The Kindly Ones

1

ALBERT, FLESHY, SALLOW, BLUE CHINNED, breathing hard, sweating a little, fitted an iron bar into sockets on either side of the wooden shutters he had just closed across the final window of the stable-block. Rolled shirt-sleeves, green baize apron, conferred a misleadingly businesslike appearance, instantly dispelled by carpet-slippers of untold shabbiness which encased his large, chronically tender feet. All work except cooking abhorrent to him, he went through the required movements with an air of weariness, almost of despair. In those days he must have been in his middle to late thirties. We were on good terms, although he possessed no special liking for children. Indeed, I was supposedly helping him lock up these outbuildings for the night, a task in principle all but completely accomplished, for some unknown reason, in late afternoon. Up to that moment, it is true, I had done no more than examine a coloured picture, fastened to the wall by four rusting drawing-pins, of Mr Lloyd George, fancifully conceived as extending from his mouth an enormous scarlet tongue, on the liquescent surface of which a female domestic servant in cap and apron, laughing heartily as if she much enjoyed the contact, was portrayed vigorously moistening the gum of a Health Insurance stamp. I was still contemplating this lively image of state-aided social service — which appeared in some manner to hint at behaviour unseemly, even downright improper — when night, as if arbitrarily induced at that too early hour by Albert’s lethargic exertions, fell abruptly in the shuttered room, blurring all at once the outlines of the anonymous artist’s political allegory. Albert withdrew ponderously from the dusk now surrounding us. I followed him into the broad daylight of the yard, where tall pine trees respired on the summer air a resinous, somehow alien odour, gently disinfectant like the gardens of a sanatorium in another country than England.

‘Don’t want any of them Virgin Marys busting in and burning the place down,’ Albert said.

Aware of a faint sense of horror at the prospect of so monstrous a contingency — enigmatic, no less than unhallowed, in its heretical insistence on plurality — I asked explanation.

‘Suffragettes.’

‘But they won’t come here?’

‘Never know.’

‘Do you think they will?’

‘Can’t tell what those hussies will do next.’

I felt in agreement with Albert that the precariousness of life was infinite. I pondered his earlier phrase. It was disconcerting. Why had he called suffragettes ‘Virgin Marys’? Then I remembered a fact that might throw light on obscurity. At lessons that morning — the subject classical mythology — Miss Orchard had spoken of the manner in which the Greeks, because they so greatly feared the Furies, had named them the Eumenides — the Kindly Ones — flattery intended to appease their terrible wrath. Albert’s figure of speech was no doubt employed with a similar end in view towards suffragettes. He was by nature an apprehensive man; fond, too, of speaking in riddles. I recalled Miss Orchard’s account of the Furies. They inflicted the vengeance of the gods by bringing in their train war, pestilence, dissension on earth; torturing, too, by the stings of conscience. That last characteristic alone, I could plainly see, made them sufficiently unwelcome guests. So feared were they, Miss Orchard said, that no man mentioned their names, nor fixed his eyes upon their temples. In that respect, at least, the Furies differed from the suffragettes, whose malevolence was perpetually discussed by persons like Edith and Mrs Gullick, the former of whom had even seen suffragette processions on the march under their mauve-and-green banners. At the same time, the nature of suffragette aggression seemed to bear, in other respects, worthy comparison with that of the Furies, feminine, too, so far as could be judged, equally the precursors of fire and destruction. Thought of them turned my mind to other no less awe-inspiring, in some ways even more fascinating, local terrors with which we might have to contend during the hours of darkness.

‘Has Billson seen the ghost again?’

Albert shook his head, giving the impression that the subject of spectres, generally speaking, appealed to him less than to myself. He occupied one of the two or three small rooms beyond the loose-boxes, where he slept far away from the rest of the household. The occasional intrusion of Bracey into another of the stable rooms offered small support where ghosts were concerned. Bracey’s presence was intermittent, and, in any case, there was not sufficient fellow-feeling between the two of them to create a solid resistance to such visitations. It was, therefore, reasonable enough, since he inhabited such lonely quarters, for Albert to prefer no undue emphasis to be laid on the possibilities of supernatural appearance even in the house itself. To tell the truth, there was always something a little frightening about the stable-block in daytime too. The wooden bareness of its interior enjoyably reconstructed — in my own unrestricted imagination — a log cabin or palisade, loop-holed and bullet-scarred, to be defended against Zulus or Red Indians. In such a place, after nightfall, the bravest might give way to nameless dread of the occult world; more to be feared, indeed, than any crude physical onslaught from suffragettes, whose most far-fetched manifestations of spite and perversity would scarcely extend to an incendiary attack on the Stonehurst stables.

The ‘ghosts’ of Stonehurst, on the other hand, were a recognised feature of the place, almost an amenity in my own eyes, something far more real than suffragettes. Billson, the parlourmaid, had waked at an early hour only a week or two before to find a white shape of immense height standing beside her bed, disappearing immediately before she had time to come fully to her senses. That, in itself, might have been dismissed as a wholly imaginary experience, something calling for banter rather than sympathy or interest. Billson, however, confessed she had also on an earlier occasion found herself confronted with this or another very similar apparition, a spectre unfortunately reported in much the same terms by Billson’s immediate predecessor. In short, it looked very much as if the house was undeniably ‘haunted’. Maids were, in any case, disinclined to stay in so out-of-the-way a place as Stonehurst. Ghosts were likely to be no encouragement. Perhaps it was a coincidence that two unusually ‘highly strung’ persons had followed each other in that particular maid’s bedroom. Neither Albert himself, nor Mercy, the housemaid, had at present been subjected to such an ordeal. On the other hand, my nurse, Edith (herself, before my own day, a housemaid), had from time to time heard mysterious rappings in the night-nursery, noises which could not — as first supposed — be attributed to myself. What was more, my mother admitted to a recurrent sense, sometimes even in the day, of an uncomfortable presence in her bedroom. At night, there, she had waked once or twice overwhelmed with an inexplicable feeling of doom and horror. I record these things merely as a then accepted situation. Such circumstances might have been disregarded in a more rationalistic family; in one less metaphysically flexible, they could have caused agitation. In my own, they were received without scepticism, at the same time without undue trepidation. Any discussion on the subject took place usually behind closed doors, simply in order that the house should not acquire a reputation which might dry up entirely the sources of domestic staff. No effort was made to keep such talk from my own ears. My mother — together with her sisters in their unmarried days — had always indulged a taste for investigation of the Unseen World, which even the threatened inconveniences of the Stonehurst ‘ghosts’ could not entirely quench. My father, not equally on terms with such hidden forces, was at the same time no less imbued with belief. In short, the ‘ghosts’ were an integral, an essential part of the house; indeed, its salient feature.

All the same, hauntings were scarcely to be expected in this red-tiled bungalow, which was almost capacious, or so it seemed in those days, on account of its extreme, unnatural elongation. It had been built only thirteen or fourteen years before — about 1900, in fact — by some retired soldier, anxious to preserve in his final seclusion tangible reminder of service in India, at the same time requiring nothing of architecture likely to hint too disturbingly of the exotic splendours of Eastern fable. Stonehurst, it was true, might be thought a trifle menacing in appearance, even ill-omened, but not in the least exotic. Its configuration suggested a long, low Noah’s Ark, come uncomfortably to rest on a heather-grown, coniferous spur of Mount Ararat; a Noah’s Ark, the opened lid of which would reveal myself, my parents, Edith, Albert, Billson, Mercy, several dogs and cats, and, at certain seasons, Bracey and Mrs Gullick.

‘Tell her to give over,’ said Albert, adverting to the subject of Billson and her ‘ghost’. ‘Too much cold pork and pickles. That’s all the matter. Got into trouble with the indigestion merchants, or off her nut, one or the other. She’ll find herself locked up with the loonies if she takes on so.’

‘Billson said she’d give notice if it happened again.’

‘Give notice, I don’t think.’

‘Won’t she, then?’

‘Not while I’m here she won’t give notice. Don’t you believe it.’

Albert shook off one of his ancient bedroom slippers, adjusting the thick black woollen sock at the apex of the foot, where, not over clean, the nail of a big toe protruded from a hole at the end. Albert was an oddity, an exceptional member of the household, not only in himself and his office, but in relation to the whole character of my parents’ establishment. He had started life as hall-boy — later promoted footman — in my mother’s home before her marriage. After my grandmother’s death — the dissolution, as it always seemed in Albert’s reminiscence, of an epoch — he had drifted about from place to place, for the most part unhappily. Sometimes he quarrelled with the butler; sometimes his employers made too heavy demands on his time; sometimes, worst of all, the cook, or one of the maids, fell in love with him. Love, of course, in such cases, meant marriage. Albert was not, I think, at all interested in love affairs of an irregular kind; nor, for that matter, did he in the least wish to take a wife. On that subject, he felt himself chronically persecuted by women, especially by the most determined of his tormentors (given to writing him long, threatening letters), whom he used to call ‘the girl from Bristol’. This preoccupation with the molestations of the opposite sex probably explained his fears that evening of suffragette attack.

In the end, after moving from London to the country, from the country back to London, up to Cumberland, down to Cardigan, Albert had written to my mother — habitually in touch with almost everyone who had ever worked for her — suggesting that, as she was soon to lose a cook, he himself should exchange to that profession, which had always appealed to him, the art of cooking running in his blood through both parents. He was, indeed, known, even in his days as footman, for proficiency in cooking, which had come to him almost by the light of nature. His offer was, therefore, at once accepted, though not without a few privately expressed reservations as to the possibility of Albert’s turning out a ‘handful’. ‘Handful’ to some extent he was. Certainly his cooking was no disappointment. That was soon clear. The question why he should prefer employment with a family who lived on so unpretentious a scale, when he might have found little or no difficulty in obtaining a situation as chef in much grander circumstances, with more money and greater prestige, is not easily resolved. Lack of enterprise, physical indolence, liking for the routine of a small domestic community, all no doubt played a part; as also, perhaps, did the residue from a long-forgotten past, some feudal secretion, dormant, yet never entirely defunct within his bones, which predisposed him towards a family with whom he had been associated in his early days of service. That might have been. At the same time, such sentiments, even if they existed, were certainly not to be romantically exaggerated. Albert had few, if any, illusions. For example, he was not at all keen on Stonehurst as a place of residence. The house was little to his taste. He often said so. In this opinion there was no violent dissent from other quarters. Indeed, all concerned agreed in thinking it just as well we should not have to live at Stonehurst for ever, the bungalow being rented ‘furnished’ on a short renewable lease, while my father’s battalion was stationed in the Aldershot Command.

The property stood in country partaking in general feature of the surroundings of that uniquely detestable town, although wilder, more deserted, than its own immediate outskirts. The house, built at the summit of a steep hill, was reached by a stony road — the uneven, treacherous surface of pebbles probably accounting for the name — which turned at a right-angle halfway up the slope, running between a waste of gorse and bracken, from out of which emerged an occasional ivy-strangled holly tree or withered fir: landscape of seemingly purposeful irresponsibility, intentional rejection of all scenic design. In winter, torrents of water gushed over the pebbles and down the ruts of this slippery route (perilous to those who, like General Conyers, attempted the journey in the cars of those days) which continued for two or three hundred yards at the top of the hill, passing the Stonehurst gate. The road then bifurcated, aiming in one direction towards a few barely visible roofs, clustered together on the distant horizon; in the other, entering a small plantation of pine trees, where Gullick, the Stonehurst gardener (fascinatingly described once by Edith in my unobserved presence as ‘born out of wedlock’), lived in his cottage with Mrs Gullick. Here, the way dwindled to a track, then became a mere footpath, leading across a vast expanse of heather, its greyish, pinkish tones stained all the year round with great gamboge patches of broom: country taking fire easily in hot summers.

The final limits of the Stonehurst estate, an extensive wired-in tract of desert given over to the devastations of a vast brood of much interbred chickens, bordered the heath, which stretched away into the dim distance, the heather rippling in waves like an inland sea overgrown with weed. Between the chickens and the house lay about ten acres of garden, flower beds, woodland, a couple of tennis courts. The bungalow itself was set away from the road among tall pines. Behind it, below a bank of laurel and Irish yews, espaliered roses sloped towards a kitchen-garden, where Gullick, as if gloomily contemplating the accident of his birth, was usually to be found pottering among the vegetables, foretelling a bad season for whichever crop he stood among. Beyond the white-currant bushes, wild country began again, separated from Stonehurst civilisation by only a low embankment of turf. This was the frontier of a region more than a little captivating — like the stables — on account of its promise of adventure. Dark, brooding plantations of trees; steep, sandy slopes; soft, velvet expanses of green moss, across which rabbits and weasels incessantly hurried on their urgent business: a terrain created for the eternal campaign of warring armies, whose unceasing operations justified recognition of Albert’s sleeping-quarters as the outworks of a barbican, or stockade, to be kept in a permanent state of defence. Here, among these woods and clearings, sand and fern, silence and the smell of pine brought a kind of release to the heart, together with a deep-down wish for something, something more than battles, perhaps not battles at all; something realised, even then, as nebulous, blissful, all but unattainable: a feeling of uneasiness, profound and oppressive, yet oddly pleasurable at times, at other times so painful as to be almost impossible to bear.

