A House and Its Head

  ‘Ivy Compton-Burnett was that rare novelist who finds a form perfect for what she has to say and sticks to it… She is the cynic’s cynic, and remains deeply shocking’

  Philip Hensher

  ‘Dark, hilarious, evil… I have all twenty of her novels and I’ve read nineteen. If I read the one that is left there will be no more Ivy Compton-Burnett for me and I will probably have to die myself’

  John Waters

  ‘Hilarious, harrowing… [like] Jane Austen on bad drugs’

  Francine Prose

  ‘Her scalpel-sharp pen performed startling surgery on the accepted concept of genteel family life’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘Absolutely sui generis… Her remorseless humor and savagery are a unique cocktail. There’s no middle ground with this novelist— you’re either bewildered by her or you become an addict’

  BOMB

  ‘A remarkable and unusual novelist, who has, in her own well-tilled field, no rival and no parallel’

  TLS

  A HOUSE

  AND

  ITS HEAD

  Ivy Compton-Burnett

  With an introduction by

  hilary mantel

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  A HOUSE

  AND

  ITS HEAD

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Also Available From Pushkin Press

  Available and Coming Soon From Pushkin Press

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  This is the merriest tale of human depravity you will ever read. It begins on Christmas day, 1885: it is breakfast time, and having prepared presents for the children, the patriarch prepares his weapons. When his wife observes that the children are down late, Duncan Edgeworth makes no reply. To further harmless pleasantries, he makes no reply either. But instead, ‘put his finger down his collar, and settled his neck.’

  Oh, Ellen, you want to say, throw a tea cup at him! She cannot, of course. As Thucydides puts it, the strong exact what they can and the weak yield what they must. By the end of breakfast, the nephew of the house, Grant, has lost his best present, a book; his uncle has thrown it into the fire.

  We can guess the book is Darwin’s Origin of Species, or some allied work: not new, but perhaps new to Grant, and enlightening to him. Ivy Compton-Burnett likes to explore the slow workings of inheritance – the persistence of family traits in physiognomy and constitution, but also the transmission of quirks and quarrels from the old and dominant to the meek and young: who themselves, in their turn, become martyrs or tyrants. Appearances do not deceive. Grant’s ‘lively almond eyes’ and ‘smooth black head’ mark him out as a charmer who commits follies with housemaids. Sybil, insipidly fair and pretty, is a drawing room machiavel. Her elder sister Nance, tall and thin with features ‘set awry,’ is the book’s moral centre – and this family badly needs one. Duncan himself is, as Grant notes, a weak man behind his bluster, spiteful rather than masterful. But there is no doubt about the essential relation between parents and children. Parents are, Duncan says simply, ‘over them,’ and in this cheese-paring establishment – ‘run on women servants,’ Ivy notes – it is father who has all the economic power. Having no direct heir, Duncan is prepared to hand his estates to Grant – but Grant is like a number of self-saboteurs in Ivy’s work, and bent on complicating his prospects.

  Born in 1884, Ivy Compton-Burnett set her stories in the world of her early years. As she was dealing with passions hallowed by time – avarice, lust, craving for power – she saw no need to trouble her reader with shifting fashions in clothes or architecture. She did not share a background with her characters, but came from the professional middle classes, her father a doctor who married twice and had two families, twelve children in all. Her family was ‘smashed up,’ as she said, by the Great War. Two of her brothers died young, one killed on the Somme. Two of her sisters poisoned themselves in a bizarre suicide pact. Ivy herself was a victim of the flu pandemic and contracted pneumonia; without antibiotics, she said, ‘one just fought for breath for about a month.’ Afterwards she suffered lingering debility and depression. After an early novel, Dolores, which she later disowned, she produced nothing until 1925, when Pastors and Masters was pronounced by the New Statesman to be ‘like nothing else in the world.’

  This slight, sharp, funny book was the beginning of an unbroken run of 19 novels, which gain in coherence and force but which, as one of her friends put it, ‘escaped the perils of popularity.’ Her British publisher did not seem to understand or value her work and did little to promote it. But it is possible that of her contemporaries, she will be read the longest – precisely because she applied the date stamp so firmly, pre-empting judgement on whether she is wearing well. She will always be seen as a curiosity, offering few of the conventional handholds a reader expects. But those who tune into her peculiar resonance find her bracing and necessary. Sometimes you blink at the page: does that mean what I think it means? Robert Liddell, in his 1955 book The Novels of I. Compton-Burnett, expresses the dismay of the new reader: ‘When I first met Miss Compton-Burnett’s work, in A House and Its Head, I wondered uneasily for some pages whether she could write at all before I discovered she wrote better than any living novelist.’

  Ivy’s life is chronicled in two volumes of biography by Hilary Spurling: Ivy When Young is followed by Secrets of a Woman’s Heart, which takes the reader from 1920 to her death in 1969. Her early life was crowded by tragedy. Later events were mostly cerebral, though Ivy knew most of the famous authors of her day and read them with a cold eye. She lived in London in modest affluence, sharing a roof for many years with the antiquarian Margaret Jourdain. Writing by hand in penny exercise books, she created a unique body of work, consistent in manner, style and subject, unaffected by critical opinion, untouched by any external prompt: as if she were listening to inner music of her own. Enough had happened to her, perhaps, for her to make up her mind what human beings were, or could be. There was no need to force artificial excitement into life. Her career was that of a witness.

