Walcot

‘Oh, you’re so jealous of your poor sister,’ Mary exclaimed. ‘It’s a horrible trait in you!’

Uncle Claude Hillman gave your father a wink. ‘The kid was queer, wasn’t he? ’Nuff to make anyone hang themselves.’

Your Auntie Violet had her own slant on the matter, saying to Bertie, ‘Well, plants die from lack of sunlight. The poor kid died from lack of love and understanding, didn’t he? They aren’t exactly elements in which your flipping family specializes, are they, Bert?’

You can understand that at this time your mind was a confusion of ill-digested thoughts. You were of an age when your perceptions were extended, when it seemed to you that every day you climbed a new metaphorical hill. You had anxieties about what was truth, what false. You were keen to bring a possible life as a geologist into line with probity of character. Many connections had to be made, many decisions confronted you.

After leaving school, you went up to Birmingham University to study the new discipline of Earth Sciences. You knew of no other university offering such a course. You were proud to be an early student, and worked hard.

During your first term in Birmingham, your Aunt Violet came to visit you, to see how you were getting on. You were ashamed to take her to your digs, but Violet seemed not to mind. ‘I like the poster,’ she said, admiring the portrait of Che Guevara hanging on your wall. There she stood, perfectly at ease in the scruffy room. Your Aunt Violet was brightly clothed in something beaded and flowing. Gipsy earrings swung from her ears. She wore silk stockings and red, high-heeled shoes. You were overwhelmed by her appearance and hoped all your new friends saw you with this illustrious relation.

She removed, with meticulous care, your soiled shirts and pants from your rickety chair. She pushed aside some paperbacks and scribbled-on pieces of paper, to make a space on the table.

‘I’ve brought you some plonk, Steve, dear,’ she said, setting down on your table a brown paper carrier bag containing a bottle of red wine. ‘I assume you drink?’

‘Of course.’ You did not wish to appear other than adult before this sophisticated aunt. The fact was that you had tasted beer and had not liked it, and the group of young men you mixed with proclaimed themselves Communists and were abstemious (and saw no contradiction in that).

Violet gingerly settled her behind down on your chair, tipped it back, put her feet up on the table edge, showing an extent of shapely leg as she did so, and eased off her high heels, so that they hung loose from her stockinged toes. She asked you what you were getting up to, now that you were free of parental control. You replied, ‘I’m considering disowning my pater. I have already disowned God. My pater has been a bad and repressive influence. I reject his way of life. You know him, auntie, and I am sure you dislike him.’

‘No, I don’t really dislike Martin. I feel a bit sorry for the old blighter.’

‘Feeling sorry for people does no one any good.’ How grown up you were being.

‘And your mother has a bit of a mental problem, as I suppose you know. Well, like poor old Bertie, in a way.’

Bertie was her husband, your mother’s younger brother. But you were uninterested in Violet’s troubles. You spoke instead of your own troubles.

You addressed her as if she were a meeting.

‘You see, auntie, I have reached the conclusion that money should not be inherited. When a person dies, his estate, if there is one, should pass to the government. Within one or two generations, we would see a complete reformation of society. The public exchequers could then finance massive projects in housing and health and education. We might then expect a general moral reformation. Also, women have to be liberated from housework. Their intellects are limited at present.’

Violet gave a little laugh. ‘That’s certainly true of my intellect.’

She added, ‘But who’s going to put up with handing over their property to some government department? Not me, old sport.’

‘Auntie, perhaps you don’t realize,’ you were being ponderously patient, ‘that thirty-one per cent of the inhabitants of Britain live below the poverty line. Thirty-one per cent! That’s disgraceful. That has to be rectified, in the name of justice. And humanity.’

Violet produced a cigarette and threw you one. You went over to get a light from her.

‘Aren’t things just as bad in Russia, where you get your ideas from?’ she said, indifferently.

You then had to lecture her on basic economics. She sat there not listening, her pretty little chin in the air.

You embarrass me by recalling what I said on that occasion. What a prig I was! Do not feel embarrassed. You were attempting to digest recently learned facts and trying on what personality suited you best. We understand that adolescence is a difficult time.

‘Don’t believe what the capitalist press tells you about Russia, auntie. You’re living under an illusion.’ You were bending over your aunt to light a second cigarette. It did not occur to you to offer her a mug of instant coffee.

‘I say, aunt, what beautiful legs you have.’

