Lathom, of course – Burrage’s celebrated fag, who scrounged toasting-forks. He was always in trouble with the other prefects for his apparent inability to distinguish other people’s property from Burrage’s. If anything was wanted, he took it; if anything had to be done, he did it, regardless of other people’s convenience, or, indeed, of his own. He was attached to Burrage, who naturally stood up for him. In fact, I think we were all jealous of Burrage for having a fag so ruthlessly competent. Burrage patronised the kid in his large, appreciative way, and Lathom basked in the rays of Burrage’s approval. I don’t blame Burrage altogether, but he certainly spoilt Lathom. He protected him from the consequences of his actions. Perhaps Burrage had advanced ideas about the non-existence of causation and imparted them to Lathom. But Burrage was rather an ass, and his reactions were probably more human and immediate.
Lathom was saved from disaster, partly by Burrage and partly by Halliday. Halliday was a great man and captain of the First Eleven. He took things easily and when he said that the kid was just potty we all accepted the explanation. That was on the day of the picnic, when Lathom turned up at feeding-time without his overcoat, and said he had thrown it away because it got in his way. The weather turned to soaking rain and Lathom got pneumonia and nearly died. We were all rather frightened and distressed, and when Lathom turned up next term we made allowances for him. I reminded Lathom that we had called him ‘Potty’, and he laughed and said we were perfectly right.
I remembered, too, that in those days Lathom had earned a reputation for himself by making caricatures of the masters. This fascinating gift had earned him still more toleration. I was not surprised to hear that he had become an artist. He said he was looking for a studio, and had seen just the thing in Bayswater, only he couldn’t afford to take it.
I asked, why Bayswater, of all places? Why not Chelsea or Bloomsbury? But Lathom said no, the rents were too high, and besides, Chelsea and Bloomsbury were hopelessly arty and insincere. They lived at second-hand and had no beliefs. To see life lived in the raw, one ought really to go to Harringay or Tooting, but they were really not central enough. Bayswater was near enough to be convenient and far enough out to be a healthy suburb.
‘The suburbs are the only places left,’ said Lathom, ‘where men and women will die and persecute for their beliefs. Artists believe in nothing – not even in art. They live in little cliques and draw the fashionable outlines in the fashionable colours. They can’t love – they can only fornicate and talk. I’ve had some. And the aristocracy has lost the one belief that made it tolerable – its belief in itself. It’s fool enough to pretend to believe in the people, and what is the good of an aristocracy playing at being democratic? And the people . . .’ He made a violent gesture. ‘Cheap scientific textbooks – cheap atheism – cheap sociology – cheap clothes – your blasted educationists have left them no beliefs at all. They marry, and then the woman comes howling to the magistrate for a separation order on any pretext, so as to get money for nothing and go to cheap dance-halls. And the man goes yelping away for a dole to shuffle all his responsibilities on to the State. But the blessed people of the suburbs – they do believe in something. They believe in Respectability. They’ll lie, die, commit murder to keep up appearances. Look at Crippen. Look at Bywaters. Look at the man who hid his dead wife in a bath and ate his meals on the lid for fear somebody should suspect a scandal. My God! Those people are living, living with all their blood and their bones. That’s reality – in the suburbs – life, guts – something to chew at, there!’
At the time I was rather struck by this.
It ended, of course, in my consenting to share the maisonette with Lathom. An hour earlier, the very word would have put me off, but under the spell of Lathom’s enthusiasm, and stupefied with food and public-school spirit, I began to think there was really something raw, red and life-like about living in a maisonette with an Old Wincastrian. And perhaps Lathom was right after all. The trouble is that raw, red life is possibly better seen at second-hand. A good still-life of a piece of rump-steak has none of the oozing clamminess of the real thing.
