“What’s wrong, David?”
“Nothing. I was just thinking I’m probably rather a nuisance to you—extra trouble and all that.”
Margaret’s thin face looked at him searchingly. “You aren’t a nuisance,” she said. “Whatever gave you that idea?” Then she tried to assume a more casual tone. “You know, David, I’ve often thought it was madness for you to go to Oxford. If you had entered an office of some kind you would have been earning a steady salary by this time. And we’ll need that, you know, if Father dies. Remember, his pension dies with him.”
David looked at his sister, but her eyes avoided his. He suddenly felt as if an octopus had whipped an arm around his ankle.
“If Father were to die,” he said calmly, “then we certainly would not keep this house going.”
“We have to live some place. Besides, I can always have a piano here.”
“I think this house would be too big for one person.” And he saw her eyes again turned towards him, questioning, watchful; he explained, “I am away for most of the year, Meg. And, frankly, if Father weren’t here I’d take a job of some kind abroad during the holidays. And after I go down from Oxford I may not even be living in London.”
“But I needn’t be alone. Florence could live with me here, and then you’d always have a home to visit when you wanted one.”
Had all this been planned in Cornwall, he wondered. He suddenly saw his personal future being neatly arranged for him, all in the name of brotherly love and sisterly care and family duty.
“Suppose I die before Father does? You should think of that too if you have started calculating results of deaths.” His voice was bitter enough to startle her. Or perhaps it was this new idea which shocked her. “Wouldn’t it be wiser to arrange your life independently of mine?”
“How?” she asked angrily. “I’ve no money. I wasn’t allowed to finish my course at the College of Music. I am qualified for absolutely nothing.”
“You did get some education,” he reminded her. He didn’t add that it had been paid for, too, through careful economising by their mother. “Why don’t you and that woman Rawson look for a job? That is what most young men and women do.”
“Then we’ll never have the careers we want.”
“How many men do have the careers they really want? Even if a man is willing to starve in a garret for the sake of his own hopes he can’t inflict that on his wife.”
“He doesn’t have to marry.”
“Mistresses are even more expensive than wives, I believe,” David said, with a smile. His anger had turned to amusement. Margaret imagined that everyone else should be arranged emotionally into the same watertight compartments as she was. Judging from the shocked look on her face at this moment, it was even possible she thought that men’s emotions were as easily controlled and managed as women’s.
“Don’t be crude, David,” she said angrily. She left the kitchen suddenly, and paused at the foot of the narrow stairs to call back, “And don’t call Florence ‘that woman.’ She is my friend. So don’t think you can separate us.”
“I am not trying to separate you,” David said, as he entered the hall. Lord, he was thinking, what phrases women use. “All I ask is that you don’t inflict her on me.”
“You are horribly mean about Roger too. You just don’t want me to have any friends, that’s it.”
“If Roger is coming round tonight for you you had better do your hair. The parting is uneven.” It had been annoying him for the last fifteen minutes.
“Roger doesn’t bother about such details,” Margaret said icily. “He is interested in what I think, not in how I look.”
He is only interested in what he himself thinks, David would have liked to say. But he didn’t. He said nothing, but knocked on his father’s door instead, and let Margaret enjoy her last word all the way upstairs.
As he set out the cards on the small table before his father Margaret was beginning a steady series of arpeggios. Their argument had not affected her playing: the notes were clear, regular, brilliant, machine-like in accuracy and attack.
“We need two packs for bezique,” David’s father reminded him gently.
“Sorry. I wasn’t thinking,” David said. He smiled, and began to feel better as he saw the anticipation in his father’s face. This was the game his mother and father had played through many a long evening. He shuffled the cards and dealt. He waited patiently as his father’s thin hands arranged them slowly, and the leisurely game began. He wondered again, as he listened to the unending stream of chromatics, if Margaret’s talent was really as first-rate as she thought. Certainly he couldn’t offer any advice. Whether you were really first- or second-rate in your work was something you had to find out for yourself.
He let his father gather a fourth ace to win a nice hundred points. It always acted like a tonic on his father if he could win, not too easily, yet definitely. He watched the invalid’s thin face, the skin drawn so tightly over its bones, the lack of flesh and red blood to give it shape and colour. The grey eyes were, at this moment, interested and alive. Their blank weariness and patience were gone. The weak hands moved slowly.
“Four aces,” his father declared, in triumph.
“Good for you.” David pushed the chips across to his father’s side of the table. He rose to turn on the light. The evenings were short now. He closed the window, for the air turned damp and cold at sunset, and shut out the voices and rushing feet of the children as they had their last game before bedtime.
As he lifted his cards once more he remembered other September evenings. There had always been eyes at windows watching the children as they played, there had always been the fading trees above the chalk-scrawled walls. He remembered the fine feeling of mist and gathering darkness, the cool touch of the night air on his hot cheeks. And when he had come indoors his mother and father had been finishing their game of bezique, and upstairs Margaret had been thumping out five-finger exercises. A profound melancholy stirred in him, and he sat quite motionless.
