Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

Though in retrospect they acquired an austere and compensating glamour, Charles’s first professional years contained many misgivings and a great deal of boredom. Occasionally also he was visited by a lost look that Lady Treves noticed and took to be some mysterious kind of reserve. It usually lifted amongst a crowd, and once or twice at some dinner party a few drinks released him into a mood in which he was apt to talk wittily enough for her to comment afterwards to her husband: ‘Charles was quite amusing, wasn’t he? Madame Papadoulos was much taken with him—asked me where he was from… I didn’t know a great deal, I’m afraid.’

‘He comes of a very decent family, my dear. Sir Havelock Anderson was a successful K.C. till he made a fool of himself—they say he still does.’ Sir Lionel searched still further in the card index of his mind. ‘The mother was a Calthorpe, one of the Irish Calthorpes—she’s been dead a long time. I think there was another son killed in the war. Not too much money. Charles will inherit what there is… I met the father once— bit of a character—rather like a crazy old Viking. Young Anderson’s a more normal type, thank goodness.’

‘He has an interesting face. Is he going to do well?’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised. Fairly good school—and Cambridge. He did well there. Oh yes, he might have his own Legation some time. The other day I had to tell him that.’

‘You HAD to tell him?’

‘He suggested a brilliant idea for completely reorganizing the Register. So damned brilliant the Foreign Office would have had a fit. I told him that by the time he had his own Legation it would probably be adopted, but that for the present he’d better hide it as he would an affair with the mistress of one of the Russians… I think I managed not to hurt his feelings.’

‘I hope so. He’s really one of the nicest men we’ve had.’

‘If only he’d write a bit larger—or else I’ll have to get some new spectacles. I think he could put the Lord’s Prayer on a threepenny-bit if he tried hard.’

‘Did you know he paints?’

‘Snowden mentioned it, but he’s never offered to show me anything.’

‘I caught him at it once. He was doing the view of the square from the big window on a Sunday afternoon when he thought no one was about.’

‘Any good?’

‘I wondered. But I couldn’t very well ask him, could I? Anyhow, I could see he wasn’t bad.’

During his leaves Charles sometimes spent short holidays with Brunon and for the rest of the time rented a service flat in London. He rarely visited Beeching for longer than a week at a stretch because, he told himself, the country bored him—which was easier if less truthful than to admit that he found his father’s company a strain. It was not that they quarrelled or failed to get along; indeed their relationship seemed more cordial than it had formerly been. Yet there was still an unease about it… a feeling that made Charles, if ever he heard his father going downstairs after they had gone to bed for the night, tiptoe to the landing with a curiosity he could hardly define—because he would never have acted thus with Snowden or Brunon, though in the morning he would probably have asked them what they had been roaming about the house for. But with his father he never put such a question.

Havelock, now approaching his seventies, had retained much of his fine physique and all his capacity for charming those he wanted to charm. Nor could it be said that he had become more eccentric, since he had already reached a limit beyond which the word would seem inadequate. What had happened was a sort of levelling off along a high plateau of singular behaviour, in which the singularities were often so trifling that the mean average distance from normal could easily be overlooked. Much of his life was outwardly like those of his neighbours, and his pastimes, though odd, were no more so than those of many another man of his age and income. The porter at his club could doubtless have capped any queer story about him with other queer stories about other club members. Letters to The Times continued without further complications, for there were still old tombstones to be discovered and written about. All this was acceptable. So were parties at Beeching at which he could be a delightful host. It was just that sometimes in his company one could feel, by a heightened awareness, that one was in the presence… of a presence. Once Charles came upon him in the library pasting a typed poem inside a copy of the Oxford Book of English Verse. Here again, a normal curiosity would have made Charles approach and look over his father’s shoulder, but he felt unable to do this; later, however, he found the book and inspected it. To his astonishment there were many of these pasted inserts, and most were obscene parodies of well-known poems. A few were rather clever. Charles was no prude, and quite unshockable by words, but what he did find depressing was the thought of so many busy hours devoted to some of the loveliest things in literature with only such a purpose in mind. He never mentioned the matter.

More discussable were Havelock’s political views, which had become increasingly bitter and at odds with almost every charted orbit. He had hated the Coalition Government, but he hated the Labour Party just as much, and he despised the Liberals. If anything he was a Conservative, but of such an extreme variety that only a few men in Parliament ever said anything he approved, and these often belonged to other parties. He sometimes found things he agreed with in the unlikeliest quarters—a remark, for instance, by D. H. Lawrence—‘Let there be a parliament of men and women for the careful and gradual unmaking of laws.’

A book that impressed him a great deal was Spengler’s Decline of the West, which was having an enormous vogue just then throughout Europe. Charles had been less impressed—partly, he admitted, because he had talked to so many professors who found innumerable technical errors in those parts of the book that concerned their own fields.

‘But of course they would,’ Havelock retorted. ‘Ever watched a schoolteacher marking an exercise? The giggles of glee when he spots a mistake?’ Havelock took a silver paper-knife and scored deeply into the mahogany desk top as if crossing out a wrong answer. ‘That’s how professors read Spengler—missing the point because they’re waiting for their own pounce.’

Charles thought there was some truth in this, but he was also puzzled by his father’s vehemence and physical violence. After a pause Havelock said: ‘I suppose you’re thinking I’ve spoilt that desk?’

‘Well, you haven’t improved it, have you?’

‘It’s not an antique. Came from a priest’s house in Maynooth—my father-in-law bought it. Just a Victorian piece.’

‘But rather nice.’

‘So you really do care about these things—furniture, heirlooms, silver, all the stuff there is here?’

‘I didn’t say I really cared FOR them, but I’d do my share of taking care OF them. There’s a bit of difference, I think.’

‘Do you ever wonder what will happen to it all?’

‘Well… what do YOU think?’

‘One of these days it will burn.’

‘You mean catch fire? I hope not—but a great many country houses do. The wiring’s bad—Cobb tried an electric toaster the other day and nearly set the kitchen alight.’

A moment later Charles was sorry he had mentioned this matter, for it made Havelock remember that they hadn’t had a fire-drill for over a year. So they had to have one—and immediately, since (as Havelock said) the essence of a fire-drill is that you don’t plan for it in advance. They fixed the canvas chute, with the guide-ropes inside, that led down to the lawn from one of the top-floor windows. Havelock rang the big brass handbell whose only other function was to summon guests to the tea tent at garden parties. Since the servants slept in their own quarters away from the main house-block, there was little reason for them to take part in the demonstration, but it was geared into Havelock’s enjoyment of the whole thing that they should, especially the housemaids, whose nervousness and disordered skirts made him feel quite blithe. Aunt Hetty and Cobb were excused on account of age, but Havelock himself, older than either, sometimes made the descent twice, emerging at the bottom like some excited thrill-seeker at an amusement park. Charles did not much care for the experience, for he usually slid down too fast and got scratched, but he realized that since his own bedroom was on the top floor there was some point in it. His chief doubt was whether, if a fire ever started in the middle of the night, anyone would wake up in time to unroll the thing out of the window.