Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

Lord Boscastle was having a bad evening. We did not stay long over port, for Roy only took one glass and was so quiet that it left all the work to me. When we went into the biggest of the drawing-rooms (called simply the “sitting-room”; it was a hundred feet long) Lord Boscastle received another blow. His wife never played bridge, and he was relying on Joan to give him his rubber. He asked whether she was ready for a game, with an eager expectant air: at last he was in sight of a little fun.

“I’m sorry, Uncle. I can’t,” said Joan. “I’ve promised to go for a walk with Roy.”

She said it flatly, unhappily and with finality.

Lord Boscastle sulked: there was no other word for it. He stayed in the room for a few minutes, complaining that it did not seem much to ask, a game of cards after dinner. People were willing to arrange picnics, which he detested, but no one ever exerted themselves to produce a four at bridge. He supposed that he would be reduced to inviting the doctor next.

That was the limit of degradation he imagined that night. In a few minutes, he took a volume from his collection of eighteenth-century memoirs and went off sulkily to bed.

Roy and Joan went out immediately afterwards, and Lady Boscastle, Lady Muriel and I were left alone in the “sitting-room”. It was clear that Lady Boscastle wanted to talk to me. She made it crystal clear: but Lady Muriel did not notice. Instead, she brought out a series of improvements which Lady Boscastle should adopt in her régime for the house.

Lady Boscastle could not move up to her own suite, for that meant calling her maid to help her. In all this gigantic mansion, she could not speak a word to me in private. It seemed very comic.

At last she insinuated some doubts about the orders for the next day’s picnic. Lady Muriel rebuffed them, but was shaken enough to agree that she should confer with the butler. “In your study, my dear,” said Lady Boscastle gently, and very firmly. “You see, you will have plenty of paper there.”

Lady Muriel walked out, businesslike and erect.

“Our dear Muriel’s stamina used to be perfectly inexhaustible.” Lady Boscastle’s eyes were very bright behind her lorgnette. “She has changed remarkably little.”

She went on: “Lewis, my dear boy, I wanted to talk to you a little about Humphrey. I think I should like your advice.”

Humphrey was the Boscastles’ son, whom I had met at Monte Carlo; he was a wild effeminate lad, clever, violent-tempered, restlessly looking for gifted people to respect.

“All his friends,” said Lady Boscastle, “seem to be singularly precious. I’m not specially concerned about that. I’ve known plenty of precious young men who became extremely satisfactory afterwards.” She smiled. “But I should be relieved if he showed any sign of a vocation.”

She talked with cool detachment about her son. It was better for him to do something: he would dissipate himself away, if he just settled down to succeed his father. Their days were over. Lord Boscastle was not willing to accept it, preferred that his son should wait about as he himself had done; but Lord Boscastle’s response to any change was to become more obstinate. Instead of taking a hand in business, he plunged himself into his gorgeous and proliferating snobbery. There was imagination and self-expression in his arrogance. It was his art — but his son would never be able to copy him.

Lady Boscastle asked me to take up Humphrey.

“He will do the talking if you sit about,” she said. “That is one of your qualities, my dear boy. Do what you can, won’t you? I shouldn’t like him to go off the rails too far. He would always have his own distinction, you know, whatever he did. But it would distress his father so much. There are very strong bonds between them. These Bevill men are really very unrestrained.”

Lady Boscastle gave a delicate and malicious smile. She had an indulgent amused contempt for men whose emotions enslaved them. There was a cat-like solitariness about her, which meant she could disinterest herself from those who adored her. That night, while everyone else in the party was bored or strained, she was bright-eyed, mocking, cynically enjoying herself. Her concern about her son did not depress her. She waved it away, and talked instead of Roy and Joan; for now, in her invalid years, observing love affairs was what gave her most delight.

She had, of course, no doubt of their relation. Her eyes were too experienced to miss anything so patent. In fact, she was offended because Joan made it too patent. Lady Boscastle had a fastidious sense of proper reserve. “Of course, my dear boy, it is a great pleasure to brandish a lover, isn’t it? Particularly when one has been rather uncompeted for.” Otherwise it seemed to her only what one would expect. She was not used to passing judgments, except on points of etiquette and taste. And she conceded that Roy “would pass”. She had never herself found him profoundly “sympathique”. I thought that night that I could see the reason. She was suspicious that much of his emotional life had nothing to do with love. She divined that, if she had been young, he would have smiled and made love — but there were depths she could not have touched. She would have resented it then, and she resented it now. She wanted men whose whole emotional resources, all of whose power and imagination, could be thrown into gallantry, and the challenge and interplay of love.

She would have kept him at a distance: but she admitted that other women would have chased him. Her niece was showing reasonable taste. As for her niece, Lady Boscastle had a pitying affection.

She speculated on what was happening that night. “There’s thunder in the air,” she said. She looked at me enquiringly.

“I know nothing,” I said.

“Of course, he’s breaking away,” said Lady Boscastle. “That jumps to the eye. And it’s making her more infatuated every minute. No doubt she feels obliged to put all her cards on the table. Poor Joan, she would do that. She’s rather unoblique.”

Lady Boscastle went on: “And he feels insanely irritable, naturally. It’s very odd, my dear Lewis, how being loved brings out the worst in comparatively amiable people. One sees these worthy creatures lying at one’s feet and protesting their supreme devotion. And it’s a great strain to treat them with even moderate civility. I doubt whether anyone is nice enough to receive absolutely defenceless love.

“Love affairs,” said Lady Boscastle, “are not intriguing unless both of you have a second string. Never go lovemaking, my dear boy, unless you have someone to fall back upon in case of accidents. I remember — ah! I’ve told you already.” She smiled with a reminiscence, affectionate, sub-acid and amused. “But our dear Joan would never equip herself with a reserve. She’ll never be rusée. She’s rather undevious for this pastime.”

“It’s a pity,” I said.

“Poor Joan.” There was contempt, pity, triumph in Lady Boscastle’s tone. “Of course it’s she who’s taken him out tonight. It’s she who wants to get things straight. You saw that, of course. She has insisted on meeting him after dinner tonight. I suppose she’s making a scene at this minute. She couldn’t wait another day before having it out. I expect that is how she welcomed Master Roy this morning. Poor Joan. She ought to know it’s fatal. If a love affair has come to the point when one needs to get things straight, then” — she smiled at me — “it’s time to think a little about the next.”

The next day was fine, and the rooms of Boscastle stood lofty and deserted in the sunshine. I had breakfast alone, in the parlour, which was the image of the “painted room” but on the south side of the house, away from the sea. The Boscastles breakfasted in their rooms, and there was no sign of Joan or Roy. Lady Muriel had been up two hours before, and was — so I gathered from whispered messages which a footman kept bringing to the butler — issuing her final orders for the picnic.