Chapter Four

 

Sherry-glass in hand, Eustace Barnack was standing on the hearth-rug, looking up at the portrait of his father over the mantelpiece.  From its black background, the square, strong face of that cotton-spinning philanthropist glared out into vacancy like a headlamp.

      Meditatively, Eustace shook his head.

      'Hundreds of guineas,' he said.  'That's what the subscribers paid for that object.  And you'd be lucky if you could get a fiver for it now.  Personally,' he added, turning to where his sister was sitting, slender and very upright, on the sofa, 'personally I'd be very ready to give you ten pounds for the privilege of not possessing it.'

      Alice Poulshot said nothing.  She was thinking, as she looked at him, how shockingly Eustace had aged since last she saw him.  Grosser even than he had been three years ago.  And the face was like a loose rubber mask sagging from the bones, flabby and soft and unwholesomely blotched.  As for the mouth ... She remembered the brilliant, laughing boy she had once been so proud of; in him, those parted, childish lips had seemed amusing in their incongruity with the manly stature - amusing and at the same time profoundly touching.  You couldn't look at him without feeling that you'd like to mother him.  But now - now the sight was enough to make you shudder.  The damp, mobile looseness of that mouth, its combination of senility and babyishness, of the infantile with the epicurean!  Only in the humorously twinkling eyes could she discover a trace of the Eustace she had loved so much.  And now the whites of those eyes were yellow and bloodshot, and under them were pouches of discoloured skin.

      With a thick forefinger, Eustace tapped the canvas.

      'Wouldn't he be furious if he knew!  I remember how bitterly he resented it at the time.  All that good money going on a mere picture, when it might have been spent on something really useful, like a drinking-fountain or a public lavatory.'

      At the words 'public lavatory', his nephew, Jim Poulshot, looked up from the Evening Standard and uttered a loud guffaw.  Eustace turned and regarded him curiously.

      'That's right, my boy,' he said with mock heartiness.  'It's English humour that has made the Empire what it is.'

      He walked over to the sofa and cautiously lowered his soft bulk into a sitting posture.  Mrs Poulshot moved further into the corner to give him room.

      'Poor old father!' he said, continuing the previous conversation.

      'What's poor about him?' Alice asked rather sharply.  'I should have thought we were the poor ones.  After all, he accomplished something.  Where's our achievement, I'd like to know.'

      'Where?' Eustace repeated.  'Well, certainly not in the rubbish-heap, which is where his is.  The mills working half-time because of Indian and Japanese competition.  Individual paternalism replaced by State interference, which he regarded as the devil.  The Liberal Party dead and buried.  And earnest high-minded rationalism transformed into cynical libertinage.  If the old man isn't to be pitied, I'd like to know who is?'

      'It's not the results that matter,' said Mrs Poulshot, changing her ground.

      She had worshipped her father; and to defend a memory which she still reverenced as something all but divine, she was ready to sacrifice much more than mere logical consistency.

      'It's motives, and intentions and hard work - yes, and self-denial,' she added significantly.

      Eustace uttered a wheezy chuckle.

      'Whereas I'm disgustingly self-indulgent,' he said.  'And if I happen to be fat, it's entirely my own vicious fault.  Has it ever struck you, my dear, that if Mother had lived, she'd have probably grown to be as big as Uncle Charles?'

      'How can you say such things!' cried Mrs Poulshot indignantly.  Uncle Charles had been a monster.

      'It was in the family,' he answered; and patting his belly complacently, 'It still is,' he added.

      The sound of a door being opened made him turn his head.

      'Aha,' he cried, 'here comes my future guest!'

      Still brooding on his reasons for being angry and miserable, Sebastian looked up with a start.  Uncle Eustace ... in his preoccupation with his own affairs he had forgotten all about him.  He stood there, gaping.

      '"In vacant or in pensive mood,"' Eustace continued genially.  'It's all in the great poetical tradition.'

      Sebastian advanced and shook the hand extended to him.  It was soft, rather damp and surprisingly cold.  The realization that he was making a deplorable impression just at the very moment when he ought to have been at his best, increased his shyness to the point of rendering him speechless.  But his mind continued to work.  In that expanse of flabby face, the little eyes, he thought, were like an elephant's.  An elegant little elephant in a double-breasted black coat and pale-grey check trousers.  Oh, and even a monocle on the end of a string to make him look still more like the elderly dandy on the musical comedy stage!

