The Blessing

  Some friends of Hughie’s now came in, accompanied by two charming little boys. They said ‘hullo’, looked with interest at Sigi, and went through to another room. ‘See you later, perhaps.’

  ‘They look rather nice,’ said Grace to Miles. ‘Do you know them?’

  ‘Who, Stocker?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes, he’s in my house.’

  ‘Is he nice?’ she persevered.

  ‘He’s just a boy.’

  ‘Yes, I see. And the other?’

  ‘The other one is a tug. We must only hope Badger-Skeffington doesn’t see him. Badger-Skeffington is the scourge of the tugs.’

  ‘What is a tug?’ said Sigi.

  ‘Somebody a bit brighter in the head than the rest,’ said Grace, to tease Hughie. He was suddenly very much on her nerves. They had been too much lately at Yeotown, she thought, and decided they must have a few days in London, though no doubt Sigi would complain dreadfully at being dragged away from his riding and all the games.

  After luncheon they went with Miles to his house, and there they followed him through a rabbit warren of passages and up and down little dark staircases. A deathly silence reigned.

  ‘How empty it all seems,’ said Grace. ‘Where’s everybody?’

  ‘Having boys’ dinner.’

  ‘Very late.’

  ‘Yes, well, it doesn’t make much difference. Late or early there’s literally nothing to eat.’

  Miles’s room, when they finally got to it, was extraordinarily bare and bleak. The walls were beige, the window curtains orange, and a black curtain hung from ceiling to floor in one corner. Over the empty fireplace there was a valedictory poem, illuminated and framed, on the closing of the Derby racecourse.

  There’ll be no more racing at Derby

  It rings indeed like a knell, etc., etc.

  It was terribly cold, colder than winter. Grace sat on the only chair, huddling into her fur coat, and the others stood round her as if she were a stove.

  ‘Is this your bedroom?’ Sigi said, taking in every detail.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Is there a bed?’ If he had been told that Miles slept on a heap of rags on the floor, like the concierges in Poland, he would not have been at all surprised.

  ‘Here, of course,’ said Miles scornfully. He lifted the black curtain to disclose an iron instrument against the wall. ‘You pull it down at night, and the boys’ maid makes it. And now, Uncle Hughie, if you’ll excuse me, I must go off and do my time. Will you wait here or what?’

  ‘I’m so terribly cold,’ Grace said imploringly to Hughie. ‘Couldn’t we go home?’

  ‘Well, rather bad luck on Miles when we’ve come to take him out. His time won’t last more than three-quarters of an hour, you know.’

  ‘Give him two pounds, he won’t mind a bit,’ she whispered.

  ‘Oh I say, Uncle Hughie, thanks very much. Are you going, then?’ he said, in tones of undisguised relief. ‘Good-bye. Will you excuse me? – I shall be late.’ He clattered away down the passage.

  ‘Really, Grace – two pounds! I usually give him ten bob.’

  ‘I’ll go shares,’ she said, ‘put it on the bridge book. Worth it to me, I was dying of cold simply.’

  The visit to Eton finished off Hughie’s chances of marrying Grace for ever. Sigismond had seen a red light, and immediately took action.

  ‘Mummy!’

  ‘Hullo – you’re early this morning!’

  ‘Well yes, I’ve got something rather important to say. You know Hughie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were you thinking of marrying him?’

  ‘Why, darling?’

  ‘The Nannies always say you will.’

  ‘Would you like me to?’

  ‘That’s just the point. I would not.’

  ‘Oh – Sigi –!’

  ‘No use pretending, I would not.’

  ‘Very well, darling. I promise I’ll never marry anybody you don’t like. And now just go and tell Nanny to pack, will you? We’re going up to London after luncheon.’

  Sigi gave his mother a nice hug and trotted off. He was not at all dissatisfied to find himself later in the day on the road back to London. The riding and the games had been great fun, but if they were to lead to the prison house, whose shades he had now seen for himself, they simply were not worth it.

  10

  All this time the Captain had been going on with his pursuit of Grace, and of course he too had seen that, if there were a way to her heart, that heart so curiously absent, it would be through Sigismond.