‘General and Mrs Conyers are coming next week,’ I said.

‘It was me told you that,’ said Albert.

‘Will you cook something special for them?’

‘You bet.’

‘Something very special?’

‘A mousse, I ’spect.’

‘Will they like it?’

‘Course they will.’

‘What did Mrs Conyers’s father do to you?’

‘I told you.’

‘Tell me again.’

‘All years ago, when I was with the Alfords.’

‘When you helped him on with his overcoat ‘

‘Put a mouse down the sleeve.’

‘A real one?’

‘Course not — clockwork.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Let out a yell.’

‘Did they all laugh?’

‘Not half, they did.’

‘Why did he do it?’

‘Used to tell me, joking like, “I’ve got a grudge against you, Albert, you don’t treat me right, always telling me her Ladyship’s not at home when I want most to see her. I’m going to pay you out” — so that’s what he did one day.’

‘Perhaps General Conyers will play a trick on Bracey.’

‘Not him.’

‘Why not?’

‘Wasn’t General Conyers put the mouse down the sleeve, it were Lord Vowchurch. No one’s going to do a thing like that to Bracey — let alone General Conyers.’

‘When does Bracey come back from leave?’

‘Day-after-tomorrow.’

‘Where did he go?’

‘Luton.’

‘What did he do there?’

‘Stay with his sister-in-law.’

‘Bracey said he was glad to get back after his last leave.’

‘Won’t be this time if the Captain has something to say to him about that second-best full-dress tunic put away in the wrong place.’

Bracey was the soldier-servant, a man unparalleled in smartness of turn-out. His appearance suggested a fox-terrier, a clockwork fox-terrier perhaps (like Lord Vowchurch’s clockwork mouse), since there was much of the automaton about him, especially when he arrived on a bicycle. Sometimes, as I have said, he was quartered in the stables with Albert. Bracey and Albert were not on the best of terms. That was only to be expected. Indeed, it was a ‘miracle’ — so I had heard my parents agree — that the two of them collaborated even so well as they did, ‘which wasn’t saying much’. Antagonism between soldier-servant and other males of the establishment was, of course, traditional. In the case of female members of the staff, association might, still worse, become amorous. Indeed, this last situation existed to some extent at Stonehurst, where the endemic difficulties of a remote location were increased by the burden of Bracey’s temperament, moody as Albert’s, though in an utterly different manner.

Looking back, I take Bracey to have been younger than Albert, although, at Stonehurst, a large moustache and face shiny with frenzied scrubbing and shaving made Bracey seem the more time-worn. Unmarried, he was one of those old-fashioned regular soldiers with little or no education — scarcely able to read or write, and on that account debarred from promotion — whose years of spotless turn-out and absolute reliability in minor matters had won him a certain status, indeed, wide indulgence where his own idiosyncrasies were concerned. These idiosyncrasies could be fairly troublesome at times. Bracey was the victim of melancholia. No one seemed to know the precise origin of this affliction: some early emotional mishap; heredity; self-love allowed to get out of hand — any of these could have caused his condition. He came of a large family, greatly dispersed, most of them earning a respectable living; although I once heard Edith and Billson muttering together about a sister of Bracey’s said to have been found drowned in the Thames estuary. One brother was a bricklayer in Cardiff; another, a cabman in Liverpool. Bracey liked neither of these brothers. He told me that himself. He greatly preferred the sister-in-law at Luton, who was, I think, a widow. That was why he spent his leave there.

Bracey’s periodic vexation of spirit took the form of his ‘funny days’. Sometimes he would have a ‘funny day’ when on duty in the house. These always caused dismay. A ‘funny day’ in barracks, however trying to his comrades, could not have been equally provoking in that less intimate, more spacious accommodation. Perhaps Bracey had decided to become an officer’s servant in order that his ‘funny days’ should enjoy their full force. On one of these occasions at Stonehurst, he would sit on a kitchen chair, facing the wall, speaking to no one, motionless as a man fallen into a state of catalepsy. This would take place, of course, only after he had completed all work deputed to him, since he was by nature unyieldingly industrious. The burden of his melancholy was visited on his colleagues, rather than my parents, who had to put up with no more than a general air of incurable glumness diffused about the house, concentrated only whenever Bracey himself was addressed by one or other of them. My father would sometimes rebel against this aggressive, even contagious, depression — to which he was himself no stranger — and then there would be a row. That was rare. In the kitchen, on the other hand, they had to bear with Bracey. On such occasions, when mealtimes approached, Bracey would be asked, usually by Billson, if he wanted anything to eat. There would be silence. Bracey would not turn his head.

‘Albert has made an Irish stew,’ Billson — as reported by Edith — might say. ‘It’s a nice stew. Won’t you have a taste, Private Bracey?’

At first Bracey would not answer. Billson might then repeat the question, together with an inquiry as to whether Bracey would accept a helping of the stew, or whatever other dish was available, from her own hand. This ritual might continue for several minutes, Billson giggling, though with increased nervousness, because of the personal element involved in Bracey’s sadness. This was the fact that he was known to be ‘sweet on’ Billson herself, who refused to accept him as a suitor. Flattered by Bracey’s attentions, she was probably alarmed at the same time by his melancholic fits, especially since her own temperament was a nervous one. In any case, she was always very self-conscious about ‘men’.

‘I’ll have it, if it is my right,’ Bracey would at last answer in a voice not much above a whisper.

‘Shall I help you to a plate then, Private Bracey?’

‘If it’s my right, I’ll have a plate.’

‘Then I’ll give you some stew?’

‘If it’s my right.’

‘Shall I?’

‘Only if it’s my right.’

So long as the ‘funny day’ lasted, Bracey would commit himself to no more gracious acknowledgment than those words, spoken as if reiterating some charm or magical formula. No wonder the kitchen was disturbed. Behaviour of this sort was very different from Albert’s sardonic, worldly dissatisfaction with life, his chronic complaint of persecution at the hands of women.

‘I haven’t had one of my funny days for a long time,’

Bracey, pondering his own condition, would sometimes remark.

There was usually another ‘funny day’ pretty soon after self-examination had revealed that fact. Indeed, the observation in itself could be regarded as a very positive warning that a ‘funny day’ was on the way. He was a great favourite with my father, who may have recognised in Bracey some of his own uncalm, incurious nature. From time to time, as I have said, there was an explosion: dire occasions when Bracey would be ordered back to the regiment at twenty-four hours’ notice, usually after a succession of ‘funny days’ had made kitchen society so unendurable that life in the world at large had also become seriously contaminated with nervous strain. In the end, he was always forgiven. Afterwards, for several weeks, every object upon which a lustre could possibly be imposed that fell into Bracey’s hands would be burnished brighter than ever before, reduced almost to nothingness by energetic scouring.

‘Good old Bracey,’ my father would say. ‘He has his faults, of course, but he does know the meaning of elbow-grease. I’ve never met a man who could make top-boots shine like Bracey. They positively glitter.’

‘I’m sure he would do anything for you,’ my mother would say.

She held her own, never voiced, less enthusiastic, views on Bracey.

‘He worships you,’ she would add.

‘Oh, nonsense.’

‘He does.’

‘Of course not.’

‘I say he does.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

This apparently contrary opinion of my father’s — the sequence of the sentences never varied — conveyed no strong sense of disagreement with the opinion my mother had expressed. Indeed, she probably put the case pretty justly. Bracey certainly had a high regard for my father. Verbal description of everything, however, must remain infinitely distant from the thing itself, overstatement and understatement sometimes hitting off the truth better than a flat assertion of bare fact. Bearing in mind, therefore, the all but hopeless task of attempting to express accurately the devious involutions of human character and emotions, you might equally have said with some authenticity that Billson was loved by Bracey, while Billson herself loved Albert. Albert, for his part, possessed that touch of narcissism to be found in some artists whatever their medium — for Albert was certainly an artist in cooking-and apparently loved no one but himself. To make these clumsy statements about an immensely tenuous complex of relationships without hedging them in with every kind of limitation of meaning would be to give a very wrong impression of the kitchen at Stonehurst. At the same time, the situation must basically have resolved itself to something very like these uncompromising terms: a triangular connexion which, by its own awful, eternal infelicity, could almost be regarded by those most concerned as absolutely in the nature of things. Its implications confirmed, so to speak, their worst fears, the individual inner repinings of those three, Billson, Bracey and Albert: Albert believing, with some excuse, that ‘the women were after him again’; Bracey, in his own unrequited affections, finding excuse for additional ‘funny days’; Billson, in Albert’s indifference and Bracey’s aspirations, establishing corroboration of her burning, her undying, contempt for men and their lamentable goings-on.

‘Just like a man,’ Billson used to say, in her simile for human behaviour at its lowest, most despicable.

In spite of her rapid accumulation of experience, both emotional and supernatural, while living at Stonehurst, Billson had not been with us long, two or three months perhaps. Like Albert, she must have been in her late thirties, though my mother used to say Billson looked ‘very young for her age’. Like Bracey, Billson, too, came of a large family, to whom, unlike Bracey, she was devoted. She talked without end about her relations, who lived, most of them, in Suffolk. Billson was fond of telling Edith that her people ‘thought a lot of themselves’. Fair, not bad-looking, there was something ageless about Billson. Even as a child, I was aware of that. She had been employed at a number of ‘good’ houses in London: the only reason, so Albert used to imply, why he was himself so indulgent of her vagaries. A ‘disappointment’ — said to have been a butler — was known to have upset her in early life, made her ‘nervy’, too much inclined to worry about her health. One of the many doctors consulted at one time or another had advised a ‘situation’ in the country, where, so the physician told her, she would be less subject to periodical attacks of nausea, feelings of faintness. London air, Billson often used to complain, did not suit her. This condition of poorish health, especially her ‘nerves’, explained Billson’s presence at Stonehurst, where maids of her experience were hard to acquire.

Behind her back (with reference to the supposed poverty of intellectual resource to be found in the county of her origin), Albert used to call Billson ‘Silly Suffolk’, and complain of her clumsiness, which was certainly notable. To her face, he was more respectful, not, I think, from chivalrous feelings, but because he feared too much badinage on his own part might be turned against himself, offering Billson indirect means of increasing their intimacy. Billson, in spite — perhaps because — of her often expressed disdain for men (even with Albert her love took a distinctly derisive shape), rated high her own capacity for raising desire in them. She would never, for example, mount a step-ladder (for some such purpose as to re-hang the drawing-room curtains) if my father, Albert or Bracey happened to be in the room. She always took care to explain afterwards that modesty — risk of exposing to a male eye even a minute area of female leg — was her reason for avoiding this physical elevation. I never learnt the precise form taken by her ‘chasing after’ Albert, about which even Edith — on the whole pretty discreet — was at times prepared to joke, nor, for that matter, the method — equally accepted by Edith — by which Bracey courted Billson. Bracey, it is true, would sometimes offer to clean the silver for her, a job he certainly performed better than she did. It was also true that Billson would sometimes tease Albert by subjecting him to her invariable, her all-embracing pessimism. She could also, of course, show pessimism about Bracey’s affairs, but in a far less interested tone.

‘Pity it’s going to rain now your afternoon off’s come round, Albert,’ she would say. ‘Not that you can want to go into Aldershot much after losing the money on that horse. Why, you must be stony broke. If you’re not quick you’ll miss the carrier again.’

To Bracey she would be more formal.

‘I expect you’ll have to go on one of those route-marches, Private Bracey, now the hot weather’s come on.’

Billson would upset Albert fairly regularly every few weeks by her fearful forebodings of ill. Once, when she saw the local constable plodding up the drive, she had rushed into the kitchen in a state of uncontrolled agitation.

‘Albert!’ she had cried, ‘what have you done? There’s a policeman coming to the door.’

Albert, as I have said, was easily frightened himself. On this occasion, so Edith reported, he ‘went as white as a sheet’. It was a relief to everyone when the subject of inquiry turned out to be nothing worse than a dog-licence. I did not, of course, know all these things at the time, certainly not the relative strength of the emotions imprisoned under the surface of passing events at Stonehurst. Even now, much remains conjectural. Edith and I, naturally, enjoyed a rather separate existence, segregated within the confines of night- and day-nursery. There was also, to take up one’s time, Miss Orchard, who — teaching all children of the neighbourhood — visited the house regularly. Edith, reasonably enough, felt the boundaries of her own domain were not to be too far exceeded by intrusion on my part into kitchen routine; while Miss Orchard’s ‘lessons’ occupied important expanses of the day. All the same, I did not propose to allow myself to be excluded utterly from a society in which life was lived with such intensity. Edith used to suffer from terrible ‘sick headaches’ every three or four weeks (not unlike Billson’s bouts of nausea), and from what she herself called ‘small aches and pains few people die of’, so that, with Edith laid low in this manner, my parents away from home, Miss Orchard teaching elsewhere, the veil would be lifted for a short space from many things usually hidden. As a child you are in some ways more acutely aware of what people feel about one another than you are when childhood has come to an end.

