Three Sons (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  When Carolyn got the letter telling her that Marty was going to get married, she could not believe it, because she had never supposed that he was the marrying sort.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Luke, over the belated breakfast that this letter had disrupted. ‘Aren’t all men the marrying sort?’

  ‘No, Luke, I don’t think they are. All women are; men are not. They dislike marriage because it ties them; I think men prefer an affair.’

  ‘Not flattering,’ he said.

  ‘I wonder what she’ll be like? Too beautiful to be real probably.’

  ‘Or not. Things go by opposites. I’ll bet she’s the churchworker type, good shoes and stockings; serviceable fleecy-lineds with elastic at the knees.’

  ‘You’ve got them wrong, Luke, that sounds much more like Adam.’

  ‘Yet I bet Adam marries for glamour and gold, Marty for grit. You’ll see.’

  Carolyn met Marty and Hilda at Benfields in the car. She left Luke purposely behind, supposedly to see after his father, but she felt that relations should be introduced by penny numbers; James last; definitely James last.

  The little junction was actively busy when the train came in, and Carolyn fussed that she would be making a bad impression or doing something foolish, ran up and down the train. She wore a pale pink silk frock, with a floppy leghorn hat, and she looked very young. Then she caught sight of Marty’s blond head, and with him Hilda, small, plain, and so serviceable. But nice, Carolyn told herself firmly, very, very nice, I’m sure! She hadn’t believed Luke’s prognostications and she should have done, undoubtedly he knew something of life.

  Carolyn went towards them, her hands outstretched. ‘Darlings, are you dead? It’s such an awful train. The worst one in the day, whatever made you choose it?’ hurriedly in the frantic, fluttering way in which nervous women talk. All the time she felt Hilda comparing Carolyn with her own mother, and had a secret feeling that Hilda’s mother was probably frightful. But Hilda was nice. The one thing that occurred to the dazed Carolyn as she led the way into the station yard was, is Hilda the right girl for Marty? How had he ever come to fall in love with her? Their outlooks must be strangely different. Marty had the choice of all the glamour girls in England and had chosen this very plain one. Why?

  In the car she could examine Hilda closer. Cheap art silk stockings, clumsy shoes, no hat, no make-up, yet she and Marty held hands like children in love. There was something simple about them, a simplicity that Carolyn had never expected to find in Marty. They walked up the garden. She could feel at home with Hilda, and was glad of it; it was almost as though she had an old friend as they went past the grass plot under the apple trees, and on to the blue darkness of the yews, with the glimpse of the facade of the house beyond.

  ‘I’m going to like it here,’ said Hilda.

  Luke was standing waiting on the step, in a pair of pale brown flannels (those frightful Oxford bags that his father kept on complaining about), and a beige shirt. He didn’t look ill, thought Carolyn, so brown and fit, plump too! Nobody would guess how frail he really was.

  ‘Hello, Marty, hello Hilda?’ he said. He had been very curious about her, for curiosity was his strong point. Luke could never let well alone, curiosity overcame him every time. He and his mother had had an altercation just before she started. Luke thought Hilda would be the rugged Greta Garbo type, beautifully aloof; Carolyn thought she would be the Jean Harlow, lovely and cuddlesome. Neither could be quite sure how Marty’s father would take this.

  James was spruced up in his room, and the somewhat formidable nurse, whose duty it was to attend him, had been banished. James could manage people. Usually trained nurses were masters of all types and mistresses of any situation, Carolyn always quailed before them, but James stood for no nonsense. He put on his court voice, said, ‘Go,’ and they went. If only he hadn’t tried it on his own people, it would have been all right, Carolyn felt.

  The moment that they had finished tea in the pleasantly friendly atmosphere of Carolyn’s room, they went up to see Daddy. She led the way, past the lovely portrait of her mother-in-law, along the landing with its fragilely exquisite balustrade, its cream walls, and glowing red carpet.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said to James. She only hoped that she sounded cheerful, but she felt alarmed at the prospect of introducing Hilda, the first daughter-in-law, to a stone wall.

