The Parasites

  “It’s been dead too long, the age of chivalry,” said Charles. “If the flower of my generation had not been blown to bits in the war they would have brought it back again. Now it’s too late. So few of us are left.”

  The bride at St. George’s had worn white and silver. When she came down the steps afterwards her veil was thrown back, and people threw confetti. At the reception in Portland Place there were long tables filled with wedding presents. Great solid silver teapots. And trays. And lampshades. The bride and bridegroom stood at the end of a long drawing room to receive their guests. When the bride drove away to her honeymoon she had changed into a blue frock and she had a silver fox fur thrown round her shoulders. “That’s a wedding present too,” somebody had said to Maria. And the bride waved from the window of the car. She wore very new long white gauntlet gloves. Maria thought of the maid stretching them upstairs and giving them to the bride, with the suède bag, also a present, and she thought of all the tissue paper on the floor. And the bride smiling, not thinking of anything but driving away with the bridegroom in the car.

  “The trouble is,” Charles had said, “I always think Lancelot was a bit second-rate. The way he carried on with Guinevere. No doubt she led him on… But Parsifal was the best of the bunch. He was the chap who found the Holy Grail.”

  Maria Delaney… Maria Wyndham… The Hon. Mrs. Charles Wyndham…

  Twelve years ago. Twelve years was a long time. And the trouble was that she, Maria, was second-rate like Guinevere, and Charles was still Parsifal, looking for the Holy Grail. Parsifal was upstairs in the bathroom letting the water run away.

  “I don’t see,” said Maria unhappily, twisting Niall’s ring, “what I could have done to make it different, if we had the years again. At least I have been honest with Charles. Up to a point.”

  “What point?” said Niall.

  Maria did not answer. There was really nothing she could say.

  “You say I’m a chameleon,” she said at last. “Perhaps you’re right. It’s difficult to judge oneself. At least I’ve never pretended to be a good person. Really good, I mean, like Charles. I’ve pretended lots of other things, but never that. I’m bad, I’m shallow, I’m immoral, I cheat, I’m selfish, I’m often very stingy and frequently unkind. But I know it all. I don’t kid myself that I possess one single quality worth a damn. Isn’t that one thing in my favor? If I die tomorrow and there really is a God and I go and stand before Him and I say, ‘Sir,’ or whatever one does say to God, ‘here I am, Maria, and I am the lowest form of life,’ that would be honest. And honesty counts for something, doesn’t it?”

  “One doesn’t know,” said Niall. “That’s the frightful thing. One just does not know what goes down well with God. He may think honesty is a form of bragging.”

  “In that case I’m sunk,” said Maria.

  “I think you’re sunk, anyway,” said Niall.

  “I always hope,” said Celia, “that one’s sins may be forgiven one because of something one did years ago that was kind, and one has forgotten. Like the bit in the Bible: ‘Anyone who gives a child a cup of cold water in My Name will be forgiven.’ ”

  “I see what you mean,” said Maria, doubtfully, “but isn’t that allegorical? We must all have given the equivalent of cups of water to people. It’s just common politeness. If that’s all we have to do to be saved, why worry?”

  “Think of the unkind things we have forgotten,” said Niall. “Those are the ones that will be totted up against us. I sometimes wake up in the early morning and go quite cold thinking of all the things I must have done and can’t remember.”

  “Pappy must have taught you that,” said Celia. “Pappy had a fearful theory that when we die we go to a theater, and we sit down and see the whole of our lives re-acted before us. And nothing is omitted. Not one single, sordid detail. We have to watch it all.”

  “Really?” said Maria. “But how just like Pappy.”

  “It might be rather fun,” said Niall. “There are certain things I should like to see all over again.”

  “Certain things,” said Maria, “but not all. How dreadful when the play began to get near to something shaming, and one knew that in a few minutes or so one would see something absolutely—well…”

  “It depends who one was with,” said Niall. “Does one have to go to the theater alone, or didn’t Pappy say?”

  “He never said,” answered Celia. “Alone, I should imagine. Or perhaps with a few saints and angels. If there are angels.”

