120

Absalom, My Son

Having escaped the fall of high explosives, incendiaries and guided missiles, and having been preserved from requisitioning or billeting because of the age and reputation of its owner, in 1948 Matthew Bateman’s house in Kent was totally destroyed by an ordinary civilian fire. It was empty at the time, and the cause of the fire was never ascertained. A farm-hand, on his way to the morning milking, noticed smoke rising from the valley, and a moment later saw a trophy of flame leap up as the thatched roof fell in.

It was a roof which in earlier years had sheltered many visitors. The headlines, ‘Well-Known Writer’s House Burned Down: Total Destruction of Kenton Mill-House,’ revived memories of rooms darkened with books and lit with the tremulous reflection of water, of a reedy voice, and a bony hand stroking a jackdaw, and of a quantity of slightly macabre bric-à-brac—blotched shells, scowling daguerreotypes, the Emblems of the Passion in a bottle—placed with old-maidish precision on fringed mats. Several such readers wrote to condole, to offer hospitality or to search, even, for that white blackbird, an empty house. These offers were politely refused by Miss Loveday Patterson, writing on Matthew Bateman’s behalf.

And so, at the age of seventy-three, Matthew Bateman found himself possessed of the clothes he stood up in and 121those in a small leather suitcase, two pairs of spectacles (those on his nose and those in his pocket), a watch, a fountain-pen, a pistol, a signet-ring, a note-book, the mss. of two novels which, published in the early twenties, had established him as a man of letters, and the ms. of an unfinished novel, earlier in date. These mss. had been lent to an exhibition in Maidstone, which he had opened afterwards, spending the night on which his house caught fire at a hotel there. He also retained Miss Loveday Patterson, who had accompanied him to Maidstone, and had been his secretary for so long that she really might be counted as part of his personal estate.

He heard the news of his loss in silence, and bore it with acid stoicism. ‘It is your books that I grieve for!’ exclaimed Mrs White, the lady who had got up the exhibition. ‘It might be worse: at least, I have read them,’ he answered. Condolers, reporters and friends in need came to the hotel in quantities, and after two days of this he told Loveday Patterson to go in search of a furnished house without neighbours or telephone and not to come back until she had found it. Thirty-six hours later she returned with news of a bungalow (called High Hope) already rented, coals delivered and a charwoman arranged for. ‘It’s on a hill,’ she said.

‘I hate hills,’ he replied.

‘And I found out in the village that the two ladies it belongs to tried to run it as a café, but couldn’t make it pay because they kept such large black dogs—they bred dogs, too—that strangers were afraid to go near it. Then all the dogs died of distemper, and one of the ladies had a nervous 122breakdown and is in a mental home, and the other has gone to work in a hostel near Birmingham.’