Blythe A Treasonable Growth

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ISBN: 978-0-571-28750-5
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

A Treasonable Growth was Ronald Blythe's was first book and only novel. It is set in Aldeburgh, Suffolk shortly before the Second World War. Ronald Blythe himself has described it as his 'Forsterian novel' and even admits to going for walks with E. M. Forster while working on the novel 'although I never mentioned it.' Freda Bellingham, the founder of Copdock School, ensnares the unsuspecting Richard Brand in order to save her ramshackle foundation. At twenty-four, Richard is that perilous mixture, gauche, good and uncommitted. He falls straight into the morass of Copdock School. The time is just before the Second World War and already the less daring British exiles in Italy are planning to return home. Among them is the celebrated novelist, Sir Paul Abott, the nephew of Freda Bellingham. He quits his Sicilian villa for Suffolk and, like his aunt, decides he must have new blood. He needs someone, 'call it an amanuensis,' someone 'more than a typist and less than a friend.' In full flight from Freda Bellingham and Sir Paul Abbott, Richard joins forces with Mary Crawford, a marriage dreamer. But lovers should be strangers first and uncommitted by too close a knowledge of each other. At this point the aged hunters of these perplexed lovers should have moved in for the kill, but even their egocentricity had to bow before the larger madness which was to shatter their little world.

In a long and distinguished career Ronald Blythe's work includes Akenfield, his classic study of English village life, poetry, fiction, essays, short stories, history and literary criticism. His work has been filmed, widely translated, awarded literary prizes and his 'voice' recognised as one of special originality. Blythe is President of the John Clare Society and has always taken part in the cultural life of his native countryside. He lives in the Stour Valley in the farmhouse which was once the home of his friend John Nash.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Blythe, Ronald

Leseproben

2

A BOY might see Miss Bellingham a dozen or so times during his stay at Copdock, unless some persistent offence qualified him for a particular audience in the abundant terror of her room. Twice a year she showed herself publicly: in May when she walked between parents and sisters scattered over her lawn in the fickle sunshine to sit under the cedar, like Paris under Ida, to judge the annual attainments; and in December when she entered her mother’s old drawing-room, now Big School, to make a speech about Christmas and duty and love. Boys who remembered little else of their schooldays remembered Miss Bellingham, and more particularly than her decrepit presence even—her voice. Intensely loud and much accentuated, by some art it also contrived to be moving, sweet and very feminine. It even made them feel that something was missing when, later on, they made their own morose encounters with women. The mystery, perhaps.

A visit to her was a journey to a goddess. Although she had adopted rooms in the servants’ quarters, there wasn’t a tread on the scrubbed deal stairs that was not hieratic. Parents with any qualms that this elderly blue-stocking might put into the heads of their quaking offspring ideas other than those needed as a foundation for the minor professions of country life, erred in two ways. The first because they had been conceited enough to imagine that anything remarkable should be hidden in such dull clay; the second that even if by some miracle it did, that the old, cold glance of Freda Bellingham would help to raise it up. The truth was she disliked boys. There was nothing perverse in her dislike, nor self-pity because she herself was maiden, nor was it because they spoilt all the best rooms of Copdock House, where she might have sat in peace if her money hadn’t run out. She simply had no use for sketches, roughs or anything in the making. What she demanded was a good full canvas, not to mention a reasonably gilt frame. To Miss Bellingham boys were embryo men and nothing more. They were incomplete and, she suspected, inhuman. For her their personalities didn’t exist. Their pain was an unpleasant snivelling. Their joy was a guffaw. They were nobbly green fruit bumping against the learned bough waiting for what seemed to her at times, endless summers before they were ripened. Like green plums, their skins might glow, but they remained essentially nasty.

She sat now opposite Mr Winsley. They were carolling down below in the street ‘We Three Kings of Orient are …’ But there were a great many voices. ‘Is it a choir?’ she asked. She forced a hand behind an ear. Her ears were big, with brown, dragging lobes. Above their expansive, almost shameful nakedness, flared a bouffant mass of white and beautiful hair. Her fingers spreading down the arm-rests of her chair were the palest flecked gold and might have been, in the poor light, the carved rosewood terminals themselves.

‘I thought I was going to die today,’ she said. Her lids crept up like shutters and she trapped Mr Winsley in her glaucous gaze.

‘Oh don’t say it! You musn’t say it!’

‘Do you imagine at this stage one chooses what to say? These things happen to me so I mention them.’

‘But you are feeling better now?’ It was as much a statement of fact as a question.

‘Better? Worse …? I don’t ask myself those kind of things, Cadman.’

She bent forward and smoothed the multifarious coverlets of rucked crochet which held her in the chair.

‘Did he arrive?’ she asked.

‘After luncheon.’

‘So he didn’t get any?’

‘Minna waited.’

‘Minna!’ repeated Miss Bellingham disparagingly.

‘Do you know what she said today?’ said Mr Winsley. ‘“Why aren’t I ever given something to do?”—She meant she herself, you know!—I really think she meant it!’

