The Cardboard Crown (15 page)

‘When I came into the hall I saw not A. T. but Austin. I nearly fainted, but I have never actually fainted. I began to tremble and held onto the bannister of the stairs. He came over to me. He looked dreadfully concerned and ashamed, like a clumsy schoolboy who has broken a very valuable piece
of china. The first thought I had that emerged clearly from the tumult in my mind was that all that Austin had done did not matter. It was only a broken vase in a house which remained standing. He did not say anything, or move close to greet me. He was waiting to see how I would receive him. When I had recovered control of my voice and my limbs I led him to a little sitting-room on the right of the hall, which was empty. I asked him how he knew I was here and he said: “He told me.” We talked a little in a formal way, but we both knew that everything was right between us. I asked a few questions about Waterpark, but he said that he had not been there. I was surprised as he had been looking forward so much to the hunting. “Where have you been?” I asked. “In London,” he said. “I’ve been reading for the bar.” When he said this I felt that even the vase was not broken, and at last I burst into tears.

‘We left the same day for London, and all the way back I felt as if I were awakening from an extraordinary dream. I could not understand myself—I can not yet—how I could turn round in a few hours from a desperate longing for A. T. to feeling all my old love for Austin as strong as ever. I wonder if there is a looseness in my character which can only be controlled if I cling firmly to my husband, whatever he does. If any other woman had behaved as I have, I should certainly have condemned her. I have not forgotten the dream. How could I? There was an unusual affinity between myself and A. T. We should have recognised it anywhere, but Rome produced the perfect conditions for its acknowledgment, just as a plant will grow in any part of the garden, but there is one particular corner, beneath a sunlit wall, where it will blossom on every branch.’

They left the following week for Australia, and were back at Westhill in time for Christmas.

There were certain things which Alice did not explain in her Rome entries, and about which one can only make conjectures. Austin, when she asked him how he knew of her whereabouts, said: ‘He told me.’ Who was ‘he’? Austin arrived in Rome only three days after Aubrey had left, therefore the latter may have written to him before the night by the Fountain of Trevi, probably after Alice had told him of her troubles and he said he could not help her, which suggests that he realised that her only enduring happiness lay in her return to her husband. It is pathetically clear that his feeling for her was not as great as hers for him. She had identified him with the splendour of Rome itself. All the same, when on the night by the fountain he saw that Alice was ready to live with him, or marry him if possible, he wanted to take her, but as he had already written to Austin, saying he should come for her, there was no course open to him but to check his impulse and go away.

This explanation fits. It is most likely the true one, but there is another. It is possible that Austin’s ‘he’ was not Aubrey, but the hall porter or the concierge, that Austin had learnt Alice’s whereabouts from her bank, and on enquiring at the hotel if she were still there, had been told so by a servant, to whom he referred indifferently as ‘he’. Again, why did Aubrey in his farewell note mention Damaris and Arthur? May his flight have had nothing to do with Austin’s coming, but have been due to his consciousness that ‘the Tunstalls were not good at happy marriages’, at least those three who
were the children of Caroline O’Hara? Did he feel in his blood some taint of Teba perversity or Renaissance wickedness which made him unfit to be the lover or husband of anyone as innocent as Alice?

And yet, when one reads his farewell letter it is impossible to deny that it is slightly nonconformist in tone—so much anxiety for her good, when he was probably just as anxious not to have half-a-dozen Australian children sliding on the marble floors of his palace. Could Renaissance wickedness have a nonconformist tinge, like ‘poetry touched with decency,’ the conception of a Cambridge don?

I wish that I had asked Arthur what Aubrey was like, but when the former was alive I was hardly aware of the latter’s existence. The Tunstall boys whom I knew at Dilton, were grandsons of Aubrey’s elder half-brother, a very different type, and there seems still to have been a taboo on the subject of the spectacular and scandalous children of Caroline O’Hara. But I had heard a reference to Aubrey which stuck in my mind. I was about sixteen, when a contemporary of his, a rather crusty old neighbour called Colonel Rodgers, was calling on my mother at Waterpark. They were discussing the Tunstalls.

