The Blue Field (16 page)

‘Will the Member please inform the audience where
he
was educated?'

‘Winchester and Balliol.'

‘Ah,'
said the red-faced man darkly.
‘Ah.'
And with that he sat down, turning right and left to glance significantly at his neighbours.

But a moment later he was on his feet again. He had armed himself with quotations from speeches which Halliday had made in the past, phrases torn from their context, sentences obviously twisted out of their original meaning, and he demanded to know whether that was a true report of what the Member had said. ‘No lengthy explanations please. Yes or no.' And then with a small regretful sigh, a long-drawn
‘Ah'
, a slight commiserating inclination of the head, the red-faced man subsided.

But the arrow with the deadliest poison he kept for the last. The subject under discussion was conscription. The red-faced man got up very slowly, like one who takes leisurely aim, being certain of a kill, and asked deliberately in his oleaginous voice

‘
Will the Member be good enough to let us into the secret of what
he
was doing between the years
1939
and
1945?'

The arrow struck. Halliday jerked his head, and for a moment I wondered: is he going to tell them about his twisted foot or isn't he? There followed what seemed a long, a painful silence, during which I reflected that of all the professions in the world I should least like to indulge in politics. Then the answer came, short and factual:

‘I was in the Ministry of Information.'

‘Ah.'
The persecutor's tone was more smooth and suggestive than ever. That is all we need to know, it seemed to say; thank you very much, that explains everything. Triumphantly he nodded and smiled to his neighbours and turned round in his seat to grin at the people behind him.
‘Ah',
he repeated.
‘Ah.'
And he sat back with folded arms and a beastly satisfaction in his smile while Mr Halliday answered the next question, speaking perhaps a shade too loudly and a shade too fast.

‘A credit to his prep-school,' Mr Chorlton whispered to me. ‘For that, I think, was literally his Achilles heel.'

The meeting ended ten minutes later. Mr Chorlton intercepted Halliday as he came down off the platform and having no doubt made an apt and suitable quotation in Latin – I am sure he was unable to resist that temptation -he brought him round to the door where Sir Gerald and I were waiting. ‘We're going to slip round to the Swan,' said Mr Chorlton in a conspiratorial whisper. In the Swan bar we sat in a corner and drank pints of beer, which Halliday obviously enjoyed. ‘You can't imagine,' he smiled, ‘how long it is since I had a free moment to sit in a pub and drink a pint. Months and months. During the session I seem to be in a tearing hurry all day and half the night. And when I come down here my Agent takes charge of me. He disapproves of my going into pubs. He says it upsets the Nonconformist conscience and loses votes.'

‘Pubs for Politicians,' laughed Mr Chorlton. ‘There's a policy for you.'

‘We make such a lot of laws,' said Halliday seriously, ‘that we get bewildered and bemused by them. We desperately need to sit down and think. And a pub's a good place for that.' And indeed, as I glanced at him across the table, I thought that was probably what he needed more than anything else: the chance to sit down and think. He was the tiredest-looking man I'd seen since the war. His eyes reminded me of the eyes of men coming out of battle. Soon he looked at his watch and got up to go. ‘I've got another meeting at 8.30,' he said, ‘ten miles away.' He hurried off, and Mr Chorlton said quietly: ‘The squirrel in
his cage, endlessly turning a little treadmill. I wonder if he realizes yet? But where the devil', he added, ‘has Gerald got to?' He'd given us the slip, just outside the Memorial Hall, muttering that he'd left something behind. I got up to order another drink, and at that moment he came into the bar. He was looking somewhat shamefaced, and he had a small piece of paper in his hand which he hurriedly tucked away in his pocket.

‘Come here,' said Mr Chorlton, ‘and tell us what you've been up to.'

‘Nothing,' said Sir Gerald. ‘Er – nothing. At least—'

‘You Seventh Day Adventist, you Good Templar, you Buddhist, Moslem, Spiritualist, Oxford Grouper,' roared Mr Chorlton. ‘I know you, you anabaptist, polytheist, gymnosophist, fire-worshipper, you hanger-on of sects and societies. Make a clean breast of it and show us that piece of paper. For unless I'm very much mistaken you have just joined the Labour Party.'