      Eustace turned to his sister.

      'He gets more and more like Rosie every year,' he said.  'It's fantastic.'

      Mrs Poulshot nodded without speaking.  Sebastian's mother was a subject which it was best, she thought, to avoid.

      'Well, Sebastian, I hope you're prepared for a pretty strenuous holiday.'  Once again Eustace patted his stomach.  You see before you the world's champion sightseer.  Author of "Canters through Florence", "The Vatican on Roller Skates", "Round the Louvre in Eighty Minutes".  And my speed record for the English cathedrals has never even been challenged.'

      'Idiot!' said Mrs Poulshot, laughing.

      Jim roared in unison and, in spite of the dinner jacket, Sebastian couldn't help joining in.  The idea of this dandified elephant galloping through Canterbury in sponge-bag trousers and a monocle was irresistibly grotesque.

      Noiselessly, in the midst of their merriment, the door swung open again.  Grey, lugubrious, long-faced like a horse, like his own image in a distorting mirror, Fred Poulshot entered as though on soles of felt.  Catching sight of him, Jim and Sebastian checked themselves abruptly.  He walked over to the sofa to greet his brother-in-law.

      'You're looking well,' said Eustace as they shook hands.

      'Well?' Mr Poulshot repeated in an offended tone.  'Get Alice to tell you about my sinus some time.'

      He turned away, and, with the scrupulous care of one who measures out a purgative, poured himself one-third of a glass of sherry.

      Eustace looked at him and felt, as he had so often done in the past, profoundly sorry for poor Alice.  Thirty years of Fred Poulshot - imagine it!  Well, such was family life.  He felt very thankful that he was now alone in the world.

      Susan's headlong entrance at this moment did nothing to mitigate his thankfulness.  True, she possessed the enormous adventitious advantage of being seventeen; but even the perverse and slightly comic charms of adolescence could not disguise the fact that she was a Poulshot and, like all the other Poulshots, unutterably dull.  The most that could be said for her was that, up to the present at any rate, she was a cut above Jim.  But then, at twenty-five, poor Jim was just an empty pigeonhole waiting to the occupied by the moderately successful stockbroker he would be in 1949.  Well, that was what came of choosing a father like Fred.  Whereas Sebastian had had the wit to get himself sired by a Barnack and conceived by the loveliest of irresponsible gypsies.

      'Did you tell him about my sinus?' Mr Poulshot insisted.

      But Alice pretended not to have heard him.

      'Talking of canters through Florence,' she said rather loudly, 'do you ever see Cousin Mary's son when you're out there?'

      'You mean Bruno Rontini?'

      Mrs Poulshot nodded.

      'Why on earth she should ever have married that Italian, I simply cannot imagine,' she said in a tone of disapproval.

      'But even Italians are very nearly human.'

      'Don't be silly, Eustace.  You know exactly what I mean.'

      'But how you'd hate it if I were to tell you!' said Eustace, smiling.

      For what she meant, of course, was just plain prejudice and snobbery - an insular dislike of foreigners, a bourgeois conviction that all unsuccessful people must be in some way immoral.

      'Father was endlessly kind to the man,' Mrs Poulshot went on.  'When I think of all the opportunities he gave him!'

      'And wise old Carlo made a mess of every one of them!'

      'Wise?'

      'Well, he got himself paid for pounds a week to keep out of the cotton business and go back to Tuscany.  Don't you call that wisdom?'

      Eustace drank the rest of his sherry and put down the glass.

      'The son still runs his second-hand bookshop,' he went on.  'I'm really very fond of funny old Bruno.  In spite of that tiresome religiosity of his.  Nothing but the Gaseous Vertebrate!'

      Mrs Poulshot laughed.  In the Barnack family, Haeckel's definition of God had been a standing joke for the past forty years.'

      'The Gaseous Vertebrate,' she repeated.  'But then, think how he was brought up!  Cousin Mary used to take him to those Quaker meetings of hers when he was a boy.  Quakers!' she repeated with a kind of incredulous emphasis.

      The parlour-maid appeared and announced that dinner was served.  Active and wiry, Alice was on her feet in an instant.  Her brother hoisted himself up more painfully.  Followed by the rest of the family, they moved towards the door.  Mr Poulshot walked over to the electric switches and, as the last person crossed the threshold, turned out the lights.

      As they went downstairs to the dining-room, Eustace laid a hand on Sebastian's shoulder.

