Two suits of full armour, which are obviously phonies but would look impressive on a fine staircase, go very well indeed. They seem to speak in steely voices of Romance – Abbotsford style. The atmosphere in the marquee is now at a heat very agreeable to Mr. Beddoe, and to Brochwel. The dismantling of Rhodri’s dream is going very well.
Brochwel does not stay for the luncheon which is offered at the back of the marquee by a firm of Shrewsbury caterers at a reasonable price. Some of the visitors have brought their own flasks of sherry and are greedy after the excitement of the morning. He does not want to mingle with them, or answer questions, and so he wanders through the gardens.
(11)
THE GARDENS had been old Rhodri’s special enthusiasm, for to him they spelled luxury and superiority of station even more than the Manor, with its mixture of Gothic Revival stuff and the very good antiques he had bought himself, helpfully guided by his old friend Fred ffrench. Rhodri’s pieces of old oak and good eighteenth-century chairs and tables were selling briskly under Mr. Beddoe’s guidance, and the Ring were picking them up at sums that had to be considered fair, even by London standards. In the gardens Belem Manor still survived as Rhodri had known it, and Brochwel thought he might still encounter a spirit which the confusion wrought by Torringtons’ men had banished from the house.
The gardens were extensive and, though the year was now well advanced, were still bright with autumn flowers and shrubs. The Coopers had fitted them out with garden figures of shepherds and shepherdesses carved in stone, not at all bad of their kind, and for their period.
The Coopers – who had they been? A wealthy Liverpool family of ship-owners whose desire it was to lift themselves in the world by the possession of a fine estate. Wales was near, and they lived before the time when all desirable estates had to be near to London, or in the Scottish Highlands. To judge from their taste in furnishing, they must have been devout, but not devout in the Methodist mode. Oh no; they were Church of England, but Low and Evangelical. The source of their money was a great merchant fleet, trading with the West Indies, and there were rumours that they had begun life – two or three generations before the family that destroyed the old, worm-eaten, dry-rotted Manor of an unguessable antiquity – as “blackbirders” who had transported slaves from Africa to the American Colonies, at a high profit, even when the spoilage of slaves who did not survive those terrible voyages was taken into account. There were jealous locals, inspired by the spite which lies at the heart of much Welsh wit, who had spoken of Belem Manor as Blackbird Hall. Probably the tale was untrue: people are apt to think that anyone with a lot of money must come by it in some discreditable way, but they are not always right. The Coopers had lived at Belem Manor in high style through most of the nineteenth century, until only one old Miss Cooper was left, writhen by arthritis in the Welsh damp and cold, and with just enough money to see her into her grave. She died at a great age, and Rhodri bought the Manor from a group of distant cousins, who had no hope of keeping it up.
Here was the bench on which Brochwel had sat five years ago, during his last visit to Belem in Rhodri’s lifetime, and it was here that Rhodri had told him the Great Secret. I see them sitting in the sunshine – for in Wales sunshine must be seized on the fly and must never be taken for granted – Rhodri so smartly dressed in white flannels and a blue blazer, my father somewhat rumpled and greyish, as a travelling professor usually is.
“I miss your mother, of course.”
“But she never came here.”
“No, no; she was here a number of times, when she felt up to the journey.”
“But you came, nevertheless, whether she came or not.”
“Yes. But you see, I had to look after the place. Couldn’t leave it unoccupied for a year at a time.”
“There are lots of servants to keep an eye on it. And Norman Lloyd is your agent, isn’t he? He wouldn’t let it come to harm.”
“Not the same thing. No manure like the foot of the master. A place loses heart if it’s not occupied.”
“Not loved, you mean.”
“Yes, that’s what I mean.”
“Mother never loved it.”
“No.”
“But she came here, all the same.”
“Yes. She wanted to see what I was doing with it. She loved all that sort of thing. Inherited from her father, I suppose. He knew what building was.”
“But he came to grief?”
“I’m not sure that I’d call it grief.”
“The Poor Farm? Wasn’t that disgrace?”
“For the old woman and the girls, it was. But I heard tales about William McOmish having a high old time out there. He was a man of some intelligence, you know. He kept the books for the Poor Farm better than anybody they could hire. And he used to give lectures – yes, lectures – to the paupers on stresses and strains, and geometry as applied to building, and the stupidity of the Russo-Japanese War, and all sorts of things. He was an old gasbag, but not a fool. Loved to talk. So he ended up as a kind of parody of what you are now – a professor, a knowledge-box, a professional Wise Man.”
“Thanks, Dad. You certainly give me a build-up.”
“Oh, go on with you! You know I’m really very proud of you.”
“Nice to hear that. I’ll make an exchange: I’m proud of you.”
“I’ve not done too badly, considering what a poor start I had.”
“Was it so poor? I’ve heard you quote Ossian. Not one of my colleagues has ever done that.”
“That was the Mater. A dear, good soul. We’d have sunk without her. The Pater lost all heart when we went to Canada.”
“It was very bitter for you, those first years?”
“Cruel. We were humble people at home, but I’d never been used to filth and wickedness. Those first months at The Courier – ! You spoke of Ossian; a line of his recurred to me every day at that time –
Blind, and tearful, and forlorn, I walk with little men.
