From a View to a Death, page 3
Skirting the Orphans, Joanna crossed the road again, towards a door in the wall which led to the back of the house. She turned to see that Spot and Ranger were following her and watched them cross the soft macadam of the road, through the heat which quivered and shook above its surface. They reached the pavement, panting and asthmatic. Les Cloches de Corneville had become fainter as she came up the street, and when she put the key in the door she heard it change to O sole mio. She flicked Spot with the lead as he maundered over the threshold and, turning the key in the lock, she began to cross the lawn towards the house. There was not a breath of air and she felt the sun burning up the skin on the back of her neck. She approached the french windows of the drawing-room. These were shut. When she reached them Joanna did not go in at once but stood looking through them, standing a little at one side so that she could see into the room and avoid the reflection made by the sun on the glass.
Inside the room, beyond the french windows, her mother was lying on the sofa. Mrs. Brandon was not reading, although she was holding a magazine in front of her. She was holding it at too oblique an angle to make reading possible, but her lips were moving and she was smiling secretively to herself. The magazine was called Everybody’s Weekly.
Joanna inspected her mother through the glass of the french windows. Mrs. Brandon was wearing a neglige of yellow material edged with fur, which stood out against the red and green roses of the chintz with which the sofa was covered, and the tartan rug and rather dirty counterpane that had also been spread over it, but which had by now almost slipped away from under her. The loose cover of the sofa was torn, so that a blue material could also be seen underneath it, and again, below this, some of the actual stuffing of the sofa itself, all this stratification suggesting the princess on her forty mattresses. Some books and magazines were within reach on an occasional table with a poker-work design on it that stood beside the sofa.
It was not impossible to see that Mrs. Brandon had been good-looking when younger. Her hair was still in places what she herself would have described as auburn and her features were good, although the powder which she had put on hastily and too thick obscured them and made her look like a favourite doll that has been worn to nothing by excessive use. It was said that she had been on the stage in her youth but she herself preferred to speak of any successes that she might have had behind the footlights as the result of an almost passionate interest in private theatricals. Anyway it had been a long time ago, before she was married, and she felt, rather justly, that it was nobody’s business but her own.
When she had contemplated her mother sufficiently, Joanna pressed her hand against one of the french windows so that both of them flew open suddenly and banged against the walls of the room. She went in followed by the dogs. Without looking up, Mrs. Brandon said:
‘I got tired of being here all by myself, darling, so I didn’t wait for you and ordered tea earlier than usual.’
A heavy perfume like the defensive cloud of a cuttlefish hung round Mrs. Brandon. It was always the same scent. Jockey Club. The scent Mrs. Brandon had used since she had been a girl.
‘Dr. Smith looked in this afternoon. He’s not a very good doctor.’
‘What has he done now?’
‘He doesn’t seem to know what is wrong with me. Or, if he does, he won’t tell me. He’s not a doctor I feel I can rely on.’
Joanna took off her hat and brushed away the hair from her forehead. She went to the big oval glass above the mantelpiece and looked at herself in it while she did this. Her forehead was too high and her hair mouse-coloured. She had a pale, very lovely skin and blue eyes. There was a certain aloofness about her appearance that distinguished her and made her the sort of girl with whom women might fall in love. Sitting down on the chair beside her mother, she poured out a cup of tea for herself.
Tour me out another cup too, darling.’
‘I’ve just been to see about my shoes for the pageant.’
‘Have you, my pet?’
‘I’m going to be one of the ladies-in-waiting to Charles II’s queen, whoever she was.’
‘Do you know, Joanna, I always loved Charles II so much. He was always one of my heroes since ever I was a girl. I know he was a bad man but I simply couldn’t help it. Perhaps it was a tiny bit because he was a bad man that I loved him so.’
‘And then I saw Major Fosdick in the town.’
‘Perhaps I even saw myself as Nell Gwyn. A little orange-girl. Pretty, witty Nell.’
‘Major Fosdick said that the Passengers have got a young man staying with them who has got a beard. At least Major Fosdick says he has. Anyway I shall see when I go up for the rehearsal on Thursday.’
‘And how did dear Spot and dear Ranger enjoy their walk?’
‘Spot was nearly run over by a boy on a bicycle. The Passengers are going to be here for the rest of the summer now, Major Fosdick says.’
Ranger, who had been trying for some time to scramble on to the sofa, at last succeeded in his object and from this point of vantage found himself able to sniff at the plate of bread and butter. Mrs. Brandon went on with her reflections, still screened by Everybody’s Weekly. Joanna drank two cups of tea and lit a cigarette. Then she went up to her bedroom. This was at the top of the house and from there it was possible to see the market square between the roofs. The Brandons’ house was a red-brick, Queen Anne affair, and it had been very damp since Joanna’s father had died, twenty-three years ago now. Her parents had married late in life and Joanna’s father was said to have been one of the best-looking men in the Navy. He was just about due for promotion when one day, bathing, he had dived into the sea and on to a rock, killing himself instantaneously. He left no money worth mentioning, but he had bought the house and so, although it was absurdly large for two persons, Joanna and her mother continued to live in it. They kept one servant, Mrs. Dadds, who did the cooking.
Joanna went to her bookcase. She ran her fingers along the spines of the books, wondering whether there was anything that she could bear to read again. Outside, someone knocked on the door. It was Mrs. Dadds.
‘Yes? What is it?’
‘Mr. Jasper Fosdick to see you, Miss Joanna,’ Mrs. Dadds said.
‘Tell him I’m out,’ said Joanna, through the door.
‘I’ve told him you’ve just come in.’
‘Well, tell him I’ve gone out again and you made a mistake.’
She heard Mrs. Dadds, still standing outside, breathing stertorously.
‘Tell him anything you like,’ said Joanna, ‘that I’ve got a headache or I’m asleep or busy. Anything. I can’t see him now.’
Zouch and Mary arrived back at Passenger rather late for tea. This meal was taking place in a large room, decorated in the taste of a generation before and hung, like the hall, with anonymous and murky oil paintings. There had been one or two visitors, but they had gone and only the Passenger family now remained. When Zouch and Mary came in, Mr. Passenger was sitting a long way away from his wife and elder daughter, engrossed in reading a pamphlet. He barely looked up when Mary introduced Zouch to him.
‘Did you decide to go to Goodwood in the end?’ said Mrs. Passenger as she handed Zouch his tea.
They had met on several occasions when he had been to see Mary at their London house but Mrs. Passenger always confused him with another of Mary’s young men, a young M.P. who had also for a short time worn a beard for political reasons.
‘I didn’t go,’ said Zouch, thinking it best to tell the truth.
He had begun suddenly to feel a little like a slum child and, never having been to a race-meeting in his life, he was not prepared to be cross-questioned about one, more especially as he was by means certain that it was indeed racing that people went to Goodwood to watch. But he added:
‘Did you?’
‘I was going to stay with the Beckinghams. Vernon of course will never stay with anyone, and besides he hates racing. But in the end I said I wouldn’t go. It’s such a lovely house, isn’t it?’
‘Which house?’
‘The Beckinghams’.’
‘I’ve never stayed there.’
‘But didn’t you meet Mary there?’
‘No,’ said Zouch.
He hoped that he would not have to divulge that he had met Mary at the house of a young married friend of hers who had since been divorced. He disapproved of divorces, knowing well that they were bad for business. Mrs. Passenger said:
‘Oh, as a place I always think it is quite perfect. But too enormous and only three bathrooms. You have to see that you are given a bedroom near one of them. If you aren’t, it spoils all the pleasure of going to Goodwood.’
She sighed. She was a little wizened woman like a sea-bird and she came of a more distinguished family than her husband. As she stopped speaking Mr. Passenger looked up from his reading. The mention of the Beckinghams had jarred him into awareness of the presence of other persons in the room. He stared in front of him.
‘Nonsense,’ he said.
‘You have never stayed there, Vernon.’
‘I used to stay there when Tom Beckingham and I were at Eton.’
‘Then you can never have looked for the bathroom, Vernon.’
Mr. Passenger raised his eyebrows at his wife and then went on with his reading. He too, as Zouch had recognised at once, was an Übermensch. A pretty grim figure in fact. Indeed part of Zouch’s uneasiness at that moment was due to an instantaneous fear that in Mr. Passenger he might have met his match.
People in the neighbourhood were accustomed to say that Vernon Passenger’s manner was due to the disappointing life that he had lived. Hardly anything in his career had turned out as he had intended. As a young man he had become tired of London society and had gone out to the Boer war as a volunteer, but a few days after his arrival in South Africa he had nearly died of measles. When he came back to England and before he had fully recovered his health he began to edit the works of a seventeenth-century minor poet. But his convalescence had allowed him little time for research and the edition was found on publication to contain so many errors that he withdrew the whole of it at his own expense. This incident had given him a distaste for the life of the mind from which he had never wholly recovered and, as his father died about this time and he came into the property, he married at once and went to live in the country. There he occupied himself with the scientific growing of apples, crop after crop of which were destroyed every year by germs. Then the war came. Mr. Passenger had pro-German sympathies. Again he backed the wrong horse. It was no wonder that he was often morose. In winter he hunted, although the hunting in this part of the country was poor. He was Master of the local pack. In summer he prowled about quarrelling with his neighbours. He was an easygoing landlord, very popular with the cottagers, because he had once spoken over the wireless on an agricultural subject.
But all the time Vernon Passenger was gnawed inside with megalomania. He wanted to get away from all that he had been brought up to because it bored him and yet he felt that it was only by the accident of his position that he had any power at all. He used to brood over this, longing to be something more, and yet knowing at the same time that when he had come to live in the country he had deliberately chosen to be what he was. What he wanted to be he did not know. He knew only what he did not want to be. By allowing this to work in his mind he became every day more and more like what he wished most to differ from.