For that reason, I always suspected that Billson would — to use her favourite phrase — ‘get her own back’ on Albert for calling her ‘Silly Suffolk’, even though I was at the same time unaware, of course, that her aggressiveness had its roots in love. Indeed, so far was I from guessing the true situation that, with some idea of arranging the world, as then known to me, in a neat pattern, I once suggested to Billson that she should marry Bracey. She laughed so heartily (like the maid damping the Insurance stamp on Mr Lloyd George’s tongue) at this certainly very presumptuous suggestion, while assuring me with such absolute candour of her own determination to remain for ever single, that — not for the last time within similar terms of reference — I was completely taken in.

‘Anyway,’ said Billson, ‘I wouldn’t have a soldier. None of my family would ever look at a soldier. Why, they’d disown me.’

This absolute disallowance of the profession of arms as the calling of a potential husband could not have been more explicitly expressed. Indeed, Billson’s words on that occasion gave substantial grounds for the defiant shape taken by Bracey’s bouts of gloom. There was good reason to feel depression if this was what women felt about his situation. A parallel prejudice against even military companionship, much less marriage, was shared by Edith.

‘Nice girls don’t walk out with soldiers,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘They don’t.’

‘Who says not?’

‘Everybody says not.’

‘But why not?’

‘Ask anybody.’

‘Not even the Life Guards?’

‘No.’

‘Nor the Blues?’

‘Tommies are all the same.’

That seemed to settle matters finally so far as Bracey was concerned. There appeared to be no hope. There was Mercy, the housemaid, but even my own reckless projects for adjusting everyone else’s personal affairs according to my whim did not include such a fate for Bracey. I could see that was not a rational proposition. In fact, it was out of the question. There were several reasons. In the first place, Mercy herself played little or no part in the complex of personalities who inhabited the Stonehurst kitchen — no emotional part, at least. Certainly Mercy herself had no desire to do so. She was a quite young girl from one of the villages in the neighbourhood, found for my mother by Mrs Gullick. Together with her parents, Mercy belonged to a local religious sect, so small that it embraced only about twenty individuals, all related to one another.

‘They don’t believe anyone else is going to Heaven,’ Edith said of this communion.

‘No one at all?’

‘Not a single soul.’

‘Why not?’

‘They say they’re the only ones saved.’

‘Why?’

‘Call themselves the Elect.’

‘They aren’t the only people going to Heaven.’

‘I should just about think not.’

‘They are silly to say that.’

‘Silly, no error.’

Billson went still further than Edith on the same theological issue.

‘That girl won’t be saved herself,’ she said. ‘Not if she goes about repeating such things of her neighbours. God won’t want her.’

The positivist character of Mercy’s religious beliefs, more especially in relation to the categorical damnation of the rest of mankind, was expressed outwardly in a taciturn demeanour, defined by Edith as ‘downright disobliging’, her creed no doubt discouraging frivolous graces of manner. In personal appearance, she was equally severe, almost deliberately unprepossessing.

‘Her face will never be her fortune,’ Albert once remarked, when Mercy had left the kitchen in a huff after some difference about washing up.

Even Bracey, with all his unvoiced disapproval of Albert, was forced to laugh at the wit, the aptness of this observation. Bracey was, in any case, cheerful enough between his ‘funny days’. If his spirits, at the lowest, were very low indeed, they also rose, at other moments, to heights never attained by Albert’s. On such occasions, when he felt all comparatively well with the world, Bracey would softly hum under his breath:

‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,

May be merry and bright.

But I’m going to be married on Sunday;

Oh, I wish it was Sunday night.’

Earlier in the year, during one of these bursts of cheerfulness, Bracey had offered to take me to see a football match. This was an unexpected, a highly acceptable invitation. It always seemed to me a matter of complaint that, although my father was a soldier, we saw at Stonehurst, in practice, little or nothing of the army, that is to say, the army as such. We lived on this distant hilltop, miles away from the daily activities of troops, who were to be sighted only very occasionally on some local exercise to which summer manoeuvres had fortunately brought them. Even so much as the solitary outline of a Military Policeman was rare, jogging his horse across the heather, a heavy brushstroke of dark blue, surmounted by a tiny blob of crimson, moving in the sun through a Vuillard landscape of pinkish greys streaked with yellow and silver. I had mentioned to Bracey the sight of one of these lonely riders. He showed no warmth.

‘Them Redcaps ain’t loved all that.’

‘Aren’t they?’

‘Not likely.’

‘What do they do?’

‘Run a bloke in soon as look at him.’

‘What for?’

‘They’ll find somethink.’

‘What happens to him?’

‘Does a spell of clink.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Put behind bars.’

‘But they let him out sometime?’

‘Twenty-eight days, might be, if he’s lucky.’

‘In prison?’

‘Some blokes want to get even when they comes out.’

‘How?’

‘Waits behind a hedge on a dark night.’

‘And then ‘

‘Takes the Redcap unawares like. Makes an ambush like. Give him a hiding.’

I accepted this picture of relaxed discipline in the spirit offered by Bracey, that is to say, without expression of praise or blame. Clearly he had described one of those aspects of army life kept, generally speaking, in the background, a world of violent action from which Stonehurst seemed for ever excluded.

Nor was our separation from the army only geographical. Military contacts were further lessened by my mother’s distaste — her morbid horror, almost — of officers’ wives who were ‘regimental’ — ladies who speculated on the Battalion’s chances of winning the Cup, or discussed with too exact knowledge the domestic crises in the life of Mrs Colour-Sergeant Jones. My mother did not, in fact, enjoy any form of ‘going out’, military or civilian. Before marriage, she had been keen enough on parties and balls, but, my father having little or no taste for such amusements, she forgot about them herself, then developed greater dislike than his own. Even in those distant days my parents had begun to live a life entirely enclosed by their own domestic interests. There was a certain amount of routine ‘calling’, of course; subalterns came to tennis-parties; children to nursery-tea.

Bracey’s invitation to the football match was therefore welcome, not so much because I was greatly interested in football but more on account of the closer contact the jaunt offered with army life. Permission was asked for the projected excursion. It was accorded by authority. Bracey and I set off together in a dog-cart, Bracey wearing blue walking-out dress, with slight screws of wax at each end of his moustache, a small vanity affected by him on important occasions. I had hoped he would be armed with a bayonet, but was disappointed. It seemed just worthwhile asking if he had merely forgotten it.

‘Only sergeants carries sidearms, walking out.’

‘Why?’

‘Regulation.’

‘Don’t you ever?’

‘On parade.’

‘Never else?’

‘Reckon we will when the Germans comes.’

The humorous possibilities of a German invasion I had often heard adumbrated. Sometimes my father — in spite of my mother’s extreme dislike of the subject, even in jest — would refer to this ludicrous, if at the same time rather sinister — certainly grossly insulting — incursion as something inevitable in the future, like a visit to the dentist or ultimately going to school.

‘You’ll carry a bayonet always if the Germans come?’

‘You bet.’

‘You’ll need it.’

‘Bayonet’s a man’s best friend in time of war,’ said Bracey.

‘And a rifle?’

‘And a rifle,’ Bracey conceded. ‘Rifle and bayonet’s a man’s best friend when he goes to battle.’

I thought a lot about that remark afterwards. Clearly its implications raised important moral issues, if not, indeed, conflicting judgments. I used to ponder, for example, what appeared to be its basic scepticism, so different from the supreme confidence in the claims of heroic companionship put forward in all the adventure stories one read. (Thirty years later, Sunny Farebrother — in contrast with Bracey — told me that, even though he cared little for most books, he sometimes re-read For Name and Fame; or Through Khyber Passes, simply because Henty’s narrative recalled to him so vividly the comradeship he had himself always enjoyed under arms.) Bracey shared none of the uplifting sentiments of the adventure stories. That was plain. Even within my own then strictly limited experience, I could see, unwillingly, that there might be something to be said for Bracey’s point of view. All the same, I knew Bracey had himself seen no active service. His opinion on such subjects must be purely theoretical. In short, the door was not irretrievably closed on the romantic approach. I felt glad of that. During the rest of our journey to the Barracks, however, Bracey did not enlarge further upon the theme of weapons versus friendship.

We had a brief conversation at the gate with the Orderly Corporal, stabled the pony, set off across the parade-ground. The asphalt square was deserted except for three figures pacing its far side, moving briskly and close together, as if attempting to keep warm in the sharp weather of early spring. This trio marched up and down continually, always turning about at the same point in their beat. The two outside soldiers wore equipment; the central file was beltless, his right hand done up in a white bandage.

‘Who are they?’

‘Prisoner and escort.’

‘What are they doing?’

‘Exercising a bloke under arrest.’

‘What’s he done?’

‘Chopped off his trigger finger.’

‘By accident?’

‘Course not.’

‘How, then?’

‘With a bill.’

‘On purpose?’

‘You bet.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Saw his name in Orders on the draft for India.’

‘Why didn’t he like that?’

‘Thought the climate wouldn’t suit him, I reckon.’

‘But he won’t have any finger.’

‘Won’t have to go to India neither.’

‘Were you surprised?’

‘Not particular.’

‘Why not?’

‘Nothing those young blokes won’t do.’

Once again Bracey expressed no judgment on the subject of this violent action, but I was aware on this occasion of a sense of disapproval stronger than any he had allowed to take shape in relation to assaulting Military Policemen. Here, certainly, was another story to make one ponder. I saw that the private soldier under arrest must have felt a very active dislike for the thought of army life in the East to have taken so extreme a step to avoid service there: a contrast with the builder of Stonehurst, deliberately reminding himself by the contents and architecture of his house of former Indian days. Like Bracey’s picture of ambushed Redcaps, the three khaki figures, sharply advancing and retiring across the far side of the square, demonstrated a seamy, menacing side of army life, one which perhaps explained to some extent the reprobation in which Edith and Billson held soldiers as husbands. These haphazard — indeed, decidedly disreputable — aspects of the military career by no means entirely repelled me; on the contrary, they provided an additional touch of uneasy excitement. At the same time I saw that such episodes must have encouraged Bracey to form his own strong views as to the ultimate unreliability of human nature, his reliance on bayonets rather than comrades. In fact his unspoken attitude towards this painful, infinitely disagreeable, occurrence fitted perfectly with that philosophy. What use, Bracey seemed by implication to argue, would this bandaged soldier be as a companion in arms, if he preferred the loss of a forefinger to the completion of his military engagements when their circumstances threatened to be uncongenial to himself? That was Bracey’s manner of looking at things, his inner world, perhaps to some extent the cause of his ‘funny days’. A bugle, shrill, yet desperately sad, sounded far away down the lines.

‘What is he blowing?’

‘Defaulters.’

We passed through hutted cantonments towards the football field.

‘Albert cut his finger the other day,’ I said. ‘There was a lot of blood.’

‘Lot of fuss too,’ said Bracey.

That was true. Albert’s world of feeling was a very different one from Bracey’s. A nervous man, he disliked violence, blood, suffragettes, anything of that kind. He was always for keeping the peace in the kitchen, even when his own scathing comments had started the trouble.

‘I should not wish to cross the Captain in any of his appetites,’ he had once remarked to my mother, when discussing with her what the savoury was to be on the menu for dinner that night.

Accordingly, Albert had been dreadfully alarmed when my father, on a day taken from duty to follow the local hounds, a rare occurrence (heaven knows what fox-hunting must have been like in that neighbourhood), having cut himself shaving that morning, managed in the course of breakfast, the wound reopening, to get blood all over his white breeches. Certainly the to-do made during the next half-hour justified perturbation on a cosmic scale. For my father all tragedies were major tragedies, this being especially his conviction if he were himself in any way concerned. On this occasion, he was beside himself. Bracey, on the other hand, showed calmness in the face of the appalling dooms fate seemed to have decreed on the bungalow and all its inhabitants. While my mother, distressed as ever by the absolutely unredeemed state of misery and rage that misfortune always provoked in my father’s spirit, attempted to prepare infinitesimal morsels of cotton-wool to stem the equally small, no less obstinate, flux of blood, Bracey found another pair of riding-breeches, assembled the equipment for extracting my father from his boots, fitted the new breeches, slid him into his boots again. Finally, all this in a quite remarkably short space of time for the completion of so formidable, so complicated, so ultimately thankless a series of operations, Bracey gave my father a leg into the saddle. The worst was over; too much time had not been lost. Later, when horse and rider had disappeared from sight on the way to the meet, the nervous strain he had been through caused Bracey to remain standing at attention, on and off, for several minutes together before he retired to the kitchen. I think the day turned out, in any case, no great success: rain fell; hounds streamed in full cry through a tangle of wire; my father was thrown, retaining his eyeglass in his eye, but hurting his back and ruining his hat for ever. In short, evil influences — possibly the demons of Stonehurst or even the Furies themselves — seemed malignantly at work. However, that was no fault of Bracey’s.

‘Why did you think it wrong of Billson to give the little boy a slice of cake?’ I asked.

We were still looking at the match, which, to tell the truth, did not entirely hold my attention, since I have never had any taste for watching games.

