Cards of Identity (43 page)

The policeman follows. He is amused to see the two footmen, thinking they are unobserved, give a hasty dusting to the parquet on which the tourists stood and spray a jet of disinfectant into their vacated air. Ahead, he hears the duke cry: ‘We now enter the library,’ and the tourists nudge each other and murmur: ‘Library. That should be interesting’ and ‘I’m told it is a famous library’.

A man with a twitching face is sitting at the writing-table near a window. He rises from a heap of papers and gives the tourists a courtly bow. His face is lined, his brow high and furrowed. The footmen run in just in time to corral the tourists with the crimson cord.

‘Here is one of the family at work,’ explains the duke. ‘In the passing of these old houses, nothing is to be more regretted than the loss of the library – and, with it, the sort of occupant you now see. Before we discuss the room, I would like you to look very closely at this individual. His bent shoulders, his pinched and nervous face, his tremulous grasp of his quill pen indicate that he will not be in contemporary society very much longer. I am not
too
well up in these matters, but I am assured that without him and his predecessors we should not have any culture at all. Throughout the centuries, ever since the dissolution of the monasteries, he has written modest commentaries on theology, Greek legend, Stonehenge, and water-divining – none of which is of much interest nowadays and, indeed, never was. He has been to literature what the rock-gardener has been to horticulture. He was never what is called a creative type, but he was always sensitive and tolerant, decently dressed, and came to meals punctually. A dim figure, you may say, but it is precisely dim nonentities which constitute the past for which we yearn. We are so dreadfully harassed ourselves and feel that we are so inadequate to the demands of our day that we love
best the image of one who was happy in his mediocrity, never made a fuss, and never got drunk.’

The tourists study Doctor Shubunkin for some time. A few of them make notes, but as the duke has not given the object a definite name, they just put ‘Lord X?’ ‘Hon. Blank?’

‘As for the rest of the furniture,’ says the duke, ‘all the things on the left are Chippendale, all the things on the right Sheraton. The books are pretty much the usual books. That brass thing is for weighing letters – popular, long ago. I think that’s about all.

‘We now pass down the corridor and enter the dining-room. The table is laid for dinner: I am sorry you cannot see the family actually
eating
their food; it is a human spectacle. Each has his or her butter-ration in the little thing like an ash-tray in front of his place. The sugar is pooled. You will observe that the table is laid precisely as it always was through the centuries: the family take pride in cleaning the silver themselves, despite the fact that they have little use for it. At the other end of the room is the hatch. When the meal is over, one member of the family shoves the broken meats on this side of it and another member goes round behind and drags them through. We take turns with the washing-up. The ceiling of this room was painted by Pagannini in 1882 and has been the finest extant example of a Pagannini ceiling since 1947 – the date of the collapse of a rather better one in the next county. The Adam fireplace is blocked-up with newspaper: we prefer the Valor stove which you see standing in the grate. The tapestry on the left was chopped up and used for polishing for many years before we were told it was a work of art and had it sewn together again. It is known as “The Last Judgement of Paris by the Bordeaux Etalier”, and was presented to the family by a close friend of William Morris.’

At this, two or three of the tourists look meaningfully at each other, consult their watches, and sniff. They have been, probably, to hundreds of other decrepit mansions and feel bilked if the antiquities are not up to the highest romantic standards. The duke, who is clearly a proud man and is doing all this only in order to make money, flushes slightly and leads the way out. One of the sniffing tourists is deaf and has to cup his ear when his companion whispers at the top of his voice: ‘I’m – saying – that – it – looks – mostly – junk – to – me … No – junk – jay – you – en – kay…. Herbert – asks – do – you – want – to – go – on? We – could – catch – the – five-fifteen.’ The other answers: ‘What are
we doing this for, anyway? I thought we were
leaving
the house. It’s all quite over my head.’

The duke does not seem to notice, as he leads the way up the grand stair, that there are now three less in the party. The footmen, too, have fallen behind: no doubt they are thoroughly disinfecting the dining-room. A car is heard starting-up in the drive.