  The settings of her novels are enclosed communities – boarding schools, or the nurseries, dining and drawing rooms of shabby country houses, where multi-generation families stage and witness primal dramas, spied on by busy neighbours and attended by a complement of cooks, butlers, bootblacks and gardeners. In these genteel families, wickedness is seldom punished – it is seldom even named. The guilty thrive, and progress to more advanced sins. If someone locks a desk, the lock will be broken. A simple parlour game will reveal the unspeakable, scrawled on a scrap of paper. Meanness and financial stringency make for routine discomfort, so if the characters come home to a good fire it is because someone has been burning a will.

  Summarized, the plot of A House and Its Head seems implausible and melodramatic. It is an accusation you could level at all Ivy’s novels. But Ivy thought otherwise. She told an interviewer, Kay Dick, ‘I think that there are a good many more deeds done than some people know.’ And elsewhere in the same interview: ‘People have a way of not coming out well in a temptation. They generally behave quite as ill as they can, don’t they?’ She added, ‘Well, not any worse than I should expect them to behave.’

  By the fourth chapter of the story, it is Ellen who is missing from breakfast. It is a circumstance her husband will hardly condone, though it proves that she is dying. Though the neighbourhood doctor has mentioned a change in her, Duncan hates illness so took no notice. His mourning is complicated and corrosive. When bullies repent, they take care not to suffer alone. Within months, Duncan has outraged the parish by marrying again. Alison is a troubled beauty scarcely older than her stepchildren. From the time the first teacup is rattled, a storm is brewing. The events that follow include an illicit affair, a divorce, and the murder of an infant in its nursery.

  A plot, Ivy said, was only a ‘washing line’ on which she hung her stories. The dialogue carries the tale; it is taut, evasive and barbed, its surface politeness concealing shocking intent. It takes time to get used to the technique, which allows so much to lie between the lines. But once you do, you feel other novelists are trying too hard. In this novel as elsewhere, horrors are punctuated by comic set pieces, and an insidious, sly undermining of everyday piety. The tone and balance could only be sustained by an author in full command of her style and equipped with a chilly moral composure. The characters may struggle and protest, talk behind their hands and mutter about their intentions and resolve; but they can no more avoid disaster than, as James Michie once put it, ‘Oedipus could have dodged his meeting at the crossroads.’

  And around the crossroads stand the neighbours, giggling. The elderly Gretchen Jekyll, keen and perceptive, doesn’t say any of the consoling things old ladies usually say. Her son Oscar, the parson, is an unbeliever. He is also unmarried, and the cause of rivalry between two cousins, Flo
rence and Beatrice. Beatrice is effusively evangelical, while Florence ‘had retired from missionary work owing to the discomfort of the life, a reason which she did not disclose, though it was more than adequate.’ These ladies have a trainee in the shape of the atrocious Dulcia, with her hearty schoolboy slang and her habit of making a bad situation worse. Dulcia is perhaps the greatest fool Ivy ever created. It is her brother, the laconic, long-suffering Almeric, who is the book’s closest approach to a romantic hero. Sometimes when a woman says, ‘Get me out of here,’ she needs a man who will do just that. Fleeing across the fields, cheered on by the reader, Almeric is lost to the plot. His life afterwards, it seems, is blameless. But most of Ivy’s characters, when they see the cage door open, go straight back in and latch it behind them.

  Given all that passes to bruise and break the Edgeworth family, it is amazing that Duncan can get a third wife. Why does the admirable Cassie, once the family governess, agree to marry him? Ivy is as pitiless as Jane Austen; money makes marriages, and love comes a poor second. A woman needs shelter; it is better to live under a domestic tyrant than to have no home, and better to have a husband than depend on a brother’s charity. But men without resources will do as much or more: compromise where they must, suppress what they know, ignore even rank criminality. Grant is bought and paid for. Sybil ends a wealthy matron. Vice is rewarded. Virtue is derided. And yet, perversely, it is admired and commended. Courage and intelligence sustain spirits that would otherwise be stifled. Gallows humour keeps despair at bay, and sharp wits probe the weak spots in the armour of the conquerors.

  Ivy seems to tell her reader, all this is no more than you know; it is what you have always known. She has a needling ability to activate the reader’s innate suspicion about human unworthiness; that ability goes to the root of her peculiar genius. This book, like her other novels, can be read again and again. Each time it discloses a little more, as if responding to the reader’s application, and each time it shows a different face, now comic and now tragic, as if reflecting the reader’s mood. The mode is old-fashioned, but the effect is strikingly modern, or postmodern. We seem to be caught in a continuous present. There will always be parents and children, always some chill dawn in which, straight-backed before an insufficient fire, we sit waiting for the action to begin.

