The New Confessions (11 page)

But on the train to Charlbury my neutral composure began to desert me. I looked out of the window at the bland and innocuous countryside and told myself to calm down. Faye would be surprised but glad to see me, I reassured myself. Everything would be fine.

At Charlbury Station I secured directions to the Hobhouses’ address from a cabby. I walked up the hill through the small town, its dullocher buildings looking quite peculiar to me, I recall. It was just after luncheon and the shops were being reopened. I had not eaten since the evening before and, as I passed a baker’s, almost swooned from hunger. I bought a slice of veal and ham pie and checked I was going in the right direction. Everyone appeared to know where Vincent Hobhouse had lived.

I walked on up through the town eating my pie. It was too warm for my overcoat. I took it off. The sky was milky, the sun invisible. The dust on the verge was white. My heavy boots crunched on the gravel of the unpaved road. At one point two small barefoot urchins chased after me, laughing at my kilt and shouting insults at me in their incomprehensible
dialect. I shied a couple of stones at them and they ran away.

The Hobhouse home was a large, solid, late-Georgian building set on a hill overlooking the town and the Windrush Valley. It had a spacious garden with many mature trees—a gloomy cedar, two monkey puzzles, elms and limes—and was surrounded by a tall beech hedge. Further down the hill was a small nursing home, past which I walked, and beyond it a row of cottages. The house was set back from what I later learned was the Oxford road, and beyond it lay open fields and countryside.

I walked up the drive. Two lolloping spaniels, followed by a little girl in a sailor suit, ran to intercept me. I stopped. I felt myself perceptibly weaken. I was suddenly appalled by the full audacity of what I had done.

“Hello,” I said, with fake bonhomie. “Is your mother in?… You must be Alceste.”

“I’m Gilda. This is Ned and this is Ted.” She introduced the dogs. “My father’s gone to heaven.”

I felt sick. “I know. I’m your cousin. John James Todd. Come to see you.”

Gilda took me indoors. We went through an entrance hall and an inner hall. I was left in a cool pale drawing room, heavy with the scent of potpourri and encumbered with the ornaments and collectibles of long inhabitation. On a round table was a group of leather- and tortoiseshell-framed photographs. I saw my mother’s face. I closed my eyes.

“Johnny?”

I turned round, blood booming like surf in my ears.
Faye
. I felt my stomach rotate with stupid love. She wore a green apron over her dress and I found myself wondering—absurdly—if she had been cleaning silver. Her hair was tied loosely at the back with a velvet bow. She looked younger even than her photograph. I felt like laughing. I had never seen anyone more beautiful. Instantly, all my doubts disappeared. I had done the right thing.

“What are you doing here?” Her tone was puzzled. Her eyes took in my kilt, my socks, my boots. All my doubts returned. I had made a ghastly mistake.

“I’ve run away from school.”

“But why?”

Because I love you, I wanted to shout.

“Because … I want to join the army.”

*     *     *

What in God’s good name made me say that? What malign fate put those words in my mouth? If I had only told the truth, think what I would have avoided. I am not sure how the subconscious mind works but this was no long-repressed ambition; nothing could have been further from my wishes. After the first flush of war fever, Minto Academy’s aggressive instincts had faded rapidly, partly as a result of waning interest, partly encouraged by Minto’s passionate neutrality. Every old Mintonian who died prompted another melancholy panegyric in favor of peace. Tones of “I told you so” seemed to hang in the air for days after every futile battle. By the end of 1915 everyone’s enthusiasm was at a low ebb. I must have blurted out my “reason” as a consequence of an instinctive association of ideas. My embarrassment. Faye’s eyes on my kilt, the Highland Light Infantry at Paddington—
ergo
, soldiering.

At first, as it turned out, it did its job admirably. All Faye’s suspicions and surprise were allayed. To my vague disappointment she did not try to dissuade me. She reminded me I was too young, but perhaps I could join up next year. Possibly, her zeal arose from the fact that I was her nephew and not her son. In fact she told me that Peter had volunteered immediately on leaving school in the summer of 1915 and he had joined a public school battalion. Faye thought this might be just the place for me. Peter would be able to supply all the right information and advice—might even get me into the same battalion. I found myself agreeing with diminishing enthusiasm. Peter, it transpired, was coming home on leave that very weekend, I should wait in Charlbury at least until then, Faye counseled, when I could ask him anything I wanted.