The duke is explaining the series of hunting paintings that climb the stairs. ‘The first shows the squire receiving an intimation from his keeper – the stocky, cringing one on the right – that there is game abroad. The second shows him having his boots pulled on, while his little son looks enviously at his father’s flint-lock and the spaniels leap with joy. The third shows him leaving the house, fully accoutred, while his wife waves a sympathetic lace hanky from the terrace. Now comes the fun! Picture Four shows the squire aiming at ahare, propped from behind by the faithful keeper. The hare is falling dead, as if in anticipation of the fatal shot. Actually, the poacher, whom you see behind that bush, has fired the shot in question, and Picture Five shows him scurrying off with his booty, pursued by the spaniels. Pictures Six, Seven, and Eight show the hunting of the poacher through various types of lovely countryside, with the squire on horseback and the keeper running beside. Picture Eight, entitled “Cornered At Last”, shows the poacher surrounded by spaniels in a gravel-pit; Nine, Ten, Eleven, and Twelve are the usual concluding ones, showing the felon brought before the magistrate, who is a friend of the squire’s, and being deported to Australia, while the squire reads a passage from the Bible to his children.
That
brings us to the top of the stairs.’

Some of the tourists have weak hearts. They are still making a panting study of Pictures Six, Seven, and Eight when the duke mounts the last step and breezes off down the nearest corridor. It is doubtful if the stragglers will ever catch up.

‘One of the problems of mansion-showing,’ says the duke, pausing outside a room, ‘is to keep people like yourselves
interested.
Our habit here is to try and give you the past atmosphere of the house by the arrangement of descriptive tableaux. Here is one that will interest you. It is entitled “Discovered!”’

He throws open the door and they crowd in withcuriosity. They see a huge four-poster bed with crimson velvet curtains: a man has parted these curtains and stands staring with a look of horror at the occupants
of the bed. These are a very handsome young man, looking up in angry surprise, and a woman, her mouth open in a scream, who is about to duck under the bedclothes.

‘This,’ says the duke in a low voice, ‘represents the son of the house caught in commerce with a drab. He has picked her up at a tavern, pressed gold into her hand, and inveigled her up the back stairs. His uncle, who entered the room to ask the young man a question about lithography, has found himself faced by something of another stamp. This is the sort of thing that was always happening in old houses. As the estate is entailed, this objectionable young man is bound to inherit it. He will cut down all the trees to pay his debts and eventually will have to sell the whole place to a nouveau-riche – or, worse, marry the daughter of one. As his morals sink lower, income tax rises higher, reaching the standard nine-and-six just as he is reaching the sink of iniquity. You know the rest.’

The tourists are impressed. It is clear – or seems to be clear – that the actors in the tableau are alive. One can see them breathing, and sometimes their muscles twitch. The uncle holding back the curtain has fits of trembling. On the other hand, these are precisely the signs of life that one would expect to see in a well-conducted hoax. On looking closer one begins to question the naturalness of the figures: the uncle’s skin is too deftly pock-marked and tinted to be real and a hip-flask is sticking out of his rear-pocket. The woman’s hair is not the colour that goes with her skin; the young man’s beauty is a bit put-on. Even the policeman, who took for granted that the figures were alive, now peers more closely, unwilling to look like a fool. After a while, the tourists begin to smile admiringly, and they nod, more or less agreed, when one of the party murmurs: ‘You can tell by the eyes. That blank look. And the eyelids and the mouth. Too mechanical. I’d guess it’s plastics, wax, and a few small air-pumps.’

The duke smiles and says: ‘We have another for you in the next room.’ He goes out, but most of the tourists are too fascinated to follow. They seem to have forgotten that they are viewing a bequest to the National Trust and are obsessed with the more fundamental matter of distinguishing between appearance and reality. ‘Please do not touch the figures!’ the duke calls back.

The next room is not so romantic. The curtains are drawn, everything is half-dark. Four tall candles burn at the corners of a high stately
bed on which lies the well-dressed corpse of an old man with a white goatee. Artistically arranged on his breast are the contents of his pockets: a snuff box, a much-worn gold chain with an old gold watch at the end of it, a lucky iron nail, a card of membership in some club, a thin wallet smoothed by years of use, etc., etc.