She looked up, giving you a flirtatious glance. Smiling she said, ‘That’s none of your business.’

‘I wish it was, really.’

Violet removed her feet from the table and tucked them under her skirt. She announced there was something serious she wanted to talk to you about. Then she said, ‘Oh, I can’t. I’m made for the frivolous life. Besides, you’re almost grown up now. You’re safe.’

‘What were you going to tell me, aunt, dear?’

She waved an elegant hand. ‘Doesn’t matter. There’s going to be another war soon. You’ll have to go, darling – serve King and country. Give your old aunt a kiss.’

You put an arm round her neck and kissed her lingeringly. An erection sprang up in your trousers. You knew she saw the effect she had on you.

She said, teasingly, ‘You are a big boy! I’d better go, sweetie.’

She stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette. She put her shoes on. She gave you a straight look, serious but affectionate. ‘Toodle-pip,’ she said. You thought as she left how old-fashioned it was to say ‘Toodle-pip’.

It was going to be a long while before you saw your aunt again. You would then be adult, war-hardened. But first you had to attend a funeral.

7

The New Widow

It was on the first day of April, 1939, that the Spanish Civil War ended. General Franco’s forces had triumphed. ‘Fascists!’ your father had been shouting for some time. But not on that particular day. For on that particular day, he was standing with his mother, Elizabeth Fielding, by the bedside of his father, Sidney Vawes Fielding, in the Southampton hospital.

Old Sidney had been lying in a white-tiled cell, on a raised bed. He had been enjoying a last puff of a cigarette, clutching the cylinder in shaky purple hands. His countenance was the colour of the hospital pillow supporting his head. He suddenly raised that head from the pillow with a startled look, eyes bulging. ‘I mean to say –’, he began, only to fall back again, dead.

He had suffered from gastritis and lung cancer. He was sixty-nine years old.

Elizabeth clutched his cold, gnarled hand with both of her delicate ones. ‘Good-bye, my dear … my faithful husband,’ she said, in her clear, but hesitant tones. This was after she had suffered her stroke.

Elizabeth Fielding had a more distinguished look about her than the majority of her clan. It could not be said that this was because of any particular facial feature, although her high forehead and delicate nostrils and lips were attractive. Her pile of white hair, secured by a small black velvet bow, gave her an impressive air. But her distinction lay more in the way she held herself stiffly erect. She had always been a silent sort of person, which had made you, when you were a small boy, fearful of her. The impediment in her speech, a result of the stroke, had hardly made her more garrulous. The family had not been accustomed to taking much notice of Elizabeth. If she resented this attitude, she wisely did not show it. She had, however, begun to show some partiality towards you, as if recognizing in your small person someone whose potentials were also overlooked.

In need of a degree of security, Elizabeth had married Sidney Fielding knowing him to be intellectually her inferior, as well as some years older than she. She tried to conceal this knowledge from Sidney, but such knowledge leaks out in many ways.

Sidney was never entirely satisfied with his wife, finding her often critical. He failed to relish her criticism as a way of advancing his own appreciation of the finer points of life. And so to their children, Martin and his brothers and sisters, that hidden dissatisfaction had a way of working through and shadowing their lives also. As to Martin and Mary’s children, you often held beliefs that cast a shadow over what should have been your contentment, and their acceptance of you.

Various members of the family were summoned for Sidney Fielding’s funeral. So the funeral took place a week after his death, on the day when Mussolini, having annexed Abyssinia, invaded Albania. This fresh sign of the rottenness of Europe was scarcely noticed by the Fielding and Wilberforce families. Or by you, for at fifteen you were enmeshed in the agonies and joys of your first love affair. You were pursuing Gale Roberts, who was proving by turns joky and elusive, affectionate and indifferent. This female behaviour was totally inscrutable to you. What Gale desired from day to day remained baffling; whereas all you desired was to get a hand up her skirt.

This problem had to be shelved on the seventh of April, when you and your sister stood by your parents’ side at your grandfather’s grave. Your heads were bowed. You wished to be sad, but Sonia kept nudging and winking at you, and exclaiming ‘Shuggerybees!’ After the ceremony, the two families, together with friends and spouses, gathered in your father’s house for drinks and refreshments. They were greeted on the doorstep as they arrived by joyous barking from Gyp. Joy Frost, terrified of dogs, ran back to the car for refuge, and took some coaxing before she reappeared on the scene. ‘Shut the confounded dog in the greenhouse,’ demanded Mary. Although you loved Gyp greatly, you did as she ordered, smoothing his noble head before shutting him in.

