Unconditional surrender (7 page)

‘
I’m worried about you
,’ his father had written in the letter which, though it was not his last – for he and Guy had exchanged news since;
auditiones malae
of his father’s deteriorating health and his own prolonged frustration – Guy regarded as being in a special sense the conclusion of their regular, rather reserved correspondence of more than thirty years. His father had been worried, not by anything connected with his worldly progress, but by his evident apathy; he was worrying now perhaps in that mysterious transit camp through which he must pass on his way to rest and light.

Guy’s prayers were directed to, rather than for, his father. For many years now the direction in the
Garden of the Soul
, ‘Put yourself in the presence of God’, had for Guy come to mean a mere act of respect, like the signing of the Visitors’ Book at an Embassy or Government House. He reported for duty saying to God: ‘I don’t ask anything from you. I am here if you want me. I don’t suppose I can be any use, but if there is anything I can do, let me know,’ and left it at that.

‘I don’t ask anything from you’; that was the deadly core of his apathy; his father had tried to tell him, was now telling him. That emptiness had been with him for years now even in his days of enthusiasm and activity in the Halberdiers. Enthusiasm and activity were not enough. God required more than that. He had commanded all men to
ask
.

In the recesses of Guy’s conscience there lay the belief that somewhere, somehow, something would be required of him; that he must be attentive to the summons when it came. They also served who only stood and waited. He saw himself as one of the labourers in the parable who sat in the market-place waiting to be hired and were not called into the vineyard until late in the day. They had their reward on an equality with the men who had toiled since dawn. One day he would get the chance to do some small service which only he could perform, for which he had been created. Even he must have his function in the divine plan. He did not expect a heroic destiny. Quantitative judgements did not apply. All that mattered was to recognize the chance when it offered. Perhaps his father was at that moment clearing the way for him. ‘Show me what to do and help me to do it,’ he prayed.

Arthur Box-Bender had been to Mass before. After the last gospel, when the priest left the altar, he looked at his watch and picked up his bowler hat. Then when the priest appeared differently dressed and came within a few feet of him, he surreptitiously tucked his hat away again. The Absolution was sung, then priest and deacon walked round the catafalque, first sprinkling it with holy water, then censing it. The black cope brushed against Box-Bender’s almost black suit. A drop of water landed on his left cheek. He did not like to wipe it off.

The pall was removed, the coffin borne down the aisle. Angela, Uncle Peregrine and Guy fell in behind it and led the mourners out. Box-Bender modestly took a place behind the Lord Lieutenant. The nuns sang the Antiphon and then filed away from the gallery to their convent. The procession moved down the village street from the new church to the old, in silence broken only by the tread of the horse, the creaking of harness, and the turning of the wheels of the farm cart which bore the coffin; the factor walked at the old mare’s head leading her.

It was a still day; the trees were dropping their leaves in ones and twos; they twisted and faltered in the descent as their crumpled brown shapes directed, but landed under the boughs on which they had once budded. Guy thought for a moment of Ludovic’s note-book, of the ‘feather in the vacuum’ to which he had been compared and, by contrast, remembered boisterous November days when he and his mother had tried to catch leaves in the avenue; each one caught insured a happy day? week? month? which? in his wholly happy childhood. Only his father had remained to watch the transformation of that merry little boy into the lonely captain of Halberdiers who followed the coffin.

On the cobbled pavements the villagers whose work had kept them from church turned out to see the cart roll past. Many who had come to the church broke away and went about their business. There was not room for many to stand in the little burying ground.

The nuns had lined the edges of the grave with moss and evergreen leaves and chrysanthemums, giving it a faint suggestion of Christmas decoration. The undertaker’s men deftly lowered the coffin; holy water, incense, the few prayers, the silent Paternoster, the Benedictus; holy water again; the De profundis. Guy, Angela, and Uncle Peregrine came forward, took the sprinkler in turn and added their aspersions. Then it was ended.

The group at the graveside turned away and, as they left the churchyard, broke into subdued conversation. Angela greeted those she had not met that morning. Uncle Peregrine made his choice of those who should come to the house for coffee. Guy encountered Lieutenant Padfield in the street.