His father was waiting for him to draw and play. “Is there anything wrong, David?” he asked.
David listened to the new burst of rhythm from upstairs. Margaret had abandoned scales for Brahms, but she still played with hard accuracy, as if the heart were not needed to balance the mind’s technical skill.
“I was wondering whether I am deluding myself too,” he answered gloomily.
“What’s that, David?” His father had been too engrossed in trying to collect four kings. “What did you say there?”
“What if I’m absolutely no good in the Diplomatic?”
His father did not quite follow his argument. “The Foreign Office needs a variety of men in its service. Inbreeding only weakens. It needs new blood. I shouldn’t worry about that, David.”
“I could probably fit into the pattern if I tried hard enough,” David said, “but that isn’t the question. The question is, can I do something more than just fit into a pattern? Or do I want to have to fit into a pattern before I can succeed? Or can anyone ever really succeed if he has to fit into a pattern? That’s what worries me.”
“The salary is small to begin with,” his father went on, following his own line of thought. “No more than a schoolteacher’s. And generally the young men have some private means of their own, or some financial backing from their family. That will be difficult for you perhaps. But it could be managed.”
“That isn’t what worries me,” David said patiently. “What I am wondering is this: should I be any good? Or should I be just a polite echo with well-trained brains? Thinking correctly, dressing correctly, fitting so smoothly into the damned pattern that I’d become incapable of standing outside of it if that were ever necessary?”
His father looked at him. “It doesn’t hurt a man to worry about these things,” he said gently. David wouldn’t fail, he assured himself. But David always had these spasms of self-doubt. There hadn’t been one major examination yet before which David had not
always been uncertain and worried. I’m glad he is that way, his father thought: it keeps him from being overconfident and self-assertive.
He said, “I never wanted a son who aimed at being rich and famous at the expense of other men. And I never wanted a son who would spend his life pretending he was big enough to fill a job, when in his heart he knew he wasn’t as good as someone else who might have had that job instead of him. But it doesn’t hurt a man to aim high as long as he never loses the habit of questioning himself. Every now and again he should get thoroughly worried about himself, try to give himself a few honest answers no matter how painful they may be.”
When David did not answer his father went on, “I’ve been a spectator for years, David, and I’ve seen more of the game than those who play it. I would like you to do well, David. Just to make up for me.” He paused there and half smiled. “But I would like you to have a career in which you’d be doing a really useful job. Mark my words, David, there’s trouble coming.”
“Spengler’s century of warring Caesarisms,” David said gloomily. “And yet, no one is thinking of war. Disarmament and the Depression is all we talk about.”
“Here, yes. But in some other countries? I saw the last war begin, and the side that won the initial advantage had been preparing for years. It could pretend it had not, it could try to throw the blame on others, but its first success proved it was lying. Because you can’t win an advantage in war unless you are well prepared. Nowadays, to hear Margaret and her friends talking, you would think that in 1914 all nations who were involved in the War were equally guilty. That’s the civilian way of thinking: they like to prove the soldier wrong—once they don’t have to depend on him to save them.”
His voice had risen. Suddenly he put down his cards.
“I had four kings actually,” he said. “I just did not manage to declare them. I’m tired, David. I think I’ll go to bed.”
David looked at him anxiously. He pushed aside the card-table and helped his father prepare for bed.
“You make a good nurse,” his father said, and patted his arm.
“It is all a matter of routine,” David said. He was thankful that Margaret had stopped playing the piano at last. There was silence in the house now, and silence in the streets.
“Something more than that, something more than that,” his father replied. You could always judge a person’s essential nature by the way he nursed, he thought. The selfish ones, the unselfish ones, the careless, the callous, the thoughtful, the gentle ones. “At least, I ought to be a judge of nurses,” he added, “even if my ideas on politics seem to be all wrong.” He smiled, and closed his eyes wearily. When David asked if there was anything else he could do there was no answer except a slow shake of the head and a slow look of thanks.
* * *
The doorbell rang when he had settled at the makeshift table in his room. (The desk, which Margaret had insisted on painting, was still wet to his touch.) He heard Margaret’s heels strike firmly on the stairs as she went down to open the door. Then he heard Roger Breen’s high-pitched voice and ineffective laugh. He would have to get rid of some of that affectation in his accent, and his expensive suits and the comfortable allowance from his father, before David would ever be able to take his political opinions at more than mere face value. Thank God, Margaret had been ready, and there was no fear of Breen’s sauntering into David’s room for a chat while he waited. Breen’s idea of a chat was to wander about, picking up a book here, dropping it there, after an amused glance at a page.
“The trouble with you Socialists,” he had once said, subconsciously justifying his own lack of hard study, “is that you read too much. You see everything but the direct means to get your end. Therefore you’ll never get it. Action, not thinking, is what counts.” He had a habit of straightening his tie after pronouncing judgment. He always wore a red one, to annoy his father (a wealthy manufacturer of boots—a lot of boots had been needed in the War—who had an accent far removed from his son’s) and to prove to the world that an expensive education at Eton could produce a champion of the working-man. David had often thought that it was just this kind of nitwit who did most harm to the workers, for even the strongest Liberal would become a Tory if he had to argue with Breen.
