What Happened at Hazelwood? Read Online Free Page A

dinner table.
    But if you are not disposed to wonder how I came to marry George I think I may say that Joyleen was thoroughly curious straight away. She is an ignorant little thing and as outlandish as her name. If you asked her to list the Seven Wonders of the World she would undoubtedly begin with Sydney Harbour Bridge and then get no farther. And if she wondered why I had married George I certainly wondered why Gerard had married her – or had been allowed by his father, Hippias, to do so. For I had gathered that the Australian Simneys were folk of the severest social sense. They were, in fact, pastoralists – a word which suggests robed and bearded persons living in tents, but which (it seems) is simply synonymous with gentry and applied to exclusively-minded folk living retired lives amid millions and millions of sheep. Hippias Simney of Hazelwood Park, New South Wales, was understood to be like that, as had been his father, Guy Simney, before him. And presumably young Gerard had been brought up in the same ovine environment. Perhaps in Joyleen he had been constrained to marry money. Or perhaps it was simply that she had got Gerard on the strength of her charms. She might be accurately described as the sort of girl who would be attractive to most men for a month or two before and a week or two after. I am bound to admit that I disliked her from the first – and you will notice how I tend to go off after her before she ought really to come in. Frankly, she was a bit of a last straw as far as I was concerned.
    But don’t get me wrong. I’m not at all like George’s virgin sister Grace, inept at and condemnatory of the whole odd and inescapable business of the sexes. Joyleen didn’t wonder why George married me. She wondered why I married George. She saw that George was of the week-or-two sort – her own sort. And she saw that I wasn’t; perhaps you will presently see it too. At any rate, don’t be misled by this hard-boiled style. It just seems the only possible medium for such a narrative as this.
    And now where have I got to? George has had Timmy Owdon, whose mother is a sixteen-year-old question-mark, in to wait at table. This has offended both his brother Bevis and his sisters Lucy and Grace. It has given Lucy’s beastly little son Mervyn an occasion for his nauseous wit and moved Mervyn’s cousin Willoughby to pitch a glass of excellent sherry at him. Grace, too, has been prompted to declaim in a loud voice about certain supposed performances of George’s in the village. Hard upon that has come the arrival of these Australians. And now they are going to cool their heels – the whole stupid scene is going to freeze into tableau – while I tell you, quite briefly, how I came to marry the middle-aged Sir George Simney.
     
    My people have been actors and actresses for generations; indeed, since the eighteenth century they have been quite a substantial part of the history of the English legitimate stage. I was always proud of all this. Yet at sixteen, and looking at the stage, I somehow didn’t think much of it. It was all temperament and no brains, and there always seemed to be one emotional mess or another round the corner. I hate scenes, and scandals, and people who are everlastingly watching themselves in an invisible mirror. This took me away from the traditional family paths and landed me at Oxford.
    But somehow after a time I didn’t think much of Oxford. I was the wrong sex for what goes on there. Young women who could get tense on cocoa and whose diet was a muddied amalgam of precocious pedantry and belated crushes just didn’t turn out to be my cup of tea any more than the little Emma Bovarys who were hopeful of careers on the London stage. I know that to view my college chiefly in this light was to miss the gracious and important part of it. Still, I just couldn’t see past all that. And I don’t pretend. At least I didn’t in those days.
    I didn’t pretend about Christopher Hoodless. I