What Happened at Hazelwood? Read online

  But why start with Joyleen? There’s no logic in that.

  Notice to begin with, then, that this dinner would have been quite notable even if those antipodean cousins hadn’t turned up. It would probably have been quite uncomfortable too. George never really got on with his younger brother, Bevis – this, perhaps, because of their long separation in youth – and nothing brought them together except the ritual business of shooting over each other’s land. But now here was Bevis staying at Hazelwood, and with him was his son, Willoughby. George was fifty-four, Bevis is fifty-three, and Willoughby is twenty. I can’t see how to avoid these bald slabs of information in starting a family chronicle like this. And I warn you that you have to remember them – more or less.

  These were the visitors. The permanents were George’s widowed sister, Lucy Cockayne, and her son, Mervyn. Lucy is two years younger than Bevis, and Mervyn a year younger than Willoughby – which is symmetrical enough. Then there was George’s younger sister, Grace, who is thirty-eight and unmarried. Or at least she is thought to be unmarried. Once you get among baronets and blunt instruments you can never be quite sure of little matters like that, can you?

  Oh – and, of course, there was me.

  I seem to have started with the genealogy after all, and let the animated scene wait. Still, it’s coming. And as for the genealogy, there are vital bits missing still. Don’t forget that.

  For instance, Timmy. A vital part of his genealogy is notoriously missing. On that evening it didn’t seem greatly to matter. You don’t need a genealogy to hand soup.

  ‘Timmy,’ said George abruptly, ‘do you like doing this sort of thing?’

  And Timmy Owdon glided behind his father and set down a plate quietly. He wasn’t going to let clumsiness express his feelings, as if those feelings came to no more than sulkiness. Timmy Owdon set down a plate and before replying to his master’s question reached for another. Old Owdon stood behind George’s chair, his one eye impassive and unwinking. If Timmy’s insolence penetrated to his torpid mental processes he gave no sign. Timmy set the second plate. Then he said: ‘No, sir.’

  ‘That so? Pity. Reckoned as promotion, I’m told.’ George, with the frown of a short-sighted but also of a saturnine man, peered up the table. ‘Lucy, Grace, you look quite glum. Have a glass of sherry. Or let Owdon pour the claret now.’

  Neither Lucy nor Grace replied. Owdon remained immobile in his place. Timmy glanced slowly round the table, but his gaze passed some eighteen inches too high for empty plates. He was taking a good look at us – and very plainly consigning most of us to the nethermost pit.

  Bevis took a glance at the boy, flushed, dropped his eyes. ‘George–’ he began, and stopped.

  ‘Yes, Bevis?’

  Bevis compressed his lips and absorbed himself with the Simney crest on his spoon. There was a silence. George laid his little finger on a glass. Owdon poured sherry.

  It pleased George to have Timmy Owdon in the room. In order to achieve this he had contrived (by simple means) to drive one of the parlour-maids from the house. Timmy was to have her place. I believe there was a time when footmen were like game – never provided except in twos or multiples of two. But now here was this solitary youth in a sort of livery, which his father had fished out from somewhere and which by no means fitted him. An uncouth lad would have been a scarecrow. With Timmy you didn’t notice. He would have looked beautiful in anything. And now in his deep smouldering anger at having been taken away from the horses and turned into an indoor servant like his father he looked like a stripling cherub, a fallen angel with all his brightness still about him.

  And yet if there had been an artist in that dining-room (and, oddly enough, Bevis’ boy, Willoughby, is shaping that way) Timmy Owdon would not have stood alone in the limelight. For there was Mervyn Cockayne, George’s nephew and Lucy’s son. Mervyn too was like an angel. In fact, he was like the same angel.

  In that lay George’s little joke. His butler’s boy and his sister’s were equally Simneys. You had only to look at them to see that there could be no doubt of it.

