I do not know for certain what happened to Billson. Even my mother, with all her instinct for not losing touch with the unfortunate, lost sight of her during the war. More than thirty years later, however, what may have been a clue took shape. When Rosie Manasch — or Rosie Udall, as she had then become — used to hold a kind of salon in her house in Regent’s Park, she often told stories of a ‘daily’ she had employed during or just after the war, a former parlourmaid of the old-fashioned kind, who liked to talk about the people for whom she had worked. By then she was called ‘Doreen’, and said she was nearly seventy.
‘She looked years younger,’ Rosie said, ‘perhaps in her fifties. A man behaved badly to her. I could never make out if he was a butler or a chef. She also had some rather good ghost-stories when she was on form.’
It was all too complicated to explain to Rosie, but this legendary lost love might well have been Albert incorporated — in the way myths are formed — with Billson’s earlier ‘disappointment’. Albert himself, as might be expected, was greatly outraged by Billson’s behaviour that Sunday afternoon, even though he himself had suffered no inconvenience from the immediate circumstances of her ‘breakdown’.
‘I told you that girl would go off her crumpet,’ he said more than once afterwards.
No doubt a series of ‘funny days’ would normally have been induced in Bracey, but, as things turned out, neither he nor Albert had much time to brood over Billson’s surprising conduct. International events took their swift, their ominous, course, Bracey, characteristically, being swept into a world of action, Albert, firm as ever in his fight for the quiet life, merely changing the locality of his cooking-pots. To my mother, Mrs Conyers wrote:
‘… I was so glad Aylmer did not make you meet that very rum friend of his with the beard. He would have been quite capable of introducing you! I do not encourage him to see too much of that person. I think between you and me there is something very odd about the man. I would rather you did not mention to anyone — unless you know them very well — that Aylmer sometimes talks of staying with him. Nothing would induce me to go! I do not think that Aylmer will ever pay the visit because he feels sure the house will be very uncomfortable. No bathroom! What a dreadful thing this murder in Austria-Hungary is. Aylmer is very much afraid it may lead to war…’
General Conyers was right. Not many weeks later — by that time my father and Bracey had been shipped to France with the Expeditionary Force — squads of recruits began to appear on the Common, their evolutions in the heather performed in scarlet or dark blue, for in those early days of the war there were not enough khaki uniforms to go round. Some wore their own cloth caps over full-dress tunics or marched along in column of fours dressed in subfusc civilian suits, so that once more the colour values of the heath were transformed. These exercises of ‘Kitchener’s Army’ greatly perturbed Albert, although his ‘feet’ precluded any serious suggestion of military service. He used to discuss with Gullick, the gardener, the advisability of offering himself, ‘feet’ or no ‘feet’, in the service of his country.
‘If you don’t volunteer, they’ll come and take you,’ he would say, ‘they’re going to put the blokes who haven’t volunteered at the head of the column and march ’em along in their shame without any buttons to their uniforms — just to show they had to be forced to join.’
Gullick, silent, elderly, wizened, himself too old to be called to the colours except in the direst need, nodded grimly, showing no disposition to dissent from the menacing possibilities put forward.
‘And I’ll soon be a married man too,’ said Albert, groaning aloud.
However, like my father, Uncle Giles and General Conyers, Albert survived the war. He spent melancholy years cooking in some large canteen, where there was no alternative to producing food at a level painful to his own standards. When peace came at last, he felt, perhaps justly, that he had suffered as much as many who had performed, at least outwardly, more onerous acts of service and sacrifice. He used to write to my mother every Christmas. The dreaded marriage turned out — as Albert himself put it —’no worse than most’. It appeared, indeed, better than many. Others were less fortunate. Bracey’s ‘funny days’ came to an end when he was killed in the retreat — or, as we should now say, the withdrawal — from Mons. The Fenwicks’ father was killed; Mary Barber’s father was killed; Richard Vaughan’s father was killed; the Westmacott twins’ father was killed. Was the Military Policeman who used to jog across the heather killed? Perhaps his duties kept him away from the line. Did the soldier who chopped off his trigger-finger save his own life by doing so? It is an interesting question. Dr Trelawney gave up his house. Edith was told by Mrs Gullick that she had heard as a fact that he had been shot as a spy at the Tower of London. We left Stonehurst and its ‘ghosts’, inexplicably mysterious bungalow, presaging other inexplicable mysteries of life and death. I never heard whether subsequent occupants were troubled, as Billson and others had been troubled, by tall white spectres, uncomfortable invisible presences. Childhood was brought suddenly, even rather brutally, to a close. Albert’s shutters may have kept out the suffragettes: they did not effectively exclude the Furies.
2
IT IS ODD TO THINK THAT ONLY FOURTEEN or fifteen years after leaving Stonehurst, essentially a haunt of childhood, I should have been sitting with Moreland in the Hay Loft, essentially a haunt of maturity: odd, in that such an appalling volume of unavoidable experience had to be packed into the intervening period before that historical necessity could be enacted. Perhaps maturity is not quite the word; anyway, childhood had been left behind. It was early one Sunday morning in the days when Moreland and I first knew each other. We were discussing the roots and aims of action. The Hay Loft — now no more — was an establishment off the Tottenham Court Road, where those kept up late by business or pleasure could enjoy rather especially good bacon-and-eggs at any hour of the night. Rarely full at night-time, the place remained closed, I think, during the day. Certainly I never heard of anyone’s eating there except in the small hours. The waiter, white-haired and magisterial, a stage butler more convincing than any to be found in private service, would serve the bacon-and-eggs with a flourish to sulky prostitutes, who, nocturnal liabilities at an end, infiltrated the supper-room towards dawn. Moreland and I had come from some party in the neighbourhood, displeasing, yet for some reason hard to vacate earlier. Moreland had been talking incessantly — by then a trifle incoherently — on the theme that action, stemming from sluggish, invisible sources, moves towards destinations no less indefinable.
‘If action is to be one’s aim,’ he was saying, ‘then is it action to write a symphony satisfactory to oneself, which no one else wants to perform, or a comic song every errand-boy whistles? A bad example — a comic song, obviously. Nothing I should like to do better, if I had the talent. Say some ghastly, pretentious half-baked imitation of Stravinsky that makes a hit and is hailed as genius. We know it’s bad art. That is not the point. Is it action? Or is that the point? Is art action, an alternative to action, the enemy of action, or nothing whatever to do with action? I have no objection to action. I merely find it impossible to locate.’