Ah. … It came to his mind to remember, almost with pain. He had accepted nephew Mark as nephew Mark: a strong slip. A good boy. But there was the point … the point! … The boy had the right sort of breeches. … But if there were incest. …
Crawling through a hedge after a rabbit was thinkable. Father had been in the churchyard to shoot rabbits to oblige the vicar. There was no doubt of that. He did not want rabbits. … But supposing he had mis-hit a bunny and the little beast had been throwing gymnastics on the other side of the quickset? Father would have crawled through then, rather than go all the way to the lychgate and round. Decent men put their mis-hits out of their agony as soon as possible. Then there was motive. And as for not putting his gun out of action before crawling through the quickset. … Many good, plucked men had died like that. … And father had grown absentminded! … There had been farmer Lowther had so died; and Pease of Lobhall; and Pease of Cullercoats. All good plucked farmers. … Crawling through hedges rather than go round, and with their guns at full cock! And not absentminded men. … But he remembered that, just now, he had remembered that father had grown absentminded. He would put a paper in one of his waistcoat pockets and fumble for it in all his other pockets a moment after: he would push his spectacles up onto his forehead and search all the room for them; he would place his knife and fork in his plate and, whilst talking, take another knife and fork from beside it and begin again to eat. … Mark remembered that his father had done that twice during the last meal they had eaten together—whilst he, Mark, had been presenting the fellow Ruggles’s account of Christopher’s misdeeds. …
Then it would not be incumbent on him, Mark, to go up to his father in Heaven and say: Hullo, sir. I understand you had a daughter by the wife of your best friend, she being now with child by your son. … Rather ghostly so to introduce yourself to the awful ghost of your father. … Of course you would be a ghost yourself. Still, with your billycock hat, umbrella and racing-glasses, not an awful ghost! … And to say to your father: “I understand that you committed suicide!”
Against the rules of the Club. … For I consider it no grief to be going there where so many great men have preceded me. Sophocles that, wasn’t it? So, on his authority, it was a damn good club. …
But he did not have to anticipate that mauvais quart d’heure! Dad quite obviously did not commit suicide. He wasn’t the man to do so. So Valentine was not his daughter and there was no incest. It is all very well to say that you care little about incest. The Greeks made a hell of a tragic row about it. … Certainly it was a weight off the chest if you could think there had been none. He had always been able to look Christopher in the eyes—but he would be able to do it better than ever now. Comfortably! It is uncomfortable to look a man in the eyes and think: You sleep between incestuous sheets. …
That then was over. The worst of it rolled up together. No suicide. No incest. No by-blow at Groby. … A Papist there. … Though how you could be a Papist and a Marxian Communist passed his, Mark’s, comprehension. … A Papist at Groby and Groby Great Tree down. … The curse was perhaps off the family!
That was a superstitious way to look at it—but you must have a pattern to interpret things by. You can’t really get your mind to work without it. The blacksmith said: By hammer and hand all art doth stand! … He, Mark Tietjens, for many years interpreted all life in terms of Transport. … Transport, be thou my God. … A damn good God. … And in the end, after a hell of a lot of thought and of work, the epitaph of him, Mark Tietjens, ought by rights to be: “Here lies one whose name was writ in seabirds!” … As good an epitaph as another.
He must get it through to Christopher that Marie Léonie should have that case, with Bamborough and all, in her bedroom at Groby Dower House. It was the last permanent record of her man. … But Christopher would know that. …
It was coming back. A lot of things were coming back. … He could see Redcar Sands running up towards Sunderland, grey, grey. Not so many factory chimneys then, working for him, Mark Tietjens! Not so many! And the sandpipers running in the thin of the tide, bowing as they ran; and the shovellers turning over stones and the terns floating above the viscous sea. …
But it was great nights to which he would now turn his attention. Great black nights above the purple moors. … Great black nights above the Edgware Road, where Marie Léonie lived … because, above the blaze of lights of the old Apollo’s front, you had a sense of immense black spaces. …
Who said he was perspiring a great deal? Well, he was perspiring!
Marie Léonie, young, was bending over him. … Young, young, as he had first seen her on the stage of Covent Garden … In white! … Doing agreeable things to his face with a perfume like that of Heaven itself! … And laughing sideways as Marie Léonie had laughed when first he presented himself before her in his billycock hat and umbrella! … The fine, fair hair! The soft voice!
But this was silly. … That was nephew Mark with his cherry-red face and staring eyes. … And this was his light of love! … Naturally. Like uncle, like nephew. He would pick up with the same type of woman as his uncle. That made it certain that he was no by-blow! Pretty piece against the apple-boughs!
He wanted great nights, then!—Young Mark, though, should not pick up with a woman older than himself. Christopher had done that, and look!
Still:
