Family History Read online

  But the final pages pack an emotional charge it is impossible to withstand. Is it a happy ending or an unhappy one? I guarantee that like Harold Nicolson, who was reading Family History on the train between Staplehurst (the station for Sissinghurst) and Charing Cross on 23 October 1932, most readers will “weep copiously”.

  Foreword

  In this novel I have spelt the word ‘that’ in two different ways: either with one ‘t’ or with two, in order to differentiate between the conjunction and the demonstrative adjective and demonstrative or relative pronoun. I fear that this innovation may irritate many readers. It has irritated me, in reading over my own manuscript, for the unfamiliar is always irritating until it has taken its place as the familiar.

  I am no friend to phonetic spelling. I prefer to think that foreigners to our language must struggle with their own difficulties in the matter of such words as plough, cough, thorough, through, though, rough; words which, spelt in the same way, are pronounced quite differently. Or with such words as Hugh, hew, hue, you, ewe, knew, gnu, view, lieu, queue; words which, spelt differently, are pronounced in the same way. I prefer to think that even the English young, like the foreigner, must grapple with the task. I should like to see the decimal system introduced into England, to save the English young many hours which might be better employed than in wrestling with our extraordinary and obsolete calculations in pounds, shillings, and pence; rods, poles, and perches. But I should not like to see the English language wholly shorn of its very peculiar peculiarities.

  Nevertheless, I do believe that in the interests of clarity, the addition of the extra ‘t’ should abolish forever the confusion of thatt ambiguous little word.

  PART ONE

  Portrait of the Jarrolds

  M-m-m, my dear,” said old Mr. Jarrold, taking his daughter-in-law for the hundred-and-twentieth time round his Museum, “thatt’s the first bit of coal brought up from the pits at Orlestone. Look at it. Thatt’s what sent Dan to Eton. That’s what made a gentleman of Dan. A dirty lump, I daresay, but worth more than all those cowrie-shells I brought back from Java. M-m-m.”

  Mr. Jarrold was such a dear old man that Evelyn Jarrold, his daughter-in-law, looked willingly for the hundred-and-twentieth time at the first bit of coal from Orlestone, and indeed at all the other miscellaneous exhibits in the Museum. Mr. Jarrold always seemed to forget that she had been round the Museum before, and seized upon her whenever she came to luncheon at the Park Lane house, to take her round the Museum afterwards. Although he referred continually to his grandson Dan, his advanced age apparently allowed him to ignore the fact that Dan’s mother was no stranger to the house, to the family, or to the Museum. He might still treat her as a visitor and as an attractive woman; might still exercise his somewhat senile gallantry. “M-m-m, my dear,” he said, taking her arm, leading her from show-case to show-case.

  She looked dutifully at his collection, disguising her boredom because she was naturally kind-hearted and liked to please the old man. Rather dusty, she thought, and lacking in life; but they preserved some kind of existence so long as Mr. Jarrold remained alive to croon his saga over them. Lumps of coal; cowrie-shells; the practical and the romantic. She knew the order of value in which he placed them. Yet he had gone once to Java, in his yacht; but his yacht had been but the outcome of his dirty lumps of coal; he had owned a yacht, because other rich men owned yachts; and the unexpected sorrow of his life,—greater even than the sorrow of his eldest son’s death in 1916,—had been his rejection from the Royal Yacht Squadron. He had been obliged to go round the world flying the blue instead of the white ensign. Evelyn experienced some indignation on his behalf whenever she remembered his humiliation.

  “M-m-m, my dear,” he murmured, like an old and sleepy bee.

  Still, he had done well for himself and his family in the world; so well, that a baronetcy was confidently expected before the year was out. He was prominent among industrial magnates, and his charity was both lavish and discriminating. Mr. Jarrold alone affected to pooh-pooh the suggestion of the baronetcy. Honours and success had clearly waited in store for the Jarrolds from the first. Evelyn Wilson, as the daughter of a country solicitor, had been congratulated on her good fortune when she became engaged to the eldest Jarrold son so far back as 1913. It was unfortunate, of course, that her husband should have been killed in the war, but at any rate her son remained as the heir. Neither her friends nor her father saw any reason to revise their congratulations.