‘Not hers to give,’ said Bracey, very sternly.

I can see now, looking back, that the question was hopelessly, criminally, lacking in tact on my own part. I knew perfectly well that Bracey and Albert did not get on well together, that they differed never more absolutely than on this particular issue. I had often, as I have said, heard my parents speak of the delicacy of the Albert-Bracey mutual relationship. There was really no excuse for asking something so stupid, a question to which, in any case, I had frequently heard the answer from other sources. All the same, the incident to which my inquiry referred had for some reason caught my imagination. In fact everything to do with ‘Dr Trelawney’s place’, as it was called locally, always gave me an excited, uneasy feeling, almost comparable to that brought into play by the story of the bandaged soldier. Sometimes, when out for a walk with Edith or my mother, we would pass Dr Trelawney’s house, a pebble-dashed, gabled, red-tiled residence, a mile or two away, somewhere beyond the roofs on the horizon faced by the Stonehurst gate.

Dr Trelawney conducted a centre for his own peculiar religious, philosophical — some said magical — tenets, a cult of which he was high priest, if not actually messiah. This establishment was one of those fairly common strongholds of unsorted ideas that played such a part in the decade ended by the war. Simple-lifers, Utopian socialists, spiritualists, occultists, theosophists, quietists, pacifists, futurists, cubists, zealots of all sorts in their approach to life and art, later to be relentlessly classified into their respective religious, political, aesthetic or psychological categories, were then thought of by the unenlightened as scarcely distinguishable one from another: a collection of visionaries who hoped to build a New Heaven and a New Earth through the agency of their particular crackpot activities, sinister or comic, according to the way you looked at such things. Dr Trelawney was a case in point. In the judgment of his neighbours there remained an unbridgeable margin of doubt as to whether he was a holy man — at least a very simple and virtuous one — whose unconventional behaviour was to be tolerated, even applauded, or a charlatan — perhaps a dangerous rogue — to be discouraged by all right-thinking people.

When out with his disciples, running through the heather in a short white robe or tunic, his long silky beard and equally long hair caught by the breeze, Dr Trelawney had an uncomfortably biblical air. His speed was always well maintained for a man approaching middle years. The disciples were of both sexes, most of them young. They, too, wore their hair long, and were dressed in ‘artistic’ clothes of rough material in pastel shades. They would trot breathlessly by, Dr Trelawney leading with long, loping strides, apparently making for nowhere in particular. I used to play with the idea that something awful had happened to me — my parents had died suddenly, for example — and ill chance forced me to become a member of Dr Trelawney’s juvenile community. Casual mention of his name in conversation would even cause me an uneasy thrill. Once, we saw Dr Trelawney and his flock roaming through the scrub at the same moment as the Military Policeman on his patrol was riding back from the opposite direction. The sun was setting. This meeting and merging of two elements — two ways of life — made a striking contrast in physical appearance, moral ideas and visual tone-values.

My mother had once dropped in to the post office and general shop of a neighbouring village to buy stamps (perhaps the Health Insurance stamps commemorated in Albert’s picture of Mr Lloyd George) and found Dr Trelawney already at the counter. The shop, kept by a deaf old woman, sold groceries, sweets, papers, almost everything, in fact, only a small corner behind a kind of iron hutch being devoted to postal business. Dr Trelawney was negotiating the registration of a parcel, a package no doubt too valuable — too sacred perhaps — to be entrusted to the hand of a neophyte. My mother had to wait while this laborious matter was contrived.

‘He looked as if he was wearing his nightshirt,’ she said afterwards, ‘and a very short one at that.’

When the complicated process of registration had at last been completed, Dr Trelawney made a slight pass with his right hand, as if to convey benediction on the old woman who had served him.

‘The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True,’ he said in a low, but clear and resonant voice.

Then he left the shop, making a great clatter — my mother said — with his sandals. We heard later that these words were his invariable greeting, first and last, to all with whom he came in contact.

‘Horrid fellow,’ said my mother. ‘He gave me a creepy feeling. I am sure Mr Deacon would know him. To tell the truth, when we used to visit Mr Deacon in Brighton, he used to give me just the same creepy feeling too.’

In saying this, my mother was certainly expressing her true sentiments, although perhaps not all of them. As I have said before, she had herself rather a taste for the occult (she loved delving into the obscurities of biblical history and prophecy), so that, however much Dr Trelawney may have repelled her, there can be no doubt that she also felt some curiosity, even if concealed, about his goings-on. She was right in supposing Mr Deacon would know about him. When I myself ran across Mr Deacon in later life and questioned him on the subject, he at once admitted that he had known Dr Trelawney slightly at some early point in their careers.

‘Not a person with whom I ever wanted my name to be too closely associated,’ said Mr Deacon, giving one of his deep, sceptical laughs. ‘Too much abracadabra about Trelawney. He started with interests of a genuinely scientific and humane kind — full of idealism, you know — then gradually involved himself with all sorts of mystical nonsense, transcendental magic, goodness knows what rubbish. Made quite a good thing out of it, I believe. Contributions from the Faithful, women especially. Human beings are sad dupes, I fear. The priesthood would have a thin time of it were that not so. Now, I don’t expect Trelawney has read a line of economics — probably never heard of Marx. “The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True,” forsooth. Then you were expected to answer: “The Vision of Visions heals the Blindness of Sight.” I was too free a spirit for Trelawney in spite of his denial of the World. Still, some of his early views on diet were on the right track.’

More than that, Mr Deacon would not say. He had given himself to many enthusiasms at one time or another, too many, he sometimes owned. By the time I met him, when Pacifism and Communism occupied most of the time he could spare from his antique shop, he was inclined to deride his earlier, now cast-down altars. All the same, he never wholly lost interest in Vegetarianism and Hygienic Clothing, even after he had come to look upon such causes as largely frivolous adjuncts to World Revolution.

As it happened, the Trelawney teaching on diet brought the Trelawney establishment more particularly to Stonehurst notice. These nutritional views played a part in local legend, simply because the younger disciples, several of whom were mere children, would from time to time call at the door of some house in the neighbourhood and ask for a glass of milk or a snack. Probably the fare at Dr Trelawney’s, carefully thought out, was also unsubstantial, especially when it came to long, energetic rambles over the countryside, which stimulated hunger. In my own fantasies of being forced to become one of their number, semi-starvation played a macabre part. On one such occasion — it was a first visit by one of Dr Trelawney’s flock to Stonehurst — Billson, answering the door, had, on request, dispensed a slice of rather stale seed-cake. She had done this unwillingly, only after much discussion with Albert. It was a moment when Bracey was having one of his ‘funny days’, therefore, by definition, unable to take part in any consultation regarding this benefaction. When the ‘funny day’ was over, however, and Bracey was, as it were, officially notified of the incident, he expressed the gravest disapproval. The cake, Bracey said, should never have been given. Billson asserted that she had Albert’s support in making the donation. Always inclined to hysteria, she was thoroughly upset by Bracey’s strictures, no doubt all the more severe on account of his own warm feelings for her. Albert, at first lukewarm on the subject, was driven into more energetic support of Billson by Bracey’s now opening the attack on two fronts. In the end, the slice of seed-cake became a matter of bitter controversy in the kitchen, Bracey upholding the view that the dispensation of all charity should be referred to my parents; Billson sometimes defending, sometimes excusing her action; Albert of the opinion that the cake did not fall within the sphere of charity, because Dr Trelawney, whatever his eccentricities, was a neighbour, to whom, with his household, such small acts of hospitality were appropriate.

No doubt Albert’s experience of a wider world gave him a certain breadth and generosity of view, not in the least sentimental, but founded on a fundamental belief in a traditional civilisation. Whether or not that was at the root of his conclusions, the argument became so heated that at last Billson, in tears, appealed to my mother. That was before the ‘ghost’ appeared to Billson. Indeed, it was the first serious indication of her highly-strung nerves. She explained how much it upset her to be forced to make decisions, repeated over and over again how she had never wanted to deal with the ‘young person from Dr Trelawney’s’. My mother, unwilling to be drawn into the controversy, gave judgment that dispensation of cake was ‘all right, if it did not happen too often’. There the matter rested. Even so, Billson had to retire to bed for a day. She felt distraught. In the same way, my mother’s ruling made no difference whatever to Bracey’s view of the matter; nor was Bracey to be moved by Albert’s emphasis on the undeniable staleness of the cake. It did not matter that Edith and Mrs Gullick supported my mother, or that Mercy did not care, since in her eyes donor and beneficiary were equally marked out for damnation. Bracey maintained his position. From this conflict, I lived to some extent apart, observing mainly through the eyes of Edith, a medium which left certain facts obscure. Getting Bracey alone was therefore an opportunity to learn more, even if an opportunity better disregarded. The fact was, I wanted to hear Bracey’s opinion from his own lips.

‘She didn’t ought to have done it,’ Bracey said.

‘But Albert thought it was all right.’

‘Course he thought it was all right. What’s it matter to him?’

‘Billson said the little boy was very grateful.’

Bracey did not even bother to comment on this last aspect of the transaction. He only sniffed, one of his habits when displeased. Billson’s statement must have struck him as beneath discussion. In fact that foolish question of mine came near to ruining the afternoon. The match ended. There was some ragged cheering. We passed once more across the barrack-square, from which prisoner and escort had withdrawn to some other sphere of penal activity. Bracey was silent all the way home. I knew instinctively that a ‘funny day’ — almost certainly provoked by myself — could not be far off. This presentiment proved correct. Total spleen was delayed, though stormily, until the following Friday, when a sequence of ‘funny days’ of the most gruelling kind took immediate shape. These endured for the best part of a week, causing much provocation to Albert, who used to complain that Bracey’s ‘funny days’ affected his own culinary powers, for example, in the mixing of mayonnaise, which — making mayonnaise being a tricky business — could well have been true.

Billson’s tactics to entrap Albert matrimonially no doubt took place to some considerable extent in his own imagination, but, as I have said, even Edith accepted the fact that there was a substratum of truth in his firm belief that ‘she had her eye on him’, hoped to make him ‘hang up his hat’. Billson may have refused to admit even to herself the strength of her passion, which certainly showed itself finally in an extreme, decidedly inconvenient form. Anxiety about her own health no doubt amplified a tendency in her to abandon all self-control when difficult situations arose: the loneliness of Stonehurst, its ‘ghosts’, also working adversely on her nerves. For the occasion of her breakdown Billson could not, in some ways, have picked a worse day; in others, she could not have found a better one. It was the Sunday when General and Mrs Conyers came to luncheon.

Visitors were rare at Stonehurst. No one but a relation or very, very old friend would ever have been invited to spend the night under its roof, any such bivouac (sudden descent of Uncle Giles, for example) being regarded as both exceptional and burdensome. This was in part due to the limited accommodation there, which naturally forbade large-scale entertaining. It was also the consequence of the isolated life my parents elected to live. Neither of them was lacking in a spirit of hospitality as such, my father especially, when in the right mood, liking to ‘do well’ anyone allowed past the barrier of his threshold. Even so, guests were not often brought in to meals. That was one of Albert’s grievances. If he cooked, he liked to cook on as grand a scale as possible. There was little opportunity at Stonehurst. Indeed, Albert’s art was in general largely wasted on my parents: my mother’s taste for food being simple, verging on the ascetic; my father — again in certain moods — liking sometimes to dwell on the delights of the gourmet, more often crotchety about what was set before him, dyspeptic in its assimilation.

General Conyers, however, was regarded as ‘different’, not only as a remote cousin of my mother’s — although very much, as my brother-in-law, Chips Lovell, would have said, a cousin à la mode de Bretagne — but also for his countless years as an old, if never particularly close, friend of the family. Even at the date of which I speak, Aylmer Conyers was long retired from the army (in the rank of brigadier-general), having brought to a close, soon after he married, a career that might have turned out a brilliant one. Mrs Conyers, quite twenty years younger than her husband, was also on good terms with my mother — they would usually exchange letters if more than a year passed without meeting — although, again, their friendship could never have been called intimate. Bertha Conyers, rather sad and apologetic in appearance, had acquired, so people said, a persecuted manner in girlhood from her father’s delight in practical jokes (like the clockwork mouse he had launched on Albert), and also from his harrying of his daughters for failing to be born boys. In spite of this air of having spent a lifetime being bullied, Mrs Conyers was believed to exercise a firm influence over her husband, to some extent keeping his eccentricities in check.

‘Aylmer Conyers used to have rather a roving eye,’ my father would say. ‘That’s all changed since his marriage. Wouldn’t look at another woman.’

‘He’s devoted to Bertha, certainly,’ my mother would agree, perhaps unwilling to commit her opinion in that respect too definitely.

