‘The move to Westhill nearly blew up the whole show. Hetty was furious and said, what she was always halfthreatening to do, that she would declare the true father of her children. She imagined that the result of this would be a double divorce and that Austin would have to marry her. Austin was not so sure that Alice would now forgive him if she knew of it. He was no longer guilty of a single uncontrolled impulse. She was as likely to be governed by justice as by mercy. Hetty couldn’t be certain, either, what Alice would do. She might forgive Austin, while Dell might divorce herself and she’d be left in the lurch. It was only because he emphasised this probability that Austin managed the move to Westhill without an explosion. But that wasn’t the end of the business.
‘I think that Austin, having got away with it for so long, had almost persuaded himself that other people knew about
it, and condoned it—even Alice. He couldn’t realise that when she persuaded him to stay the night with the Dells, as a convenience when he went to town, she had no inkling of his relationship with Hetty. Alice wasn’t used to dealing with moral thugs and that’s what Hetty was. She used to invite herself to Westhill for weeks and squat there with the insolence of a brigand. There are far more near-criminals in the world than we imagine. Alice was indignant and wretched about it, but she didn’t know how to cope with anyone who ignored all the rules of decent behaviour. Your Uncle Reggie Byngham said the other day: “One can’t argue with a dishonest bookie on a racecourse.” Alice probably felt the same about Hetty, squatting in her drawing-room as if she owned it—almost deliberately provocative and not minding if there was a bust-up.
‘This state of affairs lasted up to the time Mama and I came out from England. Austin must have known that I didn’t know about it, and yet on that afternoon at Westhill when I laughed at the size of Hetty’s sons, he couldn’t believe that I wasn’t pulling his leg, though he also knew perfectly well that if I had known it was the last subject on which I’d pull his leg. It’s that sort of confusion that puts people in a rage. To get rid of the confusion he told me the whole story that evening. A few weeks later he and Alice left for England. I don’t know how he got away from Hetty, whether there was a final bust-up or what. I think there must have been, as when they came back, although they had a house in Melbourne, they never went near the Dells. The boys used to go up to Westhill, but I don’t think Hetty ever went there again—or not for years. I think that Alice discovered the
whole thing when they were in England. She looked different when she came back and of course when once Alice knew Austin was free to break with Hetty.
‘There was one thing which was very funny. When Austin had been away a year, Hetty had another boy—Harold. This time it was the protoplasm’s. There was no mistaking it either, apart from Austin’s being away. You only had to look at the poor little devil. Beside his brothers he was like a white mouse beside a lot of prize stallions. Austin must have laughed when he saw him, but of course we never referred to the subject again, after that night at Westhill.’
Arthur chuckled and sipped his port, proud to think his stock had proved so immensely superior to lesser breeds within the law. Then he suddenly switched back to his sylphides and pioneers mood.
‘What I want you to understand,’ he said, ‘is that your grandfather was one of the kindest and most honourable men of his time. He never did a cruel thing, except this that I have told you, and he did not do that willingly.’
Arthur in the last minute or two had unconsciously revealed his own attitude to women. They meant so little to him that he thought that Austin would be amused at a woman, whom he must have regarded as a kind of wife, producing a child by another man. Also he put every bit of the blame on Hetty. He may have been justified in doing this, but can a man of Austin’s physical and moral development be held to have no responsibility for his actions? It is unlikely that he would have claimed such immunity.
Arthur pushed back his chair and we went into the drawing room. He walked with his head a little on one side,
looking like a man whose private life is disreputable, but who is reverently performing some ecclesiastical function. He lighted the tiny lamp behind the glass miniature of Alice, and then sat down and played the Chopin prelude in G. As I listened to him I no longer had that feeling of old-world tranquillity which I generally had in this room when Arthur played the piano after dinner. I thought that it was rather shocking of him to tell me all this about my grandfather, and yet Austin had died when I was six years old. He is the dimmest memory—not anyone in whose eyes I had recognised a fellow human being. He is only that portrait in the lobby which I discussed with Julian, and a ghostly giant with a hunting crop. Also when people are as old as Arthur was when he told me these things, and when they are as intelligent, and have drunk a little wine, they are apt to see humanity
sub specie aeternitatis.