‘Nice of you to have come,’ he said.

‘It is a very significant occasion,’ said the Lieutenant: ‘Signifying what?’ Guy wondered. The Lieutenant added, ‘I’m coming back to the Hall. Reverend Mother asked me.’

When? How? Why? Guy wondered, but he said nothing except: ‘You know the way?’

‘Surely.’

The Lord Lieutenant had hung back, remaining in the public, Anglican graveyard, Box-Bender with him. Now he said: ‘I won’t bother your wife or your nephew. Just give them my sympathy, will you?’ and, as Box-Bender saw him to his car, added: ‘I had a great respect for your father-in-law. Didn’t see much of him in the last ten years, of course. No one did. But he was greatly respected in the county.’

The funeral party walked back along the village street. Opposite the Catholic church and presbytery, the last building before the gates, was the ‘Lesser House’, a stucco facade and porch masking the much older structure. This was not in the convent’s lease. It had fulfilled various functions in the past, often being used as a dower house. The factor lived there now. The blinds were in the windows, drawn down for the passing of the coffin. It was a quiet house; the street in front was virtually a cul-de-sac and at the back it was open to the park. It was here his father had suggested that Guy should end his days.

The convent school was prosperous and the grounds well kept even in that year when everywhere in the country box and yew were growing untrimmed and lawns were ploughed and planted with food-stuffs.

A gate tower guards the forecourt at Broome. Behind it lie two quadrangles, medieval in plan, Caroline in decoration, like a university college; as in most colleges there is a massive Gothic wing. Gervase and Hermione had added this, employing the same architect as had designed their church. At the main door stood the Reverend Mother and a circle of nuns. In the upper windows and in the turret where the Blessed Gervase Crouchback had been taken prisoner appeared the heads of girls, some angelic, some grotesque, like the corbels in the old church, all illicitly peeping down on the mourners.

The Great Hall had been given a plaster ceiling in the eighteenth century. Gervase and Hermione had removed it revealing the high timbers. In Guy’s childhood the walls above the oak wainscot had been hung with weapons collected in many quarters and symmetrically arranged in great steely radiations of blades and barrels. These had been sold with the rest of the furniture. In their place hung a few large and shabby religious pictures of the kind which are bequeathed to convents, smooth German paintings of the nineteenth century portraying scenes of gentle piety alternating with lugubrious and extravagant martyrdoms derived at some distance from the southern baroque. Above the dais, where the panelling ran the full height of the room, a cinema screen held the place where family portraits had hung and in a corner were piles of tubular metal chairs and the posts of a badminton set. This hall was the school’s place of recreation. Here the girls danced together in the winter evenings to the music of a gramophone and tender possessive friendships were contracted and repudiated; here in the summer was held the annual concert, and a costume play, chosen for its innocence of subject and for the multiplicity of its cast, was tediously enacted.

The nuns had spread a trestle table with as lavish a repast as the stringency of the times allowed. What was lacking in nourishment was compensated for by ingenuity of arrangement. Cakes compounded of dried egg and adulterated flour had been ornamented with nuts and preserved fruit that were part of the monthly bounty of their sister-house in America; the ‘unsolicited gift’ parcels which enriched so many bare tables at that time. Slices of spam had been cut into trefoils. The school prefects in their blue uniform dresses carried jugs of coffee already sweetened with saccharine. Box-Bender wondered if he might smoke and decided not.

With Uncle Peregrine beside him to identify them, Guy made a round of the guests. Most asked what he was doing and he answered: ‘pending posting’. Many reminded him of occurrences in his childhood he had long forgotten. Some expressed surprise that he was no longer in Kenya. One asked after his wife, then realized she had made a gaffe and entangled herself further by saying: ‘How idiotic of me. I was thinking for the moment you were Angela’s husband.’

‘She’s over there. He’s over there.’

‘Yes, of course, how utterly foolish of me. Of course I remember now. You’re Ivo, aren’t you?’

‘A very natural confusion,’ said Guy.

