by Ursula Bloom
‘But I never intended to marry her,’ he reminded her. ‘Neither, of course, did I intend that she should pinch the hens. Still, let’s hope they were tough.’
James went on circuit, and whilst he was away he became ill. Carolyn was convinced that he had worried himself sick over Marty’s divorce. Adam, of course, couldn’t keep quiet over it, and wrote long dissertations about ‘dissolute brothers who stopped preferment for him’ etc. It was difficult quietening both Adam and James, but somehow or other Carolyn did it.
There was a telephone message that James had been taken ill in the night, and the doctor had suggested that he came straight home in an ambulance. The thought of James in an ambulance terrified Carolyn; she could not think what had happened to him, and an hour later he was carried into the house, and up into his room.
She found fairly soon that she need not have held Marty responsible for this collapse, for when old Dr. Twedesdale had finished examining him, he insisted on a specialist and it was diagnosed by the evening as being typhoid fever. Two nurses were installed inside a twinkling. In the space of merely a few hours, the routine of the leisurely house had changed, and had become ominously different. James’s room was shut off, and although no actual knowledge of his illness penetrated, there was that sense of latent sickness which hung quivering in the atmosphere, and was inescapable.
Luke was comforting. ‘We shall have to wait a bit, Mother, he’s got a grand constitution, and never having had a bad illness before will help him.’
‘Yes, but he worries about himself. If once he knows how ill he is, he’ll be over-anxious to make the effort to get well.’
‘I’ve got a hunch that he’ll be okay.’
But what Luke was really thinking was why hadn’t his father died instead of Arthur. Then Carolyn could have married her old love, and the whole miserable affair would start to sort itself out. Unfortunately in life it always seems that the wrong people die, and the unjust flourish.
If James died now, Adam would want to come here to live, and then what would happen? Luke and Carolyn would go away somewhere. Away somewhere! For the first time the thought curled up like a question mark in Luke’s brain. How marvellous if the two of them could go right away and forget!
Carolyn said very slowly, ‘The worst part is that if I had really loved him passionately, I believe this would have been easier to bear. But I haven’t loved him.’
‘You’ve been very good to him, darling.’
‘I’ve done my duty. No more.’
‘You can’t say that. You’ve been kind and thoughtful and amiable with him and he can be most trying.’
‘I feel now that it is cruel that whilst he suffers I cannot give him the sympathy that I ought to be able to give him. Oh Luke, I can’t do it. All that I ever felt for him is shut out. He is the … the …’
‘The other side of the wall?’
‘Yes, darling. The other side of the wall,’ and she began to cry pitifully.
For a week James’s life trembled in the balance. He grew very thin, and so quickly that it was in itself terrifying. When they went up to see him they always marked how different he looked, so that they could hardly recognise him as being the same man. He had patches of delirium, when the nurses hovered on either side of him, and perhaps it was better for his family to be shut out.
Luke watched his mother growing haggard, and knew that she could not eat. She flitted restlessly from place to place, unable to settle down to anything, wearing herself out by her own anxiety. The only thing that Luke could hope was that the crisis would come quickly, before she collapsed too. It came suddenly.
They went upstairs, Carolyn holding Luke’s hand, her eyes glazed with alarm. They went into the room where James lay, with that pearly grey face heavily rutted, and sagging. It seemed that his lips peeled back from his teeth so that he looked like a death’s head already and not a living man at all. The bony outline of the skull was prominent under the taut skin, with the hollows for the temples and the deep sockets into which his eyes had sunk.
For some time they stood there watching him, hand in hand, these two, not knowing what to do. Then James moved a little, relaxed, and his head slumped. He’s dying, thought Luke, and although he had never seen anybody die before, shrank at the thought of what would happen. But James wasn’t dying. He had passed his crisis and had fallen into his first natural sleep.
