Half of the Human Race

by Anthony Quinn

  ‘I have cousins up in Lancashire – I’ve found a cottage near to them. This house was always too big for one. My father bought it when Drewy and I were at school – as children we rather enjoyed the place …’ She tailed off, waving her hand in dismissal of this plaintive improbability. Outside he heard a breeze buffeting the windows. He searched his brain for something to say, but her air of spinsterish modesty had stilled his tongue.

  ‘I’ll show you his room,’ she said, coming to his rescue. He followed her into the hall and up the carpeted stairs, the same ones she and Tam would have taken as children, though Will’s imagination gave out when he tried to picture the place thirty or more years ago. It was as if the shadow of their father, a suicide before his son, had blotted out the light by which one might have read the house’s history. On the landing Beatrice opened the second door along, disclosing a sight that caused him an inward shock. It was crammed almost to the ceiling with the baggage of a life. Tam’s life. Dozens of framed photographs lay stacked against the walls. On a makeshift rail hung club blazers, tailcoats, topcoats, jackets of flannel and linen, dress shirts, a rainbow blaze of silk ties. Fishing rods and nets leaned in a corner. A rack of mottled bats. A large oak bookcase played host to an array of trophies, plaques, commemorative silver. A lower shelf accommodated a sequence of shoeboxes, each stuffed with correspondence. Will, not knowing where to start, plucked a letter at random from a box. Its postmark was dated 1895.

  ‘That’s all mail from admirers, and autograph hunters,’ Beatrice said. ‘About twenty years’ worth of it. He never threw anything away.’

  He raked his gaze about the room. On the right-hand wall two portraits of Tam had been hung, he presumed by Beatrice. One was a large oil by Lavery, dated and signed; the other was a Punch caricature that featured him leaning raffishly on his bat, while behind him stood several householders looking aghast at a facade of shattered windows. It was joked that one always knew when Tamburlain was batting from the sound of breaking glass around the Priory.

  Will stood there, dazed and speechless, until Beatrice said, ‘I’ll leave you to look around. The portraits and a few photographs will go with me to Lancashire. The rest – please take whatever you wish.’ Again came the demure, sorrowful smile.

  He heard the door close softly behind him. Two enormous travelling trunks, plastered with old steamer labels, stood open on the floor: in one he rummaged through tennis rackets, batting pads, fishing tackle, single stumps prised from the middle – the booty of victorious matches long ago. In the other lay bundles of his whites, club sweaters, gloves, caps, a pair of cricket boots whose white had gone grey, all emanating the musty compound scent of grass, sweat and sun-buttered afternoons. They seemed fraught with mournfulness, these things, now that their owner had gone. He picked up the boots, their spikes brown with rust; dead man’s shoes, a pair of orphans. He remembered now that Tam had lent him boots once after he had mislaid his own – perhaps these were the very ones. Nobody would wear them again.

  Melancholy had begun to press on him, surrounded by so many souvenirs. He wasn’t sure that he really wanted any of it. He looked again to the bookcase, the shelf of Wisdens, the bound volumes of Punch. Tam had kept very little in the way of literature. Perhaps he had been too busy reading all that mail from his admirers. Will’s eye stopped on a cloth-bound volume, its navy spine at a different parallel to the others. The Poems of Francis Thompson did not look like a book Tam would have acquired for himself. He took it down and turned to the flyleaf, on which a dedication had been written in pencil. The sight of the handwriting jolted him.

  16 May 1913

  For Andrew, my friend and rescuer –

  With love and gratitude, Constance

  The word ‘rescuer’ awoke a remorse in Will. He absently turned the pages, his eyes skimming over the words, when he found a bookmark in the middle of the volume; the short poem it marked was entitled ‘At Lord’s’. He read it, then turned to the bookmark itself, a sheet of writing paper, folded twice. Unfolding it, he saw it was a letter in Tam’s hand, an unfinished letter, for a single line had been scored crosswise over its closely written text. Will’s instinct shrank from intruding upon his friend’s private correspondence – or would have done, if he had not seen the name of the person it addressed. My dear Constance, it began.

