Tenderness, page 28
On the studio’s bandstand, the saxes, trombones and trumpets flashed and gleamed. Mr. Welk waved his conductor’s baton. The flowers popped. The parasols went up. Hoover wondered how Senator Kennedy liked best to take his wife. He wondered what suit he and Clyde should wear on Monday; he’d have to let Annie know tomorrow after she got back from church; they planned his suits three days in advance. After Lawrence Welk, before bed, he’d give Clyde a call. Clyde was watching too.
At last, when Bobby’s heart was full, and the words of the song were no longer enough, he seized Cissy’s waist and lifted her high. Her smile lit up the picnic. It lit up the television studio. It lit up the whole nation, from sea to shining sea, on Saturday night. That was art, Hoover thought. That was love.
The Exile
i
At the top of Rackham Hill, he had hoped for peace and the company of only the Downs, but the jingle of a recruitment band near Parham House had pursued him up the slope and wouldn’t let him be. Empire Day was almost upon them, and the springtime loveliness of England was a recruiter’s dream. Who wouldn’t rush to defend it?
Not that the recruiting officers would have had him, not with his chest. He was not the fine specimen Perceval Lucas was. He woke most nights in a sweat, and only last night he’d dreamed that Careless – the patriarch’s spaniel – had run off with his cock in his mouth.
Careless, careless, careless, the dream scolded him. How he raged in his sleep at the injustice, for he wasn’t careless at all. He could never afford to be careless – easy-going – leisured – effortless. That was the point! And yet his manhood had been taken from him anyway. Wilfrid Meynell, his patron, had taken it; the dog was merely his dogsbody, doing the work of the paterfamilias. The Colony was colonising him, unmanning him, just as it had unmanned Percy Lucas before him. No wonder Lucas had fled to the evils of war. But he, Lawrence, wanted to live his life as a life should be lived so that his nights were not wakeful with regrets.
Far below, Greatham was looped and noosed with red-white-and-blue bunting for the Empire Day celebrations. The government was preparing for gas attacks on British soil, but no matter! The spirits of His Majesty’s subjects remained insanely high. The hope was the Italians were on the brink of joining the Allied forces. Everyone had it on reliable authority that they would, and that their action was sure to be swift.
It was as if no one had ever been to Italy.
History unfolded day by day, like a creaking concertina. Who could even say what the country was fighting for? The Belgians were suffering most pitiably. That was true. Was further suffering the answer?
Now the Lusitania had been torpedoed, and all that suffering – the innocents washed up on the beaches of Ireland – seemed to prove to his countrymen that, yes! More suffering was the answer. Let’s throw all the horror we can at it!
As he descended, his mood descended with him. Yet he couldn’t not feel it: Sussex was luminous. The meadows winked with daisies and cowslips, and moorhens nested at the edges, clucking over their broods. In the woods, trees reached for each other, weaving canopies of green over the tracks and lumber-roads.
In the lane outside Winborn’s, the hawthorn and the old man’s beard glowed like fresh snowfall on the hedges. At the back of the house, the laburnum tree in the garden was tasselled in gold, and the beds he’d dug tumbled jubilantly with wallflowers and purple heliotrope.
The Meynells were Londoners through and through: impractical and therefore easily impressed by the sight of a boot on a spade. He often rolled up his shirt-sleeves and worked with Arthur, pruning the trees in the orchard or spreading manure. Their joint efforts had been rewarded. Everything looked splendid – everything, that is, except the endless people, people, people.
That weekend, Rackham Cottage, the Lucases’ place, and Winborn’s too, had turned into a seething pot of visitors. Word of Percy’s surprise arrival had spread, and Arthur had had to give up work on the raspberry canes to ferry miscellaneous visitors from the station.
The Meynells, pacifists though they were, were thrilled, and quietly proud, to have their son-in-law in residence with them for twenty-four hours. He had told no one that he’d been granted leave, not even Madeline. ‘What a surprise!’ That was the phrase du jour. Lawrence had glimpsed the man upon his arrival: a tall figure in khaki, puttees and a cap. Recruiting Now! How do you want your wife to view you? Lucas had crossed the orchard in long, effortless strides.