‘That Irishwoman’s children were bad hats,’ he said, pretending with the rudeness of old people who exploit their own bad memories, that he had forgotten that my mother was Irish, that one of them was her husband’s aunt, and that they were all her second cousins. ‘What chance had they with those names—Damaris, Aubrey, Ariadne?’ He snorted with contempt. ‘It’s a good thing Aubrey had no children—bringing art into the county. He lived and died in Italy,
and we all know that an Englishman Italianate is a devil incarnate!’

I remembered this so well, because I thought that Damaris, Aubrey and Ariadne were the loveliest names I had ever heard. I thought it would be glorious to bring art into the county, and I immediately conceived the ambition to be an Italianate Englishman.

Alice’s joy on being reunited to her children at Westhill, according to her diary, exceeded any of the sufficiently strong emotions she experienced in London and Rome, but she makes two adverse comments, one: ‘The house seems very small and overcrowded. Sarah has got the furniture all cluttered in the wrong places.’ The other: ‘Mildred has developed a dreadful voice, whining and nasal. I asked Sarah why she had not corrected it, and she said an Australian little girl should speak like an Australian. I was very angry at such nonsense. The other children speak nicely. Sarah seems to have made a particular pet of Mildred and calls her Mildy.’ There are other hints that in spite of her pleasure at being
back with her family she was depressed by her surroundings and suffered from dreadful bouts of nostalgia for Europe. Westhill, compared with the palaces of Rome and even the ordered dignity of Waterpark, must have struck her as a dingy place to call her home, especially after it had been subjected for eighteen months to Cousin Sarah’s genius for creating a drab and impoverished atmosphere. In those days, too, the surroundings of the house were more wild. The oak trees in the long avenue were little more than two rows of twigs, and made no impression on the landscape, and the European trees round the house were the same size. Only the thin drooping leaves of the gum trees, designed by the Almighty more to let the light through than to provide shade, were a scanty protection from the scorching January sun. Also at that time the furniture of the house must have been undistinguished. It had been bought when they moved in, and when they had not much money and were worried with the whole business of the move, complicated by the approaching birth of Mildred. Lady Langton retained any really good furniture and prints which Sir William had owned, and the eighteenth-century portraits and old chests from Waterpark which are here now, were not brought out till about thirty years later. It is even possible that there were not yet any wire blinds on the doors and windows, to keep out the flies, without which life here in the summer would be a nightmare.

Apparently it was more than Alice could stand, and they had not been there a week before she set about finding another house in Melbourne. Again she took one in East St Kilda, but in Alma Road, further away from the little colony formed by the Bynghams, Lady Langton and the Dells.
Neither Austin nor Alice wanted to be too close to Hetty. They could not avoid meeting her occasionally, and so it was not possible to make a complete break. Alice was fond of the little ‘Dell’ boys. They had always been welcome at Westhill, and she could not suddenly deny her affection to children, and as they were Austin’s she had a vague feeling that she was responsible for them. They continued to come and play with their half-brothers in the house in Alma Road. This arrangement illustrates the way in which so many of the family escaped or ignored the influences of the nineteenth century. It would have been quite usual a hundred years earlier, though then everyone would have been aware of the relationship.

We are now coming into the period of the lives of many people whom I knew well, and so I have more information about it, though I cannot remember exactly who gave it to me. But again, it is largely superficial information, as I only knew them as a child knows an adult. Unless one has access to a find like the diaries, or acquaintance with a reckless old gossip like Arthur, the preceding generation must always appear uniformly respectable. Their idiocies were all committed before one was born, and in the sedateness of middle-age they are not going to give each other away. Who is going to tell a boy that when his father was in his early twenties he got into financial difficulties and gave worthless cheques, or that he only married his mother because her father ‘asked his intentions,’ or even that his uncle was found in bed with a laundress a little older than himself? We have to assume that our parents were always as upright and respectable as when we knew them, and though all the world knows otherwise, no one is going to tell us. And this is quite right, as the sins of the
fathers should not be allowed to destroy their authority, or there would be no civilisation left.

Arthur told me something about Hetty at this time, but not what I would most like to have heard—an account of the first meeting between her and Austin and Alice. It must have been a strain on their
savoir faire.
Perhaps he was not present, or perhaps the situation was too sensitive, and too full of deep unhappiness for him to be funny about it. He was never ribald about anything which touched Alice immediately, but having once let the cat out of the bag with regard to Austin and Hetty, he could not resist talking about them whenever he had me alone. It had been bottled up in him for so long. He went on about them at the last dinner I had with him in about 1920, before I went to England, and did not come back to Australia for nearly thirty years, until on the death of Dominic I inherited the wreckage of Westhill.