His convalescence was difficult. James, always a strange man, was in illness a querulous autocrat. Carolyn and Luke left him as much as they dared to his nurses, the doctor advised them as to this. Dr. Twedesdale was understanding, and had it not been for his thoughtfulness those weeks would have been unendurable.
Adam’s son was born.
‘I told you that he’d do the right thing, and make certain of a son the first time,’ said Luke. ‘Now, of course, there’ll be no holding him.’
The wheels of Marty’s divorce were set in motion (all carefully kept from James), and the moment that James was well enough it was planned to go down to Polprinth for a long, quiet convalescence. Polprinth was sheltered and warm for the autumn, and there James ought to make his final recovery in the pleasant house where the figurehead leaned out across the street.
Luke was surprised at how he felt about his return to Cornwall. His own health had been better recently, in spite of what he had been through. Only now, with his father’s illness over, did he begin to feel tired and worn. His cough was irritating him too. He did not like the idea of no nurse coming down to Polprinth with them, it meant that far too much of James’s society would fall to Carolyn’s due, but the house was too small to accommodate a nurse as well.
As they sped out on to the Great West Road, Luke started wondering what had become of Loveday. If she hadn’t forgotten him it might make matters rather awkward. He supposed by now she would have run to seed, grown blowsy, thick in the hips, the usual type.
Yet when they came to Polprinth he knew that it had not changed. The same masts rose out of the little street, the same salty smell came to his nostrils and lingered about the cream houses, where the men picked at the urchins’ prickles. He saw the tamarisk blowing like a green lace fan in the wind, and the house at the corner with the figurehead of a madonna who clutched her blue bodice to her breasts with a handful of stars.
Loveday had gone away with Richard Thuke and was in Truro, Mrs. Clare told him, and instantly they were back in the little scandals and chatter of the place. There was a new doctor too, a really clever man, said Mrs. Clare, and a new vicar, a widow man, pleasantly earnest with a very charming young daughter, ‘nowt bur’a child’.
It was strange for Luke to find himself back on the balcony, with the clematis that he used to let himself down by, to his illicit adventure. Now he was much older. There was an enormous gap between himself today and the young man of last time, who had laughed and had lain here dreaming of girls with warm lips and breasts and the starshine in a pattern behind the boat where they loved.
He had changed.
Last thing he stood here, his elbows leaning on the balustrade, as he stared out across the sea. That was changeless. Though never the same, it was invariably the same, a tumbling, discordant wild with a yellow moon or a significant darkness. It might be swollen by the gale, or calm in a womanish mood of surrender. Woods had their trees hewn, fields were ploughed up, cliffs crumbled, but the sea in all its changeless, changing forms was always the sea.
Next morning he was called to the telephone by a big syndicate. They wanted a full length portrait painted of Marty, which was to hang in the foyer of a theatre. They had decided that his brother was the man to paint it, one of those vague, problematical pictures for which Luke was famous.
He ought to be flattered.
He ought to feel gratified, but for the moment he was in one of the moods that nothing flatters, and he hardly knew himself. He would have to think over it, and he came back slowly into the sitting-room where his mother was sitting. He told her about i
t.
‘But, Luke, aren’t you terribly pleased?’
‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me. It can’t be that I have worried myself to death over Dad’s illness, because I didn’t. I was philosophical about it, but now that he is better, I seem to have gone lethargic.’
‘Ten days down here will make all the difference, Luke, be patient. Give yourself time.’
‘I don’t feel that anything will change me.’
‘I think it will,’ she said.
He met Elma.
It was curious that Elma should move him so much, because he would have thought that she wasn’t at all his sort. She was only sixteen, and a very young sixteen at that. She wore no shoes or stockings, but had sandals on her feet, and a shapeless bag of a dress made of some cotton material. Her yellow fair hair was cut squarely. She cut it herself, he found, and it looked like it. It hung like a piece of cheap fringe round her head, flopping as she walked. Under it there were two eyes, the colour of the harebells that he had loved so much that summer that they had spent in Scotland. She had a little wisp of a face with high cheek bones; no colour. She walked like the gipsies, swinging her immature, breastless little body so that Luke, looking at her, did not know if she were a lady or a village girl. She might have been a changeling child, brought hither by one of the little people, or Joan the Wad. He thought that Joan the Wad was much like her.
