The Feast Read online

  Robin, however, had no wish to conceal his condition.

  ‘We’ve been drinking!’ he announced. ‘We’ve been drinking old fashioneds in the bar of the M.P.’

  ‘Robin!’ cried Mrs. Siddal.

  ‘Who paid?’ asked Gerry.

  Duff looked up and asked why they should not have paid for themselves.

  ‘Because you’ve got no cash, either of you.’

  ‘A strange lady paid for us,’ said Robin. ‘So what?’

  He teased his mother for a little while, and then he explained:

  ‘We met her on the Parade. She couldn’t make her cigarette lighter work. So Duff gave her a light. And we talked a bit and she asked us into the M.P. for a drink. She’s staying there.’

  ‘Oh well …’ said Mrs. Siddal unhappily, ‘I suppose girls do that sort of thing nowadays.’

  ‘She wasn’t a girl,’ said Robin. ‘She was older than you I should think, wouldn’t you, Duff?’

  ‘No,’ said Duff. ‘A big younger than Mother.’

  ‘It’s quite easy,’ said Siddal. ‘It reads: “All Spartans will refuse desert to-night by order.” I think desert means dessert.’

  He sat back and smiled triumphantly at his family.

  ‘So that explains it,’ said Mrs. Siddal. ‘Some game of the children’s.’

  ‘She’s a lady authoress,’ said Robin. ‘I never met one before. She says she knows Father.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Siddal.

  ‘A lady we met in Porthmerryn. Her name is Mrs. Lechene.’

  Siddal gave a joyous squeak.

  ‘Good old Anna! Fat old Anna! You don’t mean to say she’s still above ground?’

  ‘Of course she is,’ said Mrs. Siddal, who did not look pleased at the news. ‘She’s not old … only my age, as Duff says. And she’s always writing books. You see them in the library.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Siddal, ‘because I never go to the library. And all my old friends have dropped me. They might be dead for anything I know. But is Anna in Porthmerryn then?’

  ‘She’s staying at the M.P.,’ said Robin.

  ‘Oh? At the M.P.? Who with?’

  Duff and Robin looked at one another.

  ‘She didn’t say,’ said Duff. ‘We thought she was alone there.’

  ‘Not very likely,’ said Siddal.

  Duff gave his father a quick, sharp glance and said:

  ‘She’s writing a book about Emily Brontë.’

  ‘Oh my Lord! She would! She would! The only wonder is that she hasn’t done it before. Poor Emily! What a shame! Why can’t they leave that unfortunate girl alone?’

  ‘Is she a good writer?’ asked Robin.

  ‘She writes well. Everybody does nowadays. She writes this biographical fiction, or fictional biography, whichever you like to call it. She takes some juicy scandal from the life of a famous person, and writes a novel round it. Any facts that don’t suit her go out. Any details she wants to invent come in. She’s saved the trouble of creating plot and characters, and she doesn’t have to be accurate because it’s only a novel, you know.’

  ‘You don’t sound,’ said Duff, ‘as if you liked her very much.’

  ‘Don’t I? I’m talking about her books. I hate ’em. But that doesn’t mean I’ve any personal animus against the poor girl. You think one shouldn’t criticize the work of a friend? Disloyal? Isn’t that rather suburban of you?’

  ‘I only read one of Anna’s books,’ put in Mrs. Siddal hastily. ‘The Lost Pleiad. I couldn’t bear it.’

  ‘Oh yes … the one about Augusta Leigh. “Like the Lost Pleiad, seen no more below!” That made her name. A huge success. You’d have thought that stale old bone had had all the meat pecked off it. But no! It seems that in Cardiff and Wimbledon and Tunbridge Wells and Palm Beach and Milwaukee they still didn’t know. So they all lapped up The Lost Pleiad. There was an unforgettable chapter about Byron and Augusta being snowed up…. I believe they actually were snowed up. Anna didn’t invent that. But oh, bless you, she knew everything they did and said and thought from the first snowflake to the thaw. What’s she like to look at now? I haven’t seen her for … it must be at least ten years.’

  Duff and Robin looked vague.

  ‘She’s fat and rather pale,’ said Robin at last. ‘And she doesn’t look as if she makes up, except her hair which is peroxide.’

  ‘Oh no, it’s not. It’s true, Teutonic gold, and she’s very proud of it. Lets it down on the slightest provocation. She hasn’t changed apparently. She was a fat, pale girl twenty or thirty years ago, and whatever she wore looked as if she’d slept in it. She used to let her hair down at the dinner table and lean confidentially towards her neighbour till it trailed in his soup. If he blenched she said he had repressions.’

  Robin guffawed and said that Anna had told them a limerick about repressions.

  ‘Limericks!’ cried Mr. Siddal. ‘How crude she must be getting! But I suppose she mistook you for schoolboys.’

  ‘Who is Mr. Lechene?’ asked Duff, ignoring this dig.

  ‘Haven’t an idea. She’d finished with him long before I knew her. She used to say she was married at fifteen, and I daresay she was. But I expect there’s a current Mister of sorts. There always is. You didn’t see him? Perhaps he was taking a little time off.’

  ‘She wants to come here,’ said Robin. ‘She asked if we had room.’

  ‘Oh no … we haven’t,’ exclaimed Mrs. Siddal.

  ‘Why Mother? We’ve got the garden room still unlet.’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly have Anna here. The Wraxtons are bad enough.’

  ‘Well, she might upset people,’ agreed Robin. ‘She says such … she doesn’t seem to mind what she says, does she, Duff?’

  Duff made a noncommittal noise. He did not know whether he wanted Anna to come or not. She had upset him. He had been quite ashamed of the ideas which she managed to put into his head; and then she had stared at him, smiling, as though perfectly aware of what she was doing.

  ‘Duff,’ said Mr. Siddal, ‘had better be careful. She is older than the rocks on which she sits and she eats a young man every morning for breakfast. Her ash can is full of skulls and bones.’

  ‘Not now, surely!’ said Robin.

  ‘Oh yes. Every word she says, every look she gives, is a most powerful aphrodisiac; after a sufficient dose of it they don’t know that she’s fat and old and an ogress. They think she’s going to teach them some wonderful secret.’

  ‘And does she?’ asked Duff, with another of those keen looks.

  ‘That,’ confessed Siddal, ‘I don’t know. I’m not in a position to tell you. And if she has suggested anything to the contrary it’s just a little lapse of memory on her part. She finds it difficult, I daresay, to believe that any old acquaintance escaped her ash can. But I, whatever my faults, have never looked at any other woman since I married your mother. I’m what they call a happily married man.’

  8. Starting Hares

  The hotel got its first glimpse of Lady Gifford at Sunday supper, for she had kept her bed ever since her arrival the evening before. Some curiosity was felt when at last she appeared. Her pallor, her emaciation, and her faint voice bore witness to her ill-health, and nobody felt able to protest when she asked for a fire in the lounge, though the night was very warm. Gerry took up logs and she sat close to the blaze, warming her delicate hands and looking round her with a faint, triumphant smile, as if expecting to be congratulated upon her gallantry in getting downstairs at all.

  But nobody said the right things except Dick Siddal, whose custom it was to clean up and join his guests in the lounge in the evenings. And even he found the heat of the fire intolerable. He was obliged to go and sit at the other end of the room, beyond the range of her plaintive whispers. The room had several occupants, and all of them were suffocated. Sir Henry was writing letters at a desk in the bay window. The Paleys sat side by side on a sofa reading the Sunday papers. Upon another sofa sat Miss Ellis who was not suppo
sed to use the lounge, but had done so as a protest against emptying slops. Nobody sat near the fire except Mrs. Cove who had left her knitting in the most comfortable chair before supper and chose to stay there in spite of its subsequent disadvantages.

  Between these two ladies, crouching in their private inferno, a desultory conversation sprang up. Lady Gifford whispered questions to which Mrs. Cove gave terse replies in a singularly disagreeable voice. It was cold and sharp and it had a subtly common overtone, not innate, but acquired in the course of many battles with the grasping mob. She said that she was taking this holiday because she had recently sold her ‘haouse’ in the south of London. A mere house, as Siddal said afterwards to his family, would not, probably, have fetched half so much as a ‘haouse’ could. Houses are sold through estate agents who take commission. ‘Haouses’ are disposed of by their owners, who always get the best of the bargain.

  This one, explained Mrs. Cove, had doubled in value since she bought it, for the flying bombs had created a scarcity in that district.

  ‘Oh terrible!’ agreed Lady Gifford. ‘So much worse than the Blitz! More of a nervous strain, weren’t they?’

  ‘Were you in London through the Blitz, Lady Gifford?’

  This was from Miss Ellis, chirping up from her sofa, reminding them that she not only had the right to sit but might talk if she liked.

  ‘No,’ breathed Lady Gifford. ‘No … actually I was there very little. But my husband was all through the worst of it. And naturally I was very anxious. For I felt I had to be with the children. Where,’ she asked Mrs. Cove, ‘did you send yours?’

  ‘Nowhere,’ snapped Mrs. Cove. ‘We stayed in London. We had an Anderson shelter. I wasn’t nervous.’

  ‘Weren’t they?’ asked Lady Gifford.

  ‘No.’

  Mrs. Cove pursed her lips as if to say that her children knew better than to be nervous.

  ‘How lucky. Mine would have been shattered. They’re all so highly strung. I’m thankful to say not one of them ever heard a bomb.’

  ‘In America weren’t you, Lady Gifford?’ suggested Miss Ellis.

  Lady Gifford ignored her and continued to address Mrs. Cove.

  ‘We had a kind invitation from a friend in Massachusetts. They had a wonderful time. But I didn’t, naturally, want them to become Americanized. So I felt I must go with them.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Mrs. Cove, looking up from her knitting. ‘Don’t you like Americans?’

  ‘Oh yes, I love them. So wonderfully kind and hospitable.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you want your children to be Americanized? When you accepted all this hospitality?’

  ‘Oh well …’ Lady Gifford made a helpless little gesture. ‘One does want them to be British, doesn’t one?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Mrs. Cove. ‘Which is why I kept mine in Britain. I had invitations for my children. But I don’t like cadging.’

  Lady Gifford flushed slightly.

  ‘Naturally one disliked that part of it,’ she said. ‘I always thought it quite ridiculous that one wasn’t allowed to pay for them. But personally I think we owed it to our children to put them in safety, whatever the sacrifice. Don’t you?’

  She turned her haggard gaze upon the Paleys as if asking for their support. Mrs. Paley looked flustered and made no reply. Mr. Paley stared at his boots and said:

  ‘I agree with Mrs. Cove. If I had had children I should have kept them in England. I should not have allowed them to live on charity.’

  ‘Plenty of places in the British Isles were fairly safe,’ said Sir Henry, turning round. ‘Many people here never heard a bomb.’

  ‘Oh, but one couldn’t know that,’ said Lady Gifford. ‘And I don’t think innocent little children ought to suffer. I always say that. The innocent oughtn’t to suffer.’

  ‘They invariably do,’ said Mr. Siddal. ‘They always have.’

  ‘But why? Why?’

  Dick Siddal leant back upon his sofa and stared at three flies circling round the chandelier. He was getting bored with Lady Gifford.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he suggested, ‘the sufferings of the innocent are useful. That idea first occurred to me when one of my children said how unkind it was of Lot to leave Sodom, since, as long as he stayed there, the city was safe. The presence of one righteous man preserved it. I shouldn’t wonder if the entire human race isn’t tolerated simply for its innocent minority.’

  ‘What a sweet idea,’ said Lady Gifford.

  He lowered his eyes for a moment and gave her a look. Then he raised them again and pursued the hare he had started. She was an intolerably stupid woman and could not understand a word he said. But he enjoyed the sound of his own voice, and nobody was likely to interrupt him.

  ‘I daresay,’ he said, ‘that mankind is protected and sustained by undeserved suffering; by all those millions of helpless people who pay for the evil we do and who shield us simply by being there, as Lot was in the doomed city. If any community of people were to be purely evil, were to have no element of innocence among them at all, the earth would probably open and swallow them up. Such a community would split the moral atom.’

  He sat up straight and addressed his remarks to Paley, who might be able to follow them.

  ‘It’s the innocent who integrate the whole concern. Their agony is dreadful, but:

  Their shoulders hold the sky suspended.

  They stand, and earth’s foundations stay.

  Why didn’t the earth open to swallow Belsen? Even in the bunkers of the Berlin Chancellery you might find the innocent children of Dr. Goebbels. Where you have the suffering innocent, the crucified victim, there you have the redeemer who secures for us all a continual reprieve. The oppressed preserve the oppressors. If the innocent did not suffer we should all go pop.’

  Lady Gifford looked a little bewildered.

  ‘But surely,’ she said, ‘there were babies in Sodom, even after Lot went out.’

  Siddal shook his head.

  ‘Weren’t there? Surely …’

  ‘Not one.’

  ‘Really? I never knew that. Does it say so?’

  The door opened and Canon Wraxton stood upon the threshold. All conversation died down at once.

  ‘It’s insufferably hot in here,’ he announced.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s on my account,’ sighed Lady Gifford. ‘I have to be very careful not to catch a chill.’

  ‘To roast yourself will be the surest way to do it, Madam. If I’m to sit in here I really must ask for some of the windows to be opened.’

  ‘Then I can’t sit here,’ she pointed out.

  ‘You must judge for yourself about that,’ said the Canon.

  He made a tour of the windows, opening them all, before he sat down at the other desk to write a letter. Lady Gifford was obliged to go back to bed, and departed on the arm of her husband.

  9. In the Deep Night

  The murmur of the sea came in through the opened windows. A breath of cool air fanned Christina Paley’s cheek. She looked out and saw a gull so high up in the sky that a beam from the sun, already set, caught its wings.

  The heat and the darkness of the room were stifling her. She glanced at her husband. He was not reading. He was not thinking. She was sure that when he sat huddled up like this he was not thinking of anything at all; he was simply existing inside his shell. Of late he had seemed to shrink, as if the brain behind his skull was shrivelling.

  She wished that somebody would say something, and peered through the stifling dusk at her companions. There were only four of them now. They were all withdrawn, all heavily silent. Mrs. Cove knitted in the firelight. Mr. Siddal stared at the chandelier. Canon Wraxton drew circles on his blotting paper. Miss Ellis seemed to be examining a hole in the carpet. She got the impression that none of them were thinking, that nothing was passing through their minds from the outer world. Each had retired, as an animal retires with a bone to the back of its cage, to chew over some single obsession. And this frightened her. She could no
longer bear to be shut up in this murky den of strange beasts. She must get out, right out of the hotel, and away to the safety of the cliffs. She rose and slipped out of the room. Nobody noticed her departure.

  Her panic did not subside till she was across the sands and halfway up to the headland. She mastered it only to discover that her misery had returned. Despair broke over her so irresistibly that she wondered how she could still observe the pure peace and beauty of the scene. But her senses continued to tell her that the sky, sea, cliffs and sands were lovely, that there was music in the murmur of the waves, and that the evening airs smelt of gorse blossom. To that message her mind replied: No good any more. It might have helped me once.

  For she loved natural beauty, and in the earlier stages of her struggle had often found consolation in a country walk. But this was a late stage, the final stage. Now she merely felt a clearer conviction that life was over for her, the last anodyne gone. If this fair prospect could not tempt her to stay, then nothing could and she might go when she pleased.

  She went to the end of the headland and sat on a rock looking out to sea. The water was flat and pale, paler than the sky, except at the horizon where a dark blue pencil had sketched a great curve. On her left, behind the dusky mass of the next point, an after sunset light still burned. On her right, over Pendizack Cove, fell the shadow of advancing night. She thought that she would rest for a little while and then go back to the sand. She would wade out into that warm, flat sea, wade as far as she could and then swim. It was years since she had swum but she supposed she still could, for how far she did not know, but far enough. She would swim straight out towards that thin blue line of the horizon, on and on, until the end. A time would come when she could swim no more. And then there might be some moments of panic. The wish to live might reassert itself before she went under the choking water. But it would soon be over. And no one would be hurt by it, for she had given up all hope of helping Paul. Her life was useless and a burden.

  So much suffering, she thought. So much suffering everywhere. And as long as I live I merely add to it. I am not strong. I can do nothing. I’m simply another hopeless, helpless person.