  Thank you for your last. I am glad to learn that you are finding the work less troublesome at the hospital. You make fun of your alleged inadequacies as a French speaker, but I imagine the comfort and cheer you bestow upon your patients would transcend any limitations of language – it is your gift. (I still recall the kindness of your condolences to me on the death of my mother.)

  You remarked upon the ‘troubled’ tone of my previous letter, for which I must offer apology. Retirement does not go well with me; formerly, the winter would have been occupied with a club tour to Australia or South Africa, and I feel the absence of the game hanging heavy. It is the price one pays for choosing a young man’s profession – after one’s brief spell in the sun there seems to be too much time to fill.

  But I must confess truthfully that my nervous agitation springs from a quite different source. I have hesitated to express this before now lest it alarmed you, or became an awkwardness between us. I beseech you that it will not. From the first time we met, at the Maitlands’ house in the spring of last year, I conceived a feeling for you which I did not allow myself to think would ever be reciprocated, having noted the very fond attachment that existed between you and Will. When I later discovered that he intended to marry you, I naturally abandoned any possibility of pursuing my own suit, and awaited the announcement of your betrothal to him. For reasons you know well, and which I shall not here rehearse, the two of you were estranged, though I did not know this until you had been some months at Holloway. Once it was clear that Will had withdrawn himself, I considered it my privilege to be able to help you, and duly hired the services of Mr Fotheringham to expedite your release. Let me assure you that I did so without thought of return. My paramount concern was your safety, and your removal from prison. Only in the weeks following, after that sympathetic conversation we had at the Criterion, did I dare to hope that I might recommend myself to you as a devoted admirer. Your accepting the invitation to my retirement dinner at the Priory encouraged me, and when, the night before, you arrived in such evident distress at my flat I persuaded myself for a moment that your heart was as fraught with longing as my own. Alas, I was soon disabused of my error; you had come to me on no romantic mission but in desperate flight from the police. Again, I was honoured to be of service to you, only now I was obliged to mask a mood of desolation. Have I been entirely mistaken in this regard? Please do not be offended if this seems presumptuous, but I can no longer conceal those ardent feelings I have for you, nor the hope that you may one day return them. Dearest Constance, I once told you that I had pledged myself to cricket at the expense of making a life. That life – I do very humbly submit – is in your power to redeem

  There was no more; the letter had been abandoned, aborted by that brusque diagonal stroke. Will stood there, stunned. He had never suspected it for a moment: Tam, agonised, pouring out his heart and soul to Connie. The date was written at the top, 6 November 1913. Just over two months later he had killed himself, and now Will was forced to contemplate the abysmal possibility that love had unhinged his friend’s mind. Could it be? He, of all people, should know, having been wildly in love with her himself. And now he felt a deep flush of shame as he recalled several occasions during that summer when he had burdened Tam with his spoony, self-indulgent musings upon the loveliness of Connie. How he had droned on, unaware that the confidant listening patiently at his side was also her ‘devoted admirer’. He racked his memory now for a fugitive hint of that secret ardour, but he could only recall Tam’s respectful friendliness towards her. Did she have any inkling of it? he wondered. The letter in his hand could have been a rough draft of one sent thereafter. But he doubted it. Unfinishe
d and hidden away in a book, it felt like something that only Tam’s eyes had looked upon before now.

  He stared at the walls again, muted and stacked with once precious possessions, boxes of cufflinks and collar studs, county medals, engraved tankards: a burial chamber without its pharaoh. It was too much to bear, and, with heavy heart, he felt for the doorknob and backed out of the room. Beatrice, hearing his footfall on the stairs, came out to meet him. She looked surprised to find him almost empty-handed.

  ‘I’d like to take just this, if I may,’ said Will, holding up the book of Thompson’s poems.

  ‘Oh … I thought you’d like one of his bats, or … I don’t know what.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you to have asked. But I have a friend at an auction house that deals with sporting memorabilia – I once bought a bat of Tam’s there. Perhaps you’d allow me to send him over to make a valuation?’