Once David had asked icily, “How do you reconcile taking your father’s money with the belief that it’s so rotten?” But Breen had his own brand of lofty answer for that too. “He is really trying to bribe me, you know. I am showing him that my opinions cannot be bought.”
That encounter had not ended pleasantly. For David had said, “You only talk this way to win some kind of private battle with your father. It is so exciting, too, to feel you are in the intellectual vanguard, isn’t it? If you had lived at the beginning of this century, you would have worn a green carnation in your buttonhole. I meet several of you at Oxford. I’ll believe your attitudes when I see you doing something with more self-sacrifice attached to it than just sounding off among a lot of well-dressed, well-fed people. And I’ll be more reverent towards your opinions when you either stop quoting your special newspaper’s leading article, or at least have the honesty to acknowledge the quotation. You are as spoon-fed as the old boys in their fat leather armchairs in the club: you just get it out of a different bowl, that’s all.”
Breen had drawn himself up to his full five feet seven inches, and had remarked that abuse was the only argument that a reactionary ever offered. That was the last time that David had seen him. Margaret was always ready now when Breen arrived.
David pushed his work aside and walked to the window. He looked down on the narrow little gardens, stretching out like small fingers from the back of the row of houses. How could she put up with a man like Breen? She chose the weirdest friends, as if she enjoyed surrounding herself with misfits. Enjoyed? That was hardly the word to apply to Margaret. Apart from her own world of music, she did not know what enjoyment was. We are limited by our own experience, David thought. We are its prisoners.
He turned away from the window, picked up Plato’s Republic, in which he had been working that morning, and opened it. He read the fable about the Prisoners in the Cave once more.
“Damned if I agree altogether,” David said suddenly, still thinking about Margaret. “We may be prisoners, but many of us choose to be. Plato did not allow for that.”
For there were limits round our minds which sometimes we chose to set, not because we could not see, but because we preferred not to see. So far we may be willing to go: we know what to expect. But no farther, for beyond that boundary we are afraid. Our experience makes cowards of us: we want its security even if it limits us. We know that many who strike out beyond this boundary are lost. But not all. Some manage it. And when we envy them we forget the risks they took. We think that their boundaries have always been so broad and limitless. We forget that they made the effort of pushing them outward. Effort and risk. Instead we talk of luck...
Tonight, when he had been with his father, he had said he was worried. But were the reasons he had given the only true ones? Or wasn’t he too much afraid because the limits of Cory’s Walk were still holding him? If George Fenton-Stevens were to fail, then his friends would laugh and say, “Poor old George. Too bad. Better luck next time, old boy.” But if David were to fail there would be no second chance, for his own belief in himself would be gone. When you came from Cory’s Walk and aimed high, then you had to be so damned good that there was no possibility of failure. You had to be so damned good that you didn’t need a second chance. That was why he wouldn’t discuss his plans or ambitions with his friends. That was why he was always so vague about them. Yes, it was better to keep quiet about them until you pulled them off. That way the laughs and the sneers wouldn’t be so loud if you failed, and the pity wouldn’t be there, either. “Well, David didn’t manage it,” his friends would say, “but I don’t think he was very serious about it. Never mentioned it very much, did he?” That was right: keep quiet, never mention it, and then
if you failed it wouldn’t seem such a blow. If you aimed high from Cory’s Walk and then fell, you fell a long way.
Yet—he had told Penny. Strange how he had suddenly blurted it out while they were leaning over the wall of Edinburgh Castle, as if he had set himself to impress her, win her admiration. The mating display, he thought suddenly. Oh, God, did I really behave like that? But she had not laughed at him. She had listened, with her large blue eyes watching him sympathetically as if she really wanted to hear him talk.
He moved restlessly about the room. Then he sat down at his desk, pushed the books aside, and lifted a sheet of writing-paper. This was the third letter this week, Mr. Lorrimer or no Mr. Lorrimer. As he dated it he glanced at the calendar and said to himself, “Another week, and I leave for Oxford. And then Penny arrives. Damn that Rawson woman. If it weren’t for her I could have seen Penny every day until term started.”
Then he began thinking how he might see Penny on the day she arrived in London. He would arrange it. He tried to imagine the surprise on her face when she arrived at King’s Cross Station and found him waiting there to meet her. Then he glanced at his watch, noted the time, stopped all his wondering and imagining, and began to write her.
It was “Darling Penny” this time, and he didn’t even notice how naturally he had written it.
14
PENNY IN LONDON
The notice-board, three porters, and a ticket-inspector had all agreed that the train from Edinburgh would arrive at this platform in five minutes. David was still only half persuaded. He watched the giant hand of the station clock as it jerked eagerly to each new minute, and debated with himself whether he should stand at the gate to the platform or whether he should use the platform ticket which he had bought. He decided to use it, and yet keep near enough to the gate so he could not possibly miss her. He hadn’t thought of that possibility until he had actually arrived at the station.
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