  James had on his best blue silk dressing-gown, with a copy of the Law Journal in a prominent position on the bed. The nurse did the flowers beautifully, and they were in evidence. ‘Hello?’ said James.

  Even when he intended to be amiable (and he did now), he could never get round to the right side of the wall, the warmly friendly side where the sun shone. But Hilda was not alarmed. There was something about her that everyone admired; not easily ruffled, she sat down in the big easy chair in the window and although she looked so ordinary, and her clothes were obstructively ‘sensible’, one forgot all else when she talked. It struck Carolyn that Marty was being wise. He knew what he was doing.

  ‘She’s nice,’ Carolyn said to James, when the others had gone away.

  ‘No beauty.’

  ‘No, but then looks are not everything, and to-day so many good-looking girls are appallingly conceited.’

  ‘Her clothes are ghastly.’

  ‘Again, clothes are not everything.’

  ‘They are the outward and visible sign of the inward and invisible man.’

  He was starting to be trying. ‘Well, I think it is her mind that matters and I like her mind.’

  ‘Oh that!’ grunted James.

  They intended to get married at once, quietly of course, no fuss.

  ‘Bonchurch?’ asked Carolyn.

  ‘No,’ said Marty, ‘a register office in London. What’s the matter with the Caxton Hall? It does most people pretty well.’

  ‘Why not here?’ asked Carolyn, wishing it, yet realising what a glorious opportunity it would be for James to become impossible.

  ‘No, darling. Eight in the morning at the Caxton Hall when nobody knows about it. We’ve quite decided on that.’

  They were married when the play was in the middle of its run, and had lunch at the Ritz with Carolyn and Luke, and Hilda’s mother up from Ventnor. Hilda had not even bought a new frock for the occasion, but wore a simple, rather tired, blue silk one, with a spray of dark red roses pinned to the collar.

  ‘I wonder why you chose roses,’ he said.

  ‘Loving Swinburne, I suppose. Yet suddenly the only quotation he could recall was the unfortunate one :‒

  No thorn goes as deep as the rose’s,

  and wished he had not thought of it. Their marriage was just a stepping stone from bachelor life into a continued phase of much the same type of life. No joy bells. Nothing very significant, save that now he shared his happiness with someone else, and therefore the adventure of living was wider. They accepted one another tranquilly; Marty always felt that he could be at peace with Hilda, she never worried him, and that he knew spelt for happiness.

  Within the year Hollywood had made him a tempting offer, although he did not want to accept it, his agent Mike Wildford assured him it would be folly to refuse it. At some time or another he would need Hollywood experience, and provided that he did not go out there and let himself drift but came back to scheduled time, it would be all right. Marty went out there for eighteen months, and although he never liked Hollywood he found that it did satisfy his enormous appetite for work.

  He worked really hard there. There was no time for anything outside, but he gained infinitely in experience. Hilda had a villa with a swim pool, palms growing in the garden, and the best collection of cacti in Los Angeles. She knew everybody save the one person she wanted to know, which was Marty, but he was always so busy.

  ‘Well, darling, I can’t help it, I came out here for the experience; it isn’t going to be any good to me if I don’t get that experience.’

  He was glad that she clung to her dowdy clothes, he did
not want the glamorous type of wife, Hollywood showed him where that led. He liked her habits. The tiny copy of Swinburne she always kept by her bed, the way she braided her hair like a schoolgirl’s at night, her habit of kicking off her shoes, and her inability to see when anybody was making fun of her. She took every joke in deadly earnest, but could laugh when it was pointed out to her that it was to tease her. She was even-tempered. Once or twice she complained about her widowhood at Hollywood … ‘I never see anything of you, Marty, we are so apart now, so dreadfully apart …’

  And he replied, ‘When I’ve got this experience and we go home we’ll have a grand honeymoon in the Island. Meet one another all over again. There’ll be the time for it then.’

