Lord Jim at Home E-Book

Dinah Brooke

• Herausgeber: Daunt Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Giles Trenchard is born into privilege – and an atmosphere of hidden violence and isolation. Wholly unloved, he is shipped off to one boarding school after another. Always hoping to live up to his family's expectations he joins the Navy on the outbreak of war . The camaraderie of life offer him some semblance of purpose and contentment. Yet on his return from war, he finds himself adrift and one day – like the hero of Joseph Conrad's classic Lord Jim – he commits an act so shocking that it calls his past, his character and his whole world into question. When Dinah Brooke's Lord Jim at Home was first published in 1973 it was described as 'squalid and startling', and 'nastily horrific' and 'a monstrous parody' of the upper-middle class. It reveals Brooke to be a daring writer long overdue for reappraisal, whose work has retained all its originality and power. Seething with cruelty and darkness, this strange, compelling novel is as unforgettable as it is unnerving.

Leseprobe

‘There is a lot of pain in Lord Jim at Home. And a lot of humour … If it weren’t such a pleasure to read, I’d say that Lord Jim at Home – read by a novelist, like me – was an instrument of torture. It’s that good … It is an accurate portrayal of how fucked-up people behave, artfully conveyed in a way that nice people are too polite to admit they understand.’ Ottessa Moshfegh, from the foreword

‘A very clever and very alarming novel [with] an almost heroic quality, a mythical truth.’ Financial Times

‘A crisp inventory of the horrors of growing up privileged in England between the wars … It is an ordinary family household, but seen from the underside it is a Renaissance court with its own rituals, threats and dagger-play.’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Brilliant, chilling … Gripping and highly enjoyable.’ Illustrated London News

‘Evocative and excellently terse … [Brooke] has a cold and beady eye.’ Sunday Telegraph

Contents

Title PageForewordOneTwoThreeFourFiveSixSevenEightNineAbout the AuthorCopyright

Foreword

When Lord Jim at Home was recommended to me, it came with no introduction. I’m glad. I wouldn’t have wanted the effect of the novel to be mitigated in any way, so I’m reluctant to introduce it now. But I will share with you my experiences: I read very slowly at the beginning, studying Dinah Brooke’s uncanny descriptions and syntax, squinting hard to see around the curves and outcroppings of the story, stepping back in astonishment to watch a sentence unfurl like some wild plant, surreal in its beauty and dangerous in its intelligence. Like this child’s bedtime:

The curtains are drawn, the door shut, and like a rubber duck held down at the bottom of the bath and suddenly released he shoots up to float bouncing gently, turning and twisting dizzily between the floor and the ceiling. Swooning in space with the darkness velvet under his hands his body takes on strange shapes, huge, liquid, swelling head and knees, hands like a giant’s, fingers grasping from corner to corner of the room, then suddenly shrinking, wizened, like the inside of his mouth when he has managed to put a thumb painted with bitter aloes into it.

It took me about three weeks to make it through the first seventy-five pages. I kept having to put the book down and get up and look around. ‘Where am I?’ On a train. In a hotel room. On the sofa. In my room. That hadn’t happened to me since I was five, when I’d get hypnotised by the television. But now there was also the unsettling question, ‘Am I still the same person?’ Not really. As I got to the middle of the book, I had the sensation that I had aged about twenty years. Then the sensation reversed, and as I neared the end, I got younger again. I grew new nerves, as if it had altered my anatomy and sense of time.

When Lord Jim at Home appeared, in 1973, Brooke was thirty-seven, living in London, married to an actor, and raising twins. In a later autobiographical essay, she would list the main events of her life in the early seventies: ‘Became ardent feminist, then ardent encounter groupie. Turned house into commune. Husband left.’* A time of inner discovery, I suppose. An encounter group (for the uninitiated) is a form of psychodrama therapy in which individuals concentrate on and express their innermost feelings. The idea is that you encounter yourself more honestly by confronting others honestly. I wonder whether Brooke spoke of Lord Jim at Home in those groups. Did people understand anything she said? Or maybe she studied the others, took notes on their limitations and delusions, and fed them to her book like mice to a snake. Perhaps she also fed her book the traumas of people living in her commune. There is a lot of pain in Lord Jim at Home. And a lot of humor. And a lot of another thing that I can’t properly name. And almost no analysis, not really. It is too cool a book for that – cool in temperament as well as in attitude.

