Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (37 page)

In the end he told her the whole story in far more detail than he intended and she listened respectfully. It was only when he got on to personalities - to his fears for Rose Lorimer, to his desire not to damage Professor Stokesay's reputation, to his memories of Gilbert's friendship - that she became impatient. 'But these are personal things, Daddy,' she cried. 'You simply can't take them into account. It's a question of intellectual honesty' - and her voice rose high. 'Oh, a small one maybe. But you say yourself you don't know where it may lead, what accretions of untruth - if it
is
untruth - may gather round it. This is a matter of historical truth, of course you must speak up.' Her round face had all that head-girl earnestness that had so moved and so frightened him when she was a child.

'But I haven't got any proofs,' he cried.

'Oh, I can see that,' she said. 'But you must go on searching until you've found them or until you're sure that they don't exist.' She smiled. 'It's a strange sort of task for
you,
isn't it? I doubt if you ...' she was about to say 'if you have the guts,' but she checked herself and added, 'I mean pertinacity's never been your strongest suit, has it?'

The visit of Elvira was not unannounced. She called up and asked if she could come round for a drink. 'Oh, no special reason,' she said. 'Do people have to have special reasons for visiting you? It's one of Robin's home-days and everyone else seemed so ghastly. So I thought of you. At least you've got good pictures on your walls.'

That, at any rate, thought Gerald, was not the incentive. She clearly didn't know one drawing from another.

She looked older and more blowzy. It came into Gerald's head that a less scrupulous man could turn her growing devotion to him into something less platonic; and immediately there followed the thought, 'Well, she'd better hurry, if her looks go downhill as quickly as this I shan't be interested.' He shut off the thought savagely, and then smiled as he realized that psychologists would probably say it had only come to him through repression.

Elvira accepted a drink, surrounded herself in clouds of cigarette smoke, and then said, 'You talk about something, please. Something that will last a long time. But not about me and Robin. I've got one of those awful obsession things that he's been killed in a motor smash and I want to ring up to prove it's only an obsession, but of course I mustn't.' Before Gerald could speak, she went on, 'Oh God! it is all so boring. Any fifth-rate psychology student can tell you that when you're always imagining your lover's death like I am Robin's, it means you really want to get rid of him.'

Gerald said, 'Isn't all that a bit far-fetched? There are so many possible explanations of these things. Why shouldn't it be the simple one?'

Elvira curled up in her chair. 'No, of course not,' she said. 'The Freudian explanations are quite obviously the true ones. We've just come to distrust them because a lot of silly people repeat them parrot fashion.'

There was a silence which Gerald broke by saying, 'I'm not at all happy about all your "sensible" arrangements with Robin. I told him so the other day.'

Elvira stubbed out her cigarette angrily. 'I know,' she cried. 'It made me
frightfully
angry. I had so hoped you were a nice, uncomplicated person. It was very silly of me, of course, because we none of us are.'

Gerald braced himself to deal with her annoyance. 'Why does my talking to Robin show that I'm not uncomplicated?'  he asked laughing.

'Oh, of course, it does. Freud again, so you won't like it. But you couldn't have acted like that just out of a straight motive. I've thought a lot about why you really did it.' She frowned. 'I
think,'
she said judicially, 'that it may have been because you were attracted to me and felt you shouldn't be and so you tried to compensate by being frightfully altruistic. I hope it isn't that, though, because although I like you very much, I've got an age limit. Anyway, I'm madly in love with Robin, so I don't want to go to bed with other people. Only, of course, I can't expect you to see
that
because your generation were all muddled up about love and promiscuity.'

From anyone else, Gerald thought, I couldn't have taken that: but with her, at any rate, directness proves very disarming. Elvira drained her glass, and cried, 'Oh dear! What a nuisance! The one thing I
asked
was that we shouldn't talk about me and Robin.'

Gerald told himself that it would be indiscreet to talk to Elvira of Melpham. In the end, however, he did so. She was hardly more likely to speak to anyone to whom it mattered than Kay was; it would be a helpful means of taking her mind off Robin; and, anyway, he wanted to talk to her about it. No doubt that was a sublimation, he reflected, and then smiled as he thought what a cosy exchange of Freudian motives they could have made of any
affaire
they might have had.

