The Balliols Page 2

  He drew a small envelope from his pocket, extracted from it a card in the corner of which was written the name and address of the agency for which he worked. With what he took to be a flourish he presented it.

  “I don’t know if you’re thinking of buying a property here, but if you ever do, well, it wouldn’t do any harm to be in touch with someone in the know; personal equation, if you get me.”

  “That’s very nice of you.”

  “And if… well, if you cared to let me have your card, I could send you along any prospectus that I thought might interest you.”

  Balliol hesitated; then with a smile drew a card case from his waistcoat pocket, and in his turn took a card from it and handed it across. The young man read it: the name, Mr. Edward Balliol, the club in the left-hand corner, the Oxford and Cambridge, the address at the other side, 22 Easton Square. As he had thought, the kind of address his firm wanted on its books.

  “And that,” said Balliol, as he and Jane walked on out of earshot, “is the kind of young man for whom I prophesy a quite early and a quite pronounced success. I can picture him in twenty-five years converted into a portly, pompous committee man with a son entered for one of our lesser public schools; a son of whom he will be immensely proud and secretly afraid, whose bills he will settle half a dozen times and who, each time that he accepts a cheque, will contrive to give the impression that he is conferring instead of receiving a favour; who will marry for worldly reasons and whose progeny will arrive in the bankruptcy, by way of the divorce courts. Which is what, my dear, we call progress nowadays.”

  Jane made no reply. The long walk had begun to tire her. Her steps were not dragging, her breath was not hurried, her movements had the same smooth rhythm that had attracted the young man’s appreciative eye as she began the heightening climb. It had rather the gliding grace of a liner as it swings into harboured water, its engines faintly purring.

  Her husband continued his dissertation. “And it is to compete with such a one that we of the upper middle classes are at this moment training our sons at Marlborough, Cheltenham and Fernhurst. It is like training a terrier to be pitted against a wolf. There is our own Hugh at the end of his second year at Fernhurst. His competitive eye has already sorted out his rivals. He has marked the chief obstacle to his captaincy of the eleven, his most redoubtable opponent in the classroom. He fancies, as far as he has concerned himself with the problem, which is I expect to no large extent, that all through the life for which this education is supposed to train him, he will find the graph of his ambition defined by such simple landmarks. He would be astonished were he to be informed that he will find himself in competition fifteen years from now with someone whose existence at this moment he would not deign to recognize: an alert product of the council schools, attending night-classes at the end of eight hours’ manual labour in a factory.”

  As always, Balliol talked as though the subject under discussion, in this case his son’s education, was not a problem personal to himself, but one aspect of the general, social and economic problem of the hour.

  He continued on the same blandly impersonal note.

  “The trouble about such a competitor is this: Only one in ten thousand out of what our parents would have called the lower orders is born with sufficient ambition and capacity to enter the lists of such a competition. That one out of ten thousand has, in consequence, so many preliminary obstacles to face, that in passing them he acquires a momentum. He has started from so much farther back that he arrives at the starting post at a pace which within a few yards carries him right ahead of his opponents. He has, in fact, a flying start. In my day, when the masses were uneducated, we were spared such redoubtable opposition. I am convinced that Hugh has no conception of how different life is going to be for him. And I am extremely doubtful whether those who have been set in authority over him have recognized it, either.”

  Said Jane, “I think it’ll be warm enough to have tea out on the terrace.”

  They had reached the brief plateau, before Pitt House, where the hill pauses before starting its final climb to the Spaniards Road. Three youths on bicycles went by abreast. Their machines were not free wheel. They had spread out their feet sideways, so that their pedals could revolve; their caps were pulled tight to their foreheads, back to front, the peaks low upon their shoulders. They screamed excitedly to one another as they reached the top of the steepest hill within a five-mile radius of Piccadilly.

  As their machines rushed past, a motor-car with high scarlet bonnet, snorted, rattled, wheezed its way over the crest. It reached the plateau; it checked as though it were pausing to take breath; it groaned; it grunted; there was a grinding screech of tortured metal as the goggled motorist changed gears. Then with an abrupt jerk forward and a series of slight explosions the machine proceeded on its ascent.

  Balliol shook his head.

  “Dangerous things. They’ve spoilt the road for bicycling. I should not care to take a machine out now. I am very glad that what the press now call the cycling era coincided with my own enjoyment of violent exercise.”

  The era had framed their courtship. During their decorous Victorian engagement when it was considered improper for women to ride in hansoms, and evening excursions had demanded chaperons, they had ridden out in parties of four or six; he in a knickerbocker suit and belted jacket; she with a high-necked white blouse and straw hat perched forward on her head; scouring northern lanes through long autumn afternoons; looking down from Harrow, Highgate, Hampstead on to the glitter of London’s roofs and spires; taking their tea in cottage gardens.

  As they turned through the park gates he passed his arm under hers.

  “It must be over five years since we came out here,” she said.