Madeline had run to him, naturally enough. Winifred waited for him in a little passion of duty and sacrifice, willing to serve the soldier, if not the man. Then there were quick introductions and greetings before the couple disappeared.
At the outdoor table where they had been, until that moment, awaiting Mary’s photographic direction, Viola confided in him and Frieda that her sister and brother-in-law were hoping for ‘glad tidings’ before Percy was sent to the Front.
Lawrence silently forgave Viola the silly euphemism. The Lucases had gone off, rather sweetly, for a fuck. For a few hours, perhaps, they ceased to be in opposition; they let the love come forth that was in them. Then the love blazed and filled the old, silent hollow where the cottage stood, with satisfaction and magnificence. But it passed in a few hours.
All manner of friends of the family arrived. Frieda, who feared nothing but housework, claimed she was afraid to step out of doors lest she was accosted by yet another visitor. They threw themselves at her ‘like grenades’, she said. She didn’t know where to walk, which path was safe. He claimed she must do her duty, be sociable for them both, and not give offence; he required the cow-shed to write – to earn – and he would be far more productive if she would simply surrender it to him for the weekend. She must join Monica and the other Meynells for whatever activities they had planned.
She stared. What was this? her face said. Normally, her husband wrote either with her in the cow-shed or, if the weather was fine, out of doors, with his pad of foolscap. No other arrangement had ever been proposed. She had never disturbed him before – at least not when he was writing. What was he up to?
‘Is it a new piece?’
He stared back, unapologetic. ‘A notion of a piece…We will see.’
As soon as she left, he would hide his typewriter and the new manuscript in a cupboard with the mop and cleaning bucket. She’d never look there, not as long as she lived.
For the time being, he tried to interest her, with false enthusiasm, in the Meynell family visit to Queen Alexandra’s yacht on the Bank Holiday Monday. The vessel was berthed in Brighton, just offshore of the Palace Pier, and the general public was to be allowed on board to inspect its new Red Cross hospital. They were all going. She would enjoy that, he said. The pomp. The beach. Empire Day.
She regarded her husband, sucking in her cheeks with suspicion.
* * *
—
That spring, his mornings typically began with the two daily columns of body counts in The Times – one for Officers, and the other for N.C.O.s and ‘Men’. Under each column were sub-headings: ‘Killed’, ‘Died of Wounds’, ‘Accidentally Killed’, ‘Died’, ‘Wounded’, ‘Suffering from Gas Poisoning’, ‘Wounded and Missing’, ‘Missing’, and finally and most intriguingly, ‘Previously Reported Dead Now Not Dead’. He identified strangely with the latter, and between all the lines of print, he imagined the suck of the mud, the stink of old blood, and the bite of lice at his head. There were mornings when he could almost feel them latching hold of his brain.
That day, Wilfrid Meynell’s edition of The Times reported that St George’s Hospital alone was preparing a mile-and-a-quarter of beds. Coffin-makers, it was reported, couldn’t meet the demand.
The exile’s depression was worsening again, as if he were being pulled down into the mud he could imagine all too keenly. But he was at least decided: it was time to escape Greatham and all the Meynell jollity. He’d feel so much better, he assured himself, once he could afford his own house or flat again.
On sending The Rainbow to his agent in early March, he had written, feverishly, from the depths of his flu: ‘I hope you will like the book: also that it is not very improper…I could weep tears in my heart, when I read these pages.’ Whatever his agent did or did not like, the manuscript was returned to him a month later with lashings of blue pencil. Cuts to the ‘explicitly sensual’ were demanded by Messrs Methuen.
‘I hope you are willing to fight for this novel,’ he fired off to his agent. ‘It must be stood up for.’
He ignored Methuen’s demands, but revised and chipped away, sculpting the novel into being. As for its numerous alleged offences, he could not judge those at all because he could not feel their offence. He gave it to Viola, with Methuen’s notes, and asked her, once again, to act upon the least of their demands, so that he might appear, in some degree, compliant.