Four days. Four days alone with Faye (if one excluded the servants and Gilda and Alceste). I experienced a temporary relief. Problems and decisions could be postponed for a while. I was here, I was with her, living under the same roof. That had been the immediate aim of my running away and I had achieved it. I allowed myself to sink into the warm pool of her welcome.

The first thing Faye did was to telegram my father and the school. I felt curiously invulnerable and only wondered vaguely how Minto would react upon receipt of the news. I did not reflect too long on my father’s response, either. I was here in England; they seemed a continent away. This was, I now realize, the first indication of a dangerous
tendency in my character: the long view, the long term, rarely attracts me. It is the here and now I find alluring. When I act it is because I am impelled by something irresistible within me and seldom as a result of some well-plotted strategy. This happened again and again in my life and usually brought swift satisfaction followed by disastrous remorse. Suppose I had stayed out my course at the Academy and completed my certificate exams? Who knows what would have happened?… But this is futile.
How we live reflects our own natures
. The prudent, cautious, sensible approach would never be the one I chose.

So here I was in the large comfortable house. Did Faye ask herself why, if I wished to join the army, I had to run away to Charlbury to do so? She must have. But she would forgive me anything, Faye, as I was the son of her beloved, late sister, motherless since the day of his birth, bereft of a maternal guiding hand and illimitable source of love. It was only natural in such a confused moment that I should turn somewhere for solace and advice. (In fact this was the first question her son, Peter, asked me. I told him I had originally planned to enlist in London, as far away from my father’s influence as possible. A sudden failure of nerve had drawn me to Charlbury. He understood completely.)

I was served up a late lunch that day (to supplement my veal and ham pie) of cold meat, bread and pickle, and then Faye called the gardener (I cannot recall his name—an old man with a limp) to drive us in the family motor to Oxford to buy some clothes for me (a light flannel suit, two shirts, collars, a tie and, my suggestion this, a flat tweed cap). Faye took a real pleasure in our jaunt. It was a mild, hazy day. The drive to and from Oxford was taken up with a chatter of reminiscence. I am sure too that Faye secretly rather admired my resolve. When you meet people like myself who act foolhardily or spontaneously it is easy, from a haven of routine and security, to mock or deplore us. But at the same time, in your heart, there is a profound and unsettling envy of the freedom that is expressed in our careless actions. And Faye, I thought that day, was in fact rather like me. We shared the same spirit, but she had confined hers to a life of provincial worthiness when she married Vincent Hobhouse. I sensed too that, after the grief and mourning an invigorating suspense and ignorance had begun to pervade her life. What now? Where next? With whom?

Two terse telegrams arrived early that evening to undermine my intoxicated mood. Minto’s forbade me to return to the Academy and instructed me to consider myself expelled. My father’s simply ordered me
to come home at once. Faye advised me to ignore this last injunction. She felt that nothing would be gained by turning round and heading back so swiftly. She suggested I write explaining my motives in more detail and she would enclose a letter saying words to the effect that I was confused and upset and a few days’ unofficial holiday in Charlbury would be highly beneficial. The letters were written, sealed, stamped and taken down to the postbox. At the very least, Faye said, we had a week’s grace.

You can imagine what effect her complicity had on me. I felt she was behaving more like a game and spirited older sister rather than my aunt. I was sure it was significant. We were co-conspirators; it drew us closer.