      'I had the devil of a time persuading your father to let you come and stay with me,' he said.  'He was afraid you'd learn to live like the idle rich.  Luckily, we were able to checkmate him with an appeal to culture - weren't we, Alice?'

      Mrs Poulshot nodded a little stiffly.  She didn't like her brother's habit of discussing grown-up affairs in front of the children.

      'Florence is part of a liberal education,' she said.

      'Exactly.  What Every Young Boy Ought to Know.'

      Suddenly the staircase lights went out.  Even in his blackest moods, Fred never forgot to be economical.

      They entered the dining-room - red-papered still, Eustace noticed, and as uncompromisingly hideous as ever - and took their seats.

      'Mock turtle,' said Alice as the parlour-maid set down the soup in front of him.

      Mock turtle - it would be!  Dear Alice had always displayed a positive genius for serving the dreariest kind of English food.  On principle.  With a smile at once affectionate and faintly ironic, Eustace laid a thick oedematous hand over his sister's bony fingers.

      'Well, my dear, it's been a long, long time since last I sat here at your festive board.'

      'No fault of mine,' Mrs Poulshot answered.  Her voice took on a note of rather sharp and perky jocularity.  'The Prodigal's place was always laid for him.  But I suppose he was too busy filling his belly with the caviar that the swine did eat.'

      Eustace laughed with unaffected good-humour.  Twenty-three years before, he had given up what everybody said was a most promising career in radical politics to marry a rich widow with a weak heart, and retire to Florence.  It was an act which neither his sister nor his brother, though for different reasons, had ever forgiven.  With John it was a matter of outraged political principle.  But what Alice resented was the insult to her father's memory, the wound inflicted on her family pride.  Theirs was the third generation of low-living, high-minded Barnacks; and with the exception of unmentionable Great-Uncle Luke, Eustace was the first who had ever gone over to the hostile camp of luxury and leisure.

      'Ve-ry pretty,' he said to her in the phrase and tone of one who applauds a particularly well-directed stroke at billiards.

      With an income of six thousand a year, he could afford to be magnanimous.  Besides, his conscience had never troubled him for what he had done.  For the five years of their brief married life he had been as good a husband as poor dear Amy could expect.  And why any quick-witted and sensitive person should feel ashamed of having said goodbye to politics, he couldn't imagine.  The sordid intrigues behind the scenes!  The conscious or unconscious hypocrisy of every form of public speaking!  The asinine stupidity of that interminable repetition of the same absurd over-simplifications, the same illogical arguments and vulgar personalities, the same bad history and baseless prophecy!  And that was supposed to be a man's highest duty.  And if he chose instead the life of a civilized human being, he ought to be ashamed of himself.

      'Ve-ry pretty,' he repeated.  'But what an implacable Puritan you are, my dear!  And without the smallest metaphysical justification.'

      'Metaphysics!' said Mrs Poulshot in the contemptuous tone of one who is above and beyond such fooleries.

      The soup plates, meanwhile, had been cleared away and the saddle of mutton brought in.  In silence and without in any way altering his expression of irremediable suffering, Mr Poulshot set to work to carve the roast.

      Eustace glanced at him, then back at Alice.  She, poor thing, was looking at Fred with an expression of apprehensive distress - wishing, no doubt, that the sulky old baby would be on his good behaviour in front of strangers.  And perhaps, Eustace went on to reflect, perhaps that was why she had been so sharp towards himself.  Whitewashing her husband by blackwashing her brother.  Not very logical, no doubt, but all too human.

      'I hope it's cooked as you like it, Fred,' she called down the table.

      Without answering or even looking up, Mr Poulshot shrugged his narrow shoulders.

      With an effort, Mrs Poulshot adjusted her expression and turned to Eustace.

      'Poor Fred has such a dreadful time with his sinus,' she said, trying to make amends to her husband for what she had done in the drawing-room.

      As old Ellen came in with the vegetables, a half-grown kitten slipped into the room and came to rub itself against the leg of Alice's chair.  She stooped and picked it up.

      'Well, Onyegin,' she said, tickling the little beast behind the ears.  'We call him Onyegin,' she explained brightly to her brother, because he's the masterpiece of our late lamented Puss-kin.'

      Eustace smiled politely.