‘Here,’ says the duke, ‘lies the old squire, his heart broken by the vices of the young heir. The old man asked only one thing of the boy – that he keep his whores where they belonged and not bring them into the house. This reasonable injunction was not, as we have seen, obeyed. What has killed the old man is not, really, grief, but his knowledge that a whore in the home is like a horse in Troy. Once friends of that sort get into the better bedrooms, the so-called vertical structure of society begins to teeter. Any ass can get a woman
into
a house; to get her
out
is a labour of Hercules. There is no surer sign of the degeneration and collapse of an imperial class than the need to bring the vice into the home instead of going out for it.’

The tourists are not very interested in the duke’s words because this tableau is rather a let-down, compared with the previous one. Any fool can see that the corpse on the bed is a dummy. A few, just to make sure, slip out of the room to take a comparative glance at the other figures. But the two or three who remain, and who are all that are left of the party, do not hide their contempt: they point to the false beard, made of an old whitewash brush, the pink ears of moulded wax, the clumsily-managed nose, the unnatural straightness and flatness of the legs, the tracery of small veins made by a feather dipped in blue ink. This is not what death looks like, nor is it what an undertaker’s job looks like. As the policeman says (to himself): ‘Some amateur done that.’

Another car is heard in the drive. The duke says ‘Ts-ts!’, looks at his watch, and shoots down the corridor again. His voice is heard in the next room talking about gold-leaf mouldings. ‘I don’t think I’ll go on,’ says one of the three tourists sourly: ‘I expected aristocracy, not Madame Tussauds.’ ‘My little nipper could mould a better corpse,’ says a second. ‘When I pay good money,’ says the third, ‘I expect a natural response.’

The policeman catches up with the duke, who has only just discovered that he has lost his audience. Rather angrily, he questions the policeman, who says frankly that the gentlemen, as far as he could tell,
semeed to have lost interest in going on. With an incredulous look, the duke rushes back down the corridor and peers into the corpse’s room. Then he tries various doors and even looks behind a curtain. Just at that moment another car is heard starting and the duke lets out a howl of rage. Bellowing: ‘They haven’t
paid
!’
he runs to the grand stair like a madman.

The policeman, left alone, throws an observant eye over the corridor. The carpeting is so frayed and dirty that his wife wouldn’t allow it even in an outhouse. The ceiling is filthy. Sympathetic as he is where rank, antiquity, and beauty are concerned, he does feel a certain contempt for the duke. Tableaux are all very well, but they are unable to disguise poverty.

A few minutes pass, and the duke has not returned. The policeman begins to pace the corridor. He thinks he will have a private peep at the couple in the big bed; they will have a more fundamental interest without the duke present to insist on their social significance. But the coverings of the bed have been flung aside; the bending uncle is gone; the room is empty. The policeman is rather impressed: they
were
real, after all. He goes into the corpse’s room to look at the dummy again. But it has gone too. This means that it, too, was alive, or that it was a dummy which is taken away and cleaned after each exhibition. The former is the more likely theory.

He does a little more pacing and then begins to feel uneasy. Something is wrong somewhere: what is it? He is a methodical man and has been well-trained in the art of asking the right question. He decides that his uneasiness is caused by the whole set-up of this place: it is not in step with life. It does not belong to the jet-age nor to antiquity; it falls short both of the National Trust and of the export drive. But it is not his business to question the structure of society in working-hours: he has questions to ask the duke and he sets off to find him.

On the grand stair he sees an ancient countess complete with wimple. She is madly dusting the banister. He asks her where the duke is, and she answers: ‘In the kitchen.’ He does not press her because she seems a bit daft: she looks at him as if he were disguised for a tableau.

He tries the library, but the intellectual ‘Hon. Blank’ has gone. He roams through various rooms, some of which seem not to have been occupied for years and years. He opens one or two doors and raises his eyebrows at what he sees. He opens the front door and stands on the
balustraded terrace, but there are no visitors and all the cars have gone. So he goes down to the servants’ quarters and opens the kitchen door.