Through Streets Broad and Narrow (12 page)

Palgrave started to sing. He did this quite suddenly since it was a habit of his about twenty minutes after he'd had something
to drink. He sat down on a fallen tree in his sleek suit and sang in a light but true tenor:

“Believe me if all these endearing young charms
Which I gaze on so fondly to-day …”

Grania carolled up with him at the bare treetops and the rooks' nests, coming in with:

“Were to change by tomorrow and fleet in my arms
Like fairy gifts fading away …”

And John sang with them:

“You would still be adored as this moment you are
Let your loveliness fade as it will …”

But at this point Grania frowned and walked away smacking at her left thigh with the switch she had pulled from an ash tree. She called, “Who were you singing for, Palgrave?”

And Palgrave just got up, still singing and doing absurd half-pirouettes on the wet path. He was quite carried away by his own mood and voice, or seemed to want to give the impression that he was.

So, looking at John, she said, “If it was for you, I don't agree with him, because first, you're rather urban and second you've got eyes like pee-holes in the snow.”

He chased her then and she ran off the path and up the slope which was clothed with bluebell leaves and wet wood garlic. They both kept slipping on the slimy leaves and falling down on their faces. John pursued Grania and Palgrave pursued John. Grania clambered up an oak tree onto a thick dead branch and when John reached it she started to move out astride it further and further away from the trunk. Palgrave stood below, still serenading them, this time with “The Rose of Tralee.” The branch broke just as John got hold of one of Grania's ankles and they fell together onto the garlic slope clawing at each other, rolling down in the soft black earth through the oily aromatic leaves. Eventually he got on top of her, sitting on her stomach, holding her hands pinioned back behind her head so that she could only try to nudge him with her knees or throw
him off by bunting her hips against his buttocks. He was going to have said something in this moment when suddenly he saw that the face and the hair against the ground were not Victoria's. He realized then that, for an instant, he had been back at the lake where she had nearly drowned ten years before, that instead of a face Victoria would have by now only a skull. Palgrave pulled him off and Grania got up unconcernedly.

“You look better now,” she said to John, “not so towny, and Palgrave looks frightful; it doesn't suit him to be dirty on the outside.”

They were all a little out of breath, daubed over with black earth marks and green stains, their clothes and hair powdered with mosses and lichens.

“We'll all go and have baths,” Grania said, “and then tea—if I can get anyone to bring it.”

They went back to the house and through a wide hall to the staircase. The walls were covered with paintings of horses posed stiffly against skyscapes and dull green fields. Grania saw John looking at them and said, “Horses downstairs, cardinals upstairs—you two can share this bathroom; I'll bring you some towels later. You can dump your things in the Cardinal's Room.”

For a portrait gallery the first-floor landing was very dark but the de Savigny bishops and cardinals could be seen in their scarlet, poised against the dimness within their frames. To stand there was like standing outside the house, its previously black and empty windows now all mysteriously tenanted and filled by priests and fire.

Palgrave was waiting in the Cardinal's Room by a four-poster with a crimson brocade canopy. The only other furniture was a long brocade-covered ottoman, a mother-of-pearl-studded
prie dieu
large enough for the prayers of a giant, and a Victorian mahogany dressing table. On the chimney breast was a six-foot crucifix in bronze with an ivory Christ impaled through His wrists, with the hands and fingers curling like the edges of exotic shells over the metal heads of the nails.

Palgrave laid himself down on the great bed with his hands behind his head, and yawned. “I feel so sleepy,” he said in his nanny voice. “That long walk and all that stout.”

John looked at and then disregarded him. He did not look like a cardinal though he could well have been a cardinal's nephew in the Borgia period; he looked so rich and fat and corrupt.

Palgrave said, “I'm so dreadfully dizzy. Go and turn on the bath, John.”

John was thinking, If only it were Dymphna. Why do I never get the people I want into the times and places I want for them? How often have I imagined her on a bed less magnificent than this, pretending to be a little drunk and sleepy, languorous? But when it comes about, I get a toad instead.