  They had abandoned such excursions very early in their marriage. Their first child, Lucy, had been born within a year, and during Jane’s weeks of indisposition a friend had presented Balliol with a book in which the cycling enthusiast might enter his runs, the distances and times, the average of miles per hour. Within a very short time the fever of figures had bitten Balliol. He was always out to beat his own record. When Jane once again took the road it was to find that the care-free spirit had departed. Her husband no longer cycled for the pleasure of open air and open country; for exercise and the sense of speed; the freedom of being away from bricks and pavements. He cycled with one eye on the clock, the other on the cyclometer. He kept saying, “Now, do you think we could reach Shenley within twenty-three and a half minutes?” He grew resentful of wayside rests at the end of a long pull up a hill. He kept taking out his little book, writing figures, comparing figures. At the end of a day, instead of talking lazily before a fire, he would draw up charts by means of which he would invariably discover that there was some record or other that he had broken, even if it was no more than the speed record for the first twelve minutes after tea.

  In such bicycling Jane could take no pleasure. When she found she was again pregnant, fully a year before she had really wanted, she had consoled herself with the thought that anyhow she would not need to bicycle for another year. Perhaps during that time she would have been able to devise an excuse for avoiding their weekend excursions.

  She was spared that necessity, however. Before she was again fit the bicycle and the record book had been superseded. From a September holiday at Deal, Balliol returned with the announcement that he had taken up golf. That was not strictly true. Golf had taken him up. He argued that golf combined such pleasures as bicycling, fresh air, open country, pleasant companionship with professional advantages; that a great deal of business could be done “at what I believe the younger members call the nineteenth hole.” But neither was that argument strictly valid. Golf had captured him and the extent of his submission would have been no less complete had the list of his firm’s clients provided him with not a single partner or opponent to excuse the abandonment of an office desk at noon.

  On returning from an afternoon of golf he would discuss scores over
bogey, stymies and shanked approach shots with a minute elaboration of detail and theory. His handicap remained rooted in the lower teens, but a comparative study of his recent performances always convinced him that he was playing at least two strokes better than he had in the preceding month. And he invariably completed half an hour’s putting practice on the drawing-room carpet with the comforting pronouncement that he would be in single figures within a year.

  Golf was the one subject that he did not discuss impersonally.

  It was only indeed to the failure of a golfing partner that the present expedition was due. A telegram had arrived shortly before eleven. “Returning lunch. Will go walk country afternoon. Edward.”

  Which was very typical of Balliol. It never occurred to him that what he wanted, his family would not too. Jane was convinced that he had refused to install a telephone simply so that he might send such messages.

  He described the telephone, which he had only had installed at his office with considerable reluctance, as an extravagance and a nuisance. Actually, from the financial point of view it would have represented a considerable economy in telegrams, of which he rarely sent less than a dozen every week. While the nuisance, as far as he was concerned, would consist in the opening that it would afford his friends to alter the plans that he had made by telegram and letter. If they could have reached him by the telephone they would have rung up to question his decisions; and suggest alternatives. As it was, they shrugged their shoulders, thinking, “It’s a nuisance, but it’s less trouble to do it the way he says.”

  In an unobtrusive way Edward Balliol was an extremely selfish man. He got his own way without appearing to force it upon other people, without apparently knowing that he was doing so. Jane was well aware of this trait in him. She smiled at it, knowing it was simple to deal with selfish people who knew their own minds and made up yours for you.

  She had made other plans, as it happened, for that afternoon. She was going to have taken Francis, her second and five-year-old son, to sail his boat on the Serpentine. But Francis would be just as happy really with his nurse. And it was a long time since she had done anything alone with Edward. A long time, when it came to that, since she had really talked to him.

  That was one of the strange things of marriage. You could see so little of a husband. You were never allowed to be alone. He returned from his office at the day’s end. He told you in brief outline what had happened during the day, whom he had seen, what he had been told; which in Edward meant a précis of the main contents of the evening papers. It would then be time for him to take his bath. Most evenings they would either have friends to dinner, or be going out. From their first guest’s arrival or the servant’s announcing of their names they would not see each other till the final farewells had been exchanged. Husbands and wives were not allowed to sit together; to be near each other; to join in the same conversation. At the end of the evening they had barely enough energy for the exchange of a few tired comments. Next morning there was the hurried rush of a busy man starting for his office.

  “One sees less of one’s husband during twenty years of marriage than one does during the twenty weeks of an engagement,” she had once remarked to Stella Balliol.

  The retort had been the kind of thing that she was accustomed to expect from her husband’s sister.

  “That’s the only reason why marriage lasts. If wives and husbands saw as much of each other as they think they are going to when they get engaged, the divorce courts would be as crowded as the police courts.” Which was what one would expect of Stella. She could be trusted to take the unconventional view on any subject.

  All the same, this little trip, the train journey to Hendon, the walk through the fields to Golders Hill, trivial though it might be, was the most intimate afternoon they had had for months.

  And here they were now, seated on the terrace; a large tea, of watercress, meringues, strawberry jam, new-cut bread and butter set before them, with the breeze, after the long walk, cool upon her cheeks, the sky a luminous pale blue, the lawns green and dappled in the April sunlight sparkling towards the pond; with children tumbling over each other in the grass, their nurses, in prim blue uniforms, starched linen and white caps, seated on the wooden benches, slowly rocking at their prams with one eye upon their charges, the other upon the blurred print of a novelette, conducting at the same time an animated exchange of confidences, opinions and impressions with colleagues at their side; with tethered dogs, apparently asleep, waiting with cocked ear for the moving signal that would mean freedom and the sandy stretches of the heath.

