The Fox in the Attic (3 page)

In addition to improper pictures, many of the lesser family portraits were hung here in this billiardroom—“lesser” in the sense that either the sitter or the painter was better forgotten: black sheep and frail ladies; and the pseudo-Lely, the Academy rejects. But as soon as Augustine's father had married a Liberal, even the lovely drawing Rossetti had done of him as an infant angel with a tabor could no longer be hung anywhere at all at Newton Llantony—not even in here! Augustine had lately found this drawing hidden away upstairs in his grandmother's bedroom drawer: whereas Henry's portrait, posthumously painted by a limited company from photographs—that vast act of worship in oil-paint hung over the fireplace in the largest drawing-room.

Henry even while he lived had been the apple of every eye. The uncles had built him his own squash-court: when he was killed at Ypres in permanent mourning for him the court was not played in any more: it became where the larger stuffed animals were housed, including a giraffe.

So much bitter fanaticism in those two old Tories: yet in practice so much actual kindness to many, including Augustine himself—the “Liberal Woman's” child! The two things seemed hard to reconcile. Over the carved autumnal marbles of the empty fireplace there hung a huge presentation portrait of Uncle Arthur as Master, his otterhounds grouped around him; so Augustine fell to studying the face now, in the gloaming, in the hope of discovering its secret. But all it showed was that years of concentration on the animal had made the Master himself grow so like an otter it was a wonder his own hounds had not rent him, Actaeon-wise. And Uncle William? The only portrait of him here was a small lady-like watercolor in full uniform painted by an artistic color-sergeant at Hongkong. It showed the General's eye large and liquid as a Reynolds cherub's, the rounded cheek as innocent (there can have been no Liberals in Hongkong for Uncle William to look so much at peace).

The sky was darkening, but the mist seemed to have cleared now: through the tall uncurtained window what seemed like a single low star suddenly winked out, blurred only by the runnels on the glass.

Augustine raised the sash. That “star” must be the lamps in distant Flemton being lit (Flemton was a little mediaeval rock-citadel eight miles away guarding the river mouth: a kind of Welsh Mont-St.-Michel, or miniature Gibraltar). For a minute or two he stood watching, his solid height silhouetted against the window, what little daylight remained illumining his freckled, sensitive, sensible young face. But although his thoughts were distracted now, his features still wore the imprint of the shock he had had—like yesterday's footprints still discernible on dewy grass.

Uncle Arthur the otter and Uncle William the faded general ... Augustine had been fond of both old men when he was a child, and he warmed to their memory now—but fond of them as objects rather than as people, for what grotesques they were! Too old even for billiards in the end, they had sat here day-in day-out winter and summer one each side of a roaring fire while dust settled on the cover of the ever-shrouded table. Uncle Arthur was stone deaf in the left ear, hard of hearing in the right: Uncle William stone deaf in the right ear, hard of hearing in the left (hence that peculiar custom-built telephone). Both used enormous ear-trumpets: Uncle William was nearly blind too, so used a powerful monocle as well.

Suddenly it struck Augustine with force: how was it so great a gulf divided his own from every previous generation, so that they seemed like different species?

The kind of Time called “History” ended at the Battle of Waterloo: after that, Time had gone into a long dark tunnel or chrysalis called the Victorian Age. It had come out into daylight again at the Present Day, but as something quite different: it was as impossible to imagine oneself born a Victorian or born in “History” as ... as born a puma.

But wherein did the difference demonstrably lie? For the moment he could not get beyond his starting-point that all previous generations had been objects, whereas
his
were
people
: that is, what mattered were their insides—what they thought, what they felt. Not their outsides at all: the natural face in the shaving-glass was not
him
, only the invisible mind and the erupting ego within it ranked as
him
. Whereas those ... those ancient objects his uncles and their generation were outsides only: hollow bundles of behaviorist gestures, of stylized reactions to stimuli like Pavlov's dogs. Their only “reality” was the grotesques they looked, the grotesqueries they did.—Take Uncle William's story of old Sir Rhydderch Prydderch, a neighbor said to have torn out his staircase at the age of seventy and thereafter swarmed up a rope every night to go to bed: had such a grotesque any reality
except
as an imagined spectacle halfway up a rope?