  The Museum was certainly dark and dusty, curiously housed in the Park Lane family mansion. The show-cases extended round the dark well of a hall, and round the upper galleries of thatt hall, fenced off from the well by balustrades of mouchara-bieh. Mr. Jarrold took a pride in the Eastern touch provided by those pierced and fretted balustrades. They testified that he, also, was acquainted with the Orient. They testified that he, also, was a man of taste, a traveller, a man of culture. Anybody who knew Mr. Jarrold knew, naturally, that he did not give a fig for culture, except in so far as his fortune could provide it as an adjunct, an extra, a subject alternately for boast or for derision, whether typified by his own travels or by his grandson’s classical education at Eton. Both experiences resolved themselves into the same category for Mr. Jarrold: a gentleman’s luxury, quite separate from practical life. He enjoyed turning his grandson on, after dinner, to repeat a dozen lines from the Aeneid; such an accompaniment seemed to improve the quality of his port. “Come on, Dan,” he would say; “Tu regere imperio populos Romane memento,—how does it go?” And then he would beat time to the magnificent rhythm with a fork, and would derive satisfaction from the fact that he had a grandson who—thanks to him—could quote Virgil. But his electric gramophone, which wound itself up and changed its own records, and was also a wireless, gave him the same sort of pleasure. Culture, for him, was something rather expensive, and of no practical use at all.

  Still, he was a dear old man, and Evelyn followed him willingly as he mumbled round his Museum.

  It had all been assembled by himself personally; no exhibit went back further than his own generation, or, one might say, further than the Jarrold family itself. Mr. Jarrold was practically the creator of the family. Only in his generation had the Jarrolds clambered definitely out of the clay. Mr. Jarrold could point to the lump of coal which had sent his sons to St. Paul’s and his grandson to Eton; he could point to the model of the first shunting-station at the pit-head. He was very much the founder of a dynasty as he took visitors round these show-cases. It was only when he came to the evidences of his travels that he became a little confused, a little shame-faced. Here, he evidently felt, the unnecessary impinged upon the sensible. The presence of the unnecessary could be explained away only by the fact that men with fortunes such as William Jarrold’s could afford to own yachts. Yachts took such men, in their rare holidays, to strange, un-English places from which it was almost obligatory to bring back queer, un-English objects, if only to show how great the difference between English people and natives was. Mr. Jarrold muddled all this up vaguely with culture. It induced in him a confused state of mind. Pride became blurred by apology. Apology became overlaid by pride. It was fine to have a grandson who could quote Virgil, though the quotation of Virgil was also a little shameful; something to be treated with a mixture of derision and pride. It was fine to have travelled on one’s own yacht to the East, though a little shameful to have troubled to assemble works of art,—as Mr. Jarrold considered his mouchara-bieh balustrades to be,—from the East. Works of art were all right so long as they were expensive enough. But Mr. Jarrold could never quite apply thatt justification to his collection of curios.

  They were his weakness; he loved them. He kept the master-key of the show-cases on his watch-chain.

  His watch-chain was almost an emblem of civic dignity. It crossed his stomach in great gold links, and disappeared into a waistcoat pocket at either end. Mr. Jarrold’s clothes were a tri
fle old-fashioned, for his tailor had been forbidden to vary their cut for the past forty years. Black clothes in London, with a morning coat and a grey stripe in the trousers; dark grey tweed of a peculiarly unbending thickness in the country. When he went out, whether in London or the country, he donned a square black hat, midway between a topper and a bowler. Evelyn said that in London he looked like a nineteenth-century statesman, and in the country like a nineteenth-century squire. The mutton-chop whiskers, fringing his rubicund old face, and the broad tie invariably pushed through a ring, produced this effect. His short, thick-set hands, covered with freckles and fine red hairs, were the hands of a practical man accustomed to power and authority. He had never known a day’s illness in his life, and now in his seventy-fifth year his faculties remained undiminished. His constant mumble which might have been taken as a sign of old age, was, in fact, nothing more than a nervous habit of which he himself was scarcely conscious, and was thoroughly belied by the piercing glance of his small grey eye. Thatt eye declared that William Jarrold, coal-owner and iron-master, would see through all nonsense and would stand none of it, either from his family or his employees. His sons had winced before it, his subordinates had trembled, and his wife had always known her place. It was a favourite saying of his, that a man should be master in his own house.