Elvira, perhaps, was a little less quick in grasping the historical significance of what he told her than Kay had been. It was clear that English history was not included in her view of culture. She was no less attentive and interested, however, and no less adamant in her view that he must sort it out. 'Sort it out', indeed, summarized her approach, for she saw Melpham simply as a symbol of a conflict inside him that needed to be resolved. Unlike Kay, she disregarded the historical facts and concentrated solely on the personalities involved.

For her, Gilbert's alignment to the Wyndham Lewis anti-Bloomsbury group was quite enough to mark him down as a probable culprit. 'Oh! don't think that I don't
know
the faults of Bloomsbury,' she cried, 'but they had a kind of hard core of intellectual integrity. While all these others are what John and his generation would call crypto-fascists. Of course, it isn't really a question of politics but of basic mental honesty. All the same, Gilbert Stokesay's exactly the sort of person to hate scholarship or anything like that. Have you
read
his essays? He's the most ghastly egotist and he'd think that sort of practical joke was cosmic or something equally pretentious.' As to Processor Stokesay, she wouldn't hear a good word for him. 'You can call all that pro-Nazism plain vanity, but it wasn't. It was intellectual dishonesty again. Like father like son. I bet you he knew all about it.' On the other hand, likely as the Stokesays seemed to her to be culprits, she was most convinced of her own grandmother's guilt on personal grounds. 'Now
her
vanity,' she cried, 'is limitless, and look at all the kudos she got out of it, and I expect my great-uncle was quite as bad. On the other hand, she's frightfully weak.
I
know what you've got to do. You must go to Merano and bully the truth out of her.' And then rather illogically, she added, 'I'd rather like someone to go and see her, anyway. I couldn't possibly bear it myself. But I did hear from Robin, who'd got it from those relations of Marie Hélène's, that she had a sort of stroke after Christmas. Of course, she's made her bed and she's got to lie on it. But all the same, it would be rather good to get a first-hand account from someone dependable.'

Gerald was not finally convinced as to the course of action he should take, however, until he had seen Sir Edgar. It was not going to be an easy interview for him, he knew. Sir Edgar would recoil with disgust from anything smelling of scandal, particularly scandal that touched Lionel Stokesay; for, since he had always disliked the showiness of the great historian and was perhaps a little jealous of his powerful influence upon younger scholars, he did everything he could to disguise his antipathy, to dissociate himself from criticism of the dead man. In any case, his shyness, his strong conviction of moral rectitude, and his cautious approach to life would all be affronted by the story of troubled conscience that Gerald had to tell him. Yet Gerald also guessed that the old man would criticize him for not having acted sooner. Sir Edgar was slow to judge, but, his judgement once made, nothing would deter him from a speedy execution of his decision.

The interview proved as Gerald had prophesied to himself. Before Gerald was half-way through his story, Sir Edgar, like a tortoise feeding, shot his wrinkled old neck out of the hunch he had made of his body at the prospect of unpalatable words. 'Look here,' he said, 'before you go any farther, if you've got it into your head that the Melpham idol was a fake, you can forget it at once. I saw Cuspatt the other day and it seems they've made all the possible tests in the Museum laboratory. They're not tyros, you know. There's no doubt at all that the thing's genuine.'

'I'm sure,' said Gerald. 'As you will see from my story, that isn't the point. I have no doubt that the figure is a genuine Anglo-Saxon idol. The only one to be found in English soil. That's what makes the whole thing so ironical. But it may very well not belong to Eorpwald's tomb. If what I suspect is true, it was found at Bedbury in the pagan cemetery. Gilbert Stokesay, incredible though it may sound to our modern ears, was practically in charge there. Stokesay was only too flattered that his beloved son should want to take part to interfere with anything he did. I suspect that when Gilbert told me he had placed the idol in the Melpham tomb he was speaking the truth. He brought it over from Bedbury and put it there. I have such a strange conviction of having thought so at the time he told me.'

'My dear Middleton, you're trying to tell me now that Stokesay's son was a lunatic.'

