‘Come and be analysed,’ was their parrot cry. ‘Let us rid you of the poison that is clogging your mental processes, by telling you all about yourselves. Now, suppose we begin with Fa, he’s the simplest proposition in the house.’
‘What d’you mean, simple?’
‘ABC to us. No no, not your hand you dear old thing, we’ve grown out of palmistry ages ago, this is science.’
‘All right, let’s hear it.’
‘Well, so then you’re a very straightforward case of frustration – wanted to be a gamekeeper, were obliged to be a lord – followed, as is usual, by the development of over-compensation so that now you’re a psycho-neurotic of the obsessive and hysterical type engrafted on to a paranoid and schizoid personality.’
‘Children, you are not to say these things about your father.’
‘Scientific truths are nothing to object to, Sadie, and in our experience everybody enjoys learning about themselves. Would you care for us to test your intelligence level with an ink blot, Fa?’
‘What’s that?’
‘We could do it to you all in turn and mark you if you like. It’s quite easy, you show the subject an ordinary blot of ink on white paper, and, according to the picture it makes for each individual (you understand what I mean, does it look like a spider, or the Himalayas, everybody sees something different), a practised questioner can immediately assess his intelligence level.’
‘Are you practised questioners?’
‘Well, we’ve practised on each other and all the Joshes and Mrs Aster. And we’ve noted the results in our scientific notebook, so come on.’
Uncle Matthew gazed at the blot for a while and then said that it looked to him very much like an ordinary ink blot, and reminded him of nothing so much as Stephens’ Blue-Black.
‘It’s just as I had feared,’ said Jassy, ‘and shows a positively sub-human level – even Baby Josh did better than that. Oh, dear, sub-human, that’s bad –’
Jassy had now overstepped the boundary in the perpetual game of Tom Tiddler’s Ground that she played with her father. He roared at her in a sudden rage and sent her to bed. She went off chanting ‘paranoid and schizoid, paranoid and schizoid’ which had taken the place of ‘Man’s long agony’. She said to me afterwards, ‘Of course, it’s rather grave for all of us because, whether you believe in heredity or environment, either way we are boiled, shut up here with this old sub-human of a father.’
Davey now decided that it would be only kind to go over and see his old friend Lady Montdore, so he rang her up and was invited to luncheon. He stayed until after tea, and by good luck when he got back Polly was lying down in her bedroom, so he was able to tell all.
‘She is in a rage,’ he said, ‘a rage. Simply frightening. She has taken what the French call a coup de vieux; she looks a hundred. I wouldn’t care to be hated by anyone as much as she hates Boy. After all, you never know, there may be something in Christian Science; evil thoughts and so on, directed at us with great intensity, may affect the body. How she hates him. Just imagine, she has cut out the tapestry he made for that fire-screen, quite roughly, with a pair of scissors, and the screen is still there in front of the fire with an enormous hole in it. It gave me quite a shock.’
‘Poor Sonia, how like her, somehow. And what does she feel about Polly?’
‘She mourns her, and she’s pretty cross with her, too, for being so underhand and keeping it a secret all these years. I said, “You really couldn’t expect that she would tell you?” but she didn’t agree. She asked me a lot of questions about Polly and her state of mind. I was obliged to say that her state of mind is not revealed to me, but that she is looking twice as pretty as before, if possible, so it can therefore be presumed that she is happy.’
‘Yes, you can always tell by that, with girls,’ said Aunt Sadie. ‘If it weren’t for that I wouldn’t have thought she cared a bit, one way or the other. What a strange character she must have, after all.’
‘Not so strange,’ said Davey. ‘Many women are rather enigmatic, and very few laugh when they are happy and cry when they are sad to the extent that your children do, my dear Sadie, nor do we all see everything in black and white. Life is over-simplified at Alconleigh, it’s part of the charm and I’m not complaining, but you mustn’t suppose that all human beings are exactly like Radletts, because it is not so.’
‘You stayed very late.’
‘Poor Sonia, she’s lonely. She must be, dreadfully, if you come to think of it. We talked about nothing else, too, round and round the subject, every aspect of it. She asked me to go over and see Boy to find out if there’s any hope of his giving up the idea and going abroad for a bit. She says Montdore’s lawyer has written and told him that the day Polly marries him she will be completely cut out of her father’s will and also Montdore will stop Patricia’s allowance, which he was intending to give Boy for his life. Even so, she fears they will have enough to live on, but it might shake him, I suppose. I didn’t promise to go, but I think perhaps I will, all the same.’
‘Oh, but you must,’ said Jassy. ‘There’s us to consider.’
‘Children, do stop interrupting,’ said Aunt Sadie. ‘If you can’t hold your tongues you will have to leave the room when we are