Elma came into Luke’s life, walking down the street and coming to a halt where he had set up his easel to sketch. She stood back to look at the picture critically. ‘I don’t think that’s very good,’ she said, not unkindly, just frankly. And she was right.
‘No, I realise that it isn’t good.’
‘Then why are you going on with it? Why not start again and do a better one?’
He swung round and took a look at her. ‘Now who are you?’ he asked.
She was the daughter of the new vicar, quite open about herself. Her mother had died when she was an infant and she had practically brought herself up with occasional help from her father. They had no money and she had never been to school. Elma learnt all her lessons in her father’s study, and they were a miscellaneous selection of Latin and Greek and the subjects that she fancied, and a studied avoidance of anything that she disliked. Mythology attracted her, she loved literature but would not look at arithmetic, and could count little more than her ten fingers. She thought that lessons were ‘rather silly’, and quoted her father’s pet theories with a glib attraction that was all her own.
She was a good deal wilder than the gipsy girl who had won Luke from Mirabel Whittingham when younger, yet Elma had with her wildness a curious kind of culture. She was vigorously alive, and Luke saw in her youth the very fire that was lacking in himself. Before the first day was actually spent, he knew that he had flung himself headlong into yet another affair. But this one was different.
‘That’s what you always say at the beginning of each,’ his mother remarked.
‘I know, but Elma isn’t like the others. She is just a kid.’
It was Elma who took him out in a rowing boat, reminiscent of and yet fantastically unlike the trips that he had taken with Loveday. They passed a couple of bays and came to the one they sought, where semi-precious stones could be found on the shore. She sprang ashore before the boat was grounded, the waves splashing up her frock, but she only laughed. She darted about the beach, her fringe of hair bobbing, and stooping with the agility of a child, excited over what she found. She had a genius for discovering grimy little pebbles that could be polished into brilliance later, and she collected them in a small hessian bag (one of her treasures) given her by her father and the property of a bank.
There was the day when she made Luke cycle inland with her to a wish-well that she knew of. She crouched down by the shallow well, staring at the crooked ferns and black mirror of the water. She vowed that at dawn on a May morning pixies came here to grant wishes, and she was so convincing that for a moment he actually believed her. The cycle ride made him short of breath, though he would not admit it, and he felt desperately tired, yet with her spontaneous gaiety which was for ever bubbling up, she kept him from collapsing.
He went up to London to see about Marty’s portrait, and sign a contract for it. All the time he knew that he missed Elma terribly, and of course it was ridiculous, because she was merely a child. When he got back, he was quite pleased that Carolyn should tell him that Elma had mooned about like a lost faun, that she had missed him too. He found that highly satisfactory.
‘You’re glad that I came down here, Elma?’ he asked.
‘I’m frightfully glad. You’re nice. Tender, you know. Most grown-up men aren’t tender, but you’re different; I don’t like rough people, do you?’
‘I certainly don’t, though I can’t imagine anybody being rough with you.’
‘No, not actually rough, but harsh. You’re so gentle.’
‘I hope I’ll always be gentle.’
He was thinking too much of her. Then one night she came running down the quay and halted below his balcony, calling to him. He went out and saw her standing there with her print rag of a frock blown close to her by the wind, which revealed little budding curves.
‘Hush, Elma, you’ll wake the street.’
‘Luke! You can play Hop-Scotch in the moonlight. It’s lying in big squares on the quay.’
‘No, Elma, I can’t come down.’
‘Of course you can; you could climb down one of the posts. The clematis would help you?’
As though he didn’t know!
