Parlour Four Read online

  Colonel Danbury frowned, as if judging his son’s recourse to Latin distinctly indelicate. And when he spoke again it was with a certain inconsequence.

  ‘Looks aren’t everything,’ he said. ‘Everything about a girl, I mean. If a girl is decently bred, and healthy and with a head on her shoulders and isn’t exactly a beggar . . .’ The colonel broke off, as if the thread of his discourse had eluded him. ‘She may be plain,’ he began again, ‘but, if you ask me . . .’

  ‘Jane Napier plain?’ Nicholas interrupted. ‘Don’t make me laugh! The head on that girl’s shoulders is pure Modigliani, and to be admired in silence by anybody with an eye in his head and a scrap of artistic training.’

  ‘Then wouldn’t you like to see more of her?’ Nicholas’s mother asked – quite unconscious of having achieved an odd ambiguity. ‘She may be spending this week-end with her parents. Shall I ring up and find out?’

  ‘Capital plan,’ Colonel Danbury said. ‘It wouldn’t quite do to ask Rupert and Bella to a meal – not so soon after receiving their chit about the ffinch business. It would look intrusive, you know. A kind of fishing for information on what’s behind the thing. But Jane’s another matter. If she happens to be there, we’ll have her over to dinner. No, not dinner. Lunch – so that the two young people can take a walk through the woods afterwards.’

  But at this final suggestion Nicholas Danbury stood up so abruptly that his chair clattered to the floor behind him.

  ‘In heaven’s name,’ he asked, ‘just what is all this in aid of? You seem both to have taken leave of your senses. A walk through the woods? Just what’s cooking?’

  ‘If you sit down again, I’ll tell you.’ It was clear to Colonel Danbury that he must take charge of the situation, and speak frankly. ‘It’s a matter of the family kitty, my dear boy. There’s not going to be much in it for you later on, I’m afraid. No security to look forward to like Cézanne.’

  ‘Cézanne?’ Not unnaturally, Nicholas Danbury repeated the name in sheer bewilderment. But he did sit down.

  ‘And here’s this girl – whether Napier or ffinch – the only child of parents who are almost certainly coming into something in a very substantial way. And so we have thought – your mother and I – that if you and this pleasant, clean-run—’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Daddy, stop talking nonsense. It’s—it’s the most indelicate ploy I ever heard of.’ Nicholas was again on his feet, and this time he was making for the door. ‘I can’t listen to a word of it, or say anything at all. Not until later on, and when taking you, Daddy, for a walk through the woods.’

  And Nicholas Danbury departed with half his dinner uneaten.

  The walk took place on the following morning. It began in silence, but after a couple of hundred yards Nicholas spoke.

  ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t say anything much yesterday evening – not with Mummy there. But now’—Nicholas glanced swiftly but appraisingly at his father—’being, as you are, a man of the world, and all that, we can speak frankly to one another.’

  ‘Certainly we ought to have whatever it is out between us. Of course complete frankness is decidedly the proper thing.’ The colonel was much flattered that he should be judged by his son to be a man of the world. ‘So out with it. Is it true that you are married already, and have for some reason kept the thing secret from us? A wench you’d got in trouble, eh? And have done the right thing by her. And if there’s a child likely to be in the picture—’

  ‘Do be quiet and listen to me, Daddy. It’s nothing like that at all.’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it.’ Colonel Danbury realised that he had spoken out of a persuasion that artists as a body roam the land, seducing maidens, and leaving a trail of illegitimate progeny behind them.

  ‘It’s been nothing of that kind.’ For a brief space Nicholas appeared to allow himself to be amused. ‘If it had, I think I could have confessed to it before Mummy at dinner last night. But it’s something so intimate and—and carnal, that I just couldn’t do it. But with you it’s different.’ Nicholas again glanced appraisingly at his father as he drove this point home. ‘Jane and I became lovers quite some time ago.’

  ‘Just what do you mean: became lovers?’

  ‘Made love. But it just didn’t do. We are close friends still, mark you. We do concerts and theatres together. All that kind of thing. But in bed it turned out to be bloody well no go at all.’

