I decided it would be impossible to like him, and immediately liked him better. He was nothing to be afraid of, even without the handicap of his ambiguous social position, which I judged to be below that of a gentleman but above that of, well, such a person as Ted Burgess. But why make all this fuss of him? It must be because of his disfigurement. The Maudsleys were, I thought, a religious family: perhaps he was some sort of dependant whom they didn’t want to lose sight of, and they were being kind to him on Christian principles. So would I be, too, I thought, as I listened with more attention than usual to the Collect.
I didn’t get the opportunity to give him Marcus’s message; he sat on the other side of the breakfast table, which was full to capacity; several guests had arrived on Saturday while we were bathing. Marian sat on one side of him, his good side; I soon came to think of him as two-sided, like Janus. Together, they looked like Beauty and the Beast. How nice of her, I thought, to take such trouble with him! She opened her blue eyes for him as she rarely did for anyone except, at times, for me.
The men walked about to eat their porridge. This, Marcus told me, was de rigueur; only cads ate their porridge sitting down. I roamed about with mine, fearful of spilling it. The ladies, however, remained seated. Mrs. Maudsley seemed preoccupied. Her inscrutable, beeline glance rested several times on Trimingham—it didn’t have to travel, it was there. But it never turned my way, and when at last I did get her attention, the meal was over, we were leaving the table, and she said: “Oh, isn’t Marcus here?” She hadn’t even noticed that he wasn’t, though he was such a favourite with her. But she went straight up to his room, where, after making sure the coast was clear, I followed her. To my astonishment, I found an envelope with “No Admittance” on it fixed with two drawing-pins to our door. This was a challenge I at once took up; besides, it was my room as well as Marcus’s, and no one had the right to keep me out. I opened the door and put my head in.
“What’s up?” I said.
“It was decent of you to trickle along,” said Marcus languidly from the bed, “but don’t come in. I have a headache and some spots and Mama thinks it may be measles. She didn’t say so, but I know.”
“Hard cheese, old man,” I said. “But what about the jolly old quarantine?”
“Well, cases do develop when it’s over. But the doctor’s coming, and he’ll know. What fun for you if you get it! Perhaps we shall all get it, like at school. Then we shan’t be able to have the cricket match or the ball or anything. Lord, I shall laugh!”
“Is there to be a cricket match?”
“Yes, we have it every year. It helps to keep them quiet.”
“And a ball?” I asked, apprehensively. I didn’t feel equal to a ball.
“Yes, that’s for Marian, and Trimingham, and all the neighbours. It’s to be on Saturday the 28th. Mama’s sent out the invitations. Cripes! The place will be a hospital by then!”
We both laughed like hyenas at the prospect, and Marcus said: “You’d better not stay here breathing in my ruddy germs.”
“Oh God, perhaps you’re right. That reminds me, I want my prayer-book.”
“What, are you going to the jolly old kirk?”
“Well, I thought I might.”
“Pretty decent of you, but you needn’t, you know.”
“No, but I don’t want to let the side down. We do it at home sometimes,” I told him, tolerantly. “Shall I slink across the room and get my prayer-buggins?”
Last term it had been the fashion to call a book a “buggins.”
“Yes, but hold your breath.”
I filled my lungs, dashed to the chest of drawers, snatched the prayer-book, and, scarlet in the face, regained the door.
“Good egg, I didn’t think you could,” said Marcus, while I gasped. “And have you got any old button or such-like for the collection?”
Again the under-water dash to the chest of drawers, but this time I had to come up for air. As I gulped it down I had a distinct feeling of several germs, the size of gnats, going down my windpipe. To distract myself I opened my purse and sniffed it. The new leather had a pungent, aromatic smell almost as reviving as a smelling-bottle; and the central partition, which opened with a thief-proof catch, sheltered a half-sovereign. Other partitions had other coins, arranged in order of value; the outermost held pennies.
“Mama would give you something if you asked her,” Marcus said. “She probably will anyhow. She’s decent about that.”
An access of masculine secrecy about money suddenly stopped my tongue. “I’ll think it over,” I said, pinching the purse, which crackled deliciously.
“Well, don’t break the bank. So long, old chap. Don’t pray too hard.”
“Ta-ta, you old shammer,” I replied.
At home we had one way of talking and at school another; they were as distinct as two different languages. But when we were alone together, and especially when any excitement—like Marcus’s suspected measles—was afoot, we often lapsed into schoolboy talk even away from school. Only when Marcus was instructing me in les convenances, as he called them, for he liked to air his French, did he stick closely to an unadorned vocabulary. They were a serious matter.
Somewhere on the sunny side of the house, the private side, at the foot of the staircase, I expect, the party for church was assembling. A new atmosphere prevailed: voices and movements were restrained, everyone was wearing a decorous air. I admired the richness of the women’s prayer-books; the men seemed to have concealed theirs, if they had them. I was wearing my Eton suit, Marcus said that would be right; and I could change into my green suit after luncheon. Composing my features into pious lines I strayed about among the gathering guests, but no one paid me much attention until Mrs. Maudsley drew me aside and said: “Would you like to give that to the collection?” and she slipped a shilling into my hand. I suddenly felt enormously enriched and the thought flashed through me: “Should I substitute a smaller coin? That would be something to tell Marcus; but no,” I thought, “I won’t.” We were still hanging about; a feeling of tension communicated itself to me: churches don’t wait. Mr. Maudsley took out his watch. “Do we wait for Trimingham?” he said.
