Hindsight (8 page)

‘Look at them, Paul,' whispered Molly. ‘Aren't intellectuals a scream? I wonder if you'll turn out like that, or are you a bit too cautious? You have to go the whole hog, you see, the utter whole hog.'

Paul looked. Molly often talked to him about her guests, as if the teas were a sort of people-lesson. Sometimes she did it out loud, in order to tease and embarrass, but more often for him alone. But not really for him, for her. He was somebody she could say things to without interfering with the game she was playing—like one of the Sunday games back at the school, Monopoly or something, but with the people performing both as players and pieces. Because Pauf was not grown up he was outside the game.

He couldn't see the sailor's face, only the devotion expressed in the curve of the spine and the crane of the immense neck. But Daisy faced him directly, and he could see how different she was, not just in her attitude and animation but in her physical appearance. She was even paler than usual, and her face was more lined and twitchy, but at the same time less blurred. Of course she was never really blurred, like an out-of-focus photograph, but that was the impression she usually gave, somehow smudgy and difficult to recognise. Now you felt you would have known her anywhere, not just for her ugliness. She looked a bit like Mrs Fison sometimes did after what Fison used to describe as ‘one of her evenings'.

Daisy glanced up and said something to Molly in French, a question. Molly answered in the same language and Daisy returned to the sailor.

‘I wish I could talk French like that,' said Paul.

‘You'll have to fall in love with a French girl,' said Molly. ‘I'll find you one—you're twelve now—in four years' time would be perfect. This stupid war
must
be over before then. Blonde or brunette?'

‘Like you.'

‘Oh no. That would be a great mistake. Not till you're thirty, at least. And then … then, Rogue, supposing you did find somebody like me …'

‘I don't expect there is anyone.'

‘Ten out often, Mr Rogers. But if there is, try not to take her seriously. You'll only get hurt. That's the best bit of advice I'll ever give you, so don't forget it.'

As usual Paul didn't know whether she meant what she said or was pulling his leg. It did not seem odd that Molly should be able to spare time to talk to him when there were all the adult guests she was supposed to keep happy. She always hopped about between conversations anyway, like a bird among bushes, but still Paul got more than his ration. The pattern began on his very first Sunday. He came in with Miss Penoyre, inquisitive at the steamy grove of the conservatory but expecting to be taken through into a proper room beyond, and there were half a dozen people sitting round this big black church-stove. Molly (still Miss Benison to him, then) jumped up.

‘Hurrah!' she said. ‘Listen everyone, I've been to the market and bought a crumpet-slave. His name's Rogue and his father was one of my darlingest friends. Come here, Rogue, and sit on this stool. Give your coat to Annette. Now, there are your crumpets and there's your fork, and here's a glove in case the fire's too hot for your hands. Oh, isn't this perfect! Sunday, and crumpets, and a slave to toast them!'

‘I wish I'd brought my butter ration,' said somebody.

‘Don't worry,' said Miss Benison. ‘I've managed to wangle a bit extra from a sweet old farmer.'

The ‘bit extra' was a bright yellow mound, three weeks' ration for a family at least. Paul was relieved to have something quite sensible to do, which he knew he could manage without making a fool of himself, but at the same time nervous about the potentialities of Miss Benison's madness. He almost dropped the fork when he was taking the first crumpet off it because she scraped her chair up close beside him and said, ‘Lovely, I'll do the buttering.'

He muttered some kind of nothing as he passed the crumpet to her.

‘Do you mind not having a father?' she said. ‘I'm glad that funny headmaster of yours calls you Rogue, because it means I can too. Do you?'

‘I've got a step now,' said Paul.

‘Not the same thing. I adored mine when I saw him, although he was an appalling nuisance to everyone. We're different, us almost-orphans. Look at Annette. She never even saw hers.'

‘I don't think I notice much. We don't seem to talk about our families when we're at school.'

‘Isn't that funny? I thought about mine all the time, or rather I imagined families I might have belonged to. I had a very peculiar childhood.'

‘Shall I do some of these browner than others?'

‘Yes, if you like. They're best when the little black bits are just beginning to come, don't you think? But what about the holidays?'

‘I've got three uncles. And I do like Duncan.'

‘Shall I tell you about your father?'

Aunts in particular used to speak as though there was almost something wrong with Paul because he had no father, as though he needed special treatment rather in the same way Uncle Will had to have special food because of being gassed in the first war. Paul seldom actually thought about it, and when he did he managed to pretend to himself that he was sorry, but at other times he had a vague unconscious idea that it might be quite a good thing, in some ways. A year ago, for instance, his school work had gone off the boil. He still came top of Midway but not as easily as before, so The Man couldn't really stop him going up into Schol. But The Man had written to Paul's mother saying that if he didn't pull himself together he was unlikely to reach any kind of scholarship standard. This was just after his mother had married Duncan, and poor Duncan had had the job of giving Paul a talking-to. It had not been comfortable for either of them, but Paul was aware that with a real father it would have been very much worse. A real father would have had so much more leverage, would have been able to squeeze and shove in ways Duncan couldn't … Paul assumed that he would have loved and admired his father, but at the same time he felt that the absence left a space for him to grow into, in his own way, at his own speed. Perhaps if his father had had more time at home, leaving Paul with more memories, it would have been different. Miss Benison's question was a surprise. It was not the kind of thing aunts suggested.

