The Redlakes [antikvár]

I. The Ttove's HSfest IN THE year of our Lord nineteen-hundred when this adventure began, his first of any consequence since that of being born, Jim Redlake's parents were living in a house inappropriately called The Dove's Nest, a solitary Georgian dwelling embowered by sooty beeches on the crown of the Sedgebury ridge, the Western rim of the basin which contains the Black Country coal-measures. That prettily romantic name, with its hint of connubial felicity, should have given Jim's father, George Redlake, food for his ironical imagination, since, even for a novelist, his married life with Jim's mother, with whom he had eloped as a girl of seventeen twelve years before, had long passed the idyllic stage. He was one of those writers to whom success comes too early in life. By the time he was twenty-five he had found himself adopted by a small and, as he thought, esoteric group of grim intellectuals whose flatteries turned his head. By the time he was thirty-five his name was respectfully mentioned as that of a prophet of causes that were not only lost but forgotten; the kind of writer who is annually rediscovered and dropped. As time went on the rediscoveries became less frequent and the drops more complete. He couldn't understand it; which was natural enough, for he knew that he had a style of his own, considerable erudition, and a philosophy of life which was vigorous if increasingly bitter. What he didn't realise was that then (as now, for that matter) the people who care for style, erudition or philosophy wouldn't feed a canary, much less a man, his wife and a growing boy; but the fact remained that the more he craved for the amenities of bourgeois comfort the poorer he grew, with the result that he abandoned his proper vocation, which was the writing of elegant, caustic little essays flavoured with brimstone, for the treacly kind of novel which he thought the public wanted. Now treacle is all very well by itself, and so is brimstone, but the combination of both with which George Redlake sought a renewal of his reputation had a strongly medicinal flavour which the devotees of treacle and brim- 3