  ‘But will there? You can’t go back to the milestones you’ve already passed,’ and then she said slowly, in a rather pathetic little way:

  ‘From days laid waste across disastrous years,

  From hopes cut down across a world of fears,

  We gaze with eyes too passionate for tears,

  Where faith abides though hope be put to flight.’

  He looked at her in surprise. ‘Hilda darling, don’t dramatise it! It is just the course of my career.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ she said.

  Their marriage had to play second fiddle to his work, it was to be expected, and the time came when they accepted it. At first they had wanted children. Hilda was always stressing how much she would love them. The baby didn’t materialise, and when he had to come out to Hollywood Marty wasn’t sorry. Hilda didn’t mention it often now; she was happy, both of them were happy because they were extremely well suited to one another. The little incident of having no children yet didn’t count, or did it?

  At first it was difficult to tackle Hollywood, then he established himself as the English public school type, and his publicity agent played up Eton and Pembroke, so that the last year of his work there was strenuous and hard to live. But he was building up all the time.

  ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ said Hilda, then very quietly, ‘but what are you building?’

  ‘My career. I shall go back on a very different plane from the one on which I came here. I’ve been awfully lucky.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. No more. Just ‘Yes’. But as she said it he had the sudden impression of the high wall leading into Dedbury garden, warm and sweet, with the wallflowers growing atop it, homely fragrance in spring, seed pods burst open in autumn. The wall between the village and the garden beyond. So high.

  ‘What exactly do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t think I know.’

  No more.

  Both of them were tired of it when the time came for the voyage home; it would be a chance to find themselves again, he thought, but the moment he got on board his greatness had preceded him. He had to help on the sports committee, sit at the Captain’s table, meet honoured guests, give away gymkhana prizes. Autograph hunters assailed him when he sat on deck, there wasn’t really any chance of escape. Yet one night for a short space he got her alone, one of the first nights when they stood at dusk leaning on the taffrail and saw an iceberg on the sky line. It was a thing of sheer loveliness, crystal and pale blue, and they watched it for almost half an hour.

  ‘Glad to be going home, Hilda?’

  ‘Yes, I’m homesick for Bonchurch. I’d like to walk over Freshwater Down again, and see the little village under the hills.’

  He said ‘Yes,’ half listening to the sludge of the sea against the ship’s side.

  I must go down to the great, sweet mother, Mother and lover of men, the sea.

  ‘Perhaps we’ll be able to snatch that long holiday now,’ she said rather shyly.

  He did not like to admit that within the last quarter of an hour he had had a cable about a contract. It was the one he had wanted. He must act. He wanted a living audience again, to hear people, to wait for the curtain to rise, and to sense people’s reaction from the atmosphere of the place. Living response! That was what he needed. For eighteen months now he had been starved for it, that was why Hollywood had failed him; he wanted to get back into proper harness again, not mess about on Freshwater Down, and lose the chance he had worked so hard to gain.

  ‘You love your career? It means a tremendous lot to you?’ she said rather timidly, almost as though she read his thoughts. She had that gamine attraction, sweet, tender, the things he had loved so much about her from the beginning. Glancing at her, he felt that he had fallen in love with her all over again.

  ‘Hilda, you’re terribly sweet.’

  ‘I’m glad, darling.’

  She held his hand in that same childish way, and stood there saying nothing. He had the impression that for a moment the two of them trembled on the brink of a new beginning, then he wasn’t sure that he wanted that new beginning. He’d got to act. Real acting, before real people.

  ‘We’ll go back to the Island,’ he promised her.

  The first thing that he heard was of Adam’s engagement. His mother rang up his flat to tell him of it. Adam had made a wise choice, for Penelope was the only daughter of a wealthy aristocrat whose name had been in the pages of history since the Wars of the Roses.

  ‘What’s she like, Mummy?’

  ‘Oh, we’re all terrified of her. She never says anything, of course. She’s got the modern oh-so-surprised look. Very fair. No eyebrows.’

  How like Carolyn! He could imagine her saying ‘Hilda’s a darling and we adore her, but she does wear atrocious clothes, you should see her shoes!’

