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Chapter 2: English Gothic—I
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Handful of Dust, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Communication Breakdown and the Loss of Meaning
Religion, Morality, and Tradition
Chance and Fate
Civilization vs. Barbarism
Summary
Analysis
At Brat’s, Tony and Jock Grant-Menzies have both been ditched by their dates and link up to drink heavily. Tony had made a surprise visit to Brenda in London, but she is “out somewhere.” Jock is immediately uncomfortable as he tries to gauge how much, if anything, Tony knows about Brenda’s affair with John Beaver, which all of London knows about by now.
Jock diplomatically handles an uncomfortable situation by playing dumb about Tony’s cuckoldry and joining in his drinking binge. By this point, Tony can tell something is wrong in his marriage, but there is still no sign that he’s suspected his wife’s affair—with anyone, much less the detested Beaver.
Themes
Tony rues his decision to make the surprise visit and complains that he doesn’t get along with Brenda’s new circle. He reflects with disbelief on her apparent commitment to studying economics, under which guise she’s been spending most of her time in London. He says that after much thought, he’s come to realize that Brenda may have been bored at Hetton. Jock feels low as well, due to trouble with his constituents over pork farming laws, and the two continue to drink a great deal. Tony invites Jock to Hetton the next weekend, lamenting how he never sees his old friends anymore.
The sadness of Tony’s situation now comes to light, as he reckons with the fact of his formerly serene marriage faltering for reasons he can’t understand. He finally realizes that Brenda has been bored at Hetton—an obvious conclusion. His tardiness in reaching it reveals his naivete and failure to pay adequate attention to his wife. With Brenda around less and less, Tony now begins to experience the loneliness that she had been feeling at Hetton.
Themes
A call arrives from Brenda, but it is John Beaver impersonating a butler and telling Tony that Brenda is very tired and cannot see him at all tonight. Quite drunk by this point, Tony calls back and insists on coming to the flat, while Brenda pleads with him not to. She then telephones Jock and instructs him to prevent Tony from coming by the apartment, but she sends Beaver away anyhow as a precaution. Tony and Jock go on a drunken spree to the Old Hundredth, a seedy nightclub in an ethnic neighborhood that has survived generations of attempts to shut it down. At the club, two prostitutes named Milly and Babs make their acquaintance, and the staff take advantage of their inebriated customers by selling them food they didn’t order. Tony makes numerous drunken phone calls to Brenda, disturbing her all night.
The sordid sequence of Tony’s night displays the floundering helplessness to which Brenda has reduced him. His repeated failed attempts just to get in touch with his wife are painful to witness, and even more so because it is still not clear that he recognizes that she’s having an affair. His situation is helpless because leaving his cheating wife alone will be just as disastrous for him as hounding her. The night likewise exposes the fragility of his posh identity, as a bad mood and a lot of drinks are all it takes to get him elbow to elbow with prostitutes in one of London’s most notoriously sleazy nightclubs.
Themes
The next day, Tony is hungover and ashamed. Brenda is secretly thrilled, because Tony’s guilt over his behavior will keep him from prying further. Back at Hetton, John Andrew meets Tony at the train station and enthusiastically bombards him with questions about his trip to London. Tony has no good answers, since he didn’t even see Brenda, and he loses his patience and hurts the boy’s feelings. John Andrew begins holding a grudge against his father. All evening, Tony remains wracked with shame about his conduct the night before. He finally goes to bed in Brenda’s empty room.
Brenda and Tony’s respective reactions the morning after his spree highlight the differences in their moral dispositions. Though he acted irresponsibly, Tony was well justified to be upset with Brenda, but he only feels shame afterward. Brenda, whose behavior caused Tony’s reckless spree, immediately sees it as an opportunity to guilt him into accepting her further misbehavior without complaint. John Andrew begins to become a casualty of his parents’ faltering marriage.
Themes
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The next day, Jock telegrams that his weekend visit will have to be postponed. Tony finds himself with little to do by himself at Hetton, only now realizing how much time he used to waste with Brenda. John Andrew continues to hold a grudge against his father, spurning his attempts at reconciliation.
Tony does not need to work for a living. Brenda’s absence makes apparent for the first time the silliness with which he was accustomed to filling up his days. To boot, John Andrew no longer wants anything to do with him either.
Themes
Brenda, meanwhile, leans on Tony’s guilt and invites Polly, Mrs. Beaver, and other London friends to Hetton for the weekend. The women immediately begin disparaging the house’s architecture in front of Tony and suggesting improvements. Throughout the weekend, Brenda and her friends cackle continuously and subject Tony to numerous minor humiliations. His custom of bringing home buttonhole flowers for his guests on the way back from church earns their scornful laughter, as they’d been betting on what color flowers he would bring.
