For hours Joan left them together. Her own fortitude still kept her from being another drag on Roy. She remained staunch, trying to help him with her mother. Yet that night words were trembling on her lips; she came to the edge of begging him to love her for ever, of telling him how she hungered for him to marry her. She did not speak.
22: Strain in a Great House
Roy was working all through the spring in the Vatican Library, and then moved on to Berlin. I only saw him for a few hours on his way through London, but I heard that he was meeting Joan. He had not mentioned her in his letters to me, which were shorter and more stylised than they used to be, though often lit up by stories of his acquaintances in Rome. When I met him, he was affectionate, but neither high-spirited nor revealing. I did not see him again until he returned to England for the summer: as soon as he got back, we were both asked down to Boscastle.
I had twice visited Boscastle by myself, though not since Lady Muriel and Joan had gone to live there. Lady Boscastle had invited me so that she could indulge in two pleasures — tell stories of love affairs, and nag me subtly into being successful as quickly as might be. She had an adamantine will for success, and among the Boscastles she had found no chance to use it. So I came in for it all. She was resolved that I should not leave it too late. She approved the scope of my ambitions, but thought I was taking too many risks. She counted on me to carve out something realisable within the next three years. She was sarcastic, flattering, insidious and shrewd. She even invited eminent lawyers, whom she had known through her father, down to Boscastle so that I could talk to them.
Since the Royces arrived at the house, I had had no word from her or them. It was June when she wrote to say that Roy was going straight there: she added, the claws just perceptible beneath the velvet, “I hope this will be acceptable to our dear Joan. It is pleasant to think that it will be almost a family party.”
I arrived in Camelford on a hot midsummer afternoon. A Boscastle car met me, and we drove down the valley. From the lower road, as it came round by the sea, one got a dramatic view of the house, “our house”, “Bossy” itself.
It stood on the hill, a great pilastered classical front, with stepped terraces leading up from the lawns. When I first went, I was a little surprised that not a stone had been put there earlier than the eighteenth century: but the story explained it all.
Like good whig aristocrats with an eye to the main chance, the Boscastles had taken a step up after 1688. They had been barons for the last two centuries: now they managed to become earls. At the same time — it may not have been a coincidence — they captured a great heiress by marriage. Suitably equipped with an earldom and with money, it was time to think about the house. And so they indulged in the eighteenth-century passion for palatial building.
The previous house, the Tudor Boscastle, had lurked in the valley. The domestic engineers could now supply them with water if they built on the hill. With a firm eighteenth-century confidence that what was modern was best, they tore the Tudor house down to its foundations. They had not the slightest feeling for the past — like most people in a vigorous, expanding age. They were determined to have the latest thing. And they did it in the most extravagant manner, like a good many other Georgian grandees. They built a palace, big enough for the head of one of the small European states. They furnished it in the high eighteenth-century manner. They had ceilings painted by Kent. They had the whole scheme, inside and out, vetted by Lord Burlington, the arbiter of architectural taste.
They impoverished the family for generations: but they had a certain reward. It was a grand and handsome house, far finer than the Tudor one they had destroyed. It impressed one still as being on the loftiest scale. It also impressed one, I thought as I went from my bedroom to a bathroom after tea, as being grandiosely uncomfortable. There were thirty yards of corridors before I got to my bathroom: and the bathroom itself, which had been installed in the nineteenth century, was of preposterous size and struck cold as a vault. There were also great stretches of corridor between the kitchens and the dining-rooms, and no dish ever arrived quite warm.
I discovered one piece of news before I had been in the house an hour. Lord Boscastle had in his gift several of the livings round the countryside; one of these had recently fallen vacant, and Roy had persuaded him to give it to Ralph Udal. So far as I could gather, Roy had sent letter after letter to Lord Boscastle, offered to return from Berlin to describe Udal, invoked both Joan and her mother to speak for him. He was always importunate when begging a favour for someone else. Lord Boscastle had given way, saying that these fellows were much of a muchness, and Udal was now vicar of a small parish, which included the house of Boscastle itself. His church and vicarage were a mile or two along the coast.
I walked there before dinner, thinking that I might find Roy; but Udal was alone in the vicarage, although Roy had called that morning. Udal brought me a glass of sherry on to the lawn. It was a long time since we had last met, but he greeted me with cordiality and with his easy, unprickly, almost impersonal good nature. He had altered very little in appearance; the hair was turning grey over his ears, but since he was twenty-five he had looked a man in a tranquil and indefinite middle age. He was in shirtsleeves, and looked powerful, sunburnt and healthy. He drank his sherry, and smiled at me, with his eyes narrowed by interest and content.
“How do you think Roy is?” he said easily, going back to my question about Roy’s visit.
“How do you?”
“You see much more of him than I do,” said Udal, also stonewalling.
“Not since he’s been abroad,” I said.
“Well,” said Udal, after a pause, “I don’t think he is to be envied.”
He looked at me with his lazy kindness. “To tell you the truth, Eliot, I didn’t think he was to be envied the first time I set eyes on him. It was the scholarship examination. I saw him outside the hall. I said to myself ‘that lad will be too good for you. But he’s going to have a rough time.’”
He smiled, and added: “It seems to me that I wasn’t far wrong.”
He asked me about Roy’s professional future. I said that everything must come to him; the university could not help creating a special readership or chair for him within three or four years.
Udal nodded his head.
“He’s very talented,” he said. “Yet you know, Eliot, sometimes I think it would have been better — if he had chosen a different life.”
“Such as?”
“He might have done better to join my trade. He might have found things easier if he’d become a priest.” Suddenly Udal smiled at me. “You’ve always disliked my hanging round, in case he was going to surrender, haven’t you? I thought it was the least I could do for him, just to wait in the slips, so to speak.”
I asked him how much Roy had talked to him about faith. He said, with calm honesty, very little: was there really much to say? Roy had not been looking for an argument. Whichever side he emerged, he had to live his way towards it.
Udal went on: “Sometimes I wonder whether he would have found it easier — if he’d actually lived a different life. I mean with women.”
“It would have been harder without them,” I said.
“I wonder,” said Udal. “There’s much nonsense talked on these matters, you know. I’m trying to be guided by what I’ve seen. And some of the calmest and happiest people I’ve seen, Eliot, have led completely ‘frustrated’ lives. And some of the people I’ve seen who always seem sexually starved — they’re people who spend their whole time hopping in and out of bed. Life is very odd.”