  ‘Bring him to Sir Theseus on Thursday afternoon,’ he said.

  ‘My dear Captain – is Phèdre very suitable for little boys?’

  ‘Exquise Marquise, what about the Matinée Classique at the Français – is it not full of little boys seeing Phèdre?’

  ‘All right then,’ she said. It was a comfort to her to be with somebody who knew about the Matinée Classique and other features of French life. Hughie, in spite of all his efforts to educate himself in the Albertine days, had never really got much further than the Ritz bar, and now his love for everything French had turned to unreasonable hatred. Whenever Grace spoke to him of France he would say horrid little things which annoyed her. Like many large, bluff, and apparently good-natured men, Hughie had a malevolent side to his character, and knew exactly how to stick a pin where it hurt. He was always exceedingly catty about the Captain, who spoke, however, rather charmingly of him.

  ‘Why does he hate her so much?’ asked Sigi, as Hyppolitus recoiled in homosexual horror before the advancing Phaedra.

  ‘Because she’s his stepmother.’

  ‘Oh. If Papa married Madame Marel would she be my stepmother and would I hate her?’

  ‘Sh – darling, don’t talk so loud, it’s rude to the actors.’

  She couldn’t very well have said it was disturbing to the audience. A beautiful, hot day, one of the very few that summer, had not been helpful in filling the Matinée Classique with little scholars of modern psychological drama, and the theatre was empty. Three or four members of the Crew sat about, balefully watching Grace through their hair; the Captain, who always said he preferred to see his plays from the back of the gallery, an excellent alibi, was having a guilty sun-bath on the roof of his house.

  ‘Mum?’ Sigi was wriggling about, bored.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Where’s Hyppolitus’s own mummy?’

  ‘I’m not sure, I think she’s dead, we must ask the Captain.’

  ‘Mummy? Sir Theseus what?’

  ‘You must ask the Captain that too.’

  ‘Well – what’s happened to Hyppolitus now?’

  ‘Darling, try and pay attention. Didn’t you hear Theramenus saying how he had fallen off his bicycle and been run over by a lorry?’

  ‘Coo! Phaedra is upset and no mistake.’

  ‘Don’t say coo. I’m always telling you.’

  ‘Mummy, why has Sir Theseus adopted Hara-See?’

  ‘I suppose he feels rather lonely, now everybody seems to be dead.’

  ‘Will he have to make over some of his money to Hara-See?’

  ‘I don’t know. Here’s the Captain, you must ask him.’

  The Captain took them backstage and showed them the machinery, switchboard, and so on, all of which interested Sigi a great deal more than the play. After this he was allowed the run of the Royal George, to the displeasure of the younger members of the Crew, who had seen through their hair exactly how the land lay. Phaedra, however, took a great fancy to Sigi and spoilt him.

  The Captain’s courtship, meanwhile, was not making much real progress. He was hampered in it by Grace’s failure to attract him sexually, by a shyness and feeling of discomfort in her presence that he never seemed to get over. While it may be possible to do without sex in married life, he began to realize that it is very difficult to propose to a beautiful young woman without ever having had any physical contact with her
. A little rumpling and cuddling bridges many an awkward gulf. In fact it now seemed to him as if the impossibility of cuddling Grace was endangering his whole heavenly scheme. He blamed her bitterly for it. Why should she be so stiff and remote? Why not unbend, make things easier for him? It was very hard. He had thought so much, during many a wakeful night, of all that marriage with her would bring. The laurels of Madame Victoire, the griffins and castles of Madame de Pompadour, the dolphins and the fleur-de-lis; Château Yquem, Chambolle-Musigny, Mouton Rothschild. He could feel, he could see, he could taste them. Sometimes he thought that he would break down and cry like a child if all this and much more were to elude his grasp, simply because of his inability to grasp the waist of Grace.

  Nothing was going well for the Captain at this time. Subscriptions to the Royal George were falling off at a disquieting rate, various creditors were pressing their claims, Sir Theseus could obviously not be made to run much longer, and, worst of all, the Crew was in a chronic bad temper. Only old Phaedra was nice to him now, but her varicose veins had got worse and the doctor said she must give up the kitchen while she was playing this long and arduous role. So he was at the mercy of the others for his comforts, and they gave expression to their feelings through the medium of housework. Smash and burn were the order of the day. His home life had never been so wretched.