Or take the story of that disastrous fox-hunt (it had been Uncle Arthur speaking this time, sitting on Augustine's little bed one evening and feeding him with bread-and-milk). Wolves, imported by a noble Polish exile to make his new Pembrokeshire home more homelike, were alleged to have crossed with the local foxes and brought forth monstrous hybrid young: hence, ultimately, Uncle Arthur's bedtime story of those little terrified figures in Pink clinging in trees with a pack of huge red ravening foxes howling underneath (the story had been told with relish, for the Master of Otterhounds had despised fox-hunters “sitting dry-arse on their horses all day” almost as he had despised Liberals).

These particular grotesques were only hearsay, and perhaps even fabulous. But as well as his uncles there were plenty of other notable “outsides” Augustine had seen among his elders with his own eyes. There was Dr. Brinley, for instance: who was legendary, but living still. Dr. Brinley was an aged adored fox-hunting coroner never even half sober even when on a horse. Once Augustine as a schoolboy had pulled off his cap in the High Street at Penrys Cross out of respect for the dead; but it proved to be the coroner not the corpse they were carrying into Court.

Another notable grotesque here had been the late rector: parson not person, a mere clerical keeper of pigs that used to get loose during Service. From his pulpit he could see into his rectory garden, and Sunday after Sunday what he saw there made him falter and repeat himself and then suddenly explode into a cry of “
Pigs!
” that startled strangers no end. At that cry the rectory children (they had left the sty open deliberately of course) would rise and sidle out of their pew, bow to the altar before turning their backs on it, mince down the aisle with their muffs and prayer-books and Sunday hats ... and the moment they were through the church door burst into loud whoops as they scampered off.

The late bishop (who had a beard like old Kruger's) came to luncheon here at Newton one day: it was 1916, and Henry was home on embarkation leave. The rector was there, but the reverend wits had now begun noticeably to fail and so Uncle Arthur asked the bishop himself to say Grace. The rector protested—etiquette was for
him
to say Grace, and he struggled to his feet. But after “For what we are about to receive ... the usual form of words must have escaped him, for he stumbled on ex tempore: “The plump chicken, the three excellent vegetables ...” Then he sat down, seething with indignation and muttering what sounded like “May the Lord in His mercy blast and braise us all!”

Next Sunday he announced from the pulpit a momentous discovery: Johns the Baptist and Evangelist were one and the same person! He was stuttering with excitement, but Augustine heard no more because Uncle William, startled at the news, dropped his eyeglass in his ear-trumpet and began fishing for it with a bunch of keys. Uncle Arthur in his senior corner of the family box-pew kept commenting “Damn' young fool!” (he was unaware of the loudness of his own voice, of course) “Oh the silly damn' fool!” then snatched the ear-trumpet from his brother's hand and dislodged the eyeglass by putting the trumpet to his lips and blowing a blast like the horn of Roland.

As the scene came back to him now Augustine burst out laughing in the echoing, comfortable room those two old men had made: which should have been Henry's: but which instead was his.

A breath of wind came through the opened window. In the dusk something white fluttered off the marble fireplace shelf where it had been propped and Augustine struck a match to look at it. It was an engraved and emblazoned invitation-card:

—and then his name, and so on.

At the sight of that card his conscience pricked him; for the annual Banquet was tonight and he had not even remembered to answer. His two old uncles, of course, had attended the High Steward's Banquet yearly to the last; but wild horses could not drag Augustine to any function of that kind and surely the sooner people ceased even inviting him, the better! Bucolic banquets, flower-shows, the magistrate's bench, audit-days, hunt balls—the young squire of Newton was absolutely determined not to get “involved”; and surely the neighborhood ought to be only too thankful—nobody
wants
a Heavy Squire these days! In 1923 it's quite out of date. At the very least he wouldn't be missed: there are plenty of noisome little creatures who
like
doing that sort of thing. Thus he could feel his lip curl a little in derision—though quite involuntarily—as he turned himself in the dusk to contemplate once more that low fixed star which was all the lights of distant ... of gregarious, festive Flemton.

