The Red and The Green Part 1

Iris Murdoch.

The Red and The Green.

1965.

To Philippa Foot.

Chapter One.

TEN MORE glorious days without horses! So thought Second-Lieutenant Andrew Chase-White, recently commissioned in the distinguished regiment of King Edward's Horse, as he pottered contentedly in a garden on the outskirts of Dublin on a sunny Sunday afternoon in April nineteen sixteen. The garden in question, secluded behind substantial walls of rough golden stone, was large, and contained two ailing but gallant palm trees. The house, a dignified villa called 'Finglas', with big square windows and a shallow slate roof, was washed a light slightly streaky blue. It was both neat and s.p.a.cious, built in a style of confident 'seaside Georgian' which in Ireland had felicitously continued until the beginning of the present century and after. The house and garden, the walls and palm trees, the property of the father of Andrew's fiancee, were situated in Sandycove Avenue, Sandycove, one of the bright little roads of multicoloured villas which run down to the sea from the main road which leads from Dublin out to Killiney and Bray. The road on which Finglas stood, or from which, conscious of a certain superiority over the other houses, it withdrew, was clean and very quiet, seeming always full of a grey luminous light from the sea, which could be seen and indeed heard at the foot of the hill where the road ended casually in the water and the pavement turned into yellow rocks, folded and wrinkled and shining with crystalline facets. The road partook indeed of the hardness and cleanness of the rocks and the coldness and clearness of the water. Visible to the left, if one went right down to the end, and visible too from the upper windows of Finglas, was the bulky headland with the Martello tower upon it, the Acropolis of the village. The headland concealed the view of Kingstown, but from the sea's edge could be seen the folded back arm of Kingstown pier, its terminal lighthouse rising in the middle, seeming to end with the gaunt obelisk, happy commemoration of the departure from Ireland of George the Fourth. Straight ahead, across the very light dirty grey-green waters of Dublin Bay, lay the blue couchant silhouette of Howth Head, and to its right the open sea horizon, a line of cold mauve above the grey: whereon even now Andrew, pausing in his task, saw the smudge on the skyline which was the approaching mail boat. In spite of increasing activity from German submarines, the mail boats reached Kingstown with scarcely diminished regularity, though an erratic course, adopted in the interests of safety, brought the smudge of smoke into view at various and unpredictable points of the horizon.

The scene was, for Andrew, intensely familiar and yet disturbingly alien. It was like a place revisited continually in dreams, both portentous and fleeting, vivid to the point of necessity, but not entirely real. Here too it was as if his senses worked at a half pace, and smells of houses, rough feels of garden walls, echoes of voices in conservatories, were spread out and enlarged into something weird, too big and too close for comfort. Andrew's family were Anglo-Irish, but he had never lived in Ireland, although he had spent most of his childhood holidays there. He had in fact, by what he regarded as a somewhat tiresome accident, been born in Canada, where his father, who had been in the insurance business, had once spent two years. Andrew had grown up in England and more especially in London, and felt himself unreflectively to be English, although equally unreflectively he normally announced himself as Irish. Calling himself Irish was more of an act than a description, an a.s.sumption of a crest or picturesque c.o.c.kade. Ireland remained for him a mystery, an unsolved problem: and a problem which was in some obscure way disagreeable. There was of course the religious question. A far from devout and, in England, an uncontentious, uninterested, almost entirely non-practising Anglican, he felt, on arrival in Ireland, his Protestant hackles rise. There was an aggressive tingling, and something deeper which was unnervingly like fear. Today was Palm Sunday and Andrew, together with his mother and his fiancee, Frances Bellman, had attended matins at the Mariners' Church in Kingstown. On emerging from the church they had found the streets filled with those others who, streaming in far greater numbers out of their chapels, were now parading about, more slowly, more confidently, carrying palms in their hands. For them it seemed, and for their sins Christ was even now entering Jerusalem, and their demeanour exhibited already a satisfaction, even a possessiveness, which made the congregation of the Mariners' Church, trotting more soberly homeward with averted eyes, feel unreal and perfunctory, unconnected with the great events to honour which these arrogant strollers were almost casually decked. Andrew's personal apprehension of this difference, this contrast with something gaudier, more vital and more primitive, was heightened by the fact that a number of his Irish relations had, to the extreme almost incredulous horror of his mother, become Roman Catholic converts.

Andrew's father, who had died just over two years ago, had been himself a scholar manque, a gentle bookish man who had pa.s.sed thoughtfully and ineffectually through life, always a little diffident and puzzled. He had wanted Andrew to be a scholar, and had been overjoyed when his son effortlessly collected a history scholarship at Cambridge in the year before the war. This achievement, however, seemed to have exhausted Andrew's academic capacities and ambitions, and he had spent an idle though not particularly riotous year at the university when the war came. He left Cambridge with the intention of enlisting, taking with him a pa.s.sion for Malory and a vague ambition to become a great poet, and very little else in the way of higher education. His desire to serve his country was checked, however, at the outset by a prolonged bout of asthma, an ailment from which he had suffered intermittently since childhood. p.r.o.nounced fit at last, he had joined up in the autumn of 1915 and had been rapidly commissioned.

Andrew detested and feared horses. It was therefore, to those who knew him well, a matter of some puzzlement that he had chosen to serve in a cavalry regiment. The key to this phenomenon lay in Andrew's Irish cousins. He was himself an only child, and as such had pondered long and with fascination upon the mysterious and frightening sibling-relationship of which he was deprived. His various cousins, all of whom lived in Ireland, had served him in those long hated and yet loved holidays of childhood as sibling-subst.i.tutes, temporary trial brothers and sisters, for whom his uncertain affection took the form of an irritated rivalry. He felt himself indubitably superior to this heterogeneous and, it seemed to him, rather uncultivated and provincial gang of young persons, always noisier, gayer and more athletic than himself. But his superiority was rarely recognized. More often he found himself forced to play the dull one, left out of the game, not understanding the joke. This had especially been so in the matter of horses. All his cousins were natural, casual riders. They were a race of young hors.e.m.e.n, pa.s.sing him by with the insolence of the mounted. Indeed, his earliest memories of Frances, who was herself a remote relation and had belonged to the 'gang', were of a swift mounted girl, a graceful side-saddle Amazon, outdistancing him, disappearing.

So it was that Andrew's now so distressingly close a.s.sociation with horses had come about through a simple desire to impress his cousins. There was in it too, though Andrew recognized this less clearly, an element of masochism. It was like his irresistible desire always to dive off the highest board in the swimming baths, although he was terrified of heights. He had, for very fear, to press close to him the object of terror. He had established his relationship with King Edward's Horse long before, in peacetime, with no other idea than that of getting some inexpensive equestrian experience. Since he could count himself for these purposes as a Canadian, he had found it easy and convenient to attach himself to this eminent and predominantly Colonial regiment. The arrival of the war converted his game into a dreadful seriousness and hoisted him with his own petard. Pride forbade any contemplation of a change of unit. And now in his dreams he found himself pursued and cornered by enormous horses wearing German uniforms.

Andrew had had a brief but entirely uneventful glimpse of France. He had completed a strenuous training at the cavalry depot at Bishop's Stortford, where at that time hard-riding Australians were arriving weekly, and in February, shortly after receiving his commission, had been sent to join C Squadron of the regiment which was then stationed in exceptional luxury at the Chateau of Vaudricourt. When he arrived, the squadron, besides enthusiastically enjoying the amenities of the Chateau, were mainly engaged in felling trees and building stables, and the communal aims seemed distinctly domestic rather than military. It was only later that Andrew learnt that the desire to make one's surroundings convenient and comfortable is one of the more important motives in the economy of war. After a week or so of this, the divisional mounted troops were all moved to Marthes to spend some days in the First Army training area. Here they encountered not the Germans but a devastating snowstorm, and for some time Andrew's only concern was finding dry unfrozen places for horses. The horses survived the experience with equanimity, but Andrew himself went down with severe pneumonia and had to be shipped back to England. Pleurisy followed the pneumonia, and he crawled out of hospital at the end of March, an exhausted convalescent, told to report to the Reserve Squadron of his regiment in a month's time. More than half of that month had now elapsed.

Andrew was a confused soldier. The role of 'soldier' was perhaps the first role in life into which he had made a positive attempt to fit. He had played the part of an 'undergraduate' casually and, somewhat to his own surprise, not very whole-heartedly. He did not entirely like the mores of those who set the tone at Cambridge and, what was perhaps a more serious matter, he lacked the money to compete with them. So he had set himself up a little defiantly and yet not very confidently as a recluse. His work had benefited little. The idea of himself as a soldier, an idea which would have been entirely repugnant to him in peacetime, was now of course backed up by the enthusiasm of an entire community. Yet Andrew had still not been able to draw on to him the skin of soldiery or to swagger into the part with the ease which he envied in many of his contemporaries. His persona as a soldier was still disparate, composed partly of childish romanticism, partly of schoolboy conscientiousness, and partly of some yet veiled adult att.i.tude of fear and resignation. Of these perhaps the first was at present the most active, though Andrew would have blushed to admit how much his zeal depended on early impressions of the more patriotic pa.s.sages of Shakespeare and a boyish devotion to Sir Lancelot.

From the details of warfare his imagination still shuddered away. A knowledge of the facts of the war in the trenches had not destroyed his attempt to make sense of it all by means of romanticism, but it had increased the quite separate and veiled area of his fear. In the snowstorm at Marthes, as on training exercises at home, it was his plodding conscientiousness that he relied upon, and he hoped that in a situation of danger it might at least serve him in lieu of courage. Whether he possessed courage was an agonizing mystery. He despised himself for being glad that the routine concern for the welfare of the horses tended to keep the mounted troops behind the front line. He could not help being relieved rather than otherwise that the concept of the cavalry charge appeared to be outmoded. But he viewed these sentiments with alarm as deep symptoms of funk. He was intensely disappointed that he had not, during his short time in France, broken his duck in this respect.

It was an additional sorrow to him that, since he had to do a soldiering trade, he had not managed to get himself into some more modern and highly mechanized unit. He was a keen amateur of wireless telegraphy and of motor cars, and at Cambridge had been much in demand as a mechanic among his wealthier car-owning companions. He had even at one time privately decided, though he never told his father this, that he would go in for motor car design when he was through with his tripos. He would have been prepared now, though with his imagination strictly switched off, to interest himself in machine guns, and he had learnt what he could at Bishop's Stortford about the Vickers and Hotchkiss guns which were there in inadequate and intermittent supply. But during his training he had spent much more time with his rifle and even with his sword, an object which had given him initial pleasure and which he now detested. At Vaudricourt he gathered that little wireless work was to be hoped for and that C Squadron had not yet been issued with machine guns. The most directly warlike regimental occupation, now popular in B Squadron, was something known as 'bombing from horseback', which involved galloping in single file past Boche gun-emplacements and hurling in Mills bombs. Andrew, who did not like the sound of this, noticed that his senior officers approved of the Mills bomb and suspected the Hotchkiss because with the former a mounted detachment could still emulate the traditional behaviour of cavalry. There was a nostalgia, among the regulars especially, for a vanished superiority, a once useful expertize; and when one evening in the mess young Andrew had loudly remarked, 'After all, a horse is only a means of conveyance', there had been a shocked and scandalized silence.

The Reserve Squadron of the regiment had moved to Ireland the previous year, and after being stationed at the Curragh had just now moved out to Longford. It was there that Andrew was to report at the end of his leave. Meanwhile he was trying, with a certain amount of success, to ignore the future and to live as fully as possible within the little world of feminine claims and pamperings represented by Frances and his mother. He found himself almost loving the complex pre-occupied triviality of the lives of these two near and dear beings, and he stayed close to them as if to claim the protection of some small, forlorn yet powerful innocence. It was not only that he grasped their little world as a contrast to 'out there'; it was also that it somehow represented a necessary defence against all the other things that Ireland meant, the men of Ireland, his male cousins. Andrew put it to himself: I really cannot be bothered with Ireland just at the moment. And he had in fact put off, now disgracefully long his mother told him, going to visit other members of his family.

Andrew's mother had lately and precipitately decided, very much to Andrew's dismay, to sell her London flat and move to Ireland. The efficient cause of this decision was the Zeppelin raids on London, which Mrs Chase-White represented to her eager and credulous Dublin friends in vivid, even lurid terms. Her nerves, she claimed, could not stand it, with those Zepps always coming over. Andrew felt extreme irritation, not only at what he regarded as a shameful lack of stamina on the part of his parent, but also at what he suspected to be the formal cause of her decision, an atavistic urge to return to the soil of Ireland. Hilda Chase-White, nee Drumm, was, like her husband, Anglo-Irish; but whereas Andrew's father had spent most of his childhood in Ireland, Hilda and her younger brother Barnabas had been brought up in London. Andrew was vaguely aware that his mother and his uncle had in some way not got on with their parents, but he had never troubled to diagnose what was wrong, nor indeed been in a position to, since his grandparents both died when he was a small child. His maternal grandfather had been a civil servant of small means, but well known in his circle as a gay social man and a party-giver. He was also by way of being a famous practical joker. It may have been that these antics offended Hilda's sense of dignity, or it may more simply have been that she compared the London menage unfavourably with the bigger, grander and altogether more ceremonious houses of her Irish relations. Andrew recalled from childhood the tone of slightly querulous envy with which she spoke of these establishments: a sentiment not shared by his father, who, although he retained a strong nervous interest in his family there, and especially in his half-sister Millie, seemed always thankful to have escaped from Ireland.

The purchase therefore, just completed, of a house in Ireland no doubt represented for Hilda the fruition of a very long-term intention; and, especially since her head was turned by the extreme cheapness of Irish properties, it was with difficulty that Andrew had persuaded her not to acquire one of several available castles, each one damper and mouldier than the last though undeniably inexpensive, and had coaxed her at last into buying a pretty and reasonably sized house in Dalkey. His uncle Barnabas, for some long time now settled in Ireland, had been of little a.s.sistance. But as Hilda often said, not much could now be expected of Barney. Barnabas, who had figured as notable in Andrew's childhood because he was a crack shot rather than because he was a promising mediaeval scholar, had latterly, it was generally agreed, gone to the dogs. Barnabas too had felt the urge, as Hilda herself put it, 'to escape from the parents', though Andrew could not understand what in this case was felt as menacing. His uncle was the reverse of sn.o.bbish. But he too had evidently felt some imperative need to return to Ireland, had married into another branch of the family there, and, to Hilda's and indeed to Andrew's intense horror, had become a Roman Catholic. He was even, so Hilda would sometimes report in a whisper, said to be writing a history of the Irish saints, an activity which his sister found for some reason highly improper. It was in addition said of him that he had at one time wanted to become a priest, but Hilda would never publicly countenance this rumour. The fact that Uncle Barnabas had also apparently taken to drink was almost welcomed as a more normal manifestation of black sheepishness.

That some of the family were converts was something which Hilda felt as a continual affront to herself. It caused her real pain, and she spoke about it as little as possible, even to the point of keeping it dark. She had been deeply wounded by her brother's defection, for although her conception of family ties in general struck Andrew as rather worldly, she was, or had been, extremely fond of Uncle Barnabas. 'The family' was a great subject with Hilda, and Andrew had become a little reluctantly interested in the matter himself, especially as he somehow found it necessary always to explain that Frances was a distant relation. The situation was complicated. 'We Anglo-Irish families are so complex,' Hilda used often to exclaim with a kind of pride, as if complexity in families were a rare privilege. 'We're practically incestuous,' his Aunt Millicent had once added. 'What does that mean?' the child Andrew had asked, but no one had enlightened him. He sometimes felt now that 'the family' had indeed something of the fascination of the snake that eats its own tail. He was both interested and repelled, and the sense that the family occupied or pervaded Ireland, managing to inhabit most of its corners, largely composed for him the sinister power of that island.

In fact, Andrew had in recent years seen happily little of his remoter relations who owned farms in Clare and Donegal. Frances and her father, Christopher Bellman, who had at one time lived in Galway, had now moved to Sandycove, and Andrew felt no urge, though his mother sometimes suggested it, to go on a familial tour. Dublin and its neighbourhood contained quite enough of the cousinry, and those indeed with whom Andrew had always had most to do. The exploration even of this branch of the family, which was needed in order to make clear his relationship with Frances, was in fact complicated enough. His paternal grandmother, Janet Selborne-Doyle, 'a great beauty' as his mother always said when she was referred to, had married twice. Her first husband was John Richard Dumay, from whom she had had issue two children, Brian and Millicent. Of these, Brian, it was always said whether truly or not as a result of a nervous breakdown, had become a convert to Catholicism when still a student at Trinity. The 'great beauty's' second marriage, after the death of her first husband, had been to Arnold Chase-White, and the one offspring of this union had been Henry Chase-White, Andrew's father. Henry married Hilda Drumm, and Brian Dumay had married one Kathleen Kinnard who was in fact a connection of Hilda's mother's family, and who had caused pain and scandal by forthwith adopting the religious faith of her husband. Millicent Dumay then married Kathleen's brother, Sir Arthur Kinnard, and the third sister, Heather Kinnard, married Christopher Bellman, Frances' father. Both Mrs Bellman and Sir Arthur Kinnard had died fairly young, and Andrew could not recall having met them. His Uncle Brian had produced two sons, Pat Dumay, who was a year older than Andrew, and Cathal Dumay, who must now, Andrew reflected, be about thirteen or fourteen. Uncle Brian had died when Andrew was about fifteen, and his Aunt Kathleen had caused some surprise and a good deal of adverse comment by subsequently marrying her co-religionist in the family, his Uncle Barnabas, who it appeared had been one of her early admirers. That marriage had been childless.

Andrew's mother had been impressed and continually preoccupied by the goings on of her Irish relations, particularly the Kinnard family, possessors of an enviable mansion and an even more enviable t.i.tle, who, especially in the days of Arthur's father, had set a standard both of grandeur and of social freedom which must have made Hilda discontented with her restricted London life and with the 'mad' yet cosy society of her parents. There was no doubt that she coveted not only the traditional ease of the Kinnard household but also its Irish remoteness from the pettier aspects of the 'bourgeois' world. Hilda had never been quite sure that her father and mother were blessed with good taste.

Although Hilda had talked about these things to Andrew all his life, he had only very recently begun, in relation to her, to understand them. He had much earlier, and with a kind of nervous distress, apprehended his father's quite different and strangely deep anxieties about Ireland. Some family demon haunted Henry Chase-White. He was fond of his relations, and especially fond of Aunt Millicent. But the source of the trouble, Andrew soon came to conjecture, was his half-brother Brian. Brian Dumay was older than Henry by several years and was a very different kind of man from Andrew's father. Uncle Brian had occupied some post in the Bank of Ireland which never seemed to provide matter for discussion, but in so far as he entered into the life of his nephew he did so in the guise of the perfect all-round out-of-doors uncle. Andrew recalled the scenes, always the same, on hills or beaches, with Uncle Brian leading the way, leaping from rock to rock, followed by the shouting children, while Andrew's father picked his way cautiously behind. And Andrew must have been about ten when he realized, with a tender protective pang which seemed to make him on the instant much older, that his father was a little jealous in case Andrew should compare him unfavourably with Uncle Brian. It was an occasion when they had all been swimming, except for Andrew's father who had found the sea too cold and was sitting in the sandhills with a book. Andrew had run to him and been told almost roughly, 'You don't want to be here with me. Go back to your uncle.' Since then Andrew had liked Uncle Brian less. But it was not until his uncle died that he realized how extremely attached his father really was to his half-brother who must have represented something robust, attractive and puzzling, which produced in him a characteristic tremor of awkwardness. Andrew met with the same awkwardness, the same shy disguised puzzled fondness in his father's att.i.tude to himself; this barrier was never removed and Andrew felt a special pain when his father died to think that perhaps he had never known how much his son loved him.

Andrew had felt as a child an acute and uncomfortable interest in all his relations, but the magnetic centre of that field of forces had usually seemed to be his cousin Pat Dumay. It occurred to Andrew later that his own peculiar anxiety about Pat somewhat resembled his father's anxiety about Uncle Brian, only Andrew had never exactly felt any liking for his cousin. His interest in him was something more obscure and disturbing. He had spent a good deal of energy in earlier years in trying to impress Pat, and indeed it could scarcely be denied that the folly with the horses which had had such far-reaching results was an attempt to get even not so much with Frances as with Pat.

Pat, who was known in their childhood as 'the iron man', and who effortlessly excelled in all their sports and games together, had never paid much attention to Andrew. Andrew, a slow-growing child, had often, with rage, been relegated to play with 'the little boys', and he still felt that Pat casually took him to be younger than he was. There had never been any sort of confidence or friendship between them, although on a few occasions when they were older Andrew had made advances. Pat, who was not much given to talking, would then withdraw into a taciturn dignity, while at the same time seeming not to notice Andrew at all. He moved quietly, his eyes elsewhere, like someone avoiding a small obstacle in his path. In moments of revolt Andrew referred to his cousin as 'pompous' and affected surprise that he was not more frequently ragged. Yet somehow Pat's formidable dignity seemed to impose itself on others less concerned than Andrew. Other children were usually a bit afraid of Pat, who was capable at times of a good deal of violence. Andrew was reluctant to admit that he had ever feared him. But he had, when younger, felt a sort of awe which had perhaps partaken of a childish horror at Pat's religion. With years of reason and tolerance the horror had diminished, but in the quality of his persisting interest in his cousin there was still a sort of shudder as at something primitive and dark.

The younger brother Cathal, though commonly said to be cleverer than Pat, was of course of less moment to Andrew. He had spent a good deal of time in the past avoiding Cathal, who, being so much younger, had usually figured in one way or another as an impediment. The relations between the two brothers seemed not of the happiest, and Andrew conjectured the existence of some ferocious jealousy. Pat had always, ever since Andrew could remember them together, enjoyed knocking his little brother about, sometimes with a brutality which was alarming to witness. Andrew most poignantly recalled a scene when he himself was about thirteen when he had intervened to save Cathal, then a small child, from a particularly vicious attack. Pat, who had retaliated by giving Andrew a black eye, was subsequently beaten, presumably for this misdemeanour, by Uncle Brian. This occurrence had somehow, for Andrew, defined and confirmed his unhappy sense of connection with his cousin; though he doubted very much whether the incident had had any significance for Pat.

Since he had become more or less grown up, and more especially since he had become a soldier, Andrew felt with some relief that his childhood obsessions about Ireland were beginning to fall away. The tradition of the annual holiday was discontinued, and the dark wet island seemed less of the menace that it used to be. He had not been over there for some while, nor seen any of his relations apart from Frances and Christopher, who were frequent visitors to England. During this period Pat Dumay had been studying law at the National University, and was now apparently working in a solicitor's office. Andrew, rather vaguely hearing news of him from time to time, was gratified to learn that he had not specially distinguished himself in his studies: and the notion that he was after all more talented than his cousin came as a salve to his, in any case diminishing, consciousness of that old rivalry. He was rather surprised that Pat had shown no sign of enlisting, a matter commented on adversely by Andrew's mother, who, vaguely conscious of him as a compet.i.tor with her own boy, rather disliked Pat. But this unexpected blemish in the heroic figure of his boyhood was in fact far from displeasing to Andrew, and although he publicly disowned his mother's scornful opinion he secretly shared it.

Andrew's satisfaction at being liberated from Ireland was a little checked by the excessive nervous disturbance which he now felt on visiting the place again, and especially on hearing that his mother proposed to settle there. He had reckoned on seeing very little of Ireland in the future. He had decided, though without announcing this to anyone, to remove Frances from it completely as soon as this could be arranged. The removal of Frances indeed represented for him a sort of final triumph over the past. He felt irritated, and in a curious way a little frightened, to find that the severance could not be quite so complete. He told himself rationally that he must really begin to behave about the whole thing in a more grown-up way. Yet when he thought of the visit which he was to pay the Dumay household on the following day, he was not only childishly pleased at the idea of showing off his uniform and his newly grown moustache: his heart beat faster, he did not know why.

This visit, and a subsequent visit to his Aunt Millicent, had been urged upon him as a duty by his mother, although as he well knew she felt no particular affection for any of the people concerned. Hilda regarded 'the family' as having an importance which, while she might not have used this language, transcended affection. She would not have professed actually to like any of her relations, with the exception of Christopher Bellman, Frances and her own brother; and even in these two latter cases there were cross-currents of a hostility very obvious in origin. Millicent Kinnard and Kathleen, as she now was, Drumm, aroused in Hilda, whenever they were mentioned, a particular sort of almost physical jerky nervousness. These two very different persons were, Andrew knew, in different ways a disappointment and a scandal to his mother. Stationed at important points within the family machine they simply failed to turn the right handles.

Andrew's father had been extremely though rather nervously fond of his half-sister, and this may not have endeared Millie to Hilda. He had also been devoted to Kathleen, though not in any way which could have caused rational annoyance to his wife, his gentle and complete devotion to whom had been a show-piece of the family. It was for Andrew felicitously axiomatic that his parents had been a happy united pair, and he was even now curiously conscious of his father's presence as a support to his mother and himself. Hilda's irritations with Aunt Millicent and Aunt Kathleen were more largely social in origin. Andrew was tolerantly aware that his mother was a fearful sn.o.b and that 'keeping up with Millie', which was presented as a tiresome duty, was made considerably less disagreeable by the fact that Millie had a t.i.tle. There was also the wealth, the splendour and what was left of the ceremony. But it was just here that Aunt Millicent failed.

Andrew could remember when he was quite small hearing a side-whiskered gentleman at a garden party saying to another, 'I say, Millie Kinnard is rather fast, isn't she?' The idea seemed to please the gentleman, but Andrew's mother, who was standing near by, had indignantly hustled Andrew away in the course of the reply. There had never been, as far as he knew, any positive scandal connected with his aunt, but he was given to understand that she was a person who habitually 'went too far', although whither it was she proceeded with unwonted celerity, overstepping what barriers, he never altogether discovered. Millie was of course known to hold rather progressive views on 'the woman question', had taken a nurse's training, contrary to the family's wishes, during the South African war, and had managed to get herself briefly to the scene of action. She had, it was said, not mourned too long after her husband's death. She was rumoured to wear trousers and smoke cigars. She possessed and could fire a revolver. She had a great many gentlemen friends.

'Millie has style' was the sort of remark which people tended to make and which Hilda hated to hear. For her, Millie's style was bad style and Millie's undeniable form was bad form. Andrew's mother was anxiously conventional and indeed regarded convention, which she preferred to think of as ceremony, as a fortress against all that she most feared. Perhaps in the end it was a fortress against her father's practical jokes. Aunt Millicent represented, just where one might have expected an access of strength, a dangerous breach in the defences. Andrew had chanced not to see his aunt for some years, since she had been away on his last visit, and his memories of her went right back to a scene in some summer garden where what seemed a pretty girl in a white dress, under the dappled shade of a parasol, had laughed at him, but not unpleasantly, making him laugh too. He felt a certain interest in seeing her again.

Aunt Kathleen was quite another matter. While Aunt Millicent failed through frivolity, Aunt Kathleen, nee after all Kinnard, failed through dullness. Millie's form might be regrettable, but Kathleen was formless; and it was this, even more than the monstrous fact of being a Roman Catholic, which Andrew's mother held against her. The Dumay house in Blessington Street was shabby, disorderly, even dirty; and in this Hilda deplored a sheer lack of inherited discipline. 'When you think of Kathleen's opportunities,' she would say as prologue to a denunciation. Nor could she forgive Kathleen for marrying Barnabas, and thereby confirming her benighted brother in a state of insanity from which he might otherwise have recovered. Hilda also resented, though for fear of giving it further publicity she never mentioned, the fact that Kathleen supported her husband financially. Barnabas, who had latterly been employed in the public service, gave up this work soon after his marriage to devote himself entirely to research. Hilda blamed his wife for what she regarded as his progressive demoralization, and when the drinking bouts began she would say, 'It's all of a piece!': meaning Catholicism, Kathleen, alcohol, and the Irish saints.

As Andrew meditated rather vaguely in the cool April sunshine of that Sunday afternoon concerning his forthcoming visit to the Dumays, he was engaged in the task of fixing Frances' red swing. The swing, its wooden seat painted with a sort of peasant design of white hearts upon a scarlet background, had been ever since long ago a feature of the Bellman's much larger and wilder garden in Galway. That morning when he had been looking at a photograph alb.u.m with Frances they had come upon a picture of her, a little girl with a big straw sunbonnet, sitting upon the swing, while Andrew in a sailor suit stood rather ungraciously by. As Andrew began reminiscing about the swing Frances had said that in fact they had brought it with them, it was somewhere around, and Andrew had said that of course he would fix it up forthwith. Then they had both fallen silent.

Andrew thought of and indeed referred to Frances Bellman as his fiancee, although nothing had yet been quite formally fixed between them. It was rather that an understanding, dating from somewhere very remote in their childhood, had gradually grown up, like a tall genie taking shape between them and joining their hands. They had been, on the many occasions when they had been able to be together, 'inseparable' as children; and as soon as Andrew was ready to fall in love he fell in love with Frances, as if this were an inevitable and natural aspect of growing up. The frenzy of love had been calmed almost at once by the sense that he could not possibly lose her. There was already the security of a long attachment. He had felt no interest in any other woman although he had had his share of opportunities and indeed of flattering attentions.

He was sometimes surprised at the ease with which he had been immediately conducted into this congenial haven, and attributed it somehow to the same kindly G.o.ds who had made him the only child of happily married parents. Frances too was an only child, and this made her seem quite especially of the same race as himself. Andrew adhered to no general theories of a romantic nature concerning the importance of a stormy initiation into love, and particularly now, with the prospect of a return to the war opening before him like a black hole, he was prepared to settle gladly for a security in his personal life which seemed likely to exist nowhere else. France, not Frances, would lay his soul naked.

Andrew had never formally proposed, though he a.s.sumed that some absolutely explicit suggestion, such as the naming of a day, would be necessary before the ceremony could be performed. In a way he would have preferred simply to wake up one morning and find that Frances was his wife; and he felt sure that she felt exactly as he did. She accepted and completed his half-voiced a.s.sumptions about the future, and their conversations were like a song sung in s.n.a.t.c.hes by persons who know their parts so well that they need only by a note or two suggest them. He knew that Frances understood him perfectly. That was why they had both fallen silent suddenly together when they were speaking of the swing, since a swing suggested a child. Andrew was still a virgin. Where Frances was concerned, two ideas were curiously enlaced in his mind, the idea of his first introduction to s.e.xual intercourse and the idea of his death. The hours of both these events he pictured as flying towards him through the darkness like great scarlet darts; and although he did not doubt that the former would arrive before the latter, he sometimes, and especially in sleepless nights, thought that the latter might not come far behind. This returned his thoughts to what had made him and Frances suddenly silent.

The connection between the two ideas in fact went, for Andrew, deeper than anything suggested by the casualty lists. He profoundly feared the notion of the s.e.xual act, and whenever he imagined himself doing that to Frances he felt appalled incredulity. This act, an act of terrible violence involving the destruction of both the aggressor and the victim, seemed something quite separate from his old deep love for Frances, and separate even from the uneasy excitement which he had felt during the last week at living in the same house with her and accompanying her as far as her bedroom door. It was as if the act in question would have to be committed in a clandestine manner, like a secret murder. He could not imagine it as a part of ordinary life, and as the scarlet dart flew nearer and nearer he had times of feeling most dreadfully afraid.

Another consideration which joined the two fearful ideas together and made him confused and frightened about what was to come was a vague sense that people surrounding him, his family, perhaps society, expected him to make Frances pregnant before he was sent to the Front. An old aunt had practically blurted out something like this in his presence; and he divined some such thought in the mind of his mother, who was in some ways ambivalent about his relationship to Frances. This sort of dubious 'survival', offered as a kind of duty, made Andrew upset in a rather self-pitying way which he usually avoided. He wanted to live and be happy with Frances himself and to be under no obligations of that sort to the human race or even to her. He felt too, in these moods, hustled, and more inclined to procrastinate about the whole business. However, the moods soon pa.s.sed, swept away by his sheer tenderness for the girl and his increasing sense that this was the moment to settle his destiny, or rather to confirm a settlement which seemed to have been so felicitously made long ago.

Andrew's mother was very fond of Frances, but had sudden little sharp bursts of hostility towards her, as he imagined she would towards any girl that Andrew proposed to marry. Frances let them pa.s.s, shaking her head like a pony, which she in many ways resembled, and Hilda would at the next moment be especially affectionate. Andrew was exceedingly fond of his mother, sometimes he felt alarmingly fond of her, although she exasperated him extremely almost all the time. He disagreed with her views on everything and her ambitions made him shudder. He particularly disliked the social half-truths which she constantly told as a matter of instinct. She would imply that she had attended gatherings of which she had only heard, and when in Ireland would portray the glittering nature of her London social life in a way which amounted to serious misrepresentation. He flattered himself that he could observe with a sharp eye the world which so dazzled his mother; yet while he blushed for her vanity he could not see her as corrupted.

He had, in the past, felt a good deal of nervousness on the subject of whether his mother would think that Frances, an unt.i.tled, unfashionable girl, who had never even properly 'come out', was good enough for him. He had gradually with relief become aware that Hilda regarded Frances as a rather special young person. He only subsequently realized that there was a particular reason for this. Christopher Bellman was extremely rich. Children are usually oblivious of any except the most evident differences in wealth, and Andrew had only lately acquired an adult awareness of how much, in that sense, particular men had 'behind' them. He felt this awareness to be an onset of worldliness, especially when he noticed that such knowledge did in some way alter his view of people. But of course he had loved Frances and even wanted firmly to marry her long before he had apprehended her as an heiress. He was only thankful that this fact about her seemed to pacify his mother completely, who otherwise would certainly have been on the warpath in London in ways which would have greatly displeased him. He excused this covetousness in her, as he excused in himself a certain quiet satisfaction at the idea of marrying, quite accidentally, a rich girl: his parents had always been very poorly off and Andrew was just at an age to appreciate how inconvenient this was.

His prospective father-in-law, Christopher Bellman, was still a rather obscure and alarming figure to Andrew. He was constantly surprised to see how easily his mother managed to get on with Christopher. It was as if she simply failed to notice that he was a dangerous animal. It was indeed the spectacle of Hilda and Christopher gambolling together that most especially brought home to Andrew what seemed to him an adult insight: that someone can seem, and in fact be, quite different with one person from what he is with another. It was as if Hilda's mechanism was simply not designed to pick up a whole range of rays given off by Christopher, to which Andrew was sensitive and which led him to find Christopher 'dangerous'. Andrew thought that it was also very adult of him not instantly to dub his mother, for that reason, deficient. But neither did he, as he would when younger have done, regard her as daring. He searched rather for irrational features in his own att.i.tude.

Christopher was in fact English, though Irish by adoption through his wife Heather, and an Irish 'enthusiast' in a way which sufficiently marked him as an alien. When younger he had worked in the Civil Service, first in London and then in Dublin, but had retired in middle life to devote himself to scholarship, wherein, Andrew noticed, he concealed his systematic seriousness under an air of dilettante trifling. He was an expert on the antiquities of Ireland and possessed a large library on the subject, destined in his will for Trinity College, Dublin. He was familiar with Gaelic, although he had never joined the Gaelic League and was hostile to the wholesale cultivation of the Irish language which had come to be, for many of his acquaintances, such an important political end. He knew a good many of what he called 'the Irish Ireland mob', but kept aloof from all politics and controversy. Andrew judged him, though not always confidently, to be a cold man. Yet his pursuits were harmless, he was obviously very attached to Frances, and had always encouraged Andrew.

Sometimes Andrew, forever making little of his fright, decided that it was simply Christopher's appearance that unnerved him. His future father-in-law was very tall and looked anything but English. He might have been southern French or even Basque. He had extremely black hair and large dark eyes and a long thin very red mouth. He had always been cleanshaven, with a dulled sallow complexion. His longish hair was looped back behind his markedly pointed ears and his bushy triangular eyebrows met and grew for a considerable way down the bridge of his narrow and slightly hooked nose. The brow was prominent, yellower than the rest of the face, and much scrawled over with fine wrinkles, so that it sometimes seemed that he was wearing a cap pulled down to eye level. This gave him a secretive air. Yet he managed to look handsome and even young, and his eyes, always rather cautious and watchful, were very often humorous. Perhaps it was simply that Andrew suspected that Christopher was frequently laughing at him. He felt, however, an immense respect for Christopher, for his learning and for his rather mysterious detachment. Exhorted for some time to call him by his Christian name instead of 'Sir', he had found this difficult.

Andrew had by now almost finished dealing with the swing. It had not been a complicated operation, but he had dreamily prolonged it, simply glad to find himself mechanically occupied. The ropes were securely knotted on to a projecting bough of the big chestnut tree which stood beside the lawn, and as they chafed to and fro they dislodged a light dusting of bark which descended on to Andrew's blond head in a peppery rain, making him sneeze. The ropes slipped neatly through the slots in the seat and were knotted together below. Andrew had mended an incipient crack with a slat of wood and filled up a hole with putty. The red-and-white painted surface was as bright as he remembered it, the central spot of scarlet in those green childhood scenes, polished by many childish posteriors into a warm soft glow. He was rubbing it over with his sleeve, almost as if for some magical evocation of the past, when he caught sight of Frances coming from the house to call him in to tea.

A number of blackbirds, who had been threatening each other upon the lawn, flew up at her approach. The garden was in that disturbing expectant condition of the spring when everything is exuberantly leafy but nothing is in flower. All was green, that particularly pale vivid, damp-looking green which emanates from the Irish soil or is perhaps elicited by the dark brightness of the Irish light, a green washed over with silver. The slender spears of montbretia which fringed the house, the pallid waxy stripes of hemerocallis, the fuzzy shifting ma.s.ses of fuchsia gave to the scene something of the air of a lush reedy water meadow. Against this dense vegetable harmony Frances advanced, wearing a full-skirted dress of white spotted voile and Irish lace with a wide sash of mauve satin. Andrew, who had been drooping lazily, sprang to attention, his glance darting involuntarily to her ankles which the new fashion left clearly visible Frances was a small girl, inclined to plumpness, with something distinctly bouncy or frisky in her gait. Andrew had once punched another boy who called her 'dumpy'. There was in fact a brightness and vitality in her which forbade such a description. She had more the plump grace of a pretty pony. She had Christopher's dark hair which, travelling to a complex bun behind, was looped over her ears just like his. She had, too, his long mouth and the large prominent brow about which she could never decide whether to hide it or to reveal it. But the slightly exotic look which in Christopher suggested the south, gave to Frances an almost gipsy appearance, or perhaps rather she just looked Irish, of the Irish of Ireland, wide-faced, a little tousled, with a long powerful smile.

Without speaking to Andrew she hopped at once on to the swing and began to urge herself to and fro. The ropes groaned upon the bough and the chestnut bark descended like black confetti on to her white dress. It began very mistily to rain.

Chapter Two.

'WHAT'S on at the Abbey?'

'Some stuff by W.B. Yeats.'

'The Countess Cathleen, man? I don't think we feel strong enough for that, do we. What about the Gaiety?'

'D'Oyley Carte. I believe it's The Yeoman of the Guard.'

'Well, we might go there. Only don't forget my furniture is arriving at Claresville on Thursday.'

It was about half an hour later and tea was nearly over. They were sitting round the low wickerwork table in the conservatory, while outside the garden was being caressed or playfully beaten by the light rain which drifted a little in the breeze from the sea. Rain in Ireland always seemed a different substance from English rain, its drops smaller and more numerous. It seemed now to materialize in the air rather than to fall through it, and, transformed into quick-silver, ran shimmering upon the surface of the trees and plants, to fall with a heavier plop from the dejected palms and the chestnut. This rain, this scene, the pattering on the gla.s.s, the smell of the porous concrete floor, never entirely dry, the restless sensation of slightly damp cushions, these things set up for Andrew a long arcade of memories. He shifted uneasily in his basket chair, wondering how long it took to develop rheumatism.

Christopher had lighted his pipe, Frances was sewing, Hilda, without occupation, was sitting very upright as if the organization of the party had suddenly fallen upon her. Her hair, a pale blonde striped with grey, rather scanty and silky, pulled well away from the face and banded by a black velvet ribbon, looked like a neat cap, and she appeared older than her age. Her face, lightly wrinkled or rather perhaps crumpled, was a uniform colour of soft parchmenty gold, and often gave the impression of being weather-beaten or sunburnt, although Hilda in fact shunned the open air. The large straight nose and rather stern dark-blue eyes completed the picture of a person of authority, although an inherent vagueness in Hilda's principles made her in practice a less commanding person than she seemed.

'I'm longing to see your house finished,' said Frances.

'Thank G.o.d you didn't buy that crumbling pile at Dun-drum,' said Christopher. 'I'd have had to help you keep it upright, and it would have been a full-time job.'

What about me? thought Andrew, with a sudden pang, but then decided that he was being morbid.

'Kathleen said she'd find me a maid. I gather one has to pay ten shillings a week now.'

'And most of them would steal the cross off an a.s.s's back and can't be trusted to cook anything but rashers and eggs!'

'Oh, I'm good at training servants. I had a perfect little jewel in London. And of course I shall have the telephone installed.'

'The telephone is fine here if you only want to talk to the exchange! Have I convinced you on the motor car question?'

'Yes, Christopher. I think after all it would be foolish to buy a motor car just now. There are too many difficulties. I hear Millie has just bought a Panhard. She is so extravagant.'

Andrew knew quite well that his mother was aware that she could not possibly afford a motor car.

'We might think in terms of a pony and trap, though. After all, one must get about. And when the war is over I shall certainly purchase a touring car. Andrew shall learn how to operate it.'

A Vauxhall Prince Henry, thought Andrew dreamily to himself. When the war was over he would have money to spend. It was nice to think that he had a rendezvous in the future with a Vauxhall Prince Henry.

'I think I shall always stick to my bike,' said Christopher. 'The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.'

'I was very relieved Andrew didn't want to go into the Flying Corps,' said Hilda, speaking as if her son were not present.

'What's on tomorrow, Aunt Hilda?' asked Frances, revealing a long straight row of white teeth as she bit a length of thread off from the spool. Andrew's mother had always been content with this formal mode of address, which increased Andrew nomenclaturial difficulties with Christopher, since to address him familiarly in Hilda's presence would seem a kind of disloyalty.

'Tomorrow, my dear,' said Hilda, with the confiding eagerness she always evinced over any social plan, however trivial, 'tomorrow Andrew goes to tea at Blessington Street. I can't manage it, I've got to be at Claresville then to see the builder. You'll go with him, won't you?'

'I don't mind,' said Frances. 'I like to watch Cathal growing up. He looks entirely different now every time I see him.'

'He's such a big boy. It's hard to believe he's only fourteen. Children grow up so much more quickly nowadays. You'll go along too, Christopher?'

'Please not. That house depresses me. And Kathleen always makes me feel guilty!'

'I don't see why she should. But the house is gloomy, and there's always that curious smell on the stairs. Don't you think Kathleen has become awfully sour and self-absorbed just lately? And so dreadfully pious! Someone told me she goes to chapel every day.'

'She does it to spite Barney,' said Christopher, puffing his pipe, his gaze upon the quietly dripping palm trees.

Hilda, as usual, did not follow up a remark which made reference to her brother's religion. She went on, 'And on Tuesday, I know it's a terrible bore, but we must go and see Millie, I did promise. She's back from Rathblane now, it's her time for being in town. How do you think Millie is these days, Christopher? Going downhill?'

'Not specially,' said Christopher. 'She's been hunting like a maniac all the winter.'

'She certainly has plenty of energy,' Hilda conceded. 'I sometimes think she really might have been somebody if she'd been born a man.'

'Can't one be somebody if one's born a woman?' asked Frances.

'Well, hardly in that way, dear. Though in plenty of other ways which are just as important,' said Hilda vaguely.

'I think being a woman is like being Irish,' said Frances, putting aside her work and sitting up. At such moments she had an unconscious gesture of pushing back her hair to reveal her large brow. 'Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.'

'Come, come, women have always had Home Rule!' Christopher always jestingly set aside his daughter's sometimes rather ferocious attempts to turn conversation into serious channels.

'The emanc.i.p.ation question is certainly a grave one,' said Hilda. 'I am not at all hostile to the idea myself. But there are so many values- And I'm afraid that your Aunt Millicent's idea of emanc.i.p.ation is wearing trousers and firing a revolver in her own house.'

Christopher laughed. 'That's about it. But one must start somewhere! Will you be coming to Millie's, Frances?'

'No, thanks.'

Andrew had long been aware that Frances did not like Aunt Millicent, but he had never been able to make out why. Among the generalizations about women which pa.s.sed freely around his regimental mess was one to the effect that women never like each other, since every woman regards every other woman as her rival. Andrew, while attending with interest to all such distillations of worldly wisdom on a subject which was still very mysterious to him, suspected that this one was over-simple. It was true that women, leading more isolated and emptier lives, were naturally, when opportunity offered, more frantically anxious to attract attention and more ruthless in their pursuit of the opposite s.e.x than were men who had, after all, other interests, as well as more chances to know each other in an atmosphere of free fraternal co-operation. Or so it seemed to Andrew, who saw men as inherently dignified animals and women as inherently undignified animals. However, in his own experience, when he had noted a marked dislike of one woman for another there had usually been some reason for this other than the postulated general rivalry.

In the matter of dislike of Aunt Millicent, his mother for instance disliked her out of envy for her t.i.tle and her money, and because she failed to further Hilda's social ambitions. While Aunt Kathleen disliked her because of Uncle Arthur. Kathleen had it seems been very attached to her brother Arthur and had, rightly or wrongly, felt him to be in some way slighted or belittled by Millie, who was in fact fairly universally said to have married Arthur for rather worldly reasons. Uncle Arthur's early death was also somehow vaguely felt to be Millie's fault. 'Poor Arthur,' Hilda used to say. 'Millie simply ate him. Kathleen never forgave her.' Frances' dislike, which could hardly be put down to loyalty to either Kathleen or Hilda, persons from whom to say the least she felt detached, could perhaps after all be more simply explained as the nervous envy felt by a young girl who, however much she might officially despise such values, recognized in an older person a kind of elegance and glitter which she could never hope to emulate. Or more simply still it might be that Frances had weighed Millie in some spiritual balance and found her wanting. Andrew noted, sometimes a little uneasily, that his fiancee was capable of making quite uncompromising moral judgments.

'I hear there is to be mixed bathing at the Kingstown baths,' said Hilda, pursuing some train of thought concerned with the enormities of the modern world. 'I cannot approve. Not with the bathing costumes people wear nowadays. Frances and I saw a girl at the Ladies Bathing Place at Sandycove who was showing nearly the whole of her legs. Do you remember, Frances?'

Frances smiled. 'She had very pretty legs.'

'I'm sure you have very pretty legs, my dear, but they're n.o.body's business but your own.'

Andrew, feeling an entirely private amused resentment at this judgment, suddenly found himself catching Christopher's eye. Christopher gave him a faint secretive smile. Distressed, Andrew dropped his gaze and pulled at his moustache. There was something curiously improper about catching Christopher's eye just then. It was almost like an exchange of winks. He felt suddenly mocked and threatened. He could never make Christopher out.

Christopher, perhaps to cover what he had apprehended of Andrew's embarra.s.sment, went on at once, 'In fact nothing may come of the mixed bathing idea. Father Ryan has already protested about it. You and the Holy Romans see eye to eye on this, Hilda.'

'They're certainly very full of themselves these days,' said Hilda, 'protesting against this and demanding that. I expect it's the prospect of Home Rule. "Home Rule will be Rome Rule" may prove but too true. We must prepare ourselves.'

'Indeed,' said Christopher. 'And yet they've opposed it all along the line. It's the Church not the Castle that has really kept this country down. All the great Irish patriots have been Protestants, except for O'Connell. The Church was against the Fenians, against Parnell.'