  ‘When’s he being married?’

  ‘In a fortnight. Hasn’t he asked you to be best man?’

  ‘No. Probably dukes are the only ones socially equipped to apply. I haven’t heard a word from him for eighteen months.’

  He went back and told Hilda, who did not seem surprised. She said she had always thought Adam would marry somebody startlingly smart, and here it was!

  ‘Well, if he makes half as wise a choice as I did, he’ll be a very lucky man, my sweet,’ said Marty gaily.

  He saw Mike at once about work; the new contract was his, and swept him up in a whirl. He couldn’t hold back now, when it was tremendously important to play the part that he had always wanted.

  They managed a week-end in the Island, time would not allow of more. There was one lovely picnic in a wood in the spring rain; a wood that was pink with campion, and blue with bluebells, in a delicate blend of colour. They ate sandwiches sitting on a fallen log, with a friendly robin chirruping at them and the rain dripping in silver, so that the wood was like a transformation scene at the panto with a gauze curtain before it.

  In the wood the tremendous beauty of May was predominant; petty things like Marty’s career and his future seemed to be as remote as autumn, and as matterless; cobwebs on distant bleaching grasses, on rose-buds turned to red berries, on pods of campion seed blown to the four winds of Heaven. No more! Then there was the Sunday when it rained really hard, coming down the panes in such thick rivers that they could hardly see the greyness of the sea beyond, with the boats, plying to and fro on it. The future seemed important then, and the May wood distant. There are gold leaves and vigorous splashings of colour in the autumn, it is not all cobwebs and blown seed. The agent rang up suddenly over the telephone, a new future was fixed, and he came back into the sitting-room very pleased about it.

  ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ he asked Hilda.

  ‘Is it?’

  It struck him that she wasn’t happy. He sat down on the rug at her feet and clasped her knees with his hands. ‘What’s the matter, Hilda? Something wrong?’

  ‘Marty, it’s me, of course … I’m silly, but at times you seem to be so unapproachable. It’s the very thing that you criticise in your father and Adam, yet it’s in you too.’

  ‘But I’m not a bit unapproachable. I’m never dim and distant like they are. It’s my career, I suppose, it must at times come between us, though never so that it matters of course, never really! Would you like me
to give it up?’

  ‘I might be happy, but where would you be, Marty darling? Would that make you happy? You’d hate it; besides, what should we live on?’

  ‘Love,’ he said, ‘and, Jove, our larder is full.’

  But, of course, he could not throw aside his career, and he knew it. After all, he had never deviated from the one idea of being a great actor, it was the thing he wanted more than all others and was prepared to ride roughshod over anything to get it. He stroked her hair affectionately.

  ‘Perhaps we’ll have a baby and go domestic?’ he said, ‘I believe that’s half the trouble; you need a baby of your own.’

  ‘Do I?’ she asked.

  They went down to Adam’s wedding in June. It was so like Adam to have it cut strictly to pattern, in a big church beyond Epsom. Marty motored down. He had insisted that Hilda should dress up for the occasion and now wasn’t sure that he had done the right thing. Hilda wasn’t the dress-up sort.

  A stranger sat beside him in the car, a stranger in dove grey with large pearls and a funny little perked-up hat. She was the woman he would never have married, and surely the orchids were all wrong. Hilda was the type for simple flowers, cowslips, primroses, daffies, pink campions and bluebells, but never orchids.

  ‘I hardly know you,’ he said.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know myself, Marty.’

  The village was agog, the churchyard crowded as they went up the red carpet into the church. Adam was at the chancel, calmly resigned; he would be! Carolyn was in the pew behind him looking far too young, with James, looking rather old. Luke seemed to be better than Marty had seen him for some time. He turned to his brother.

  ‘Don’t we all look funny?’ was his reaction.

  Marty glanced at the bride’s relations, and there seemed to be a good deal of silver fox and ostrich tips, and more orchids of the largely vulgar type that he cared less about. He thought nothing of them.