Beak Browder and Charlie Delaney were little men, sure enough. Somehow I had to get out of that.”
“And you did. You fought the hero-fight.”
“Get away with you! There was nothing heroic about it. Just hard, hard work and a lot of personal sacrifice.”
“Every man’s fight is the hero-fight, wherever and however he meets it. If he has the courage to face the dragon, or destiny, or whatever it may be, and whether he wins or falls in the battle, it’s the hero-fight. Dad – tell me – I’ve always wanted to ask – what pushed you on to make a success of your life? The kind of success that sees you at last here at Belem Manor?”
“To be wholly frank, Brocky, I think it was laziness, of a kind. You see, there was one thing I always wanted, and held ahead of me as a great thing to be achieved. I always wanted to have a twenty-minute nap after lunch, every day of my life. Now, it was obvious that a journeyman printer, or a Monotype man, couldn’t do that. Even the Union hadn’t the nerve to ask for that, if they had the imagination to conceive of such a thing. It was obvious that I had to be self-employed or – no nap. Never. So, I saved, and scraped, and your mother went without things, and at last I was able to buy a half-interest in a little weekly paper for a few hundred dollars. The nap was mine at last. And after that it was simply a matter of hard work, as I said.”
“In certain ways that is a shamefully immoral story. Desire For Nap Leads to Success: how would that look as a headline?”
“Terrible. Misleading the young. But true, as so many terrible and misleading things are.”
“And Mother supported you and stood by you through all that?”
“Like a warrior. No man ever had a better wife.”
“Then what went wrong?”
“Wrong? I don’t understand you.”
“You do, you know. Ever since I can remember, you two were pulling different ways. When did you stop pulling together?”
“I don’t know that I can tell you.”
“You don’t know?”
; “Oh yes, I know. But I’ve never told anybody. And you are her son, after all.”
“Is it something very shameful? It wasn’t another woman, was it?”
“Brocky, what a common mind you have! If anything goes wrong between husband and wife, it has to be another woman. You, a professor of literature! Is that the only story you know?”
“Easy with the Welsh rhetoric, Dad, and tell me. Do you think I’m old enough to know?”
“We were very close. Not Hollywood close but really close. Before you there was another child. About fourteen months after we were married. We didn’t tell you. A girl. Stillborn. That was a blow, but we survived it. What happens to stillborns, I wonder? The doctor took it away. Probably put it under his roses. He murmured something about the danger of pregnancy after a certain age, but I didn’t pay proper attention. I had your mother to comfort. Then John Vermuelen wrote his family history.”
“I never knew about that.”
“I didn’t keep it around the house, and I don’t think your mother did either. But I had a little job-plant in the newspaper office I owned then, and John asked me to print the history for him. It wasn’t much bigger than a pamphlet. It included a family record up to the time of publication, and that was when I discovered about your mother.”
“What about her, for God’s sake?”
“When we married, she lied about her age. She was a full ten years older than she had admitted to. I was so furious I cried. Cried right there, standing beside the make-up stone. I remembered the Pater saying to me, ‘Rhodri, you must surely know that Malvina is a lot older than you are. People around town know it. Haven’t you heard?’ But I was headstrong and told him to mind his business and I’d mind mine. We had a terrible row when I confronted your mother with it. Went on for days. She didn’t defend herself. Just wept. She’d deceived me, and I thought I could never forgive her. But I did, and you’re the evidence of the forgiveness. When you were born your mother was nearly forty-five, and in those days – how old are you now? Forty-five yourself? – that was considered very risky. But you seem to be tidy enough. Long-headed, as the children of old parents are supposed to be.”
“But how can you have quarrelled so bitterly about such a trivial thing?”
“Trivial! You can’t mean that! Trivial! My God, Brocky, it was a failure in truth, and in loyalty. What do you suppose a marriage is, if it isn’t rooted in truth and loyalty?”
“People do speak of love, from time to time.”
“Is love anything but truth and loyalty?”
“Nowadays the stress seems to be on the physical thing.”
“Exactly! They mean sex. Sex is an instinct, and for some people it seems to be the supreme pleasure, but what can you build on it? Forty or fifty years of marriage? No, that means truth and loyalty, when sex has become an old song.”
“That’s very Confucian.”
“From what I hear, Confucius was no fool.”
“Women want love.”
“Is that what they want? I’ve always wondered.”
“You and Freud.”
“Surely he knew. I thought he knew everything.”
“He said he didn’t know that.”
“He was the great mental-health man, wasn’t he?”
“I suppose you could call it that.”
“He was rather after my time. Never read him. Read about him, now and then.”
“He said the measure of psychological health was the ability to love and the ability to work.”
“I certainly have had the ability to work. And I really loved your mother very much, in the beginning. Real love, not just pillow-love.”
“And did she love you?”
“As much, I suppose, as that terrible home and those awful parents made possible. I realize I was very green when I married. Things were very different then. We were both virgins. Do you know that in all that long marriage I never saw her naked? Never knew at the end how horribly her left breast had decayed? When the doctor told me, I was as much in the dark as any stranger. Of course that was the way her parents had lived. Her mother – an old tartar. Tongue like a two-edged sword. I hope you had a good look at Nuala’s parents before you married her.”
