Arthur & George

corroding and undermining? What if I then discover – what if we then discover – that I do not love her as I thought, or that she does not love me as she thought? What would there be to be done then? What?’
    Sensibly, the Mam does not reply.
    Arthur confides everything to the Mam: his deepest fears, his greatest elations, and all the intermediate tribulations and joys of the material world. What he can never allude to is his deepening interest in spiritualism, or spiritism as he prefers it. The Mam, having left Catholic Edinburgh behind, has become, by a sheer process of attendance, a member of the Church of England. Three of her children have now been married at St Oswald’s: Arthur himself, Ida and Dodo. She is instinctively opposed to the psychic world, which for her represents anarchy and mumbo-jumbo. She holds that people can only come to any understanding of their lives if society makes clear its truths to them; further, that its religious truths must be expressed through an established institution, be it Catholic or Anglican. And then there is the family to consider. Arthur is a knight of the realm; he has lunched and dined with the King; he is a public figure – she repeats back to him his boast that he is second only to Kipling in his influence on the healthy, sporting young men of the country. What if it came out that he was involved in seances and suchlike? It would dish all chance of a peerage.
    In vain does he attempt to relate his conversation with Sir Oliver Lodge at Buckingham Palace. Surely the Mam must admit that Lodge is an entirely level-headed and scientifically reputable individual, as is proven by the fact that he has just been appointed first Principal of Birmingham University. But the Mam will not admit anything; in this area she refuses adamantinely to indulge her son.
    Arthur fears to bring the matter up with Touie, in case it upsets the preternatural calm of her existence. She has, he knows, a simple trustingness in matters of faith. She presumes that after she dies she will go to a Heaven whose exact nature she cannot describe, and remain there in a condition she cannot imagine, until such time as Arthur comes to join her, followed in due course by their children, whereupon all of them will dwell together in a superior version of Southsea. Arthur thinks it unfair to disturb any of these presumptions.
    It is harder still for him that he cannot talk to Jean, with whom he wants to share everything, from the last collar stud to the last semicolon. He has tried, but Jean is suspicious – or perhaps frightened – of anything touching the psychic world. Further, her dislike is expressed in ways Arthur finds untypical of her loving nature.
    Once he tries recounting, with some tentativeness and a conscious suppression of zeal, his experience at a seance. Almost at once he notices a look of the sharpest disapproval come over those lovely features.
    ‘What is it, my darling?’
    ‘But Arthur,’ she says, ‘they are such common people.’
    ‘Who are?’
    ‘Those people. Like gypsy women who sit in fairground booths and tell your fortune with cards and tea leaves. They’re just … common.’
    Arthur finds such snobbery, especially in one he loves, unacceptable. He wants to say that it is the splendid lower-middle-class folk who have always been the spiritual peers of the nation: you need look no farther than the Puritans, whom many, of course, misprized. He wants to say that around the Sea of Galilee there were doubtless many who judged Our Lord Jesus Christ a little common. The Apostles, like most mediums, had little formal education. Naturally, he says none of this. He feels ashamed of his sudden irritation, and changes the subject.
    And so he has to go outside his iron-sided triangle. He does not approach Lottie: he does not want to risk her love in any way, the more so as she helps nurse Touie. Instead, he goes to Connie. Connie, who only the other day, it seems, was wearing her hair down her back like the cable of a mano’-war and breaking hearts across Continental Europe; Connie, who has settled all too solidly into the role of Kensington mother; Connie, moreover, who dared oppose him that day at Lord’s. He has never solved the question of whether Connie changed Hornung’s mind, or Hornung Connie’s; but whichever way round, he has come to admire her for it.
    He visits her one afternoon when Hornung is away; tea is served in her little upstairs sitting room, where once she