‘It depends,' he said.

‘It always does. Are you going to risk it?'

‘Yes.'

‘You're like him, you know. I arranged this on purpose so that I could see you sitting in front of that stove toasting crumpets. He used to sit like that in the hospital.'

‘Were you a nurse?'

‘They kept trying to send me home, but I got round them.'

‘You must have looked after hundreds and hundreds.'

‘Hundreds and hundreds. Lots of them became friends, but only a few were special friends, like your father. Of course he was English, and that helped. We had such a party when the news of his MC came through, too. It was one of the best nights in my life. He used to write to me for years. I've still got his letters—I just throw everything into a trunk and never look at it, but it's there. Lovely letters, such fun, just like the dear man. Isn't it extraordinary to think of somebody like that, with all that life in him, simply stopping—gone—because of a wing-tip getting a foot too close to the ground? And here you are instead, starting all over again.'

‘Shall I do another one?'

‘Oh yes. Don't stop till the crumpets run out.'

A man's voice laughed overhead.

‘That sounds like your motto in life, Molly.'

‘No, because they never will. I'll see to that.'

She rose to take the plate of buttered crumpets round but returned and went on talking about Paul's father. It gave Paul a curious sensation of only existing by accident, all this having happened long before his real parents had met—at a shooting-party near Bedford, his mother always said. Hearing about those old days was like hearing about an alternative world, in which there was not going to be a boy called Paul Rogers.

The ideal, run-together Sunday tea ended with Paul and Mr Wither walking across the park with the last light fading and a few stars out. The path through the chestnut grove would be strewn with shield-shaped golden leaves. Mr Wither could walk quite fast, using a sturdy walking-stick and lurching on to his deformed leg at each step, an effortful gait that caused him to pant after the first hundred yards and made conversation difficult. Paul walked with what he thought of as his hillman's stride beside him, using his gun as a staff. He always took it down to Sunday teas, just as he did on his deer-stalks, and in fact seldom thought of it as a gun. It had become a sort of talisman of his freedom to come and go as he wished. He kept it in a convenient slot between two stacks of lockers in the locker-room.

They would come up the last slope, Mr Wither panting, but also chuckling or muttering inaudibly and exuding a general sense of enjoyment of the world. Paddery would stand in front of them, a dark and silent cliff, all its black-out in place, but the film show usually ended just about the time they let themselves in through the side door, and the night erupted with the racket of loosed boys.

8

H
ow much of the foregoing is true, or even true? I find it impossible to say. Take the question of Daisy O'Connell and the ultra-square sailor, about which Dobbs was to challenge me: that man existed, I know. He already figured in my vague picture of tea in the conservatory (a picture even less focused and organised than I have made Paul's appear). Thinking about him I summoned up a memory of Daisy talking with animation about books in a mixture of French and English, but looking more haggard and twitchy than usual. I believe that is also true, but admit that it might well be a product of my desire to create some sort of personality for her which I could then offer to Dobbs. With my after-knowledge I felt I could assume that the man she was talking to was one of the many conscript servicemen who compensated for the grind and desolation of their new life by stepping up whatever cultural interests they may previously have had—the audience for whom Connolly founded
Horizon.
The square sailor looked the part, so I put him in.

The details of conversation are obviously yet more dubious. Yes, Molly did say she would find me a French girl to fall in love with and I asked for someone like her, and yes, she said with apparent earnestness that I wasn't to try that till I was thirty and I would get hurt. And yes, I did get it into my head that she had nursed my father; but for that very reason it would be absurd of me to claim that her answer to my question was less direct than I'd taken it to be. To judge by Dobbs's next letter that may well have been the case, but at least at the rational level I had thought otherwise, and had made her answer as I had simply because most conversations tend to proceed with a good deal of clutch-slip.

Three explanations seem possible: coincidence; unconscious memory; imaginative truthfulness. As a writer who depends largely on his imagination, naturally I lean to the third. The imagination is a mechanism for producing worlds, and the more powerful it is the more coherent each world becomes. So, when you feed a few ingredients from the real world into the mechanism, your imaginary details and events must become coherent with reality, i.e. either true or ‘true'. Again and again writers invent things which turn out to be facts. This is never the amazing coincidence it seems, merely a sign that the coherence-mechanism is functioning well. So I was cheered by the things Dobbs told me about Molly and Daisy. It made me feel that the machine was humming.