‘Well,' said Sir Gerald, ‘he
did
talk a lot of sense, didn't he? And you know I always believe in trying everything. But it was that horrible red-faced man who did it really. I thought: goodness me, if that sort of person is a Tory – well, after all—'

‘Did you not,' accused Mr Chorlton, ‘only three weeks ago send off your annual subscription to the Elmbury branch of the Conservative Association? Are you not also a regular subscriber to the Liberal Party funds?'

‘It is one of my few principles', said Sir Gerald firmly, ‘to keep an open mind.'

On the way back to Brensham Mr Chorlton talked about Halliday.

‘You know,' he said, ‘I could make a diagnosis of that young man's trouble. He's never had much fun in his life. He is suffering, in the modern jargon, from serious
fun-deficiency. I believe Brensham might cure him. I should like to watch his reaction, anyhow, on one of the occasions when the village takes its hair down and goes a bit crazy. I wish he could meet old William Hart when he's full of homemade wine and roaring his happiness to high heaven in his great voice like the Bull of Bashan. I wish he could see the Frolick Virgins, with all their young men, giggling and cuddling on their Saturday evening out. I'd like to take him into the Horse and Harrow, say, when Joe Trentfield's telling his naughtiest stories, and Mimi and Meg are strumming on the piano, and everybody's singing all our wildest songs, on Christmas Eve!'

The Hallidays came to live at Brensham a fortnight later, and while their furniture was being moved to the Manor they spent a night at the Horse and Harrow. For Mrs Halliday at any rate this was a most unhappy introduction to Brensham ways. She was obviously a girl who above all things abominated disorder. She had an almost physical abhorrence of the haphazard, the unorganized, and the unplanned. But in order to enjoy a night at the Horse and Harrow one has to be appreciative, or at any rate tolerant, of the most uncompromising individualism. The plumbing, indeed, has so much individuality that it might be described as anarchic.

Even the journey up to her bedroom must have seemed a nightmare to Vicky Halliday. I have taken a good many visitors to stay at the Horse and Harrow, and have carried their suitcases upstairs for them, so I am familiar with the experience. You are led first into the kitchen, which is small and generally full of children belonging to Mimi and Meg.
Mrs Trentfield mountainously rises up from an armchair and Mimi and Meg, often with babies at their breasts, appear like foothills beside her. ‘I'll have to lead the way,' says Mrs Trentfield, ‘because the staircase is a bit awkward.' It is indeed. It goes up in a corkscrew spiral, in pitch darkness even by day, and the suitcase jams against the banisters. At every bend a low beam juts out, upon which you bump your head. At the sound of the bump Mrs Trentfield chuckles, and when she does so the whole staircase creaks. ‘Sorry,' she says, ‘but visitors
always
bump their heads and I
always
has to laugh.' At the top of the staircase there is a narrow crooked corrider with an uneven floor; here you invariably trip up; and at the end of it you climb another convolute staircase, and reach the Guests' Bedroom. ‘Here we are at last!' says Mrs Trentfield, as triumphantly as if she were a pilot who has brought his vessel safely to anchor through the treacherous shoals. The room, which is a fairly large one, is almost completely filled by the largest bed you have ever seen. ‘Take care you don't get lost in it,' says Mrs Trentfield cheerfully.' It's feathers. Now I must explain about the bathroom. I hope you won't mind; but the fact is the bathroom was built on separately, by a local jobbing builder, and to get to it you have to go down the way we came up, and through the living-rooms, and through the bar, and up the other side. It's a nuisance, but it can't be helped, and of course if you like you can always arrange to have your bath during closing-time . . .' As like as not, while she stands beaming there, a most extraordinary noise, which seems to come from the ceiling, startles you out of your wits. It is a sort of deep gurgling chuckle, interspersed with choking gasps, and ending with what sounds like a loud belch. ‘That's just the plumbing,' explains Mrs Trentfield, kindly, ‘and it only means that somebody's pulled the lavatory plug downstairs. The water tank makes
that noise when it's filling up again. Joe – my husband – he calls it
Minnehaha Laughing Water.
Lord, he's a merry man!' she adds. ‘Twenty years we've bin here and twenty times a day he's heard it, but I should begin to wonder what was up with him if it didn't make him laugh!'

Poor Vicky Halliday! I called at the Horse and Harrow in the evening, and took her into the bar for a drink. (Her husband, in his usual tearing hurry, had driven off to a meeting at the other end of his constituency.) In protest, I think, against the untidiness of her surroundings she had over-tidied her hair and reduced it to that state of symmetry and order in which she would like to see the disorderly world and especially the disorderly village of Brensham. She looked rather like a model for Hitler's ideal of Aryan womanhood. There was, however, a large and angry-looking bump on her forehead.

