Don't Tell Alfred Read online

  ‘I envy you that. Provins and Nancy are at their best in the fall. Such interesting towns. Try and go to Cirey, it’s well worth it, and just outside Paris don’t forget to stop your car at Grosbois – ’

  ‘We haven’t got a car. We are walking.’

  ‘Walking to Provins? With the baby?’

  ‘The baby? Oh yes, he’s coming too. Not to Provins, to China.’

  ‘My! That’s quite some walk. China – let me see now – after Provins and Nancy – don’t miss the Place Stanislas – you can take in Munich and Nuremberg and Prague. I envy you that. Lemberg, they say, has charm. After Moscow there is the holy city of Zagorsk, the tomb of St Serge in solid silver. Are you looking for a special school of architecture or just going haphazard? By the way, I suppose you have your visas for China. I heard it was none too easy – ’

  David said they had no visas for anywhere. They were looking for Truth, he added.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid you may end up in gaol?’

  He said, loftily, that Truth flourished in gaols, specially in Eastern ones.

  ‘We are the bridge,’ he added, ‘between pre-war humanity with its selfishness and materialistic barriers against reality and the new race of World Citizens. We are trying to indoctrinate ourselves with wider concepts and for this we realize that we need the purely contemplative wisdom which comes from following the Road.’

  Mildred Jungfleisch now had her clue. As soon as she realized that David was not on an ordinary House and Gardens honeymoon, but was in search of Truth, she knew exactly where she was and how to cope. She dropped the Place Stanislas and Grosbois and brought out such phrases as ‘Mind-stretching interpretation of the Cosmos’, ‘Interchange of ideas between sentient contemporary human creatures’, ‘Explode the forms and habits of thought imposed by authority’, ‘I once took a course in illogism and I fully realize the place it should hold in contemporary thought’, ‘Atmosphere of positive thinking – change is life’.

  One saw why she was such an asset in society; she could produce the right line of talk in its correct jargon for every occasion. She never put a foot wrong. David was clearly both delighted and amazed to find so kindred a spirit at his patents’ table; they talked deeply until the end of dinner. Their neighbours lost interest in the conversation as soon as it moved from personal to eternal issues (the highlight having been the disclosure that David did not know the age of his own baby) and the usual parrot-house noise of a French dinner party broke out. As for the student of modern languages, she never opened her mouth. M. Hué, who was next her, tried all sorts of gambits in French, English, German, Portuguese and Norwegian. She merely looked as if she thought he was about to strike her and held her peace.

  I now tried to put these children out of my mind for the present and do my duty as a hostess.

  ‘What does patibulaire mean?’ I asked M. Bouche-Bon-temps. I thought M. Begum had the grace to look embarrassed; he turned hurriedly to his neighbour.

  ‘Patibulum is Latin for a gibbet.’

  ‘I see exactly.’

  M. Bouche-Bontemps was very kind and tactfuL Instead of abruptly wrenching the conversation in an obvious manner from the subject which was clearly preoccupying me, he began talking about difficult young persons of former days. In seventeenth-century England there were the Ti Tyre Tu, educated gangsters who called themselves after the first line of Virgil’s first eclogue. In the 1830s, ‘the same length of time from Waterloo as we are from Dunkirk’, young Frenchmen called Bousingos, like the Ti Tyre Tu, wore strange clothes and committed lurid crimes. I could have wished he had left out the lurid crimes, but I saw the connexion.

  ‘I don’t know about England,’ he said, ‘but in France mothers are frightened of making their children frown. They love them so much that they cannot bear to see a shadow on their happiness; they never scold or thwart them in any way. I see my daughter-in-law allowing everything, there’s no authority outside school and the children do exactly as they like in their spare time. I am horrified when I see what it is that they do like. They never open a book, the girls don’t do embroidery, the boy, though he is rather musical, doesn’t learn the piano. They play stupid games with a great ball and go to the cinema. We used to be taken to the Matinée Gassique at the Francais and dream of Le Cid – that’s quite old fashioned – it’s The Kid now. How will it end?’

  ‘I think you’ll find they will grow out of it and become like everybody else.’