Percy Lucas’s brother, Edward, visited the Colony from time to time and spoke to Viola in low, conspiratorial tones, no doubt trying to persuade her to go more ruthlessly at the book – to maim it. Edward – or E.V. Lucas, as he was more widely known – was a reader for Methuen, and the exile suspected his visits to Greatham were not merely to offer greetings to his sister-in-law’s family, as claimed. He was a double-agent for Methuen, meddling, and meddling again. The exile came to resent Perceval Lucas all the more for the fact of his brother.
On the domestic front – and what a ‘Front’ it was! – he and Frieda had managed to agree on one thing: their separation would be an immense relief. She was to take a room or a small flat in London – Hampstead, with a bit of luck. Publicly, they would say to friends that the separate London residence was to be a base from which she would endeavour to make contact with her children when Monty, Elsa and Barby were in London, in term-time. The following winter, he himself would need to be in London a good deal – ‘for work’, he would say. There was a chance it might even be true.
In the short-term, he would, discreetly, find himself an alternative room or cottage – a bolt-hole far from Greatham. He had to escape. He might stay in Sussex or he might go farther afield. Friends might help again…Ottoline had offered him a cottage on her husband’s estate, but then had wanted to charge him – an imminent bankrupt! – for the cottage’s renovations. The wealthy were wealthy for a reason.
Who could he trust? Kot, always – but Kot had nothing. Murry, but Murry was always running off after Katherine and their latest melodrama. Viola’s cow-shed was damp – blast and hang it! – it was the problem – but he would shake off this flu as soon as he was elsewhere. Anywhere else!
In his own mind, he classified himself as the ‘Now Not Dead’ – there were worse states – and it was high time he limped away from Greatham. He had promised to complete Mary’s tuition in time for her August entrance exam, and he would not let her down. He would miss Mary’s company, Hilda’s affection, Viola’s charm and Madeline’s great warmth. In his estimation, she was the only Meynell truly capable of a natural, honest, unaffected love. He had watched with a stab of envy as she’d run headlong at the first glimpse of her husband in the orchard. In her rush, the hem of her frock had caught on her heel and she’d nearly gone over, but the joy never left her face.
Who was Perceval Lucas before he was in uniform? A man who preferred Morris-dancing to any actual occupation. To work! A man who lived off his wife’s father. A dilettante who compiled folk tunes and called himself a genealogist. No wonder he’d gone off to train for war, to do something at last. It did not suit him to be a modern soldier. In the thick, gritty, hideous khaki his subtle physique was extinguished as if he had been killed. In the ugly intimacy of the camp his thoroughbred sensibilities were just degraded. Still – the exile couldn’t not see it – how fine, how effortlessly fine, Perceval Lucas was in person, just as he was in Mary’s cricket photograph in the library of Winborn’s.
One final writing task remained to him before he fled Greatham. He was a painfully slow typist, but if he could make a reasonable manuscript, he could send it off without anyone knowing. It was unlikely any editor in England would touch the story, but in America there was a chance, and now, with Second Lieutenant Lucas’s surprise appearance in the orchard and their introduction, the vital battle scene came to him, as if with a will of its own: He turned round with difficulty as he lay. But he was struck again, and a sort of paralysis came over him. He saw the red face of a German with blue, staring eyes coming upon him, and he knew a knife was striking him.
He didn’t stop at his character’s leg, for it was the handsome face from the photo in the library which preoccupied him, above all. The German cut and mutilated the face of the dead man as if he must obliterate it. He slashed it across, as if it must not be a face any more; it must be removed.
The exile felt aggrieved about the garden at Rackham Cottage. He had cleared brambles and briars. He had mended the path and the bridge over the stream. For weeks, he had cultivated pots and bell-jars of new summer shoots – sweet peas, larkspur, gladioli – and had been looking forward to planting-out this weekend. But Percy Lucas’s unexpected appearance had spoiled his plans. The gentleman-warrior had laid claim to his Sussex plot once more, and Lawrence was suddenly, in his own eyes, a mere poacher, snatching at another man’s life.