‘I felt quite sorry for Hetty at that time,’ said Arthur. ‘It is always uncomfortable when someone who has been outrageously bumptious crumples up. Sometimes one has a devastating retort to make to some pompous ass, but doesn’t make it as one couldn’t bear the indecent spectacle of his collapse—so the brute goes on being pompous. Hetty collapsed. She seemed to have shrunk. Of course with her it could not last for very long, but she was like that for nearly two years. Her clothes looked as if they didn’t fit, and her spirit was so broken that when she and the protoplasm, who it turned out after all really was one, went out in their jinker, she actually let him drive, while in her arms was that horrible little badge of her shame, your cousin Horace.’

‘But he was legitimate,’ I protested.

‘You talk like a grocer,’ said Arthur impatiently. ‘If she met Alice and Austin in a friend’s house, she would give them furtive guilty glances, and there were some damned awkward moments when that fool Dell boasted about his splendid sons. Before this Hetty had had a confident, rapacious vitality, which made her clothes unimportant. Now people began to notice how dreadful they really were. What in a way made it worse was that Alice looked better than ever. When she went away she was a very pretty young woman, but when she returned she was beautiful, with the air of someone who knows the world. She had a look in her eye which you don’t see in provincial people. You don’t see it either in the eyes of people who are just worldly. Their eyes are merely shallow and hard. The expression I mean comes from a mixture of knowledge and tolerance, but tolerance with very clear limits, and kindness where it is possible to be kind. You can tell gentle people more by their eyes than anything else. Then Alice’s clothes were always in perfect taste, so that when you saw her beside Hetty in her black alpaca and her cairngorms, or whatever those pebbles are she hangs round her neck, you would not have thought that they could possibly be connected, and if you had been told that Alice’s husband had been unfaithful to her with Hetty, you would have said he was blind and mad. I must say that I was a bit bewildered by Austin’s lack of taste. If one is going to do that sort of thing, it should be all mixed up with secret passages and scented notes, and flunkeys and gold beds. You shouldn’t just sneak into the scullery while the servant’s out, to do a bit of carpentering. Anyhow when they returned Hetty’s game was up. Austin told her Alice knew, and she couldn’t blackmail him any
more. He never looked at her again, not in that way, though I believe it half amused him to meet her occasionally, especially in some place like Bishopscourt or at a dinner party at Mrs Hopkins’s, who was president of the committee of the Home for Fallen Girls. Poor old Austin, he had some funny kinks in his nature. As a matter of fact it was damned funny. Hetty all through stuck grimly in the most respectable society, even in this shrunken and collapsed period. It wasn’t only that she had lost Austin, you see, and that Alice knew—that was bad enough—but for the first time in her life she was ashamed of herself, the reason being of course that she had produced Horace. She had exactly the feelings of a great dane that finds a white dachshund in its litter. It was only Horace, nothing else, that made her look so furtive. I was quite sorry for her and saw her fairly often. Alice didn’t mind.’

Arthur’s close life-long friendship with Alice began at this period, or at least became intensified. It is hard to know exactly the time of developments of this sort and in my eagerness to ‘get them across’ I may place them too soon. In spite of Arthur’s little lamp and the painting on glass, his friendship with Alice was not sentimental. It was founded on similarity of taste and interest, and particularly maybe on the fact that they had both had brief, intense, abortive attachments to the two Tunstalls. Alice may have hinted to him of the events in Rome. He knew that the prelude in G had powerful associations for her as he mentioned it to me. I may now say of Arthur ‘poor old boy’ for if he had known that one day I would have access to all the details of this affair, more than he knew himself, he would have exploded. His lighting the
lamp every night may have been due as much to his love of ritual as to his affection for Alice, or it may have become so. When he was a young man in England he was very High Church, a ‘Puseyite,’ but after the death of Damaris he gave up all outward observance of religion. He believed that she had deliberately driven over the cliff and therefore according to the orthodox was a lost soul. He could not accept this and so felt that he could not consistently go to Church, a great sacrifice for him. He belonged to a generation that was very exact in its doctrine. Nowadays a young man in Arthur’s place would say: ‘Oh, no one could be hard on Damaris. God is too big for that’ and continue to walk in processions with candles and incense.