Emma, the maid, served tea as soon as the guests came in. All were dressed in black, making family likenesses more apparent, the Wilberforces with their sallow complexions, the Fieldings with their aquiline noses, the Frosts with their tendency to be undershot, the Hillmans – or Claude at least – with their flushed faces and broken-veined cheeks.

Your parents’ house gave off a slight greenish tinge. There were thick old green velvet curtains at the downstairs windows, destined to serve as blackout curtains during the war then looming. The furniture was heavy, and some of it shabby. It had been bought on the never-never at Heal’s in London, shortly after Martin and Mary had married. The pictures on the walls of the living room showed Sopwith Camels and other ancient aeroplanes manoeuvring in clear blue skies. Mary had striven to brighten the room with bowls of flowers strategically placed, as advised in the pages of Amateur Gardening, to which she subscribed.

You were forced into the company of Joey and Terry, the two sons of Aunt Ada, your father’s sister. Ada was there, still rather weepy from the graveside, with her husband, Claude Hillman, who was at this time of his life a stockbroker. Claude, your father always said, was ‘a bit of a bounder’.

‘Cheer up, old ducks,’ Claude told Ada. ‘Old Sid’s time was up. He had a good run for his money, didn’t he?’

‘Oh, Claude, truly, “in the midst of life we are in death”.’

He thrust his rubicund face at hers. ‘Rubbish! In the midst of life we are in need of drink. Death’ll have to wait until I’ve got a noggin in me.’

There had been a time a few months earlier when you had gone to play with Joey and Terry. They had stuck their hands in the pockets of their shorts and put their round, sand-coloured heads together. They contemplated you before asking, in no friendly terms, ‘Do you know the system, sport?’

‘What system is that?’ you asked.

Terry had looked at Joey. Joey had looked at Terry. ‘He asks what system,’ they said to each other. Then, to you, ‘Why, mathematics, of course. Do you know what numbers are for?’

‘They’re for counting,’ you said, sulky under such interrogation.

And the two boys had laughed. They showed you a blackboard in their den. On the blackboard, cabbalistic signs mixed with numbers. Some signs were enclosed by chalk squares. Arrows indicated directions. You were impressed that they had various coloured chalks.

‘What’s all this “DOBD” in these red squares?’ you asked.

Terry sniggered behind a grubby hand. ‘Do or Be Done, of course.’

Summoning a protective indifference, you remarked that that was silly.

‘It’s our future. It’s our system. We don’t expect you to understand.’

But you had stayed for lunch in their house. Aunt Ada served cold stuffed veal with small new potatoes, cold, and a salad of crisp, sharp cos lettuce. Ada was a little woman with pale lips, very neat with her hair and clothes. Later on, not very surprisingly, Claude would leave Ada.

To see these two boys now in your own house, rapidly gobbling the snacks, aroused your hostility.

‘Are you two still playing about with your stupid system?’ you asked Joey.

‘Our dad met Bertrand Russell,’ Joey said, proudly.

It seemed unanswerable at the time.

Accompanying Claude and Ada were the Frosts. Joy Frost with pigtails, tied for the occasion with black ribbons, was Claude’s younger sister. Her husband, Freddie Frost, adolescent in appearance, was regarded by the Fieldings as being rather loud. He was being rather loud now, saying cheerfully to Archie over his shoulder, as Emma poured more wine into his glass, ‘Well, there’s another one fallen off the old perch, eh, what?’

He nudged his brother Archie in the ribs in order to encourage him to share in the joke – Archie being always, in Freddie’s judgement, too serious and quiet.

‘Show some respect,’ said Archie. ‘Try the sausage rolls and shut up.’

You heard a good deal of shutting up in those days.

Of these Frosts, Joy at sixteen seemed to suffer the most grief. Her nose had been reddened by constant applications of a small handkerchief during the funeral. She confided now to her Aunt Ada, ‘I’ve never been touched by death before – apart from the odd hamster.’ Ada pressed her niece’s hand. ‘I know, my dear.’ She repeated herself, saying, ‘“In the midst of life we are in death” – including hamsters.’

Meanwhile, Mary was welcoming in her stodgy older brother, Jeremy, who was looking about him for the fount and source of alcohol. ‘Poor old pop, Mary,’ he said heavily, laying a hand on her shoulder. ‘Gone to his eternal rest, as they say. Still, not a bad life, I suppose. He certainly came up in society, didn’t he?’ He gave a short laugh.

