We talked about some acquaintances, then about Roy again.
Udal said: “Well, we shall never know.” Then he smiled. “But I can give him one bit of relief, anyhow. Now I’ve got this job, I don’t see any particular reason why I should have to borrow any more money from him. It will save him quite a bit.”
I laughed, but I was put off. I tried to examine why. From anyone else, I should have found that shameless candour endearing. Like Roy, I did not mind his sliding out of duties he did not like. I did not mind, in fact I admired, his confidence in his own first-hand experience. I did not mind his pleasure, quite obvious although he was so settled, in an hour of scabrous gossip. They were all parts of an unusual man, who had gone a different way from most of our acquaintances.
Yet I was on edge in his company. Roy had once accused me of disliking him. As we talked that afternoon, I felt that was not precisely true. I did not dislike him, I found him interesting and warm — but I should be glad to leave him, I found his presence a strain. I could not define it further. Was it that he took everything that happened to him too much as his by right? He had slid through life comfortably, without pain, without much self-questioning: did I feel he ought to be more thankful for his luck? Did he accept his own nature too acquiescently? His idleness, his lack of conscience, his amiable borrowing — he took them realistically, without protest, with what seemed to me an over-indulgent pleasure. He looked at himself, was not dissatisfied, and never kicked against the pricks.
It was strange. Though I was not comfortable with him, he seemed perfectly so with me. He told me of how he proposed to adjust his life, now that at last he had arrived at a decent stopping place.
He intended to devote Sunday and one other day a week to his parish: three days a week to his own brand of biographical scholarship: one day to sheer physical relaxation, mowing his lawn, ambling round the hills, sitting by the sea: which would leave one day “for serious purposes”. I was curious about the “serious purposes”, and Udal smiled. But he was neither diffident nor coy. He meant to spend this one day a week in preparing himself for the mystical contemplation. One day a week for spiritual knowledge: it sounded fantastically businesslike. I said as much, and Udal smiled indifferently.
“I told Roy about it,” he said. “It’s the only time I’ve ever shocked him.”
It struck me as so odd that I spoke to Roy when we met in the inner drawing-room before dinner. I said that I had heard Udal’s time-table.
“It’s dreadful,” said Roy. “It makes everything nice and hygienic, doesn’t it?” He was speaking with a dash of mockery, with hurt and bitter feeling. He shrugged his shoulders, and said: “Oh, he may as well be left to it.”
Just then Lady Muriel entered and caught the phrase. She gave me a formal, perfunctory greeting: then she turned to Roy and demanded to know whom he was discussing. Her solid arms were folded over her black dress, as I had seen them in the Lodge: my last glimpse of her after the funeral, when she kept erect only by courage and training, was swept aside: she was formidable and active again. Yet I felt she depended more on Roy than ever.
Roy put his preoccupations behind him, and talked lightly of Udal. “You must remember him, Lady Mu. You’ll like him.” He added: “You’ll approve of him too. He doesn’t stay at expensive hotels.”
Lady Muriel did not take the reference, but she continued to talk of Udal as we sat at dinner in the “painted room”. The table was a vast circle, under the painted Italianate ceiling, and there were only six of us spread round it, the Boscastles, Lady Muriel and Joan, Roy and I.
Lady Muriel’s boom seemed the natural way to speak across such spaces.
“I consider,” she told her brother, “that you should support the new vicar.”
Lord Boscastle was drinking his soup. The butler was experimenting with some device for reheating it in the actual dining-room, but it was still rather cold.
“What are you trying to get me to do now, Muriel?” he said crossly.
“I consider that you should attend service occasionally.” She looked accusingly at her sister-in-law. “I have always regarded going to service as one of the responsibilities of our position. I am sorry to see that it has not been kept up.”
“I refuse to be jockeyed into doing anything of the kind,” said Lord Boscastle with irritation. I guessed that, as Lady Muriel recovered her energies, he was not being left undisturbed. “I did not object to putting this fellow in to oblige Roy. But I strongly object if Muriel uses the fellow to jockey me with. I don’t propose to attend ceremonies with which I haven’t the slightest sympathy. I don’t see what good it does me or anyone else.”
“It was different for you in college, Muriel,” said Lady Boscastle gently. “You had to consider other people’s opinions, didn’t you?”
“I regarded it as the proper thing to do,” said Lady Muriel, her neck stiff with fury. She could think of no retort punishing enough for her sister-in-law, and so pounded on at Lord Boscastle. “I should like to remind you, Hugh, that the Budes have never missed a Sunday service since they came into the title.”
The Budes were the nearest aristocratic neighbours, whom even Lord Boscastle could not pretend were social inferiors. But that night, pleased by his wife’s counter-attack, he reverted to his manner of judicial consideration, elaborate, apparently tentative and tired, in reality full of triumphant contempt.
“Ah yes, the Budes. I forgot you knew them, Muriel. I suppose you must have done before you went off to your various new circles. Yes, the Budes.” His voice trailed tiredly away. “I should have thought they were somewhat rustic, shouldn’t you have thought?”
Revived, Lord Boscastle proceeded to dispose of Udal.
“I wish someone would tell him,” he said in his dismissive tone, “not to give the appearance of blessing me from such an enormous height.”
“He’s a very big man,” said Roy, defending Udal out of habit.
“I’m a rather short one,” said Lord Boscastle promptly. “And I strongly object to being condescended to from an enormous height.”
But, despite the familiar repartees, there was tension through the party that night.
One source was Joan: for she sat, speaking very little, sometimes, when the rest of us were talking, letting her gaze rest broodingly on Roy. There was violence, reproach, a secret between them. Roy was subdued, as the Boscastles had never seen him, although he put in a word when Lady Muriel was causing too much friction.
Even if Roy and Joan had been in harmony, however, there would still have been frayed nerves that night. For the other source of tension was political. At Boscastle, when I first stayed there, people differed about political things without much heat. There was no danger of a rift if a political argument sprang up. But it was now the summer of 1938, and on both sides we were feeling with the force of a personal emotion. The divisions were sharp: the half-tones were vanishing: in college it was 8–6 for Chamberlain and appeasement; here it was 3–3. On the Chamberlain side were Lord Boscastle, Lady Muriel, and Roy. On the other side (which in college were called “warmongers”, “Churchill men”, or “Bolsheviks”) were Lady Boscastle, Joan and I.
Roy’s long ambivalence had ended, and he and I were in opposite camps.
Bitterness flared up in a second. Lady Muriel favoured a temporary censorship of the press. I disagreed with her. In those days I did not find it easy to hold my tongue.
“Really, Mr Eliot,” she said, “I am only anxious to remove the causes of war.”