  “It’s just as it used to be,” he said.

  She knew what he meant by that; just as it had been eighteen years ago, in their days of courtship, when they had escaped from chaperons. And a little sob rose in her throat, because it was the same and yet not the same; because there was the sunlight and the grass; the blue sky, the nurses, the dogs, the tumbling children; and in her heart the sense of spring and poetry.

  There was all that here. But the elegant young man whose Bohemian attire had made him conspicuous but had charmed her, since it seemed right on him, had exchanged that loose elegance of dress for a modish dapperness; because a drawled voice that had said such absurd fond things as “How wise of you to wear eyes that match an April sunlight;” that had indulged in elaborately subtle sophistries over trifles, developing world philosophies from the cut of a waiter’s waistcoat, was no longer self-consciously but unconsciously affected. A pose had become a manner. With the direction of its wit altered, so that he spoke facetiously about what mattered, instead of seriously about what did not matter. The lavish tea that was spread before them was no longer a gesture to placate a waiter. “Let’s order a great deal so that we can sit here a great while. I couldn’t think of food when I am with you,” he used to say. But the high-piled plates were now very sturdily employed in the assuagement of a hearty appetite; while she herself, though her heart was light, stung with the sense of vanished winter and budding life, was no longer the reflection of a young man’s mood; was no longer to that young man as is a garden to the sun; bright and gay and coloured, when the sky is cloudless; lifeless and toneless when its light is hidden. Indeed, she was not thinking of that man, at all, but was wondering about the evening’s dinner party; was thinking of the low bowl of flowers, the clustered primroses and pansies that she would set in the centre of the table; of how the high-tapered candles would be reflected on the polished walnut; of the large bowl of tulips that she had set in the window to catch the eye of the guests as they arrived, so that they would feel, in spite of the dimming light and greying sky above the house tops, that spring had indeed returned. Of that she thought, and in particular of the frock with the long folds of turquoise blue that she would be wearing that night for the first time, that she was still half afraid would look too young for her.

  And she felt sad suddenly on this April day because things were the same and yet not the same; since the world had the same look but the eyes and the heart were changed.

  “I think I shall put Mr. Rickman on my left,” she said.

  III

  It was six o’clock when she returned to the large Bayswater house in the oblong rectangle of houses that in residential London is called a Square. She had lived in this house for sixteen years, since within a few months of the birth of her first child, Lucy, she had realized that she was again to become a mother. The face of London had changed greatly during those sixteen years, but no sign of that change had disturbed the formal quiet of the Square from which not only bagpipes, monkey-men and barrel organs, but all symbols of the new age, were rigorously excluded. The basemented, three-storied row of houses with their flight of seven white steps leading to a heavy portico, their flat stucco fronts, bright with sun-blinds and flower boxes, had faced steadily for fifty years the long strip of railinged garden whose branches for a few moments in early May were brightly emerald. A few yards away the crowded thoroughfare of the Edgware Road had reflected
hour by hour along its jostled pavements, in its packed shop windows, on its high-flared hoardings, the rapid advance of the twentieth century. But over Easton Square a Victorian calm still brooded.

  As her husband pushed open the front door, Jane hesitated on its threshold, as though something had occurred to her; but after a pause that was momentary she passed on in silence.

  From the top of the house came the sound of a slammed door, a girl’s voice shouting, “Yes, it’s they,” and the door slammed. There was a clatter of footsteps on stairs, a girl of thirteen, bright-eyed, her cheeks flushed, was flinging herself into Jane’s arms. “Mummie darling, how late you are.”

  A moment later a tall girl, thin and unformed at a girl’s awkward age, was self-consciously welcoming her father.

  “Mummie,” Ruth was saying. “You are going to let us watch you arrange the flowers? You promised, didn’t you?”

  Schoolroom tea was not till half-past six. To watch their mother arrange flowers had been always one of the children’s treats.

  “Come along,” she said.

  The two girls sat at the table, their elbows rested on it, while Jane filled the long oblong dish with primroses and pansies. As always, Ruth was the most talkative. At thirteen years old she was still a child, with the eager, un-selfconsciousness of a child; with the slim prettiness of a Baumer drawing. She was alert, vivid, like quicksilver. Lucy, in her sixteenth year, on the other hand, was awakened, self-conscious. She was scraggy; her movements were abrupt. She always seemed to be wondering where to put her hands; usually they were fiddling with her collar, or at her belt. She was dark, with a pale skin. There was normally a slightly sullen look upon her face. Until you looked into her eyes you did not realize that she might become a very lovely woman. Then you saw more than that. Her eyes were of a brown that was very near to black. They were large and long-lashed. They were not only beautiful, they were brave. You knew that she was capable of deep feeling, of devotion, of selflessness. You would think that. Then she would look away. You would see only her sullen profile. You would think, “Whatever she may be in two years’ time, I know what she is now: a bad-tempered, not very pretty girl.”