He was relating to me history and human behaviour, and was hardly aware that he was talking of a man on whose moral nakedness it was not seemly that I should look. Because of Arthur’s lack of self-consciousness, I was not embarrassed, and now I thought that perhaps the only thing I should not have heard was his subdued exclamation: ‘Poor old boy!’ I felt that in those words he revealed the sadness of his own life, and his affection for the brother with whom he had played all the games of childhood in those early days which to him, even more than to myself, must have seemed the sunlit morning of the world. It was a sadness I could not share, and therefore I thought which I should not see.
Since that dinner with Arthur, thirty years ago, I have had access to other sources of information, and now I
have the diaries, from which it is clear that the birth of Cousin Harold, which he thought must have amused Austin, really shocked and shattered him, not merely because it was the occasion of Alice’s discovering the situation. It revealed to him fully the immorality of his own relationship with Hetty. He had believed in his simple fashion that Percy Dell really was some kind of eunuch. It was easy, looking at him, to think that he was not properly a man. When he had to face honestly the fact that he had been sharing Hetty with this miserable specimen, he was revolted. He saw her as an adulteress not because of her relations with himself, but with her husband. On that morning when he caught the train to Frome, he must have been in a wretched and anxious state of mind. Alice had not come in before he left. He was almost certain that she knew, and yet he dared not do anything which might reveal the facts, if she did not know. At the last minute he scribbled a note: ‘I have to go to catch the train. I hope you have a good holiday.’ He sent for a hansom and drove off to Paddington.
It was all these events related by Arthur which Alice must have reviewed as she sat in misery in the park. She had never forgotten the details of that first voyage to England, and she recalled those oddities in Austin’s manner during its later weeks, which had caused her to write the first of those tiny French entries in her diary. She went on through all the events of the last ten years—the time when they lived near the Dells in East St Kilda and later at Westhill. She lived again through those long visits from Hetty, when she had squatted there as if she owned the place, and no doubt she felt she did own it as she owned Austin. Alice’s indignation when she realised the
full meaning of those visits, their vile impudence, was so great that she felt she could not bear to see either of them again. Then there was Austin’s burst of anger against Arthur, who had been poking fun at the Dell boys. The meaning of the whole thing was clear. It all fitted, right up to this morning, when she had read out Sarah’s letter. She stayed in the park till the late afternoon, her reason convincing her that it must be true, her imagination repudiating the convictions of her reason.
‘Il y a déjà trois semaines depuis que j’ai quitté Austin et je ne sais encore que faire. Je me sens le coeur déchiré, que ma vie est tombée en ruines, mais il me semble sage d’oublier et de tout pardonner. Il faut aussi penser aux enfants.’
This is a sample of the entries in Alice’s diaries during her three weeks tour with the Misses Urquhart. Until they parted there is hardly any reference to those two ladies except that one of them made herself tiresome complaining about the poor quality of the tea. They visited the towns immediately to the south and east of Paris. This was Alice’s first experience of mediaeval France, and one to which she had been looking forward all her life, but she was so numbed by her own
wretchedness that she could not respond to it. This inability was an added injury—to be given what she had longed for at the very moment she was unable to enjoy it. She remembered Lady Langton’s words about periods of an adverse fate. She felt that her fate was not merely adverse, but malignant. Occasionally she made an attempt to appreciate what she saw. She wrote:
‘The little city of Troyes is like a jewel with its many beautiful churches.’ Of Chatillon: ‘When I went into that dark narrow church on the hill I almost felt the ghosts of Charlemagne’s knights emerge from the walls.’ Each of these entries is followed by others in which she returned bewildered to her own problems. At Vézelay she escaped from the Misses Urquhart and sat for a whole afternoon on the ramparts, looking down on the summer hills and fields, but thinking of nothing but herself and Austin.