Mrs. Passenger had, in fact, intended to marry another man, better-looking but less intelligent than him, but she came of a large family of daughters and the other man who was eligible enough, became over-excited one night at a dance and unexpectedly proposed to, and was accepted by, one of her sisters. After that she decided to marry Vernon Passenger, and, although after their marriage some of his habits came as a surprise to her, she only sometimes regretted it because she was a woman with a serene temperament and most of the time she had only a very vague idea of what was going on round her. Mr. Passenger himself sometimes liked his wife and sometimes disliked her but from the earliest days of their honeymoon he had made up his mind to brood about her as little as possible and for many years now he had remained successfully entrenched behind his own personality.
In appearance Mr. Passenger was not distinguished. His lips and nose were too thick, and a casual observer might have mistaken him, until they had encountered his constrained manner, for a dentist or professional man who rode well to hounds. He had a high-pitched voice and when spoken to was accustomed to look at the speaker for a few seconds and then walk away without answering. And yet Zouch knew that he was a dangerous man as soon as he set eyes on him.
To bridge over the pause in the conversation, Zouch said to Mrs. Passenger:
‘What a lovely garden you have.’
Before she could answer, her husband looked up again and, holding out to Zouch the pamphlet he had been reading, he said:
‘Have you studied this yet?’
Zouch glanced at the title. It was called The Powers and Duties of Local Authorities in Connection with Rural Amenities. He shook his head. He could not imagine that a work with such a name would interest anyone to a great extent. He said:
‘I haven’t read it yet.’
Mr. Passenger began to pick small pieces of fluff off his suit. He was, according to his usual custom, wearing out in the country clothes that were too old for London. His reddish face looked as if it had been scrubbed with emery-paper.
‘Read it,’ he said. ‘It would interest you.’
‘I will.’
Mr. Passenger said: ‘No one cares about the country now. People like you and me are the only ones left who mind whether or not the whole of England becomes an industrial suburb. We do what we can but it is too late.’
‘Yes,’ said Zouch, ‘I fear it is.’
He was flattered at being included in this way by his host in the same category as himself, although the subject was one to which he had never given much thought in the past nor proposed to do so in the future, unless, as might well happen, it proved to be Mr. Passenger’s only topic of conversation. He handed back the pamphlet. Mr. Passenger said:
‘I suppose you are a Communist like all the rest of the young men now?’
No one was more convinced than Zouch that the existence of the fine arts depended on the survival of the capitalist system but considering that to express this verity would be to stress unnecessarily his status at Passenger Court he merely said:
‘I don’t know very much about politics.’
‘But no Communist ever considered that any bar to holding political opinions.’
‘I’m not a Communist anyway.’
‘Well, I think I am.’
Mrs. Passenger said: ‘How absurd.’
‘All right,’ said Mr. Passenger. ‘Absurd.’
‘You’re always saying things like that, Vernon.’
‘Mayn’t I say what I like in my own house?’
Mr. Passenger shook his head once or twice, still plucking specks of grey from his trousers. Then he stood up and, after staring for a minute or two out of the window, he went out of the room, leaving the door open behind him. They could hear him in the hall tapping the barometer. Then they heard his footsteps become fainter as he went away down the passage. Betty said:
‘Father seems rather off colour lately.’
Mrs. Passenger said: ‘He’s been interviewing old Fosdick about North Copse. And you know what that means ’
‘What a nuisance that old man is.’
Mary said: ‘We met him while we were on our walk. He looked too extraordinary.’
‘I think old Fosdick will go off his head quite soon,’ Mrs. Passenger said. ‘His manner has been very odd lately.’
Zouch, who was hemmed in by several little tables containing food, had begun to feel out of the conversation and so to make a digression he said to Mary:
‘I shall hope to paint you, Mary, while I am staying here.’
He was surprised at the effect this remark had. Mary went quite pink with pleasure. It was evident that she was delighted. She said:
‘Oh, that will be fun. I’ve never had my portrait painted before. Where would be the best place to do it?’
‘Somewhere where the light is good and preferably where the things can remain undisturbed.’
‘I’ll go up to the old schoolroom and see if it is full of rubbish. If it is, we will have it all cleared out and you can do it there. That would be a splendid place.’
She jumped up, looking remarkably pretty, Zouch thought, and went out of the room. Betty lit a cigarette. She said:
“Well, well, well. Are you going to paint all of us?’
Mrs. Passenger said: ‘Mr. Zouch will certainly not be allowed to paint me whether he wants to or not. That is quite definite. And now I am going to write some letters. Don’t scatter ash all over the carpet, dear. It makes such a mess when you do that.’
She wandered about the room for a few minutes as if she were looking for something and then, giving up hope of finding whatever she wanted, she went away. Zouch and Betty were left alone together. Zouch said:
‘Anyway, I hope I shall be allowed to do a portrait of you one of these days even if I mayn’t paint your mother?’
‘Anything you like,’ said Betty. ‘If the old face is any good to you. By the way, I think I’ve remembered where it was that I saw you before. It was years ago at Zelli’s. You were with that little Creole that they used to call Hortense. You were pointed out to me as the lucky man.’
As Betty seemed to see nothing startling in this and as it was possible that she was equally well informed about other episodes in his past life, Zouch decided that once again it was an occasion to tell the truth, and so he stroked his beard and said:
