The Last Houseparty (18 page)

“No, sir.”

“No?”

“I don't see it matters how you k-kill people, if you're g-going to k-kill them at all.”

“We are talking about the civilian population of great cities.”

“They're for it anyway, sir, don't you think?”

Sir Charles accepted the break in the chain of his argument as if it had not happened.

“If there is a war, certainly,” he said. “That is a further reason why there must be no war. The salvation of this nation and empire depends on the avoidance of conflict with Germany, and that in turn depends on our political will. There is no such will, anywhere in the nation. There is no demand for war, no expectation of peace. We are in a general stupor, hypnotised by the approaching monster. We need a voice to wake us, and that voice must be heard in Parliament. For, mark you, under our present leadership the ship of state will not sail gallantly and deliberately into the battle line. It will drift, pilotless, chartless, to all intents unsteered. Our task—mine and my friends'—is to see that that does not happen. The issue is so finely balanced that a very few votes and voices will make the difference. This is a great moment in our history, Vincent. I need young Harry to join me in the effort. He has made it plain to me that he will talk his decision over with you. Earlier I used the image of the primitive tribesman who puts his soul into safe keeping with some rock or tree so that he can walk through the snares of the enchanter unbewitched. I am asking you to release him so that he can join me in my battle. Well?”

“He'll make up his own mind, sir.”

“Of course he will. But making up one's mind is a process. One does it in part by converse with friends. What will you say to him?”

“This chap—the one who's putting up the c-capital—suppose Harry doesn't like the line you're taking—in a c-couple of years, I mean …”

Sir Charles sighed.

“The question you are attempting to ask is the oldest in the world,” he said. “It can never be answered because those who ask it mean a different thing from those whom they ask. You wish to know whether, in accepting an arrangement such as I outline, Harry will be subtly compelled to support causes in which he does not believe, to connive in stratagems which he knows to be corrupt, to work with allies who may be vicious, or stupid, or potential traitors to the nation. Whether, in Shakespeare's phrase, he must subdue his nature to what he works in, like the dyer's hand. For make no mistake, these are indeed the materials with which he must work. The nature of man, and therefore of politics, decree that it shall be so. But I, in attempting to formulate an answer to your question, am myself asking whether Harry has it in him to become a handler of such dye-stuff. For there is no escaping this, Vincent. The cloth is there, wherewith we must be clothed. There is an end to running naked through the meadows of childhood. The cloth is on the loom, being constantly woven. Every minute of the day, like it or not, the shuttle is rattling between the threads. It must be given its colour. The question is, by whose hand?”

As he spoke Sir Charles turned and stretched his own hand forward, pale in the shadowy light, the long fingers slightly crooked to hold an invisible sphere. At the same time his marred but formidable head stared directly at Vincent, riddling him with his gaze. Vincent gazed back, unanswering, not apparently seeing Sir Charles, still the cadet on parade enduring the onslaught of words as if he were a thing as insensate as the butt of the rifle round which his left hand curls. At last Sir Charles turned away to face once more along the frontage of the house.

“Look,” he said quietly. “There she is again.”

Now Vincent responded, turning his head also. The terrace was barred with strong light streaming from the open doors and windows of the morning room, but the shutters of the Great Hall were closed, as were those of the rooms beyond the dance floor. The noise that emanated in music and chatter from the dance seemed integral with the electric light, so that the moon and the line of pale lamps along the balustrade became by contrast the markers of realms of silence. Two-thirds of the way up the tower that shouldered out at the far end of the frontage appeared another such realm, a faint window, the feebleness of whose illumination made it seem yet more peaceful than the silences of either lamp or moon. In its rectangle, standing presumably on the thick inner sill, was the silhouette of the child. Vincent gazed at the shape, perhaps not even seeing it, his personality having undergone that change, that apparent gathering together and focusing of energies, with which he tended to confront mechanical problems.

“Well, Vincent,” said Sir Charles. “I can only ask you to do your best for Harry.”

