who could help me get my books and things straight at Sheldon?

  Tomlinson’s have just taken the last volume of Charon’s Cox—I’m glad to see the going of it. Scrimshanks is being re-issued. (Again, you will say.) The B.B.C. want The Woman Who Meddled—but without its sequel. So they shan’t have it.

  I’m pleased to be coming back to Sheldon. Yet sad. It means that so much is over.

  Love,

  Pauly.’

  ‘Well?’ she said, exasperated by his silence.

  ‘You know that I’m pleased,’ answered Mr Winsley defensively, ‘why must I say it!’ He had put on his glasses to read the letter and his pupils were enormous.

  ‘The advice, Cadman …’

  Mr Winsley thought he saw light.

  ‘It is very true that I have little time these days, but if there is anything that I can do to help Sir Paul you know that I will only be too pleased.’

  Miss Bellingham twisted round suddenly. For a moment it looked as if she was going to get up. She did so sometimes. It always staggered him, mostly because the exertion that brought it about was so concentrated as to appear saurian in its strength. But now she just turned to face him. Her half-sealed eyes took in his fat little legs, his neatly inclining shoulders and the black bone buttons winking down his waistcoat. Her lips crept back in the new outlandish mirth she allowed herself these days. She laughed and he let her.

  ‘How did you find out that he writes?’ she asked at last.

  Mr Winsley did not reply.

  ‘Sulks,’ she said.

  He glanced at the clock. It was nine-twenty. ‘Time you were resting, my dear,’ he announced primly. The jalousie had worked free at last and was clacking wildly against the wall. He opened the window to fasten it and the December wind ravished the cloying heart of the room. He caught the shutter and fixed it.

  ‘Well,’ cried Miss Bellingham, ‘how did you find out?’

  ‘Hush …’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to me such an extraordinary question,’ she complained, but in a more controlled voice.

  ‘There’s no mystery—he told me. Or rather he told Minna. You know her naïvety—she asked him outright.’

  ‘And he said yes?’

  ‘He blushed, if I remember.’

  Miss Bellingham was touched. ‘Well he’s different to Pauly. Pauly wrote things when he was twelve and we were all forced to read them. And when he was twenty he’d buy up nearly the whole issue of a magazine that happened to contain one of his tales. You’d never have called Pauly indifferent about what he wrote!’

  ‘Or modest either,’ retorted Mr Winsley with distinct asperity.

  ‘That old middle-class thing!�
�

  He looked down at her, catching at a ghostly flirtatiousness. Bending arcoss the chair, he patted her hand.

  ‘You’ve got to rest,’ he scolded in a babyish, chin-chucking voice.

  ‘You were a fool, Caddie, weren’t you? Say you were!’

  ‘I must get that shutter mended,’ he said in a highly-concerned way.

  ‘First a doll and now a doormat—but it’s what you must have wanted!’

  ‘Is there anything else?’ asked Mr Winsley, moving about, piling up flocky little cushions, tidying books and papers, placing two sleeping tablets in a stained Rockingham saucer and last of all, tugging a curtain back and revealing a big, untidy bed.

  There was a long pause. Miss Bellingham had retrieved The Times from where it had fallen behind its rack and now her hands crackled through it like trapped birds. Her hair in contrast with the newspaper was whiter than ever. Above her head, a clock built into a model of St Martin-in-the-Fields went tuk-tuk, tuk-tuk. Deep down in the chasm of the street a car purred by.

  ‘Caddie.’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Caddie—it’s the last time. Tell me, did it really seem so truly—utterly … impossible …? Then, I mean?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’ he said sharply, but not unkindly. ‘The whole point surely is that it was then and not—not later. Isn’t that the answer? Anyway, why bring it up again now?’

  Miss Bellingham toyed with a sleeping pill. She moved it gently across the painted saucer, pushing it on from rose to rose with a varnished nail.

  ‘You always did get out of things,’ she retorted equably.

  It is your plight that you make not the faintest attempt to, thought Mr Winsley. ‘Sleep well,’ he said.

  He was at the door when she called, ‘Cadman!’ She had clambered out of the chair and was bunching her hair between fluttering fingers. Shawls strewed the carpet. ‘Tell Mr Brand that I would like to see him now.’

  ‘Now?’ he expostulated.

  Miss Bellingham didn’t answer. Without looking again he knew she was aspen with her curious, sudden, decrepit anger.