For my father, the Conyers visit presented, like so many other elements of life, a sharp diffusion of sentiment. By introducing my father a short time earlier in the guise, so to speak, of a fox-hunter wearing an eyeglass, I risk the conveyance of a false impression, indeed, a totally erroneous one. The eyeglass was on account of extreme short sight, for, although he had his own brand of dandyism, that dandyism was not at all of the eyeglass variety. Nor was hunting his favourite pastime. He rode fairly well (‘blooded’ at the age of nine out with the Belvoir, his own father being an unappeasable fox-hunter), but he took little pleasure in horses, or any outdoor occupation. It is true that he liked to speak of hunting in a tone of expertise, just as he liked to talk of wine without greatly caring to drink it. He had little natural aptitude for sport of any sort and his health was not good. What did he like? That is less easy to say. Consecrated, in one sense, to his profession, he possessed at the same time none of that absolute indifference to his own surroundings essential to the ambitious soldier. He was saddled with the equally serious military — indeed, also civilian — handicap of chronic inability to be obsequious to superiors in rank, particularly when he found them uncongenial. He was attracted by the Law, like his brother Martin; allured by the stock-market, like his brother Giles. One of the least ‘intellectual’ of men, he took intermittent pleasure in pictures and books, especially in such aspects of ‘collecting’ as rare ‘states’ of prints, which took his fancy, or ‘first editions’ of comparatively esoteric authors: items to be safely classified in their own market, without excessive reference, critically speaking, to their standing as works of art or literature. In these fields, although by no means a reactionary in aesthetic taste, he would recognise no later changes of fashion after coming to his own decision on any picture or school of painting. After a bout of buying things, he would almost immediately forget about them, often, a year or two later purchasing another copy (sometimes several copies) of the same volume or engraving; so that when, from time to time, our possessions were taken out of store, duplicates of most of his favourite works always came to light. He used to read in the evenings, never with much enjoyment or concentration.

‘I like to rest my mind after work,’ he would say. ‘I don’t like books that make me think.’

That was perfectly true. In due course, as he grew older, my father became increasingly committed to this exclusion of what made him think, so that finally he disliked not only books, but also people — even places — that threatened to induce this disturbing mental effect. Perhaps that attitude of mind — one could almost say process of decay — is among many persons more general than might be supposed. In my father’s case, this dislike for thought seemed to stem from a basic conviction that his childhood had been an unhappy one. His melancholy was comparable, even though less eccentrically expressed, with Bracey’s, no doubt contributing to their mutual understanding. Much the youngest of his family, his claim to have been neglected was probably true. Happy marriage did not cure him. Painfully sensitive to criticism, he was never (though he might not show this) greatly at ease with other men; in that last characteristic resembling not a few of those soldiers, who, paradoxically, reach high rank, positively assisted by their capacity for avoiding friendship, too close personal ties which can handicap freedom of ascent.

‘These senior officers are like a lot of ballerinas,’ said my friend Pennistone, when, years later, we were in the army together.

Certainly the tense nerves of men of action — less notorious than those of imaginative men — are not to be minimised. This was true of my father, who, like many persons who believe primarily in the will — although his own will was in no way remarkable — hid in his heart a hatred of constituted authority. He did his best to conceal this antipathy, because the one thing he hated, more than constituted authority itself, was to hear constituted authority questioned by anyone but himself. This is perhaps an endemic trait in all who love power, and my father had an absolute passion for power, although he was never in a position to wield it on a notable scale. In his own house, only he himself was allowed to criticise — to use a favourite phrase of his —’the powers that be’. In private, he would, for example, curse the Army Council (then only recently come into existence); in the presence of others, even those ‘in the Service’ with whom he was on the best of terms, he would defend to the last ditch official policy of which in his heart he disapproved.

These contradictory veins of feeling placed my father in a complex position vis-à-vis General Conyers, whom Uncle Giles, on the other hand, made no secret of finding ‘a bit too pleased with himself’. As a much older man, universally recognised as a first-rate soldier, the General presented a figure to whom deference on my father’s part was obviously due. At the same time, the General held revolutionary views on army reform, which he spared no opportunity of voicing in terms utterly uncomplimentary to ‘the powers that be’, military or civil. My father, of course, possessed his own especial likes and dislikes throughout the hierarchy of the army, both individual and general, but deplored too plain speaking even when he was to some considerable extent in agreement.

“Aylmer Conyers is fond of putting everyone right,’ he used to complain. ‘If he’d stayed in the Service a few years longer, instead of devoting his life to training poodles as gun-dogs, and scraping away at that ‘cello of his, he might have discovered that the army has changed a little since the Esher Report.’

Uncle Giles would immediately have been reproved for making so open a criticism of a senior officer, but my father must have felt that to criticise General Conyers was the only method of avoiding apparent collusion in an attack on the whole Army Council. In any case, Uncle Giles’s unsatisfactory mode of life, not to mention his dubious political opinions, radical to the point of anarchism, put him out of court in most family discussions. He was at this period employed in a concern fascinatingly designated a ‘bucket-shop’. My father had, in truth, never forgiven his brother for transferring himself, years before — after some tiff with his commanding officer — to the Army Service Corps.

‘It’s not just snobbishness on my part,’ my father used to say, long after Uncle Giles had left that, and every other, branch of the army. ‘I know they win a lot of riding events at gymkhanas, but I can’t stick ’em. They’re such an unco-operative lot of beggars when you have to deal with ’em about stores. I date all Giles’s troubles from leaving his regiment.’

However, I mention Uncle Giles at this point only to emphasise the manner in which the Conyers visit was regarded for a number of reasons with mixed feelings by my parents. There were good aspects; there were less good ones. Albert, for instance, would be put into an excellent humour for several weeks by this rare opportunity for displaying his talents. He would make his mousse. He would recall Lord Vowchurch’s famous practical joke with the clockwork mouse, one of the great adventures of Albert’s life, not only exciting but refreshingly free from the artifices of women — although Mrs Conyers herself was allowed some reflected glory from her father’s act.

Mrs Conyers was one of the few people with whom my mother liked to chat of ‘old times’: the days before she set out on the nomadic existence of a soldier’s wife. Mrs Conyers’s gossip, well informed, gently expressed, was perfectly adapted to recital at length. This mild manner of telling sometimes hair-raising stories was very much to the taste of my mother, never at ease with people she thought to be ‘worldly’, at the same time not unwilling to enjoy an occasional glimpse of ‘the world’, viewed through the window briefly opened by Mrs Conyers. The General had become a Gentleman-at-Arms after leaving the army, so that her stories included, with a touch of racing at its most respectable, some glimpse of the outskirts of Court life.

‘Bertha Conyers has such an amusing way of putting things,’ my mother would say. ‘But I really don’t believe all her stories, especially the one about Mrs Asquith and the man who asked her if she danced the tango.’

The fact that General Conyers was occasionally on duty at palaces rather irked my father, not so much because the General took this side of his life too seriously — to which my father would have been quite capable of objecting — but because he apparently did not take his court duties seriously enough.

‘If I were the King and I heard Aylmer Conyers talking like that, I’d sack him,’ he once said in a moment of irritation.

The General and his wife were coming to Stonehurst after staying with one of Mrs Conyers’s sisters, whose husband commanded a Lancer regiment in the area. Rather adventurously for that period, they were undertaking the journey by motor-car, a vehicle recently acquired by the General, which he drove himself. Indeed, the object of the visit was largely to display this machine, to compare it with the car my father had himself bought only a few months before. There was a good deal of excitement at the prospect of seeing a friend’s ‘motor’, although I think my father a little resented the fact that a man so much older than himself should be equally prepared to face such grave risks, physical and financial. As a matter of fact, General Conyers, who always prided himself on being up-to-date, was even rumoured to have been ‘up’ in a flying machine. This story was dismissed by my parents as being unworthy of serious credence.

‘Aylmer Conyers will never get to the top of that damned hill,’ said my father more than once during the week before their arrival.

‘Did you tell him about it? * said my mother.

‘I warned him in my letter. He is a man who never takes advice. I’m told he was just the same at Pretoria. Just a bit of luck that things turned out as well as they did for him — due mostly to Boer stupidity, I believe. Obstinate as a mule. Was up before Bobs himself once for disobeying an order. Talked himself out of it, even got promotion a short time after. Wonderful fellow. Well, so much the worse for him if he gets stuck — slip backwards more likely. That may be a lesson to him. Bad luck on Bertha Conyers if there’s an accident. It’s her I feel sorry for. I’ve worried a lot about it. He’s a selfish fellow in some ways, is old Aylmer.’

‘Do you think I ought to write to Bertha again myself?’ asked my mother, anxious to avoid the awful mishaps envisaged by my father.

‘No, no.’

‘But I will if you think I should.’

‘No, no. Let him stew in his own juice.’

The day of the Conyers’ luncheon came. I woke up that morning with a feeling of foreboding, a sensation to which I was much subject as a child. It was Sunday. Presentiments of ill were soon shown to have good foundation. For one thing, Billson turned out to have seen the ‘ghost’ again on the previous night; to be precise, in the early hours of that morning. The phantom had taken its accustomed shape of an elongated white figure reaching almost to the ceiling of the room. It disappeared, as usual, before she could rub her eyes. Soon after breakfast, I heard Billson delivering a firsthand account of this psychical experience to Mrs Gullick, who used to lend a hand in the kitchen, a small, elderly, red-faced woman, said to ‘give Gullick a time’, because she considered she had married beneath her. Mrs Gullick, although a staunch friend of Billson’s, was not prepared to accept psychic phenomena at any price.

‘Don’t go saying such ignorant things, dear,’ was her comment. ‘You need a tonic. You’re run down like. I thought you was pale when you was drinking your cup of tea yesterday. See the doctor. That’s what you want to do. Don’t worry about that ghost stuff. I never heard such a thing in all my days. You’re sickly, that’s what you are.’

Billson seemed partially disposed to accept this display of incredulity, either because it must have been reassuring to think she had been mistaken about the ‘ghost’, or because any appeal to her own poor state of health was always sympathetic to her. At that early stage of the day, she was in any case less agitated than might have been expected in the light of the supernatural appearance she claimed to have witnessed. She was excited, not more than that. It was true she muttered something about ‘giving notice’, but the phrase was spoken without force, obviously making no impression whatever on Mrs Gullick. For me, it was painful to find people existed who did not ‘believe’ in the Stonehurst ghosts, whose uneasy shades provided an exciting element of local life with which I did not at all wish to dispense. My opinion of Mrs Gullick fell immediately, even though she was said by Edith to be the only person in the house who could ‘get any work out of’ Mercy. I found her scepticism insipid. However, a much more disturbing incident took place a little later in the morning. My mother had just announced that she was about to put on her hat for church, when Albert appeared at the door. He looked very upset. In his hand was a letter.

‘May I have a word with you, Madam?’

I was sent off to get ready for church. When I returned, my mother and Albert were still talking. I was told to wait outside. After a minute or two, Albert came out. My mother followed him to the door.

‘I do quite understand, Albert,’ she said. ‘Of course we shall all be very, very sorry.’

Albert nodded heavily several times. He was too moved to speak.

‘Very sorry, indeed. It has been a long time …’

‘I thought I’d better tell you first, ma’am,’ said Albert, ‘so you could explain to the Captain. Didn’t want it to come to him as a shock. He takes on so. I’ve had this letter since yesterday. Couldn’t bring myself to show you at first. Haven’t slept for thinking of it.’

‘Yes, Albert.’

My father was out that morning, as it happened. He had to look in at the Orderly Room that Sunday, for some reason, and was not expected home until midday. Albert swallowed several times. He looked quite haggard. The flesh of his face was pouched. I could see the situation was upsetting my mother too. Albert’s voice shook when he spoke at last.

‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I’ve been goaded to this.’

He shuffled off to the kitchen. There were tears in his eyes. I was aware that I had witnessed a painful scene, although, as so often happens in childhood, I could not analyse the circumstances. I felt unhappy myself. I knew now why I had foreseen something would go wrong as soon as I had woken that morning.

‘Come along,’ said my mother, turning quickly and giving her own eyes a dab, ‘we shall be late for church. Is Edith ready?’

‘What did Albert want?’

‘Promise to keep a secret, if I tell you?’

‘I promise.’

‘Albert is going to get married.’

‘To Billson?’

My mother laughed aloud.

‘No,’ she said, ‘to someone he knows who lives at Bristol.’

‘Will he go away?’

‘I’m afraid he will.’

‘Soon?’

‘Not for a month or two, he says. But you really must not say anything about it. I ought not to have told you, I suppose. Run along at once for Edith. We are going to be dreadfully late.’

My mother was greatly given to stating matters openly. In this particular case, she was probably well aware that Albert himself would not be slow to reveal his future plans to the rest of the household. No very grave risk was therefore run in telling me the secret. At the same time, such news would never have been disclosed by my father, a confirmed maker of mysteries, who disliked imparting information of any but a didactic kind. If forced to offer an expose of any given situation, he was always in favour of presenting the substance of what he had to say in terms more or less oracular. Nothing in life — such was his view — must ever be thought of as easy of access. There is something to be said for that approach. Certainly few enough things in life are easy. On the other hand, human affairs can become even additionally clouded with obscurity if the most complicated forms of definition are always deliberately sought. My father really hated clarity. This was a habit of mind that sometimes led him into trouble with others, when, unable to appreciate his delight in complicated metaphor and ironic allusion, they had not the faintest idea what he was talking about. It was, therefore, by the merest chance that I was immediately put in possession of the information that Albert was leaving. I should never have learnt that so early if my father had been at home. We went off to church, my mother, Edith and I. The morning service took about an hour. We arrived home just as my father drove up in the car on his return from barracks. Edith disappeared towards the day-nursery.