I wish, all the same, that I had tried to play up to Lathom better. It was irritating, of course, to find that he was still regardless of other people’s convenience. I did not object to his bagging the best room for his studio – that was in the bond – but it was tiresome to have him overflowing into my room all day when I was at work. Lathom is one of those spasmodic workers who need constant applause and excitement. He would work like fury for several hours, snarling at me if I came in to retrieve a garment or lighter that he had borrowed; but, the fit over, he would wander in to where I was grimly struggling with a knotty piece of biography and talk. He talks well, but his interests are lopsided. He is a real creator – narrow, eager, headlong, and loathing introspection and compromise. He questions nothing; I question everything. I am only semi-creative, and that is why I cannot settle and dismiss questions, as he does, in one burst of inspired insight or equally inspired contempt. Lathom is all light and dark – a Rembrandt. I am flat, cold, tentative, uneasily questioning, a labourer in detail. I caught no fire from Lathom, and I quenched his. It is my disease to doubt and to modify – to be unable to cry at a tragedy or shout in a chorus. It was my fault that I did not help Lathom more, for, just because of my uneasy sensitiveness, I understood him far better than he ever understood me. It would have suited him better if I had violently disagreed with him. But I had the fatal knack of seeing his point and cautiously advancing counter-arguments, and that satisfied neither of us. I see this now, and, indeed, I saw it then; it is characteristic of people like me to see a thing and do nothing about it.
This, of course, was where the Harrisons came in. I liked Harrison. If I had not liked him, I should not be making this statement, which is, I am afraid, entirely contrary to the public-school tradition. Harrison was a man of very great sincerity, no imagination and curiously cursed with nerves. It is all wrong for a man of his type to have nerves – nobody believes or understands it. In theory, he was extremely broad-minded, generous and admiringly devoted to his wife; in practice, he was narrow, jealous and nagging. To hear him speak of her, one would have thought him the ideal of chivalrous consideration; to hear him speak to her, one would have thought him a suspicious brute. Her enormous vitality, her inconsequence, her melodrama (that is the real point, I think), got on his nerves, and produced an uncontrollable reaction of irritability. He would have liked her to shine for him and for him only; yet a kind of interior shyness prompted him to repress her demonstrations and choke off her confidences. ‘That will do, my dear’; ‘Pull yourself together, my girl,’ checked a caress or an enthusiasm; a grunt, a ‘Can’t you see I’m busy,’ a ‘Why have you suddenly got these ideas about’ music or astronomy or whatever the latest interest might be. Into the muffling of his outer manner, her radiance sank and was quenched. Yet to others he spoke with earnest pride of his wife’s brilliance and many-sided intelligence.
Harrison’s instinct was to dominate, but by nature and training he was unfitted to dominate that particular woman. It could have been done in two ways – by capturing the limelight, or by sheer physical exuberance. But neither of these things was in his power; he was inexpressive and sexually unimaginative, as so many decent men are.
He had his means of self-expression: his water-colours and his cookery. It was his misfortune that in the former he should have been weak, conventional and sentimental, and bold and free only in the latter. I believe, indeed, that all the imagination he possessed ran to the composition of sauces and flavourings. It is surely a matter for investigation whether cookery is not one of the subtlest and most severely intellectual of the arts; else, why do its more refined manifestations appeal to women hardly at all and to men only in their later and more balanced age? Unlike music or poetry or painting, food rouses no response in passionate and emotional youth. Only when the surge of the blood is quieted does gastronomy come into its own with philosophy and
theology and the sterner delights of the mind. If Harrison could have made a big public splash with anything, she could have understood that and preened herself happily as the wife of a notoriety. But she had no eyes for the half-lights.
At first it was amazing to me that Lathom showed so much patience with Harrison. Lathom is a barbarian about food and magnificently intolerant of bad painting. Twaddle about Art and Atmosphere got short shrift with him. Yet he let Harrison bore him to any extent with his prattle and his picturesque bits. Harrison did, indeed, treat him with a deference flattering in a man of his age, but under ordinary circumstances that would merely have infuriated Lathom, who, to do him justice, is no drawing-room lion. It was not that Harrison provided the response which I gave so awkwardly. In time I realised that, though I had my selfish reasons for refusing to see it. Mrs Harrison was the radiant prism for Lathom’s brilliance, and Lathom used Harrison in that service as carelessly as in the old days he had used the prefects’ toasting-forks. He saw the tool ready to his hand and took it, without shame and without remorse.