Miss Bellingham laughed too. Her lips fled back and showed darkness. It was the mirth of a mask. ‘You were a fool, you know, Cadman,’ she said, but without rancour. ‘I suppose Minna liked him?’ she added.

‘I think so.’

‘Do you?’

‘I suppose so—why not? He’s like all the rest, of course; he thinks he’s going to make a big bang in the world …’ Mr Winsley snuffled and passed a cold finger over the little delta of veins which ran down the tip of his nose.

Miss Bellingham sank back into the buttony comfort of her chair. Her jaw worked slightly as it always did when she was absorbed in thought, grinding away with a gentle mandibular insistency. Mr Winsley watched her. He hadn’t sat. He now leaned against the cluttered bookshelves and swung one foot backwards and forwards with unconscious grace. A tall oil lamp with a blue glass stem threw a ball of light between them. Miss Bellingham’s lids, half closed, hid all her eyes. Once or twice she ran her hand up over the shawls in a stiff little clawing movement before she let it rest among her beads and once she turned and stared long at the jalousie fidgetting against the window.

‘I arranged that he should take the fourth and fifth for everything except maths and physics,’ said Mr Winsley. The silence irked him. It emphasized an existence beyond the limits of his knowledge, a delicious enfeeblement of blood and resolution which was the penumbra of the end. Those futile scrabblings of her fingers against the chair! The way she indulged dissolution! He could shake her. He hoped he wouldn’t be as selfish when his time came!

‘My dinner was cold tonight,’ she complained suddenly.

‘I’m sorry. Minna must see Ellen at once.’

‘Ellen—?’

‘She’s the new cook—the one we hired last week.’

‘Why do you say “we” when she’s obviously some inefficient slut that Minna found!’

‘But you did see her.’ Mr Winsley’s face grew owlish in his intensity to convey conviction.

Miss Bellingham said: ‘They’re using the top landing again. I heard them. I won’t have it!’

Mr Winsley could not explain. He read all along the top row of the bookcase opposite. The Psychology of the Poet Shelley by Edward Carpenter. Cities by Arthur Symonds … The Transactions of the Seldon Society … Marie Bashkirtseff … Octavia Hill … Leaves of Grass … Who’s Who 1911 …

But Miss Bellingham was recovering. Her liveliness when she remembered it was huge. She jerked up now and tried to reach something on the table. Mr Winsley picked up letters, papers, pamphlets—a book to help her. ‘Allow me,’ he repeated over and over again, blind to how much it maddened her, this getting-in-the-way politeness of his that was only a damned nuisance. She dashed whatever he proffered from his hand. He let her do so with joy. Her sudden strength set his fears at rest. She found what she was looking for. It had slid down the side of the chair. She clutched it firmly, a broad white envelope exquisitely addressed to herself.

‘Paul is coming home,’ she announced.

Mr Winsley was speechless.

‘In fact, he is home,’ went on Miss Bellingham. ‘He’s at Brown’s Hotel and will be coming down to Sheldon after Christmas. He invites advice. Here, see for yourself.’

She threw the letter and it fell to the floor. Mr Winsley dived to retrieve it like an adipose gannet avid for the least information.

‘Is it a secret?’ he enquired.

‘Read it and see.’ ‘My dear Aunt,’ he read.

‘Or I might almost say, my dearest, dearest Egeria, if I were normally given to such excesses. I’m in London. Are you surprised? And will you be amazed when I tell you that I intend very soon to be found only at Sheldon? I’m miserable about it, of course—not for dear Sheldon but for being hurried along by all these armies, for being pushed out. It is generally believed in Sicily that it must come in the spring. I pray not and the British Government evidently believes not—or so people say on trains. But things are bad and I thought to come home now would be to do so less precipitously than later on. The Harveys have left too—in fact we all came together. It was terrible getting rid of things and packing things and saying farewell to the garden. Allessandro wept, I wept, Father Guiseppi wept—such a flood! But even if there isn’t a war, I think that the time has come to consider Sheldon. I’m fifty-three.

Did I tell you we saw Hitler? It was at Mainz last October. But surely I would have told you. But it is possible I forgot, so here is the description once more. The general, all-over impression, as you might say, is mycological. A flocculent puffiness pushing out a policeman’s coat. The wonder is his voice, of course; harder than anything imaginable. And coming out of his soft little body, it’s as marvellous as flames spurting from a sponge. Do you remember a particular type once described as ‘common’? Well he is that. They roared and roared and I’m sorry to say that we almost did too. A roar is so infectious! We ached not to and ached at the same time to be sick. An uncomfortable confliction, you must agree!—but I mustn’t bore you.

Is there a soul in your estimable employ who could help me get my books and things straight at Sheldon?

Tomlinson’s have just taken the last volume of Charon’s Cox—I’m glad to see the going of it. Scrimshanks is being re-issued. (Again, you will say.) The...