For the moment he had clean forgotten what had just happened on the Marsh; and yet in his face that look of yesterday's footmarks had still persisted even while he laughed.

Flemton, the object of Augustine's mild involuntary derision ...

That long line of dunes dividing the seven-mile stretch of sea-marsh from the sea ended in a single precipitous peninsular outcrop of rock, and this was washed by the mouth of a small smelly tidal river which served as creek still for a few coasting smacks (though the trade was already dying). The tiny, unique self-governing township of Flemton was crowded right on top of this rock, the peeling yellow stucco of its Regency houses bulging out over its mediaeval walls like ice-cream from a cornet.

This was Flemton's great night—the night of the banquet—and now the rain had stopped. Princes Street was decorated: Chinese lanterns hung in the pollarded limes: signal-flags and other bunting, colored tablecloths, tanned sails, even gay petticoats and Sunday trousers streamed from some of the poorer windows. The roadway milled with happy citizenry hoping for a fight presently but not yet: little Jimmy-the-pistol was bicycling up and down among them letting off rockets from his handlebars, the pocket of his jacket on fire.

Moreover the aged, famous Dr. Brinley had driven himself over early from Penrys Cross along the sands in his pony-trap. Dr. Brinley knew Flemton of old: each elegant, rotting, fungusy house and the men, women and children who swarmed in them. He saw all these people as he tended to see the whole world—and indeed, as the world too saw him—with a heightening, Hogarthian eye; but he loved them and needed them none the less. The scene tonight was meat and drink to Dr. Brinley and he paused to enjoy it.

A group of women in the middle of Princes Street had their heads together: “Can't think where that Dai of mine has got to,” Mrs. Dai Roberts was saying.

She seemed to speak with difficulty. “That woman has mislaid her false teeth and the ones she has borrowed are a poor fit,” thought Dr. Brinley in the shadows, chuckling.

“Down on the Marsh, shooting with Mr. Augustine he was very usual,” said a yellow-haired young man with a hare-lip: “Happen they've stopped on for the evening flight.”

“My Dai'll never give the Banquet a miss, I know that!” said Mrs. Roberts.

“Will Mr. Augustine be attending this year, Mrs. Roberts, do you know?” a woman asked her diffidently.

Mrs. Roberts spat like a man and returned no other answer; but the quivering of her goiter made her look like an angry turkey and the others took their cue:

“It's a crying shame,” said someone.

“Shut away in that great house all alone—it's not natural,” said another.

“Clean mental, to my way of thinking,” said someone else. Then she lowered her voice a little: “There's mentality in the blood, they say.”

“Mentality!” exclaimed Mrs. Roberts contemptuously: “Wickedness you mean!” Then she too lowered her voice to a sinister tone: “Why for should he shut hisself away like that
if his life was fit to be seen
?”

A knowing and a scandalized look descended on them all:

“Flying in the face of Almighty God!”

“Enough to bring his uncles back from the grave.”

There was a brief pause. Then:

“Poor young Mr. Henry ... Pity
he
got hisself killed in that old war.”

“The little duck! I seen him guv his bath once, the little angel! Loviest little bit of meat ...”

“Aye, it's always that way: while them as
could
be spared ...”

“
Rotten
old Kayser!”

“Still: if most days he's out shooting with your Dai ...”

“‘Days'! But what about the
nights
, Mrs. Pritchard? Answer me that!”

Mrs. Pritchard evidently couldn't.

Dr. Brinley strolled on, but now another early arrival had paused for breath after the steep ascent. This was the new bishop, whose first visit to Flemton it was. Meanwhile the talk had been continuing:

“
All alone there with no one to see—it just don't bear thinking on!
”

“
I wouldn't go near the place—not if you paid me.
”

“
Quite right, Mrs. Locarno! Nor I wouldn't neither!
”

“
Not even by daylight I wouldn't!
”