I have put all this down, as I saw it, without consideration for the feelings of anybody. It is useless to blame people for their peculiarities of temperament. At the time I did not interfere, because, to tell the truth, I was working hard and involved in my own concerns, and did not want to be bothered with Lathom’s affairs. Besides, I rather prided myself on a cynical detachment in such matters. As it turns out, I should have done far better to preserve this cheerful selfishness throughout. That I did not was again due to sentimentality and public-school spirit, and I am heartily ashamed of it.
I suppose I must say something about Mrs Harrison. It is difficult, because I both understood and disliked her. Just because she had no use for me, I was detached enough to see through her. I have not the superb and centralised self-confidence that could strike the colours from her prism. I come back to that image, because it expresses her with more accuracy than any description. My diffusion left her dead glass. But in Lathom’s concentration she shone. He gave her the colour and splendour her dramatic soul craved for. She saw herself robed with all the glowing radiance that dazzled her half-educated eyes in the passionate pages of Hichens and de Vere Stacpoole. I hardly think she was wicked – I do not think she had any moral standards of her own. She would adopt any attitude that was offered to her, provided it was exciting and colourful enough. I think she had enjoyed herself at her office; she had radiated there in the little warmth of popularity which always surrounds people of abundant physical and emotional vigour, but at home she had only the devotion of Miss Milsom, with her warped mind and perilous preoccupations. She visualised herself into the character of a wronged and slighted woman, because that was the easiest way to evoke clamorous response from Miss Milsom – and, of course, from Lathom when he came along.
It is rather surprising, I feel, that Harrison was never jealous of Lathom, as he was of every other man, including myself. I fancy it was because he looked on Lathom as his own friend, primarily. Now I come to think of it, it was of his wife’s personal life that he was jealous – her office, her interests, the friends she had made for herself – everything that had not come to her through him. My position was different. He distrusted me because of my work and opinions. I had written an unpleasant book and I had no definite moral judgements. From such a man, nothing but impropriety could be expected. He was wary and uneasy in my presence. He could talk food with me, and did, but only, I think, in despair for want of other appreciation. He was fearfully lonely, poor soul, and I failed him miserably. And he was jockeyed by me into letting his wife’s picture be shown at the Academy – but only because he thought I was belittling his wife’s character. His change of mind was a chivalrous rush to her defence. I was pleased with myself at the time, I remember; I suppose my light-hearted diplomacy was about as disastrous as diplomacy usually is. What devilish things we do when we try to be clever. After all, Harrison probably understood his wife only too well, but he could not bear that anyone should suspect the clay of his idol. He destroyed himself rather than let her down. I rather think that Harrison had something heroic behind his primness and his gold spectacles.
There was one thing which I ought most certainly to have left severely alone, and that was the final disaster, in which Miss Milsom was concerned. For once I was seized with the idiotic whim to play the martyr and the noble-spirited friend. At the very moment when my reasonable and deliberate policy of detachment should have come to my aid, I must choose to take the centre of the stage and indulge in high-mindedness.
Lathom woke me up. He came and sat on my bed, and I noticed with irritation that he had been borrowing my dressing-gown again. He always took things.
‘I’m in a mess,’ he said.
‘Oh?’ said I.
He told me what had happened. I have seen Miss Milsom’s account. It is accurate in all points but one. Far from repulsing Lathom, she had encouraged him. He had broken from her at the foot of the staircase with considerable difficulty. He was filled with a righteous disgust, which struck me as funny under the circumstances.
‘Disgusting old woman,’ said he.
‘True,’ said I. ‘None should have passions but the young and the beautiful. What are you going to do? Serve with Leah seven years in the hope of getting Rachael in the end?’
‘Don’t be filthy,’ said he. ‘There will be a row about this, I’m afraid.’
‘Very likely,’ said I. ‘But that is your affair.’
‘Not altogether,’ said Lathom. ‘You see, she thinks it was you.’
‘Me?’ I was considerably taken aback.
‘Yes. You see, I had your dressing-gown—’
‘So I observe.’