  It now became imperative to find another play with which to replace Sir Theseus. The Crew pushed their hair out of their eyes and read quantities of manuscripts, many of them in the original Catalan, Finnish, or Bantu, and wrote résumés of them for the Captain to see. He had told them, and indeed in their hearts they knew it, that this time they must put on something which would sell a few seats. ‘For once,’ he said, ‘try and find a play with a plot. I believe that would help. Something, for once, that the critics could understand.’

  One bright spot in the Captain’s life just then was how well he was getting on with Sigismond. The little boy hung about the theatre, thoroughly stage-struck, and told his mother, who of course repeated it, that he revered the Captain second only to M. l’Abbé.

  The Captain, on his side, was entranced. Knowing as he did no children of that age, Sigi appeared to him a perfect miracle of grace and intelligence. He kept begging to be given a part in a play, and the Captain thought that, if something suitable could be found, it would be from every point of view a good idea. The child had received a great deal of publicity for having ridden the cheval de Marly, he was very pretty, possibly very talented, and the whole thing would bring the Captain into continual contact with Grace. Sitting with her in his box on the first night, both feeling rather emotional, it might suddenly become possible for him to take her hand, to press her knee, even to implant a kiss on a naked shoulder when nobody was looking.

  Now it so happened that a certain member of the Crew had been teasing the Captain for quite a long time to put on a play she had translated from some Bratislavian dialect, and of which the protagonist was a little boy of ten. The Captain had read her translation, which, he thought, probably failed to convey the fiery poetry and political subtleties of the original. In English it seemed rather dreary. But now this play was being very much discussed on the Continent. It was put on in Paris, where it had a mixed reception, and was said to have run clandestinely for several months in Lvov. The Captain, with Sigi in mind, decided to have another look at it.

  It was called The Younker. An old Communist, whose days had been spent wringing a livelihood from the bitter marsh land round his home, lay on his bed, ageing. He lay alone because, so ungovernable was his temper, no human dared approach him. His dog, a famous mangler, lay snarling by the empty hearth. His only son had married a foreign Fascist woman; for this he had turned him out. The son had gone to the foreign Fascist woman’s land and there had died. The old man kept his savings in gold in a pot under his bed, and it came upon him that he would like to give this pot, before he died and before the Party got it, to his son’s son, and that he would like to see this child before his old eyes failed. The younker arrived. He was a manly little fellow, not at all awed by his grandfather’s ungovernable rages, or by his grandfather’s dog, the mangler. Indeed he went everywhere with his little hand resting on its head. He brought love into that house, and presently he brought his mother, the Fascist woman, and she made the bed, which had never been made before. And by degrees this child, this innocent, loving little creature, bridged even the great political gap between his mother and his grandfather. They joined a middle-of-the-road party and all ended in happiness.

  The Captain began to see possibilities in this play if it could be altered and adapted according to an idea he had, and put on with Sigi in the name part. The great difficulty would be to get round the Crew; if only he could achieve that he foresaw a box-office success at last.

  He called a conference on the stage after the Saturday matinée. The Crew sat about in high-necked sweaters, shorts, and bare, blue feet, their heads bowed and their faces entirely obscured by the curtain of hair. Though he did not know it, they were in a dangerous mood. They had hardly set eyes on the Captain of late, either at home or in his theatre; he had been, they knew, to many parties, in rich, bourgeois houses, with Grace. Rumour even had it that he had been seen in Sir Conrad’s box at the Ascot races. None of this had done him much good with his Crew.

  The Captain began by saying that it was quite essential for the Royal George to have a monetary success. If it did not, he pointed out, they would no longer be able to satisfy their serious public with plays that they alone were brave enough to produce. They would, in fact, be obliged to shut their doors and put out their lights and close, leaving a very serious gap in the intellectual life of London. The Crew knew that all this was so. They sat quite still listening. The Captain went on to praise Fiona very highly for her translation of The Younker. He said he had been re-reading it, that it was very good, that he thought it would do. He then branched off into a disquisition on the psychology of audiences through the ages.