4

What was the event—what is any event—actually like? The form of the question, the need to use a word such as “like”, suggests the difficulty of exact answer. In the succeeding seconds the event has begun its new existence as a memory of the participants, and thus become something different. That memory, should the participants choose to summon it up, will each time have undergone both diminutions and additions, and should they attempt to speak of it must now endure wrenching transformations, not merely because of the inadequacies of language, but because it must be reorganised into probably false coherences in order to be sayable at all. In something the same way the sleeping mind perceives images, static or brief spasms of action, while another part of what we are forced to think of as the same mind attempts to improvise a plot, or story-line, in which these images will more or less make sense. The dual process is the dream, but on waking this dream can only be recalled by the secondary element, the story-line, and the primary images which were the heart of the dream will have to be demoted into incidents, or mere frills and curlicues of the fancy, irrelevant to the basic architecture of plot—a plot that never existed in its own right. There are monsters in our museums, skeletons pieced together and given plaster flesh and painted skin and then taken by visitors for accurate portrayals of the creatures that paddled the ancient swamps, until some maverick palaeontologist reinterprets the crushed and exiguous fossil-finds and one of the monsters discovers that it was never that shape at all.

And what if memory fails—is overlaid perhaps by other and more potent memories or else, as in this case, is almost immediately blanked out by the trauma of the event itself? The event still occurred. The tree did fall in the desert, though there was no one to see or hear it. And there are still fossils in the mind, though even more exiguous. For memory is not a single store. Parts of both body and mind possess autonomous resources of recall, so that the tongue, and not the mouth, appears to remember of its own accord that last mouthful of coffee left somewhere about the house undrunk in its mug. Remaining with these separate oral memories, take the case of a thirteen-year-old girl at a bleakly jolly boarding school, towards the end of the war. Since, in theory, a woman's main task in wartime is to bind up the wounds of heroes (other resources for hero-comfort not being teachable at such establishments) the girls have lessons in first aid. They are shown how, and then set to bandage each other's arms or legs. The trained nurse who has given the demonstration has made it so quick and easy, the roll of bandage unwinding from her hand to wrap crooks and curves and hollows smooth as snowfall, but the girls soon discover how different is the practice of life from any demonstration. Strange loops and loosenings beset them, ends that unwind as fast as the opposite ends wind up. Two hands are not enough to control these writhings, so mouths come unhygienically into play.

A hand rises.

“Please, miss—something's wrong with Sally.”

The voice is half alarmed, half amused by an event dramatic enough to provide an afternoon's gossip and guesswork. Something is indeed wrong with Sally. Bandagers stop their weaving, wounded sit up to crane, nurse and class mistress wade through them to the child who is kneeling, upright, pale, unaware, shuddering as a nun might in her cell, pierced in the midst of prayer by the longed-for but still terrible visitation.

Sally wakes in the sick bay, knowing nothing since the moment of kneeling to bandage Louisa's ankle. A letter from her dead stepfather is in the headmistress's confidential file, explaining that owing to an unfortunate occurrence in Sally's past care may need to be exercised in certain circumstances. Her friends are therefore instructed not to talk, either to her or to each other, about the episode—thus effectively extending its gossip value to almost a week. But Sally herself, in any case always a slightly isolated child, appears untouched by her new interestingness. Her central mind, that which seems to her to be the real and only Sally, has no communication with the small autonomous province of mouth-memory, despite that province's power at a particular stimulus—the dry, dust-like, flavourless presence of cloth on lips and tongue—to put the whole empire of body and mind into trance.

One may be tempted to dig where such an unusual fossil has protruded from the strata. For one reason or another one may become obsessed with a need to know the true configuration of the monster. Some years later Sally Quintain sits in the visitor's chair of a leather-smelling office and listens to a fat, bald man talking in a foreign accent. She is very pale, but not as chalk-white as she was when she lay in trance on the couch beneath the window, and her features declare her true age, just over twenty-one, though half an hour ago they had reverted to the almost boneless softness of a child's.

“The trauma is evidently very deep,” says Dr Fettil. “I woke you deliberately. I would not recommend proceeding further by hypnosis. You have a very deep-seated trauma which you are anxious to conceal.”

“I'm not! I want to know.”

“That is superficial. I cannot by hypnosis force you to go against your fundamental inclinations. The proper way to proceed is to embark on a course of analysis, to enable you to recognise and come to terms with the nature of this trauma.”

“How long would that take?”

“It is impossible to say.”

“Guess.”

“Well, between one and three years.”

“I only want to know what happened. I don't want to change myself or anything. I'm perfectly happy with myself as I am.”

“If you know what happened you will change yourself.”

“But … Didn't I say anything? I feel as though I'd been through a mangle.”

“You told me about a dream.”

“Ah … the bear?”

“Yes.”

“What did I say? Listen, I know I have that dream, about once a month. I wake up sweating, absolutely rigid, but I can never remember what it was that frightened me. I used to shout out about a bear when I was small. Oh, come on. I'm paying you a lot of money. You might at least tell me my own dreams.”

Dr Fettil nods stolidly and consults his note-pad.

“You are in a cave by the sea,” he says. “You are lying on the sand and looking at the ripple-shadows on the roof. The Captain has left you, saying he will come back soon. Clearly the Captain is your father.”

“I don't think I want explanations for the moment. Just the dream.”

“Very well. You lie for a long time in this cave, telling yourself how happy you are. After a while you are lying the other way round, and aware that the end of the cave is dark. You try to see the end wall, and you realise that the cave is much deeper than you thought. You become afraid of the darkness. You try to move, but you cannot. You are clutching your doll, but she puts her head into your mouth, so that you are unable to call out. A bear comes out of the darkness, standing on its hind legs. A black bear with a white head. It leans over you. Its head is a cauliflower. It puts up its hands and starts to remove its head.”

“I told you that?” whispers Sally.

“Yes. That is all, apart from some moanings and struggles.”

“I wasn't going to believe you, you know … The Captain … He comes out of a book … There was water under trees somewhere, and light being thrown up … Yes, that's when I wake up. It's quite an ordinary nightmare until I see the cauliflower. He's going to show me something underneath.”

“Miss Quintain, the nature of this dream and your own reaction to it reveals a serious and deep-seated trauma. Once more …”

“Do you think it's connected with the other thing that happened? It might come from before, you know. My mother says I've always had nightmares, ever since I was tiny.”

“I cannot say without further analysis. The trauma itself may well pre-date that also. Your father …”

“No. I don't want to know about any of that. It's what happened outside me I want to know about, for purely practical reasons, not what happened inside me. I may be wrong, but …”

“You are wrong.”

“I'm sorry. Actually you've been quite a help. It won't be money down the drain.”

“If you decide to proceed no further I propose to waive my fee.”

“Oh, no. Really, you mustn't. I did tell you what I wanted and you agreed.”

“I have not supplied what you wanted.”

Sally, very pale still, smiles.

“But you've given me something else almost as good,” she says. “I'm going to teach myself to wake up as soon as I realise the Captain's gone.”

“You will only push the trauma still deeper.”

“The deeper the better.”

IX

T
he sound of footsteps converged on the dark and winding stair, Miss Quintain climbing from the courtyard, Mr Mason coming carefully down from the clock room. There was no question of passing, so she turned into the chamber where the weights hung and waited. Only one weight in fact dangled there, nine feet up. The others were stacked against the far wall, and over them the bob of the pendulum swung to and fro on its fourteen-foot rod. Its tock filled the room, a steady beat every two seconds.

“Isn't it marvellous to hear it going!” said Miss Quintain as Mr Mason stepped into the room. He looked pleased but did not smile. His gaze seemed to fluster her slightly, as though accusing her of entering his domain unasked. Indeed, when he spoke his words made it clear that he had deliberately descended to prevent her entering the upper sanctum, though at the same time he supplied a perfectly acceptable overt reason for this.

“Heard you coming,” he said. “Didn't want to trouble you to climb all the way.”

“You shouldn't have bothered. I'm perfectly spry,” she said.

Still, there was something not quite settled about her demeanour. Of course it could have been that this was normal, among people with whom she was familiar. The tightness, precision, control, were reserved for confrontations with strangers, and the relationship with Mr Mason was felt to have progressed beyond that. Alternatively she was discovering, as the weeks went by, something particular to that relationship and was not yet sure how to come to terms with it. He waited.

“I've got something I'd like you to read,” she said. “It's rather long, but … it does tell you a bit about the fire, which might be a help, but that's not really … You see, I want to have a talk with you, but I'd like you to read this first. It's only fair. Do you mind?”

Mr Mason reacted with complete stolidity, apparently not even perceiving her agitation. He took the buff-coloured folder she handed him and opened it. Inside were twenty or thirty sheets of flimsy paper, covered with a large-lettered handwriting, the script suggestive of a slightly diffuse personality ordering itself for the purposes of communication. Mr Mason held it at arm's length to read the first few words. He looked up.

“You quite sure …” he began.

“Yes. All of it. Right through,” said Miss Quintain.

“Take a bit of time.”

“There's no terrific hurry. I thought if we could have a talk when you come next week.”

“I'll give it a go during my dinner.”

“Well …”

“Fetch my food back here then, shall I? Seeing it's private.”

“If you wouldn't mind.”