He disliked Second Lieutenant Perceval Lucas in proportions equal to his desire to live in his house, to be loved by his wife, to father his children, and to walk on his strong, lean legs. He wanted to swing the man’s cricket bat, tend his earthly paradise, and put down roots in his patch of old England. His own England was gone – razed, violated and industrialised – so that the likes of Percy Lucas and the Meynells could have their verdant slice of Sussex: their Colony retreat, away from their comfortable London house; their peace of mind; their eighty acres; their Downs overlooking the silver sea.
He did at last succeed in getting rid of Frieda that day; a shopping trip to Chichester with Monica and Mary was planned in the motor. He reminded his wife that they had not a shilling to spend. Wasn’t she still in mourning? Why couldn’t she wear her black day-frock? Why did she always need more? He told Monica through the passenger window that ‘Mrs Lawrence’ was ‘under no circumstances to borrow’ from either her or Arthur – or from Mary, for that matter. She was not, he said, above defrauding the child of her egg-money. Frieda had blushed deeply. But why should he bear the humiliation alone? He worked at everything tirelessly while she strove only for new hats and frocks, and gave him no children. He felt sure she was withholding her womb from him in some act of visceral resistance. And still he was making her a summer hat!
* * *
—
Their finances haunted him. The week before he had presented himself to the High Court at Somerset House in London, and he was still waiting to learn whether he’d be declared a bankrupt, with his name in the papers for all to see. The Registrars of the High Court might as well cut his knees out from under him. He’d be crippled by it. He’d never recover.
That dark day in London, the only distraction from his own woes had come when he’d crossed the river on a rumour. The rumour had proved true. He heard the riots, near the East India Dock, before he saw them. A woman in her apron told him that the uproar had started with a crowd of boys looting a pastry-cook’s shop. They’d smashed the front pane and had descended, eating everything in sight. The German owners had run for their lives. In that part of town, every second butcher’s or baker’s was German.
It was just as well he’d sent Frieda off to leafy Hampstead to investigate a bed-sit, although it was impossible to say what sort of reception she would have there. The Lusitania had gone down only three days before. She might be out on her ear.
Boys as young as ten picked up bricks and stones. Women arrived on the scene, followed by men from the docks. Later, the papers said German shop-owners were dragged out from under their beds. While he watched at the edge of the crowd, a looted piano was rolled into the streets and the crowd started to sing ‘Rule Britannia’.
Police with truncheons arrived but were quickly outnumbered. At the front of the crowd, a German man was stripped in the street. Another was ducked in a horse-trough as he pleaded in broken English: ‘I am Russian!’
Lawrence worried for Kot. The masses often didn’t bother to distinguish between ‘foreigners’. It was a contagion. Grief twisted up with rage; rage at the atrocities in Belgium, at the gas attacks at the Front, at the death of 1,200 souls at sea, and so many women and children among them. The images from the papers – of their eyes still open to the shock of the sea – wouldn’t leave him, or anyone else who had looked on them. He paced at the perimeter of the crowd, walking and seething, feeling himself drawn into the tide of hatred. Never had he felt smaller or more futile than he had that year. It made him want to kill – a million, two million, Germans.
Or at least Frieda.
How infuriating she was. Only the day before, he’d had to disabuse her of the notion that she would take a three-bedroom house in the best part of Hampstead.
* * *
—
Husband and wife met up at Victoria Station. Frieda had not secured the Hampstead bed-sit – the mood of the day was against her.
Returning from London to Greatham, they travelled via Brighton, and joined Lady Cynthia and her children on their seaside break, for two days as planned. They somehow succeeded in hiding their strife, and Cynthia was unusual among the exile’s friends in that she seemed not to mind Frieda. She even grew fond of her.
Herbert Asquith, the PM’s son, was still in Flanders. Cynthia found herself often alone, and anxious. Her debts were growing, and it was not easy to travel freely between friends’ houses with the burden of her little son, an unusual and uncontrollable child.