While I ordered the drinks she stared with disapproval at the remarkable assortment of curios, curiosities and unseemly odds-and-ends which decorated the walls of the bar. Her cool and unamused glance wandered from the old top-hat which surmounted the moth-eaten stag's head to the stuffed parrot and to the fox's mask upon which in the late hours of VE-Day Joe had ceremonially hung up his Home Guard cap. She had no sense of the comic or the absurd, and she found nothing funny in Joe's extraordinary collection of malformed and contortionist vegetables which occupied the mantelpiece – potatoes with legs and arms, a parsnip like a mermaid, a pear like a wizened old man, a marrow with a caricature of Winston Churchill engraved upon it, a hobgoblin tomato putting out its tongue. When she had taken a long look at all these she turned to me and made her considered comment.

‘A bit prep-school, isn't it?' she said.

I forbore to ask her if she liked her room, because I felt
quite sure that she had an antipathy to double beds, especally enormous ones, and that she regarded feather mattresses as an affront to good hygiene. So we talked uncomfortably about the weather and the Village Hall which she proposed to redecorate and the Women's Institute which she proposed to wake up. Then Mimi's husband, Count Pniack, came into the bar, and I introduced him to her. He sprang to attention and loudly clicked his heels. ‘The P is silent,' he barked; and clicking his heels once more, and bowing stiffy from the hips, he went out to the kitchen.

‘He was here during the war,' I explained, ‘and married the landlord's daughter.'

‘Oh, I see. One of those
reactionary
Poles,' said Mrs Halliday.

A moment later Mrs Trentfield came through the kitchen door, a surge of flesh accompanied by the smell of frying fat and boiling pudding.

‘Supper's ready, my dear! There's chit'lings, and suet roll, and, if you've got a corner to fill, bread and cheese and pickled gherkins and home-made piccalilli!'

There was something anarchic even about the hospitality at the Horse and Harrow.

Next weekend the Hallidays had another unfortunate experience. Mr Chorlton had offered to ‘show them round the village', but it turned out to be a drizzly grey day, November had shut down, the countryside was brown and sodden, and most of the population of Brensham, looking their most oafish, were engaged in picking sprouts. The squealing of a pig, shrill and tremulous upon the still air, accompanied the sightseers wherever they went.

Normally Mr Chorlton would not have noticed this bucolic sound; but whenever it became exceptionally loud Mrs Halliday gave him a look of inquiry and at last when the squeals reached a crescendo she observed to her husband:

‘Maurice, I believe they're doing something awful to that wretched animal.'

Now Mr Chorlton was aware that Jeremy Briggs the blacksmith was preparing to kill his pig (which was called Mr Molotov because of its exceptional obstinacy) for he had noticed the preparations in the smithy yard as he passed by: the well-scrubbed bench, the pile of straw, the earthenware jug of cider on the bench, and the neighbours hanging about because a pig-killing was always a bit of a ceremony in Brensham. Guessing that the Hallidays would disapprove of public butchering, he didn't tell them this, but took them into the church to see the memorial brasses. Not even the thick walls of the church, however, were impervious to the pig's squeals, which sounded even more blood-curdling as they echoed in the vaulted roof; so Mr Chorlton conducted the Hallidays down to the river, and walked them about half a mile along the footpath, despite some warning twinges of gout in his big toe. But wherever they went the intermittent squeals followed them.

Dusk fell at last, and Mr Chorlton, already limping badly, turned for home; but the smithy lay between the river and his house, and unless he led his charges across the muddy sproutfields there was no way round it. He therefore took them back by way of the village street and by a most unhappy chance the squealing ceased abruptly and significantly just as they approached the smithy. There was a short grunt, such as an old gentleman might make as he settled down for an afternoon snooze at his club, then silence. And here let it be said that the execution, without doubt, was performed swiftly and mercifully by Dick Tovey
the butcher, who takes as much pride as a bullfighter in making a clean kill. The squealing which had provided such a lengthy prologue to the drama had been, like most prologues, completely irrelevant; it was no more than the pig's protest against the invasion of his rest and quietude. The Hallidays, however, were not aware of this.