Authors: Margaret Drabble
Highcross House comes into focus, on its slight eminence, in the fading glimmer of dusk. It is, unusually, ablaze with light, and making an effort to welcome its guests. It stands on the site of what was once Highcross Farm, a building which nobody now remembers. The old farm had been a pleasing and harmonious dwelling, built of a light and delicate limestone of pink and ochre and a weathered orange, with a steep tiled roof, whereas the new Highcross is heavy, red and brutal, well pointed, ostentatious, penitential, and, like its present owner, angry and severe. Bessie Bawtry’s home in Slotton Road has six rooms: this house has about forty. It stands uncomfortably upon its land. The Heathcote Wadsworths had been wise to build up here, on magnesian limestone, away from the fault line, rather than on top of their own burrowings, for the clay Coal Measures are riddled with subsidence. They have built wisely, but they have not built with elegance. This is not a house to inspire affection.
Bessie is in no position to make such distinctions, for the sheer size of the thing overwhelms her spirits and blurs her vision, but the London houseguests have made much mock of it—such arch and spiteful mock that poor Gertrude has almost felt within herself an impulse to defend it. It is not its fault that it is so ungainly, so unsmart, so out-of-every-fashion. She has tried to make up for its failings with lights and flowers, with ribbons and candles, and music spills out of the doorway and across the gravel terrace.
Vast polished floorboards, acres of sideboards, huge bulbous banisters, heavy-framed mirrors, false Tartan and some fine Georgian Sheffield plate. Fruit cup, more alcoholic than it tastes, and little sandwiches, and sausage rolls with flaky greasy pastry. Is this a party? What is it for? What
are
parties for? Here are chattering and giggling, and a room where the carpet has been rolled back for dancing. The older folk gather and gossip in corners, the more confidant of the younger ones flap and flirt. It should be easy to escape notice in this mêlée, to mix, to blend in, to vanish. Not many of the guests here are accustomed to this kind of party. Will the locals and the gentry mix, will trade speak to houseguest, will doctor speak to colliery manager? Will they recognize one another for what they are, or will the signals be too confusing? Gertrude Wadsworth hasn’t the faintest about how to introduce anyone to anyone, and she doesn’t know who half of them are in the first place. She is gauche and graceless and red in the face, despite her layers of bright pink face powder. But there is enough noise going on to cover the gaps, and some people, at least, seem to be having a good time. What more can one hope for?
Bessie Bawtry is lost. She has surrendered her grey cloth coat to a maid in a cloakroom, and is now exposed in her crêpe de Chine frock with its unintentionally uneven hemline. She has lost sight of Miss Heald and Miss Haworth. She cannot see any of the Barrons. Where is Joe, her reliable sixth-form sweetheart? She had been sure she would find him here. She recognizes Mr Spooner from the Laurels, but she has never been introduced to him, so that’s not much good. She is lost in a sea of unknown shapes and faces. She dares not take a glass of the fruit cup from the silver tray that is offered to her. A feeling of panic pervades her. She longs to be back home, at her cramped little table, with her Latin grammar, her
Golden Treasury,
her certificates. But she cannot go home. There is no way home. She is stranded. And now this huge woman in pale green bears down upon her, angrily, gruffly, and demands her name.
‘I’m Miss Bawtry,’ offers Bessie, knowing that she is now one of the grown-ups, no longer little Bessie, but Miss Bawtry, for had not Miss Strachey herself, the principal of Newnham College, so addressed her?
‘Miss Bawtry, eh! Miss Bawtry!’ parrots the cruel hardfaced big woman, and she laughs, a dismissive, contemptuous laugh. ‘Well,
Miss
Bawtry, make yourself at home here, won’t you! Have a glass of wine, why don’t you!’
Bessie knows she has done something wrong, but what is it, what can it be? She turns away, in confusion. But the big woman pursues her, catches her hand, and says, ‘Come along, Miss Bawtry, let me introduce you to—to Freddie Farley. Freddie, come here and speak to Miss Bawtry!’
And Freddie Farley, summoned from another conversation, is forced to speak to Bessie Bawtry. He is gentler with her than Gertrude Wadsworth has been, for unlike Gertrude he is not shy, he is easy and sociable, and he does the best he can with this nice timid little blond girlie: he walks her to another room, asks her questions, and learns from her that she is between school and college, that she has a place at Cambridge, that she lives in Breaseborough, and that she has never before been to Highcross or met her hostess.