  “Dreary for the angels,” said Maria. “Worse than being a dramatic critic. Sitting through somebody’s interminable life.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Niall. “They probably quite enjoy it. And the word goes round if something very special is on. ‘I say, old boy, it ought to be pretty lurid tonight. Maria Delaney is on at eight-fifteen.’ ”

  “What nonsense,” said Celia. “As if saints and angels are like a lot of beady old men in a club. They would sit quite impassive. Above it all.”

  “In that case one wouldn’t mind them going,” said Maria. “They’d be just a row of dummies.”

  The door opened and we all three looked self-conscious, as we used to do as children when the grown-ups came into the room.

  It was Polly. She poked her head round the door. It was one of the habits that infuriated Niall. She never came right into the room.

  “The children look such ducks,” she said. “They’re in bed having their supper. They want you to go up, and say good night.”

  We felt this was fabrication. The children were perfectly happy by themselves. But Polly wanted us to go and see them. See their well-brushed, glossy hair, their shining faces, the red and blue dressing gowns that she had bought at Daniel Neal’s.

  “All right,” said Maria. “We’re going up to change, anyway.”

  “I meant to bath them for you, Polly,” said Celia, “but we’ve all been talking. I forgot it was so late.”

  “They wondered why you hadn’t come,” said Polly, “and I told them they mustn’t always expect Auntie Celia to run round after them. Auntie Celia likes to talk to Mummy and Uncle Niall.”

  The head vanished. The door closed. The cheerful footsteps pattered up the stairs.

  “That was a nasty crack,” said Niall. “A whole world of condemnation in her voice. I believe she has been listening at the door.”

  “I do feel guilty,” said Celia. “It is my thing at weekends to bath the children. Polly has so much to do.”

  “I think Polly would be the worst person to have in the stalls at the theater,” said Maria. “After one was dead, I mean. She would stare with stark disapproval at everything I have ever done from the cradle onwards. I can hear her gasp: ‘Oh, Mummy. Whatever is Mummy doing now?’ ”

  “It would be an education,” said Niall. “It would open new vistas.”

  “I don’t think she would understand half of it,” said Celia. “Like taking someone tone-deaf to hear Brahms.”

  “Nonsense,” said Niall. “Polly would have her eyes on sticks.”

  “Why Brahms?” said Maria.

  There was another footstep on the stairs. A heavy one this time. The footsteps paused outside the door of the drawing room, and then moved away to the dining room. There was the sound of a bottle being uncorked. Charles was decanting the wine.

  “He’s still in a bad mood,” said Maria. “If he was all right he would have come into the room.”

  “Not necessarily,” whispered Niall. “He always makes such a thing about the wine, and having the right temperature. I hope it’s some more of that Château Latour.”

  “Don’t whisper,” said Celia; “it makes us look so guilty. After all, nothing has happened. He’s only been for a walk.”

  She glanced hastily round the room. Yes, it was tidy. Niall had dropped the ash on the floor. She rubbed it in the carpet with her foot.

  “Come on, let’s go and change,” she said. “We can’t crouch here like criminals.”
r />   “I feel rather ill,” said Niall. “I have a chill coming on. Maria, can I have a tray in my room?”

  “No,” said Maria. “If anyone is going to have a tray upstairs it will be me.”

  “You neither of you need trays,” said Celia. “You’re both behaving like a couple of children. Maria, surely you are used to coping with a domestic crisis if Niall is not?”

  “I’m not used to coping with anything,” said Maria. “My path has always been made sweet for me.”

  “Then it’s time you trod on a few thorns,” said Celia. She opened the door and listened. There was silence in the dining room. Then the soft, gurgling sound of liquid being poured from a bottle into a glass decanter.

  “It’s Captain Hook,” whispered Niall, “poisoning the medicine.”

  “No, it’s my inside,” whispered Maria. “It always does that at rehearsals. At about half-past twelve, when I’m getting hungry.”

  “It reminds me of that awful time we all went down to Coldhammer to stay with Charles’s parents,” said Celia, “just after Maria came back from the honeymoon. And Pappy told Lord Wyndham the wine was corked.”

  “Lady Wyndham thought Freada was my mother,” said Niall. “The whole thing was disaster from start to finish. Freada left the bath-room tap running. The water came through the ceiling to the room below.”

