I wondered how I was to reply. I knew that the letter she would like best would contain news of Southwood: the small details of every day, even to the condition of my dahlias. How was I to deal with my bizarre journey to Istanbul? To mention it only in passing[171] would seem both unnatural and pretentious, but to describe the affair of Colonel Hakim and the gold brick and General Abdul would cause her to feel that my mode of life had entirely changed, and this might increase her sense of separation and of loneliness near Koffiefontein. I asked myself whether it would not be better to refrain from writing at all, but then on the last page her paper had slipped in the machine and the print ran diagonally up into the previous line she had typed, I look forward so to your letters because they bring Southwood close to me. I put her letter away with others of hers that I kept in a drawer of my desk.
It was quite dark now, and yet more than an hour would have to pass before Chicken arrived, so I went to choose a book from my shelves. Like my father, I rarely buy new books, though I dont confine my reading, as he did, to almost a single author. Modern literature has never appealed to me; to my mind it was in the Victorian age that English poetry and fiction reached the highest level. If I had been able to write myself and in my boyhood before my mother found me the position at the bank I sometimes had that dream I would have modelled myself on one of the minor Victorians (for the giants are inimitable): perhaps R.L. Stevenson or even Charles Reade[172]. I have quite a collection too of Wilkie Collins[173], though I prefer him when he is not writing a detective story, for I dont share my aunts taste in that direction. If I could have been a poet I would have been happy in a quite humble station, to be recognized, if at all, as an English Mahony and to have celebrated Southwood as he celebrated Shandon (it is one of my favourite poems in Palgraves Golden Treasury). Perhaps it was Miss Keenes mention of St. Johns Church, the bells of which I can hear on a Sunday morning while I am working in the garden, that made me think of him and take down the volume.
It was quite dark now, and yet more than an hour would have to pass before Chicken arrived, so I went to choose a book from my shelves. Like my father, I rarely buy new books, though I dont confine my reading, as he did, to almost a single author. Modern literature has never appealed to me; to my mind it was in the Victorian age that English poetry and fiction reached the highest level. If I had been able to write myself and in my boyhood before my mother found me the position at the bank I sometimes had that dream I would have modelled myself on one of the minor Victorians (for the giants are inimitable): perhaps R.L. Stevenson or even Charles Reade[172]. I have quite a collection too of Wilkie Collins[173], though I prefer him when he is not writing a detective story, for I dont share my aunts taste in that direction. If I could have been a poet I would have been happy in a quite humble station, to be recognized, if at all, as an English Mahony and to have celebrated Southwood as he celebrated Shandon (it is one of my favourite poems in Palgraves Golden Treasury). Perhaps it was Miss Keenes mention of St. Johns Church, the bells of which I can hear on a Sunday morning while I am working in the garden, that made me think of him and take down the volume.
Theres a bell in Moscow,
While on tower and kiosk O
In Santa Sophia
The Turkman gets;
And loud in air
Calls men to prayer
From the tapering summit
Of tall minarets.
Such empty phantom
I freely grant them;
But there is an anthem
More dear to me
Tis the bells of Shandon,
That sound so grand on
The pleasant waters
Of the River Lee.
The lines on Santa Sophia had never before rung so true: that dingy mausoleum could not compare with our St. Johns and the mention of it would remind me always of Colonel Hakim.
One book leads to another, and I found myself, for the first time in many years, taking down a volume of Walter Scott. I remembered how my father had used the volumes for playing the Sortes Virgilianae a game my mother considered a little blasphemous unless it was played with the Bible, in all seriousness. I sometimes suspected my father had dog-eared various pages[174] so that he could hit on a suitable quotation to tease and astound my mother. Once, when he was suffering severely from constipation, he opened Rob Roy apparently at random and read out, Mr. Owen entered. So regular were the motions and habits of this worthy man I tried the Sortes myself now and was astonished at the apposite nature of the quotation which I picked: I had need of all the spirits a good dinner could give, to resist the dejection which crept insensibly on my mind.
It was only too true that I was depressed: whether it was due to Miss Keenes letter or to the fact that I missed my aunts company more than I had anticipated, or even that Tooley had left a blank behind her, I could not tell. Now that I had no responsibility to anyone but myself, the pleasure of finding again my house and garden had begun to fade. Hoping to discover a more encouraging quotation, I opened Rob Roy again and found a snapshot lying between the leaves: the square yellowing snapshot of a pretty girl in an old-fashioned bathing-dress taken with an old-fashioned Brownie. The girl was bending a little towards the camera; she had just slipped one shoulder out of its strap, and she was laughing, as though she had been surprised at the moment of changing[175]. It was some moments before I recognized Aunt Augusta and my first thought was how attractive she had been in those days. Was it a photograph taken by her sister, I wondered? But it was hardly the kind of photograph my mother would have given my father. I had to admit that it was more likely he had taken it himself and hidden it there in a volume of Scott which my mother would never read. This then was how she had looked she could have hardly been more than eighteen in the long ago days before she knew Curran or Monsieur Dambreuse or Mr. Visconti. She had an air of being ready for anything. A phrase about Die Vernon printed on one of the two pages between which the photograph lay caught my eye: Be patient and quiet, and let me take my own way; for when I take the bit between my teeth, there is no bridle will stop me. Had my father deliberately chosen that page with that particular passage for concealing the picture? I felt the melancholy I sometimes used to experience at the bank when it was my duty to turn over old documents deposited there, the title-deeds of a passion long spent. I thought of my father with an added tenderness of that lazy man lying in his overcoat in the empty bath. I had never seen his grave, for he had died on the only trip which he had ever taken out of England, and I was not even sure of where it lay.