He would have laughed if it hadn’t saddened him. He wished that Elma had been the first girl for whom he had climbed down the balcony, and, suddenly burnt by the old fire, he put a leg over the parapet and went slithering down, with the same feeling of exultation, and the branches of the clematis brushing his face like feather fans.
‘Well, Elma, here I am.’
‘You needed me to teach you how.’ And she danced up and down, in quick little jumps, her feet together, and clapping her hands like a child.
‘Did I?’
‘Of course. Now come and play Hopscotch.’
That had not been what Loveday had wanted. They went out on to the quay where the cobbles ended and the paving began; it was a faery world, with gold spaces cast by the moon. What a silly thing to come out here squandering precious moonshine that was made for love! But he played with her. Once, glancing up, he saw that a shortish, rather bulky woman stood watching them.
‘We’re spotted, Elma.’
‘Oh, she doesn’t matter!’ said Elma, and flung herself forward to jump into the square again, that queer fringe of yellow hair shaking about her gamin face, her body crouching. She was like an eager kitten, turning as quickly. Still the woman eyed them.
‘I hate being watched,’ he said.
Elma caught at his arm. ‘It’s only old Jake’s daughter, the one from Truro. She’s married to Richard Thuke the carpenter, and sometimes she comes here to stay. She’s got lots of children.
She would have! Yet he knew that she would never love her children as she had loved men; that type of woman never does. He could not play until Loveday had gone away, then he rejoined Elma, but not with the same verve.
‘How will you get back?’ she asked at last.
‘I’ll see you home first.’
‘No, you won’t. I’m Puck. “I go, I go, look how I go, swift as an arrow from the Tartar’s bow”.’
‘But you’re a girl! Men always see girls home.’
‘Oh no, Luke, it all sounds much too grown-up. I like seeing myself home. How will you get back?’
He paused under the leaning figurehead, then suddenly jerked himself up the stanchion; he swung himself up and over the balustrade, with the scent of bruised leaves and late clematis flowers in his nostrils. He was over the top; perhaps he was over the top in his own life too? He did not know. He felt marvellous. He leant over the balustrade and saw her standing in the street,
the adorable Puck personality of her. Now he knew that he was really in love.
He would start Marty’s portrait in the autumn when they returned to Dedbury. His father was wonderfully better, recuperating far more quickly than anyone had anticipated. It looked as if he would come out of this illness all the better for the enforced rest.
They stayed on into October.
‘What are you going to do about Elma?’ Carolyn asked Luke one day, a very sparkling day with the waves rimmed by sunlight, and the fishing boats returning.
‘There is nothing that I can do about her.’
‘She’s very fond of you, Luke.’
‘I’m fond of her too, but she’s such a child.’
‘She may be a child, but I wouldn’t have thought that was the way that you felt about her.’
‘You don’t think that I mean to marry her?’
‘I think you would if you could.’
He turned bitter. He reached the point where he could not hide it any more. ‘You know perfectly well that I can’t marry anybody, not with this illness in me. They may think that they have cured me, but they haven’t. I know that when I wake in the night soakingly wet. I know when I cough. I can feel the wretched thing dragging me down all the time, when I feel so terribly tired. I …’
‘Luke. Luke, look at me?’
He did not lift his head. ‘I want to be free to enjoy my life, like other men enjoy their lives, not shut in by the wall of a sanatorium, that’s what it is! You’ve got a wall in your life too.’
‘Luke, together we’ll tear it down, because we can, you know. Your father built that wall up deliberately, but you never built this one. Marty made his own, that sort of thing one cannot pull down, but yours we can destroy.’
‘I can’t see how. I see nothing ahead for me.’
Suddenly she seemed to have grown tremendously strong. ‘My son, we are going to get you cured. I don’t care if it is the very last thing I do, I don’t care what happens, but you and I are going to fight it together. Give me your hand. We can beat it, and we will.’