For Tony, who detests company, this weekend gathering of Brenda’s vapid socialite chums is his worst nightmare. Brenda has been part of his world of quaint and affectionate rituals like gathering buttonhole flowers since the beginning of their marriage, but now she is willfully disrupting it and exposing it to mockery. Tony silently endures the indignity of his loathsome guests.
Themes
Brenda begins to worry that Tony will start acting up in response to these indignities and the boredom of life at Hetton without her around, and thereby potentially make trouble for her affair. She thus conspires with Polly Cockpurse to mollify and distract Tony by setting him up with an affair of his own, using her neighbor from the London flat, Jenny Abdul Akbar, as the bait. Invited for the weekend, Jenny comes out strong upon arriving at Hetton in a cloud of musk and exotic furs. She curls up and purrs by Tony’s side but mistakes his name for Teddy. Tony finds this vulgar American widow of a Moroccan prince a ridiculous woman, and her weekend of intended seduction at Hetton is a disaster. He does not, however, suspect that Brenda and Polly were putting Jenny up to the job.
Brenda’s recognition that her openly disdainful treatment of Tony and Hetton may be going too far seems to indicate a degree of conscience on her part. However, her response of trying to sidetrack him with his own affair indicates two things: first, that she only thinks about Tony’s feelings out of preemptive self-interest; and second, that she can only conceive of a plan based on what would work on her. It predictably fails miserably on Tony, and the whole fiasco calls into question how well she really knows Tony at all, and how their marriage functioned smoothly for as long as it did.
Themes
John Andrew, on the other hand, seems to experience a sexual awakening when Jenny greets him with a kiss on the lips. Thereafter the boy is quite enamored of her, asking her endless questions about her exotic appearance and mysterious past. Brenda and Polly ruefully admit that their plan has failed. Meanwhile, Brenda’s disregard for Tony becomes increasingly pronounced, with less and less effort put into her cover story of studying economics.
John Andrew’s infatuation with Jenny indicates that he has been starved for affection in the months since his parents’ marriage has started to fray. It simultaneously underscores the boy’s ongoing natural rejection of the prim class etiquette standards that Tony, who finds Jenny vulgar and distasteful, has internalized.
Themes
Brenda invokes her fictitious economics course to excuse herself from the upcoming fox hunt at Hetton, a grand annual tradition. The weekend before the hunt, Brenda invites Jock, Marjorie, and Marjorie’s husband Allan to Hetton, and Tony enjoys the company. Brenda devotes the whole weekend to Tony, making him glad as she accompanies him to church and other habitual outings. Tony sleeps in bed with Brenda for the first time in a long while, and he raises doubts about the health of their marriage, saying that her being away so much makes him wonder if she’s being unfaithful. Brenda reassures him that their marriage is fine. Meanwhile, all their guests independently speculate about whether the other guests know about Brenda’s affair.
In keeping with her self-interested attempt to lure Tony into an affair, Brenda again recognizes that some kind of appeasement is necessary for Tony in light of her skipping the fox hunt. She thus treats him affectionately, like she used to, for a whole weekend. The reader is treated to the ironic juxtaposition of the naïve Tony finally raising a timid question about their marriage’s health to Brenda, which she quickly dismisses, while everyone else in their house talks knowledgably about her affair.
Themes
Tony convinces Jock to stay down for the fox hunt and invite his girlfriend, Mrs. Rattery, mysteriously dubbed “the shameless blonde.” She arrives at the wheel of her own propeller plane. She speaks little and enjoys masculine activities, as well as extended solitaire sessions. Tony is surprised, as he had expected Jock’s girl to be a garrulous bimbo.
Mrs. Rattery acts as a foil to the predatory, status-obsessed women that have featured in the plot so far. Her laconic “masculine” nobility likewise shows up Tony’s relative spinelessness. His low expectations for her also hint at his prejudicial lack of interest in women, as displayed in his treatment of Brenda early in the novel.
Themes
The day of the great fox hunt arrives, and John Andrew has been eagerly anticipating it for weeks. The whole community takes part, and Tony permits John Andrew to ride along on Thunderclap within a certain limit—much to the nanny’s chagrin, who thinks poorly of the whole hunting affair. On the ride out, they pass Miss Ripon from the village barely controlling a frantic and unwieldy horse that her father has been trying for some time to get rid of for an unfair price. When the stipulated limit is reached and no foxes found, Ben Hacket reluctantly insists that he must take the devastated John Andrew home, while Jock proceeds with the hunt.
Tony overrides the disapproving Nanny to allow John Andrew to join the fox hunt, suggesting that the father-son relationship is on the mend. Throughout the novel, Ben Hacket seemingly takes a more active interest in John Andrew than Tony does, but his reluctant observance of Tony’s designated limit serves as a reminder that he is ultimately Hetton’s employee.