To describe the plot here would be to ruin a surprise, so I will only say that the novel is largely a portrait of one Giles Trenchard, born in Cornwall between the wars, a son of the British middle classes, and that apparently it is based on a true story (something I didn’t know when I read it). Giles suffers a horrible and privileged upbringing, goes away to school, joins the Navy, comes home, and attempts to begin a life as a grown man. The novel ends when he is twenty-something and has done something very unexpected, but not altogether shocking – except to the people around him, who ask how someone so ‘healthy and clean-limbed’, with such an ‘honest, reliable, open English face’ can have acted the way he did. The situation and language echo the Joseph Conrad novel Lord Jim, about a young English sailor who disgraces himself at sea, then spends his life in the South Pacific, trying to escape his cloud of shame. In Brooke’s novel, as the title suggests, escape is not an option. (‘Patusan’, the island paradise that Lord Jim makes his own, has become the name of a Navy destroyer.) And the moment of public disgrace isn’t a catalyst, it’s the outcome of a life.

Although we meet Giles as a newborn baby, we never grow to love him. This is not an emotional novel, although it is concerned with the vulnerability of a child’s mind. It is a strong, impermeable book. The narrator’s mind sticks to the facts of subjective experience. If it weren’t such a pleasure to read, I’d say that Lord Jim at Home – read by a novelist, like me – was an instrument of torture. It’s that good.

It takes enormous control to write well about a baby, for one thing, and from a baby’s point of view. A reader naturally feels threatened by that perspective. Ego barges into the mind and says, ‘What about me? I was a baby, too.’ At least that has been my experience. In the same way that we might not want to hear the details of another person’s dreams, we don’t want to hear about their experience being a baby. Nobody should get credit for having a certain kind of dream. And nobody should get credit for being a certain kind of baby. Babies don’t create themselves. They don’t make any decisions about how to be. They don’t know how. And yet we project onto our baby-selves the wisdom of a Buddhist sage. Case in point. My first memory is of being in the crib at my babysitter’s house, waiting for my mother to pick me up. It was night and the room was dark. I was too young to know how to count, but I took some careful note of the many headlights which passed diagonally from the road through the windows and skipped across the perpendicular planes of the walls, like rubber balls, again and again. One of these lights, I knew, would announce my mother, but I had to wait – I felt – an eternity. To me, this recollection is still rife with heartache and is my reference point for the birth of my consciousness, i.e., my existential suffering.

This is the first time I have written about it, because until now I was too lazy to describe it. Brooke, however, writes from the point of view of infant Giles with a patient, tireless, and freakish genius. There were times where I felt she had made a chiropractic adjustment in my brain, revising what I understood to be the logic of an infant, and not in the way I expected:

Pain and humiliation. Not so much the soiled nappies pressed over his mouth and nose, as the brisk, impersonal unpinning and flipping from back to front, and wiping. Is she wiping shit off the Prince’s bottom or off the table? Impossible to tell from her expression or her voice. Does that sensation belong to me? wonders the Prince. Does that expression belong to me?

Again, ‘Where am I? Who am I?’ If you can’t answer these questions, you may be suffering from a concussion.

This isn’t the only freakish thing about the book. For example, I would argue that Giles, the main character, is not really a character in any usual sense. He lacks the lowest level of agency and self-definition, although to describe him as passive would be incorrect. More like a human being who has been mostly lobotomised. And yet I feel I understand him, and know him. He is familiar. Simultaneously, I have no anxiety about his well-being. But I do cringe as I read of the cruel abuses by his nurse and parents. I don’t really care what tragedies he suffers during the war, but I like to imagine them. I have no skin in the game at all, in the end, when his fate is up for review. Am I a monster? Or has the book taught me to opt out of the usual mind games that a novel plays with a reader? Worry usually provides suspense. But you have to care in order to have worries. I didn’t care, and I didn’t worry, but I was suspended, consistently and dramatically, in the mirage of the novel, a world that baffled me and yet made perfect sense.

Another disorientation: the perspective attaches onto characters whose tangential narratives are immaterial, the point of view skipping around souls, as though picking people out in a crowd and following them for a minute, and then skipping again. It is jarring to a wonderful effect, mimicking the movement of the protagonist’s depersonalised adventures.