  Hilary Mantel

  Chapter 1

  ‘So the children are not down yet?’ said Ellen Edgeworth.

  Her husband gave her a glance, and turned his eyes towards the window.

  ‘So the children are not down yet?’ she said on a note of question.

  Mr Edgeworth put his finger down his collar, and settled his neck.

  ‘So you are down first, Duncan?’ said his wife, as though putting her observation in a more acceptable form.

  Duncan returned his hand to his collar with a frown.

  Duncan Edgeworth was a man of medium height and build, appearing both to others and himself to be tall. He had narrow, grey eyes, stiff, grey hair and beard, a solid, aquiline face, young for his sixty-six years, and a stiff, imperious bearing. His wife was a small, spare, sallow woman, a few years younger, with large, kind, prominent eyes, a long, thin, questioning nose, and a harried, innocent, somehow fulfilled expression.

  The day was Christmas Day in the year eighteen eighty-five, and the room was the usual dining-room of an eighteenth-century country house. The later additions to the room had honourable place, and every opportunity to dominate its character, and used the last in the powerful manner of objects of the Victorian age, seeming in so doing to rank themselves with their possessor.

  ‘So you are down first of all, Duncan,’ said Ellen, employing a note of propitiation, as if it would serve its purpose.

  Her husband implied by lifting his shoulders that he could hardly deny it.

  ‘The children are late, are they not?’ said Ellen, to whom speech clearly ranked above silence.

  Duncan indicated by the same movement that his attitude was the same.

  ‘I think there are more presents than usual. Oh, I wish they would all come down.’

  ‘Why do you wish it?’

  ‘Well, it is not a day when we want them to be late, is it?’

  ‘Do we want them to be late on any day? Oh, of course, it is Christmas Day. I saw the things on the table.’

  Ellen also saw them.

  ‘Oh, you have been down first, and put your presents at the places!’

  Duncan moved his neck with an air of satisfaction in the ease he had attained.

  ‘I think they will all be down soon,’ said his wife, her manner seeming to carry comfort.

  ‘Will they?’ just uttered her husband, looking at the wall as if something on it struck him.

  ‘They won’t be very late on Christmas Day.’

  ‘Why should they be late on Christmas Day or any other? What reason would you suppose?’

  Ellen did not say.

  ‘Have you any idea what purpose is actuating them, the three at once? It must be something important.’

  ‘Well, the mornings are getting dark.’

  ‘The mornings are getting dark! The mornings are getting dark! Do you mean they are so sunk in lethargy and self-indulgence, that they need a strong light to force them to raise their heads from their pillows? Is that what you mean?’

  Ellen, uncertain how much she had meant of this, was silent.

  ‘I don’t think they will be very late this morning.’

  ‘Only rather late, in concession to a standard of civilized decency.’

  ‘I know they are looking forward to their presents,’ Ellen advanced in the culprits’ favour.

  ‘We hardly expected to have to force them upon them.’

  ‘I am sure they do not think of it like that,’ Duncan was assured.

  ‘I expect they do not,’ he said, with a little burst of bitter mirth; ‘I suppose even they are not quite so sub-human.’

  ‘They could not be a better nephew and daughters than they are.’

  ‘We see they could be on this occasion,’ said Duncan, biting his thumb-nail and speaking absently.

  ‘I believe I can hear one of them,’ said Ellen with simple relief; ‘I am sure there was a sound on the stairs.’

  ‘A sound on the stairs! A remarkable thing to hear at this time in the morning!’

  ‘It is Nance; I know her step. I am glad that one of them is down.’

  ‘Glad? Why?’

  Ellen gave no reason.

  ‘It is a natural thing for a young woman to come downstairs in the morning to have her breakfast,’ said Duncan, seeming to disclaim any less tangible purpose in his daughter. ‘Well, Nance, you have condescended to join us?’

  ‘If that is the word you would use, Father. I felt simply that I was joining you.’ Nance embraced her mother and went to her seat, obeying the unrecognized family law, that the father should not receive a morning salute. ‘I have never taken my place before such a pile of gifts. Do I fall upon them, or wait for those who delay longer than I?’

  ‘Have we waited for you?’

  ‘I observed you had, Father, was indeed struck by it. But was the process congenial enough to be emulated?’

  Nance Edgeworth was a tall, thin girl of twenty-four, with her father’s head placed rather squarely on her shoulders, her mother’s features set a little awry on her face, and an expression that was her own.

  ‘Have you seen anything of Grant and Sibyl this morning?’

  ‘No, Father. It is not a time of day when family intercourse flourishes.’

  ‘I asked you, Nance, if you had seen anything of them.’

  ‘No. My life to-day has hitherto been solitary. Ah, the things that I needed, that I was without! I hope to find cause to sustain these cries of joy. Do I hear the laggard footfalls on the stairs?’

  ‘This listening for footfalls seems a foolish thing in adult human beings,’ said Duncan with a little laugh. ‘Why should not people come down in the morning?’

  ‘I can think of no reasons, Father. And apparently they could think of none that held weight for long. Happy Christmas, sister and cousin!’