‘It’s happened,’ said my mother.

‘What?’

My father’s face immediately became very grave.

‘Albert.’

‘Going?’

‘Getting married at last.’

‘Oh, lord.’

‘We thought it was coming, didn’t we?’

‘Oh, lord, how awful.’

‘We’ll get someone else.’

‘Never another cook like Albert.’

‘We may find someone quite good.’

‘They won’t live up here.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll find somebody. I’ll start on Monday.’

‘I knew this was going to happen.’

‘We both did.’

‘That doesn’t help.’

‘Never mind.’

‘But today, of all days, oh, lord.’

Their reception of the news showed my parents were already to some extent prepared for this blow to fall, anyway accepted, more or less philosophically, that Albert’s withdrawal into married life was bound to come sooner or later. Nevertheless, it was a disturbing state of affairs: the termination of a long and close relationship. No more was said at that moment because — a very rare occurrence — the telegraph-boy pedalled up on his bicycle. My parents were still standing on the doorstep.

‘Name of Jenkins?’

My father took the telegram with an air of authority. His face had lightened a little now that he was resigned to Albert’s departure, but the features became overcast again as he tore open the envelope, as if the news it brought must inevitably be bad.

‘Who can it be?’ said my mother, no less disturbed.

My father studied the message. He went suddenly red with annoyance.

‘Wait a moment,’ he said to the boy, in a voice of command.

My mother followed him into the hall. I hung about in the background.

‘For goodness’ sake say what’s happened,’ begged my mother, in an agony of fearing the worst.

My father read aloud the words, his voice shaking with irritation:

‘Can you house me Sunday night talk business arrive tea-time Giles.’

He held the telegram away from him as if fear of some awful taint threatened him by its contact. There was a long pause. Disturbing situations were certainly arising.

‘Really too bad of him,’ said my mother at last.

‘Damn Giles.’

‘Inconsiderate, too, to leave it so late.’

‘He can’t come.’

‘We must think it over.’

‘There is no time. I won’t have him.’

‘Where is he?’

‘It’s sent from Aldershot.’

‘Quite close then.’

‘What the devil is Giles doing in Aldershot?’

My parents looked at each other without speaking. Things could not be worse. Uncle Giles was not much more than a dozen miles away.

‘We heard there was some trouble, didn’t we?’

‘Of course there is trouble,’ said my father. ‘Was there ever a moment when Giles was not in trouble? Don’t be silly.’

There was another long pause.

‘The telegram was reply-paid,’ said my mother at last, not able to bear the thought that the boy might be bored or inconvenienced by this delay in drafting an answer. ‘The boy is still waiting.’

‘Damn the boy.’

My father was in despair. As I have said, all tragedies for him were major tragedies, and here was one following close on the heels of another.

‘With the Converses coming too.’

‘Can’t we put Giles off?’

‘He may really need help.’

‘Of course he needs help. He always needs help.’

‘Difficult to say he can’t come.’

‘Just like Giles to choose this day of all days.’

‘Besides, I never think Giles and Aylmer Conyers get on very well together.’

‘Get on well together,’ said my father. ‘They can’t stand each other.’

The thought of this deep mutual antipathy existing between his brother and General Conyers cheered my father a little. He even laughed.

‘I suppose Giles will have to come,’ he admitted.

‘No way out.’

‘The Conyerses will leave before he arrives.’

‘They won’t stay late if they are motoring home.’

‘Shall I tell Giles he can come?’

‘We must, I think.’

‘It may be just as well to know what he is up to. I hope it is not a serious mess this time. I wouldn’t trust that fellow an inch who got him the bucket-shop job.’

Uncle Giles did not at all mind annoying his relations. That was all part of his policy of making war on society. In fact, up to a point, the more he annoyed his relations, the better he was pleased. At the same time, his interests were to some extent bound up with remaining on reasonably good terms with my father. Since he had quarrelled irretrievably with his other brother, my father — also on poorish terms with Uncle Martin, whom we never saw — represented one of the few stable elements in the vicissitudes of Uncle Giles’s life. He and my father irritated, without actually disliking, each other. Uncle Giles, the older; my father, the more firmly established; the honours were fairly even, when it came to conflict. For example, my father disapproved, probably rightly, of the form taken by his brother’s ‘outside broking’, although I do not know how much the firm for which Uncle Giles worked deserved the imputation of sharp practice. Certainly my father questioned its bona fides and was never tired of declaring that he would advise no friend of his to do business there. At the same time, his own interest in the stock market prevented him from refraining entirely from all financial discussion with Uncle Giles, with whom he was in any case indissolubly linked, financially speaking, by the terms of a will. Their argument would often become acrimonious, but I suspect my father sometimes took “Uncle Giles’s advice about investments, especially if a ‘bit of a gamble’ was in the air.

‘Shall I say Expect you teatime today?’

‘How is Giles going to get here?’

‘I won’t fetch him. It can’t be done. The Conyerses may not leave in time.’

My mother looked uncertain.

‘Do you think I should?’

‘You can’t. Not with other guests coming.’

‘Giles will find his way.’

‘We can be sure of that.’

My mother was right in supposing Uncle Giles perfectly capable of finding his way to any place recommended by his own interests. She was also right in thinking that Albert, after confiding his marriage plans to herself, would immediately reveal them in the kitchen. Edith described the scene later. She was having a cup of tea before church when Albert made the official announcement of his engagement. Billson had at once burst into tears. Bracey was having a ‘funny day’ — though a mild one — brought on either by regret at the necessity of resuming his duties, or, more probably, as a consequence of nervous strain after a spell in the house of his Luton sister-in-law. Accordingly, he showed no interest in the prospect of being left, as it were, in possession of the field so far as Billson was concerned. After issuing his pronouncement, Albert turned his attention to the mousse, the cooking of which always caused him great anxiety. Billson moved silently from kitchen to dining-room, and back again, laying the table miserably, red-eyed, white-faced, looking as much like a ghost as any she had described. She had taken badly Albert’s surrender to the ‘girl from Bristol’. The house had an uneasy air. I retired to my own places of resort in the garden.

The Conyers party was scheduled to arrive about one o’clock, but the notorious uncertainty of motor-cars had given rise to much head-shaking on the probability of their lateness. However, I was loitering about the outskirts of the house, not long after the telegraph-boy had disappeared on his bicycle over the horizon, when a car began painfully to climb the lower slopes of the hill. It could only contain General and Mrs Conyers. This was an unexpected excitement. I watched their slow ascent, which was jerky, like the upward movement of a funicular, but, contrary to my father’s gloomy forecast, the steep incline was negotiated without undue difficulty. I was even able to open the Stonehurst gate to admit the vehicle. There could be no doubt now of the identity of driver and passenger. By that period, of course, motorists no longer wore the peaked cap and goggles of their pioneering days, but, all the same, the General’s long check ulster and deerstalker seemed assumed to some extent ritualistically.

‘It is always cold motoring,’ my mother used to say.

The car drew up by the front door. The General, leaping from it with boundless energy, came to meet me, leaving his wife to extract herself as best she could from a pile of wraps and rugs, sufficient in number to perform a version of the Dance of the Seven Veils. Tall, distinguished, with grey moustache and flashing eyes, he held out his hand.

‘How do you do, Nicholas?’

He spoke gravely, in a tone no different from that to be used with a contemporary. There was about him a kind of fierceness, combined with a deep sense of understanding.

‘We are a little earlier than I expected,’ he said. ‘I hope your father and mother will not mind. I drove rather fast, as your mother said you lived at the back of beyond, and I am always uncertain of my own map-reading. I see now what she meant. How are they educating you up here? Do you go to school?’

‘Not yet. I have lessons with Miss Orchard.’

‘Oh, yes. Miss Orchard is the governess who teaches all the children round here. I know her well by name. What children are they?’

‘The Fenwicks, Mary Barber, Richard Vaughan, the Westmacott twins.’

‘Fenwick in the Gloucesters?’

‘Yes, I think so — the regiment that wears a badge at the back of their cap.’

‘And Mary Barber’s father?’

‘He’s in the Queen’s. Richard Vaughan’s is in the “Twenty-Fourth” — the South Wales Borderers.’

‘What about the father of the Westmacott twins?’

‘A Gunner.’

‘What sort of a Gunner?’

‘Field, but Thomas and Henry Westmacott say their father is going to get his “jacket” soon, so he may be Royal Horse Artillery by now.’

‘An exceedingly well-informed report,’ said the General. ‘You have given yourself the trouble to go into matters thoroughly, I see. That is one of the secrets of success in life. Now take us to your parents.’

This early arrival resulted in my seeing rather more of General and Mrs Conyers than I should have done had they turned up at their appointed hour. First of all there was a brief examination of the Conyers car, a decidedly grander affair than that owned by my father, a fact which possibly curtailed the period spent over it. Since there was still time to kill before luncheon, the guests were shown round the garden. Permitted to accompany the party, I walked beside my mother and Mrs Conyers, the General and my father strolling behind.

‘Has your ghost appeared again?’ asked Mrs Conyers. ‘Aylmer was fascinated when I told him your parlourmaid had seen one. He is very keen on haunted houses.’

Her husband was famous for the variety of his interests. In this particular connection — the occult one — there was some story, probably mythical, about General Conyers having taken advantage of his appointment to the Body Guard to investigate on the spot some allegedly ghostly visitation at Windsor or another of the royal palaces. This intellectually inquisitive side of the General’s character specially irked Uncle Giles, who liked to classify irreparably everyone he knew, hating to be forced to alter the pigeon-hole in which he had himself already placed any given individual.

‘Aylmer Conyers may be a good tactician,’ he used to say, ‘at least that is what he is always telling everyone — never knew such a fellow for blowing his own trumpet — but I can’t for the life of me see why he wants to lay down the law about all sorts of other matters that don’t concern him in the least. The last thing I heard was that he had taken up “psychical research”, whatever that may be.’

My father, although he would never have admitted as much to Uncle Giles, was inclined to agree with his brother in the view that General Conyers would be a more dignified figure if he accepted for himself a less universal scope of interests; so that when the General began to make inquiries about the Stonehurst ‘ghost’, my father tried to dismiss the subject out of hand.

‘A lot of nonsense, General,’ he said, ‘I assure you.’

General Conyers would have none of that.

‘External agency,’ he said, ‘that’s the point. Find it hard to believe in actual entities myself. Ought to be looked into more. One heard some strange stories when one was in India. The East is full of that sort of thing — a lot pure invention, of course.’

‘I believe ghosts are thought-forms,’ said Mrs Conyers, as if that settled the whole matter.

‘If you are experiencing hallucination,’ said her husband, ‘then something must cause the hallucination. Telepathic side, too, of course. I’ve never had the opportunity to cross-question first-hand someone who’d seen a ghost. What sort of a girl is this parlourmaid of yours?’

‘Oh, please don’t cross-question her,’ said my mother. ‘We have such dreadful difficulties in getting servants here, and we are losing Albert as it is. She is not by any means a girl. You will see her waiting at table. Very hysterical. All the same, the maid we had before used to tell the same story.’

‘Indeed? Did she? Did she?’

‘I must say I think there is something peculiar about the house myself,’ said my mother. ‘I shall not be altogether sorry when the time comes to leave it.’

‘What about the people who let it to you?’

‘The fellow who built the place is dead,’ said my father, now determined to change the subject, come what may. ‘The lease was arranged through executors. We got it rather cheap on that account. He was in the Indian Army — Madras cavalry, I believe. What do you think about the reorganisations in India, by the way, General? Some people say the latest concentrations of command are not working too well.’

‘We want mobility, mobility, and yet more mobility,’ said General Conyers, ‘in India and everywhere else, more especially since the Baghdad Agreement. If the Germans continue the railway to Basra, that amounts to our recognising the northern area of Mesopotamia as a German sphere of influence.’

‘How much does Mesopotamia matter?’ enquired my father, unaware that he would soon be wounded there.

‘Depends on when and where Germany decides to attack.’

‘That will be soon, you think?’

‘Between the Scylla of her banking system, and the Charybdis of her Socialist Party, Germany has no alternative.’

My father nodded respectfully, at the same time a trifle ironically. Although, in principle, he certainly agreed that war must come sooner or later — indeed, he was often saying it would come sooner — I am not sure that he truly believed his own words. He did not, indeed, much care for talking politics, national or international, unless in the harmless form of execration of causes disliked by himself. Certainly he had no wish to hear strategic situations expressed in classical metaphor, with which he was not greatly at ease. He had merely spoken of the Indian Army as a preferable alternative to discussing the Stonehurst ‘ghosts’. The General, however, showed no sign of wishing to abandon this new subject.