The first publisher of Lord Jim at Home presented it as a novel about the upper middle class in England, as if it were an anthropological study or a work of classic Naturalism, which it most certainly is not. Glancing at the initial criticisms of the novel, I see some advantages to living in this modern age. Even in a favorable review in the Times Literary Supplement, back in 1974, it was clear that the critic Stuart McGregor, a man of good taste, maybe, completely misunderstood the book. In describing the last stretch of the novel, after Giles comes home from war to a mother who greets him politely and then goes back to her game of bridge, he writes, ‘His postwar story, with its long succession of failures mounting to a sad but long-foreseen climax, is a monstrous parody of the way nice, well-brought-up people think and behave.’ I don’t think so. I think it is an accurate portrayal of how fucked-up people behave, artfully conveyed in a way that nice people are too polite to admit they understand. I’m grateful it’s back in print. I think the world may be readier than it was.

Ottessa Moshfegh

Pasadena, 2023

* ‘An Obsession Revisited’ in Fathers: Reflections by Daughters (ed. Ursula Owen), London: Virago, 1983.

One

The house on the cliffs is furnished with an eau de nil carpet and a rosewood desk. In the garden are rhododendrons and tamarisk. In the dining room is an oval mahogany table polished so that it reflects, like a camera obscura, the blue of the sky and muted green of the lawn. A soft, blurred pyramid of light in the dark room, smelling of meat.

At the rosewood desk the Queen is writing letters. She has a round face, pink and gentle. Her hair is thick, light brown, with soft waves. Her ankles are also thick. She is small, but a cloak trimmed with ermine suits her, and a crown or tiara sits easily upon her head. She has written many letters at this desk. One is to that famous newspaper The Times, asking them to find for her the very best nurse for her expected child. Only the very best will be good enough for this infant, wrapped in inherited lace, to be christened in the church where his forefathers had been christened.

A nurse with red hair like flame, and azure blue eyes and a stone face, travels down from another kingdom in the North, where the princes and princesses have grown old enough to be sent away. She joins the cook, the maid and the gardener as a servant of the household. The only slave is the infant Prince. He is the necessary foundation of the structure, but he doesn’t know it. And the foundation is at the bottom.

He is kept under control by two weapons; just enough of his desires are satisfied to prevent open rebellion, and fear.

He is regularly fed, washed and powdered. ‘Can’t abide a child who smells,’ says the nurse to the maid. At one month, his sagging body, hairless, toothless, clad only in a smocked angel top, is precariously balanced after each feed on a tiny enamel pot. At seven months, gasping, half blinded, mouth and nose full of shit and the stench of ammonia from his own nappies, he is clean and sometimes dry during the day.

All day he lies in his cot, arms tucked down, and stares at the white ceiling of the nursery, or in his pram and stares at the dark rhododendron leaves against the sky. At night he lies alone in the deep velvet blackness, no living body beside or around him, no thudding heart, breath, movement or voice, strapped flat on his back so that he cannot turn and smother himself in the lacy pillow.

Once a day, in the eau de nil drawing room, among the guests and teacups, he is transferred from the starched arms of his nurse to his mother’s soft bosom and powdery smell, and fed, when the nurse has gone, with kisses and licks of sugar. ‘Oh dear, nurse would be cross, but he is such a darling.’ Then comes the exquisite pain, torn away from this tender sweetness, fingers clutching, body arched, screams of despair. Even a rat would have learned that a broken string of pearls and knocked over teacup meant that next day there would be no love, no sugar. The Prince learns in the end, but a rat would have learned sooner.

The Queen has no real understanding of discipline. She professes to agree that her child should not be allowed downstairs unless he can behave himself properly, but during the day she sometimes creeps up the back stairs when the nurse is busy elsewhere, to coo at and caress the infant as he lies in his cot. The door opens. The Queen’s pink face and brown hair become a blur as she moves away. Her soft voice turns into a guilty whine. Her presence fades through the dark cavern of the open door. The nurse’s skin holds the light like marble. She is the strong arm of the establishment. It is her duty to ensure the propagation of its self-righteousness. Her position is that of a servant, but her authority is second only to that of the King himself. She is the éminence grise, and conscious of her power.

