and gentle, and it was inexpressibly painful.
The disease ran fast; yet although he did not see or know the half of it, this period seemed to Richard a boundless everlasting state, in which anxious misery became the normal condition – grey apprehension at the best, in the intervals between crises. It went on and on, from the time when he first found her incapable, her words a slurred mixture of incoherent dignity, lachrymose precepts and weird jollity, until the last day when they took her off in a terrible drugged-sober state, quite withdrawn, yellow-faced, huddled in an old black dress with her peroxide hair straggling its dead colour over the dusty lightless cloth.
The course was rapid indeed; but not so break-neck that each gradation did not prepare him for the next. In some ways the very beginning was the most difficult time, for then he could not tell how remote from normality this was – was his feeling that everything was hideously astray quite justified? The bald policeman, shining on the cottage step without his helmet and standing there to tell him that ‘she was taken poorly at the bus stop’ said it with an appearance of normality. Everybody was still polite: the world continued, apparently unmoved.
But there is external and internal normality, and here too it was the beginning that was the most difficult: his inner world cracked irreparably when first he heard her singing a dirty song. It was more destructive than many of the later stages; more wounding, for example, than the lewd accusation about Mr Atherton, which came to him prepared. Besides, they were shouted out by an enemy, a queer rakish manifestation of another self that seemed to possess her, invade her, from time to time, an intruder from another, later generation and another, unknown, class: the same which caused her to dye her hair. This being was openly hostile: shrieked ‘Prig’ at him and smashed things: but it lacked authority and even its most evilly calculated words – dirty little Welshman or Liverpool guttersnipe – caused no more than a dull wound; and some of the time it was afraid of him.
Later he realised that he had not seen or understood many aspects: the odd bookie or bookie’s clerk, the vague men hanging about the shadows, they never meant anything. He was protected by his own ignorance (forty-five was old age for him) and by people’s kindness – a kindness which had at one time puzzled him. Very early he had noticed that the occasional invitations to proper Easton Colborough houses had stopped, invitations that had always been very irksome to him, by the way; but in the town he still sometimes met the people, and they would speak to him with a particular earnestness, trying to inject an unusual degree of sympathy or benevolence into words that of course remained utterly commonplace.
It was a very difficult case for interference – no family doctor, no near relatives who could be spoken to and no one with the authority to write to them. Mrs Temple had no close friends in the town, and those of her acquaintances who might have come forward in any other circumstances could not in these. There were eccentrics by the dozen in Easton Colborough and certifiable lunatics like Miss Hodson, who sometimes ran about in her nightgown with her long hair trailing down her back, and they were all very kindly treated – perfectly acceptable. But the good women would not tolerate the least unchastity: a hint of riggishness with labourers wiped Mrs Temple’s name out of the list of human beings. The nightmare ran on, therefore, a longer time than would be thought credible: yet it had its end – ignominious and violent, but still an end, as far as anything can have an end.
By the kindness of his friends, Richard was sent almost directly away to France, to live as a resident pupil in the house of a Monsieur Durand, a respectable and conscientious person long known to Mr Atherton. He was the only pupil; no one in the house spoke a word of English, and the change could hardly have been more complete. His window looked out not on to the lush green of Grimmond’s meadow, but on to a stark plain of vines: the light that surrounded him, the air he breathed, the food, drink, language, smells, manners – all these were entirely different. And yet it is possible that even without this immense assistance he would have recovered fairly soon: one of the most striking sights upon a sheep-farm is the castration of the ram-lambs; they undergo their mutilation with a few little inward groans and stand as it were amazed for one or two minutes; then they start to graze again. And although they do not play that day, nor the next, after some time they do, almost as if the thing had never been done to them. In any case, after the mingled shock of travel and exhaustion was over, Richard found himself as much at home in this new house as ever he was likely to be, familiar with its hours, the arrangement of his room and the distance from this place to that, and he was not without taking pleasure from it.
During his life there, other pupils appeared from time to time – once there were as many as four together – but they usually stayed only a few months, to cram for a Beaux Arts examination; and the regular inhabitants were Monsieur and Madame Durand, Fifine the maid, and himself. It was difficult to believe that the desiccated, fussy, pedantic Monsieur Durand could ever have been a boon-companion of Mr Atherton’s youth, an habitué of the Lapin Agile and a friend of some of the best, most hopelessly disreputable painters in Paris before the ’14 war; and looking at his competent, frigid, official pictures it was difficult to believe that he had ever seen any painting since Puvis de Chavannes – difficult, that is, for one who had no experience of the chilling force of virtue. Monsieur Durand was nine parts dead from self-imposed rectitude and conscience; but he was a capable teacher of official art, and in his dry, pompous manner he was not unkind. (He looked like a piano-tuner.) Madame was less amiable, a big, strong, moustachioed woman with too great a love for economy; she was an ardent church-goer, and there were several others who looked just like her in the local charitable society. The sight of a congregation of them made one wonder how the Church had lasted so long. Both Monsieur and Madame Durand avoided any close contact with the pupils: they cultivated the high degree of formality usual in bourgeois circles in the France of that time, and Richard remained Monsieur Temple to the end.
The other permanent face in the household was that of Fifine, the maid. It was a pale, bald, waxy face with a nose, a Gothic face, a universal peasant face, shrewd and ignorant. She was employed for all duties, and Madame Durand’s all meant everything; fortunately, Fifine had been brought up in a mountain village of the dry Corbières, a little to the south, where they work fourteen hours a day to keep alive, and she was constitutionally very strong. She was not only willing but also able to clean the house, wash and iron all the laundry, prepare the food and then take a heavy two-pronged mattock and labour the kitchen-garden before dealing with the poultry and cutting the wood for the next day’s fires. She was of some age between thirty and fifty, and she spoke the harsh patois of her region more easily than French. She was a deeply pious woman: her earthy and often superficially irreverent religion informed her whole life: it was an immensely practical religion, and yet it was lit with a fine unselfconscious mysticism. She answered the question that her mistress raised, for a church of Fifines was likely to outlast time.
It was a pity that she was no better a cook, however: though indeed a high degree of talent would have been wasted on the penitential fare that passed through the Durand kitchen – haricots, stockfish, blood-pudding and chick peas, for the most part. She did not take to Richard for some time: it needed weeks and even months for her kindness to overcome her suspicion of anything new, above all foreign as well as new; but after that she became his frequent companion, and she was certainly the best friend he made in France, the most interesting and agreeable person in that house.
The house itself was built of glazed purple bricks, and it had a high-pitched slate roof; it stood in a vineyard about a mile outside the town, a striking contrast to the usual houses of the neighbourhood, with their white walls, low pink-tiled roofs and small grilled windows. Madame Durand always referred to it as ‘my house’, just as she spoke of ‘my garden’ and ‘my vineyard’. The vineyard was a broad flat expanse of some twelve acres, although it looked larger because there were no hedges to prevent it seeming to merge with the precisely similar vineyards beyond it and to either side: it was planted with seventy-five thousand vines in hundreds and hundreds of perfectly regular rows, an industrial exploitation of the unwilling earth for the manufacture of the lowest grade of common wine. The vineyard came right up to the house on three sides – the house swam
