“Very well. I shall be glad to have things arranged. You can imagine how this hurts me.”
Noel’s mind was working fast now. He would have to see Paul, of course, not much but a bit. Why couldn’t he use the kid? There must be some sort of inn within reach of where she lived, where Paul could be pushed until he joined up in something. Handled right he could stop him trying to see his mother. As long as Paul had a bit in his pocket he never had been interested where it came from. The odd twenty-five quid would probably look a lot after being in jug. He would make the old bitch cough up three hundred to-night. She was obviously expecting to pay. He sang:
“How you looked when you smiled
Only for ever
That’s putting it mild.”
The music stopped. He took his arm away from Adela’s. As he smiled at her and murmured vague thanks he felt an assurance he had never before felt with anybody.
“Tell me about your work,” Gardiner said to Claire.
Claire made a dismissing gesture with her shoulders.
“I’m odd-job man. I’m a chauffeur in the day time and at night I do shelter feeding on a mobile canteen.”
Gardiner drew his chair forward.
“Now, that’s very fortunate. I should reckon you are just the person I want to talk to. I come of Quaker stock, and, though I look upon this Nazism just as I look upon cancer, something malignant that’s just got to be cut out, it’s peace that I’m worrying about. I’m a rich man, and I want to do something towards building a better world, for the fine brave people of this island. It’s seemed to me that there’s something good come out of these shelters, a spirit of friendship. I should like to build on that and give places, beautiful buildings where, when the war’s over, the folks could meet. I don’t figure right now what shape these places will take, but something in the way of clubs which everybody can join, for neighbourliness, for amusement and culture. How does it strike you?”
Claire, as he was talking, was seeing the shelters she visited. The drab or whitewashed walls, the rows upon rows of bunks, the wooden forms, the little heaters, the primitive lavatories. She smelt the thick air, she saw the people, magnificent in their power of endurance, but she saw too that courage and endurance, however highly tested, do not change the heart. Temporarily crowds were thrown together, to sleep one above the other, to bear horrible experiences together, but it was not making them fundamentally different. Because Mrs. Smith slept in a bunk next to Mrs. Brown it did not make them friends. Mrs. Smith might, and probably did, hold Mrs. Brown’s hand and say: “It’s all-right, ducks, that one’s missed us,” but then all the Mrs. Smiths and Mrs. Browns had always been superb to each other in time of trouble. They thought nothing of sitting up the night through to help when a baby was born or when someone was dying. They showed a sympathy and understanding beyond praise when the street was bombed. Yet when there was no emergency they shut the door and said: “My husband says we’ll keep ourselves to ourselves.” How often had the very people whom Claire had admired most for their example and helpfulness in air raids whispered to her a night or two later: “They’re a funny lot round here. You want to be careful. You can’t trust anybody.”
She did not want to be crushing, so she said gently:
“We’re a funny lot in this country, you know. I think it’s a grand idea, but I’m not quite sure it would work.”
“But it’s been done and has worked. Some places have wonderful settlements where the people go. There’s a poor man’s lawyer, and libraries, and a little restaurant.”
“Those are church things, I should think. Places for mothers’ meetings and babies’ clinics and all that.”
“Well, my idea is not quite that way. I’d want a licence for all my clubs, so that the people could have their glass of beer.”
Claire’s eyes were amused.
“Poor Mr. Penrose! Oh, don’t try and start anything with beer. The drink licensing laws are dementing in England.”
“There was a place I’ve only heard of, for it’s been gone some years, that sounded near what I had in mind. It was in Bermondsey, called the Bermondsey Bookshop. It made a great reputation, distinguished authors came and spoke, and the people ran their own magazine, and wrote for it themselves. Well, that was fine. But these clubs I have in mind would go further. Restaurant,” he smiled, “and beer, if it can be managed, and a fine hall with a stage and nights of ballet, and fine music and good acting. Then I’d like a swimming pool, and sports rooms, and maybe a card room, and a big nursery for the children.”