  So already, you see, the plot begins to thicken. To no lady of feasible age and of the Simney blood could this clamant genetic fact be palatable. And few country gentlemen whose butler has thus obscurely distinguished himself among his womenfolk will first continue to employ the man and then, some sixteen years on, bring the natural child to his table as a footman. But George liked that sort of thing. Hitherto Timmy had lived unobtrusively in the stables. This was the first occasion on which George had chosen to show him off as the family scandal. Or as one of the family scandals. There are a good many more, some of which will presently come in.

  ‘Owdon,’ said George, ‘how old is your boy?’

  George’s butler turned abruptly and made a sign to the remaining parlour-maid. He was an unbeautiful creature – in some fray, piratical or otherwise, he had got his face messed up as well as losing that eye – and I used to fancy that an unexpected sensitiveness sometimes made him veer away like this when any general attention was directed on him.

  ‘Sixteen, sir,’ said Owdon.

  ‘Is that so?’ And George looked up the table. ‘Only a couple of years younger than Mervyn. But quite a different type. I mean, quite a different psychological type. Although both, I should say, are intelligent. Owdon, you would agree that Mr Mervyn is intelligent?’

  ‘Certainly, sir.’

  And Owdon moved off along the table – rather a silent table. George, of course, could give a wholly adequate rendering of the country gentleman able at any time to converse familiarly with his servants. And somehow this added an extra flavour of nastiness to his atrocious behaviour.

  The only person who did not appear upset was young Mervyn Cockayne himself. He looked appraisingly at Timmy, and as if by some instinctive sympathy his angelic features took on momentarily the same sultry look. I think their eyes met – in which case the sensation must have been just that of looking into a mirror. But when he spoke it was altogether sedately.

  ‘It is very respectable’ – Mervyn has a high-pitched voice which instantly commanded the table – ‘to derive one’s retainers from the same family generation by generation. Owdon is to be congratulated for having forwarded so pleasantly feudal a disposition of things.’ Mervyn looked round the table and affected to be much struck by an array of frozen faces. ‘Mama,’ he cried – and his voice rose to a parody of an anxious squeak – ‘is it possible that I can have said something gauche?’

  Lucy Cockayne looked vague, which was her refuge on such occasions. George looked delighted. Of all his relations it was this little toad alone whom he at all tolerated. Indeed, he made a favourite of Mervyn. It was generally agreed that he would leave him the greater part of what it was his to dispose of: a personal fortune of very considerable extent.

  ‘And now it is for Timmy to carry on the tradition.’ Mervyn was off again with the largest innocence. His eyes travelled once more round the table – an inquiring and speculative eye. It rested for a moment on his aunt Grace and passed on to the accompaniment of the faintest possible shake of the head. ‘Willoughby,’ he said suddenly – and much as if an altogether different topic of conversation had struck him – ‘did you ever feel, as I have done, that it is a pity not to have a sister?’

  Willoughby Simney might have replied to his cousin – only his father forestalled him. ‘Lucy’ – Bevis had gone a brick red and addressed his sister abruptly – ‘your boy ought to be birched. Eighteen or not, he ought to be birched.’

  ‘Whereas if I did have a sister’ – and with a skilful pause Mervyn swept in the attention of the whole company again – ‘she would have to be churched. A less painful experience, but equally embarrassing.’

  ‘Church?’ said Lucy absently. Whether she at all understood this indecent talk in which her brat was indulging I don’t know. ‘That reminds me. Wasn�
��t Mr Deamer here this afternoon?’

  ‘Deamer?’ said George sharply. ‘Fellow has no business coming about the place.’ He spoke much as if the vicar of Hazelwood was a dishonest gamekeeper whom he had turned away. ‘Unless to call on a sick servant and leave a tract. Owdon, are any of your people sick?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Grace Simney, who had so far not spoken during the meal, put down her spoon and looked directly at her brother. ‘George,’ she said, ‘the tract was meant for you.’

  ‘Was it indeed, now?’ And George sipped his sherry.