‘One of these fine mornings the Germans will arrive over here,’ he said, ‘or walk into France. Can’t blame them if they do. Everyone is asking for it. We shall be squabbling with the Irish, or having a coal strike, or watching cricket. In France, Cabinet Ministers will be calling each other out to duels, while their wives discharge pistols at newspaper editors. And when the Germans come, it will be a big show — Clausewitz’s Nation in Arms.’

‘Able fellow, Clausewitz,’ my father conceded.

‘You remember he said that war was in the province of chance?’

‘I do, General.’

‘We are a great deal too fond of accepting that principle in this country,’ said General Conyers. ‘All the same, I thank God for the mess we made in South Africa. That brought a few people to their senses. Even the Treasury.’

My father, equally unwilling to admit the Boer War to have been prosecuted without notable brilliance, or that the light of reason or patriotism could penetrate, in however humble a degree, into the treasonable madhouse of the Treasury, did not answer. He gave a kind of half-sneer, half-grunt. I think my mother must have thought there had been enough talk of war for the time being, because she suggested a return to the house. The hour of luncheon was in any case approaching. I departed to the nursery.

‘Everyone’s in a taking today,’ said Edith, herself rather ruffled when I arrived at table. ‘I don’t know what has come over the house. It’s all your Uncle Giles coming to stay without warning, I suppose. Albert says it’s just like him. Now, don’t begin making a fuss because the gravy is too thick. I haven’t given you much of it.’

In the subsequent rather sensational events of the afternoon, I played no direct part. They were told to me later, piecemeal; most of the detail revealed by my mother only many years after. She herself could never repeat the story without her eyes filling with tears, caused partly by laughter, perhaps partly by other memories of that time. All the same, my mother always used to insist that there had been nothing to laugh about at the moment when the incident took place. Then her emotion had been shock, even fear. The disturbing scene in question was enacted while Edith and I were out for our traditional Sunday ‘walk’, which took its usual form that afternoon of crossing the Common. We were away from home about an hour and a half, perhaps two hours. Meanwhile, my parents and their guests had moved from dining-room to drawing-room, after what was agreed later to rank as one of the best meals Albert had ever cooked.

‘Aylmer Conyers does love his food,’ my mother used to say.

When announcing that fact, she would speak as if kindly laughter were the only possible manner of passing off lightly so distressing a frailty in friend or relation. Indeed, the General’s pride in his own appreciation of the pleasures of the table was regarded by people like my parents, in the fashion of that day, as a tendency to talk rather more than was decent of eating and drinking. On this occasion he had certainly been full of praise for Albert. Possibly his eulogies continued too long entirely to please my father, who grew easily tired of hearing another man, even his own cook, too protractedly commended. Besides, apart from anything he might feel about the General, the impending arrival of Uncle Giles had justifiably set my father’s nerves on edge, in fact thoroughly upset him. As a result he was very fretful by the middle of the afternoon. He freely admitted that afterwards; feeling, indeed, always rather proud of being easily irritated. Mrs Conyers and my mother, come to the end of their gossip, had begun to discuss knitting techniques. Conversation between the two men must have dragged, because the General returned to Near Eastern affairs.

‘We haven’t heard the last of Enver and his Young Turks,’ he said.

‘Not by a long chalk,’ agreed my father.

‘You remember Skobeloff’s dictum?’

‘Quite so, General, quite so.’

My father rarely, if ever, admitted to ignorance. He could, in any case, be pretty certain of the calibre of any such quotation offered in the circumstances. However, the General was determined there should be no misunderstanding.

‘The road to Constantinople leads through the Brandenburger Tor.’

My father had visited Munich, never Berlin. He was, therefore, possibly unaware of the precise locality of the monument to which Skobeloff referred. However, he could obviously grasp the gist of such an assertion in the mouth of one he rightly judged to be a Russian general, linking the aphorism immediately in his own mind with the recent Turkish request for a German officer of high rank to reorganise the Ottoman forces.

‘If Liman von Sanders—’ began my father.

He never finished the sentence. The name of that militarily celebrated, endlessly discussed, internationally disputed, Britannically unacceptable, German General-Inspector of the Turkish Army was caught, held, crystallised in mid-air. Just as the words left my father’s lips, the door of the drawing-room opened quietly. Billson stood on the threshold for a split second. Then she entered the room. She was naked.

‘It’s always easy to be wise after the event.’ My mother used invariably to repeat that saying when the incident was related — and it was to be related pretty often in years to come — implying thereby criticism of herself. Her way was habitually to accept responsibilities which she considered by their nature to be her own, her firm belief being that most difficulties in life could be negotiated by tactful handling. In this case, she ever afterwards regarded herself to blame in having failed to notice earlier that morning that things were far from well with Billson. My mother had, it was true, suspected during luncheon that something was amiss, but by then such suspicion was too late. Billson’s waiting at table that day had been perceptibly below — a mere parody of — her accustomed standard. Indeed, her shortcomings in that field had even threatened to mar the good impression otherwise produced on the guests by Albert’s cooking. Not only had she proffered vegetables to the General in a manner so entirely lacking in style that he had let fall a potato on the carpet, but she had also caused Mrs Conyers to ‘jump’ painfully — no doubt in unconscious memory of her father’s hoaxes — by dropping a large silver ladle on a Sheffield plate dish-cover. Later, when she brought in the coffee, Billson ‘banged down’ the tray as if it were red-hot, ‘scuttling’ from the room.

‘I made up my mind to speak to her afterwards about it,’ my mother said. ‘I thought she wasn’t looking at all well. I knew she was a great malade imaginaire, but, after all, she had seen the ghost, and her nerves are not at all good. It really is not fair on servants to expect them to sleep in a haunted room, although I have to myself. Where else could we put her? She can’t be more frightened than I am sometimes. Then Aylmer Conyers stared at her so dreadfully with those very bright blue eyes of his. I was not at all surprised that she was nervous. I was terrified myself that he was going to begin asking her about the ghost, especially after she had made him drop the potatoes on the floor.’

In short, Billson’s maladroitness had been judged to be no more than a kind of minor derangement to be expected from her for at least twenty-four hours after her ‘experience’, although, as I have said, listening in the first instance to the story about the ‘ghost’, my mother had been pleased, surprised even, by the calm with which Billson had spoken of the apparition.

‘I really thought familiarity was breeding contempt,’ said my mother. ‘I certainly hoped so, with parlourmaids so terribly hard to come by.’

Albert’s announcement of impending marriage was scarcely taken into account. Probably Billson’s passion for him had never been accepted very seriously — as, indeed, few passions are by those not personally suffering from them. Possibly I myself knew more of it, from hints dropped by Edith, than did my mother. On top of everything, the prospective arrival of Uncle Giles had distracted attention from whatever else was happening in the house. However, even if the extent of Billson’s distress at Albert’s decision to marry had been adequately gauged — added, as it were morally speaking, to the probable effect of seeing a ghost that morning — no one could have foreseen so complete, so deplorable, a breakdown.

‘I thought it was the end of the world,’ my mother said.

I do not know to what extent she intended this phrase, so far as her own amazement was concerned, to be taken literally. My mother’s transcendental beliefs were direct, yet imaginative, practical, though possessing the simplicity of complete acceptance. She may have meant to imply, no more, no less, that for a second of time she herself truly believed the Last Trump (unheard in the drawing-room) had sounded in the kitchen, instantly metamorphosing Billson into one of those figures — risen from the tomb, given up by the sea, swept in from the ends of the earth — depicted in primitive paintings of the Day of Judgment. If, indeed, my mother thought that, she must also have supposed some awful, cataclysmic division from on High just to have taken place, violently separating Sheep from Goats, depriving Billson of her raiment. No doubt my mother used only a figure of speech, but circumstances gave a certain aptness to the metaphor.

‘Joking apart,’ my mother used to say, ‘it was a dreadful moment.’

There can be no doubt whatever that the scene was disturbing, terrifying, saddening, a moment that summarised, in the unclothed figure of Billson, human lack of coordination and abandonment of self-control in the face of emotional misery. Was she determined, in the habit of neurotics, to try to make things as bad for others as for herself? In that, she largely succeeded. There seemed no solution for the people in the room, no way out of the problem so violently posed by Billson in the shape of her own nude person. My father always confessed afterwards that he himself had been utterly at a loss. He could throw no light whatever on the reason why such a thing should suddenly have happened in his drawing-room, see no way of cutting short this unspeakable crisis. In telling — and re-telling — the highlights of the story, he contributed only one notable phrase.

‘She was stark,’ he used to say, ‘absolutely stark.’

This was a relatively small descriptive ornament to the really vast saga that accumulated round the incident; at the same time, it was for some reason not without a certain narrative force.

‘I’ve come to give notice, m’m,’ Billson said. ‘I don’t want to stay if Albert is leaving your service, and besides, m’m, I can’t stand the ghosts no longer.’

Stonehurst, as I have said, was a ‘furnished’ house, the furniture, together with pictures, carpets, curtains, all distinctly on the seedy side, all part of the former home of people not much interested in what the rooms they lived in looked like. However, India, one way and another, provided a recurrent theme that gave a certain cohesion to an otherwise undistinguished, even anarchic style of decoration. In the hall, the brass gong was suspended from the horn or tusk of some animal; in the dining-room hung water-colours of the Ganges at Benares, the Old Fort at Calcutta, the Taj Mahal; in the smoking-room, a small revolving bookcase contained only four books: Marie Corelli’s Sorrows of Satan, St John Clarke’s Never to the Philistines, an illustrated volume of light verse called Lays of Ind, a volume of coloured pictures of Sepoy uniforms; in the drawing-room, the piano was covered with a Kashmir shawl of some size and fine texture, upon which, in silver frames, photographs of the former owner of Stonehurst (wearing a pith helmet surmounted with a spike) and his family (flanked by Indian servants) had stood before being stowed away in a drawer.

In human life, the individual ultimately dominates every situation, however disordered, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. On this occasion, as usual, all was not lost. There was a place for action, a display of will. General Conyers took in the situation at a glance. He saw this to be no time to dilate further upon Turkish subjection to German intrigue. He rose — so the story went — quite slowly from his chair, made two steps across the room, picked up the Kashmir shawl from where it lay across the surface of the piano. Then, suddenly changing his tempo and turning quickly towards Billson, he wrapped the shawl protectively round her.

‘Where is her room?’ he quietly asked.

No one afterwards was ever very well able to describe how he transported her along the passage, partly leading, partly carrying, the shawl always decently draped round Billson like a robe. The point, I repeat, was that action had been taken, will-power brought into play. The spell cast by Billson’s nakedness was broken. Life was normal again. Other people crowded round, eventually took charge. Mrs Gullick and Mercy appeared from somewhere. The doctor was summoned. It was probably just as well that Albert was having a nap in his room over at the stables, where Bracey, too, surrounded by saddlery, was prolonging his ‘funny day’. By the time these two reappeared, the crisis was long at an end. Having taken the first, the essential step, General Conyers, like a military dictator, who, at the close of a successful coup d’état, freely transfers his power to the civil authority, now moved voluntarily into the background. His mission was over, the situation mastered. He could return to private life, no more than the guest who happened to have been fortunate enough to find the opportunity of doing his host and hostess a trifling good turn. That was the line the General took about himself when all was over. He would accept neither praise nor thanks.

‘She made no trouble at all,’ he said. ‘More or less walked beside me — just as if we were going to sit out the next one in the conservatory.’

In fact he dismissed as laughable the notion that any difficulty at all attached to the management of Billson in her ‘state’. To what extent this modest assessment of his own agency truly represented his experience at the time is hard to estimate. He may have merely preferred to speak of it in that careless manner from dandyism, an unwillingness to admit that anything is difficult. I have sometimes speculated as to how much the General’s so successful dislodgement of Billson was due to an accustomed habit of command over ‘personnel’, how much to a natural aptitude for handling ‘women’. He was, after all, known to possess some little dexterity in the latter sphere before marriage circumscribed him.

‘Aylmer Conyers couldn’t keep away from the women as a young man,’ Uncle Giles once remarked. ‘They say some fellow chaffed him about it at a big viceregal bun-fight at Delhi — Henry Wilson or another of those talkative beggars who later became generals — “Aylmer, my boy,” this fellow, whoever he was, said, “you’re digging your grave in bed with Mrs Roxborough-Brown and the rest of them,” he said. Conyers didn’t give a dam. Not a dam. Went on just the same.’

Whether or not General Conyers would have done well to have heeded that warning, there can be little doubt that some touch of magic in his hand provided Billson with a particle of what she sought, a small substitute for Albert’s love, making her docile when led to her room, calming her later into sleep. Certainly he had shown complete disregard for the risk of making a fool of himself in public. That is a merit women are perhaps quicker to appreciate than men. Not that Billson herself can be supposed to have sat in judgment on such subtleties at that uncomfortable moment; yet even Billson’s disturbed spirit must have been in some manner aware of a compelling force that bound her to submit without protest to its arbitration.

‘I’ll just smoke another cigarette, if I may,’ said the General, when everything had been accomplished, ‘then Bertha and I really must set off in our motor-car. I’ve got to think about getting down that hill.’