“Goodness! How many of these clubs do you want to build?”
“One to so many thousands of the community, in every town of any size in the country. Run by committees of the people, in the way they run committees in many of these shelters.”
“It will cost the earth.”
“I don’t reckon to support them alone, but I could get others interested, and if we bought the land and built the clubs, and the people paid a few pence to belong, maybe the boroughs and councils would run them.”
“Who’s going to pay the orchestras and ballet dancers?”
“It wants working out, but with God’s help it can be done. I’ve always thought that art belonged to a country just as much as her parks and public buildings, and should be for the people.”
Claire felt quite breathless listening to him. She was laughing, but she was touched at the same time.
“It sounds glorious, but if you only knew what you were up against. You can’t give things to the people of this country; they make them for themselves if they want them. I don’t say if you could try your clubs they wouldn’t be used, but I’m sure it’s a mistake to build places; you should work the other way on. Try buying up a shelter or two that the people are used to coming to, and start a bit of your schemes there, and if it works you’ll find it expands and then you can build. That’s what happened to the Old Vic. Nobody built a theatre in the Waterloo Road and said: “I’ll give the people Shakespeare.” They used an old theatre and the people came, and then they had to add to it. The same with our ballet. Nobody would have built a theatre where Sadler’s Wells is for ballet, but in peace-time it’s one of the best things we’ve got. My husband and I used to go whenever we were in England.”
Gardiner noticed her unwillingness to speak of her husband. He lit her cigarette for her.
“But you’ve a fund in this country for a national theatre.”
Claire pulled at her cigarette.
“That’ll be a very good thing for you to watch, if it’s ever built. I . . . we used to laugh a lot about that. Put up an enormous building in South Kensington and then find a public! I’ve always thought more in terms of picture galleries than anything.” She quoted Lin. “It’s no good building a gallery to show pictures. If the public really want to look at a picture they’ll go to a mortuary to look at it; if there are so many of them they burst the walls of the mortuary, it’s time to talk about building a gallery.”
The music had stopped. Claire glanced towards the floor. Meggie and Andrew, laughing at some joke, were coming towards them.
Claire had not fooled Gardiner since he had first set eyes on her. Let Adela say what she liked about her getting over her loss, he was convinced she was doing nothing of the sort. He read the lines of pain on her face, and saw the hopeless wretchedness at the back of her eyes.
“I was wondering if, when I’ve got this scheme worked out, you would give me some help.”
Claire was watching Noel and Adela.
“I’m rather busy,” she said vaguely.
“I wasn’t referring to now. I meant after the war.”
She shot round. “After the war!”
“Why, yes.”
It would have seemed impossible for Claire to turn paler than she was normally, but she did then.
“I can’t make any plans for that.
I don’t expect to be here.”
“Where are you going to be?”
She took her eyes off him and played with some breadcrumbs on the table, sweeping them into a neat pile. Her voice was light, gay, and artificial.
“Goodness knows.” She got up. “I must give Meggie back her chair.”
Gardiner watched her pick up her bag, and walk past Noel. She stood with a hand on Meggie’s shoulder, looking with apparent amusement at what Noel was doing with his champagne.
“He’s got a little jade elephant, Claire,” Meggie said, “and he says it’s got to have a drink.”
Claire laughed.
“What’s it done to earn it?”
Noel took the elephant out of his glass and put it back in his pocket.
“You’d be surprised!”
“I’m going to take my chair back, Meggie.” Claire turned to Andrew. “How do you find Meggie’s dancing?”
Meggie was back in her seat between Noel and Gardiner.
“We didn’t exactly dance,” she told the table. “We were trying to follow that fat lady in green, with the man with the bald head. It’s awfully difficult to do. Once they stopped suddenly and we almost knocked them over.”
“Silly children!” said Adela.