At last they were back in Paris. They had arranged to return to England together, but Alice felt too undecided to face Austin yet. She believed that if she were to join him at Waterpark, it would mean that she had accepted the situation. She told the Misses Urquhart that she would stay in Paris a little longer.
‘But wouldn’t it be very marked, dear Mrs Langton,’ said the elder sister, ‘for you to stay alone in Paris?’
The Misses Urquhart were both over forty and Alice was not yet thirty, so that although she was married they were more in the position of chaperone. Alice said that she wanted to do a little shopping and to see Paris more thoroughly.
‘I hope that Mr Langton will not be vexed at our coming home without you.’ These mild words were uttered in such
a vicious tone that Alice realised her conduct was thought exceedingly unconventional. With a curious mixture of reticence and impertinence the two ladies managed to convey to her that she of all people should be careful, as her elopement was not forgotten, while her mother’s behaviour in Sydney could not be forgotten, as it was perennial. These references and the disapproval which they emitted as they said goodbye left Alice in greater depression then ever. She took it as a foretaste of what would happen if there were any break between herself and Austin. She would lose not only her husband but the complete trust of her friends. She nearly changed her mind and followed them by the next train. She felt intolerably lonely and prepared to forgive anything if she could return to the security of affectionate family life. But that sense of justice which was so strongly developed in her, would not allow her to do it. She could not return to something which she now thought had never existed, except in her own imagination. She had been cheated and she could not acquiesce in that. There would have to be some adjustment, and half of her wretchedness came from her inability to see how this could possibly come about. She could not help being aware of the benefits the Langtons had from her. Austin had a marriage settlement of £1,000 a year. She had lent Lady Langton money to furnish her house in London, and again to return to Australia after the death of Damaris. She had lent money to Mrs Mayhew when the dean died, and even to Owen Dell when he was in difficulty. Some of these loans turned out to be gifts. She did not think that she had done anything excessive, but when she found that in return she had not even the fidelity of her husband, the channel through
which these benefits flowed, she felt that she had been exploited. This suggests that she was confusing her finances with the feelings of her heart, but it was not so. She simply believed that it was only honourable to accept gifts from those for whom one had completely loyal affections. She felt that she had been a party to dishonourable transactions. I do not want to pretend that Alice had no faults. She had to deal so much with money, and was responsible for the security of so many people that she may have treated it with more respect than most women. If she had not done so, she would soon have had none.
She stayed for two or three days alone in Paris. She went sightseeing to the Louvre, to Versailles, but found that after staring at some of the most famous pictures in the world, she had then turned away without the faintest idea of what she had been looking at. Suddenly she decided to go to Italy. She did not expect to enjoy it, but she had always wanted to go there and she thought she might as well snatch this one ambition from the wreckage of her world. Also it would provide a non-commital excuse for not returning at once to Waterpark. She wrote to Mrs Thomas Langton and said that as her time in Europe was short, she was taking this opportunity of visiting Rome. She still did not write to Austin.
I have now come to the entries in Alice’s diaries which I discovered on the night when I discussed with Julian the possibilities of this book, when we had examined the portraits of Alice and Austin in the lobby. They are the entries which decided me to write it. I already knew about Austin and Hetty, but it had never occurred to me as the subject of a novel, partly because I first heard of it from Arthur at a time
when it would have been impossible to write about it. Hetty herself was then living. Now thirty years have removed the survivors of one, and the whole of the succeeding generation, and only the ghosts can be grieved at my disclosures.