‘Cambridge, eh!’ he echoes admiringly. ‘You must be a clever one, then!’
Bessie Bawtry does not know whether this is meant as a compliment, nor, if it were, how she should receive it. She says nothing. Freddie starts to speak to her of all the people he knows at Cambridge, but of course she has never heard of any of them, nor can she respond to any of his inquiries about the town, or the colleges, or the dons. Freddie Farley cannot think of any other topic of conversation. He is getting nowhere with this one. He asks her to dance, but she says she cannot dance. He will have to ditch her, he can’t spend the rest of the evening trying to talk to this tongue-tied mousie of a schoolgirl, it is too painful. He has done his best. He tells her to look up his cousin Douglas at St John’s when she goes up next autumn. And he hands her on, like a parcel, to Angela and Cedric, and bows his way out.
Bessie is overcome by a sense of unutterable failure. Freddie Farley, good-natured, lightweight, has undone all her bright hopes, all her prospects. He has pushed her back into the mire, just as she was beginning to clamber painfully out of it. She has not understood one word he has said to her, but she has understood its import. It is as she suspected. Cambridge is a place peopled by confident characters like Freddie Farley, in dinner jackets, who will be unspeakably bored by Bessie Bawtry. There will be no place for her there. She is a failure before she even arrives. There is no way forward, she is condemned to Breaseborough for ever.
Angela and Cedric, far less friendly than Freddie, reinforce his message. They quiz her about her schooling, cut her short when she mentions Miss Heald, and walk away from her in midsentence.
Bessie escapes to a cloakroom, and sits in the water closet until someone comes and rattles the door handle.
She finds her lonely way to the library, where she lurks behind a bookcase. The titles of the books swim before her eyes.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Punch
and the
Spectator
in bound, unread volumes. Samuel Johnson, Smollett, Richardson. Bessie knows that she is more capable than most of the people in this house of reading those volumes. But what does that matter? Books do not matter. They are the foothills. Beyond them stretch Alpine ranges of unscaleable and giddy horror. There is no happiness to be had on earth.
***
‘So do you think Gertrude is
happy
}’ asks the poet of the painter, as they take refuge from their social obligations in the library alcove. They are pursuing a conversation about their hostess, initiated earlier on the dance floor. Bessie Bawtry, perched out of sight on the library steps, tries not to listen, because she knows that eavesdropping is wrong. But she dare not move, and she can’t help overhearing.
‘Happy as happikins,’ says the painter, settling into the window seat and kicking off her tight glacé kid buckled shoes. She rubs her toes, and yawns. It’s been a long day, and most of the folk up here are heavy going, and the tunes are old-fashioned. Gertrude has tried hard, but she hasn’t quite pulled it off. It’s too shaming to retire to bed alone before midnight, but really, she’s almost had enough. Not that it’s very pleasant in the guest rooms. It’s arctic up there.
‘No, but seriously,’ says the poet.
The painter yawns again, and wrinkles her snub nose in what she believes to be a fetching and playful manner. She reaches into her little beaded reticule for a cigarette, and pushes it into her mother-of-pearl cigarette holder, and lights up.
Bessie thinks that smoking in a library is very wrong, but it’s not her place to reveal herself and say so, is it?
‘She’s a very good sort, is Gertrude,’ persists the earnest bearded poet. ‘I think she might respond.’
‘You want to pack
everyone
off to Vienna,’ says the painter. ‘I don’t think it’s the right thing for
everyone.
I think Gertrude is better off being a virgin.’
‘How do you know she’s a virgin?’
‘I think she must be, don’t you?’
‘What an appalling thing to say,’ says the poet, although secretly he agrees with the painter.
‘I imagine she’s a lesbian. If she’s anything,’ says the painter. Her cigarette smoke perfumes the dusty air. ‘But I don’t suppose she’s anything.’
‘Everybody is something,’ says the poet.
‘So they say, these days, but I don’t believe it. I think lots of people have no sex urge at all. I think a lot of people get on quite well without it. I don’t, and you don’t, but I bet our Gertrude does. She does quite nicely as she is, if you ask me. And she does very nicely by us too. Quite a place she’s got here, isn’t it? Have you ever seen anything like it?’
‘It’s dreary,’ says the poet.