  ‘The two greatest dramatists of the modern world,’ he said, ‘are Shakespeare and Racine.’

  There was no sign of life from the figures round him; faceless and dumb, bowed immovably over their bare, blue feet, they waited for him to go on. The Captain knew that had he said Sartre and Lorca there would have been some response, a tremor, perhaps, parting the silky blonde curtains, or a nodding of the veiled heads. No such tremor, no such nodding, occurred. He began to feel nervous, to wonder whether he was going to fail in what he was attempting. But he had never failed, as yet, to master his Crew, and he thought all would be well.

  ‘Now Shakespeare and Racine,’ he went on, nervously for him, ‘understood the psychology of the playgoer, and they both knew that there are two things that audiences cannot resist. The first (and if we are to take a lesson from these great men, as I think we should, this will give scope to Ulra when designing her set) is the appeal of the past. The second, I am afraid, discloses a weakness in human nature, a weakness which exists as strongly today as it did in the 17th century. Not to put too fine a point on it, audiences like a lord. Shakespeare knew what he was about, that can’t be denied. You’ll hardly find a single commoner in Shakespeare’s plays, and when they do occur he doesn’t even trouble to invent names for them. 1st gravedigger, 2nd soldier, and so on. You’d think he might have written some very penetrating studies of the burghers of Stratford, he must have had plenty of copy. Not a bit. Kings and lords, queens and ladies made up his dramatis personae. Webster the same. And who’s to say they’re wrong? “I am Duchess of Malfi still” makes us cry. “I am Mrs Robinson still” wouldn’t be at all the same thing.’

  The Crew did not raise a titter at this joke, and the Captain had an uneasy feeling it had probably been made before. He hoped he was not losing his grip, and hurried on,

  ‘As for Racine, his heroes and heroines are usually Imperial.

  ‘Now I say that what was good enough for the Globe and the Théâtre Royal is good enoug
h for the Royal George. Supposing, Fiona dear, that you were to rewrite The Younker, to set it in an English country house in the nineties, to change the violent old Communist into a violent old Earl? Write the part of the boy for our adorable little Sigismond – he should prove a tremendous attraction. If you do all this, as only you can, Fiona, if Ulra makes a really amusing set for it – a Victorian castle, Ulra, in the Gothic style, lace collar, velvet suit for the Younker – I think I can prophesy certain success. I think we could count on six months with the house packed. After that we shall be able to go on with what we are trying to do in this theatre, don’t be afraid that I’ve lost sight of that. I won’t keep you now,’ he looked at his watch, ‘I have to go to London, but I will be home for dinner.’ They always dined after the evening performance in the Captain’s house. ‘We can talk it over then –’

  Not a movement, the curtained figures sat as in a trance. He did not quite like it, but was not seriously alarmed; he had weathered too many a storm in that ship with that Crew, those hearts of oak.

  When the Captain arrived home rather late for dinner the house was in darkness, and empty as the Marie Céleste. There were signs of recent human activity, a meal had evidently just been eaten and not cleared away, but nobody was there.

  The Captain supposed that his Crew must have gone on shore. They sometimes did so of an evening and always, on these occasions, left some delectable titbit sizzling in the oven for him. But the kitchen was in darkness, the oven cold and bare. He peered into the bedroom usually occupied by Ulra to see if a sulking figure were not perhaps lolling on the bed. If so it must be stirred up, made to minister to his needs. Not only was there no sulking figure, but nylon hairbrush and broken comb had vanished from the dressing-table, crumpled underclothes no longer brimmed from half-open drawers, duffel coats and ragged ball dresses no longer bulged behind the corner curtain, there were no old shoes lying about on the deal floor and no old hats on the deal shelf. Ulra had clearly gone, and taken all her belongings. Down in the Port Royal, up beneath the Toits de Paris, the same state of affairs existed in every bedroom. The Captain’s heart sank within him. This was desertion. Mutiny he could have dealt with, his dreaded cat o’ nine tails, sarcasm, had but to be seen by the Crew for them to come to heel, but desertion was far more serious. They had almost certainly, he knew, gone off in a body to join the staff of Neoterism.