  ‘Who is everybody else, though – you and me and the Ambassador or some American film actor?’

  ‘You and me,’ I said firmly. ‘To our own children we must be the norm, surely. They may react from our values for a while but in the end they will come back to them.’

  ‘But these grandchildren of mine are getting so big – they don’t seem to change. They still throw that idiotic football at each other as soon as their lessons are over.’

  ‘Good for the health, that’s one thing.’

  ‘I don’t care. I don’t want them to win the Olympic games. Furthermore healthy children are generally stupid. Those wise old monks knew what they were doing when they founded the universities in unhealthy places. I hate health – the more over-populated the world becomes the more people bother about it. Hiinde, wollt ihr ewig lehen? says I!’

  ‘To your own grandchildren?’

  ‘Specially to them!’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘I am very serious, however. This is a moment in the history of the world when brains are needed more than anything else. If we don’t produce them in Western Europe where will they come from? Not from America where a school is a large, light building with a swimming-pool. Nor from Russia where they are too earnest to see the wood for the trees. As for all the rest, they may have clever thoughts about Karl Marx and so on, but they are not adult. If the children of our old civilization don’t develop as they ought to, the world will indeed become a dangerous playground.’

  I said, ‘My two grown-up boys were perfect when they were little, very, very brilliant, longing to learn, all for Le Gd as opposed to The Kid. They both did well at Oxford. Now look at them. Bearded David there, with a first in Greats if you please, is walking to China in search of Truth. In other words he has given way to complete mental laziness. The other one, Basil, even cleverer, my pride and joy, lies on his face all day on a Spanish beach. How do you explain that?’

  ‘I think they’ve got a better chance than my poor grandchildren because at least they have some furniture in their heads already.’

  ‘If you ask me they’ll all come out of these silly phases. They are nothing new – my cousins and I were quite idiotic when we were young. The only difference is that in those days the grown-ups paid no attention, while we concentrate (too much probably) on these children and their misdoings. How old are yours, by the way?’

  ‘They must be quite seven, eight and nine by now.’

  He was very much surprised when I laughed.

  ‘At their age,’ he said, ‘I was reading the great classics in my spare time.’

  ‘We all think that about ourselves, but it isn’t always quite true!’

  As soon as we left the dining-room, David took his wife away. He explained that they had an important rendezvous at the Alma. ‘We are several days late – we must go at once.’

  ‘But you’ll come back for the night?’

  ‘Possibly, or we may sleep there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Under the bridge, where we are meeting our friend.’

  ‘Oh, don’t do that. You must be tired.’

  ‘The great Zen Master, Po Chang, said when you are tired, sleep. We can sleep anywhere.’

  ‘And the baby?’

  ‘He’ll come too. He sleeps all the time. Good night, Ma.’

  ‘Shall we see you tomorrow?’

  ‘Possibly. Good night.’

  Philip and Northey reappeared. Valhubert sprang from his chair beside Mme Hué and in a rapid and skilful ma
noeuvre he whisked Northey to an unoccupied sofa. They sat there for the rest of the evening, laughing very much. Grace, half-listening to Philip who had made a bee-line for her, looked at them imperturbably, quizzically, even, I thought. At the usual time and in the correct precedence, the guests came and thanked us for a delightful evening and went their way. I have seldom felt so exhausted.

  Chapter Twelve

  I SAT on my bed, looking at Alfred.

  ‘Do we laugh or cry?’ he said.’ Did you see the baby?’

  ‘Not really. It seemed to be asleep. I saw the cradle all right.’

  ‘Whose do you think it is?’

  ‘Oh, surely theirs?’

  ‘It’s yellow.’

  ‘Babies often are.’

  ‘No, darling. I mean it’s an Asiatic baby.’

  ‘Heavens! Are you quite sure? I thought it was our grandchild.’

  ‘It may be. A throw-back. Had you a Chinese ancestor of any sort, Fanny?’

  ‘Certainly not. Perhaps you had?’