  “But of course I remember now,” said Maria. “That’s when it must have started. That’s when it first began.”

  “When what started?” asked Celia.

  “Why, Charles being jealous of Niall,” said Maria.

  16

  When people play the game “Name three or four persons whom you would choose to have with you on a desert island,” they never choose the Delaneys. They don’t even choose us one by one as individuals. We have earned, not always fairly we consider, the reputation of being difficult guests. We hate staying in other people’s houses. We detest the effort of plunging into a new routine. Houses that are not ours, or where we have staked no claim, are like doctors’ houses, like dentists’ waiting rooms, like the waiting rooms at stations; we do not belong.

  We are unlucky too. We catch the wrong trains and arrive late for dinner. Soufflés are ruined. Or we hire cars and then have to ask if the driver can be put up in the village. All this causes a commotion. We stay up much too late at night, at least Niall does, especially if there is brandy, and in the morning we lie in bed until past twelve. The maids—if there are maids, and in the old days there used to be—never can get into our rooms.

  We hate doing the things our host and hostess want us to do. We loathe meeting their friends. Round games, cards, are abhorrent to us, and conversation worst of all. The only possible way of spending a weekend in another person’s house is to feign illness and hide all day in bed, or else to creep away into the garden.

  We are bad at tipping. And our clothes are always wrong. In fact, it is preferable never to stay away unless violently in love. Then, Niall said, it is always worth it, because of creeping along a passage at 3 a.m.

  When Maria first married Charles she stayed with him in house parties for about a year, because she was still acting her part of being the Hon. Mrs. Charles Wyndham. But she never really enjoyed it. Not after the first few times of floating downstairs in evening dress. The men always stayed in the dining room far too long, and there would be that interminable business of talking to the women, who, with eager lips, plied her with questions on the theater. In the daytime the men disappeared with guns, or dogs and horses, and because Maria could neither shoot nor ride, nor do anything at all, she would be left with the women once again. And that to Maria was hell.

  Celia’s problem would be a different one. People, finding her more sympathetic than either Niall or Maria, would pour out to her the story of their lives. “You have no idea what he does to me,” and she would find herself involved in another person’s troubles, her advice sought, her cooperation demanded, and it would be like a net closing round her from which there was no escape.

  Everyone tried hard to behave well, that time at Coldhammer. It was one of those invitations that were given hurriedly, probably without real intention, at Maria’s reception. The whole courtship and wedding had been a rush affair, the poor Wyndhams were bewildered, they had really had no time to sort out the Delaney brood. All that had sunk into their confused minds was that their beloved son had decided to marry the lovely, ethereal girl who was playing in the revival of Mary Rose, and she happened to be the daughter of Delaney, whose beautiful voice had always brought tears to Lady Wyndham’s eyes.

  “After all, the fellow is a gentleman,” Lord Wyndham must have said.

  “And she is such a darling,” must have been the echo of his wife.

  Lady Wyndham was tall and dignified, like an aristocratic hen, and her gracious manner had a curious frigidity about it, as though she had been dragooned into courtesy from birth. Maria declared that she was easy, and not a bit frightening; but when Maria said this Lady Wyndham had just given her a diamond bracelet and a pair of furs, and Maria was being starry-eyed as Mary Rose. Celia found Lady Wyndham forbidding and intense. She cornered Celia at the wedding reception and began to talk about the Thirty-nine Articles which Celia, in the first moment of madness, thought was some reference to the objects found in Tutenkhamon’s tomb. Only later, when she questioned Maria, did she discover that Lady Wyndham’s pet hobby horse was Prayer Book reform. Niall insisted that Lady Wyndham was perverted, and kept hidden in some secret closet, known only to herself, a riding whip and spurs.

  Lord Wyndham was a bustling, busy little man, a great stickler for time. He was always dragging out a watch, with a huge fob and chain, and consulting the dial, and then comparing it with other clocks and muttering under his breath. He never sat down. He was eternally restless. His day was one long program with every second filled.

  Lady Wyndham called him “Dobbin,” which was quite unsuitable. Perhaps it was this that had given Niall the idea about the riding whip and spurs.