Palgrave said, “You'll have to help me to get my things off, I'm completely
désoeuvré.”

John thought, And Victoria's dead. He went across the hall past the cardinals into a dark creaking corridor with the ridiculous rhyme repeating itself to the measure of his footsteps:

“A toad instead
,
And Victoria's dead
A toad—instead.”

He found a large bathroom with a yellow-lined wood-panelled bath with taps labelled “Press for Hot” and “Press for Cold.” There was a central spout through which the conjoined streams were supposed to flow in equable union, but the water remained tepid no matter what combination of pressures he tried.

The bathroom was L-shaped; in addition to the bath it contained a wastepaper basket made of an elephant's forefoot complete with its horny nails and, in the short limb of the L, a club-type lavatory upholstered in old ring velvet. The walls of the small annexe were decorated with greening photographs of Oxford undergraduates of the late 1920's with menu cards of defunct societies like the Gravediggers and steel engravings of Cardinal Newman and Bishop Bourne. John expected to see the face of Greenbloom amongst those of the mooning and arrogant young men until he realized that the period was a little too early. But he did find a cryptic placard bearing a borrowed coat of arms which proclaimed: “
E. St. C. W. sat here 1928
.”

He went back to the door and turned the Victorian lock
punched with the words:
Hobbs, London, Machine-made patent lever
, undressed and got into the lukewarm water.

When Palgrave knocked at the door John called out, “The lock's gone wrong. You'll have to get Grania to give you another bathroom.”

“Let me in, I'm freezing.”

“The lock's jammed.”

He half-expected Palgrave to say, “Love laughs at locksmiths,” but instead he became angry.

“You haven't tried. Get out of the bath and rattle the thing from your side.”

“It's no good, I've tried, it's jammed. When you get hold of Grania, do ask her to bring me some towels.”

To keep himself warm and to baffle Palgrave he started to sing:

“I wonder why you keep me waiting, Charmaine, my Charmaine?” and after a few minutes Palgrave went away.

John allowed him time to get out of the Cardinal's bedroom and then went back there himself and dried on the Cardinal's curtains.

When he got down to the hall again Grania, who was looking fresher and pinker than ever, said, “Wherever did you get to? I took towels along to Palgrave and he told me you'd got yourself locked in one of the lavs.”

“It was a bathroom.”

“Really, which one?”

“Bathroom and lav combined.”

“Oh,” she said, “that's my brother's bathroom, Sebastian's.”

John said, “I'm freezing cold. Did you manage to rake up any tea?”

“Palgrave said there wouldn't be time, he's in a tearing temper about something. Have you been beastly to him?”

“I don't think so.”

“He's probably in love with you,” she said, “my brother was like that for a time, so I know.”

But at this point Palgrave came down the stairs looking very reserved. His manner was expressively formal and he maintained it the whole way back to Ffynchfort.

When they got in, Claire Maunde, slumped in an armchair with the same novel on her knee, asked them, “Well, did you two have a good time?”

“Not bad,” said Palgrave.

“Where was it you went?”

“To the de Savigny's.”

“Romans, aren't they?” asked Cac Wac. “Personally I could never stand Romans in the Mess. They're either totally irreligious with no belief in anything, or else they're religious from first to last, which is damned unhealthy.”

Charles Chamberlyn-Ffynch came out of his study when Murphy was serving the sherry and the conversation was dropped until the man had gone.

“Must be awkward,” said Cac Wac, “living in a Catholic country, isn't it, Charles? I suppose you've never been quite sure of them since the Easter Rising? Beats me how you manage to live at peace at all.”

“It's a question of tolerance, really, in all things,” said old Chamberlyn-Ffynch. “Tomorrow, for instance, the servants will go off to Mass in the village at seven, lay on breakfast for themselves and us at eight thirty and the house will go down to Wilson's Mattins at ten. Never have much real trouble.”