By midday it had begun to rain. A few steady drips on the roof of the clock room tapped out alternatives to the louder knock of the escapement. Mr Mason had folded his coat to make a cushion on his tool-chest and sat there with one of the figures of Father Time, still bearing smoke stains from the fire, poised close behind his shoulder. He read steadily, taking unnoticing mouthfuls, laying the finished sheets face down beside him. He wore rather small-lensed, brass-rimmed spectacles perched half-way down his nose. They gave him the look of a very old-fashioned type of craftsman, of a role adopted years ago and clung to.

“15th August 1940

“My darling Sal,

It seems strange to write to you like this, and not use one of our pet names, but you will have outgrown them, no doubt, by the time you read this; and from my own point of view I am anxious to be as clear and unemotional as possible, and not to put any unfair pressures on you. One thing, however, I will ask: try to read right through. You will find parts of it difficult, and even painful, but for my sake I want you to read every word, because this letter concerns the two things that were most important in my life until I met your mother and you. Once you have read it you owe me nothing, and must do whatever you wish, consulting only your own physical and emotional interests. If you choose to burn these pages and forget all about them, that will be your own choice and therefore what I would wish. If you choose to follow any of the ideas or suggestions in them, that will still only be what I would wish because it has been your own choice. I hope that is clear.

“My instructions to Perring and Perring are that in the event of my death they will keep this letter at least until you are sixteen. Then, supposing your mother has also died—and who knows what may not happen in a war like this?—the senior partner is to open it, read it, and unless you have shown serious signs of mental instability (I cannot believe that that will be the case: you are among the sanest people I know) he is to give it to you.

“If your mother is alive (as of course I hope she will be) you will receive this letter six months before your twenty-first birthday. Nobody else will have read it, but Perrings will enclose a note warning that you should not read it if you are currently in a low state. The point is that under the terms of my will my as yet unsettled rights to Snailwood devolve on you when you are twenty-one, and I want you to have a bit of time to make up your mind about your feelings.

“Snailwood itself is of course one of the two things of importance to me of which I have spoken. My Uncle Snailwood's failure to leave a clear will, combined with my Aunt Ivy's refusal to forgive us for what, in her words, we ‘did to Vincent', are already making matters quite difficult enough; my own presumed death can only make the former problem worse. I am working as best I can on Aunt Ivy, and it is just possible that my death will in fact appease her, but she has more than her share of the Snailwood unpredictability.

“I have given the lawyers to understand that I have made you my heir in order to help with death duties (the understanding of lawyers being limited to notions of that type). My real reason, of course, is that at the moment you appear to care about Snailwood as much as I do. This feeling for the place in you may or may not last. I must insist that you do not attempt to keep it alive for my sake. I shall be dead. I very strongly do not believe in any kind of after-life. I have been extremely happy at Snailwood, both before and after you and your mother came to live there, but that play will be over, the curtain down, the audience gone home for ever. Do not try to revive it. If you want to continue at Snailwood because you think you will be happier there than elsewhere, that is all that will matter.

“It is going to be difficult, my dear. The combination of Uncle Snailwood's will and Aunt Ivy's intransigence and the war will make your finances very pinched if you do decide to stay. Let us suppose the war ends in a victory for the allies (though, as I write, Britain seems to be all that is left of that alliance). I find it hard to believe that in a war-exhausted world any government, of whatever stripe, will find it practicable to legislate for the convenience of owners of estates such as ours. All I can suggest is that you keep your eyes and ears open and remain as flexible as possible to the changes of the world. And it will change, beyond anything we can envisage. The whole social structure for which houses such as Snailwood were built will very likely crumble into dust. How could one continue to live here, in that case?

“My own idea has been that I may have to open the garden as a show place. The house itself is of no great interest: anybody can see it from the river, and that is the best of it. But I believe the garden could be made as attractive as anything in England, so that visitors would pay to see it in worthwhile numbers. I talked about the possibilities years ago, walking round with Harold Nicolson. You will find my notes at the back of the ‘G' file, but you are not to follow them slavishly, supposing you take up this suggestion at all. I only put it in here to show you what I mean by flexibility. Nothing that will make your life possible should be considered taboo, not even Sunday trippers.

“All this supposes that the difficulty with Aunt Ivy will be settled. I write what follows partly to help you understand the nature of that difficulty, and so cope with it, but mainly because it concerns the other very important thing in my life, besides Snailwood. This is my relationship with my cousin Vincent Masham. I may seem to be breaking my promise to your mother not to speak or write to you about him, ever; but that promise was given in the shock of the event; when, in fact, I hardly knew you, and before I realised what a splendidly balanced and intelligent person you were beneath your exterior sulks and shyness. In any case, I feel my death will have released me from all such promises.

