by Ursula Bloom
‘If I stay, what chances have I?’
James Blair ignored that. ‘I thought you’d realise the price of your market value.’
‘But I’m asking you to do something for me?’
‘Not a farthing. Go on wanting to marry the girl. I don’t believe in marriage.’
That evening Hugo walked out into the garden heavy with a mature summer. The flowers had grown untidy; ragged seed pods blew from them, there was old man’s beard in grey, straggling wreaths on the hedges, and the leaves of the walnut tree were tinged with yellow. He stood under it, looking up into the dark warmth of the branches. The jackdaws had nested in the crown again this year; he could hear them chattering together, as quarrelsome couples as you could wish to meet. The tree was tall and straight, always the same, yet always different. He smelt the remembered scent of its boughs, and it stirred his imagination, and taking hold of him, shaped the tree into a ship. It was not like the little steamer in which they had crossed the Channel only this week, but a great ship, with a fine superstructure, spreading masts and high bridge. The walnut tree seemed to say, ‘Desire is not dead. Opportunity still lives.’ He touched it furtively, knowing that it had revived some of the lost hope in him.
He went to see Isolde that week-end, travelling up to London by a slow train on the Sunday and going down by bus to the village. She met him in her car, with a picnic basket in the dicky, and they went off together to a wood. It was a Kentish wood, with a tangle of Kentish cobs in the hedgerows, where the brown leaves were flecked with gold. They sat together, drinking light white wine, and eating cold chicken and salad, and meringues. Life was sweet. Even with his father being so cruel, it was still sweet.
He had to tell her about it. ‘I’m so sorry that it isn’t better news, my dearest, but you’ve got to take this on the chin. He’s a terribly hard man.’
‘He won’t raise your pay?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘I think that I always knew he wouldn’t. I had that feeling and I made up my mind to take a job, Hugo, anyway for the time being. It won’t hurt me, it might even be rather fun.’
‘But, darling, what can you do?’
‘Something with children. I’d adore being with children, they’re so sweet.’
‘But nowadays everything is so technical. People are over-educated. Either you are a nurse, and a nurse has to be college-trained, or you’re a governess, and she has to be a blue stocking. You can’t be a blue stocking, darling. I wouldn’t allow that.’
‘But there are other jobs. In-between sort of jobs, cheap governesses, I’ll have to be one of those.’
‘I’d hate it for you.’
‘Don’t you understand, it isn’t what either of us hates, it’s what’s got to be?’
‘Who’s going to see after your father?’
‘This morning he told me that he’d got a plan. He said that he was making arrangements for his own future, and it struck me that he was happier about it. He told me to come out with you and enjoy myself.’
‘Perhaps he has found a job?’
‘It must be something like that.’ She leaned closer to him. ‘Sometimes out of despair lovely changes come about. It’ll do that for us, Hugo. I believe that if you trust strongly enough in fate, fate won’t let you down.’
‘Oh, my darling, you are so courageous!’
‘Nonsense, it’s just that I do believe in it. One day your father will change his mind.’
‘You don’t know my father. He ought to have let me go into the Navy. If he had done, I’d have been a sub. by now.’
‘Subs can’t marry.’
‘Can’t they just! Some of the more precocious midshipmen marry.’
‘How ridiculous you are!’ She leaned back against him with the wind blowing her fair hair across his cheek, and with the soft scent of early autumn in her nostrils. ‘What will happen to us, Hugo? What do you think will happen?’
‘Well, it strikes me that my father will die. This angina of his is getting worse; he looks dreadful at times. He’ll go, you’ll see, and then the office will come to me. I’m the “and Son”.’
‘But supposing he left it away from you?’
‘He wouldn’t do that. That’s about the one thing that I am sure of.’
Hugo was remembering the sign swinging asthmatically with the wind in the alley off Ludgate Hill; the sign that read ‘James Blair and Son’. His father had been so proud to add the fresh coat of paint to the ‘and Son’, Hugo knew that, and the tea office had stood there for generations. It would go on for generations.
The sun came dappling through the tree branches as they sat there, arms about one another. The world seemed to be shut out of this wood, and here inside they could make it fairy with their own romance. They forgot all else save the ecstasy of being in love. For them a magic wand waved, and they had everything before them. They did not realise that it was growing late, until the first hint of chill crept into the warm refuge of the wood, and the shadows deepening, enfolded them coldly. Then they had to hurry.
‘I mustn’t miss the train.’
‘I’ll get you there in no time.’
‘Right.’
He caught the train, and as he was leaning out of the window to clasp her hand, she pushed a letter towards him.
‘Good heavens, I nearly forgot! Father said I was to give you that last thing. You needn’t read it till to-morrow. It isn’t important, so he said.’