At dinner the Captain hinted that he was some kind of a spiritualist, “No affiliations, though; don't believe in organized religion.” He talked portentously about a man he knew down in Norfolk who lived in two caravans, one filled with cage birds and books, the other his living quarters. This fellow, an Old Harrovian, knew things; he could establish contact with the dead and had a local reputation as a wart charmer and spiritual healer. He had even, or three occasions, claimed cures of cancer. The villagers from miles around consulted him about their own disorders and those of their stock; they sought his offices over their bereavements and love affairs and hauntings. “And you can laugh,” said Cac Wac, “as no doubt you will, but that's the fellow whose advice I should seek if ever I were in real trouble.”

Claire Maunde became caustic. “D'you mean trouble with your liver, your love life or your ancestors?”

“Ah!” said Cac Wac, “that's the point, how does one know
that they're not all connected? That's Wilbraham's view, anyway, one of his Seven Points.”

“You really mean to say that if someone you were fond of died or you thought you'd seen a ghost or got cancer you'd go off to this ridiculous man in the caravan?”

“There'd be no need to
go
to him. I'd simply send Wilbraham a letter and a guinea or two and by return of post I'd get back a card giving me his instructions.”

“What kind of instructions?”

“That would depend. It's not the kind of thing one likes to talk about.”

“I should think not,” she said. And she got up and left them to drink their port alone.

The Captain flushed, he perhaps felt himself betrayed by his own tongue, but he conquered his vexation and smiled at his host.

“They always think they know best about everything, God bless them,” he said.

Palgrave and John went up to the attic to play with the steam trains, but Palgrave was still angry and the engines ran badly so they went down to the ballroom which had not been used since Palgrave's twenty-first birthday, three years earlier.

It was a long Georgian salon at the opposite end of the house to Lady Eleanora's room, but it was unheated and had the ruined air of an unused room. There was a row of gilt French Empire chairs against each of the two side walls and at the far end a small proscenium on which stood a piano with Palgrave's guitar case on its unopened top, a set of jazz drums and some music stands with his monogram painted on their glass fronts.

Palgrave said, “We can't make too much racket; but I do feel like some music.”

“I suppose that rules out the drums,” John said. “A pity; I used to be quite good once—”

“Out of the question; we're over Shelagh's room. Which would you prefer me to play, the piano or the guitar?”

“—in the O.T.C. at Beowulf's,” John added, remembering the only occasions on which he had been able to identify himself with public-school life. Evenings between preps when, with
the sticks in his hands and the drum swaying, he had countermarched backwards and forwards across the quadrangle, the echoes of the bugles and side drums clashing through the sunset.

Palgrave picked out “Some of These Days” on the piano and the memory of Beowulf's gave place to an even more poignant nostalgia: the vision of himself and Dymphna dancing in timeless unison down the cold floor of the ballroom past the rows of empty chairs.

Palgrave sang:

“You're going to miss me, honey
Some of these days
You're goin' to feel so blue.”

The fantasies mingled and grew: the soldier and the dancer fused into the hero: courageous, successful, certain of himself in love and in war.

“You'll miss my kissin' ”

sang Palgrave with increasing feeling:

“You'll miss my huggin'
You'll miss me honey
When—I'm—far—away.”

His round bald face was turned half-seeing in John's direction. He was beginning to sway, his little hands flew over the keys like fatted doves and his light voice trilled out the words with well-bred nonchalance.

John picked up the wires and started to brush the vellum of the smallest drum:
swish swish, trick click
. Jazz; I'm in the smoke, New Orleans; The Duke. I'd like to be a bulging Negro forever, pounding about in a broken rhythm.
Clickety click
, I'll get into Mayfair drawing-rooms and debauch debutantes. I'll be a white bandleader and take a private engagement to play at Palgrave's next dance, to celebrate,
swish click
, the death of his father and his own inheritance. Dymphna will be here. I'll catch her eye, step down from the stage; snake hips, master of the dance. We'll be young for ever.

But Palgrave had stopped playing.