North Face (18 page)

“I had a feeling all the time that there was
something
in the background.”

Beneath the crudeness of the words there moved an instinctive kind of humanity. It relieved Miss Searle, unawares, of the sense of pure vulgarity which would have made it impossible to go on. Besides, though she did not know why, she longed still to be talking, not yet to be left alone.

“Yes, she was apparently a girl a good deal younger than himself, and I should imagine—” She checked herself in confusion. She had been about to add “—from quite a different class; the school nurse.” In her anxiety to cover a trace of this, she told much more of the story than she had meant to tell.

“My God,” said Miss Fisher, “what an awful thing.” There was a genuine compassion in her voice; but there was also, inevitably, the satisfied response to a strong sensation which is hard to avoid by people who have become indurated to minor ones. It made Miss Searle feel, for a moment, as if she had been standing with arms akimbo gossiping over a fence. Her sense of humiliation roused, in reaction, her instinctive defences. They were powerful ones; for more than ten years she had held a position in which it was most unsuitable to be in the wrong.

“Yes,” she said. “Very dreadful indeed. Luckily men seem able to console themselves, and find distractions, much more quickly than most women would think possible.”

Shades of doubt, and a confused struggle with ideas, were reflected in Miss Fisher’s face as she thought this over. Finally she said, “Well, we’re all of us human, I suppose.”

There was no depth of meaningless generalisation, Miss Searle thought, which would not pass for philosophy among the half-educated. She did not attempt reply. Miss Fisher, who never felt much at home herself with abstract thought, said, “I should hope he divorced her, after that.”

“I believe so. One imagines it would hardly be made absolute yet.”

“Well,” said Miss Fisher, her voice suddenly sharp and practical, “seeing he’s the innocent party as they say, he’d better watch his step.”

A startled look fixed, for a moment, Miss Searle’s pale eyes. She had never been forced to consider the technicalities of divorce. One either recognised it, or one did not. Her own position was, by heredity and conviction, that of the high Anglican.

“If he is a Churchman, he will probably not consider himself free to re-marry, in any case.”

Miss Fisher’s mouth opened, remained parted for a moment, and closed again. She had heard that tone of voice before; you might as well beat your head on a wall, she thought, for all the use. Giving it up, she looked out of the window.

While they had been talking, the police must have left. At the moment when Miss Searle’s eyes followed, involuntarily, the direction of Miss Fisher’s, Ellen came out of the front door and joined Neil in the garden. Sound carried clearly in the still air; though the sentence with which he greeted her was not wholly audible, there was no doubt that it had included the use of her Christian name.

Miss Searle turned and smiled at Miss Fisher. It was the kind of smile which can be felt in the works of Jane Austen when she describes some piece of behaviour too ill-considered to admit of true levity, but too trivial to merit a paragraph of serious prose.

“I expect,” she said, “you must become very tolerant of human nature, in work like yours.”

“Well, it’s a fact you don’t have many illusions about it.” A moment ago, Miss Fisher’s own system of defence had prompted a little flourish on her next trip to Bridgehead, which had suddenly taken on in her mind the bright colours of defiance. But it was not Miss Searle she wished to defy; it was a little mean, perhaps, rubbing it in to someone who hadn’t had the luck. In any case, it wasn’t till tomorrow.

“It’s going to be a lovely morning. I suppose you wouldn’t care to come down for a bathe?”

Out in the garden, Neil had produced a map from his pocket; to study it better, he and the girl had spread it out on the lawn and were poring over it, like children, on hands and knees.

“I think,” said Miss Searle to Miss Fisher, “that’s a quite excellent suggestion. I can really think of nothing I should enjoy more.”

N
EIL GLANCED AT THE
doubtful sky, felt a causeless but unshakable optimism about the weather, considered it realistically, and put his mackintosh in his rucksack.

Ellen’s door opened as he passed it on his way’ down. She put her head round it, keeping the rest of her person twisted out of sight.

“Are we climbing?” she asked.

“I shouldn’t think so. I doubt if there’s anything there.”