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
He put it into his pocket, and the train started but he leaned out waving to her, until they turned the bend. It was a race across London, and the down train was a slow one, pottering at all the little stations. When they came to Hatfield he suddenly remembered Mr. West’s letter. For no reason at all he had become curious about it, and it felt like a leaden coffin in his pocket knocking against his ribs. He felt it again, and now, for no reason at all, was convinced that it was of ill omen. He ought to have opened it before. In the dusty carriage a Jewish rabbi stoutly buttoned into a fusty black coat read an imposingly bound book, and a woman nodded tiredly over her cheap attaché case. A hat rack sagged with parcels, and there was nothing to divert his interest, which focused again on the letter. He found this mood unbearable and could not sit here, with the letter still an enigma in his pocket. He brought it out and opened it, reading it by the stark yellow light of the lamp, and with the woman opposite to him still nodding.
The letter was short.
‘A promise is a promise, I know. I apologise, but this was something that I could not keep. You and Isolde will be happy together, and I know that you will see after her. Your father, realising the circumstances, will enable you to marry her at once, and care for her. I’m getting out. It is the best way. J.W.’
Seven
Hugo had bought an evening paper and was reading about the crisis and Mr. Chamberlain leaving Croydon and flying to Berchtesgarten with all the Cabinet to see him off. It seemed that everything that Muriel had said about the world changing was coming true. Undoubtedly there would be war. Perhaps not to-day, nor to-morrow, but there would be more crises if we got out of this one, and from one of them war itself would come.
It was curious that the thought of this sent him back to the night when he had lain in the loft at Hindhead, and had seen the golden nail-paring of a moon over the Hampshire fir trees, and listened to Muriel talking. She had been so wise as she spoke of a different world which she felt so sure would emanate out of this. Then, of course, nobody had ever supposed that there could be war again. They’d have laughed at the idea. Now history was repeating itself. He was sure that war was rising out of the distance. The echo might still be far away, but it would come much nearer.
Suddenly, it seemed that through his thoughts a destroyer cut her way, racing out to sea; he could see her quite clearly, her decks cleared for action. He was no longer an outsider staring at her, he was in her, riding with her. In a flash the picture cam
e and went. Muriel had said that chance was coming to all the world and particularly to his world.
The tea office was behaving with commendable calmness.
‘War won’t come, we’ve all got too much sense,’ said Miss Helstone; now she was a much older Miss Helstone, with a tubular stomach, and a painful tendency to wear gored tweed skirts to emphasise it.
Miss Irwin also showed signs of the passage of time. The bicycling gentleman had been actively inconstant, one spring expedition, when he had lingered for light refreshment in a wood with a blonde cyclist who wore cord shorts and baby socks and had fascinating curls. Miss Irwin had taken it badly; she couldn’t get over it, because the bicyclist had been her last chance, and she knew it.
‘Now I’ll be married to Darjeeling,’ she moaned her fate, ‘it’s ever so awful.’
Also too much out-of-doors had played havoc with her complexion. She had a network of little veins on her cheeks; she had lost any looks she had ever had.
However, Munich did not trouble her; she believed that something would turn up; she was in her spare time a British Israelite, and found it extraordinarily comforting.
Old James Blair sat in his office, and nobody knew what he thought. Hugo was convinced that if war came his father would die, because London would assuredly be bombed off the face of the earth, and the shock would be terrible for old people, particularly those with angina. It was horrible to walk out on to Ludgate Hill for lunch in the restaurant, with the bright September sunshine on the pavement and the buildings, and to think that this very street might be so much rubble. Horrible thought, yet terrifyingly possible.
He was grateful that Isolde was in the country.
When her father had died, Isolde had gone to Emily Binns. Emily was the only person that Hugo could think of in the emergency, and she had accepted Isolde as a trust, and had asked no reimbursement. The holiday had given the girl the time to look round her, and from the bosom of the Binns family she had taken a job. There was no doubt about it that Isolde had pluck. Sometimes she made Hugo terribly proud of her.
Eventually she had written telling him that she was going to be with a naval officer and his wife who had a house in the Liphook area, and who had two small children. Afterwards she wrote weekly to Hugo, and although she wrote with extraordinary courage, he noticed that her love of children had waned considerably, and on the few occasions when they could and did meet, he got to understand that she was going through a bad time.
He himself was furious that he could not marry her. He had searched for another job, examining the advertisements in the paper every morning, and although at first he had believed that persistence would meet its reward, there had come a time when he was not so optimistic.
He had interviewed several employers, who, on paper, offered the very niche that he wanted, but when he came to go further into details, there was always some obstacle.
He found that life does not offer handsome remuneration to inexperienced youth. His father had been quite right. And when he gathered that Isolde was unhappy, it redoubled the anguish. He was so disappointed in himself, and so worried about her. He did not know what to do, and they could meet so seldom. For a time there seemed to be no solution, then one day Isolde wrote to tell him that she had taken a job nearer to him, in Buckinghamshire, which would be much more convenient, because they could meet every week-end. When he went to see her the first time, he was dismayed to find that she had engaged herself as cook to a woman artist who lived in a charming little manor house, and who only kept servants who were not really of the servant class.
‘But why should this dismay you, Hugo?’ asked Isolde in the sitting-room which was loaned to them. ‘It’s mere snobbishness on your part. The arrangement makes Miss Harrison very happy, and it suits me down to the ground. I can tell you that anything is better than being with children. Gosh, how awful women are about their children!’
