myself up and make a mystery of myself would be a form of self-advertisement. I knew what she was doing and why she was doing it, but nevertheless I responded. Grimly I set out to show her I could take it—no matter what it was! Sympathy, tact, the extra kindliness in a voice, the conscientious avoidance of any reference to accidents or illness, the pretence that I was as other men—I endured them all with a poker face.
I had not found the old ladies’ reaction to my state too embarrassing. Lady St Loo had adopted the line of tactful avoidance. Lady Tressilian, a maternal type, had not been able to help exuding maternal compassion. She had stressed, rather obviously, the latest books. She wondered if, perhaps, I did any reviewing? Mrs Bigham Charteris, a blunter type, had shown her awareness only by rather obviously checking herself when speaking of the more active blood sports. (Poor devil, mustn’t mention hunting or the beagles.)
Only the girl, Isabella, had surprised me by being natural. She had looked at me without any suggestion of having to look away quickly. She had looked at me as though her mind registered me along with the other occupants of the room and with the furniture. One man, age over thirty, broken … An item in a catalogue—a catalogue of things that had nothing to do with her.
When she had finished with me, her eyes went on to the grand piano, and then to Robert and Teresa’s Tang Horse which stood on a table by itself. The Tang Horse seemed to awaken a certain amount of interest in her. She asked me what it was. I told her.
‘Do you like it?’ I asked her.
She considered quite carefully before replying. Then she said—and gave the monosyllable a lot of weight, as though it was important—‘Yes.’
I wondered if she was a moron.
I asked her if she was fond of horses.
She said this was the first one she’d seen.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I meant real horses.’
‘Oh, I see. Yes, I am. But I can’t afford to hunt.’
‘Would you like to hunt?’
‘Not particularly. There’s not very much good country round here.’
I asked her if she sailed and she said she did. Then Lady Tressilian began talking to me about books, and Isabella relapsed into silence. She had, I noticed then, one art highly developed; the art of repose. She could sit still. She didn’t smoke, she didn’t cross her legs, or swing them, or fiddle with her hands, or pat her hair. She sat quite still and upright in the tall grandfather chair, with her hands on her lap—long narrow hands. She was as immobile as the Tang Horse—it on its table, she in her chair. They had something, I thought, of the same quality—highly decorative—static—belonging to a bygone age …
I laughed when Teresa suggested that she didn’t think, but later it occurred to me that it might be true. Animals don’t think—their minds are relaxed, passive, until an emergency arises with which they have to deal. Thinking (in the speculative sense of the word) is really a highly artificial process which we have taught ourselves with some trouble. We worry over what we did yesterday, and debate what we are going to do today and what will happen tomorrow. But yesterday, today and tomorrow exist quite independently of our speculation. They have happened and will happen to us no matter what we do about it.
Teresa’s prognostications of our life at St Loo were singularly accurate. Almost at once we became plunged up to the neck in politics. Polnorth House was large and rambling, and Miss Amy Tregellis, her income diminished by taxation, had shut off a wing of it, providing this with a separate kitchen. It had been done originally for evacuees from the bombed areas. But the evacuees, arriving from London in mid-winter, had been unable to stomach the horrors of Polnorth House. In St Loo itself, with its shops and its bungalows, they might have been able to support life, but a mile from the town, along ‘that narsty winding lane—the mud, yer wouldn’t believe it and no lights—and anybody might jump out on yer from be’ind the hedge. And vegetables all mud out of the garden, too much green stuff, and milk—coming right from a cow quite hot sometimes—disgusting—and never a tin of condensed handy!’ It was too much for Mrs Price and Mrs Hardy and their offspring. They departed secretly at early dawn taking their broods back to the dangers of London. They were nice women. They left the place clean and scrubbed and a note on the table.
‘Thanking you, Miss, for your kindness, and we know you’ve done all you can, but it’s just too awful in the country, and the children having to walk in the mud to school. But thanking you all the same. I hope as everything has been left all right.’
The billeting officer did not try any more. He was learning wisdom. In due course Miss Tregellis let the detached wing to Captain Carslake, the Conservative agent, who also led a busy life as an Air Raid Warden and an officer in the Home Guard.
Robert and Teresa were perfectly willing for the Carslakes to continue as tenants. Indeed, it was doubtful if they could have turned them out. But it meant that a great deal of pre-election activity centred in and around Polnorth House as well as the Conservative offices in St Loo High Street.
Teresa, as she had foreseen, was swept into the vortex. She drove cars, and distributed leaflets, and did a little tentative canvassing. St Loo’s recent political history was unsettled. As a fashionable seaside watering place, superimposed on a fishing port, and with agricultural surroundings, it had naturally always returned a Conservative. The outlying agricultural districts were Conservative to a man. But the character of St Loo had changed in the last fifteen years. It had become a tourist resort in summer with small boarding houses. It had a large colony of artists’ bungalows, like a rash, spread along the cliffs. The people who made up the present population were serious, artistic; cultured and, in politics, definitely pink if not red.
There had been a by-election in 1943 on the retirement of Sir George Borrodaile at the age of sixty-nine after his second stroke. And to the horror of the old inhabitants, for the first time in history, a Labour MP was returned.
‘Mind you,’ said Captain Carslake, swaying to and fro on his heels as he imparted past history to Teresa and myself, ‘I’m not saying we didn’t ask for it.’
Carslake was a lean, little dark man, horsy-looking, with sharp, almost furtive eyes. He had become a captain in 1918 when he had entered the Army Service Corps. He was competent politically and knew his job.
You must understand that I myself am a tyro in politics—I never really understand the jargon. My account of the St Loo election is probably wildly inaccurate. It bears the same relation to reality as Robert’s pictures of trees do to the particular trees he happens to be painting at the moment. The actual trees are trees, entities with barks and branches and leaves and acorns or chestnuts. Robert’s trees are blodges and splodges of thick oil paint applied in a certain pattern and wildly surprising colours to a certain area of canvas. The two things are not at all alike. In my own opinion, Robert’s trees are not even recognizable as trees—they might just as easily be plates of spinach or a gas works. But they are Robert’s idea of trees. And my account of politics in St Loo is my impression of a political election. It is probably not recognizable as such to a politician. I daresay I shall get the terms and the procedure wrong. But to me the election was only the unimportant and confusing background for a life-size figure—John Gabriel.
The first mention of John Gabriel came on the evening when Carslake was explaining to Teresa that as regards the result of the by-election they had asked for
