Chapter 16

It seemed at first another and a happier world which I had re-entered: I was back home, in the late afternoon, as the long shadows were falling; a boy whistled a Beatle tune and a motor-bicycle revved far away up Norman Lane. With what relief I dialled Chicken and ordered myself cream of spinach soup, lamb cutlets and Cheddar cheese: a better meal than I had eaten in Istanbul. Then I went into the garden. Major Charge had neglected the dahlias; it was a pleasure to give them water, which the dry soil drank like a thirsty man, and I could almost imagine that the flowers were responding with a lift of the petals. The Deuil du Roy Albert was too far gone to benefit, but the colour of the Ben Hurs took on a new sheen, as though the long dry chariot race were now a memory only. Major Charge looked over the fence and asked, “Good journey?”

“Interesting, thank you,” I said dryly, pouring the water in a thick stream on to the roots. I had removed the absurd nozzle which serves no useful purpose.

“I was very careful,” Major Charge said, “not to give them too much water.”

“The ground certainly seems very dry.”

“I keep goldfish,” Major Charge said. “If I go away, my damned daily always gives them too much food. When I return I find half the little buggers dead.”

“Flowers are not the same as goldfish, Major. In a dry autumn like this they can do with a great deal of water.”

“I hate excess,” Major Charge said. “It’s the same in politics. I’ve no use for Communist or Fascist.”

“You are a Liberal?”

“Good God, man,” he said, “what makes you think that?” and disappeared from sight.

The afternoon post arrived punctually at five: a circular from Littlewood’s, although I never gamble, a bill from the garage, a pamphlet from the British Empire Loyalists which I threw at once into the waste-paper basket, and a letter with a South African stamp. The envelope was typewritten, so that I did not at once conclude that it had been sent by Miss Keene. I was distracted too by a package of Omo propped against the scraper. I had certainly not ordered any detergent. I looked closer and saw that it was a gift package. What a lot of money manufacturers waste by not employing the local stores to do their distribution. There they would have known that I am already a regular purchaser of Omo. I took the packet into the kitchen and noticed with pleasure that mine was almost exhausted, so I had been saved from buying another.

It was getting chilly by this time, and I turned on the electric fire before opening the letter. I saw at once that it came from Miss Keene. She had bought herself a typewriter, but it was obvious that as yet she had not had much practice. Lines were unevenly placed, and her fingers had often gone astray to the wrong keys or missed a letter altogether. She had driven in, she wrote, to Koffiefontein – three hours by road – to a matinée of Gone with the Qind which had been revived at a cinema there. She wrote that Clark Fable was not as good as she remembered him. How typical it was of her gentleness, and perhaps even of her sense of defeat, that she had not troubled to correct her errors. Perhaps it would have seemed to her like disguising a fault. “Once a week,” she wrote, “my cousin drives into the bak. She’s on very good terms with the manger, but he is not a real friend as you always were to my father and me. I miss very much St. John’s Church and the vicar’s sermons. The only church near here is Dutch Deformed, and I don’t like it at all.” She had corrected Deformed. She may have thought that otherwise I might take it for an unkindness.

I wondered how I was to reply. I knew that the letter she would like best would contain news of Southwood: the small details of every day, even to the condition of my dahlias. How was I to deal with my bizarre journey to Istanbul? To mention it only in passing would seem both unnatural and pretentious, but to describe the affair of Colonel Hakim and the gold brick and General Abdul would cause her to feel that my mode of life had entirely changed, and this might increase her sense of separation and of loneliness near Koffiefontein. I asked myself whether it would not be better to refrain from writing at all, but then on the last page – her paper had slipped in the machine and the print ran diagonally up into the previous line – she had typed, “I look forward so to your letters because they bring Southwood close to me.” I put her letter away with others of hers that I kept in a drawer of my desk.

It was quite dark now, and yet more than an hour would have to pass before Chicken arrived, so I went to choose a book from my shelves. Like my father, I rarely buy new books, though I don’t confine my reading, as he did, to almost a single author. Modern literature has never appealed to me; to my mind it was in the Victorian age that English poetry and fiction reached the highest level. If I had been able to write myself – and in my boyhood before my mother found me the position at the bank I sometimes had that dream – I would have modelled myself on one of the minor Victorians (for the giants are inimitable): perhaps R.L. Stevenson or even Charles Reade. I have quite a collection too of Wilkie Collins, though I prefer him when he is not writing a detective story, for I don’t share my aunt’s taste in that direction. If I could have been a poet I would have been happy in a quite humble station, to be recognized, if at all, as an English Mahony and to have celebrated Southwood as he celebrated Shandon (it is one of my favourite poems in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury). Perhaps it was Miss Keene’s mention of St. John’s Church, the bells of which I can hear on a Sunday morning while I am working in the garden, that made me think of him and take down the volume.

 

There’s a bell in Moscow,

While on tower and kiosk O

In Santa Sophia

The Turkman gets;

And loud in air

Calls men to prayer

From the tapering summit

Of tall minarets.