  But he was not in the least grim, and he had always liked a pretty woman, though he had been wise enough not to marry one. He liked his daughter-in-law Evelyn.

  His gaiety increased noticeably whenever she came to the house. Evelyn liked him too; she almost loved him. They were the best of friends. She took trouble to please him, chaffing him affectionately, creating little private jokes between them, so that he purred like an old tom-cat and chaffed her in return. “Ah, my dear, you waste your time on an old fellow like me.” For all his chaff, however, she knew that his views on life were severe. His upper middle-class morality was absolutely rigid. A second marriage he would have tolerated, since it was not reasonably to be expected that her life should have to come to an end on the day Tommy was killed in Flanders, but any less reputable affair he would condemn out of hand. He took it for granted that Evelyn, like all the other members of his family, knew exactly how far she ought to go. He had no doubt that she had accepted a certain amount of admiration between the ages of twenty-four, when Tommy was killed, and thirty-nine, which she now must be. Thatt was natural. He had paid her a good many compliments himself, and younger men must have paid her many more. But of her virtue he was unquestioningly convinced. And if anyone in his presence expressed a wonder at her continued celibacy, he explained it by saying that she lived for the boy.

  “When does Dan come back, my dear?”

  “On the twentieth, Papa.”

  All his children called him Papa. Evelyn had brought herself to it with difficulty.

  “And you’re both coming down to Newlands for Christmas?”

  “But of course. If you’ll have us.”

  “Don’t you always come for Christmas? Well, then. Besides, what should I do without you? And I want you to talk to Evan.”

  “What’s the matter with Evan, Papa?”

  “Drinks too much,” said Mr. Jarrold shortly.

  “Evan?”

  “Evan. Suppose he thinks I can’t see. I can, though. I can see when a bottle of brandy, half full at the end of dinner, is empty by breakfast. Damn good brandy too,— much too good to get drunk on.”

  “You mean?”

  “I mean that he sneaks down to the dining-room and finishes it after I’ve gone to bed. Thatt’s what I mean. M-m-m.”

  “Why don’t you tell Paterson to put away the drinks after you leave the dining-room?”

  “Sensible as usual, my dear,—I like your sense—but Paterson would see through it. I can’t give my own son away to Paterson. Difficult enough to give him away to you.”

  Evelyn had known for years that Evan drank.

  “Very well, Papa, I’ll talk to him.”

  “I haven’t told his mother,” said Mr. Jarrold, shooting a sudden glance at her.

  “No, of course not, Papa; much better not.”

  “Don’t you think so?” said Mr. Jarrold, delighted and relieved by this confirmation. “Only distress her,—what?—and do no good to Evan. Tommy never drank, did he?”

  “No!” said Evelyn, suddenly laughing, and for some reason she pressed the old man’s arm affectionately to her side; “Tommy had every virtue and no vices.” Mr. Jarrold must never know anything about Tommy’s mean little vices. Tommy was a ‘good fellow’ in his father’s eyes.

  “Dull dog, Tommy,” rose to Mr. Jarrold’s tongue, but he suppressed it, remembering that Tommy was dead and had been Evelyn’s husband. “I can’t think where Evan gets it from,” he grumbled; “I never drank as a young man; at least, no more than was natural. A binge every now and then; but I never soaked. Evan soaks.”

  “Have you said anything to him yourself, Papa?”

  “No fear!” said Mr. Jarrold emphatically. “Why, if a man of my age said anything of the sort to a man of his age, he’d drink two bottles of brandy instead of one. I’ve lived long enough to know thatt. No; give him a chance first. M-m-m. You talk to him, my dear, and if he takes no notice of what you say I’ll weigh in. I’ll bring up all the big guns too. ‘Tell him I’ll cut him off with a shilling. ‘Tell him I won’t regard him as my son. ‘Won’t have drunkards directing my business when I’m gone. ‘Won’t have drunkards looking after Dan’s interests. Not safe. As soon trust the Rolls to a drunken chauffeur. But I won’t speak to him myself till everything else has failed.”

  “I shall probably fail, Papa.”

  “Certain to. Hopeless job I’m giving you. Shan’t blame you if you do. The hand that rocks the cradle can’t cork the bottle. M-m-m. All the same, Evan likes you. Likes you too much, I sometimes think. There’s just a chance, he might listen. Try.”

  “I’ll try, Papa,” said Evelyn, who had already tried.

  “That’s right. Tackle the hopeless job, and you may bring it off. I have, sometimes. Tackled the hopeless job. Not often. Only on big issues. Evan isn’t a big issue.”

  “Poor Evan, Papa!”

  “Nonsense. Don’t sentimentalise. He ought to have more guts. Everybody has temptations. Had them myself. Didn’t give way. Not thatt sort, though. Poor Evan,—rubbish. Tell him to take a pull on himself. Tell him to remember the business. He wants a share in it, doesn’t he? Well, he won’t get it unless he takes a pull. Not a pull at the bottle, mind. Another sort of pull. M-m-m. At his socks.”

  Evelyn found the subject embarrassing; it gave her a feeling of dishonesty to pretend surprise at Mr. Jarrold’s confidences, when she herself could have told him far more about Evan than he was ever likely to know.

  “Don’t let us think about it any more now,” she said; “I promise you that I’ll see what I can do at Christmas. Show me some more of your treasures. I don’t believe I have ever seen everything in the Museum. And I shall have to be going in a few minutes.”

  “Appointment?”

  “Only with a dressmaker,” said Evelyn smiling.

  “Ah, thatt’s good,” said Mr. Jarrold, faintly stirred by this suggestion of feminine mysteries; “have lots of pretty frocks for Christmas. You always look nice, my dear. Those furs,—very becoming to you. And nice scent too. Like women to use scent. Suitable. Always say that women are the flowers of life, and flowers ought to smell good. Most of the new ones don’t though.”

  “Did Mrs. Jarrold tell you thatt, Papa?”

  “I’ve got a nose of my own, haven’t I? Improved varieties—pooh. They’ve improved all the smell out of them. Give me cabbage roses every time, and nice soft clothes for women. Muslin, thatt’s what I like, and pretty colours.”

  “I can’t wear muslin in December, I’m afraid, Papa.”

 
“Oh, you’re all right,” said Mr. Jarrold, looking at her approvingly; “you look soft, and warm,—the way women ought to look, and as though you hadn’t a bone in your body. Healthy, though. Most women nowadays look as though they hadn’t room to keep their lungs in.”

  “You’ll soon be telling me that I’m fat,” said Evelyn.

  “Slender, slender,” said Mr. Jarrold; “not sickly, I meant, and not as hard as a board. Just right. We might get some skating at Christmas.”

  She was accustomed to his abrupt changes of subject. “I hope so,” she replied, glowing; “I love skating, and so does Dan.”

  “Spoil his hunting, though,” said Mr. Jarrold.

  “I don’t know that thatt would break his heart,” said Evelyn cautiously. She felt her own heart beginning to beat faster. Here was the opening she had been waiting for, and much as she disliked the prospect she must avail herself of it. She had promised Dan. Dan, who was frightened of his grandfather, had persuaded himself that his mother would make everything all right, and though Evelyn had sighed over his weakness when she saw how easily he shifted his difficulties on to her, she had resolved not to fail him.

  “Nonsense,” said Mr. Jarrold; “every proper boy would break his heart if his hunting was spoilt in his Christmas holidays. Dash it, not every boy has hunters like Dan. Most boys have to come out on an old tub of a pony on two days of the week. But no one could ever say I didn’t mount my grandson properly.”

  He was quite angry, quite indignant. He took his hand away from Evelyn’s arm, and walked away by himself, staring into a show-case full of grinning Javanese masks, his hands clasped behind his back, muttering to himself.