Alice had intended to go first to Florence, but on the afternoon of the second day, as the train was approaching Pisa, she caught sight of the leaning tower. To come unexpectedly on a world-famous curiosity was exciting, especially to an Australian who had seen few of them. She left the train at Pisa station, drove to an hotel, and then, glad to be free of the train, walked briskly along to the Campo Santo. As she passed along the river bank, with the solid line of renaissance palaces on her right, for the first time since she left London she felt a faint gleam of pleasure and of hope. It may have been largely due to her physical relief from the cramped space of the train. She puts it down to a liberation of the spirit brought about by her first glimpse of the Renaissance, but she wrote all this in the evening before going to bed, and this feeling may not have awakened until she reached the cathedral and may have been due to something quite different. The marble of the three lovely buildings, the cathedral, the baptistery and the tower, mellowed with age to a golden tint, was bathed in the evening sunlight. Beyond the walls of the Campo Santo was a line of distant purple hills, which might easily have been the background of a cinquecento painting. Within sight there was nothing of the modern world. She writes that she had the feeling that the centuries between herself and Giorgione and Perugino had been swept away.
She walked slowly across the grass to see the buildings from the other side. As she turned the corner of the cathedral
she came upon a man who was standing looking at the baptistery, which was behind her, so that for a moment he glanced straight into her eyes. He immediately looked away, and with a kind of impersonal courtesy, moved out of her path. She thought he must be an Englishman, but his face and manner were more sensitive than those of the fox-hunting neighbours at Waterpark. He disappeared round the building, the way she had come, but for the rest of the time she was in the Campo Santo, she was aware of this slight encounter and pleased by it.
In her hotel when she came down to dinner, she saw this man seated at a table near her own. She felt that he was aware of her, but he made no sign of recognition. He finished his dinner before she did, and he had to pass her table to leave the room. She was prepared to bow to him, as she was sure that he was English, but he did not look in her direction. She was disappointed as she was longing to talk to almost anybody.
The next morning at the railway station, she was having some difficulty with the porter about her luggage, when this man again appeared. He came along the platform and asked if he could be of any help. She explained which things she wanted with her in the carriage. He addressed the porter in fluent Italian and there was no further trouble. She noticed that he scrutinised her luggage with particular interest, and she thought it strange in a man who otherwise appeared so well bred. Then he said that he could not help noticing that, on her trunks were some labels: ‘Langton, Frome, G.W.R.’ and added:
‘Surely you must be one of the Langtons of Waterpark?’
‘My husband is a cousin of Mr Thomas Langton’s,’ said Alice. ‘We are Australians.’
‘Are you Mrs Austin Langton?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Alice, ‘but how do you know my name?’
‘I am Aubrey Tunstall. My sister Damaris married your brother-in-law.’
‘Oh!’ Alice paused, a brief acknowledgment of the tragic aspect of the connection between them. ‘How extraordinary that we should meet here!’
‘It’s more natural for us to meet here than at Dilton, I’m afraid,’ he said smilingly. ‘I’m hardly ever in England.’
Alice had an idea that the Tunstalls might hold the Langtons to be in some way responsible for the death of Damaris, but there was no suggestion of this in his reference to it. He asked if he might travel to Florence with her, if that was her destination. She said that she intended to spend a few days there on her way to Rome. She told him that Austin was hunting at Waterpark, that she did not hunt, and that she was taking advantage of this to see what she could of Italy. She said that she had not very long as they probably would soon have to return to Australia.
‘When you see Arthur Langton, give him my kindest regards,’ he said. ‘I feel that we might have been very great friends if he had stayed in Europe.’ He said that he had a little painting that Arthur had given him. She was surprised, as Arthur had never mentioned his friendship with Aubrey Tunstall. From the way he spoke it was clear that he regarded Arthur as quite free from any share of responsibility for the tragedy. He even remarked that Damaris had a very difficult temperament.
He asked her where she intended to stay in Florence, and when she said that she did not know, he recommended an hotel. He said that he was going to stay a few days with his sister, Ariadne Dane, who had a villa up towards Fiesole. He also lived in Italy and had an apartment in Rome.
‘Yes, I know that,’ said Alice. She told him of the strong impression made on her by the three beautiful buildings in the Campo Santo and that she had not really meant to stop at Pisa, but had been unable to resist the glimpse of the leaning tower. He seemed very pleased by her enthusiasm, especially when she said that she would prefer the leaning tower if it were straight.