Fear as a weapon of control. Fear of deprivation is useful. Deprivation of food shows, but deprivation of the affection and presence of the mother does not. It also has the advantage of letting everyone at court see where the power lies. Fear of pain is of little value until the infant’s nervous system is sufficiently developed to understand what pain is and where it is coming from. Fear of the dark, and of solitude, on the other hand, can be used almost from birth.

The Queen, returning from a banquet, listens anxiously to the choked and exhausted sobs, screams, hiccups from the nursery. She creeps up the stairs, holding her long skirt round her. Her hand is on the door. Nurse appears in a white flannel nightgown. ‘Oh dear, nurse, I’m sorry, I just thought I might …’

‘There’s nothing wrong with him, Madam. If you go in now you will only upset him.’

‘But …’

‘He’s got to learn.’

‘But surely isn’t four hours …?’

‘You must do as you think fit, Madam.’

The door closes behind her turned back. The Queen stands outside the door of the nursery wringing her hands. The breathy screams and cries continue. Long strings of saliva tremble, sticky, no longer wet. ‘I’m here darling. It’s mummy. Don’t cry, mummy’s here.’ A soothing whisper on the other side of the door. After some time the choked screams die down. The child is sleeping. The Queen, cold and stiff, creeps downstairs.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ asks the King, humped half asleep in the turquoise and white bedroom.

‘I’m worried about the baby. He cries so much.’

The smooth, soft skin of her forehead creases with anxiety. She is making her own small rebellion.

‘He’s got to learn who’s master,’ says the King, pulling the satin covered eiderdown up round his shoulders and tucking it under his chin. The infant Prince is his enemy, gathering strength to put his eyes out, chop his balls off, take his kingdom. I am bigger than you, and I am stronger than you, thinks the King, and I will win.

‘Don’t blame me, darling, it’s not my fault, I’m only trying to do what’s best for you.’ The Queen still wrings her hands, kneeling before the awful figure of her son. She steps out of her crepe de chine cami-knickers and lays them over the back of a chair. ‘She’s been trained, you see. She knows how to deal with children. I’m such a silly old thing, darling, I never know what to do.’ She pauses before putting on her nightdress, and smiles at herself in the mirror.

In the morning she is astonished to see how small he is. His pink, creased face, unfocused eyes, and jerky, wavering movements do not after all express revengeful and accusing rage. It is perfectly all right. Everything is normal again. Hugged and kissed, in smock and sausage curls, he is only mummy’s darling baby boy – and being so good today.

Later the floor of the nursery becomes the Prince’s territory. Increasing movement has given him the freedom of a cage. He sits on a tartan woollen rug behind his wooden bars, and waits to see what the world will offer him. The rug is fringed at either end, and he spends one morning chewing part of the fringe into wet strings with his gums. The next day both fringed ends have been neatly sewn down. Turn your attention, Prince, to a teddy bear and a jointed wooden doll. Far away, across the large expanse of mottled green linoleum, in front of the fireplace, lies a rag rug; a forest, a jungle – black and beige and pink and maroon.

This becomes the centre of his attention. Who wants to shake a rattle when by a process of inherited sensual knowledge he knows that some at least of those crushed and flattened pieces of rag, the beige ones certainly, the pink perhaps – and the maroon? don’t know, to be determined by experiment – if pulled will stretch themselves out softly, changing their nature, becoming thin and tall instead of short and fat, and then, let go, will fall back with a sudden sharp movement into their original softness. The infant Prince groans and squeals and humps himself up onto his knees and rubs his head from side to side. Softness and elasticity and shape that changes as you pull and press it, pink and beige. In the tiny cushions of his fingers and his lips the sensations exist.

Once, when his nurse is out of the room, the Prince by cunning manipulation of his heels and bottom manages to slide the rug across the linoleum and push the playpen after it until he almost, stretched hand through the bars, one finger touching, clutching, ouch! oh! oh yes, pain has become a useful method of control.

Pain and humiliation. Not so much the soiled nappies pressed over his mouth and nose, as the brisk, impersonal unpinning and flipping from back to front, and wiping. Is she wiping shit off the Prince’s bottom or off the table? Impossible to tell from her expression or her voice. Does that sensation belong to me? wonders the Prince. Does that expression belong to me?

The hair at her temple is orange, and pulled back tightly under her cap. If it were released it would spring into a curve, round and full. Flattened, it retains the fossilised impression of a curl. It cannot be straight. It twists back on itself.