She gave him a vivid picture of a mother worn out by the overruling demands of a couple of inexorable children, with whom she was quite unable to cope. Of the father’s moments of fury, when he slapped them hard, or of the ridiculous coaxings when he had been won round by their mother to believe that they were ‘so sweet’, or ‘such little dears’.
It had been ghastly.
‘No, I prefer to be a servant, Hugo, a real straight-forward servant. Those children made me murderous.’
‘I never realised that you knew anything about cooking.’
‘I didn’t originally, but I went to classes. I stayed long enough at the Wrightsons to acquire some knowledge, and that was the only reason why I did stay there. It struck me that cooking was a stock-in-trade. We have to eat. A good cook is always worth her money.’
‘But you of all people to cook! You!’
‘And why not!’
‘I don’t know. It just happens that I feel that way.’
She came closer to him and slipped her hand into his. ‘Oh, darling, I do love you so. One of these days we’ll be happier having been through so much.’
‘Shall we?’
‘Yes, of course.’
He tried to sweep the feeling of frustration from him, but it wasn’t easy.
Once, when his father was in bed with a bad attack, he had brought Isolde to Lynton Lodge to see the place. It was a spring day, when the narcissi were out, perfuming the air, and the walnut tree stretched ashy branches against the pale blue sky. It was always the last to bud.
He crossed the lawn and stood with her beneath the boughs.
‘I wanted to bring you here with me. It’s strange but I’ve always loved this place. I’ve always felt that here somebody was near me, here I could dream, and be happy.’
‘I know. You thought it was a ship?’
‘To me it is a ship. It always has been. This is something that has never changed and it always will stay a ship.’
‘One day that ship will come to you, Hugo.’
‘Perhaps.’
He wished that he were not losing heart. When he had found her doing a cook’s job he had made another, even more desperate, search to better his own position. He had had no luck. It would have been madness to desert the tea office with no better offer in view, for here at any rate there was a future.
That day at Lynton Lodge he showed her his treasures, the photograph of the young girl, not more than sixteen, with her hair parted primly in the middle and worn in two long pigtails over either shoulder. The girl who had never seemed to be anybody’s mother, but just Marguerite. He showed Isolde the hairpin box, with the picture of Anne Hathaway’s cottage, and the new scent which still clung to the yellow wood. He showed her the baby curl that was still gold.
‘She must have been very lovely,’ he said.
‘But why have you never found out anything about her?’
‘Well, how can I? My father won’t speak of her, he shuts up the moment that she is mentioned. Anyway, when you come to think about it, it must be torture for him to remember. When I got to my grandfather, he had gone slightly ga-ga. I could never find out anything.’
‘But it seems so very extraordinary not to know what your own mother was like.’ She touched the hairpin box caressingly. ‘Hugo, you ought to find out.’
‘Perhaps one day; though I’m hanged if I can see how.’
It had gone on and on.
They were always hoping that something would turn up to enable them to marry, and nothing had happened. Now it was the unexpected, and Mr. Chamberlain was flying to Berchtesgarten in a gallant effort to stop war.
War is no respecter of persons. It speeds up life, it speeds up death too, but it also speeds up marriage, Hugo remembered.
He came out into the September sunshine on Ludgate Hill, and he had his lunch at the Lyons where everybody was discussing the crisis. Some of the girls were quite emotional, the men were stoical; what would be, would be, they said.
Ebenezer Minch had gone home with a chill at midday. There was no doubt in Hugo’s mind that both m
en with the same personality were crocking up. His father’s angina was raddling him with increasing fury, and Minch had never been quite the same person since his bad attack of pneumonia in the spring, though he liked to think that he was.
Well, he supposed the week would see war or peace. And if it was peace, it would probably be peace for some few years. Europe had had a fright. It had got cold feet.
Two days later, Mr. Chamberlain was back from Berchtesgarten to everybody’s surprise, and the greatest gloom settled itself upon the country, which realised that this news was certainly not the good news that they had expected. Arriving at the office dead on time the following morning, Hugo was met by Miss Helstone. She looked unusual. So far Miss Helstone had not been seriously disturbed by the suggestion of war, believing with a Queen Victoria faith that England could not possibly be bullied or badgered into such a thing, and that undoubtedly someone would stop it. Now her face was blotchy, as though with crying, he was quite sure that her eyes were wet.
She said, ‘Oh, Mr. Hugo, it’s poor Mr. Minch.’
‘What’s happened to him?’
‘He’s dead. Mrs. Minch has just rung up. He died in the night, isn’t it awful?’
The death of Ebenezer Minch, which could only relieve the world of a most unpleasant personality, did not strike Hugo as being ‘awful’, but the fact that did shock him was that the office depended very largely on Ebenezer, who would leave a gap impossible to fill.
‘We must break this gently to my father,’ he explained, remembering the angina, and feeling that the rupture of the long association of Ebenezer in business with him would be a great shock. ‘How was Mrs. Minch?’
‘She seemed to be ever so queer. Not a bit herself. Quite calm, you know, but queer. She wasn’t even crying.’
It was curious that Miss Helstone could cry. It irritated Hugo, because she wasn’t the sort of woman one would have expected to fret most illogically after Ebenezer. She had always disliked him.