But if that was true of these sections of my novel it was not the case at all with the apparently straightforward work of going back and weaving in the material about plot and suspects which was supposed to turn my autobiographical ramblings into an orthodox whodunit. The machine groaned, hiccupped, juddered, stalled. The more purely invented the material, the less I was able to bring it into being. The two subsidiary masters—Floyd and Hutton—managed to stalk through a few unsatisfactory pages as just-visible ghosts of their real selves, but a quite fictional park ranger I needed simply refused to exist. Worse than that, he became a sort of nay-sayer. His unreality began to infect the areas surrounding the points at which he was supposed to put in an appearance. I was beginning to lose confidence in the whole idea (a vague but sinister sensation, analogous to the symptoms preliminary to the onset of flu) when Dobbs's letter came.

It was written in his own hand on paper from a ruled pad. I thought I detected a slight shakiness in the formation of the letters, and even if he had not said so I would have guessed from variations in size and spacing that it had been composed in several stages.

Dear Rogers,

Thank you very much for the latest instalment. I wish there had been more of it, but I cannot expect even you to produce at that sort of pace. Do you never get stuck or dry up?

As you will see from the address, I am back in hospital. Treatment this time. Less demeaning and uncomfortable than the tests, but involving drugs which make me sleep when I do not want to and then leave me lying awake when I would give anything for oblivion.

I am apparently in for a longish stay and have a room of my own, so I have brought some work with me, to wit one of MB's trunks. This may seem madness, an unmanageable mess from a sick-bed, but it is intellectually undemanding—about what I am up to—and I must do something. Besides, I have become obsessed with the notion that the woman is deliberately preventing me from completing my book, and I will not be so used; though I fear that the deadline is now less likely to be Steen's centenary but (a less metaphorical use of the word) my own demise. Please do not pass this on. I am reading between the lines on my doctor's forehead and have told no one else; but having a need to tell someone I feel that you are sufficiently a stranger not to be seriously put out.

I am doing what I can to fight back. Against MB, I mean. I have taken the minor risk of sending the first two-thirds of the MS off for final typing.

Did you see my ad in
The Times
for Richard Smith? I must thank you for your further fleshing-out of him at the conservatory teas, though I hope you will forgive my saying he remains as much of an enigma as ever.

A propos,
one of Lord Orne's complaints to MB was the cost of keeping the conservatory heated. Certainly by the time he wrote coke must have been hard to come by in sufficient quantities, but I suppose that if there was any of the stuff to spare anywhere in Devon it would somehow or other have found its way into MB's stove. Of course she had the gardener on her side; Orne refers to him as having said that the conservatory plants would have died in the winter of '41 (remember it? I was at Marlborough. We suffered) if MB had not contrived to get the fuel to keep the heating going. That was very much her style. She battened, but managed to make the relationship appear symbiotic.

That reminds me. She was never a nurse. I see you do not explicitly make her claim to have been. She worked for the same organisation as Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, something called the American Fund for French Wounded, run at the Paris end by a Mrs Lathrop. They took supplies to hospitals, blankets and bandages I suppose, but also a certain amount of creature comforts, with which MB no doubt made free. It was war work of a fairly privileged kind. Désirée O'Connell was the other member of her team, and it was through her that MB met Steen first, in 1918. The supplies for the celebration party when your father got his medal would no doubt have come out of the fund. I wonder what he was doing in a French hospital; but the fact that he was there would be a reason for the authorities to suggest that MB, as an Englishwoman, went in and chatted with him. I very much doubt that there were ‘hundreds and hundreds' of similar cases.

I find your account of O'Connell quite interesting. Either you have a better memory than you claim or you know more than you are letting on. I think I told you she was a poet, and rumoured to be the illegitimate child by a Frenchwoman of some Irish
littérateur.
She wrote exclusively in French, prose poems derived from the Imagist idiom, quite untranslatable. Rimbaud's
illuminations
are the closest well-known approximation I can give you. She signed her work ‘D.D.' Did you know this, really? It would not have been pronounced quite as you have spelt it.

She was always notoriously plain. Many accounts mention the contrast between her and MB, but having made the point the writer of course concentrates on MB. Only the crasser observers considered the relationship to have been lesbian. The general opinion was that MB did not want to live alone and kept O'Connell around for the contrast, and as an
entrée
into intellectual circles. Furthermore, O'Connell had a small income and MB nothing. I will come back to this.

O'Connell's importance to me is that she was apparently in love with Steen. Steen did not reciprocate. Far from it. He disliked her in a manner I cannot parallel elsewhere in his life, though he had a good number of enemies. He acknowledged that she had a certain talent, but thought she was putting it to obnoxious ends. I think I told you that he went to great lengths to prevent her coming on the yachting trip with MB (or did I? These drugs make me hazy about such things). Some of her later poems appear to be about her love for Steen, but they are too hermetic to be any use to a biographer.