She is very competent. The child is always clean. His white boots are neatly laced up, without a mark on them. His white socks, showing just above the top of the boots, bite softly into the shiny flesh. His dimpled knees are bent double, as if they were made of plasticine. Carried, in a rush of air, on a bony arm, along corridors covered with linoleum and down wooden stairs to wider stairs covered with green carpet. Sudden silence of the clumping footsteps. The crackling of starched cotton becomes loud. The light upstairs is white and cold, the stairs dark. The carpeted corridors and rooms muted, pale and green. The air becomes warmer and more voluptuous as they descend. The smells are different. So are the sounds. Doors open and shut. Voices murmur and rise musically. Sharp, stifled, bell-like notes of silver on china. The teacups are translucent. Light lies in them dark amber or pale gold. Today Father is there as well, the King himself, not properly contained either in his clothes or his body. Squeeze him a little, prick him with a pin, and blood will gush forth. His shoulders burst out of his dark grey suit, his neck bursts out of his shirt collar. It is as wide as his face. There is no difference between his neck and his face. The blood pulses, thick and dark purple, behind his skin. His brown eyes shine hotly, squeezed outwards by remorseless pressure. The resonance of his voice makes the teacup tremble faintly against the saucer. His hair is dark and thin and neatly brushed. He wears no crown. He does not approach the Prince too closely. He remains at the other end of the room, talking to other large, grey men. But his voice makes the Prince’s throat ache, and gives the sugar a strange taste, in spite of the cooing circle of ladies-in-waiting, with their soft hands and pale skirts and swaying waves of hair.

It is pleasant to be back in these surroundings. Passivity becomes, after all, pleasure instead of shame. The Queen’s bosom is soft and full under her pale green blouse. Her neck is soft. He can feel her skin tremble as the blood pulses beneath it. A touch as delicate as a butterfly’s wing. She raises her hand to brush away a strand of hair. The Prince’s eyes stare, pale blue, unfocused, towards the ceiling. They stare out and see inside himself sensations woven together, black, flecked with grey and red. He sucks on his tongue. His hand flutters downwards. Impossible that any human touch could be so soft. The Queen shakes her head impatiently, but does not take her eyes from her friend, whose lips are different shades of red inside and out, and whose cup is stained with an imprint of the skin texture of her lower lip.

‘Geoffrey goes before the selection board on Friday.’ She speaks and drinks with her upper lip flaring backwards. The Prince’s hand finds a different texture at the base of his mother’s neck. Rougher and cooler, but still soft – crepe. A raised seam round the neck, and others leading downwards, little raised patterns covering his mother’s body. The Prince’s hand follows a path downwards; gently, slowly, aimlessly, with the tip of one finger. The Queen says,

‘Geoffrey’s just the sort of man we need.’ The Prince’s hand comes to rest over his mother’s nipple, and an expression of faint anxiety on his face is noticeable in retrospect as he relaxes. A gush of milk, which has never before flowed for her child, rises from the springs of the Queen’s bosom and stains her dress.

‘Oh Lord, darling,’ cries her friend, ‘the little beast has wet you.’

The Queen springs to her feet with a scream of shame and astonishment. The Prince is banished to arm’s length. No one wants to take him from her. On the Queen’s breasts are two round stains of deeper green. The resonant voices are silent. The grey men turn to look at the Queen.

‘Nurse! Nurse!’ But there is still half an hour before the nurse is due to collect the Prince. Someone rings the bell. The Queen presses the Prince to her bosom to hide her shame. ‘I must go and change.’

He is privileged. Because of his wickedness and the Queen’s shame he is privileged to fly upstairs in her arms and lie on the ice cold shiny satin counterpane while she pulls off her clothes, sobbing.

‘Beastly, horrible little boy.’ Her lips are trembling, they turn down at the corners like a child’s. She sniffs. Her voice trembles.

‘Oh I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it.’ There are little buttons and buttonholes at the back of her blouse. She cannot undo them. Her friend has followed her upstairs. She helps undo the buttons.

‘They’re such filthy little pigs. One really ought not to have anything to do with them until they’re at least two.’ Light is reflected from the shiny satin counterpane and the white walls. The triple mirror on the dressing table under the window is dark except for the white faces of the two women. Tears are running down the Queen’s face. She takes off her blouse and throws it on the floor with a shudder. She looks down at herself and says in a thin, frightened voice, ‘It’s come right through.’ The coffee-coloured lace is sticky. To take off her camiknicks she first has to take off her skirt. Now she knows the taste of humiliation. The nurse taps on the door.