'No,' said Gerald, 'only a particular kind of man at a particular time.' He tried then to explain to Sir Edgar, as far as he understood it himself, Gilbert's outlook on life. He spoke of his hatred of his father, his wild devotion to his mother, his hostility to contemporary culture, his Nietzschean idea of a practical joke.

A film of weariness crept over Sir Edgar's eyes. When Gerald had finished, he said, 'I see. Gilbert Stokesay was killed in the war, wasn't he? I can't help thinking, you know, Middleton, that a lot of that generation were lost souls from the day of their birth, poor fellows.' It was clear that a full appreciation of the point of view of Gilbert Stokesay was quite beyond him. 'But even if what you suspect is true, with Stokesay's son dead, there could be no evidence now.'

'I don't know. There may have been people who helped, or who found out afterwards and for one reason or another kept quiet. That's what I must find out,' Gerald said.

Once he was convinced that Gerald had a case worthy of consideration, Sir Edgar's criticism changed its tack. 'I'm afraid I simply don't understand, Middleton,' he said, and his eyebrows beetled over his bright little eyes, 'why you haven't spoken before. You owed it to Pforzheim and even more to our own Museum chaps to give them some warning of this. Thank heaven Pforzheim hasn't made his report on Heligoland yet! You've run the risk of putting him in a very awkward position. Quite frankly, I think your behaviour's been indefensible.'

Gerald tried not to look resentful, he strove to allow his real desire for the old man's understanding to be unclouded by the irritation that he felt at its not being immediate. 'I have so little evidence,' he said, 'and so many people that I care about are involved in the repercussions - Stokesay himself, Rose Lorimer, the general reputation of the English historians. Do you think it's been easy even to reach this point? Besides, how far would Pforzheim listen to what is only really a personal hunch?'

Sir Edgar's face softened. 'I understand, my dear boy,' he said. 'It all explains a lot to me about your attitude to things in these last years. All the same you
must
say something to Pforzheim. It's all too likely he'll dismiss the story. These Huns are very obstinate, you know. But he'll probably modify his statement at Verona. If you like,
I'll
have a word with Cuspatt, just to alert him, you know.'

'So you think I
should
pursue the matter?'  Gerald asked.

'Yes, Middleton, I'm afraid so. It's an unpleasant business. More like some detective's job. But you say there are people who may know more - Portway's sister-in-law and others - you must see them. They may not know just how important the matter is. Laymen are very ignorant. Let me know how you get on.'

'It's damnable,' Gerald said, 'all this coming when I want to get on with editing the
History.'

Sir Edgar smiled. 'For a man of your years you have a curious expectation that life runs smoothly,' he said.

Before Gerald left, he tried to hurriedly excuse himself again by speaking of the family difficulties that beset him. He started to speak of John's double life, but Sir Edgar checked him. 'My dear fellow,' he said, 'your private affairs don't concern me. I don't mean that unkindly, but these things are better kept apart. In any case, I can't help you in anything like that. I have only one answer - my trust in God. And you're old enough to have considered all that for yourself. I will say one thing though: as historians we've got to tell the truth about the past as far as we know it, but that's quite a different thing from searching into the truth of people's lives here and now. All this prying and poking about into what other people prefer to keep hidden seems to me a very presumptuous and dangerous fashion. But then I'm a very old man. It doesn't much concern me any longer.'

CHAPTER
2

P
ROFESSOR
P
FORZHEIM
listened respectfully to Gerald and agreed to modify his report to the Congress. It was clear that he did so more out of deference to Gerald's authority than out of any weight that he placed upon the evidence that Gerald gave him. It was hardly to be expected that a German historian would be much influenced by a story so dependent for its conviction upon nuances of personality - of personalities, too, so very English. The report that he gave to the Congress laid emphasis, then, on the dependence of the conclusions drawn from the Heligoland discoveries upon the earlier discoveries at Melpham. For anyone who doubted Melpham, Heligoland would have seemed quite unestablished; but as no one
did
doubt Melpham, Heligoland was acclaimed. It was the most Gerald could hope for. The interest of the Congress, in any case, was not so much aroused by Aldwine's dual faith as by the addition of Aldwine to Eorpwald and the exciting promise of more to come. Two or even one and a half have always a disproportionately greater power of suggestion than one.