You imply but do not directly state that by the time you knew her she was a thoroughgoing alcoholic. Do I also detect an implication that for the interview with the odd-shaped naval gentleman she had deliberately sobered up enough to be able to converse at an intelligent level? There is a casual reference in a letter from Apollinaire to Braque about seeing her very drunk and throwing bottles at people ‘as usual'. Her drinking was Steen's overt reason for refusing to have her on the yacht; he said he didn't want to keep fishing her out of the sea; but as I say he disliked her anyway, and no doubt felt he would have more chance with MB if she were not around. She must have had the constitution of an ox if she was still drinking on that scale seventeen years later. Where, incidentally, did she get the stuff in wartime?

On the other hand it throws a new light on MB that she was prepared to take on such a liability over so long a period. I doubt that O'Connell's small private income would by now have been a sufficient incentive, even with MB's preference for what she called ‘living off the land' (really no more than the shameless exaction of hospitality from anyone who could offer it).

All this is academic, for my purposes. My professional interest in the pair stops abruptly in the early Twenties, when Steen seems to have come to the conclusion that he was never going to make it with MB, and simply left Paris. He must have had the first indications of his illness about then; he was seeing specialists by the end of '23. And whatever it was that happened between him and Smith came at this time. Then he shut himself up and wrote his last two books.

Did I tell you how good I think they are? I take it you have not read them, but if you find yourself near a reputable library read the fourth chapter of
Honey from the Rock.
The book is a discussion of the place of the Jews in Western civilisation, but typically Steen didn't use the subject in order to contribute to the so-called Jewish Question, but as a sort of paradigm of all human behaviour. Chapter Four will make your hair stand on end if you read it remembering that it was written eighteen years before Buchenwald.

How did he come to look at the world with those eyes? That's what I want to know. He might have written as good a book ten years earlier, but it would have been quite different. I feel as though I had written six hundred pages as mere preparations to answer that question, and now I can't do it. God, let Smith see my ad and answer it. Supposing he's still alive.

Meanwhile I amuse myself with irrelevant speculations about the household you encountered. For instance, do you know the real status of the girl you call Annette Penoyre? You make her refer to MB as ‘Aunt Molly'. This of course might mean anything in the usage of that class and period and certainly cannot be said to imply, let alone prove, an exact relationship. I think MB can have had no kin closer than second cousins. The one really worthwhile thing to come so far out of these intolerable trunks is a letter from Steen in which he makes it clear that the opening sequence of
The Fanatics
is closely based on MB's own experience. You have her saying she had a very peculiar childhood, and that was certainly the case. Collating bits of Nineties gossip with Steen's novel, I think the facts were probably these:

The parents were an appalling couple, the father a sort of gentleman horse-coper, the mother vapid, disorganised, sexually accessible to a remarkable degree but in a manner so unlikely to arouse genuine passion that she was more tolerated than you would have expected. They moved in the very outermost fringe of the circle that surrounded the Prince of Wales (E. VII-to-be), sometimes living together, sometimes apart. One silly hack has ‘proved' that the Prince was MB's father, but this cannot be true; she would have been better treated. Neither parent had brothers or sisters but both were related by cousinage to a number of county families, and they developed a technique of blackmailing these with a threat that they themselves would come to stay unless the family in question took care of the child for a while. In the end the Gore-Phillipses took her on most of the time, on the understanding that they did not have to bring her up with their own brood. As a result MB spent most of her childhood in large Gore-Phillips houses where the family were not at the time residing; Eaton Square in August; their Scottish hunting-lodge in mid-winter; and so on.
The Fanatics
opens with the hero as a child wandering round a huge fake-Gothic castle on the west coast of Scotland, with the main rooms dark because the shutters stay closed all winter, but with blazing coal fires in the grates in an effort to keep the damp out, and for company two old couples who speak little but Gaelic. It is one of those passages which speak, which have an imaginative charge not accounted for by the material described. Steen's letter says, ‘I have stolen your childhood. I must have it for the novel. It is what I have been looking for these past eight years.' I am fairly certain that he is talking about this opening sequence.

As a matter of fact I was working on this very question when I had to come in here.
The Fanatics
is not, even in the eyes of devotees, a success, though Steen for a while regarded it as his major work. He had begun thinking about it before the war, but had then had his ideas drastically disrupted (I take it you
have
read
To Live like the Jackal)
and was unable to resume until something dislodged the inner log-jam. He seems to have persuaded himself that his encounter with MB had done the trick. This answers your question whether she did not mean something more to him than his other women, and I suppose I must concede that here the answer is yes. But her intrusion was, if anything, more disastrous than that of the Kaiser.