  “You must come down to Coldhammer directly Charles and Maria return from Scotland,” Lady Wyndham said to Pappy, in the maelstrom of the wedding, and Maria, her small face hidden by an enormous bunch of lilies, said, “Yes, Pappy, please,” not thinking what she was saying, not considering, in the excitement of the moment, that to see Pappy at Coldhammer would be like wandering in a bishop’s rose garden and coming suddenly upon the naked Jove.

  Dynamic and robust, Pappy mixed well with kings and queens—especially those in exile—and Italian noblemen and French countesses, and the more Bohemian of what was termed London intelligentsia; but with the English “county”—and the Wyndhams were essentially “county”—Pappy seemed out of place. He was unaware of the fact. It was his family who suffered.

  “But of course we will come to Coldhammer,” said Pappy, who, towering above the other guests at the reception, dwarfed the assembly. “But I insist on sleeping in a four-poster bed. Can you produce one for me? I must sleep in a four-poster bed.”

  He had cried all through the wedding. Celia, on the return from the vestry, had to support him down the aisle. It might have been Maria’s funeral. But now, at the reception, champagne had worked revival. He glowed with love for all. He kissed complete strangers. The remark about the four-poster was a jest to be tossed aside. Lady Wyndham treated it as serious.

  “The Queen Anne suite has a four-poster,” she said, “but the rooms face north, over the drive. The view from the south is so much better, especially when our Prunus floribunda is in flower.”

  Pappy laid his finger against his nose. Then he bent down to Lady Wyndham’s ear.

  “Keep your Prunus floribunda for others,” he said in a loud whisper. “When I visit Coldhammer I expect only my hostess to be in flower.”

  Lady Wyndham remained unmoved. Not a flicker of understanding passed across her features.

  “I am afraid you are no gardener,” she said.

  “No gardener!” protested P
appy. “Flowers are my passion. All things that grow in Nature, my delight. When we were young, my wife and I used to wander barefoot in the meadows, sipping the dew from the lips of buttercups. I shall do it again, at Coldhammer. Celia shall wander with me. We will all wander together. How many of us do you invite? My stepson, Niall? My old love, Freada?”

  He waved a vague hand that seemed, in its largesse, to embrace a dozen heads.

  “Of course,” said Lady Wyndham, “bring who you wish. We have, at a pinch, put up eighteen…”

  A note of doubt crept into her voice. Aversion struggled with civility. As her eyes wandered towards Freada, wearing a more preposterous hat than usual, Niall knew she was trying to place the correct relationship between them all. Was Freada then a former wife and Niall her son? Or was everybody illegitimate? No matter. Let it pass. Manners came first. And Charles had married Maria, who at any rate seemed a sweet girl and so unspoiled.

  “We shall be delighted,” said Lady Wyndham, “to see the whole family. Shan’t we, Dobbin?”

  Lord Wyndham muttered something unintelligible and pulled out his watch.

  “What are they doing?” he said. “They ought to go and change. That’s the worst of these things. So much hanging about. Young people always will hang about.” He eyed the clock on the wall. “Is that clock right?” Nobody answered.

  And it was because of all this that the Delaneys found themselves at Coldhammer.

  It was one of those large, imposing houses of indeterminate age, begun possibly before the Tudors and never finished. Wings had been thrown out from time to time. There were flights of steps at the front door, and pillars. The house was separated from the park into which it was plunged by a wide ditch, referred to by the Wyndhams as a “ha-ha.” The pleasure grounds lay at the back of the house, southward, beyond a terrace. Maria used to wonder, after the first flush of excitement had died down, what pleasure had ever been obtained from them. There were too many winding paths raked by assiduous gardeners, and the formal yew hedges, blanketing the view, were clipped every few yards or so into the tortured shapes of cocks. Nothing grew “au naturel.” Everything was planned. Two roaring lions of stone flanked the terrace on either side, their mouths wide open in a perpetual snarl. Even the spinney, the only possible walk on a wet day, which looked in the distance like a Rackham drawing, was spoiled in the center by a lily-pond that had no business to be there, beside which squatted a great toad in lead.