That first evening, the two of us at dinner, adjacent, the corner of the table between us. The limping gardener doubling as a butler (the real one had been killed at Loos). Sherry, oxtail soup, whitebait in cream sauce, claret, lamb cutlets, Bercy potatoes, apple charlotte, Welsh rarebit, port. I in my new suit (I had shaved with Vincent’s blunt cutthroat), my back warm against the dining room fire, my face hot, two red highlights on my cheeks like coins. I seemed to be breathing deeper, as if my lung capacity had doubled and the circumference of my nostrils had mysteriously expanded. Faye, in three-quarter profile. Smudged eyes, winking cameo on a velvet choker, a dusting of powder on the downy hair in front of her ears, the finest lines on her face and top lip. A dress of aquamarine. Silk? It shone and shifted in the candle glow. I was bold with wine. I felt ten years older and talked to her as an equal, another adult. The game and spirited older sister had quietly stolen away. I put my fork down and smiled. This could be my house, my wife even. I felt brimful of a strange, cocksure composure.

“You know, you look so like Emmeline when you smile.”

Blood ties crept between us like chaperones. I felt both sad and irritated for a moment. But it was a useful prompt.

“I was going to ask you … that is, if you don’t mind. I was wondering—you said you had a lot of letters from her, from my mother. Could I—if it’s all right—see them?”

“Of course.” Touch on my arm. I thought the flannel would smolder. “I’ll look them out for you. Are you terribly hot, John?”

“Me? No, no. Fine, perfect.”

That night I left my own room and walked across the upstairs landing and along the corridor towards her bedroom. I stood outside the door, a
faint luminescence from a nearby window highlighting the graining of the oak door and the metalwork of the latch. I sent my restless presence into her room and waited for it to be noticed. Was she lying awake, stirring beneath the sheet and blankets, thinking about me, wishing I had the courage to creep quietly into her bed? I stared at the mute and neutral door as if expecting it to become miraculously transparent.… It is at instants like these that believers in the existence of telepathic communication either win or lose disciples. If it worked at all, then it would work tonight. I stood outside and concentrated. All she had to do was call my name. I felt a pounding in my frontal lobes. My brain power could have driven an electric motor. But I heard nothing, just the creaks and settlings of an old house.

That was my moment. I should have taken it. A year or two later, I believe, I would have gone in, perhaps with some useful fabrication to hand (a moment’s grief, a night terror) to allow a plausible embrace. I cannot blame myself; it asks a lot of a person to possess that conviction and worldliness at seventeen. And yet I had run away from school; my life was already set on that frenzied precipitous course from which it never subsequently deviated. But for some reason I was stalled by inertia. After God knows how many breathless minutes I realized I was shivering vigorously, and slunk back to my room and my cold solitary bed.

The atmosphere was different the next day. Not significantly so, but definitely altered. Faye, it seemed to me, had realized that the license of the previous night was too heady and distracting. The prosaic older sister returned. I came down to breakfast and found her on the point of leaving—“visiting.” On her way out she showed me two box files full of my mother’s letters.

I took them into the drawing room and began to read them through. I ate my lunch alone and read on into the afternoon. I felt exhausted, having run gauntlets of harrowing emotions.

It is bizarre, to say the least, to read about a familiar world as yet unaltered by, and indeed indifferent to, your presence. Here was our apartment, Kelpie’s Court, Edinburgh, the High Street, my father, Thompson, Oonagh … Thompson proved the biggest strain. Here was the little plump boy, doted on, drenched in his mother’s love. I have rarely envied Thompson. Sometimes I envied his money, but only fleetingly. But that day in Charlbury I felt the writhing vicious force of envy squirm into every corner of my body. I could have killed him,
then, it was so all-powerful. Killed him with glee, so consumed was I by acid resentment of his good fortune. He had known Emmeline Todd, and been loved by her.

Calmness returned gradually.

They were loving candid letters between sisters who were close friends. My mother—sweet, good-natured, generous—fully aware of all life’s pleasures … The letters were fascinating; I heard a voice, encountered a person of whom I was only dimly aware—and then only in some gaudy, sentimental idealization—but they provided me with no hard facts. They were chatty and inconsequential.

And then, quite unheralded, in September 1897:

The unremarked arrival suggested mutual knowledge. Both sisters knew him. From then on Donald’s name made regular appearances: what he was doing, where he was thinking of buying a house, his disdainful reflections on the academic caliber of his colleagues …

Then: March 14, 1898.