  Beatrice looked doubtful. ‘Is it really worth much?’

  Will assured her that it was, and after a little more persuading she agreed to the auctioneer’s visit. Financial security was the least she deserved, and it was one last favour he could do for Tam. She kept him talking on the step for a few minutes. As he made a valedictory sigh, she looked searchingly at him, and said, in a diffident tone, ‘You know, I still wonder about him – about why …’

  He felt the unsent letter burning a hole in his breast pocket. He could have taken it out for her to read. But how would it help? Weren’t we all, in the end, a mystery to each other?

  ‘I don’t think one ever stops wondering,’ he said.

  On the ’bus home, the convalescent officer in uniform drew respectful glances from several of his fellow passengers, but Will barely noticed them. He was turning over Tam’s letter in his mind, probing its forlorn phrases and recalibrating the perspective from which he now saw Connie. In his self-absorption he had failed to discern her effect upon Tam, which was bad enough; but in his pride and egotism he had failed to appreciate her effect upon himself, which was unforgivable. Stirrings, intimations of his mistake had intermittently troubled him during the last four years, but he had somehow managed to tamp them down, written them off as a nostalgic indulgence. Her unassuming graciousness, her good humour – her beauty – these qualities he had seen in her and admired. But it was something else: that fierce independence which had got on his nerves during the short time they had known one another now seemed to him, in retrospect, the very brightest part of her. Why, wasn’t it this that had saved his life? Tam had understood: a woman, this woman, might be the antidote to death! Any man with half an ounce of wisdom would have understood, would have recognised the force of destiny and immediately devoted himself to securing her happiness. How mortifying not to have been that man. Only now did he understand that in the broken puzzle of his existence Connie was the vital missing piece. She had saved his life once. He would have to ask her, as humbly and earnestly as Tam almost had, to save it again.

  As the town turned to country and the tall hedgerows slid past the ’bus window, Will felt the urgency of his mission as consumingly as a fever. He had squandered the most precious opportunity of his life three and a half years ago. By a miracle it had come round again: he would not let it slip this time.

  It had taken Connie nearly two weeks to get back on her feet following her illness, and her mother flatly refused to allow her an immediate return to work. This enforced absence, though it caused her some guilt, had a gratifying upshot in enabling her to spend time with Fred, whose arm was now out of its sling. During her convalescence they would take the train from Barnsbury to Chalk Farm, then walk through Primrose Hill down into Regent’s Park. One afternoon as they strolled its circle Fred spoke, hesitantly at first, of what he had been through on the Somme, an account from which Connie learnt once again the terrifyingly narrow margin that determined whether a man lived or died. Within minutes of the offensive’s start Fred had come close to obliteration: deputed to lead a bombing party into no-man’s-land, he had paused to regroup by a shell hole when they were suddenly caught by artillery fire from behind their own lines. The range had been miscalibrated, and the barrage was falling on top of them. ‘Strafed by our own guns!’ he said, shaking his head. Of the six men in his team Fred was the only one left standing. A man who had been ten yards from him was literally blown to pieces – ‘about the size of a pork chop’, he added. Connie had a sense that she was the only woman – perhaps the only person – to whom Fred would ever impart that appalling image.

  On returning home by ’bus, their mother greeted her with a postcard that had just arrived. It was from Will, and tersely expressed: he was coming up to town the next day, and would be most obliged if they could meet.

  ‘What does he want?’ asked Fred.

  ‘I really can’t imagine,’ said Connie with a shrug. ‘Well, I’m at Endell Street tomorrow afternoon, and in the evening I’m going to this …’ She picked up the stiff-boarded invitation to an officers’ evening at a grand address in South Kensington; Marianne, the hostess, had not forgotten her promise to keep in touch. Connie, intrigued as much as anything by the prospect of seeing inside Marianne’s house, had hoped to take Fred, but he was off to Cambridge to visit friends.

  ‘Why not invite him?’ suggested Fred. ‘He might enjoy the company.’