  ‘Yes it was!’ Grace’s voice was suddenly shrill. She was staring at Timmy with a sort of fascinated repulsion, and it was plain that her mind was swinging agitatedly between this ancient family scandal and some revelation of the afternoon. Looking at her one could see why Mervyn had shaken his head. She had not at all the appearance of one likely to become inadvertently the mother of a fresh generation of Hazelwood retainers. Grace is blanched and angular and faded. Intellectually able and full of nervous force, she became in her later twenties headmistress of a girls’ school. She is that still. But for years now she has regularly devoted her holidays to mild nervous illness. This always brings her back to Hazelwood – and her brother. And she was looking at him now with features drawn in anger. ‘Yes it was,’ she repeated. ‘Some girl in the village–’

  Bevis, who had glanced round the room and seen that the parlour-maid was still present, abruptly interrupted. ‘Willoughby,’ he said, ‘I didn’t like the way you were hunching your shoulders this afternoon. It contracts the chest, my boy, and that means that you have to hold your breath or the aim goes nowhere. And you were having binocular trouble, too. Continuity of glance–’

  ‘A very young girl–’

  ‘–and uniformity of movement…’

  Bevis is all for decency – which doesn’t mean that he is any more estimable than other members of the family. I would call him bluff, obtuse and unscrupulous; and he is secret where it is the Simney habit to be open. I don’t know that he much improved matters by starting this shouting match with Grace.

  But at least he diverted Mervyn.

  ‘To me,’ said Mervyn, ‘Willoughby appeared to shoot well. But uncle George, too, it seems, can bring down his bird. Mama, let us listen to aunt Grace and plan for the moral regeneration of the village. Let us set up a Vigilance Society at the Hall and have uncle George and Owdon as joint patrons. And our excellent Willoughby shall be beadle.’

  ‘Be what?’ said Willoughby.

  ‘The rascally beadle who shall flagellate the fallen daughters of the peasantry. Just your line. And no doubt your papa will lend you a birch. As for aunt Grace–’

  Willoughby lifted his sherry glass and pitched it in Mervyn’s face. Lucy ridiculously sprang to her feet as if to protect her darling boy, and her chair went over backwards. Grace had now lost all control of herself and was hurling at George whatever it was that Mr Deamer had come cautiously to insinuate. Bevis for some reason was bellowing angrily. And at the whole silly and disordered spectacle George was laughing heartily, as if he were an eighteenth-century backwoods squire in some rough-and-tumble novel by Smollett.

  It was at this moment that Owdon, who had left the dining room a few minutes previously came in again. It was plain that something had happened. The man was ashen – and a mere vulgar family rumpus would by no means have taken him that way.

  ‘Your Ladyship,’ he said, ‘Mr Hippias has arrived, and Mr and Mrs Gerard with him.’

  You had almost forgotten me, Gentle Reader, had you not? And I don’t think you realized that I am a woman – and Lady Simney?

  3

  But there it is; it is the widow of the late baronet who is telling the story – the unfinished and painful story which lies around me as I write. My name is Nicolette and I am twenty-eight – which means that I was twenty-six years younger than my husband.

  You will wonder how I came to marry him. Or perhaps you won’t. After all as yet you know nothing about me. And you may be more interested at the moment in Hippias and Gerard and Joyleen, the antipodean cousins who are out there waiting in the hall while Owdon, strangely discomposed, mumbles to me of their arrival at that displeasing dinner table.

  But if you are not disposed to wonder how I came to marry George I think I may say that Joyleen was thoroughly curious straight away. She is an ignorant little thing and as outlandish as her name. If you asked her to list the Seven Wonders of the World she would undoubtedly begin with Sydney Harbour Bridge and then get no farther. And if she wondered why I had married George I certainly wondered why Gerard had married her – or had been allowed by his father, Hippias, to do so. For I had gathered that the Australian Simneys were folk of the severest social sense. They were, in fact, pastoralists – a word which suggests robed and bearded persons living in tents, but which (it seems) is simply synonymous with gentry and applied to exclusively-minded folk living retired lives amid millions and millions of sheep. Hippias Simney of Hazelwood Park, New South Wales, was understood to be like that, as had been his father, Guy Simney, before him. And presumably young Gerard had been brought up in the same ovine environment. Perhaps in Joyleen he had been constrained to marry money. Or perhaps it was simply that she had got Gerard on the strength of her charms. She might be accurately described as the sort of girl who would be attractive to most men for a month or two before and a week or two after. I am bound to admit that I disliked her from the first – and you will notice how I tend to go off after her before she ought really to come in. Frankly, she was a bit of a last straw as far as I was concerned.