Presently he found himself with the solicitor.

‘Perhaps we could have a few words in private?’

‘Let us go outside.’

They stood together in the forecourt. The heads had disappeared from the windows now; the girls had been rounded up and corralled in their class-rooms.

‘It always takes a little time to prove a will and settle up but I think your father left his affairs in good order. He chose to live very quietly but he was by no means badly off, you know. When he inherited, the estate was very large. He sold up at a bad time but he invested wisely and he never touched capital. He gave away most of the income. That is what I wanted to talk to you about. He made a large number of covenants, some to institutions, some to individuals. These of course terminate with his death. The invested money is left half to you and half to your sister for your lives and afterwards to her children and, of course, to your children if you have any. Death duties will have to be paid, but there will be a considerable residue. The total income which you will share has been in the last few years in the neighbourhood of seven thousand.’

‘I had no idea it was so large.’

‘No, he didn’t spend seven hundred on himself. Now there is the question of the payments by covenant. Will you and your sister wish to continue them? There might be cases of real hardship if they were stopped. He was paying allowances to a number of individuals who, I believe, are entirely dependent on him.’

‘I don’t know about the institutions,’ said Guy. ‘I am sure my sister will agree with me in continuing the payments to individuals.’

‘Just so. I shall have to see her about it.’

‘How much is involved?’

‘To individuals not more than two thousand; and, of course, many of the recipients are very old and unlikely to be a charge for many years more.

‘There’s another small point. He had some furniture at Matchet; nothing, I think, of any value. I don’t know what you’ll want to do with that. Some is at the hotel, some in store at the school. I should suggest selling it locally. There’s quite a shortage of everything like that now. It was all well made, you will remember. It might get a fair price.’

The brass bedstead, the triangular wash-hand stand, the prie-dieu, the leather sofa, the object known to the trade as a ‘club fender’ of heavy brass upholstered on the top with turkey carpet, the mahogany desk, the book-case full of old favourites, a few chairs, the tobacco jar bearing the arms of New College, bought by Mr Crouchback when he was a freshman, the fine ivory crucifix, the framed photographs – all well made, as the lawyer said, and well kept – these were what Mr Crouchback had chosen from his dressing-room and from the smoking-room at Broome to furnish the narrow quarters of his retreat. Angela had taken the family portraits and a few small, valuable pieces to Box-Bender’s house in the Cotswolds. And then in the six days’ sale silver and porcelain and tapestries, canopied beds, sets of chairs of all periods, cabinets, consoles; illuminated manuscripts, suits of armour, stuffed animals; no illustrious treasures, not the collection of an astute connoisseur; merely the accumulations and chance survivals of centuries of prosperous, unadventurous taste; all had come down into the front court where Guy now stood, and had been borne away and dispersed, leaving the whole house quite bare, except for the chapel; there the change of ownership passed unrecorded and the lamp still burned; not, as it happened, a thing of great antiquity; something Hermione had picked up in the Via Babuino. The phrase, often used of Broome, that its sanctuary lamp had never been put out, was figurative.

All Guy’s early memories of his father were in these spacious halls, as the central and controlling force of an elaborate regime which, for him, was typified by the sound of hooves on the cobbled forecourt and of the rake in the gravelled quadrangle; but in Guy’s mind the house was primarily his mother’s milieu; he remembered the carpet covered with newspaper and the flower petals drying for pot-pourri, his mother walking beside him by the lake under a sunshade, sitting beside him on winter afternoons helping him with his scrapbook. It was here that she had died leaving the busy house desolate to him and to his father. He had lost the solid image of his father as a man of possessions and authority (for even in his declining fortunes, up to the day of leaving Broome, Mr Crouchback had faithfully borne all his responsibilities, sitting on the bench and the county council, visiting prisons and hospitals and lunatic asylums, acting as president to numerous societies, as a governor of schools and charitable trusts, opening shows and bazaars and returning home after a full day to a home that usually abounded with guests) and saw him now only as the recluse of his later years in the smell of dog and tobacco in the small seaside hotel. It was to that image he had prayed that morning.