      The consolations of philosophy, he reflected, of religion, of art, of love, of politics - none of these for poor dear Alice.  No, hers were the consolations of an Edwardian sense of humour and the weekly copy of Punch.  Still, it was better to make bad puns and be whimsical in the style of 1912 than to indulge in self-pity or capitulate to Fred's black moods, as everyone else at the table had done.  And, by God, it was pretty difficult not to capitulate.  Sitting there behind his bulwark of mutton, Fred Poulshot fairly beamed with negativity.  You could positively feel it as it beat against you - a steady, penetrating radiation that was the very antithesis of life, the total denial of all human warmth.  Eustace decided to attempt a diversion.

      'Well, Fred!' he called out in his jolliest tone.  'How's that City of yours?  How's the gorgeous East?  Business pretty good?'

      Mr Poulshot looked up, pained but, after a moment, forgiving.

      'It could hardly be worse,' he pronounced.

      Eustace raised his eyebrows in mock alarm.

      'Heavens!  How's that going to affect my Yangtze and South China Bank dividends?'

      'They talk of reducing them this year.'

      'Oh dear!'

      'From eighty per cent to seventy-five per cent,' said Mr Poulshot gloomily; and turning away to help himself to the vegetables, he relapsed once more into a silence that engulfed the entire table.

      How much less awful the man would be, Eustace was thinking, as he ate his mutton and brussels sprouts, if only he sometimes lost his temper, or got drunk, or went to bed with his secretary - though God help the poor secretary if he did!  But there had never been anything violent or extreme in Fred's behaviour.  Except for being absolutely intolerable, he was the perfect husband.  One who loved the routine of marriage and domestic life - carving mutton, begetting children - just as he loved the routine of being (what was it?) Secretary and Treasurer of that City and Far Eastern thingumabob.  And in all that concerned these routines, he was the soul of probity and regularity.  Swear, get angry, deceive poor dear Alice with another woman?  Why, he'd as soon embezzle the company's petty cash.  No, no, Fred took it out on people in a very different way.  He didn't have to do anything; it was enough for him just to be.  They shrivelled and turned black by mere infection.

      Suddenly Mr Poulshot broke the long silence, and in a dead, toneless voice asked for the redcurrant jelly.

      Startled as though by a summons from the other world, Jim looked wildly round the table.

      'Here you are, Jim.'  Eustace Barnack pushed the dish across to him.

      Jim gave him a grateful look, and passed it on to his father.  Mr Poulshot took it without a word or a smile, helped himself and then, with the evident intention of involving another victim in this rite of woe, handed it back, not to Jim, but to Susan, who was in the very act of raising her fork from her plate.  As he had foreseen and desired, Mr Poulshot had to wait, dish in hand and with an expression on his face of martyred patience, while Susan hastily poked the mutton into her mouth, put down her knife and fork with a clatter and, blushing crimson, accepted the proffered jelly.

      From his front-row seat at the human comedy, Eustace smiled appreciatively.  What an exquisite refinement of the will to power, what elegant cruelty!  And what an amazing gift for that contagious gloom which damps even the highest spirits and stifles the very possibility of joy.  Well, nobody could accuse dear Fred of having buried his talent.

      Silence, as though there were a coffin in the room, settled all at once upon the table.  Mrs Poulshot tried desperately to think of something to say - something bright, something defiantly funny - but could find nothing, nothing at all.  Fred had broken through her defences and stopped up the source of speech, of life itself, with sand and ashes.  She sat there empty, conscious only of the awful fatigue accumulated during thirty years of unremitting defence and counter-attack.  And as though it had somehow become aware of her defeat, the kitten sleeping on her knee uncurled itself, stretched and jumped noiselessly to the floor.

      'Onyegin!' she cried, and reached out a hand; but the little cat slid away, silky and serpentine, from under her fingers.  If she had been less old and sensible, Mrs Poulshot would have burst into tears.

      The silence lengthened out, punctuated by the ticking, now for the first time audible, of the brass clock on the mantelpiece.  Eustace, who had begun by thinking that it would be amusing to see how long the intolerable situation could last, found himself suddenly overcome by pity and indignation.  Alice needed help, and it would be monstrous if that creature there, that tapeworm, were left to enjoy his triumph.  He leaned back in his chair, wiped his mouth and, looking about him, gaily smiled.

      'Cheer up, Sebastian,' he called across the table.  'I hope you're not going to be glum like this when you're staying with me next week.'

      The spell was broken.  Alice Poulshot's fatigue dropped away from her, and she found it once more possible to speak.

      'You forget,' she broke in waggishly, as the boy tried to mumble something in response to his uncle's challenge, 'our little Sebastian's got the poetic temperament.'  And rolling her r's like an old-fashioned reciter, she added, "Tears're from the depth of some divine despair-r."'

      Sebastian flushed and bit his lip.  He was very fond of Aunt Alice - as fond of her as she herself would ever allow anyone to be.  And yet, in spite of his affection, there were times - and this was one of them - when he would have liked to kill her.  It wasn't merely himself that she outraged with this sort of remark; it was beauty, poetry, genius, everything above the level of the commonplace and the conventional.

      Eustace observed the expression of his nephew's face, and felt sorry for the poor boy.  Alice could be curiously hard, he reflected - on principle, just as she preferred bad cooking.  Tactfully, he tried to change the subject.  Alice had quoted Tennyson; what did the young think of Tennyson nowadays?

      But Mrs Poulshot did not permit the subject to be changed.  She had undertaken Sebastian's education, and if she allowed him to indulge his native moodiness, she wouldn't be doing her duty.  It was because that silly mother of his had always given in to him that Fred now behaved as he did.

      'Or perhaps,' she went on, her tone growing more flippant as her intention became more severely didactic, 'perhaps it's a case of first love.  "Deep as first love, and wild with all regret."  Unless, of course, it's Epson Salts that the poor boy needs.'

      At this reference to Epson Salts, young Jim broke into a peel of laughter all the more explosive because of the constraint imposed upon him by his proximity to the source of gloom behind the mutton.  Susan glanced with solicitude at Sebastian's reddening face, then frowned angrily at her brother, who didn't even notice it.

      'I'll cap your Tennyson with some Dante,' said Eustace, coming once again to Sebastian's relief.  'Do you remember?  In the fifth circle of Hell:

 

                                             Tristi fummo

                                             Nell' aer dolce che del sol s'allegra.

 

And because they were sad, they were condemned to pass eternity stuck there in the swamp; and their horrid little Weltschmerz came bubbling up through the mud, like marsh gas.  So you'd better be careful, my lad,' he concluded mock-menacingly, but with a smile which signified that he was entirely on Sebastian's side, and understood his feelings.

      'He needn't bother about the next world,' said Mrs Poulshot with a touch of asperity.  She felt strongly about this immortality nonsense - so strongly that she didn't like to hear it talked about, even in joke.  'I'm thinking about what'll happen to him when he's grown up.'

      Jim laughed again.  Sebastian's youthfulness seemed to him almost as funny as his possible need of a purge.

      That second laugh spurred Mr Poulshot into action.  Eustace, of course, was just a hedonist, and even from Alice he could really expect nothing better.  She had always (if was her only failing, but how enormous!) proved herself shockingly insensitive to his inner sufferings.  But Jim, happily, was different.  Unlike Edward and Marjorie, who in this respect were altogether too like their mother, Jim had always shown a decent respect and sympathy.  That he should now so far forget himself as to laugh twice, was therefore doubly painful - painful as an outrage to his sensibilities and an interruption to his sad and sacred thoughts; painful, too, because so disappointing, such a blow to one's faith in the boy's better nature.  Raising the eyes which he had kept so resolutely fixed upon his plate, Me Poulshot looked at his son with an expression of sorrow.  Jim flinched away from that reproachful regard and, to cover his confusion, filled his mouth with bread.  Almost in a whisper, Mr Poulshot spoke at last.

      'Do you know what day this is?' he asked.

      Anticipating the rebuke that was to come, Jim blushed and muttered indistinctly through the bread that he thought it was the twenty-seventh.

      'March the twenty-seventh,' Mr Poulshot repeated.  He nodded slowly and emphatically.  'This day, eleven years ago, your poor grandfather was taken from us.'  He looked fixedly for a few seconds into Jim's face, observing with satisfaction the symptoms of his discomfiture, then dropped his eyes and lapsed once again into silence, leaving the young man to feel ashamed of himself.

      At the other end of the table Alice and Eustace were laughing together over reminiscences of their childhood.  Mr Poulshot did his best to pity them for the frivolity that made them so heartlessly insensitive to the finer feelings of others.  'Forgive them, for they know not what they do,' he said to himself; then, closing his mind against their idle chatter, he addressed himself to the task of reconstructing in detail his negotiations, on the evening of March the twenty-seventh, 1918, with the undertaker.