  But don’t get me wrong. I’m not at all like George’s virgin sister Grace, inept at and condemnatory of the whole odd and inescapable business of the sexes. Joyleen didn’t wonder why George married me. She wondered why I married George. She saw that George was of the week-or-two sort – her own sort. And she saw that I wasn’t; perhaps you will presently see it too. At any rate, don’t be misled by this hard-boiled style. It just seems the only possible medium for such a narrative as this.

  And now where have I got to? George has had Timmy Owdon, whose mother is a sixteen-year-old question-mark, in to wait at table. This has offended both his brother Bevis and his sisters Lucy and Grace. It has given Lucy’s beastly little son Mervyn an occasion for his nauseous wit and moved Mervyn’s cousin Willoughby to pitch a glass of excellent sherry at him. Grace, too, has been prompted to declaim in a loud voice about certain supposed performances of George’s in the village. Hard upon that has come the arrival of these Australians. And now they are going to cool their heels – the whole stupid scene is going to freeze into tableau – while I tell you, quite briefly, how I came to marry the middle-aged Sir George Simney.

  My people have been actors and actresses for generations; indeed, since the eighteenth century they have been quite a substantial part of the history of the English legitimate stage. I was always proud of all this. Yet at sixteen, and looking at the stage, I somehow didn’t think much of it. It was all temperament and no brains, and there always seemed to be one emotional mess or another round the corner. I hate scenes, and scandals, and people who are everlastingly watching themselves in an invisible mirror. This took me away from the traditional family paths and landed me at Oxford.

  But somehow after a time I didn’t think much of Oxford. I was the wrong sex for what goes on there. Young women who could get tense on cocoa and whose diet was a muddied amalgam of precocious pedantry and belated crushes just didn’t turn out to be my cup of tea any more than the little Emma Bovarys who were hopeful of careers on the London stage. I know that to view my college chiefly in this light was to miss the gracious and important part of it. Still, I just couldn’t see past all that. And I don’t pretend. At least I didn’t in those days.

  I didn’t pretend about Christopher Hoodless. I acknowledged to myself that I loved him from
the first day we met. How these things come about I don’t know. It is said that an enduring and exclusive passion may be born of the fact that the shade or texture of a young man’s jacket unconsciously reminds one of some rug or blanket one used to suck in one’s cot. And certainly falling in love is irrational, and love itself is impersonal – impersonal even though in no other human relationship is it so certain that one particular individual is utterly indispensable and the other just as utterly out of court. This falling in love with Christopher is the chief thing that has happened to me, and the best. And yet I don’t understand it at all. As you will presently see, I oughtn’t to have done it. Instinctively, I ought to have sheered off. But there it was.

  Christopher talked anthropology mostly, and how the University had never really acknowledged it as a science, and how the old descriptive anthropologies were not a great deal of good, and how it was futile to trace cultural affiliations about the globe looking for the Ark or the Garden of Eden. Only something called configurational anthropology (which I came to understand pretty well) was really getting anywhere, and there he himself hoped one day to do this and that. Christopher’s talk was on those lines. He was twenty-three, and had some sort of junior Fellowship or research scholarship, and was living half among undergraduates and half in a common-room with a lot of old men. It was in going from one to the other, so to speak, that he caught a glimpse of me and stopped for a good stare. That stare went on for some weeks. I saw that Christopher was very shy.