“Very nice, jolly people. Father a lawyer in Cork.”
“And Catholics?”
“Lapsed.”
“Well, there it is. Now you know.”
“Really, Dad – about her age – I don’t see that it was all that big a thing.”
“It was a failure of truth and loyalty.”
“Oh, come on!”
“Christ forgave the adulteress, but I don’t recall that he ever forgave a liar. And there was the other thing, of course.”
“What other thing?”
“This thing. Wales. When it became possible for me to come back here every summer she set her face against it. It was a land where she could not follow. She didn’t even try.”
“Her family were Loyalists. Canada was their country.”
“She wouldn’t understand that this is my country. That was a loyalty she wouldn’t permit, but she couldn’t stop it, so it was the irresistible force and the immovable object … Result, deadlock.”
“I didn’t see it that way. It seemed to me it was Pull-Devil-Pull-Baker, and you both were fighting for my adherence to your particular loyalty. Have you any idea how difficult that was for a child, and even more difficult when I was growing up?”
“For a while, we thought your only loyalty was to Julia.”
“Perhaps it was. But if so it was an escape from the tensions at home.”
“Tensions. What tensions?”
“That house was a warring camp. A psychological battlefield where not a shot was fired, but hostile feeling and determined opposition spread like poison gas.”
“You’re exaggerating! Who’s the rhetorician now?”
“I am. And for good reasons. Only exaggeration can give any idea of the day-to-day, year-in year-out quality of the feeling in that house. Mother was determined to win me for Canada. You were always dangling the romance and beauty of Wales before my eyes. When you offered to send me to Oxford, Mother knew exactly what you were at. And she played the invalid, and insisted that I go to Harvard, so that I could dash home if she thought she was dying. You know what I mean – she had more near-deaths and recoveries than Harry Lauder had farewell tours. Harvard wasn’t Canada, but at least it was New World, and she was New World to the soles of her feet.”
“All right. As we seem to be getting down to cases, tell me, and tell me true. Which side have you come down on? Are you New World or Old?”
“Sounds like a novel by Henry James.”
“Never read him.”
“Don’t. But that was his question and he plumped for the Old.”
“And you’ve plumped for – ?”
“Both. Or neither. I suppose my real world is the scholar’s world. What we used to call in my Waverley days Eng-Lang-and-Lit. Not a bad world. That’s my homeland.”
“A bit dry-as-dust, isn’t it? All in books, I mean.”
“A little dryness doesn’t hurt. Mother used to talk to me, when I was a child, on Dominion Day as a usual thing, about loving Canada. But I couldn’t love Canada, though I did my dutiful best until I was about fourteen. You don’t love Canada; you are part of Canada, and that’s that. Mother talked about loving Canada as if it were a woman. A mother, I suppose. She wasn’t strong for my loving a woman as a mate. Never. Other countries may be like women. France makes a great thing of Marianne, or whatever she’s called, and the English still sing sometimes about that big helmeted bruiser Britannia. But Canada isn’t like a woman; it’s like a family – various, often unsympathetic, sometimes detestable, frequently dumb as hell – but inescapable because you are part of it and can’t ever, really, get away. You know the saying: My country, right or wrong – my mother, drunk or sober.”
“I see. Well, you’ll never be able to live here, that’s one certain thing.?
??
“No.”
“When I’m gone, you’ll sell it up, I suppose. If your mother sees, down through the Gates of Pearl, she’ll dance a jig for the granny’s pig, as she used to say.”
“That was one of her Old Ontario expressions.”
“Well, to use another of hers, I’m hungry enough to eat a horse and chase the rider. What about getting in for lunch?”
“Yes, if we’re late the kitchen staff will be annoyed, and there’ll be wigs on the green. That’s another of mother’s.”
“Oh, not while Rose is there. She’d cut a dead dog in two for me.”
“With a dull knife, I have no doubt.”
“Extraordinary how your mother’s Old Loyalist turns of phrase keep cropping up, even here in the Old Country.”
“She was a very powerful character, whatever you may have against her.”
“Don’t say that! I have nothing against her. That’s all done with. Never harbour grudges; they sour your stomach and do no harm to anyone else.”
“Lunch?”
“Lunch.”
(12)
THERE HAD BEEN many conversations during the last visit, for Rhodri seemed to be in the confessional mood that comes with age, when a life’s accounts are being made up. Recollections and scraps of family lore kept asserting themselves in Brochwel’s mind as he followed the fortunes of the sale.
Rhodri’s old Welsh chests, of sturdiest oak and carved with symbols recording their first owners’ loyalty to the Stuarts, fetched very good prices, though it was a period when oak was not “in” and the big money was in mahogany and walnut pieces. And how they gleamed, not as shiny objects, but as rich things that spoke from the heart of the wood and the craftsmanship that had determined its present shape. Old Rose, the housekeeper, and the last of the servants to be “kept on” as a caretaker, was in ecstasy as each treasured piece went, usually to a member of the Ring, under Mr. Beddoe’s skilled direction.