“Right, I shan’t be a moment.” Her head withdrew. They had climbed yesterday, in a mild way, after the police had gone. It had appealed to him as a simple means of taking her out of herself, no more than a neighbourly duty; it would have been brutal to leave her alone. The plan had answered well. He could not remember, now, what had led up to making a fixture for today as well, only that it had seemed to follow quite naturally at the time. As he went down the last flight of stairs it occurred to him that she had been listening for his step while making up her mind how to dress. A vague pleasure at being consulted on this decision added itself to his diffused cheerfulness, but was altogether too silly to find lodging in his surface thoughts.

She came down a few minutes later, in a blue linen shirt and a grey skirt, pleated, which swung a little with her step.

“What sort of state is this castle in?” she asked as they left the last houses behind.

“Pretty ruinous, I expect. It’s marked in Gothic on the map.” Both spoke as if they were continuing a current conversation, though they had said almost nothing since they started out.

“I think,” said Ellen, “I like the ones that haven’t been kept up and lived in the best; they’re more themselves.”

After this very female generalisation, he was surprised to find, presently, that she had read Froissart, Villehardouin, Joinville and Malory, not conscientiously but, it was apparent, greedily, as if they had been novels. She was diffident about it and he had to drag it out of her piecemeal.

“Have you always been a mediaevalist?” he asked.

She looked quite alarmed. “Oh, it’s only for fun. I liked it at school, and in the last few years I’ve gone back to it a bit. It was a change,” she added apologetically, “from the factory.”

And, Neil surmised, from much besides. As if she had anticipated his thought, she said, “It seems all right till someone utters the word ‘escapism,’ and then you feel like a secret drinker.”

“It’s an overworked word. No one can live, for instance, without a certain amount of sleep. I’m expecting to hear that labelled escapism any day now.” He was feeling a revulsion from his own phase of unrelaxing struggle; his first rejection of the doctor’s sedative had been tiresomely characteristic of his whole effort, he thought. Now as at several other times, he did not recall the fact that she had had as many years to make her adjustments in as he had had months; trouble has a way of leaping at parallels and discarding the rest. She looked so young that the thought would have been, in any case, hard to make real.

“Sometimes,” she said, “it isn’t as escapist as you’d like it to be. Nowadays, I mean. It was hard to imagine the cruelty once; now you can. Froissart on De Foix reads awfully like some journalist dealing politely with a successful dictator, except that the style’s better.”

More used than he had realised to the scholastic angle, Neil was enjoying this personal approach, and feeling thankful that for once he hadn’t to ruin it with injections of what the examiners required.

“I don’t recall the gentleman,” he said, “but I gather you dislike him.”

“Who, De Foix? After that story I should think only God wouldn’t dislike him. One ought to pity him, I know, but …”

“I’m classics, not history. I wish you wouldn’t assume I know everything. Come on.”

“I’d spoil it.” They had reached high ground between the cliffs and the moor, which lay before them in a shimmering lavender haze of coming heat. It looked timeless and still, with the latent fierceness of a sleeping lion.

After he had persuaded her, she said, “Froissart’s terribly nice about it all, on the surface. He’d been entertained like a prince for three months, of course, in the castle; but De Foix impressed him too, I think. He did everything magnificently, peace or war; too much of a gentleman to read or write, but a great patron of the arts. The handsomest man of the age, as well. His bastard sons were all on the same scale and lived with him in state; the Countess doesn’t seem, to have objected, not that I expect it would have cut any ice if she had. She could afford not to, though; she was the King of Navarre’s sister, and her own son was the most magnificent of the lot.

“Everything started when this King swindled the Earl of Foix over somebody’s ransom; it was a sort of Big Business then, you know. He thought it would be a good idea to send the Countess to make her brother pay up. When she couldn’t, she was afraid to come back. The way Froissart puts it is ‘She knew well the Earl her husband was cruel when he took a displeasure.’ She must have known, because she stayed in Navarre for years, while her son was growing to marriageable age. The Earl married him off to an heiress at fifteen. He seems to have been more interested in his mother, though, because after the wedding he asked to go and see her. The Earl gave him leave, but he wouldn’t send a message, and when the Countess heard that, she was still afraid to go back.