“Well, perhaps another minute or two,” his wife replied.
My mother was wrong: we didn’t drive; the church was only half a mile away. You could see it most of the time, you couldn’t miss it; besides, it overlooked the cricket field. We straggled along, in twos and threes, not in a crocodile, as we did at school. At school we arranged beforehand whom we should walk with. Feeling strange without Marcus, I attached myself experimentally to one or two couples, and when they seemed to be occupied with each other I walked alone. Presently Marian, who was also alone, came up to me and I told her about Marcus. “I expect he’ll be all right,” she said. “It’s probably just a touch of the sun.” The sun was blazing down, and the dust blowing up at us.
“Is your hair dry now?” I asked solicitously.
She laughed and said: “Thanks to your bathing-suit!”
I felt proud of having been of use to her, but I couldn’t think of anything to say to her except “Does it only come down by accident?”
She laughed again and said: “Haven’t you any sisters?” which surprised and even wounded me; I had told her all about my family circumstances, for me an oyster-like disclosure, the day we went to Norwich. I reminded her of this.
“Of course you did,” she said. “And I remember it all perfectly. But I have so many things to think about, it slipped out of my mind. I am so sorry.”
I had never heard her apologize to anyone before, and it gave me a strange feeling of sweetness and power; but I didn’t know what to say next and fell to looking at her, at her straw hat with a bow on it like the sails of a windmill, at the patterns her flowery light-blue skirt made as it trailed the dust. Suddenly out of the corner of my eye I saw that Trimingham was following us; he wasn’t dawdling as we were and would soon catch up with us. I didn’t want this to happen and calculated
how long it would take him to overtake us, but in the end I felt compelled to say: “Trimingham’s coming after us,” as if he were a disease, or a misfortune, or the police.
“Oh, is he?” she said, and turned her head, but she didn’t call to him or make a sign, and his pace slackened off, and when he did come abreast of us, he passed us, to my great relief, with a smile, and joined the people who were walking in front.
6
I FORGET how we got into the church or who told me where to sit. That was a thing that had been bothering me, for I knew it was important to sit in the right place. But I remember we sat in a transept, at right angles to the rest of the congregation, and raised a step or two above them. A verger offered me a prayer-book and a hymn-book, and I was pleased to be able to show him that I was already provided.
I was relieved at being in church at last; it was like having caught a train. The first thing I did was to examine the Psalms for the Day and add up the number of verses, for I knew that if there were over fifty I might feel faint and have to sit down, a thing I dreaded, for it made people turn and look at me; and once or twice I had been taken out and made to rest in the church porch till I felt better. I enjoyed the importance that this gave me, but I dreaded the preliminaries—the cold sweat, the wobbling knees, and the wondering how long I could hold out. Perhaps they were a sign that religion didn’t agree with me. In those days congregations were hardier than they are now, and the Psalms went their appointed length.
But there were only forty-four verses all told, so my mind was set at rest, and I looked about for something to occupy it with. The transept wall was covered with mural tablets, and on every one the same name occurred. “To the memory of Hugh Winlove, Sixth Viscount Trimingham,” I read. “Born 1783, Died 1856.” I studied them carefully. All the viscounts seemed to be called Hugh. Seven viscounts were accounted for, but there should have been eight—no, nine. The fifth was missing; there was no record of him. And the ninth was missing, too. “To the memory of Hugh, Eighth Viscount Trimingham, born 1843, died 1894.” It offended my sense of completeness. What was still more annoying, two of the viscounts had perversely been called Edward. What had happened to the fifth Viscount, that there was no memorial to him? He lived so long ago that he might have got into one of those fortunate periods when history seemed to get along without dates. But the eighth Viscount had died in 1894, so there must be a ninth. Why was he not there?
Suddenly it dawned on me that he might be still alive.
This discovery, or hypothesis, for I could not quite convince myself of its truth, caused a revolution in my attitude towards the assembled viscounts. At first I had thought of them as so much church furniture, utterly dead and gone, more dead, more gone, than if they had been given proper graves instead of mere wall space. They were something out of a history book; the deeds recorded of them were just like those recorded in a history book: the battles they had fought in, the honours they had won, the positions in the Government they had held—what could be deader than all that? Their exploits were things to be learned, to be forgotten, to be examined about, perhaps to be punished for forgetting. “Write out the sixth Viscount Trimingham ten times.”
But if there really was a ninth Viscount, not buried in a wall but walking about, then the whole family came to life; it did not belong to history but to today; and the church was the citadel of its glory; the church and Brandham Hall.
I brooded over this, and it seemed to me that the Maudsleys were the inheritors of the Trimingham renown. It was, I felt, local, and they enjoyed it by right of rent. And if they, so did their guests, including myself.
A glory brighter than the sunshine filled the transept. It filled my mind too, and, reaching upwards and outwards, began to identify itself with the Zodiac, my favourite religion.
