The Wooden Shepherdess (24 page)

Meanwhile Gilbert had moved on to other election themes: the festering state of the Party's “Reunion,” with both sides worn to gangrenous sores wherever Lloyd George and the Party Machine came in contact: “No Trespassing” boards signed “D.L.G.” all over Liberal Wales, and a tourniquet clapped on the vital flow from the little man's moneybags.

Mary said something.... True (agreed Gilbert), what mattered was less the hopeless seats we'd allowed to go by default than the possible seats we had fought and so dismally lost; but how could Party morale survive when Lloyd George's refusal to cough up the cost of a candidate left so many with no one to work for and vote for?

“Are you listening, dear?” said Gilbert; and Mary said Yes, she was.... But can't Gilbert see (she was thinking) what locking his moneybags means is that Lloyd George is running no risk of winning elections so long as Asquith survives? That brought to her mind John Simon's story: how, after the previous election, Gilbert Murray had wanted Asquith himself to take office with Labour support, instead of the other way round.... Ah, but that would mean “finding a niche for Our Little Friend,” which was something which Asquith refused to even discuss.... So Asquith too would be taking good care no risk of winning was run so long as that meant high office for D.L.G.; and two such leaders, only agreed in their common desire for defeat, were only too likely to get their way!

“Are you listening, dear?” Gilbert asked her again; and Mary again said she was.... So the Liberal Party was doomed, she decided: when one of them died in the end it would be too late. She studied her husband's face. What would Gilbert do, when he found that his leaders themselves had condemned him to forty years in the wilderness? Oust them for somebody new—but for
whom
?

Or else ... But no, for surely Gilbert would never abandon his Party! After all Gilbert was Liberal born and bred. Three centuries back an earlier Roundhead Gilbert had bought the Mellton estates from their bankrupt Cavalier owners, and ever since then the Chase had sent to the House its Whig and later its Liberal squires.... All the same, she couldn't quite get out of her mind another of Jeremy's nastier dicta (said apropos Winston Churchill lately leaving the Liberal Party—ostensibly rather than have to support the Socialist Party in office): “No, the Man of Principle never deserts his Party: he brands the Party itself for deserting him and his principles.”

Then the door opened and in came Augustine's charming friend, an American young Mr. Fairfax intrigued by kippers but thankful to find that this elegant British home had coffee to offer at breakfast as well as tea.

A young Mr. Fairfax, too, who felt it a privilege being the Christmas guest of an eminent British Statesman. He'd always been taught to hold the British House of Commons in high regard, all American politics being so crooked.

Paris called him, and Anthony wasn't intending to stop on in England long; but above all else in England he wanted to hunt.

From a card pinned up in the hall he learned that a Boxing Day Meet would be held at Tottersdown Abbey, and privately hoped that Mary would offer to lend him a mount. But Mary advised him to wait, since Boxing Day Meets were never for serious hunting but more for working off Christmas dinners and half the county followed on foot (privately Mary preferred to keep him under her eye if she took him out, which could hardly be done in a Boxing Day scrum).

So Mary hacked to the Meet alone with a groom. But Anthony wanted to witness it all the same, and persuaded Augustine to tramp there with him over the downs (while Polly most unwillingly stopped at home).

On the way, Augustine described the Abbey—the house they were going to see—as “a fake-Victorian mansion, though really built in the Middle Ages.” After the Dissolution, he said, a motley succession of secular owners had kept on trying to fake the Abbey to look up to date; and because of its elephantine size, each spent so much that the next generation had had to sell it—which started the tale of an Abbot's Curse. One of the earliest hid its barbaric old Gothic front behind a Renaissance colonnade: then a Georgian lowered the pitch of the roofs, and a Regency owner clad acres of stonework in stucco he painted to
look
like stone. But no one had total success till the late-Victorian Henry Struthers who covered the stucco in ivy, added a vast Gothic-revival porch with arrow-slits, hid the Georgian roofs behind gargoyles and battlements, stained-glassed a number of windows—and lo, today from top to toe it looked a completely Victorian edifice!

“All the genuine monkish stonework and carving appears convincingly imitation, seen in the context of Struthers; and even the ruined Chantry looks utterly bogus, apparently built round a vaguely Florentine fountain and planted with Wellingtonias.”

