Gunning lived in a bottom, in a squatter’s cottage, they said. With a thatch like Robinson Crusoe’s bonnet. A wise-woman’s cottage. He lived with the wise-woman, a chalk-white-faced slattern…. And a grand-daughter of the wise-woman whom, because she had a cleft palate and only half a brain the parish, half out of commiseration, half for economy, had nominated mistress in the school up the hill. No one knew whether Gunning slept with the wise-woman or the grand-daughter; for one or the other he had left his missus and Fittleworth had tanned his hide and taken his cottage from him. He thrashed them both impartially with a hunting thong every Saturday night — to teach them, and to remind them that for them he had lost his cottage and the ten bob a week Fittleworth allowed such hinds as had been in his service thirty years…. Sex ferocity again!
And how shall I thy true love know from another one?
Oh, by his cockled hat and staff and by his sandalled shoon!
An undoubted pilgrim had suggested irresistibly the lines to him!… It was, naturally, that bitch Sylvia. Wet eyes she had!… Then some psychological crisis was going on inside her. Good for her.
Good for Val and Chris, possibly. There was no real knowing…. Oh, but there was. Hear to that: the bitch-pack giving tongue! Heard ye ever the like to that, sirs. She had had Groby Great Tree torn down…. But as God was her maker she would not tear another woman’s child…
He felt himself begin to perspire…. Well, if Sylvia had come to that his, Mark’s, occupation was gone. He would no longer have to go on willing against her; she would drop into the sea in the wake of their family vessel and be lost to view…. But damn it, she must have suffered to be brought to that extreme…. Poor bitch! Poor bitch! The riding had done it…. She ran away, a handkerchief to her eyes.
He felt satisfaction and impatience. There was some place to which he desired to get back. But there were also things to be done: to be thought out…. If God was beginning to temper the wind to these flayed lambs… Then… He could not remember what he wanted to think about…. It was — no, not exasperating. Numb! He felt himself responsible for their happiness. He wanted them to go rubbing along, smooth with the rough, for many long, unmarked years…. He wanted Marie Léonie to stay with Valentine until after her deliverance and then go to the Dower House at Groby. She was Lady Tietjens. She knew she was Lady Tietjens and she would like it. Besides she would be a thorn in the flesh of Mrs…. He could not remember the name….
He wished that Christopher would get rid of his Jewish partner so as to addle a little brass. It was their failing as Tietjenses that they liked toadies. He himself had bitched all their lives by having that fellow Ruggles years ago sharing his rooms. Because he could not have borne to share with an equal and Ruggles was half Jew, half Scotchman. Christopher had had for toadies firstly Macmaster, a Scot, and then this American Jew. Otherwise he, Mark, was reconciled with things. Christopher no doubt was wise in his choice. He had achieved a position in which he might — with just a little more to it — anticipate jogging away to the end of time, leaving descendants to carry on the country without swank.
Ah…. It came to his mind to remember, almost with pain. He had accepted nephew Mark as nephew Mark: a strong slip. A good boy…. But there was the point… the point! The boy had the right sort of breeches…. But if there were incest…
Crawling through a hedge after a rabbit was thinkable. Father had been in the churchyard to shoot rabbits to oblige the vicar. There was no doubt of that. He did not want rabbits…. But supposing he had mis-hit a bunny and the little beast had been throwing gymnastics on the other side of the quickset? Father would have crawled through then rather than go all the way to the lych-gate and round. Decent men put their mis-hits out of their agony as soon as possible. Then there was motive. And as for not putting his gun out of action before crawling through the quickset…. Many good, plucked men had died like that…. And father had grown absent-minded!… There had been farmer Lowther had so died; and Pease of Lobhall; and Pease of Cullercoats. All good plucked farmers…. Crawling through hedges rather than go round, and with their guns at full cock! And not absent-minded men…. But he had remembered… just now, he had remembered that father had grown absent-minded. He would put a paper in one of his waistcoat pockets and fumble for it in all his other pockets a moment after; he would push his spectacles up onto his forehead and search all the room for them; he would place his knife and fork in his plate and whilst talking take another knife and fork from beside it and begin again ‘o eat…. Mark remembered that his father had done that twice during the last meal they had eaten together — whilst he, Mark, had been presenting the fellow Ruggles’s account of Christopher’s misdeeds….
Then it need not be incumbent on him, Mark, to go up to his father in heaven and say: “Hullo, sir. I understand you had a daughter by the wife of your best friend, she being now with child by your son.” Rather ghostly to introduce yourself to the awful ghost of your father…. Of course you would be a ghost yourself. Still, not, with your billycock hat, umbrella, and racing-glasses, an awful ghost!… And to say to your father: “I understand that you committed suicide!”
Against the rules of the Club…. For I consider it no grief to be going there where so many great men have preceded me. Sophocles that, wasn’t it? So, on his authority it was a damn good club….
But he did not have to anticipate that mauvais quart d’heure! Dad quite obviously did not commit suicide. He wasn’t the man to do so. So Valentine was not his daughter and there was no incest. It is all very well to say that you care little about incest. The Greeks made a hell of a tragic row about it…. Certainly it was a weight off the chest. He had always been able to look Christopher in the eyes — but he would be able to do it better than ever now. Comfortably! It is uncomfortable to look a man in the eyes and think: You sleep between incestuous sheets.
That then was over. The worst of it rolled up together. No suicide. No incest. No by-blow at Groby…. A Papist there…. Though how you could be a Papist and a Marxian-Communist passed his, Mark’s comprehension…. A Papist at Groby and Groby Great Tree down…. The curse was perhaps off the family!
That was a superstitious way to look at it — but you must have a pattern to interpret things by. You can’t really get your mind to work without it. The blacksmith said: By hammer and hand all art doth stand!… He, Mark Tietjens, for many years interpreted all life in terms of Transport…. Transport be thou my God…. A damn good God…. And in the end, after a hell of a lot of thought and of work the epitaph of him, Mark Tietjens, ought by rights to be: “Here lies one whose name was writ in sea-birds!” As good an epitaph as another.
He must get it through to Christopher that Marie Léonie should have that case of stuffed birds with Bamborough and all, in her bedroom at Groby Dower House. It was the last permanent record of her man…. But Christopher would know that….
It was coming back. A lot of things were coming back…. He could see Redcar Sands running up towards Sunderland, grey, grey. Not so many factory chimnies then, working for him, Mark Tietjens! Not so many! And the sandpipers running in the thin of the tide, bowing as they ran; and the shovellers turning over stones and the terns floating above the viscous sea….
But it was great nights to which he would not turn his attention; great black nights above the purple moors…. Great black nights above the Edgeware Road where Marie Léonie lived… because, above the blaze of lights of the old Apollo’s front, you had a sense of immense black spaces….