Claire saw Gardiner’s eyes were fixed on her. She had an uncomfortable feeling that he was thinking about her, and perhaps guessing something near the truth. She had been quite pleased to talk with him, but he was too interested for someone who wanted to be accepted at her surface value. She was sorry to let Adela down, not that she cared a damn about Adela, but she was her hostess. Still, she couldn’t talk to somebody who was going to probe.
“What about us having that dance?” Noel said to Meggie.
Meggie’s face shone.
“I’d adore it. Come quick before Mummy tells me to do something else.”
Adela was talking to Gardiner and Andrew. Claire touched Andrew’s arm.
“Come on, let’s dance.”
Andrew got up.
“I’m not very good.”
“Never mind. Come on.”
Adela raised her eyebrows.
“Really, what odd manners. I was talking to that young man.”
“I guess your niece gave him his orders. Anyway, I’m glad. I wanted to talk to you, Adela. It’s hard when they’re all around.”
Adela took a cigarette out of her case; her talk with Noel behind her, she could stand Gardiner better, but she was furious with Claire. Selfish creature! It really was abominable behaviour to go and dance right on top of being asked to take Gardiner off her hands.
“And I want to talk to you. What do you think of my little Meggie?”
Gardiner, anxious though he was to say what he had in mind, had to answer that.
“I think she’s a wonderful little girl. It would have been a great privilege if you had allowed Millicent and myself to take her for the war.”
“I should have been delighted. One worries so about children, their food and everything, but my brother-in-law begged to keep her, and I felt I couldn’t refuse. Perhaps after the war you’d invite her.”
“Why, yes; indeed, I can think of nothing we’d like better. Now our girls are married, Millicent gets lonesome. A visit from Meggie would be a real joy. Millicent has just lived for the children. There’s not been much else in her life.”
Adela thought of Millicent’s houses, cars, jewels, clothes, social position, and Gardiner, who, if rather dull, was a very presentable husband and fabulously rich.
“I’d hardly say that. She’s a very lucky woman in every way.”
“I know you feel that’s so, and maybe feeling like that you think that a woman like Millicent and a man like myself, who seem lucky right along the line, haven’t the understanding to share your sorrow. But Millicent’s and my life hasn’t been quite what it seemed.”
Adela was interested. Surely she was not going to hear of infidelities, and if so, whose? Gardiner was much too good to be unfaithful, even if he felt like it, and she doubted if he had even felt like it. As for Millicent, elegant, serene, maternal, she would think a lover bad manners.
“Really!”
“Millicent married, as you know, very young. She was just back from that finishing school of yours. My, she was beautiful, you’ll remember that! She’s still beautiful to me. I was just crazy about her, and I thought she felt the same about me, but maybe I just swept her off her feet. She was so young, and in love with love. We were very happy; I didn’t know there was such happiness this side paradise. When our first boy came it just seemed that I couldn’t hold any more happiness. I was like a goblet filled full and overflowing.”
He paused, and Adela felt she had to say something, but really she could not imagine what. She thought Gardiner’s face, glowing at his memories, slightly ridiculous. She knew what marriage was, she had some very charming memories of the early days of her own marriage, but why this enthusiasm now? She fell back on an interested “Really?”
Gardiner neither saw nor heard Adela. He was looking into the past.
“Yes,” he said, answering himself. “It was very, very wonderful. Then, about the time our second child was born, we received a visitor from England. His father’s firm did business with my father’s firm. He was getting married, and was to work in one of their branches in India, but his father wanted him to come to us for some months to study how we did things our end. He was a young man of about my own age, very good-looking, and very English in his manner. I don’t know now when I first knew that George loved Millicent and that she loved him. Just at first it seemed as if I couldn’t face up to things at all. It had never crossed my mind that she didn’t feel for me just the same way I felt for her. Then, as I watched those two together, I saw that for all my happiness they had something that I had never known. I don’t believe that two people becoming equally deep in love with each other happens often. I think one or the other usually loves most, but with Millicent and George there was nothing like that. They were two pieces of a pattern falling into place.”