  ‘I doubt it. The Winchams, as you know, were yeomen in Herefordshire, in the same village since the Middle Ages. If one of our ancestors had gone to the East and brought back an exotic wife it would have become a thrilling legend of the family – don’t you think? The little young lady didn’t look Mongolian, did she?’

  ‘Not a bit. How very mysterious. Well, if they’re taking it to China that will be coals to Newcastle, won’t it?’

  For two days we saw nothing of David, Dawn or the cradle; on the third day they turned up again. Alfred and I were having our tea in the Salon Vert. ‘It looks as if they’ve gone for good,’ I was saying. ‘Weren’t we nice enough to them?’

  ‘I don’t see what more we could have done.’

  ‘I suppose not. I have this guilty feeling about David, as I’ve often told you, because of loving him less than the others.’

  ‘One must see things realistically, my darling. You love him less because he is less lovable – it’s as easy as that.’

  ‘But may it not be because I loved him less from the beginning – I lie awake, trying to remember – ’

  ‘He has always been exactly the same,’ said Alfred, ‘he was born so – ’

  Then they sidled, crabwise, cradle between them, through the door.

  ‘Oh good, oh good,’ I said, ‘there you are. We were beginning to be afraid you had gone East.’

  David pressed his beard into my face and said, ‘On the contrary we went back a little – West – to Issy-les-Moulincaux. But now we are really on the road. We’ve just called in to say good-bye.’

  I rang for more tea cups and said to Dawn, hoping to bring her into the conversation, ‘Issy-les-Moulineaux is such a pretty name. What’s it like when you get there?’

  She turned her headlamps on to me, dumb, while David scowled. He despised small talk and civilized manners.

  ‘It’s just a working-class suburb,’ he said. ‘Nothing to interest anybody like you. We went to see a practising Zen Buddhist who’s got a room there.’

  ‘And where did you stay?’

  ‘In his room.’

  ‘For three whole days?’

  ‘Was it three days? How do I know? It might have been three hours or three weeks. Dawn and I don’t use watches and calendars since we have no [voice of withering scorn] “social engagements”!’

  ‘I thought you said he lived under a bridge.’

  ‘He used to, but they have turned the embankment into a road. Imagine motor-cars speeding through your bedroom all night. He says the French are becoming simply impossible – ’

  The baby now began to scream. ‘I expect he wants changing,’ said David.

  Dawn got up and bent over the cradle as if to do so there and then. ‘Come upstairs,’ I said. We each took a handle and went to the lift. ‘I got this room ready for you hoping you would stay for a night 01 two. It’s called the Violet Room. Mrs Hammersley and Mr Somerset Maugham were born here, imagine – ’

  She smiled. She was a duck, I thought – I did so wish she could speak. When she picked up the baby I saw that Alfred was quite right, it was as yellow as a buttercup, with black hair and slit black eyes, certainly not European: a darling little papoose of a baby.

  ‘The pet!’ I said. ‘What’s its name?’

  At last the pretty mouth opened. ‘’Chang.’

  I saw that a canvas bag with a broken zip fastener had been deposited on a folding table meant for luggage. ‘I’ll send my maid, Claire, to unpack for you.’ She shook her head vehemently.

  ‘She’s not frightening a bit and she’d love the baby – very well, if you’d rather not. Have you got what you need, dearest?’ She nodded. ‘Come down again when you are ready.’

  I went back to the Salon Vert. David was saying, ‘Zen forbids thought’ and Alfred was looking sad, no wonder, at these words which were the negation of his whole life’s work. ‘It does not attempt to be intelligible or capable of being understood by the intellect, therefore it is difficult to explain.’

  ‘It must be.’ (Falsetto.)

  ‘The moment you try to realize it as a concept, it takes flight.’

  ‘Mm.’ (On a very high note.)

  ‘Its aim is to irritate, provoke and exhaust the emotions.’

  To my utter amazement, Alfred now lost his temper. During twenty-six years of married life I had never seen that before. He said, furiously, ‘You have succeeded in irritating, provoking and exhausting my emotions to a point at which I must tell you that, in my view, most Asiatics are incapable of thought. Zen must be simply perfect for them. But you are not an Asiatic; you have studied the great philosophies – ’

  ‘Please, Father, say Asian.’ David had not even noticed the effect he was having on Alfred.