 

 

Such empty phantom

I freely grant them;

But there is an anthem

More dear to me —

’Tis the bells of Shandon,

That sound so grand on

The pleasant waters

Of the River Lee.

 

The lines on Santa Sophia had never before rung so true: that dingy mausoleum could not compare with our St. John’s and the mention of it would remind me always of Colonel Hakim.

One book leads to another, and I found myself, for the first time in many years, taking down a volume of Walter Scott. I remembered how my father had used the volumes for playing the Sortes Virgilianae – a game my mother considered a little blasphemous unless it was played with the Bible, in all seriousness. I sometimes suspected my father had dog-eared various pages so that he could hit on a suitable quotation to tease and astound my mother. Once, when he was suffering severely from constipation, he opened Rob Roy apparently at random and read out, “Mr. Owen entered. So regular were the motions and habits of this worthy man…” I tried the Sortes myself now and was astonished at the apposite nature of the quotation which I picked: “I had need of all the spirits a good dinner could give, to resist the dejection which crept insensibly on my mind.”

It was only too true that I was depressed: whether it was due to Miss Keene’s letter or to the fact that I missed my aunt’s company more than I had anticipated, or even that Tooley had left a blank behind her, I could not tell. Now that I had no responsibility to anyone but myself, the pleasure of finding again my house and garden had begun to fade. Hoping to discover a more encouraging quotation, I opened Rob Roy again and found a snapshot lying between the leaves: the square yellowing snapshot of a pretty girl in an old-fashioned bathing-dress taken with an old-fashioned Brownie. The girl was bending a little towards the camera; she had just slipped one shoulder out of its strap, and she was laughing, as though she had been surprised at the moment of changing. It was some moments before I recognized Aunt Augusta and my first thought was how attractive she had been in those days. Was it a photograph taken by her sister, I wondered? But it was hardly the kind of photograph my mother would have given my father. I had to admit that it was more likely he had taken it himself and hidden it there in a volume of Scott which my mother would never read. This then was how she had looked – she could have hardly been more than eighteen – in the long ago days before she knew Curran or Monsieur Dambreuse or Mr. Visconti. She had an air of being ready for anything. A phrase about Die Vernon printed on one of the two pages between which the photograph lay caught my eye: “Be patient and quiet, and let me take my own way; for when I take the bit between my teeth, there is no bridle will stop me.” Had my father deliberately chosen that page with that particular passage for concealing the picture? I felt the melancholy I sometimes used to experience at the bank when it was my duty to turn over old documents deposited there, the title-deeds of a passion long spent. I thought of my father with an added tenderness – of that lazy man lying in his overcoat in the empty bath. I had never seen his grave, for he had died on the only trip which he had ever taken out of England, and I was not even sure of where it lay.

I rang up my aunt, “Just to say good night and make sure that all is well.”

“The apartment,” she told me, “seems a little solitary without Wordsworth.”

“I am feeling lonely too – without you and Tooley.”

“No news when you came home?”

“Only a letter from a friend. She seems lonely too.”

I hesitated before I spoke again. “Aunt Augusta, I have been thinking, I don’t know why, of my father. It’s strange how little one knows of one’s own family. Do you realize I don’t even know where he is buried?”

“No?”

“Do you?”

“Of course.”

“I would have liked, if only once, to visit his grave.”

“Cemeteries to me are rather a morbid taste. They have a sour smell like jungles. I suppose it comes from all that wet greenery.”

“As one grows old, I think, one becomes more attached to family things – to houses and graves. I feel very badly that my mother had to finish like that in a police laboratory.”

“Your stepmother,” my aunt corrected me.

“Where is my father?”

“As a half-believing Catholic,” Aunt Augusta said, “I cannot answer that question with any certainty, but his body, what is left of it, lies in Boulogne.”

“So near? Why wasn’t it brought back?”

“My sister had a very practical and unsentimental side. Your father had gone to Boulogne without her knowledge on a day excursion. He was taken ill after dinner and died almost immediately. Food poisoning. It was before the days of antibiotics. There had to be an autopsy and my sister didn’t like the idea of transporting home a mutilated corpse. So she had him buried in the cemetery there.”

“Were you present?”

“I was on tour in Italy. I only heard about it much later. My sister and I didn’t correspond.”

“So you’ve never seen the grave either?”

“I once suggested to Mr. Visconti that we make a trip, but his favourite Biblical quotation was, ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’”

“Perhaps one day we might go together.”

“I am strongly of Mr. Visconti’s opinion, but I am always ready for a little travel,” my aunt added with unsentimental glee.

“This time you must be my guest.”

“The anniversary of his death,” my aunt said, “falls on October second. I remember the date because it is the feast day of the Guardian Angel. The Angel seems to have slipped up badly on that occasion, unless of course he was saving your father from a worse fate. That is quite a possibility, for what on earth was your father doing in Boulogne out of season?”