  ‘But, Nicholas, it often happens that a first time—’ This was the voice of experience speaking. The colonel, although naturally much distressed, almost managed to feel pleased with himself.

  ‘I’m not talking about a first time. I’m talking about half a dozen times. I just didn’t turn Jane on – nor she me, except in the most demeaning and functional manner. She had to tell me that she got no more feeling from it—from that, I mean, than if I’d been a gent who was going to leave a ten-pound note on the mantel-shelf. Funny, wasn’t it? As soon as our clothes were off it was just bloody and bleakly n.g. And here’s you and my mother thinking to cook up an entirely blissful marriage of convenience. Danbury marries ffinch, and everybody applauds and throws confetti and old shoes. Jesus Christ!’

  ‘Nicholas, has it been the same with any other woman or women?’ Colonel Danbury felt that he had to keep an end up.

  ‘Not a bit. Of course I’ve had near-tarts – and one or two wives of other men, for that matter – with whom it was a shade squalid in the recollection. But I really believe that Jane and I wanted to love one another. There was something like that.’ For a moment Nicholas seemed lost in thoughts totally obscure and even frightening. ‘But this blighted planet is like that, isn’t it? Delighting in nasty surprises. Yet Jane and I haven’t quite given in to it. As I’ve said, we continue to see each other, and to enjoy that. But on the bedroom side of things we’ve both agreed to—well, to undertake other commitments.’ Nicholas was silent for some minutes as the walk went on.

  ‘Do you think,’ he then asked, ‘that you can explain all this to my mother?’

  Colonel Danbury, in his turn, was silent for some minutes. And then he spoke with decision.

  ‘Certainly not. It wouldn’t do at all. With the womenfolk, you know, a little prevarication is required at times, and is quite in order. But it won’t be plain sailing. You and I must put our heads together, my dear boy.’

  SWEETS FROM A STRANGER

  If I were a professional writer I could probably make a short story – a modishly sinister short story – out of the mere episode (as it was) that I propose to recount here. Alternatively, and were I a historian, I could so frame it that it showed like a footnote to a phase of Scottish social history. Indeed, with something like this latter, I see I had better begin.

  In the final quarter of the eighteenth century, then, the superior classes in Edinburgh began building themselves a New Town. Hitherto they had lived in a more or less mediaeval city to the south of the Nor’ Loch, higgledy-piggledy with the poorest of the poor, but fortified, no doubt, by an equal contiguity with such elements of the Scottish aristocracy as maintained a town house in the capital. In many instances, the migrating haute bourgeoisie, while losing the contiguity, very consciously maintained shades and degrees of kinship with this augustly territorial stratum of Scottish society. This is a very Scottish thing.

  When they had built their New Town the haute bourgeoisie fairly quickly decided that it ought to contain a New School to which to send their sons. Hitherto these sons, had, of course, also lived higgledy-piggledy with the sons of the humble and unwashed, and if they sorted themselves out from time to time it was to engage in ‘bickers’ with their less fortunate fellows. A ‘bicker’ was a gang-fight likely to lead to a good deal in the way of bruises and gashes occasioned by clubs and stones. I don’t think that as a boy I had so much as heard of these broils, which had evaporated from the popular memory. Perhaps I first read of them in Lockhart’s Life of Walter Scott.

  Hitherto, again, gentle and simple had gone
to school together. The Edinburgh High School had for centuries held an unchallenged place at the head of Scottish scholastic education. Everybody went there, down to the future Sir Walter himself. But it was tough and rough. Moreover, it was situated, not in the commanding position it enjoys today, but in what was now thought of simply as the slums. The persons planning or plotting for a new and exclusive school made much of the inconvenience – and worse – likely to be encountered by their sons in their daily going to and fro this ancient place of education. So the New School was built, and Sir Walter was wheeled in to make an opening speech.

  I have written all this by way of highlighting the essentially insulating class-structure of society which intensified itself (I believe) throughout the nineteenth century – perhaps even more in England than in Scotland – and into which were born those who, like myself, passed their infancy before the First World War.

  In due course I was despatched to the preparatory department of the ‘new’ school – now, indeed, within sight of its centenary. I don’t think there were many – if, indeed, any – boarders in the prep, and I certainly cannot yet have come to think of the boarding-houses as strongholds of mysterious wickedness. I knew nothing about wickedness, except as something that frequently turned up in the Bible. And from the Bible when produced I had early formed the covert habit of removing my mind and thinking of Tom Thumb. My mother, however, must have been very aware of the Devil, and that he was among us, having great wrath. For on one of the first days of my returning from school she suddenly gripped my arm in its bright new scarlet blazer and uttered a strange question with yet stranger intensity.

  ‘Donald, you do know that there is such a thing as vice in this world?’

  Here again was something on which my mind was entirely blank. But I had discovered by this time how best to cope with sudden incomprehensibilities from grown-ups, and I hastened to assure my mother that there was nothing I didn’t know about vice. This, perhaps a shade oddly, at once relaxed whatever anxiety had been harbouring in her consciousness. But what can it have been? The question puzzles me to this day. What scope can she have imagined the Devil as having for manoeuvre in what was called Class 1B? In 1B we weren’t exactly toddlers any longer, but our ages must have averaged out at about eight. It wasn’t as if my mother bore any sort of habitually prurient mind. In her own way, she belonged to an Age of Innocence as completely as I did myself.

  And here is another type of insulation operative in this environment in which I grew up. There was a kind of tacit censorship upon any explicit ventilation of the seamier side of things. So far as I can remember, almost nothing of the sort even got into our newspapers. The existence of mere poverty was, of course, acknowledged; and although I don’t recall hearing that distinction between the ‘poor’ and the ‘good poor’ which many Victorian philanthropists had managed to be aware of, there was, I believe, a vague and diffused feeling that a condition of indigence was in itself reprehensible, and that contact with it should, if unobtrusively, be avoided. Cousins of my own age in Moray in the distant north, some of them of families a good deal grander than ours, I had observed on holidays playing freely with the farm labourers’ children. Nothing of the sort with us. All Edinburgh boys other than our own schoolfellows we referred to as keelies, which is Scots for street-arabs. And for weeks on end, any member of the poor with whom I ever conversed was in uniform, like tram conductors or our own maids – the latter being distinctively dressed in crisp aprons and caps, and being rather carefully ‘well-spoken’ as well. It would only be when a tramp (and there were a good many tramps around) came to the door and had to be found a ‘piece’ that I held the slightest commerce with these virtual non-persons.

  I appear rather to be harping on all this. But it serves in part to explain the element of shock in my small adventure.

  ‘Adventure’, I see, is the wrong word. ‘Experience’ might be better. But, whatever it was, it was something startlingly new to me, and I am surprised to find that I cannot with any certainty put a date to it. In formal studies of the psychology of childhood, precise dating must, I imagine, be vital – and by ‘dating’ I of course mean determining and stating the age in years and months at which one or another significant act of behaviour has been produced. Even when children crop up in works of fiction one rather wants to know just how old they are supposed to be. When a novelist hedges over this, ignoring the point, or passing over it unemphatically and with no reiteration, I am left with the sense of him as not confident that he knows quite what happens to children when. This may be unjust, and I am far from being an authority on literary matters. (In point of fact, I work as a solicitor – of the kind called in Scotland, perhaps a shade mysteriously, Writers to the Signet.)

  But I return to my episode (another possible word for the thing) and its dubious chronology. And here I am at least given a hint by my bicycle. The bicycle comes into the story because one of the first explanations I afforded myself of what was happening was simply that there was a design to purloin it. And it was my second bicycle. I am very certain of that. My first bicycle had been an unassuming and locally manufactured affair. My second was resplendent: rigid, rapid, and reliable. And my father, since he was a leading surgeon, distinctly well-off, and amiably disposed to spoil his family, may well have given it to me on my tenth birthday. Further than this on the point, I can’t go.

  I was already not very fond of games, and I wasn’t much of a reader either, although I have become something of one since. In summer I collected butterflies, and in winter postage stamps: clearly I wasn’t an imaginative boy. I may also have been slightly isolated from my schoolfellows – this because we lived not in the New Town strictly regarded (the ‘windy parallelograms’, as somebody or other has called those august Georgian squares and oblongs) but in a large and somewhat retired house on its western fringe. This controlled the route I took home on my bicycle. If my journey was straight from the school itself I was companioned for part of the way up the ascent that led eventually to Princes Street. But if it was from our playing-fields, which lay at some remove from the main buildings and boarding-houses, I was on my own from the start, and quite early on there was one very steep incline which could be negotiated only by dismounting and pushing the Raleigh uphill.

  In Edinburgh many people live in tenements. Elsewhere, these might be called apartment blocks, or flats, or even mansions. But here they distinguishably exhibit something of their ancestry in the dwellings of the Old Town. Four or five storeys high, and with their ground floor occasionally turned into shops, they may extend the full length of a street as an uninterrupted terrace, with at regular intervals common staircases, stony and often smelly as well, giving access to small dwelling-places on either hand. Occasionally, however, these dwelling-places turn out to be, through some mysterious agency, more commodious than one would expect, and to be inhabited by persons distinctly of more consequence than their neighbours, and who don’t at all seem to mind the often exhausting, grimy, and malodorous approach to their hall door. There is in this – as I say – some shadow of ancient times, when, on what has come to be called the ‘Royal Mile’, men powerful in the land were contented to live up just such a staircase, among neighbours who were at the best of the mechanic class.

  Here and there around the city and its environs are oddly sited small examples of this sort of thing. It is as if a volcanic eruption had tossed these bits and pieces high into the clouds, and then landed them at random, topside up but sadly in disrepair, in one unexpected place or another. There was a particularly good example on my left hand as I shoved my bicycle up that hill, and I believe that for some time I hadn’t liked the look of it. But just what the look was, I can no longer say. The old woman and her gesture are etched on my brain, but the decrepit and surely half-abandoned building (demolished many years ago) largely eludes me. I have a vague picture of three storeys, the uppermost having windows broken for the most part and with rags of curtains blowing through. And I see the
frontage rising not straight from the pavement, as was commonly so with tenements, but beyond a small patch of garden thick with thistle and nettle. The old woman as she makes that gesture is knee-high among this – which means that she has advanced a foot or two from the open door of the building.

  She had beckoned me. She was not only old, but haggard and dirty and bedraggled and dressed in what I thought of as rags as well. I was instantly horrified and frightened: of that I am certain. But the situation lasted only for a moment. I had shoved on the handle-bars with a will, and the thing was behind me.

  By the time I arrived home – and it was nearly all a breezy coasting once I reached the top of the hill – I knew I was going to be mum about that weird soliciting. Provisionally, I had decided that the old woman was a witch. I knew about witches not through fairy-stories or the like, but as a matter of family tradition. My maternal grandfather, having retired from the Indian Civil Service, had occupied himself in farming some scraps of land rented from a kinsman on high ground about midway between the small Scottish towns of Nairn and Forres. Much of the surrounding countryside is now patched with large plantations, collectively dignified with the title of Darnaway Forest. At a former time it may well have been heath – and blasted heath at that. Certainly from the upper windows of my grandfather’s house one could remark a ruin, perhaps a couple of miles away, traditionally known as Darnaway Castle, and not far from this a small tump called Macbeth’s Hillock. My mother, stretching (or contracting) things a little, would assert that it was on her father’s ground that the new Thane of Cawdor encountered the Weird Sisters. It was almost as if we had witches in the family.

  I knew that witches went in for that mysterious ‘wickedness’, and it must have been this that put it in my head that the old woman beckoning from her doorway was proposing to lure me from my bicycle (perhaps with the offer of a poke of jujubes) in order that it should instantly be carried off by a confederate. This persuasion remained with me as I hurried away, curiously shaken.