‘She recognised the feel – the quilting, you know – damn it all, she rubbed her ugly face in it—’
‘Really,’ I said. ‘The kittenish old creature.’
All the same, I was not pleased. Gestures which delight in the right person are so indecent when performed by the wrong. In fact, it is only when we contemplate the loves of unpleasant people that we see the indecency of passion. It is disgusting to think of the amorous transports of, let us say, Mr Pecksniff. Grotesque characters only exist for us from the waist upwards.
‘I suppose,’ I went on, ‘it didn’t occur to you to mention that you were not me?’
‘I didn’t say anything. I got away. I didn’t want to make a noise. In fact . . .’
In fact, he had made use of me cheerfully enough, and was now wondering whether I should put up with it.
‘Look here,’ I said, ‘what do you intend to do? If you want to carry on an intrigue with Mrs Harrison, I tell you, frankly, I’m going to get out and leave you to it. It bores me and I don’t care about these alarms and excursions. Anyhow, why didn’t you leave the woman alone? You’re doing her no good.’
Then he exploded and started to tramp about. She was the greatest miracle God had ever made. They were meant for one another. They had got into each other’s blood and all the rest of it. That, of course. Equally, of course, if Harrison had been a decent sort of man he would have sacrificed his own feelings. (As if Lathom had ever thought of sacrificing anything.) But Harrison was a brute, who did not appreciate the wonderful woman who had been entrusted to him. Lathom could suffer himself, but he could not bear to see her suffer. It was all so damned unjust. The man was not fit to live. He deserved to be murdered for his rotten paintings, let alone for his cruelty to his wife. And to think that his revolting hands should have the right . . .
And so on.
It is so very odd that in moments of excitement we should all talk like characters in a penny novelette. However long one lives, I suppose it always strikes one with the same shock of surprise.
‘That’ll do,’ I said at last. ‘We can take that as read. If Mrs Harrison feels as you do about it—’
He interrupted me to assure me at unnecessary length that she did.
‘Very well,’ I said, ‘why not
do the decent and sensible thing and take her away? You won’t find this kind of back-stairs intrigue permanently inspiring, you know. Besides, it seems to be the kind of thing you do very badly.’
‘I wish to God,’ replied Lathom, ‘that I could take her away. Heaven and earth, man, do you think I wouldn’t do it like a shot if I had half a chance? But she won’t hear of it. She’s got some poisonous idea about not making a scandal. It’s this damned awful suburban respectability that’s crushing the beautiful life out of her. When you see what she was meant to be – free and splendid and ready to proclaim her splendid passion to the world – and then see what this foul blighter has made of her—’
‘Well, there you are,’ said I. ‘That’s the raw, red life of the suburbs, as per specification. That’s what you came here for, isn’t it? Look here, Lathom, buzz off and let me get to sleep, there’s a good chap. You can blow your feelings off in the morning.’
‘Oh, all right.’ He got up from the bed and hesitated at the door. ‘I only thought I’d warn you,’ he added, a little awkwardly, ‘in case the old woman says anything to you.’
‘Dashed good of you,’ I said dryly. ‘What am I to do? Make love to the confidante while you make love to the mistress, and go stark mad in white linen?’
‘Oh, you needn’t bother to do that,’ said he. ‘I should just treat the whole thing as a joke. Or, if she makes a fuss, apologise and say you were a bit screwed. I’ll back you up.’
I was so infuriated with him for shoving the responsibility on to me in this light-hearted way that I told him to clear out, which he did.
As a matter of fact, I rather under-estimated the seriousness of the thing. I mean, I did not realise the lengths to which Miss Milsom’s resentment might go. I determined merely to avoid the woman in future, and, in fact, treat the whole episode as if it hadn’t occurred. I thought Lathom had received a salutary shock and useful lesson on the difficulties attending suburban love affairs, and that he might bethink himself and stop the whole thing before it had gone too far. A good thing, too. I was clearing out and getting married at Easter, and there, so far as I was concerned, was an end of it. Lathom could fish it out for himself after that. My book had made a sudden success, and I was feeling rather cock-a-hoop with myself.