“To say that Vincent and I were ‘great friends' is entirely to misunderstand the relationship. We were not inseparable, though we did attend the same schools and spent some of our holidays together at Snailwood. But even at Eton, where I was in College and Vince in an Oppidan house, we were never in the same forms and might not see each other for more than a bit of casual chat in the street two or three times a week. Yet the bond between us was immensely strong; quite as strong as marriage, it seems to me, though I am passionately happy in my marriage to your mother.

“Putting it like this may imply to you that our relationship was at bottom
^*
one of suppressed homosexuality. No. My own inclinations are very strongly towards your sex and always were, even at Eton, where a good deal of homosexuality was prevalent in my day, among boys who later showed themselves to be perfectly ‘normal' and had merely resorted to their own sex because there was almost no opportunity for anything else. Vincent was rather different, in that he was extremely inhibited about sexual matters of any kind; but I don't think his problem was suppressed homosexuality. It is true that Aunt Ivy was a classically appalling mother, but not the exponent of smother love one reads of in the textbooks. Seeing his behaviour at Eton, and later his reactions to certain kinds of physically attractive women (your mother a good example) I am persuaded that his bent was very much the same as mine, and at least as strong, but that he found great difficulty in giving it expression.

“Vince's difficulties are not irrelevant to you, but I have embarked on them sooner than I meant. Let me go back to my own feelings for him. Our relationship did have something in common with marriage, in the sense that we had developed into what we were, each into his own shape (if you follow me) to accommodate the shape of the other. I was actually talking to Vince about this the evening before he vanished, instancing the superficial example of how his uncommon ability at ball games and my reaction to it had caused me to choose certain paths in my own development and thus helped to make me what I am. In the course of the same conversation (I always, you won't be surprised to learn, did most of the talking) we turned to the question whether I would get the chance to bed your mother that night, only having met her the evening before.
^**
It seemed to me quite a possibility, and I said so. At least there was nothing to prevent my having a go, as there hadn't been with a number of women before. Sometimes I'd brought it off, sometimes not, but there had been no problem about trying. Now it seems to me by hindsight that the simplicity to me of this business may have been analogous to the simplicity Vince found in biffing a fast-moving ball where he wanted with a bat or racket. Perhaps the fact that he found sexual approaches so tricky made them marginally more straightforward for me; and the fact that I had few problems in that field made it more than marginally harder for Vince.

“Anyway, it is of more immediate importance that we did have this conversation, that Vince was somewhat disturbed by it (I never used to take much notice of that because I thought it was good for him) and that I then did spend the night with your mother. In the course of that night a man came to your room, tied a gag into your mouth and sexually assaulted you. Your nurse found you asleep in the morning with the gag still round your face and blood on your nightie. A doctor was called, and confirmed what must have happened.

“You yourself seemed to remember nothing whatever of the incident; but when you had been put back into your bed and your mother was talking to the doctor at the other side of the room, you started to scream the words ‘dirty face'. The doctor was preparing a sedative for you when you fell asleep of your own accord, on your mother's lap. The doctor then left. Your mother stayed in the room and when you woke she again asked you who had attacked you. (I should have mentioned that you slept with a night-light which was still burning in the morning, so you would have seen the man.) It was at this point that, according to your mother, you said it had been Vince. By this time Anderson, the local bobby, had been called, but when your mother questioned you in his presence you refused to speak.

“Later that morning, at Anderson's suggestion, you were taken down to watch the house party being photographed in the courtyard, with the idea that you might recognise your attacker, or otherwise react to him. The photographing was interrupted by a fire breaking out in the clock tower, and some of us rushed off to try and extinguish it. By the time we had managed to break into the tower the fire had a serious hold, but we managed to control it until the arrival of the fire brigade. (The fire had nearly certainly been started by a disgruntled employee of my uncle's, the tragic end to a great comic saga which I will tell you one day, but irrelevant to you and Vince.)

“Returning from our efforts in the tower, Vince and I found you, your mother, your nurse and Anderson in the cloisters. I had no idea why Anderson was there. Your nurse had appeared at breakfast and greatly to Zena's irritation insisted on speaking to your mother. Next time I'd seen her she was clearly worried and told me the doctor had been called to see you, so I had assumed you had gone down with mumps or something. I was surprised to see you in the cloisters. You did not look well, and as we came towards you you turned, saw us and started to scream. We looked a proper pair of blackguards, filthy with smoke and cinders.