Hand In Glove Part 9

For this-and most other insights into Tristram's early years- McKitrick was indebted, as he made clear, to the poet's sister, Beatrix, the only living witness to many of the events he described. The thought that she too was now dead struck home at Derek. It transformed what must have been mere reminiscence when related to the author into a fixed and final historical statement. No more than what it told could ever now be told.

Lionel Abberley was, according to Beatrix, a young man of exceptional sporting and intellectual prowess. Destined for a place at Oxford in the autumn of 1914, he enlisted instead in the Army at the outbreak of the First World War and was killed early the following year. His mother, devastated by the loss, entered a physical and mental decline that ended in her death in November 1916.

How these two blows affected the character of young Tristram was not certain. What was certain was that his father invested all his hopes for the future in his remaining son and that Beatrix was obliged to a.s.sume a maternal role in the family despite her tender years.

Tristram followed in his brother's footsteps at Rugby without ever quite fitting them and went up to Worcester College, Oxford, in the autumn of 1926. He had till then displayed neither poetic vocation nor political conviction, but both were soon to blossom. Oxford in the late twenties was, of course, an ideal environment for this to happen in and McKitrick went to great lengths to demonstrate how Tristram was influenced by and a.s.sociated with such contemporaries as W.H.

Auden and Louis MacNiece. Excessive lengths, Derek felt, since actual links between them appeared to have been few.

Joseph Abberley's reaction to the publication of Tristram's first 52 R O B E R T G O D D A R D.

full-length poem, "Blindfold," in the anthology Oxford Poetry in 1928 was said by Beatrix to have been mixed, revealing as the work did a socialist sentiment to which the old man was bound to object.

He objected even more to the friends Tristram invited to Indsleigh Hall, suspecting that those who were not communists were h.o.m.os.e.xuals and that many of them were both. Predictably, McKitrick looked for evidence of h.o.m.os.e.xuality in Tristram's behaviour at this time, and claimed to find some. If he did, it was not in the testimony of Beatrix Abberley. She maintained that what misled her father was merely a dandified pose on her brother's part.

After leaving Oxford, Tristram lived for a year in London with a.s.sorted friends, writing sporadic but unpublished verse. He continued to accept a generous allowance from his father, who cherished the hope that he would eventually return home and take over the reins at Abberley & Timmins.

In the summer of 1930, Tristram embarked on a European tour to which his father had agreed only as prelude to his settling down to some kind of career. At Joseph Abberley's insistence, Beatrix accompanied her brother. In the course of the next year, they visited nearly every country in Europe, including Russia, Germany, Italy, France-and Spain. Tristram's exposure to the widespread economic distress they saw, coupled with a rosy-hued view of Stalin and an aversion to Mussolini, completed his conversion to socialism, though it was never to extend to a formal acceptance of Communism. What was to emerge from the rash of poems inspired by the tour was a coolly con-trolled anger at the abuse of political and economic power coupled with a keen sympathy for the underdog. Tristram Abberley struck many of those who met him in the early thirties as a witty pleasure-loving young man, but beneath this image-as the poems proved-a robust and articulate mind was at work, a.n.a.lysing humanity on a grand as well as a minor scale. Yet he seemed also to crave personal involvement in the events of the day, a craving rooted, as McKitrick saw it, in his presence in Madrid at the time of the anti-monarchist riots of May 1931, when he became convinced that only concerted action by the common people could achieve genuine political change.

Back in England in the autumn of 1931, Tristram at last complied with his father's wishes and accepted a junior managerial position at Abberley & Timmins. It was a disastrous move. Within a few months, he had put his socialist principles into practice by encouraging the H A N D I N G L O V E.

53.

workforce to resist a pay cut. A complete rift between father and son ensued. Tristram was dismissed and his allowance cancelled. Beatrix sided with her brother and was similarly disowned. They moved to London and lived together in straitened circ.u.mstances, Tristram sc.r.a.ping along as a journalist with various left-wing weeklies.

Tristram's first collection of verse, The Brow of the Hill, was published in October 1932. Although it made little impact at the time, it contained what McKitrick categorized as his best and most heart-felt poems, including the frequently anthologized "False G.o.ds."

The sudden death of Joseph Abberley early in 1933 transformed his children's finances. Tristram was able to abandon journalism and take up a free and easy existence in London society, whilst Beatrix left London to settle in Rye. Brother and sister drifted apart from then on and, at this point in the book, McKitrick was obliged to resort to more varied sources of opinion about his subject's development.

The general view was that Tristram was a hedonist with an un-easy conscience. The wealth he had inherited from his father enabled him to lead an extravagant and irresponsible life, indulging his enthusiasm for travel, fast cars and beautiful women. The poems he wrote served to a.s.suage the guilt he felt at such activities. And all the while a basic inclination towards socialism, apparent in his verse if not in his behaviour, ensured that he could not ignore the problems of the age.

After spending much of 1934 in the United States, he returned to England to put the finis.h.i.+ng touches to his second collection of verse, The Other Side, published in the spring of 1935. This collection met with widespread critical approval, even though, in McKitrick's judgement, the poems generally failed to match the originality and imme-diacy of his earlier work.

That spring also saw his engagement to Mary Brereton, a twenty-one-year-old secretary at his publisher's offices, a girl far removed from the female company he had lately been keeping. Her description of their courts.h.i.+p, as recorded by McKitrick, conjured up a strangely simple image of the poet: loyal, generous and more contented than the nature of his verse suggested. They married in September 1935 and, for a while, Tristram filled the role of doting husband as easily as he had that of the free-thinking socialite.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936, he seemed at first reluctant to become involved. By the autumn, the International 54 R O B E R T G O D D A R D.

Brigades had begun recruiting volunteers to fight for the Republican cause, but he made no move to join them. He expressed his support for the Republic when the periodical Left Review conducted a poll of English writers, but that was as far as he went. McKitrick attributed his reticence to domestic considerations. He had a young and by now pregnant wife to support, along with her orphaned brother. They had to come first. And, since he could give no practical a.s.sistance to the cause, he decided to refrain from empty rhetoric on its behalf.

As the Civil War continued, and the Republic's plight worsened, his inaction began to gnaw at his conscience. The conflict between the Republic and Franco's Nationalists distilled for him, as for many others, the conflicts of a whole decade. It was a heaven-sent opportunity to take a stand in defence of his principles. The birth of his son, Maurice, in March 1937, freed him of at least one domestic preoccupation and in July he accepted an invitation to attend an International Writers' Congress in Spain. He set off claiming that he wished merely to discuss intellectual att.i.tudes to the war, but McKitrick contended that he had already resolved to take an active part in the hostilities. A desire to emulate his dead brother's heroism and to recapture the exhilaration he had felt during the riots in Madrid six years before combined to override all reservations. When the congress ended, he did not return home.

The first Mary Abberley knew of her husband's decision to fight was when she received a letter from him announcing his acceptance of a commission in the British Battalion of the Fifteenth International Brigade. She was horrified. But she would have been even more horrified had she realized she would never see him again.

Tristram committed himself to the Republican cause just as others were beginning to abandon it. By the summer of 1937, the International Brigades were a weary and disillusioned force, with most of their best and brightest recruits killed in earlier fighting. But, to those who recollected his arrival for McKitrick's benefit, Tristram Abberley had come as living proof that all was not lost. They spoke of his energy and his generosity, his contagious belief in the justice of their struggle, his ability to restore a sense of purpose even to the most disaffected. The final and most contradictory of all the phases of his life-that of the selfless warrior-had begun.

But it was not to last long. Lieutenant Tristram Abberley first saw action-and distinguished himself by his bravery-on the Fuentes H A N D I N G L O V E.

55.

del Ebro front in October 1937. Then, in January 1938, his battalion was called in to the gruelling Battle of Teruel. He suffered a serious leg-wound during a rifle engagement outside the city on 20 January and was subsequently evacuated to hospital in Tarragona. Amputation was not considered necessary and he appeared to be well on the road to recovery when a blood infection set in. He died on 27 March 1938 and was buried in Tarragona the following day.

Tristram Abberley's career as a poet did not end with his death.

Indeed, in many respects, it was only then in its infancy. His experiences in Spain had prompted a last outpouring of verse, sent back to his widow among his personal effects and not published until 1952, when it emerged under the t.i.tle Spanish Lines. This revived interest in the whole body of his work, which during the 'fifties and especially the 'sixties grew steadily in popularity and esteem. By the time of McKitrick's research for his book in the mid-seventies, he was regarded as one of the most significant English poets of his generation.

Wisely, McKitrick did not attempt to reconcile the conflicting aspects of his subject's life and personality. The poems, he thought, were what would ultimately be remembered about Tristram Abberley.

Though the biographer could explain how they had come about, he could not penetrate to the secret of why.

Derek's despondency deepened as he neared the conclusion of the book. He had hoped, for no good reason, that something-anything-in the life and death of Tristram Abberley would come to his rescue. Instead, he was left as empty-handed as he had feared he would be. The Beatrix, Mary and Maurice he had read about might as well have been different people for all the insight he had gained into their more recent lives. If there was a secret buried in their collective past that explained what had happened, it was not to be found in the words and actions of a long-dead poet. If it was to be found at all, Derek would have to look elsewhere. But in what direction he did not know. He had been running towards a dead end all along. And now he had arrived.

CHAPTER.

TEN.

Eight days had pa.s.sed since Beatrix's funeral when Charlotte decided she could postpone a visit to Jackdaw Cottage no longer. On a cool breezy morning, she drove down to Rye, collected the key from Mrs Mentiply and entered what was now her property but still seemed indelibly to belong to another.

Thanks to Mrs Mentiply, the cottage was spotlessly clean. It was as if she regarded her bequest as a retainer and meant to discharge her duties more a.s.siduously after her employer's death than before.

The effect was to suggest Beatrix had merely gone away for a few days. All was as she might expect to find it when she returned. Except that she would not return.

Listlessly, Charlotte wandered from room to room, reliving in jumbled order her visits down the years. In her memory of them, she fluctuated between childhood and her present age, but Beatrix never varied. Always she was the same: kindly but not indulgent, generous but not playful. She had treated Charlotte as an adult long before she was one and retained to the end an independence of mind which some found disconcerting but which Charlotte had come more and more to admire.

But an end had come to all that and to preserve Jackdaw Cottage as some kind of museum was surely not what Beatrix would have wanted. As she gazed from the window of what had often been her room out across the small patch of garden towards the sea, Charlotte knew that the wisest solution was the swiftest: sell up and have done.

Yet Beatrix would surely also have wanted her to have a memento of their times together, something that would remind her of her G.o.dmother whenever her eye fell upon it. Ironically, she would have chosen one of the smaller pieces of Tunbridge Ware, but they lay bagged and labelled in a police station bas.e.m.e.nt, awaiting Colin Fairfax's trial. The only remaining item of Tunbridge Ware was the work-table in the drawing room and, as soon as Charlotte had thought of it, she realized how appropriate it would be, since it combined practicality and elegance in a manner close to Beatrix's heart.

H A N D I N G L O V E.

57.

Without further ado, she carried it out to her car, went back for some blankets to wrap it in for the journey, then briskly took her leave. Tomorrow she would contact an estate agent and put the sale of Jackdaw Cottage in hand. Tomorrow nostalgia would be cast aside.

"So, what you're telling me," said Colin, "is that you've drawn a complete blank."

"Yes," Derek replied, averting his gaze towards the bare wall of the visiting room. "I'm afraid I have."

"The family have nothing to say?"

"Not to anybody a.s.sociated with you."

"And there are no clues to be found in Tristram Abberley's biography?"

"None. Read it yourself and see."

"I intend to."

They eyed each other warily for a moment, Derek sensing the silent accusation of failure that hung between them. Colin would think he had lost his nerve, misplayed his hand, blown his chance.

And the worst of it was that he would be right.

"Where do we go from here?"

"I don't know."

"Well, I do. At least, I know where I go. Down for a long stretch.

Dredge keeps pus.h.i.+ng me to do some kind of deal with the police.

And I would if I could. But I can't. They all think I'm holding out on them. They mean to make me suffer for that. And suffering isn't my favourite occupation. But it seems I may have to get used to it."

"I'm sorry, Colin. If there was anything-"

"Find something!" Colin nearly shouted the words, drawing a sharp glance from the warder. "Just keep trying, brother," he murmured through a fixed grin. "You're my only hope."

At Ockham House, Charlotte was in the process of selecting a suitable place for Beatrix's work-table when the telephone rang. It was Ursula.

"h.e.l.lo, Charlie. Maurice asked me to call you."

"Really? I thought he was still in New York."

"He is. But we spoke last night. He wanted me to find out if you could have lunch with us next Sunday."

"Next Sunday? Well, yes, I'd be delighted. But . . ."

58.

R O B E R T G O D D A R D.

"Is there some problem?"

"No. No problem at all. I'm just surprised Maurice should make a transatlantic phone call simply to invite me to lunch."

"Well, it appears he's bringing somebody back with him from New York who wants to meet you, so he asked me to make sure you were free."

"To meet me? Who is this person?"

"I don't know. Maurice wouldn't say. ' Very keen to make your acquaintance.' That's all I know. A secret admirer, perhaps."

"In New York? I hardly think so."

"I shouldn't be too sure."

"You know who it is, don't you?"

"Absolutely not. Guides' honour. Anyway, the mystery will be solved on Sunday. You will come, won't you?"

"Don't worry. I'll be there. With an incentive like that, how could I stay away?"

CHAPTER.

ELEVEN.

The forced jollity of a midsummer Sunday lay in wait for Charlotte throughout her journey to Bourne End. Every pub car park was full, every picnic-spot clamorous with children and dogs. Why she should be forever excluded from the communal pleasures of humanity at play she did not know. Sometimes she was glad to be excluded. Sometimes she suspected it was an insult devised by the world for her and n.o.body else. And sometimes she simply did not care.

The Thames was clogged and noisy with craft of all description.

Charlotte crossed it at Cookham and turned, with some relief, into the unmarked road that led to an exclusive handful of riverside residences, among them Swans' Meadow.

It was a house, she often thought, ideally suited to its owner's personality. Visible from the other side of the river and therefore an object of admiration, it was also aloof and secluded. Though large and H A N D I N G L O V E.