‘Shall I take him away, Madam?’

‘Yes. Take him away.’

Away from the cool white light of his mother’s bedroom, from the powders and scarves and lace. From the dumpy woman in her stockings and girdle sitting on the stool in front of the dressing table, with her friend starting to undo her brassiere, and tears on her cheeks.

The more the Prince’s desire for his mother increases the more he is deprived of her. The long emptiness of nursery days turns bitter. He holds himself in suspension, waiting for her. He no longer releases gifts of himself into the cold tin potty or the marble hands of his nurse. He takes food into his mouth but does not swallow, or swallows but does not digest, and vomits it up again, later, unchanged. ‘I shall not breathe, or grow, or live until I am in the arms of my mother.’ He is not doing the right thing, so Mother is not allowed into the nursery, and he is not allowed downstairs for tea. Sometimes his mother comes upstairs and stands in the doorway of the nursery looking at him. But however much he screams and struggles she does not take him in her arms. She looks at him, anxious, troubled, but wary now, of his power.

‘He’s got to learn, Madam.’ She goes away, relieved.

The nurse is a fighter. She has strength, courage, skill. She is not to be beaten. She revels in the sound and smell of battle. The harsh crack of her hands on desperately flailing limbs, the webbing straps that bind the child to his mattress pulled tighter every night. She glories in it. She glories in an adversary worthy of her strength. The savage must be controlled, he must be tamed. He must learn how to be a child. He cannot know, poor ignorant, screaming wretch, what a child should be. But she, the nurse, has been taught, over many years, by the expectations of those who employ her. A child should be quiet and malleable. He should have no desires. He should have no will. Wilfulness is the devil. He should eat and sleep, eat and sleep again. Occasionally, clean and neatly dressed, he should gurgle and coo at selected relatives. Of the dark battles of the nursery nothing should be seen. This child is a worthy adversary in the strength of his desires and the violence of his struggle, but he has no cunning. He can find no other means to achieve what he wants. She feels a certain amount of pity for him, and contempt. In a harsher society he would never have survived. There is no bounce, no spring to his character. He cannot swallow a defeat and then attack from a new angle. He continually proclaims his misery and his despair. The nurse, bored and disgusted, shuts him in the toy cupboard when she can stand his screaming no longer.

There at least he has plenty to occupy him. But he can’t concentrate. Locked into the uneasy blackness he is possessed by fear. He lacks light, warmth, comfort. There is no soothing voice to answer his cries, no arms to hold and rock him.

Stupid child, do you not see that if you do what I desire, if you eat and excrete, and are silent, and grow fat, then you shall have your heart’s desire? Then you will be held in loving arms for one hour every day unless the Queen goes out? Do you not understand? Why are you so ignorant, stupid and uncouth? If I shut the door of the toy cupboard, and the door of the nursery, and the door of my own room, and sit quietly sewing or knitting there, I can hardly hear your screams. I am not aware of the unnatural extravagance of your feelings. When I take you out, after several hours, you will be limp and quiet. You will eat, between hiccups, and quite probably sleep as well. You and I are engaged in a private battle. It has nothing to do with that damp and ineffectual lady the Queen. I am on your father’s side. I understand him better. He is the King. He knows the meaning of authority. He can take decisions and bear responsibility. He is not afraid to hold lives in the palm of his hand. There is a flame of understanding between us. I am a strong woman, and not afraid of my strength. I submit to no one. I owe my allegiance only to the King.

The Prince does not know where he can find support. He sees the Queen, but she will not hold out her arms to him. The nurse is an iron hand, pressing down upon his head. Her red hair, the crackling of her apron, and her cold, hard hands are a barrier that keep the softness of the world away from him. It is true that he is ignorant and stupid, and does not know how to adjust himself. The hysterical passion of his crying prevents him from seeing how life could be made easy. He learns too slowly. In any other experiment he would have been abandoned.