Themes
On the road back, they encounter Miss Ripon and her steed again. She had been tossed from the horse and injured. While they wait with her in the road for a horse trailer to take the animal away, a stopped motorcycle backfires and startles the horse. The steed kicks, knocking John Andrew off his saddle, then striking the boy again into a ditch and killing him instantly. All quickly agree that no one is to blame.
That John Andrew had to plead so hard to be allowed to participate in the fox hunt, and that he dies in a random accident while being sent home rather than in a glorious hunting chase, makes his death both ironic and all the more tragic. The fact that there is no obvious person to point fingers at only amplifies the feeling of senselessness.
Themes
As the hunting party laments the tragedy, Tony’s first thought is to get the news to Brenda. Jock volunteers to go to London and tell her in person. Tony is in disbelief but calmly begins setting about the necessary arrangements. He diplomatically handles bothersome well-wishers like Rev. Tendril. Tony has no desire to talk about religion in this challenging time, although, as Mrs. Rattery says, “some like it.” He appreciates Mrs. Rattery’s decision to stay with him while Jock is gone. She suspends judgment on Tony’s confident assertion that the news will grieve Brenda, saying, “You can’t ever tell what’s going to hurt people.” Tony obsesses over the time of day, repeatedly speculating whether Brenda has been informed yet. Mrs. Rattery successfully distracts him with the only card game Tony knows: Animal Snap, which involves the two of them making animal noises. The butler sees this behavior and is mortified.
Tony’s almost muted reaction to the news of John Andrew’s death, followed by his nervous fixation on the time, are classic signs of shock. His impatience with religious talk at this moment of death and crisis reveals that his habitual churchgoing was not connected to any genuine religiosity. His only concern at this point is informing Brenda and anticipating her reaction. Mrs. Rattery again acts as the model of stoic masculinity. Her ominous remark foreshadows Brenda’s reaction not being quite what one would expect from a mother. The game of Animal Snap creates a moment of grim, surreal humor amidst the senseless tragedy.
Themes
Jock finds Brenda’s flat empty, but Jenny Abdul Akbar appears in the hall. Hearing the news about John Andrew, she bewails her cursed fate as a bringer of evil. Yet she quickly puts these histrionics aside and leads Jock to Brenda at Polly’s house. There, the bogus psychic Mrs. Northcote is reading the ladies’ fortunes, giving the same vague predictions to them all in private. Brenda keeps steering her reading towards information about John Beaver. Jock arrives and tells her there’s been a fatal accident, confirming it when Brenda asks, “John?” When Brenda realizes it was John Andrew and not John Beaver, she blurts out “Oh thank God” before bursting into tears. Later, as she packs her bag at the apartment to return to Hetton, she tries to tell Jock that she was delirious when she said that, but he is unconvinced. He sees her off to the train.
Jenny’s reaction to the news brings out her absurd self-centeredness, in contrast to Jock, who has volunteered for a very serious task in order to help his friend Tony. The fortune-telling party at Polly Cockpurse’s is of course a carnival of narcissistic delusion, as well as gullibility. Ironically, Brenda has her sham fortune reading interrupted by genuinely fortune-altering news. Her kneejerk reaction makes explicit the damning revelation that has been heretofore implied: she cares more about her odious boytoy John Beaver than her own son, and is relieved to hear that the latter, not the former, has died.
Themes
At Hetton, Tony handles the inquest and gets the necessary affairs in order. Ben gets Tony’s approval to sell Thunderclap. Brenda returns, and she and Tony agree that there is nothing to be said. And yet, Brenda shocks Tony by keeping to her old plans to spend the weekend at a friend’s house—much to the friend’s embarrassment. Brenda tells Tony that their life at Hetton is all over, leaving him dumbfounded.
Tony continues to maintain his composure as the sad silence following a death sets in. He was not, however, prepared for the speed and conviction with which Brenda casts off the remaining trappings of her and Tony’s marriage, which embarrasses even her friends.
Themes
Tony invites Jock to Hetton for the weekend and tries to rationalize Brenda’s going away, but at the friend’s house, Brenda tells John Beaver she loves him. She then states as much in a brief letter to Tony that also clarifies she won’t return to Hetton. Tony is shocked, still completely clueless about Brenda’s affair. Jock must tell him that everyone except Tony has known for some time.
Clearly, Tony has been naïve about Brenda’s affair for a long time by now, but Brenda’s departure is so bizarre that he is justified in trying to explain it as a symptom of shock. Meanwhile, John Andrew’s death has liberated Brenda to declare her true feelings for Beaver.
Themes