Anthony asked who lived there now; and that special note of constraint which protests that you're neither snobbish nor anti-Semitic infected Augustine's voice as he named “Nathaniel Corcos, First Lord Tottersdown.” Very much richer than any previous owner, this one alone had made no attempt to alter the Abbey's appearance: “The old boy feels it exactly suits his style—as a pure Sephardic Jew with a pedigree long as your arm and a fortune centuries-old whom everyone takes for a nouveau-riche.”

On arrival they found a crowd of hundreds milling around on the four or five acres of gravel, or fighting its way to a long white table where flunkies in gorgeous flunkery served hot punch: a tiny handful of horsemen surrounded by people with no idea what it meant, getting kicked. Younger hounds were barging their way through the throng like professional footballers: Whips and Huntsmen struggled vainly to get them under control, and cursed the silly women who tried to pat them and fed them on sausage-rolls. No wonder that Polly was left at home in a mob like this!

They caught one distant glimpse of Mary, on foot. Wisely she'd left her mount for the groom to hold till the final moment when hounds moved off; and now she was chaffing a tiny farmer who sat a Gargantuan beast which probably pulled the plough....

Then Augustine gave a sudden cry of delight, and darted away through the crowd towards the house. Hurrying post-haste after Augustine and blocked by a glowering Polly's-age child on a Shetland pony so low he nearly fell over it, Anthony only acknowledged her “Damn you, look where you're going you oaf!” by politely raising his hat without looking round. Then he found Augustine engaged with another young man, and clearly both overjoyed at the meeting—although this only showed in their twinkling eyes, and at first they hardly spoke (but when they did speak, both spoke at once).

For Augustine was not the only truant lately returned to Dorset. Archdeacon Dibden was Rector of Tottersdown Monachorum and this was Jeremy, just got back from a four-months spent in Russia and Central Europe. That was to be his last fling of freedom before getting swallowed up in the Civil Service, a fledgling Assistant Principal.... “Call me a ‘Postulant' rather,” he'd just been insisting before Augustine joined them: “For what more strictly enclosed Contemplative Order exists than the English Civil Service?”

With him were Ludovic Corcos (the son of the house), who was one of his oldest friends; and an even more dazzling Gentile lady. Augustine's attention was fully engaged, but she quite took Anthony's breath: she couldn't be more than her twenties, and visibly winced when Jeremy called her “My Aunt.”

When hounds had at last moved off, half of the crowd went home. The rest of them tried to “follow,” but didn't know where to go: for the Hunt had instantly disappeared in a mist which made the occasional horn or the hound giving-tongue seem to come from anywhere, back or front. In twos and threes they slowly zig-zagged about, plodding in twenty acres of heavy plough until they succeeded in reaching the nearest fence—to find that beyond it lay thirty acres of heavy plough, where they finally stuck.

Watching the last of these plodders fade in the mist, “La nostalgie de la boue ...” murmured Jeremy: “Strange, that this British liking for playing in mud has only a name in French.”

“There's probably something about it in Freud,” said Ludovic.

“Indeed there is!” cried Jeremy's Aunt.

“Then his grandfather
must
have been married twice,” thought Augustine.

*

It still was too early for lunch, so Ludovic led them up to his den. He closed the stained-glass window, swept a scimitar off the sofa to let them sit and opened his limed-oak cocktail-cabinet.

“Mud and Blood—the English sportsman's gods, his Heavenly Twins,” mused Jeremy: “Little wonder that under
their
aegis he won the War!” He paused while his good hand lifted the paralyzed one to clamp its fingers convincingly round his glass, then added, “At least in sports like sailing or mountaineering the life at risk is your own.”

“Chaps do get killed,” said Augustine.

“Not actively killed by the fox—more's the pity.”

“Then what about pig-sticking?” Ludovic interposed. “There, if you take a tumble the boar himself disembowels you.”

“Ugh!” said Jeremy's Aunt (by now they were all of them calling her “Joan”).

“The man with only his spear, the charging boar with his tushes—and hard, like stubbing your spear in the trunk of an oak.”

“Ludo!” Jeremy cried: “You little savage, don't tell me you really enjoyed it!”

Inwardly Anthony boiled. Sure, he'd got wise in the end to Augustine's corny notions of fun; but this Jeremy guy with his polio arm.... You'd take that Yid for the only White Man out of the bunch by the way the other two talked!

Meanwhile in Ludovic's mind was revived that intoxicant, loose-reined leaping out of the dark of the Moorish cork-woods: out over boulders and sunlit palmetto, and galloping blind with eyes for only the jinking quarry in front where a fox-hunter wouldn't have risked his horse at a walk. Boars have killed lions.... He silently smiled at his manicured nails as he dreamed of his twelve-and-a-half hand Barb and a Tangier boar standing ten-and-a-half with its back to the Rocks.... But then some sixth sense took him across to the window. At what he saw, looking down through the colored glass, he stiffened: that enigmatical huddled group on the gravel, which suddenly changed its hue as it crossed from the amber pane to the red.... He turned to his guests: “Forgive me a moment, Father may need my help. I'll be back, but meanwhile fill up your glasses.”

He slipped from the room.

“Fill up your glasses....”

The Bedouin say that a man's soul travels only as fast as a camel: the man whose body moves any faster must wait for his soul to catch up. Jeremy'd come home much too quickly, by train—and had left his soul far behind where the singing Danube giddies through the Visegrad Narrows. Spotting a Sliwowitz bottle he poured a man's-size tot for himself, then poured out one for Augustine.

Augustine accepted it, lost in dreams of his chase by the cops in the Dusy: the Bearcat's plunge from the dam—and who says the fox can't enjoy it, at least in retrospect?

Anthony's homesick eyes were searching the labels in vain for Bourbon....

Joan had only eyes for Augustine. He looked so uncannily like his cousin Henry, killed in the War only five days after they'd secretly got engaged.

At Mellton Gilbert was glad to be spending the day alone, with so much to think out. But first he'd some tiresome letters to answer; and then he remembered he'd got to consider his figure these days, so made his reluctant way to the ex-Mausoleum which housed his squash-court. There he changed into shorts and for twenty minutes or so woke the cavernous echoes, practicing shots. After that he took a shower (thank God the water for once was really hot!).

With Asquith losing his seat (thought Gilbert, starting towards the house), things were tricky indeed. That business of choosing a Party Sessional Chairman.... When some of them tried for Collins (the new Chief Whip) the Little Welsh Goat had turned very nasty; and when it was put to the vote got elected (Gilbert himself had abstained: he profoundly distrusted Lloyd George, but when hitching wagons to stars it is fatal to hitch to the wrong one).

He crossed the lawn, where Polly in scarlet leggings and gloves was exercising her latest puppy as well as her governess. Vaguely he waved his racket, but Polly was too taken up with her puppy at first to respond until Miss Penrose sharply reminded her: then she shouted something he didn't bother to hear....

On the loggia Susan Amanda was braving the raw December air in her pram; but he passed his encapsulated baby without a glance, for Gilbert by now was hungry for luncheon as well as so busy distrusting Lloyd George—and Lloyd George's latest Land Reform ideas in particular.
Any
meddlesome mucking-about with the age-old, delicate structures enshrining the tenure of land was something which Gilbert regarded with righteous horror; and who could know more about that than Gilbert, a model land-owner himself? But this latest scheme would be virtual Nationalization: something disastrous for farmers—they'd all be hamstrung by County Committees and town-bred officials who couldn't tell late-sown barley from quitch; and disastrous for landlords, since all they would get for their land would be Lloyd George “Bonds”—not even hard cash. As for any young man who wanted to break into farming, he hadn't a hope: for this hare-brained “hereditable tenure” idea accrued to some sitting tenant's unmerited profit and penalized everyone else.

Gilbert lunched alone, then shut himself in his study and lit a rare cigarette to help him think.... That little Welsh crook had somehow smuggled a hint of this into the Party Manifesto, which Strachie declared had cost us a lot of votes in the agricultural West. This blatantly Socialist measure would have to be fought tooth-and-nail at the coming Party Convention, or else the “Liberal” Party must lose any rag of pretense to the name. He'd better join forces with some of those sensible chaps from the North: such men as Runciman ... Geoffrey Howard, of Castle Howard ... Charles Roberts, involved through his wife with the Carlisle Estates. These were sound Liberals all; and thoroughly sound about land, as well as hating Lloyd George.