‘It is such an exquisite thing in itself,’ she said, ‘that it ought to be admired for its beauty, rather than its oddity.’ He gave her a glance of warm approval, and she felt that there was already a basis of friendship between them.
At the station in Florence, he saw to her luggage and engaged a cab for her, which he directed to the hotel he had named. His own things were put into a carriage which had been sent to meet him. He gave a hint of surprise that Alice was travelling without a maid, and she told him that Australians were self-reliant. When her cab stopped at the hotel, his carriage drew up behind it. He alighted and came into the hotel with her. He spoke to the manager, who treated him with deference, and evidently told him that Alice was someone who must be shown great consideration. Alice thanked him for what he had done and he said:
‘It is the least I could do for a neighbour who is almost a relative. I am much more indebted to you for making what
might have been a tiresome journey delightful.’ He shook hands and said goodbye.
The rest of the day was very dull to Alice. All her problems which she had forgotten while she was talking to him in the train, returned to distress her. She thought the English were strange and unfriendly, judging as people are apt to do, a whole nation by one man. She was sure that an Australian, after all the pleasant intercourse of the journey, would not say goodbye in that final manner. In the evening she wrote in her diary, after the long description of her encounter with Aubrey Tunstall:
‘I should remember what Lady Langton says about periods of misfortune—that it is foolish at these times to attempt to seek any pleasure or happiness. I should not have come on to Italy, but have returned with Miss Urquhart. Tonight I feel dreadfully lonely. I wish I were at Westhill with my darling children. How lovely it would be to stand on the hill looking across the bay, and to smell the gum leaves, and to hear the children shout in the evening air.’
The next afternoon, Mrs Dane left a card and a note for her. The note invited her to luncheon on the following day and apologised for the short notice but the writer understood that Alice was only in Florence for a limited time. If Alice was able to come a carriage would be sent for her. Mrs Dane excused herself for writing by mentioning that their families were neighbours in Somerset, but she did not refer to Arthur or Damaris. Alice was excited by this invitation, as she had heard at Waterpark that Mrs Dane was both beautiful and cultivated, though not entirely approved of by her relatives. Also she was longing for some human contact.
In the afternoon she went to the Uffizi and she deliberately noted certain pictures so that she could discuss them with Mr Tunstall.
Mrs Dane’s villa had none of the associations of that word in Alice’s mind, which were purely suburban. It was a villa in the Vergilian or Renaissance sense of the word. She had been in some fine country houses near Waterpark but never in anything comparable with the magnificence of this. She was led down a colonnade which made her think of a Fra Angelico
Annunciation
, into a very large drawing-room. On the yellow brocade walls were paintings which appeared to be by those masters whose works she had seen yesterday in the Uffizi, and on the domed ceiling were painted gods and amorini revelling in sunset splendour. There were about a dozen other guests and Alice was the last to arrive, not by her own arrangement as she could not come before the carriage was sent for her. Amongst these people were a young Italian tenor, a Roman principessa, a Royal Academician, a French duke and duchess and an English lady novelist, festive with orchids and jewelry, whom, it was said later, Mrs Dane had horsewhipped for stealing her lover. Alice thought Mrs Dane extremely distinguished in appearance and like her mother whose portrait she had seen at Dilton. Caroline O’Hara, Lord Dilton’s second wife and as I have mentioned the granddaughter of the duque de Teba, was the mother of Aubrey, Damaris and Ariadne Tunstall. She was a famous beauty, a poetess and amateur actress in whom the Regency tradition lingered well into the Victorian era. I also have seen this portrait. It shows her to have had one of those passionate chiselled faces, and an immensely emotional mouth. I also
when a boy saw Mrs Dane, then very old. I shall not describe her here, except to say that she terrified me. Even when Alice saw her, I think her beauty must have been more of bones than of flesh. Alice wrote: