Go Back at Once E-Book

Robert Aickman

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 466

Beschreibung

Completed by Robert Aickman in 1975; but never before published in the USA; Go Back at Once is a delicious; delirious comic fantasy about the joys and terrors experienced by two young women seeking to escape the degradations of our technological and conformist age by fleeing to a chaotic; poet-ruled utopia.

Leseprobe

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And Other Stories Sheffield – London – New Yorkwww.andotherstories.org

Copyright © 2020 by the Estate of Robert Aickman, c/o Artellus Limited, 30 Dorset House, Gloucester Place, London NW1 5AD, England

Introduction © Brian Evenson, 2022

All rights reserved. The rights of Robert Aickman to be identified as the author of this work and of Brian Evenson to be identified as the author of the introduction have been asserted.

Originally published in 2020 by Tartarus Press, UK First paperback edition 2022, And Other Stories

ISBN: 9781913505202 eBook ISBN: 9781913505219

Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London; Cover Design: Travis Brun.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

And Other Stories would like to thank Rosalie Parker, R. B. Russell, S.T. Joshi and Jim Rockhill for their help in the preparation of this volume.

Contents

IntroductionChapter One: The HeroChapter Two: The ProblemChapter Three: The New HomeChapter Four: The ConversationChapter Five: The ShopChapter Six: The HealerChapter Seven: The InvitationChapter Eight: The Water JumpChapter Nine: The UncertaintyChapter Ten: The SuggestionChapter Eleven: The InterviewChapter Twelve: The DependentChapter Thirteen: Fire EnginesChapter Fourteen: The PetsChapter Fifteen: The RevelationChapter Sixteen: The SpellChapter Seventeen: The LetterChapter Eighteen: The BoudoirChapter Nineteen: The CommunicationChapter Twenty: The DecisionChapter Twenty-One: The JourneyChapter Twenty-Two: The BreakdownChapter Twenty-Three: The Distinguished VisitorChapter Twenty-Four: The AllocationChapter Twenty-Five: Settling DownChapter Twenty-Six: EmploymentChapter Twenty-Seven: The Oil StoreChapter Twenty-Eight: The Garment StoreChapter Twenty-Nine: ChangingChapter Thirty: The CanadianChapter Thirty-One: The Acting MinisterChapter Thirty-Two: AlarmChapter Thirty-Three: The FiancéChapter Thirty-Four: The OfficersChapter Thirty-Five: Bye-ByesChapter Thirty-Six: Night or Day?Chapter Thirty-Seven: Preparations for WorkChapter Thirty-Eight: Sources of SupplyChapter Thirty-Nine: The RepetitionChapter Forty: The LoverChapter Forty-One: The SickbedChapter Forty-Two: The TearChapter Forty-Three: La Couture Assez GrandeChapter Forty-Four: The WildfowlersChapter Forty-Five: Conditions at the DepôtChapter Forty-Six: Sight-SeeingChapter Forty-Seven: The ProfessorChapter Forty-Eight: Walking on the WaterChapter Forty-Nine: The AnthemChapter Fifty: A Further AuguryChapter Fifty-One: At Work on a YachtChapter Fifty-Two: Cressida Finds HerselfChapter Fifty-Three: Tars on the TaffrailChapter Fifty-Four: The EmblemChapter Fifty-Five: The ExposureChapter Fifty-Six: Twilight at MiddayChapter Fifty-Seven: All AboardChapter Fifty-Eight: Midnight at TeatimeChapter Fifty-Nine: Clutching at StrawsChapter Sixty: Go Back at OnceConclusion

‌Introduction

Readers know Robert Aickman, if they know him at all, as a writer of ‘strange stories’: tales that don’t quite descend fully into a territory that might rightly be called horror but which are, nonetheless, unsettling and, well, strange. They’re stories that leave you off balance and unsure, stories with the potential to haunt you for a long time after you finish reading them.

Yet there’s an entirely other Robert Aickman out there, more ambitious, no less strange, harder still to classify: Aickman the novelist. In his longer fiction, we meet a writer born into the wrong era – someone who wouldn’t be out of his element trading bon mots with Noël Coward, someone whose work wouldn’t be out of place beside Waugh’s and Wilde’s. His writing here is funny and charming, satirical and playful in a way we get only the briefest glimpses of in his stories. Where many (though not all) of his stories have somewhat hapless male protagonists, he offers, in the two novels and one novella of his that have been published, female focal characters: young women and girls coming into their own. He proves surprisingly good at ventriloquising the voices of these female characters, though also perhaps a little bit unhealthily fascinated by the different outfits he imagines them wearing.

Only one novel of Aickman’s was published in his lifetime, The Late Breakfasters (1964). Hardly a success when it first appeared, it garnered little attention in the years that followed. Now, it may be cursed by lying too much in the shadow of the strangeness Aickman is known for – when it was reissued by Valancourt a few years ago, it was packaged as The Late Breakfasters and Other Strange Stories, and was followed by six tales in Aickman’s typical mode. But The Late Breakfasters is hardly strange in the classical, supernatural sense, and to present it as such is an encouragement to misread. It’s a bit like packaging a banana together with a half-dozen nails and calling the results lunch. Rather than being chilling or unnerving, The Late Breakfasters is delightful, melancholy, and full of wit. It more resembles what might have resulted in the unlikely event of Evelyn Waugh and Ronald Firbank collaborating on a novel about semi-unrequited lesbian passion.

Another novel, or more like a novella, The Model, was only published six years after Aickman’s death, in 1987. Reading something like a fable, it tells the story of a young girl named Elena who wants to train as a ballerina. When she discovers she is to be given in marriage by her father to settle his debts, she flees to pursue her dream. Yet the tone is anything but grim, and as she travels things become very odd indeed, the reality of the world feeling increasingly contingent.

Both of these books arguably do have their fantastical moments – briefly (and tenuously) in The Late Breakfasters and more pervasively in The Model – but such supernatural developments are deployed differently than the unnerving and certainty-eroding oddness that undergirds Aickman’s best stories. And yet the novels have a deftness to them, a lightness, not so dissimilar from the stories as to be unrecognisable, but given a prominence that makes them into supreme pleasures for those readers who can tune into their anti-modern wavelength … especially if they can, for the duration, set aside the expectation of ‘spookiness’ bred by Aickman’s reputation.

For many years, The Late Breakfasters and The Model were Aickman’s only longer pieces available. Now there’s one more: Go Back at Once. Originally written in 1975 but left unpublished, the novel languished in Aickman’s archives for decades as a typescript until Tartarus Press, the most committed publisher of Aickman’s work, issued it in a limited collector’s edition. The edition you hold is the first trade edition.

In Go Back at Once, Aickman managed to write something that initially seems like a satirical sort of Bildungsroman, but quickly exceeds those bounds. The novel is ostensibly about Cressida Hazeborough and her friendship with Vivien, a wealthy upper-class schoolfriend with whom she is quite close. It takes place in the aftermath of war, with Cressida having lost her brother, Hugh, to combat. Unsure of what to do with herself but knowing the last thing she wants is to stay home and slip into marriage with a boy she’s known for years (who both she and Vivien refer to by the moniker Tiddleywinks) she comes to London with Vivien to live with Vivien’s Aunt Agnes. Aunt Agnes is the first divorced person that Cressida has met, which gives her a curious allure. Cressida knows her father would not approve of her living with a divorcee – after all, he also disapproves of short hair on women, short dresses, and drinking cocktails – so she keeps this information to herself when asking her parents for permission to go. She takes a job in a shop called Perdita, where she works with someone who is also named Perdita. Meanwhile, Vivien works as the receptionist for a psychoanalyst (who she convinces to see Cressida without charging her) and attempts to write a novel.

Everything seems set up for Cressida to become increasingly aware of herself, fall in love, and blossom fully into adulthood, and for Vivien to serve as her foil in this. In a more traditional novel, this is precisely what would happen. But Aickman has little interest in pursuing this arc. Instead, he’s interested in the way Cressida converses with those around her, interested in the dynamics of the characters, but less and less focused on writing a Bildungsroman in a predictable sense. And so, a quarter of the way into the novel, Aickman abandons London altogether and dizzyingly propels his characters to Trino, a makeshift country that’s been carved out of a patch of Italy by someone named Virgilio Vittore.

Vittore is a little like Harry Lime in the movie The Third Man: we are told a great many things about him, some accurate, some mere rumour, before he appears ‘in person’. He’s first mentioned at the dinner table, and everyone seems to know who he is except for Cressida. We know that his name circulates in the newspapers, that everyone is conscious of him, that many of the stodgier of Aunt Agnes’s guests disapprove of him. Eventually Cressida and Vivien encounter his face on a stamp. In time they come to understand that he’s a dreamer, a romantic, that he’s rumoured to own houses in every capital in Europe, that he’s physically unattractive yet irresistible to women, that he ‘governs according to the laws of music’, and that he has had some sort of past connection to Aunt Agnes, the specifics of which she takes a certain pleasure in feeding to Cressida and Vivien in dribs and drabs.

Unlike Cressida, Vivien seems to know a little bit about Vittore. When Cressida asks in frustration who exactly this Vittore is, she responds, ‘with emphasis’, ‘He is a man,’ but goes on to qualify this: ‘At least I think so.’ The source of her information is an article she read in Woman’s Own. Drawing on the words of that esteemed publication, Vivien proclaims that ‘Vittore is a great poet, and a great playwright, and a great athlete, and a great soldier, and a great leader, and a great aviator, and a great lover. That most of all.’ He has all the dangerous fascination of a carefully constructed charismatic authoritarian leader – which in fact he is, though Cressida and Vivien cling to his idea of ruling by music and believe this might redeem him. Fascinated by rumours of him in London, once in Trino Cressida and Vivien continue to circle Vittore, drawing closer and closer to him – though Cressida fears she might never actually set eyes upon him.

The majority of the book takes place in Trino. It involves the exploration of an artificial country run by way of romantic notions and enthusiasms, but without an excess of organisational principles. Vittore’s endeavour is supported by a motley assortment of folk from everywhere, who each seem to have arrived in Trino for their own peculiar reasons. Cressida’s coming of age in London is replaced by a madcap, parodic, and often very funny version of the same in Trino. This portion of the novel, particularly in the way it describes the place and the people in it, strikes me as reminiscent of Anthony Powell’s Venusberg (1932), about a journalist who secures a position in a Baltic country and his misadventures there, though that novel doesn’t have nearly the humour that Aickman’s does.

In a way Cressida is no more at sea in Trino – where at one point she is quite literally at sea – than she was in London. Resourceful, she manages to pick her way through a number of prickly situations. But we as readers are more lost: we might have been able to feel superior to her struggles with certain social circles in London because we have already surmounted such struggles in our own lives or experienced them in books. But in Trino we’d be as off balance as she is and would probably operate with a great deal less aplomb.

One of the strengths of Go Back at Once is the closeness of the third-person narrative to Cressida herself, the care with which Aickman touches on her sometimes ingenuous manner of thinking and speaking, allowing it to permeate the entirety of the narrative, sometimes through free indirect discourse, sometimes through more complex means. For instance, it may be the narrator who tells us that ‘The walls were hung with boudoir-coloured silk, and there were boudoir-designed furnishings, the colour of dried skeletons on the steppes,’ but the whole phrasing of that description, its repetitions, what it chooses to notice, is imbued with Cressida’s often amusing way of looking at the world. Or is it? Perhaps this is as much the narrator giving his own words to things that Cressida may be inchoately feeling or thinking, and perhaps he’s getting it wrong. The line between the narrator’s satire and the young woman’s own feelings becomes very blurry indeed, and Aickman knows how to exploit that ambiguity to maximum effect.

Go Back at Once, like Aickman’s other novel-length works, has a certain lightness, in the positive sense that Italo Calvino uses the term. There’s a buoyancy to the prose that allows Aickman to move from absurdity to absurdity with a deft touch that keeps the balloon that is the novel aloft. There’s something gleeful and slightly dangerous about the satire of the book, partly because it’s not always clear where the satire is meant to start or stop. It’s a novel full of contradictions – Aickman, quite conservative, does seem genuinely to admire this impossible romantico-fascist state that follows the laws of music, but he also can’t help but be sceptical of it. It’s a glorious dream for him (with more than hints of nightmare to us), but even when he’s only dreaming his pessimistic streak wins out. He can’t resist breaking his dream apart, which ends up making his Trino feel like more of a critique than he perhaps intended.

Such tensions give the novel a kind of innate dynamism. The effect is similar to what the best satire gains when (as is the case with Swift’s work, for instance) the connection of the writer to what he or she is satirising becomes less important than his or her delight in the world being created. Go Back at Once is a wonderfully readable book, full of deft and often very funny turns of phrase. It may not be strange in the sense of Aickman’s stories, but it’s well and truly strange in its own unique way – thoroughly mischievous, sly, and inviting.

BRIAN EVENSON

‌Chapter One

The Hero

Once upon a time everyone knew that Sawbridgeworth was pronounced Sapsworth, that Daventry was pronounced Danetree, that Cirencester was pronounced Cissiter, that Derby was pronounced Darby, and, on the same principle, that beautiful, remote Happisburgh, at the very furthest corner of Norfolk, was pronounced Hazeborough, and had been since the days of its greatness. When times were swiftly changing, Mr Vernon Happisburgh had been faced with a difficult decision. Should he begin to pronounce himself Happ-is-burg or spell himself Hazeborough?

He decided upon the latter, largely so that there should be no confusion with the Imperial Family that had now fallen on difficult times.

When Isaac Disraeli decided to become a Christian, he took all his family with him, hand in hand. So, necessarily, it was with the name-change in Mr Hazeborough’s family, who, however numbered only two: his wife, whose name was Phyllis, and his daughter, whose names were Cressida Hermione Helena. Until a year or two before, there had also been a son, Cressida’s older brother Hugh, but he had been killed within mere months of being conscripted, and within mere weeks of the war’s end. The three survivors became Mr, Mrs, and Miss Hazeborough.

Cressida had loved her brother, who, indeed, had been a god among youths, captain of cricket, stand-off half in the second fifteen, and the first to win the open hundred yards three years running. He had been a strong and impressively competitive swimmer, a rider to hounds of more than promise (as the elderly Master had expressed it), and a dab hand with the foils, though not actually Captain of Fencing. He had danced like Vernon Castle (when given the chance).

It was in memory of him, though he had been six years older, that Cressida later took up fencing herself. There were a number of girls who went in for it at Riverdale House. First the class had been taken by Mrs Hobbs, but soon a male instructor had had to be sent for. Cressida had excelled from the first, all the time half-imagining herself to be Hugh; and in the end she had fenced for the school. The team might well have carried all before it if the others had been as good as Cressida. Alas, those very things in which we excel at school are precisely those of least application when we are compelled to drag ourselves away.

At Riverdale House, Cressida’s great preoccupations, other than the memory of Hugh, had been poetry, and a dark-haired girl named Vivien, who loved poetry too. Both girls wrote it, read it, and especially read it aloud to one another. In the end Cressida came upon some lines that summed up the situation:–

‘The Wily Vivien stole from Arthur’s court:

She hated all the knights, and heard in thought

Their lavish comment when her name was named.’

Vivien was the younger by slightly more than a year when the two found one another in the fourth form under Miss Elm, who was not merely silly, as are so many schoolteachers, of all sexes, but simply mental. Vivien was even cleverer than Cressida and seemed likely one day to be even more beautiful. Neither of these considerations stood at all in the way. Indeed, Cressida positively preferred things to be as they were. It seems likely that Cressida would never have encountered the greatest man of his age (some, including the man himself, said, of any age) but for Vivien’s enthusiasm and drive in the early stages of the project.

With the consent of the authorities and of Mr and Mrs Hazeborough, Vivien accompanied Cressida to the unveiling of the tablet to Hugh in his school chapel. After Tea, which was dull (the cakes and biscuits, like the partakers, were past their prime), the two slipped back into the high, red-brick chapel and read all the memorials to the great men: poets, generals, secretaries of state, colonial governors, prison governors, governors of the Bank of England.

‘Lives of great men oft remind us,’ remarked Vivien. Cressida was not used to seeing her in a plain black dress.

‘He was only a headmaster,’ said Cressida, examining a tablet, large, Latinate, and cracked.

‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’ Vivien pointed out.

‘That’s just about all that women can do,’ said Cressida.

‘Nonsense,’ said Vivien. ‘You’re going to do much more.’

‘I hope so,’ said Cressida, doubtfully but dutifully. ‘At least I think I hope so.’

‘Of course you hope so,’ said Vivien. ‘It’s much better to be a woman than a man.’

A little later, the elderly verger entered, having heard voices.

‘Oh!’ he exclaimed when he saw who it was. ‘Enjoying yourselves, are you?’ He did not know how to make the best of girls.

‘Yes, thank you,’ said Vivien. ‘Very much.’

It would not have been proper for Cressida to reply, seeing what they were there for that day.

They continued their purposeful examination of all the memorials.

The verger stood about.

‘Don’t you feel cold?’ he asked after a bit.

‘No,’ said Cressida. ‘We never feel cold.’

It was a point upon which she and Vivien particularly prided themselves, at least in comparison with some of the silly geese at Riverdale House.

‌Chapter Two

The Problem

It was unthinkable that Vivien should stay on after Cressida had left.

At their last prize-giving, Vivien had won the prize for Latin (that was how she had had no difficulty with the inscriptions) and Cressida the prize for elocution. At a later phase of the ceremony, Cressida had been called upon to manifest her art, and she had recited ‘The Listeners’ by Walter de la Mare; ‘The Great Lover’ by Rupert Brooke; and, more daringly, William Morris’s ‘I know a little garden close’. She was loudly applauded by the entire audience, tightly packed in the hot room and with many of the males in morning dress with spats. She seemed to appeal more than either the scene from a well-known play by Molière which had preceded her or the girl who played Bach on the violin after her. Then came a surprise. At the very end, the headmistress, Miss Grindleford, rose yet again and said that while Riverdale House did not regularly present a Good Conduct Prize but only when quite exceptional merit seemed to compel, yet that year the staff felt there was such merit, and that it had been displayed by Cressida Hazeborough. So as well as a Popular Reciter, bound in red, Cressida received a Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antonius bound in green, and translated idiomatically by a Clerk in Holy Orders. The head girl, Mary Daimler, looked sour, without being particularly successful in concealing the fact; and Cressida was considerably at a loss, then and thereafter, as to why she had been picked on. Of course her behaviour had been perfectly reasonable, because only silly geese flaunt themselves or make any kind of overt challenge. Vivien, who had sat near the back in her sixth-form dress, pointed out later that there is little known correlation between conduct and reward anywhere in this world, though it may be different in the next: ‘Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,’ she said. Vivien’s parents could not attend because they were in the Caribbean. This was not for pleasure, but because Vivien’s father, Sir Neville, held an appointment there.

Both Cressida and Vivien were perfectly clever enough to go on to a university and, having arrived there, to excel; but there was no question of that for either of them. Cressida, indeed, was intended (in so far as intention entered into it) simply to return to Rutland and there await picking on for matrimony. Vivien, on the other hand, was positively not wanted in the West Indies. Her mother pointed out that her father and herself would soon be back in any case, because they always were, and suggested that in the meantime Vivien move into her aunt’s house near Gloucester Road and perhaps look for a job of some kind. Her mother added that she had already written on the subject to Aunt Agnes (who was her husband’s sister, not her own). She did not say whether or not Aunt Agnes had replied in any way.

Cressida and Vivien had discussed the whole matter before the end of the term; though not long enough before for complete convenience. The casual attitude of their respective parents strongly suggested that they would have preferred their daughters to remain safely at school for all time, even though they, the parents, had to pay for it. Vivien too had an elder brother, Paul, but he had already vanished into the Palestine Police, where he led a life of excitement.

The best they could think of was that Cressida should move in on Aunt Agnes also.

‘Would your parents mind if you didn’t go straight back home?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Cressida. ‘But wouldn’t Aunt Agnes mind?’

‘Aunt Agnes is a good sport in her own way,’ replied Vivien.

‘What way is that?’

‘Well, to start with, she’s divorced.’

‘Daddy wouldn’t like that!’

‘My daddy didn’t like it either. It nearly finished his career. That’s supposed to be why he’s stuck away where he is.’

‘I’ve never known anyone who’s been divorced,’ said Cressida.

‘You’ll meet plenty more when you know Aunt Agnes.’

‘Really?’

‘The house is always full of them. They’re the sort of people Aunt Agnes likes best. She told me so.’

‘She can’t have told you a thing like that!’

‘Of course, she did. Don’t be a goose, Cressida. If Aunt Agnes weren’t the type she is, she might make difficulties about taking you in. So thank your stars.’

‘I’ll have to ask Mummy and Daddy,’ said Cressida.

‘Well, don’t say too much. Just tell them that your hostess’s brother is a K.C.M.G.’

Vivien bought each of them a banana sundae to settle the matter.

‌Chapter Three

The New Home

‘Should your aunt still call herself a countess when she’s no longer married to the man who’s the earl? Not that I don’t think she’s wonderful all the same.’

The room provided for Vivien contained a large sofa as well as a bed, and on it Cressida sprawled. In her own room, though there was a bigger bed than Vivien’s, there was no sofa. Cressida had rather expected to be sharing a room. She did not know whether to be glad or sorry about things as they were. At Riverdale House, they had contrived adjoining cubicles, separated only by a cretonne curtain. It was always said that there were many changes in one’s life when one left.

‘Why ever not?’ replied Vivien. ‘Once a countess, always a countess. Not all the water in the wide rough sea can wash the grace from an anointed king.’

‘That’s a bit different. Aunt Agnes hasn’t been anointed.’

‘Who has, nowadays?’ said Vivien. ‘Have a cigarette.’

‘I don’t really like them,’ said Cressida, taking and lighting one all the same.

‘These are special. One of Aunt Agnes’s friends supplies them. They’re Balkan or something. Gaston says they wouldn’t kill a kitten.’

‘Is Gaston French?’

‘Yes, he’s at the embassy or somewhere. I don’t like him.’

‘Have you seen much of him?’

‘I’ve seen him twice.’

‘Is that often enough?’

‘Too often,’ replied Vivien.

Later, Cressida changed into her first really short dress. She had bought it that afternoon in Kensington High Street. Neither Mrs Hazeborough nor her husband liked short dresses. This one had been very cheap, but Cressida felt that it was hard to see why one should pay more when in any case so very little stuff was involved. The dress was mainly a pale pink.

Vivien’s dress was scarlet. It had not been bought at the same time. Vivien always wore either red or black when she possibly could, which was most of the time, because her parents were mostly out of the country.

Cressida’s figure, however, was more in the fashion than Vivien’s.

‘We must do something about our hair tomorrow,’ said Vivien, eyeing Cressida’s figure in her new dress.

‘My father hates short hair on women,’ said Cressida.

‘None the less, this is London, darling,’ said Vivien patiently, ‘and we are about to meet the cream of society.’

‘Really? I hadn’t realised.’

‘You look fine, Cressida,’ said Vivien. ‘Really beautiful.’

Cressida let Vivien descend the staircase first.

Gaston apparently was not there. At least, Cressida thought not, but the introductions were exceedingly confusing, as the two girls had entered after the company had become quite animate, following several drinks. These appeared to be largely cocktails, and there was an actual Negro in a white jacket to shake them up. Cressida’s father did not approve of cocktails, and, in fact, she had never consumed one.

‘Cocktail, darling?’ asked Lady Luce. Cressida accepted at once.

She and Vivien sometimes called one another darling, but the promiscuous use of the endearment by adults was still another thing that Mr Hazeborough quite specifically objected to.

At that moment, Cressida deliberately resolved henceforth to waive every single one of her parents’ objections, or very nearly so. It really had become a matter which needed a decision, one way or the other.

There were more men than women. All the men were in dinner jackets, but some of the women struck Cressida as being less well dressed than she and Vivien. This was disillusioning.

Nor could it be said that any of the men was yet making eyes at her, or at Vivien either. Perhaps Lady Luce, Vivien’s Aunt Agnes, would not have liked it in either of their cases, Cressida reflected. Perhaps, too, all the men had known Vivien since she was a child.

It continued to be quite easy to go on merely talking to Vivien.

‘Is that man really black or is he a white man with black on his face?’

‘He’s black,’ replied Vivien. ‘But he’s not here all the time.’

‘There wouldn’t be enough for him to do,’ said Cressida.

‘Possibly not,’ said Vivien. ‘I must say that Aunt Agnes might do more to mix us up. That little more and how much it is; that little less and what worlds away.’

But the more Cressida gazed around, the less sure she felt that she wanted to be mixed, least of all artificially.

The disconcerting thing was that these people seemed to have more in common with the people she was accustomed to in Rutland than they had anything distinctive of their own. Even the legendary cocktail had failed, as far as she could tell, to exhilarate. Probably Vivien’s Aunt deemed herself too judicious to offer her another one.

A man did speak to her, but in a tone adapted not so much to a friend of his daughter’s (supposing he had a daughter) as to a child at the village school. Cressida, fresh from Riverdale House, with all its sophistication, could have snapped at him, though she just managed not to, through the expedient of not speaking at all. So far in life she had found middle-aged men more interesting than young men, in so far as she had met either; but this middle-aged man was an exception. Perhaps he was divorced, and this had saddened him.

Vivien had drifted away and was now talking to a man with white hair and a red face who had even risen to his feet for her benefit.

Dinner, however, really was succulent; unimaginably better than Rutland. Some of the girls had deemed it immodest to think of nothing but food and drink. Vivien, on the other hand, had tended to cite Tolstoy (despite his apelike and toothless appearance): ‘People with exceptional talents have exceptional appetites.’ It was the only thing by Tolstoy she could remember reading.

Cressida had never encountered such food as this before, and the men on either side of her were so impossible that she was able to do it full justice. The men kept addressing one another over Cressida’s head, though only literally. The wives who were present tended to shout at one another also, Cressida noticed, rather than address the men next to them. Altogether, the noise in the room was tremendous. The conversation, Cressida adumbrated, was full of sound and fury; signifying nothing. Would her own life offer no more than this? So frequently she doubted both life and herself, whatever Vivien might proclaim.

Vivien had been placed by her aunt between two of the younger men. Perhaps both had been brought forward for Vivien’s sake. One had dark, wavy hair and a large, pale flower in his buttonhole. Cressida supposed that he looked quite interesting, though Vivien’s expression as she listened to him was, as so often, enigmatic.

‘If one is at the bar,’ Cressida could hear him saying, ‘the grind is just murder. One hardly sees one’s wife and kids from year’s end to year’s end.’

Cressida was surprised that he should already be thinking of things like that. But then she might not be the only person of more or less her age to be doubtful about the most that life could possibly offer. She had never before met another such person (Vivien was always a blaze of confidence), but here might be one. Intermittently, she eyed the young man opposite. Of course it was hardly to be expected that Lady Luce should provide two equivalent young men for her, Cressida, who had never been properly invited to the house at all. Even though Lady Luce had been kindness itself to her, she really knew nothing about her, except what Vivien had proffered, which was often distorted, to say the least.

Cressida picked away the last little scraps of fish from the bone. At procedures like this she must learn to be effortlessly proficient, in case she should one day find herself seated between cabinet ministers or ambassadors. Her two actual neighbours seemed interested mainly in catching fish rather than in eating them.

‘If one goes in for medicine,’ said Vivien’s young man, ‘it’s simply slavery. One can give almost nothing to one’s home-life at all.’

Cressida thought that, of the two careers, the bar would be better for him, owing to the clarity of his diction. At the bar one has to speak in a loud voice for hours at a time, for days on end, sometimes for months and years, as in the Tichborne case. Her father frequently referred to that great legal battle.

‘Not until it’s too late,’ put in the other young man, who had sandy hair, already waning, and very small spectacles, before very small eyes.

‘Too late, Jeremy? What do you mean?’ asked the first young man, put completely off his theme, and speaking across Vivien.

‘A doctor has no time of his own until it’s too late to be of any use to him.’

‘That’s precisely what I was saying, Jeremy. One even thinks of the church, like Alastair. But really one can’t quite.’

Cressida failed to hear why that was; because at that moment both her neighbours, having finished their fish course, spoke to her simultaneously.

At a subsequent stage, the late night edition of the evening paper appeared. It was brought to Lady Luce on a salver by a man who had helped with the serving; white, not black.

Lady Luce held the paper before her and glanced at the front page. There was an almost universal hush, lest the oracle might impart.

‘Vittore has dashed off and captured somewhere else,’ imparted Lady Luce conclusively, and as if some announcement simply had to be made.

‘Bloody mountebank!’ exclaimed the man with the white hair and red face. ‘If you’ll excuse the language, Agnes.’

‘He did fight on our side in the war,’ said one of the married women.

‘If you call what he did fighting,’ said another guest, masculine, formless, average.

‘Really, Tomlins,’ said the same married woman. ‘I don’t see how we are in a position to know.’ Presumably she was the man’s wife; presumably this was one couple where there had been no question of a divorce for either party; presumably Tomlins was the husband’s Christian name.

‘Some of us know,’ said another man, quietly, but, as he intended, lethally.

Cressida might have guessed who would settle the matter.

Vivien spoke up. Though she had a clear enough voice, Cressida had not previously heard her during dinner. Perhaps she had not uttered.

‘Virgilio Vittore is the greatest man in the world,’ said Vivien.

All laughed tolerantly.

‘How do you know, dear?’ asked Lady Luce.

‘Everyone knows,’ said Vivien. ‘That’s just the trouble.’

‘I’m not sure I know,’ said Lady Luce, to ease the tiny tension. She was smiling suitably. Among other things, she conveyed that no one knew what she really knew.

Cressida much regretted that she had no views on the matter, in that she did not at all clearly know who Virgilio Vittore was, though she too had seen the name every now and then in the newspapers.

The trouble was that, at Cressida’s age, one could not take in and concentrate equally upon every topic reported. Cressida had thought it best to seek a convincing grasp upon selected subjects. In due course, she would take up further subjects, perhaps when she had grasped all there was to grasp about the present subjects, so that they had become a little boring. New subjects sometimes even imposed themselves and spread out on their own, as she had already noticed. It seemed likely that one day she would have grasped all that she would wish to grasp, and perhaps be a little bored with everything there was.

In the drawing room, Lady Luce explained to Cressida that, when the men appeared, they were all going to play bridge, so that Cressida might prefer to go up to her room. Cressida did not particularly want to go to her room, but it seemed difficult to demur.

‘I forget, Vivien,’ said Lady Luce. ‘Do you play bridge?’

‘No, Aunt Agnes,’ said Vivien. I haven’t the brains.’

‘Of course you have, dear,’ said an elderly lady, whom the new fashion did not entirely suit. ‘Bridge is nothing like as difficult as people say. I managed to teach the man who came to mend the chairs.’

‘Beatrice Basingstoke,’ remarked another woman, ‘managed to teach her Pekingese.’

‘I think you should learn bridge, Vivien,’ said Lady Luce. ‘I’ll see what can be done about it before your parents come back. In the meantime, perhaps you and Cressida would like to sit in one of the corners and play something else?’

‘Don’t worry about us, Aunt Agnes,’ said Vivien. ‘We both know that we still have much to learn.’

The men held back for what Cressida thought a surprisingly long time. The first pot of coffee had had to be consumed lest it grow cold; and now there was anxiety about the second pot. Cressida had always supposed that the conversation of women among women was what it was, owing to her being there, a mere schoolgirl; but in Lady Luce’s house she began to wonder whether it was not much the same whether she was there or not. Certainly the women seemed to take very little notice of her. What was more, she began to doubt also whether the conversation of men among men could be anything much preferable. Most of the adult men she had met so far had merely depressed her. She was relieved to reflect that Vivien seemed to feel the same. Now all the youth of England is on fire, Vivien sometimes remarked sarcastically at suitable moments.

Already, Cressida had very nearly come to the conclusion that divorced people were hardly distinguishable from other people. But that, she suddenly realised, might be precisely the danger; the element in the divorce situation that most disturbed her father. It seemed very probable. Like confirmation, the whole thing was perhaps difficult to grasp until one had been divorced oneself, which Heaven forfend. But to think of having even once to marry one of those men in the dining room! Even though many of them had been married twice, or much more! Not even the youth who ‘really couldn’t quite’ take holy orders appealed to Cressida. In fact, she was pretty sure that he was not even the one she would pick, if pick she had to. And one day the compulsion was going to be difficult to avoid—or to evade. The evening had brought the matter home to Cressida as nothing before had done. It was marvellous that people managed to grow up, thunderstroke after thunderstroke, without more nervous breakdowns.

There was a woman talking endlessly about the taxes and raising her tone menacingly whenever another attempted to intrude. What the woman said was perfectly true, of course; or at least substantially so. Cressida knew enough to know that, as taxation was one of the most frequent themes at home. The troubles were that the woman was using all the wrong arguments, both silly and offensive ones; and that she would have been such a poor advocate even for the right arguments. The arguer is the greater part of the argument, Cressida reflected.

When even the second pot of coffee was nearly cold, most of the men dribbled back, in many cases tottery and truculent. Cressida assumed that the absentees were queued up around the bathroom.

Lady Luce was too good-natured to refer to the state of the coffee. She simply poured it out, and one of the men passed it round among the other men, as if nothing were wrong. It was too late for a third pot in any case; the servants having gone to bed or gone somewhere else.

‘Sorry we hung about, Agnes,’ said one of the men. ‘We were talking about the All Blacks.’

‘If we’re going to play bridge,’ said Lady Luce, ‘we’d better hurry up and organise ourselves.’

‘You organise us, Agnes!’

There was much conflictual moving of furniture and opening up of objects hitherto closed in on themselves; much sitting down in wrong places and standing up again; much abnegation and some assertion: while all the time missing men were sauntering back, and ladies flitting out to make themselves even lovelier.

It was easy for Cressida and Vivien to go unnoticed, especially as one of the men, upon his return, had left the door open.

They went up to Vivien’s room.

‘What are the All Blacks? Are they a jazz band?’

‘They are a football team,’ said Vivien. ‘I was taken to see them once. Rugger. Twickenham.’

‘Is all conversation like that when one has left school?’

‘All the conversation I’ve heard,’ said Vivien. ‘It’s a mask, you know.’ Vivien was smoking again.

‘Then there’s something more exciting behind the mask? Is there really, Vivien?’

‘Of course men talk shop a lot, when we’re not there—and most of the time when we are. You mustn’t expect the Art of Conversation at Aunt Agnes’s bridge evenings.’

‘No, of course not,’ said Cressida, blushing slightly. ‘Were all those people divorced?’

‘I think so. I don’t know any of them very well.’

There was a pause.

Then Cressida asked, ‘What exactly are we going to do about it, Vivien? We’ll be sucked in, else. Sucked down, more likely.’

‘Not me,’ said Vivien, stubbing her cigarette, less than half smoked. ‘And not you either. We’re going to fight. We need a strategy.’

‘Send me word,’ said Cressida, ‘when we’ve got one.’

‘I don’t know enough yet. Paul always said you can’t work out a proper strategy unless you have the knowledge. But I’m going to learn, Cress. And so are you. We’re in this together, and well you know it.’

Cressida considered. The matter had never before been put so plainly to her.

‘I suppose so,’ she said cautiously. ‘I’m not sure where I am.’

‘You had your chance when Tiddleywinks proposed to you. Did you want to marry Tiddleywinks? Well, then.’

‘Vivien,’ Cressida protested. ‘It wasn’t a proper proposal. I keep telling you. Tiddleywinks simply asked if he might propose when we were both older and when he was fully trained. You must remember that I’ve known him ever since we were babes.’

‘I know one thing, Cressida,’ said Vivien. ‘When it comes to the opposite sex, I am interested only in a Man, and neither you nor I have ever met one.’

‘Give me that man that is not passion’s slave,’ cited Cressida.

‘Or that is,’ said Vivien.

They then read their books, while Vivien smoked cigarettes, one after another, none of them completely finished.

‘Vivien,’ said Cressida, when it was long past midnight. ‘I’m going.’

Vivien seemed still absorbed, though much time had passed.

‘What book is it?’ asked Cressida. They made a particular point of not trying to influence one another about books.

Vivien smiled and held the cover towards Cressida. Cressida read: Castiglione, The Courtier.

‘Can you understand it?’

‘It’s not in Italian, idiot, it’s translated.’

‘Even then. Do you understand it?’

‘Some of it,’ said Vivien. ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth.’

Cressida said goodnight and they kissed.

‘No good asking if you want anything,’ said Vivien, ‘because you won’t get it even if you do.’

‘D’you mean they’re still playing bridge?’

‘I should think so. Once they’ve started they don’t stop. When I was a kid, I used to creep down and find them with the curtains drawn and the lights on hours after it was daylight outside. I think that bridge is all Aunt Agnes really cares about.’

‘I suppose she’s very good at it.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Vivien. ‘Daddy says she loses every time.’

‌Chapter Four

The Conversation

None the less, what amounted to an alternative view of Aunt Agnes was offered to Cressida that very same night.

Though Vivien had trouble in sleeping, Cressida slept like a little bird, as her mother often put it. Notwithstanding, she woke up at once when Aunt Agnes entered her room, quietly though Aunt Agnes did it. Aunt Agnes was carrying a lighted candle in a large silver candlestick. Cressida was accustomed to the nocturnal use of candles in Rutland, but in Central London it surprised her.

‘I didn’t want to wake you up,’ said Aunt Agnes softly. ‘Perhaps you were awake already. Like me.’

‘You didn’t wake me up,’ said Cressida politely.

‘I’m glad,’ said Aunt Agnes. ‘After all, you are my guest.’

‘It’s very nice of you,’ said Cressida.

‘It’s very nice for me,’ said Aunt Agnes. She seemed a different person; a gentler and (to be honest) nicer person. Not that Cressida had felt any serious lack of gratitude, or of respectful fascination.

Aunt Agnes wore eau-de-nil silk pyjamas and a matching silk peignoir. Embarrassingly, Cressida wore only a pale-blue nightdress with dog roses on it. Vivien had long objected to this garment, and to others like it, but Cressida’s parents were not made of money, let alone Cressida herself, who had virtually none at her free disposal; nor was she going to accept presents of clothes from Vivien, even had they been offered, which, judiciously, they had not been.

Aunt Agnes’s bobbed hair was tied up in an eau-de-nil bandeau-de-nuit, which suited her.

‘I can’t sleep, Cressida,’ said Aunt Agnes. ‘Those frightful cards. I hate them. Do you mind if I sit down?’

‘Please sit down,’ said Cressida.

Aunt Agnes seated herself in the chintz-covered armchair.

‘Those frightful people, too,’ said Aunt Agnes. ‘Just between the two of us, Cressida, don’t you agree with me? Aren’t they frightful?’

‘I don’t know them well enough.’

‘You don’t have to know people well in order to know them.’

‘That’s what Vivien says.’

‘It’s true,’ said Aunt Agnes. ‘It’s true with most people, anyway.’

‘You seem different.’

‘I am Vivien’s aunt, and can’t help behaving like an aunt when she’s there. Her parents expect it of me. I’m not your aunt.’

‘I should like it very much if you were,’ said Cressida.

‘That’s nice of you but I’m not sure that I want another niece. Perhaps we could just be friends?’

‘I should like that,’ said Cressida.

‘But it’s not only being Vivien’s aunt that’s wrong. The trouble with me is that I just don’t like crowds. With a crowd of people I’m at my worst. They make me hate myself as well as them.’

‘Vivien says she doesn’t like people.’

‘You’re very fond of Vivien, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. She’s my best friend and always will be.’

Aunt Agnes smiled. ‘You’re quite right. Vivien is a very clever girl.’

‘Not clever only,’ said Cressida.

‘I’m sure not. But the cleverness is important. Because it will prevent Vivien ever being happy—or quite happy.’

‘Yes,’ said Cressida. ‘I know that.’

‘So from time to time she may very much depend upon you.’

‘Oh, Lady Luce, do you think so? I feel that I’m the one who depends on her.’

‘Cressida,’ said Aunt Agnes, ‘I wish I could suggest that you called me something other than Lady Luce, but I won’t have Aunt Agnes, and I can’t permit you to call me by my Christian name while my niece is around and is your best friend too, so I fear that there is absolutely nothing to be done about it.’

Cressida could think of no instant reply to that, so it was fortunate that Aunt Agnes continued speaking.

‘Vivien has not had a very happy childhood, because her parents are not well-suited. It is largely my brother’s fault, but there it is. So I am particularly glad that she has a good friend in you.’

‘I still miss my brother very much,’ said Cressida. ‘He was killed in the war.’

‘Oh,’ said Aunt Agnes. ‘So many people were killed in the war.’

‘My uncle too. My father’s younger brother. He was a colonel, but apparently it made no difference.’

‘Nothing made any difference. I lost the man I loved, Cressida.’

‘Oh, but you found someone else, Lady Luce!’ cried Cressida, much wanting it to be so, very glad it was so, thinking no further.

‘Yes, of course. Most of us do that in the end.’

Remembering that Aunt Agnes was, after all, divorced, Cressida, once more, did not quite know what to say.

‘There should never have been a war, all the same,’ said Aunt Agnes.

‘There must never be another one, Lady Luce,’ said Cressida with great firmness. ‘Never.’

‘Of course not,’ said Aunt Agnes. ‘And now would you like me to go?’

‘I am a bit sleepy,’ said Cressida, all manners forgotten.

‘I expect I am too,’ said Aunt Agnes.

She rose to her feet, retied the wide cincture of her peignoir, crossed to the bed, and lightly kissed Cressida on the brow. ‘I want you to stay as long as you like, or as long as you need to,’ she said. ‘However long it may be. I can’t say that in the clear light of day. But remember. It’s something understood and settled.’

Quietly opening and shutting the door, Aunt Agnes departed, leaving in the room impressions of languor and sentiment which Cressida found so overpowering that she fell asleep almost immediately.

She dreamed that she was in a desert, tied naked to a tree, the only tree there was, or the only one she could discern from her disadvantageous position. Her hands were tied together behind the tree, and it was very hot, though not so much with the dry heat one would expect to rise from sand as with the damp heat one would expect to fall from rainforest. In front of her, seated on the sand, were a group of men, ten or twelve of them, all in mud-of-Flanders uniforms, however incongruous. In fact, there were actual grey streaks on them now; blanched, very nearly, by the sun. Cressida was perspiring all over, and her damp hair fell into her eyes, about which she could do nothing. Someone had said that she should have had her hair cut shorter, that it was expected of her; but plainly she had done nothing about it. The men were listlessly chucking cards and dice about on the sand, and speaking nothing but obscenities. Some were words that Cressida vaguely knew to exist; some were words she had never before heard or heard of. On the face of it, the only communication between the men consisted in competitive snarling; but it was the matey form of snarling which Cressida had observed men to go in for when on their own. Probably the men had been isolated for a long time, so that the maleness of their behaviour had been intensified. The whole desert was littered with empty brown bottles and cartridge cases. The men were very huddled, so that it took some time for Cressida to realise that the faces of many were disfigured by ghastly wounds, crimson and twisting. As for her own situation, it was not so much that Cressida had no explanation for it, as that it did not occur to her to need one. But in due course, in ten seconds, ten hours, ten years, no time at all, the growling and bickering men seemed to be taking one another more seriously: the backchat was becoming abuse, conventionalised no longer. A possible explanation was that the beer, and the rations, and such slaughterable game as there might ever have been, had run out; because soon the men were actually fighting, each against all. They were packed closely together and milling unpredictably: like a rugger scrum on Pathé Pictorial. Cressida began to feel fright. The sweat of fear augmented the sweat of the sun. Then she realised that the men had drawn their bayonets, and had fully committed themselves. They were slashing and hacking at one another. Their salacious words were no longer tired and almost meaningless: they had become choice stimuli to frenzied action, like the liturgical shrieks of Islamic fanatics. One after another the men were dropping to the dirty sand, overcome, lacerated, inert. So much defeat within only a few feet of her almost made Cressida dissolve with terror. ‘Hugh,’ she cried. ‘Oh, Hugh.’

She was awake. She realised that she had fallen asleep while lying on her back and with her hands locked together beneath her body; the position from which she had been addressing Aunt Agnes, and in which Aunt Agnes had kissed her. She was terribly hot.

While she was slowly releasing herself, there was a light tap on the door and Vivien entered.

‘What is it, Cressy?’

‘A dream.’

‘I thought you were being strangled.’

‘Did I wake you up? Sorry.’

‘No. I wasn’t asleep.’

‘Well, I’m sorry about that then.’

‘Yes. I think my mind’s too active.’

‘Vivien, you realise we don’t really know how Hugh died. We don’t actually know at all. I suppose some people know, but we never shall. I never properly thought of it before. I believed what they all said.’

‘Probably better not to know, Cressida.’

‘I don’t agree with that. It’s going to haunt me. I absolutely need to know.’

‘You’re much too hot, Cressy. People always are in this house. It’s one of the worst things about it.’

Vivien was still wearing one of her school nightdresses, but at least it was in a single colour, and a strong one: red, of course. At Riverdale House, it had considerably divided opinion among the girls; and had even elicited a puzzled comment from one of the mistresses.

‘It is rather hot, but I’m very lucky to be here,’ said Cressida. She did not mention Aunt Agnes, and without even having to decide not to.

‘None the less, life does not end with bridge parties. We must keep our eyes and ears open, Cressy. Four eyes. Four ears.’

Cressida resolved immediately that she would do her best.

‌Chapter Five

The Shop

It was all very well for Vivien to keep saying things, but acting upon them was so difficult. This did at all not surprise Cressida.