Think about being good, my mother had told me, and I had no difficulty in doing this, for I had a sense of worship. At school I took singing lessons, and among the pieces I learned was one—“My song shall be alway thy mercy praising”—from which I got great pleasure: I felt I could really contemplate the mercy of God, and hymn its praises if I didn’t have to stand forever; but I thought of it simply as an attribute of God; I didn’t connect it with the sins of men. And in the same way I did not associate goodness much with moral behaviour; it was not a standard to live up to, it was an abstraction to think about; it was included in the perfection of the heavenly bodies, though it was not their goodness that specially attracted me, it was their immunity from the disabilities I suffered from. I never thought of comparing my lot with theirs, except as a contrast.
Rapt in contemplation of the absolute, I missed some of the service and my nervous apprehension about the Psalms returned, but it was shortlived. At verse forty I examined my symptoms and found them normal: I knew by experience that in the space of four verses nothing untoward could develop.
But now came an ominous sound; the clergyman’s voice changed gear and took on a deeper note: “O God, the Father of Heaven.” My spirits sank. We were in for the Litany. I at once took out my watch, for having a bet with myself as to how long it would last was the best way I knew of getting through the ordeal.
Usually I closed my mind completely to what was being intoned, only waiting for the drone to change its rhythm—the sign that the end was getting nearer. But this time some of the words came through, and “miserable sinners,” instead of being a sound, reached me as a meaning with a challenge.
I rebelled strongly against it. Why should we call ourselves sinners? Life was life, and people acted in a certain way, which sometimes caused one pain. I thought of Jenkins and Strode. Were they sinners? Even at the height of the persecution, I had never thought of them as such: they were boys like myself, and they had got me into a situation which I had to use my wits to get out of; and I had got out of it, I had turned the tables on them. If I had thought of them as sinners, requiring mercy from God, not resistance from me, the story of my deliverance would have lost its zest. I should deserve no credit for my victory: the solution to the problem would have been in God’s hands, not mine, and I might even have to confess myself a sinner, for drawing down the curses.
“No,” I thought, growing more rebellious, “life has its own laws, and it is for me to defend myself against whatever comes along, without going snivelling to God about sin, my own or other people’s.” How would it profit a man, if he got into a tight place, to call the people who put him there miserable sinners? Or himself a miserable sinner? I disliked the levelling aspect of this sinnerdom; it was like a cricket match played in a drizzle, where everyone had an excuse—and what a dull excuse!—for playing badly. Life was meant to test a man, bring out his courage, initiative, resource; and I longed, I thought, to be tested: I did not want to fall on my knees and call myself a miserable sinner.
But the idea of goodness did attract me, for I did not regard it as the opposite of sin. I saw it as something bright and positive and sustaining, like the sunshine, something to be adored, but from afar.
The idea of the assembled viscounts contained it for me, and the Maudsleys, as their viceroys, enjoyed it too, not so incontestably, but enough to separate them from other human beings. They were a race apart, super-adults, not bound by the same laws of life as little boys.
I had just reached this conclusion when the last hymn was announced. What a long service, almost a record! It was twelve fifty-two. The sidesmen were doing their rounds; and the expression of the one who mounted the transept steps and came towards us justified me in thinking that we were something special, so respectful was it.
Walking back from church, I again found myself the odd man out, and this time Marian didn’t join me; she went at once to the head of the little procession, as if she had made up her mind beforehand. I lagged behind, trying to conceal the fact of my isolation by staring around me like a tourist. But again I was not the last: Trimingham had stayed at the church door chatting to the verger, who looked nothing if not obsequious. I was puzzled
by all this deference shown to Trimingham and was still resenting it when he caught up with me and said, very pleasantly, I had to admit:
“I don’t think we’ve been introduced. My name is Trimingham.”
Being without experience of social usage, I didn’t know that I ought to tell him my name in return; I didn’t give him credit for modesty and thought it rather silly of him to imagine I didn’t know his name, when it had been on everybody’s lips.
“How do you do, Trimingham?” I replied repressively, as who should say: “Trimingham you are, and don’t forget it.”
“You can call me Hugh, if you like,” he volunteered, “I don’t charge extra.”
“But your name is Trimingham, isn’t it?” I couldn’t help asking. “You told me it was yourself.” To be on the safe side, and also with a certain guile, I added hastily: “Mr. Trimingham, I mean.”
“You were right the first time,” said he.
Overcome by curiosity, I stared at his odd face, at the scar, the down-weeping, blank eye, the upturned mouth, as if they could tell me something. Then I suspected him of teasing me and said:
“But aren’t all grown-up men called Mister?”
“Not all,” he said. “Doctors aren’t, for instance, or professors.”
I saw the flaw in this.
“But they’re called Doctor or Professor,” I said. “It’s a—a title they have.”
“Well,” he said, “I have a title, too.”
Then it dawned on me, and it was like the dawn of the unimaginable. Slowly, painfully I said:
“Are you Viscount Trimingham?”
He nodded.
I had to get it absolutely right.
“Are you the ninth Viscount Trimingham?”