I rang up my aunt, Just to say good night and make sure that all is well.
The apartment, she told me, seems a little solitary without Wordsworth.
I am feeling lonely too without you and Tooley.
No news when you came home?
Only a letter from a friend. She seems lonely too.
I hesitated before I spoke again. Aunt Augusta, I have been thinking, I dont know why, of my father. Its strange how little one knows of ones own family. Do you realize I dont even know where he is buried?
No?
Do you?
Of course.
I would have liked, if only once, to visit his grave.
Cemeteries to me are rather a morbid taste. They have a sour smell like jungles. I suppose it comes from all that wet greenery.
As one grows old, I think, one becomes more attached to family things to houses and graves. I feel very badly that my mother had to finish like that in a police laboratory.
Your stepmother, my aunt corrected me.
Where is my father?
As a half-believing Catholic, Aunt Augusta said, I cannot answer that question with any certainty, but his body, what is left of it, lies in Boulogne.
So near? Why wasnt it brought back?
My sister had a very practical and unsentimental side. Your father had gone to Boulogne without her knowledge on a day excursion. He was taken ill after dinner and died almost immediately. Food poisoning. It was before the days of antibiotics. There had to be an autopsy and my sister didnt like the idea of transporting home a mutilated corpse. So she had him buried in the cemetery there.
Were you present?
I was on tour in Italy. I only heard about it much later. My sister and I didnt correspond.
So youve never seen the grave either?
I once suggested to Mr. Visconti that we make a trip, but his favourite Biblical quotation was, Let the dead bury their dead.
Perhaps one day we might go together.
I am strongly of Mr. Viscontis opinion, but I am always ready for a little travel, my aunt added with unsentimental glee.
This time you must be my guest.
The anniversary of his death, my aunt said, falls on October second. I remember the date because it is the feast day of the Guardian Angel. The Angel seems to have slipped up badly on that occasion, unless of course he was saving your father from a worse fate. That is quite a possibility, for what on earth was your father doing in Boulogne out of season[176]?
Chapter 17
Chapter 17
Strangely enough, I felt almost immediately at home in Boulogne.
As the direct boat from Folkestone no longer sailed, we took the Golden Arrow from Victoria, and I was relieved to notice that my aunt had not brought with her the red suitcase. The English side of the Channel lay bathed in a golden autumn sunlight. By the time we reached Petts Wood the buses had all turned green, and at Orpington the oast-houses began to appear with their white cowls like plumes in a medieval helmet. The hops climbing their poles were more decorative than vines, and I would gladly have given all the landscape between Milan and Venice for these twenty miles of Kent. There were comfortable skies and unspectacular streams; there were ponds with rushes and cows which seemed contentedly asleep. This was the pleasant land of which Blake[177] wrote, and I found myself regretting that we were going abroad again. Why had my father not died in Dover or Folkestone, both equally convenient for a days excursion?
And yet when at last we came to Boulogne, stepping out of the one coach from Calais reserved for that port on the Fleche dOr, I felt that I was at home. The skies had turned grey and the air was cold and there were flurries of rain along the quays, but there was a photograph of the Queen over the reception desk in our hotel, and on the windows of a brasserie[178] I could read GOOD CUP OF TEA. EAST KENT COACH PARTIES WELCOME HERE. The leaden gulls which hovered over the fishing boats in the leaden evening had an East Anglian air. A scarlet sign flashed over the Gare Maritime saying CAR FERRY and BRITISH RAILWAYS.
It was too late that evening to search for my fathers grave (in any case, the next day was his true anniversary), and so my aunt and I walked up together to the Ville Haute and strolled around the ramparts and through the small twisted streets which reminded me of Rye. In the great crypt of the cathedral an English king had been married, there were cannon balls lying there shot by the artillery of Henry VIII, and in a little square below the walls was a statue of Edward Jenner[179] in a brown tailed-coat and brown tasselled boots. An old film of Treasure Island with Robert Newton was showing at a small cinema in a side-street not far from a club called Le Lucky, where you could listen to the music of the Hearthmen. No, my father had not been buried on foreign soil. Boulogne was like a colonial town which had only recently ceased to be part of the Empire, and British Railways lingered on at the end of the quay as though it had been granted permission to stay until the evacuation was complete. Locked bathing-huts below the casino were like the last relics of the occupying troops, and the mounted statue of General San Martín[180] on the quay might have been that of Wellington[181]. We had dinner in the restaurant of the Gare Maritime, after walking over the cobble-stones and across the railway lines with no one about. The pillars of the station resembled the pillars in a cathedral deserted after dark: only a train from Lyon was announced like a hymn number which no one had bothered to take down. No porter or passenger stirred on the long platforms. The British Railways office stood empty and unlighted. There was a smell everywhere of oil and weed and sea and a memory of the mornings fish. In the restaurant we proved to be the sole diners: only two men and a dog stood at the bar and they were preparing to go. My aunt ordered soles à la Boulonnaise for both of us.