‘But big,’ says the painter, who comes from Bloomsbury via Potters Bar.
‘And such sad people,’ says the poet.
‘What’s sad about them?’ says the painter, although secretly she agrees with the poet. ‘They seem to be having a merry old time of it. In their own dismal kind of way.’
‘And what a landscape,’ continues the poet, who is not listening to the painter. ‘What have they done to it? It’s terrible, terrible.’
The poet had been naïvely shocked by what he had seen out of the railway-carriage window. He had never been north before. He had not known it was like this. The pitheads, the quarries, the scars, the mountains of slag, the spoil heaps, the careless, casual filthy dumping. The lack of the most elementary, animal cleanliness. You could not get away from it—the lack of
toilet training.
Not even animals foul their own nest as this northern race had done. Had they lost all sense of dignity and human worth? That they should let their slaves live in such subhuman dirt? Poor Gertrude, heiress of muck. It’s wrong, he tells the painter. It’s disgusting. Mountains and mountains of shit. You can’t do that to the countryside.
The poet comes from the soft green valleys of Somerset, and is just finishing a successful analysis.
‘Oh, I think it’s quite dramatic,’ says the painter, intent on being perverse. ‘Sublime, in its way.’
‘Sublime?’ echoes the poet. ‘It’s not sublime. It’s just a filthy mess and muddle.’
‘Oh well, maybe you’re right,’ yawns the painter. She isn’t interested in landscape. Landscape is old hat. She paints people, in violent shades of orange and pink. She prefers people.
‘Anyway,’ says the painter, ‘it’s interesting. For a change.’
She stubs out her cigarette on the parquet. It’s lucky Bessie cannot witness this act of vandalism. Things are bad enough for Bessie behind the bookcase. She would not like to be an accomplice in this deed.
‘I met a
very
nice young man,’ says the painter, starting up again, provocatively. ‘A young local. The D. H. Lawrence of Breaseborough. Red-haired, and all. Did you spot him? I made him dance with me. He didn’t want to, but I made him.’
‘Was he a gamekeeper?’ asks the poet.
‘No, I’m afraid not. Nothing so romantic. He said he was a travelling salesman. I told him he couldn’t be, but he insisted that he was. He was very young and handsome, and he quoted poetry at me.’
‘What sort of poetry?’
‘How would I know? You know I can’t read. Something about soft hands and peerless eyes. It was very pretty.’
‘Keats,’ says the poet.
‘Who?’
‘Keats, you ninny.’
The painter pretends that she does not mind being called a ninny, but she does. She does not think it nice of the poet to tease her about her reading habits. It was true that she had been incapable of reading more than half a page of the article on narcissism he’d put under her nose on the train down to Yorkshire, but she bet that not many other of the party-goers at this festivity would have been able to plough through it either. The poet is a beast.
‘You’re a beast,’ says the painter to the poet. ‘A beastly beastly beast.’
Bessie cannot make out what happens next, but it sounds improper. A scuffling and a giggling and a short cry of surprise. The kind of thing you tried not to hear going on in the back row of the cinema.
To Bessie, the whole interchange has been both improper and, mercifully, largely incomprehensible. There have been words in it that Bessie has never heard before. She had got the Keats quote, though, brief though it was. It was from ‘Ode on Melancholy’. They’d done it with Miss Heald for Oxbridge entrance.
But what on earth was all that business about Vienna? Bessie sits tight, and hears the conversation strike up again, as the bodily noises quieten down.
‘You know,’ says the painter reflectively, and solemnly, in a quite different mode, as though the kissing interlude had never taken place: ‘You know, I think Gertrude probably is happy. Maybe not happy as happikins, that was a silly thing to say, but happy enough. She’s sort of—self-sufficient. She’s self-contained. She doesn’t need any of us. She can live without us. Don’t you think? I think she’s not afraid. And most of us are afraid. Most of the time. I think she’s got so used to being afraid that now she really isn’t afraid any more. She’s grown out of it. She’s grown up. I think that’s why I like her. What do
you
think?’
‘I think I love and love and love you,’ said the poet, entranced by this brave and uncharacteristic outburst of generosity from Potters Bar and Bloomsbury. ‘I love and love you, you beautiful beautiful darling.’
He does not sound as though he means it very seriously, but how can one tell? People don’t talk like that when they are serious. Do they?