‘That’s not a very nice way of putting it.’ But it appeared your mother’s thoughts were elsewhere, for she went on to say that she had heard on the radio that when certain kings could no longer satisfy their wives, they were put to death, or else the crops failed. She believed this was in some African tribe or other.

‘Don’t see what you are on about,’ said Jeremy. ‘We’re no African tribe. Pop wasn’t black, thank goodness.’

His younger brother Jack agreed, but said, sotto voce, ‘No disrespect, please, Jeremy. Not in Mother’s hearing.’ He nodded towards Elizabeth.

‘But I didn’t respect him. He gave me a rotten childhood.’ However, Jeremy had lowered his voice to make this pronouncement. ‘Poor old bugger, all the same.’

Claude was interested in another kind of respect. He grabbed his two sons and addressed them confidentially. ‘You two better behave respectfully to your grandmother. I happen to know that all of Granddad’s money is left to her, so be nice to the old girl.’

‘Will she be rich, dad?’ Joey asked.

‘Stinking rich, my boy. Stinking rich. So watch it!’

‘Will we be rich, dad?’ Terry asked.

Claude closed one eye. ‘You go to work on it, old lad.’

All round the room and into the nearby breakfast room, muttered family conversations went on, the family being semi-glad to be called together.

‘I don’t know Hunstanton,’ Jack Wilberforce proclaimed, as if bestowing a signal honour on the town he named.

Jeremy said, before holding out his glass for a refill as Emma came round with the bottle, ‘I always felt a bit sorry for mum.’

‘He gave Liz a hard time,’ Flo agreed. ‘She had more intelligence than Sidney, that was the problem.’

The lady referred to as Liz was the newly widowed Elizabeth, sitting alone in a corner of the room. Mary and Martin had escorted Elizabeth to a sofa, donkey brown and genuine leather, where she sat poised and elegant in her sweeping black dress. She wore a wide-brimmed black hat with a white rose attached to the brim. Elizabeth was in her late forties; her face, with its sharp features, was utterly pale, utterly composed, as she looked about the room.

Since her stroke, the old lady kept her ebony walking stick to hand; but the sofa suited her well enough because it had a high seat, from which it was easy to rise without assistance.

You went over to speak to her. ‘I’m so sorry, Granny dear. Granddad will be greatly missed.’ You added, ‘By you, most of all.’

‘It is character … istic of your mother,’ she began, ‘to wear a dress which fits – which does not fit, I should say – her. Properly.’

‘Yes, Granny, but –’

She reached out and clutched your hand. ‘Yes, it’s about your granddad sad. But the over war … the Civil War Spanish is over. We must be small mercies. Grateful for –’

She paused, gazing upwards, searching for a word.

‘Small mercies?’ you suggested.

Later in life, you would come greatly to respect your grandmother. Moreover, it grew to be your opinion that Elizabeth was the one scholarly member of the family, apart from Jeremy’s wife, Flo. Your grandmother, in your view and that of others, had not been well treated by her husband Sidney. Sidney had been too busy making money to care properly for his grand wife – or for her intellect.

Elizabeth had suffered her stroke three years earlier. Her intellect had carried her through. Sonia affected to be scared of the speech impediment. As Sonia happened to be passing, you grabbed her arm and made her say hello to her grandmother.

‘Oh, I thought you didn’t want to talk to me, Granny,’ said Sonia, grinning and rocking her body back and forth in an idiotic way.

‘Why should I … why not wish … to talk to you, child?’ asked Elizabeth, scrutinizing Sonia with some interest.

‘I thought perhaps you did not like hunchbacked children, Granny.’ Sonia made an awful grimace as she said this.

‘On the cont … on the contrary. I adore hunchbacks, child. Remind me of your name.’

‘Oh,’ Sonia gazed at the floor. ‘I am sister to the adorable Valerie, who was perfect and not hunchbacked. Little Valerie-Wallerie was the world’s most perfect child.’

You reassured your grandmother, pointing a finger to your temple, working it back and forth as if to drill into your brain. ‘Sonia is a bit touched, Grandma. It runs in the family.’

Elizabeth made no direct reply to this remark, although she flashed at you something that could have been a smile of understanding. She fished in her handbag, took out a cigarette case and extracted a cigarette. When she had lit it and blown a plume of smoke from her nostrils, she said, not looking at you, but gazing rather into the room, where her relations were milling about, ‘Why are your Uncle Bertie and Auntie Violet not here? Why did they not attend Sidney’s funeral?’

‘I’m afraid Mother doesn’t approve of them. Well, at least she doesn’t approve of Auntie Violet. She told Auntie she was not welcome.’

You did not add that you had asked your mother why she did not want Auntie Violet in the house. To which she had replied, loftily, that she was a good judge of character.

‘Violet wears good clothes. Wears well. Them well,’ said Elizabeth, now.

‘Yes, but Mum says they are too expensive.’

The old lady inspected your face. ‘Violet, I recall … Violet criticized your Uncle Jeremy. Jeremy’s of his son, deplorable treatment. Poor Sid. Rightly so, to my mind. It’s as well to speak. Brave to speak, um, out. A necessary adjunct. I say, adjunct of civiliz … our civilization.’

Lamely, you said, ‘We were all upset about Sad Sid.’

‘Suicide. Suicide is … sorry, suicide is always a family … A criticism, I mean to say, of the family.’

‘We are a funny family, I must agree,’ said Sonia. ‘Look at their faces! But our sausage rolls are good. May I get you one, Granny?’

‘No, thank you. Valerie.’

‘No, sorry Granny.’ Sonia vigorously shook her head. ‘I’m Sonia, thanks very much. And I’m alive. Valerie is the one who is not alive.’

‘I see.’ Elizabeth spoke gravely, looking into Sonia’s face. ‘And was not Valerie also hunchbacked?’

‘Oh, heavens no! Valerie was perfect, Granny. Everyone knows that. That was why she died, so they say. Died of perfection, like Jesus on the Cross. In fact, I believe I saw her at your husband’s graveside.’ She pressed her fingers to her lips. ‘Sorry, shouldn’t have mentioned gravesides.’

Elizabeth nodded thoughtfully, but she could not restrain a smile. ‘Well then, Sonia, you should go far in life, and get into a lot of trouble on the way.’

She dismissed the subject. Again the inspection of your face. You liked your grandmother’s intelligence, while finding it alarming at times. Her face still bore traces of a smile.

‘I hope you learnt something. Stephen. From Sad Sid’s death. Unlike your cheeky little sister.’

‘Valerie?’

‘Sonia.’

‘I still feel bad about it, Gran.’

‘Feeling bad is the same. Is not the same as something. Learning something.’ She changed the subject abruptly. She tapped the end of her cigarette on the rim of a brass ashtray, which was secured in the middle of a weighted leather strap so that it hung comfortably over the arm of the sofa on which she was sitting. ‘But that you know.’

She murmured the sentence to herself again, perhaps checking to see that she had got it right. ‘But that you know.’

‘Why should your mother have a say? Have a say over whether or not one attended? Attended.’ She seemed momentarily to be stuck on the word. ‘If her brothers and his wife attended … attended his father’s funeral? Particularly when Sidney had a special. Special affection for Bertie. If you remember, dear, Bertie in his youth. In his youth, he flew … where?’

‘Kabul,’ you said.

‘Oh dear, I must go,’ said Sonia. ‘I’ve just remembered something.’ She slipped away, saying, ‘I just want to see if Gyp has died in the greenhouse.’

‘Yes. Kabul,’ Elizabeth echoed. She watched Sonia’s retreat with a slight smile. ‘It’s in Africa, I believe.’

‘Afghanistan, Granny.’

‘Of course. Quite right.’

You had no answer to her larger question. You knew only that, in the days preceding the funeral, terrible arguments had broken out between your parents. Some weeks earlier, Mary had ventured a few critical remarks regarding Violet to Violet’s husband, Bertie. She told him that Violet was ‘spendthrift’, and had added the damning word ‘gallivanting’. Bertie had become furious, vowing he would not speak to his sister again. Nothing had been said on that occasion about Violet’s criticisms regarding the causes of Sad Sid’s suicide; indeed, the word ‘suicide’ had proved too terrible to utter. In an endeavour to settle the quarrel, Martin had phoned Jack, Mary’s other brother, asking him to intervene. Jack had accused Martin of going behind his sister’s back. So a thunderous family row had developed, about which you knew nothing, walking into frosty silences as into a brick wall. Mary had said, ‘I don’t care who’s died, I won’t have that Violet here, flaunting her new clothes about the place! Neglecting her children! Making eyes at all the men!’ And that ended the matter.