  ‘I suppose, alone with you and your mother, I may be allowed to use the correct – ’

  ‘Not if it hurts my feelings. You see, our baby is one – ’

  ‘Adorable!’I said.

  ‘Oh my dear boy, I beg your pardon a thousand times. Well, I’ve got some papers to read so perhaps I’ll go back to the Chancery. Good-bye for the present.’

  ‘He’s called ‘Chang, Dawn told me,’ I said as the door shut on Alfred.

  ‘We named him after the great Zen Master Po Chang. We dropped the Po. You have heard of him?’

  ‘I seem to know the name — I’m awfully ignorant though, about all that.’

  ‘It was Po Chang who placed a pitcher before his followers and asked them “What is this object?” They made various suggestions. Then one of the followers went up to it and kicked it over. Him Po Chang appointed to be his successor.’

  ‘Oh of course! Well, anyhow, I thought the baby a perfect angel.’

  ‘He’s everything to us.’

  This rule about never asking questions, though I knew it to be sound and would never break it, sometimes made life rather difficult. I was dying to know the origins of baby ‘Chang but how could I find out?

  ‘You must have one of your own,’I hazarded.

  ‘We are going to – that’s why we got married.’

  ‘When you’ve got two babies, which makes a family, will you not settle down?’

  ‘The wheel of birth and death, in the face of eternity, is of no more importance than sleeping or waking. Do you not know that new bodies are only created so that we can work out our own Karma?’

  ‘Oh, do shut up and talk sensibly,’ I said.

  ‘To talk in terms that you would understand, Ma, I can’t approve, I never have, of your way of life. I hate the bourgeoisie. In Zen I find the antithesis of what you and Father have always stood for. So I embrace Zen with all my heart. Do you see?’

  ‘Yes. I wonder why you feel like that?’

  ‘It seems almost incredible that people like you should still be living in the 1950s.’

  ‘You can’t expect us to commit suicide in order to fall in •with your theories.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind you being alive, it’s the way yo
u live. Basil feels as I do. I’ve implored him for years to cut the umbilical cord and now at last he has.’

  ‘That’s your doing, is it? Thanks very much. He lies on his face on hot sand, instead of reading for his exam. It seems appalling waste of time to me.’

  ‘Time does not exist. People who have clocks and watches are like bodies squashed into stays. Anything would be better than to find oneself in your and Dad’s stays when one is old. Dawn and I are looking for an untrammelled future. Where is she?’

  ‘If you go to the room above this one you’ll find her.’

  He went. Presently I heard his heavy footfall over my head. When David was a child Uncle Matthew used to say he walked like two men carrying a ladder. Greatly relieved, I telephoned to the Chancery. I got Philip. ‘Just tell Alfred,’ I said, ‘that old Zennikins has gone and he can come back and finish his tea.’

  Alfred kissed the top of my head. ‘To think he took a first in Greats!’

  ‘Let me pour you out another cup – that’s cold. I remember, when the boys were little, you used to.say if they don’t revolt against all our values we shall know they are not much good.’

  ‘That was not very clever, was it?’

  ‘You were very clever – you took a first in Greats yourself. Another thing was: “I hope when they see me coming into a room they will look at each other as much as to say: here comes the old fool. That is how children ought to regard their father.”’

  ‘How very odd of me. I’ve quite forgotten.’

  ‘Yes, one forgets – ’

  ‘Hot news,’ Northey said, next day. ‘David and Dawn are drinking whisky with sweet Amy in the Pont Royal bar. ’Chang has been dumped with the men’s coats.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’ve just seen them.’

  ‘And what were you doing at the Pont Royal bar?’

  ‘I was meeting Phyllis McFee, the friend of my far-distant youth in Caledonia stern and wild.’

  ‘Northey, it’s not a suitable place for young girls. Please find somewhere else to meet her – why not here? What’s the good of giving you that pretty room – ?’

  ‘You’re saying all this because you don’t like clever little Amy.’