“The King of Navarre had his own ideas about all this. The day the boy was due to leave, he had him in for a private talk, and said that if he really wanted his mother home again, it could easily be arranged. And he handed over a little bag with powder in it, a love-philtre, he said. The boy need only slip it in his father’s food and he’d not only forgive his wife but love her for ever, provided no one was told about it, which would spoil the charm. The lad was terribly grateful, and hung it round his neck to have it ready. He was very careful not to tell anyone when he got back; so when one of his half-brothers saw it and got curious, it ended in a fight. The little brother lost and went away crying, and happened to meet the Earl, who asked him what was the matter. All the child could say was that Gaston carried a purse of powder round his neck, and he thought it was something to do with his mother coming back. ‘Then the Earl entered into imagination,’ Froissart says.”

“That evening the boy was serving his father’s place at table. In the middle of the meal the Earl called him over, and suddenly ripped open his coat. The boy just went dead white and stood in complete silence. The Earl took some of the powder and gave it on bread to a dog under the table. It took one swallow and died at once.

“The boy still stood there fixed on his feet. The Earl would have killed him at the table, with his dinner-knife, if the courtiers hadn’t got in the way. There might be some explanation, they said, and besides there was no other legitimate heir. At last the Earl agreed to lock Gaston up while he thought it over. While he was thinking, he tortured all the squires in his son’s household to death. There were fifteen of them, about the same age as the boy. He said they must have seen the purse and they ought to have reported it. There’s still no record of the boy’s saying anything. He was put in the keep, in a room without a window, and no one saw him but the jailor who brought his food.

“As soon as the news got about the demesne, deputations poured in to beg Gaston off; he seems to have been a friendly lad whom everyone knew. Someone even went to the Pope at Avignon, and a Cardinal was sent to go into things. He got there a bit late, though. The boy lay on his bed in the dark for a fortnight, with all the food he was brought lying on the floor beside him. The jailor got worried, and finally went to the Earl. It seems to have made him angry again, the boy taking things into his own hands. He went to the keep, walked up to the boy’s bed, ordered him to eat, and when nothing happened took him by the throat and shook him. He was weak by then, so he died.

“The Earl was always very correct about etiquette. He went into black and shaved his head. All he said that’s recorded is, ‘I shall never have the joy that I had before.’”

The lane had turned to a high trackway crossing a hill; there were sparse oaks here, stunted and leaning towards the land. The only tall trees were a few Scotch firs, which strained and murmured against the wind.

Neil said, after a little while, “And you don’t think civilisation’s advanced in the last five hundred years?”

“Do you?”

“‘I shall never have the joy that I had before’ … He wore a hair shirt under his armour, I suppose, and was afraid of hell fire. Perhaps he was even afraid of himself. So much painful remorse, just for having liquidated an anti-social element. We do things better now.”

“I suppose we’re all tarred with it, in the last few years. One had to disinfect things with generalisations sometimes, not to go crazy. De Foix did have his confessor. What have we?”

“Nothing at all,” he said, “if we want to live.”

“Do you mean that?” said Ellen, looking at him; whether in curiosity or appeal, he could not tell.

“I suppose not. I mean no nice warm-huddle of solidarity. People get together in this century like insects under a stone, to sanction all their more disgusting emotions and waste most of their good ones. If you can’t live without a bit of group-ego, go to a party and get tight. That’s honest anyway, you keep your own hangover and the damage to your mind is mainly physical. The Greeks knew that; that’s why they honoured Dionysus as a god. The good shepherd who led the beast in mankind into the woods till it was tired, and kept the altars of the immortals pure.”

“The immortals?” she said. Her voice sounded bitter; but with the kind of bitterness which contains, unknown perhaps to itself, the longing for an answer. It stirred something in him, the residue of his faith: the irreducible something of whose survival he had, till this moment, been unsure. He thought of the Crito. But Socrates had not had the benefits of an English public school education; words like Truth, Beauty and Good had slid with Mediterranean shamelessness across his tongue. Neil said, “Oh, well.”