  She wrinkled her nose at first, but then came to reconsider the possibility. Will had earned her gratitude by his prompt visit to East Molesey to condole with Mima and the girls, and it would not be unpleasant to renew their acquaintance outside of a hospital. Perhaps … She went to the study, and plucked a pencil from a quiver of them she kept in a drawer. Without thinking too deeply about it, she wrote a short reply informing him of Marianne’s ‘at home’, and suggested he might wish to accompany her.

  Thus was it arranged that Will would call at Endell Street at seven o’clock and squire her to the evening’s event. At the appointed hour Connie came down to the entrance hall of the hospital and found an officer seated at one of the wooden benches. It took her some moments to realise that it was Will; during his time at Endell Street she had never seen him in uniform. His posture, leaning forward with his chin propped up on joined hands, was one of profound contemplation. When she called his name he looked momentarily startled, as one woken from a deep reverie. He stood up to greet her, and she took in his severely correct attire, buttons blazing off the khaki, the Sam Browne belt across his chest and his riding boots polished to a parade-ground sheen. For a moment she thought he was going to salute her, but he merely removed his cap.

  ‘You look awfully smart,’ she said. Her own WHC grey-green seemed rather dowdy in comparison.

  Will blushed, and led her to a taxi waiting on the street. The fierce early-August temperature had cooled with the onset of evening. The journey took them through Trafalgar Square, along the Mall and into Knightsbridge; Will offered a somewhat mechanical account of his recuperation at Silverton House. He confessed that his routine was to get up early and go out for the day, sparing himself his mother’s company.

  ‘But Miss Brink must be pleased to have you near,’ said Connie.

  ‘Yes, she’s been very patient with me,’ he replied, in an absent tone. Recalling their last conversation about Ada, Connie decided not to enquire too deeply as to how things stood. She told him a little about Marianne, and how they had known one another at school, but she sensed that Will, though he gave the impression of listening, was somewhat preoccupied. He would insert a murmured ‘hmm’ or ‘ah’ on the wrong beat, which in turn disconcerted Connie and reduced her to looking out of the window. Eventually their cab turned off Fulham Road into Sumner Place and deposited them at a tall white stuccoed house, about the size of a small hotel. A maid ushered them inside, and as they passed through the porticoed entrance they heard the strains of ‘Tipperary’ in the distance. They followed the sound through the hall, thronged with officers, out into a long garden, where a drum and fife band were in full flow. The musicians were all women.
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  ‘Dear God,’ muttered Will. Connie smiled at this throwback to suffrage days, and only hoped that ‘March of the Women’ would not be part of the band’s repertoire. At that moment she heard her name called, and turned to find Marianne approaching. She was at her most stately this evening, sheathed in a black satin gown that heightened the drama of her pale skin. A loop of pearls glimmered at her throat.

  ‘I’m so pleased you could come,’ said Marianne, planting a kiss upon her. Connie, turning to Will, felt an unanticipated thrill of pride in being able to introduce him to their hostess. ‘I gather you’ve been convalescing,’ she said to him.

  ‘Yes – and very well looked after,’ he replied, with a glance at Connie.

  ‘May I introduce you to some of our residents? We have quite the little club here now.’ Marianne took his arm.

  Will, allowing himself to be steered into a circle of officers, was privately chagrined. He really had no interest in talking to anyone but Connie: she was to be the focus of his whole evening. He had betrayed his nerves in the cab, he knew, and was exhorting himself to keep calm. Now his scheme had been unseated and he was fraternising with pipe-smoking hearties whose company he had had quite enough of in France.

  Connie, meanwhile, had just accepted a light for her cigarette from a cheery young subaltern when she heard someone excitedly hailing her from the corner of the garden, and out of the shadows walked Laura Scott. They had not seen one another since Connie returned to London last year, and the exultant nature of this sudden reunion caused heads to turn.

  ‘Marianne told me you’d crossed paths near St Paul’s a few weeks ago – but I didn’t dare hope you’d allow yourself an evening like this!’