Adela was absorbed. So that was what had changed Millicent! Of course, now she came to think of it, she had not seen much of her at about that time. She had married Richard the year Millicent’s second child had been born, and Millicent had not been able to come over for the wedding because she was enceinte. She had seen her before Paul was born, but of course she had been so absorbed in herself and the hope of having a son that she would not have been very observant to changes in any one else. Then there had been the Great War. She had not placed the change in Millicent as early as that, but then she had thought it was connected with herself and Paul. Really, this was a most surprising story!
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. While I was thinking what to do, and how I’d live without Millicent, George told me he was cutting his visit short and going back to England. It was the night before he left I had to speak to Millicent. You never saw such suffering on a human face. It seemed to me that no two people should have to endure what they planned to do. To tear them apart was like tearing apart a body.”
There was so long a pause that Adela had to prod him.
“Go on. The children will soon be back.”
“Millicent’s a great woman, and George a fine man, I guess. George had made a mistake and gotten himself engaged to a girl, but he went back to her. Millicent had her children. Maybe they thought of cutting loose and going away together, but if they did they never told me. George went back home and married and tried to make a good husband. But you can’t deny love like he had for Millicent, and I guess Alice, the poor girl he married, knew, just as I knew, what it’s like to give your heart to someone whose heart isn’t theirs to give away. Later, George and Alice had a boy, Michael, and they put all they had to feel into that son. George and Millicent corresponded. George wrote her all
about Michael. He was a brilliant boy, and through the letters Millicent came to look on him most like her own boy. Wherever we were in Europe George brought the boy to see us, and he planned later to send him to us for a visit. Before that happened Michael was killed. Michael’s death made Millicent ill. She kept saying she didn’t see how George could carry on.”
Adela was out of her depth. She could not begin to imagine the sort of love of which Gardiner was talking. Also she resented the story of this unknown man’s suffering over the death of a son. To have a son who was brilliant and then lose him was a mere scratch on the surface of pain compared to her wound.
“Hadn’t they any other boys?”
Gardiner looked round the dance floor for Andrew.
“That one.”
“The Bishops! Is it that boy’s father you’re talking about? Well, if they’ve still got him, surely that’s been a help. Losing one son must be more bearable if you have another.”
Gardiner shook his head.
“It’s hard to explain. It seemed as if Michael was the comforter and the compensation for their messed lives for both George and Alice. When the other two children came, a girl, Ruth, and this boy, they neither of them meant what Michael meant.”
“How very odd.” Adela’s mind was hovering over Gardiner’s and Millicent’s lives as she had seen them, and trying to readjust them in the light of Gardiner’s story. “I find all this very curious. You and Millicent have always seemed so devoted.”
“We are. Millicent’s been wonderful to me, but I know what loneliness means. There’s no loneliness like loneliness of the heart, Adela. Millicent’s been spared that. She has given and received great love. I guess I’ve only given.”
“Why have you told me this?”
“Because you said people like you two, who have never known suffering, won’t understand. What Millicent and I have had to bear is nowhere near what you’ve suffered, but when I can look you in the face and tell you that the saying that time is a great healer is a lie, you’ll know I can appreciate what pain means. It’s pained me now telling you this story. I never told it to any one before, but I must make you feel that I can meet you on some ground of understanding. I know why you feel bitter about Paul. Why you can say you loathe him. Why you wish he was dead. Why you say you won’t ever see him again. But you’ve got to cut all those feelings right out. Thank God Paul isn’t dead. Thank God you’ve got a second chance. You loved that boy better than your life. You can talk to yourself how you like, but you can’t fool yourself. You can no more cut a love like yours out of your heart than you can cut out your soul. You know it, Adela. You love him now, and you’ll love him until the day you die. Maybe you’re scared of having him back. Maybe you’re so scared you’d run away so as not to see him, but that’s only fooling with yourself. Running from truth won’t change truth. You’re Paul’s mother, and the moment he’s free you’ll just have to see him, it’s human nature. The thing now for you to face is, what are you going to do to help him?”
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