One day the Prince is taken to visit the old Judge, his grandfather. They have a lot in common. They both dribble and are incontinent. The old Judge, in his wheelchair, wrapped in rugs, leers at his grandson with contempt. His eyes sparkle. He hides a secret knowledge to himself in the sun porch. His secret knowledge is his age. Ha ha ha, he says to the child, you have to wait till you get to be my age. You’ll never get to be my age, miserable, puny thing. I am ninety-one years old and I can shit in my pants and nobody rubs my nose in it. After dinner I sit in my panelled dining room, alone, with a servant standing behind my chair, a docile audience if I have no other, and I suck on my cigar and roll the port around my tongue for as long as I like. I am respected. I wear a velvet smoking jacket. I am a judge. I have worn the black cap and sentenced men to death. That is why women wipe my bum with creams and lotions, and turn me over in my bed with care.

The Prince lies in his mother’s lap. He is good. The sun is balmy on his face. The fears of the dark cupboard have shrunk to the size of an old man wrapped in a dark fringed rug. His mother will protect him. She is tickling his face with a feather and making him laugh to show his dimples. From his position lolling back comfortably in her arms he can see blue sky striped with white wooden bars which enclose the window panes. Under the sky is a curve of green, and in the far distance, on the outer corners of his vision, one on each side, a tiny dark tree. He cannot see the dark old man unless he turns his head uncomfortably sideways and backwards. He practises the movement while keeping his eyes fixed on the sky. His mother’s face looms over him like a brown and pink cloud.

‘Don’t wriggle darling, you’ll fall.’ She taps his face with the feather, playful punishment. The air in the sun porch is warm and still. It smells of cigar smoke, freesias and liniment. The smell of the freesias is painfully fresh and sweet.

‘Isn’t it lovely to feel the spring sunshine?’ The old man raises his eyebrows and clashes his gums. The door opens and Miss Henrietta, the Judge’s sister, comes in. The Queen is glad to see her. She is only eighty-three, and was once a great beauty and engaged to a Lord. She wears her hair in a soft roll, with a bun on top, and a velvet ribbon round her throat, as she has done since she was a girl.

‘Our civilisation is dying,’ she says. ‘It is no longer possible to buy silk knickers with a drawstring waist.’ She removes a cushion and sits down on a straight-backed bamboo chair. ‘I have written to Harrods and Gorringe’s and the Army and Navy Stores.’ The sun porch has a brick floor with Persian carpets on it, and a table with magazines. ‘A civilisation must be judged by the minor comforts it can provide.’ The Queen nods and the old Judge does not bother to say the things that come into his mind. ‘No woman of real sensibility can stand elastic round her waist.’ Miss Henrietta ignores the Prince. He is of no interest to her.

In the nurse’s sitting room the two nurses drink tea delicately, sucking the moisture from their lips after each sip, and placing the cups back exactly in the centre of the saucer. The nurse with red hair is wearing a navy cap and gabardine coat for this outing. ‘You’ve got a better room here than mine,’ she says. ‘But I couldn’t abide looking after an old man. He must be worse than a child for mess.’

‘It’s the washing I can’t stand. I made it quite clear before I came. There’s got to be a woman to do the washing.’

The old man’s nurse has thick eyelids and thick wings to her nostrils. The lips of her cunt are thick. The texture of her flesh is dense. Each hair grows sturdily outwards; the space between them is visible.

‘Let’s just lift you up a bit, your Lordship, while I slip this under you. There, that’s better, isn’t it?’

‘Kiddies are too noisy for me.’

‘You can train a child. You can’t train an old man.’

‘He’s not too bad. Sometimes gives me a glass of port.’

Later on the child is sent home with the nurse, alone, at her mercy, while the King and Queen remain to have dinner with the old man. He likes to go through his ritual in public once a week. After tea he has a little nap in his wheelchair in the sun porch while the Prince, also having a little nap, is packed into the moses basket and the back of the car. Much whispering and shuffling so as not to wake the Judge. A remarkable number of bonnets, shawls and blankets are necessary to protect the precious child from draughts. The Judge’s chauffeur in charcoal grey uniform, the peak of his cap like an extra-long, sharp nose, drives the black Humber at funeral pace so as not to jog the infant Prince. The nurse sits right angular in the back, one hand possessively on the moses basket. The Prince sleeps.

The glass partition between the front and back of the car is closed. The chauffeur knows the roads well. He keeps his eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror. He can see one cheek, one ear, one flattened curl of red hair and part of a navy gabardine hat. He puts his mouth to the speaking tube. ‘Lovely hair you’ve got, Miss.’