It would be interesting to know whether Alice told Austin about Aubrey Tunstall. One feels it would have been only fair. She does not mention having told him, and yet there appears to have been greater confidence between them after her return from England, and a general atmosphere of greater happiness in their lives. She was like someone who has believed herself to be in perfect health, but puzzled by an occasional weariness and dull pain in her side, and who then after the climax of an operation, realises what true health can be. Although she must always have felt the attraction of Europe she settled down contentedly to her Melbourne life. She may have felt that Europe, however attractive, was a place from which it was safer for her to stay away as both of her visits there had had unfortunate and nearly disastrous accompaniments, though she did not know that this sequence was to be repeated more than once again in her life. Her interest was fully occupied with her new house in Melbourne,
a much larger and better equipped one than she had had before, and in her growing children who were very lively and full of high spirits and ‘Langton wit,’ except Mildy who remained under Sarah’s influence. A year after her return from England she had her last child, a girl who was christened Diana. This name was a departure from the Emmas and Hettys of Victorian tradition, and was considered by the relatives to be both pagan and affected. There can be no doubt that when Alice chose it she had in mind Damaris, Aubrey and Ariadne. She now had five children not counting a baby that died. They were in order of age, Steven who was my father, Margaret, who was called Maysie, Mildred, George and Diana. Steven, and George when he was old enough, went as day boys to the Melbourne Grammar School. Margaret and Mildred went to a school kept by a Madame Pfund, whose portrait by Longstaff hangs in the Melbourne National Gallery. They spent their holidays at Westhill, where they were nearly always joined by some of the Dells and the Bynghams.

I keep referring to the Bynghams, but I have given no account of them. Over the chimney piece in the little drawing-room at Westhill, where I began to write this book, there is a portrait ‘attributed’ to Kneller, which I have already mentioned, of a William Langton who was born in 1691. He wears a green velvet coat and riding breeches, while swathed around him, like ‘ectoplasm’ in a spiritualist photograph, is a gorgeous furbelow of cherry-coloured silk, which can hardly have been part of his costume as he went hunting round Waterpark. It was probably one of the artist’s ‘props’ as it appears also in a portrait of William’s wife. He wanted
a patch of cherry-colour to contrast with the green coat but it was not essential to the portrait. In the same way the Bynghams appear in this story. They are a patch of colour, a broad influence rather than a clearly defined number of distinct individuals. I found it hard to distinguish between my many Byngham uncles. Except for John they come more to my mind as a species. They were important to us as they were the channel through which Teba blood might come in an unexpected spurt, to darken the nature of someone like Dominic or Julian. They were only transmitters, not containers, as the Bynghams were the most large round jovial horse-loving extroverts it is possible to imagine, although they were capable of scarlet rage when confronted with a dirty trick. This, combined with the fact that Captain Byngham would not for a moment tolerate any departure from the highest standard of courtesy and good manners gave them a reputation for chivalry. Amongst that horde of boys, my mother and her sister were the only girls.

They had not, as much as the Langtons, taken on the colour of Australia, partly because there were so many of them that they made a community of themselves, and because of their father’s insistence on manners and their mother’s naive conviction of her superiority. She had a definitely Spanish appearance, and apart from her ancestry, did not look the kind of person with whom one would be flippant. But she was very kind to us children, and whenever we went to Kilawly gave us presents on a scale she could not then afford.

The Bynghams were supposed to be rich, and perhaps in the early days they were. Captain Byngham owned a large station in the Riverina, but it became increasingly mortgaged.
To bring up eleven children, all with expensive tastes and a love of hospitality, must have put a strain on any reasonable income. Even if they had been paupers the young Bynghams would have been attractive to women, who could not resist their sanguine faces, their aplomb, their lively Irish eyes, their round noble voices, their excellent manners, the caressing charm which they turned on automatically for pretty girls, and the social position which they assumed so naturally that no one, least of all themselves, ever questioned it. Captain Byngham was intimate with governors like the Normanbys and the Hopetouns, and when in the eighties the Duke of York with his brother Clarence and one of the Battenbergs came out to Melbourne, my mother danced in the opening cotillon with the future king.