Edith and I returned from the ‘walk’ just at the moment when General and Mrs Conyers were leaving. Their car had paused at the gate. My parents had come to the end of the drive to see the guests safely down the hill, my father full of advice about gears and brakes. Naturally enough, there was still a certain air of disturbance about the whole party. Even the General looked flushed. When Edith and I appeared, nothing of course was said, there and then, about what had taken place, but I could tell from my mother’s face that something very out of the way had happened. The rather forced laughter, the apologies to be heard, confirmed that. The events of the day were by no means at an end, however. My father opened the gate. The Conyers car began to move slowly forward. As it entered the road over a hump in the ground, making rather a jerk, an unexpected impediment was suddenly put in the General’s way. This was caused by a group of persons, unusually dressed, who were approaching from the left. They were running towards us. It was Dr Trelawney, followed by a pack of his disciples. They must suddenly have appeared over the brow of the hill. Without pausing to get breath they were now advancing up the road at a sharp pace, Dr Trelawney as usual leading. General Conyers, accelerating through the Stonehurst gate — an awkward one to negotiate — wheeled left, taking the corner in a wide arc, possibly owing to imperfect control of the steering. He had to apply his brakes sharply to avoid collision.

Dr Trelawney leapt nimbly aside. He was not hit. The car came to a standstill in the middle of the road. General Conyers opened the door and jumped out with all his habitual energy of movement. At first it might have been thought that he intended to call Dr Trelawney to order for obstructing the highway in this manner, strike him, kill him even, like a dog. Some tremendous altercation seemed about to take place. In due course, violence was shown to be far from the General’s intention, although for a second or two, while he and Dr Trelawney stood facing each other, anything appeared possible. The same vivid contrast might have been expected, graphically speaking, as when the Military Policeman had ridden through Dr Trelawney’s flock, like a hornet flying slowly through a swarm of moths. On the contrary, this pair, so far from being brought into vivid physical and moral opposition, had the air of being linked together quite strongly by some element possessed in common. The General’s long, light ulster and helmet-like deerstalker, Dr Trelawney’s white draperies and sandals, equally suggested temple ceremonial. The two of them might have met on that high place deliberately for public celebration of some rite or sacrifice. At first neither said a word. That seemed an age. At last Dr Trelawney took the initiative. Raising his right arm slightly, he spoke in a low clear voice, almost in the accents of one whose very perfect enunciation indicates that English is not his native tongue.

‘The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True.’

Then a very surprising thing happened. General Conyers gave an almost imperceptible nod, at the same time removing his hands from the pockets of his ulster.

‘The Vision of Visions,’ he said, ‘heals the Blindness of Sight.’

By that time most of Dr Trelawney’s disciples had caught up with their master. They now clustered in the background, whispering together and staring at the car. Through its windscreen, Mrs Conyers gazed back at them a little nervously, perhaps again fearing that some elaborate practical joke was being staged for her benefit. From the gate my parents watched the scene without approval.

‘Well, Trelawney,’ said the General, ‘I heard you had come to live in this part of the world, but I never thought we should have the luck to run across each other in this way.’

‘If you journey towards the Great Gate, you encounter the same wayfarers on the road.’

‘True enough, Trelawney, true enough.’

‘You are approaching the Sublime Threshold.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘You should make good your promise to spend a rhythmical month under instruction, General. We have a vacancy in the house. There is no time like the present. You would be subjected to none but probationary exercises at first. Disciplines of the Adept would not be expected of you in the early days.’

‘Look here, Trelawney,’ said General Conyers, ‘I’m a busy man at the moment. Besides, I have a strong conviction I should not commit myself too deeply for the rest of the year. Just one of those feelings you have in your bones. I want to be absolutely mobile at the moment.’

‘Such instincts should be obeyed. I have heard others say the same recently. The portents are unfavourable. There is no doubt of that.’

‘I will write to you one of these days. Nothing I’d like to see more than you and your people at work.’

‘At Play, General. Truth is Play.’

‘Give me a change of routine. Sort of thing I’m always meaning to do. Got very interested in such things in India. Bodhisattvas and such like, Mahasatipatthana and all that reflection. However, we shall have to wait. Sure I’m right to wait. Too much business on hand, anyway.’

‘Business?’ said Dr Trelawney. ‘I think you need meditation, General, more than business. You must free the mind from external influences. You must pursue Oneness — the Larger Life.’

‘Sure you’re right about that too,’ said the General. ‘Absolutely certain you are right. All the same, something tells me to let Oneness wait for the time being. That doesn’t mean I am not going to think Oneness over. Not in the least.’

‘Think it over, you must, General. We know we are right. But first you must gain Spiritual Mastery of the Body.’

How long this unusual conversation would have continued in front of the Stonehurst gate, if interruption had not taken place, is hard to say. It was brought to a close by a new arrival, wearing a straw hat and flannel suit, who pushed his way unceremoniously between a group of longhaired boys in short Grecian tunics, who were eyeing the car as if they would very much like to open the bonnet. This person had a small fair moustache. He carried a rolled umbrella and Gladstone bag. The strangeness of Dr Trelawney’s disciples clearly made no impression on him. He looked neither to the right nor to the left. The beings round him might just as well have been a herd of cows come to a stop in their amblings along the road. Instead of regarding them, he made straight for my parents, who at once offered signs of recognition. Here was Uncle Giles.

‘Hope you did not mind my inviting myself at such short notice,’ he said, as soon as he had greeted my mother. ‘I wanted to have a word with him about the Trust.’

‘You know we are always delighted to see you, Giles,’ she said, probably even believing that true at the moment of speaking, because she always felt warmly towards hopeless characters like Uncle Giles when they were in difficulties. ‘We live so far away from everything and everybody nowadays that it is quite an exception for you to have found Aylmer and Bertha Conyers lunching with us. They were driving away in their motor when—’

She pointed to the road, unable to put into words what was taking place.

‘I see Aylmer standing there,’ said Uncle Giles, who still found nothing at all unusual in the presence or costume of the Trelawney community. ‘I must have a word with him before he leaves. Got a bit of news that might interest him. He is always very keen on what is happening on the Continent. Interest you, too, I expect. I had quite a good journey here. Was lucky enough to catch the carrier. Took me almost to the foot of the hill. Bit of a climb, but here I am.’

He turned to my father.

‘How are you?’

Uncle Giles spoke as if he were surprised not to find my father in hospital, indeed, in his coffin.

‘Pretty well, Giles,’ said my father, with a certain rasp in his voice, ‘pretty well. How has the world been wagging with you, Giles?’

That was a phrase my father tended to use when he was not best pleased; in any case his tone graded low as a welcoming manner.

‘I wanted to have a talk about business matters,’ said Uncle Giles, not at all put out by this reception. ‘Mexican Eagles, among other things. Also the Limpopo Development Scheme. There has been rather a crisis in my own affairs. I’d like to ask your opinion. I value it. By the way, did I mention I heard a serious piece of news in Aldershot?’

‘What on earth were you doing in Aldershot?’ asked my father, speaking without alleviating the irony of his tone.

He must have seen that he was in for a bad time with his brother.

‘Had to meet a fellow there. Soldiered together years ago. Knowledgeable chap. I’ll just go across now and have a brief word with Aylmer Conyers.’

Uncle Giles had set down his Gladstone bag by the gate With characteristic inability to carry through any plan of campaign, he was deflected from reaching the General by the sight of Mrs Conyers sitting in the car. She still looked rather nervous. Uncle Giles stopped and began talking to her. By this time General Conyers himself must have noticed Uncle Giles’s arrival. He brought to an end his conversation with Dr Trelawney.

‘Well, Trelawney,’ he said, ‘I mustn’t keep you any longer. You will be wanting to lead your people on. Mustn’t take up all your day.’

‘On the contrary, General, the day-with its antithesis, night — is but an artificial apportionment of what we artlessly call Time.’

‘Nevertheless, Trelawney, Time has value, even if artificially apportioned.’

‘Then I shall expect to hear from you, General, when you wish to free yourself from bonds of Time and Space.’

‘You will, Trelawney, you will. Off you go now — at the double.’

Dr Trelawney drew himself up.

‘The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True.’

The General replied with a jerk of his head.

‘The Vision of Visions heals the Blindness of Sight.’

The words were scarcely finished before Dr Trelawney had again begun to hasten along the road, his flock trailing after him. A moment or two later, they were among the trees that concealed Gullick’s cottage, where the road became a track. Then the last of them, a very small, pathetic child with a huge head, was finally lost to sight. No doubt they had reached the Common, were pursuing Oneness through the heather. Oneness perhaps also engaged the attention of General Conyers himself, because, deep in thought, he turned towards the car. He stood there for a second or two, staring at the bonnet. Uncle Giles terminated his conversation with Mrs Conyers.

‘I was admiring your new motor-car, General,’ he said. ‘Hope it is not bringing you as much trouble as most of them seem to cause their owners.’

Now that Dr Trelawney was out of the way, my parents moved towards the car themselves, perhaps partly to keep an eye on Uncle Giles in his relations with the General, still lost in reflection.

‘Thought I’d better not introduce you,’ said General Conyers, straightening himself as they came up to him. ‘One never knows how people may feel about a fellow like Trelawney — especially if he lives in the neighbourhood. Not everybody cares for him. You hear some funny stories. I find him interesting myself. Nasty habits, some people say. Can’t believe a word he says, of course. We met him years ago with a fellow I used to know in the Buffs who’d taken up yoga.’

The General lifted the starting-handle from the floor of the car.

‘Are you an expert in these machines, Giles?’ he asked.

He used the tone of one speaking to a child, not at all the manner of an equal in which he had addressed me earlier in the day. Knowing all about Uncle Giles, he was clearly determined not to allow himself to be irritated by him.

‘Never driven one in my life,’ said Uncle Giles. ‘Not too keen on ’em. Always in accidents. Some royalty in a motorcar have been involved in a nasty affair today. Heard the news in Aldershot. Fellow I went to see was told on the telephone. Amazing, isn’t it, hearing so soon. They’ve just assassinated an Austrian archduke down in Bosnia. Did it today. Only happened a few hours ago.’

Uncle Giles muttered, almost whispered these facts, speaking as if he were talking to himself, not at all in the voice of a man announcing to the world in general the close of an epoch; the outbreak of Armageddon; the birth of a new, uneasy age. He did not look in the least like the harbinger of the Furies.

‘Franz-Ferdinand?’ asked General Conyers sharply.

‘And his morganatic wife. Shot ’em both.’

‘When did you say this happened?’

‘This afternoon.’

‘And they’re both dead?’

‘Both of them.’

‘There will be trouble about this,’ said the General.

He inserted the starting-handle and gave several terrific turns.

‘Bad trouble,’ he said. ‘They’ll have to postpone tomorrow night’s State Ball. Not a doubt of it. This was a Servian, I suppose.’

‘They think so.’

‘Was he an anarchist?’ asked Mrs Conyers.

‘One of those fellows,’ said Uncle Giles.

‘Mark my words,’ said General Conyers, ‘this is a disaster. Well, the engine has started. We’d better be off in case it stops again. Good-bye to you both, thank you again enormously. No, no, not another word. I only hope the whole matter settles down all right. Good-bye, Giles. Good-bye, Nicholas. I don’t at all like the news.’

They went off down the hill. We all waved. My mother looked worried.

‘I don’t like the news either,’ she said.

‘Let me carry your bag, Giles,’ said my father. ‘You’ll find things in a bit of a muddle in the house. One of the maids had an hysterical attack this afternoon.

‘I don’t expect it’s too easy to get staff up here,’ said Uncle Giles. ‘Is Bracey still your servant? Albert still cooking for you? You’re lucky to have them both. Hope I see something of them. Very difficult to get yourself properly looked after these days. Several things I want to talk about. Rather an awkward situation. I think you may be able to help.’

The whole party was moving towards the house. Edith, who had been standing in the background, now detached me from the grown-ups. We diverged to the nursery. I suppose my father, in the course of the evening, helped to sort out the awkward situation, because Uncle Giles left the following day. No one yet realised that the Mute with the Bowstring stood at the threshold of the door, that, if they wanted to get anything done in time of peace, they must be quick about it. Already, the sands had almost run out. The doctor, for example, ordered a ‘complete holiday’ for Billson. Inquiries revealed that she had gone to rest in her room that afternoon, where, contemplating her troubles, she had fallen asleep to awaken later in a ‘state’, greatly disturbed, but about which she could otherwise remember little or nothing. No doubt one of those nervous shifts of control had taken place within herself, later to be closely studied, then generally regarded as a sudden display of ‘dottiness’. It was, of course, agreed that she must go. Billson herself was insistent on that point. That decision on both sides was to be expected. Although the story passed immediately into legend, surprisingly little fuss was made about it at the time. A few days later — while the chancelleries of Europe entered into a ferment of activity — Billson, escorted by Edith, quietly travelled to Suffolk, where her family could take care of her for a time. Left alone with my mother during Edith’s absence from home on that occasion, I first heard a fairly full and reliable account of the story, fragments of which had, of course, already reached me in more or less garbled versions, from other sources. A long time passed before all the refinements of the saga were recorded and classified.

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.