Well, it was over now.
He flung away to the Club and took a double whisky with his lunch.
At Stanney Royd that evening Jonathan turned on the television set and sat watching keenly for the election results.
‘I’m tired, I think I’ll go up to my room,’ said Morcar after a while.
‘Shall I turn this off? Would you prefer it to be off?’ said Jonathan anxiously.
‘No, no. Keep it on by all means.’
‘Well, it is rather exciting,’ said Jonathan. His eyes were positively starry with enthusiasm, for indeed the two main parties were running neck and neck. (The Liberals seemed to be doing even worse than usual.)
‘Come up and tell me the Annotsfield result,’ said Morcar kindly.
A few hours later Jonathan knocked at his door.
‘Labour is in with an overall majority of four,’ he said.
His manner was decorous and he was obviously trying to keep the rejoicing out of his voice in deference to Morcar’s opinions, but his eyes glowed with happiness.
‘Well, I hope they won’t regard that as a mandate for all kinds of wild-cat schemes,’ said Morcar grumpily.
‘We shall, Uncle Harry!’ cried Jonathan in a sparkle of friendly defiance so youthful that Morcar could not but smile.
‘How about Annotsfield, then?’ he asked.
Jonathan sobered.
‘Labour gain,’ he said.
The effect on Morcar was all that Jonathan had feared; his colour seemed to fade still further and his vitality to dim. Annotsfield not represented by a Liberal! He thought of the great days when the British Liberal Party, enlightened, progressive, generous, was the wonder and almost the ruler of the world. Everything seemed to be crumbling about him. The whole world looked strange. If he had not been Harry Morcar, a tough solid stubborn Yorkshireman, he told himself firmly, he would really have felt quite daunted.
‘Well, goodnight, Jonathan,’ he said.
He wanted the boy to leave him quickly, for he needed to lie back in his pillows, and could not yield to such an expression of weakness while Jonathan was in the room.
‘Goodnight, Uncle Harry,’ said Jonathan, closing the door behind him.
38. Chuff and Marriage
‘I don’t think it will be any use, Chuff,’ said Jonathan seriously. ‘But I think you are right in making your wishes known. Why not broach the matter to him tomorrow, when he’ll be at home all day? Tomorrow afternoon. After he’s had his nap, and before we have to dress to go out.’
Accordingly on the afternoon of Christmas Day Chuff nerved himself to the encounter and presented himself in Morcar’s den. The members of the Stanney Royd household had eaten a very light lunch without benefit of Mrs Jessopp, who had gone off for the day to her eldest son, because they had all been invited to Emsley Hall for Christmas dinner that evening. The invitation pleased none of them. Chuff had hoped to escape for the evening to the Mellors, whose midday family party, with many aunts, would then be over. Jonathan did not enjoy seeing his mother as Nat Armitage’s wife. Susie, though she had a delicious new white frock for the occasion which she could not help looking forward to wearing, did not enjoy seeing Jonathan with his mother. Morcar could have enjoyed dining with Nat and Jennifer well enough if the younger generation had not been about, but he guessed this generation’s reactions and knew he would be on tenterhooks all evening lest Jennifer perceive them also and be hurt. When the time for dressing arrived, therefore, everybody would probably be in an irritable mood; but for the present, in the dead of the afternoon, good humour might still be hoped to prevail.
‘Well, Chuff, what do you want?’ said Morcar, waking with a start. ‘If you’re trying to get off from your Aunt Jennifer’s tonight, it’s no use, so don’t try it.’
‘I wasn’t going to,’ said Chuff with an air of virtue.
‘What is it, then?’
‘I suppose it’s no use, either, saying I want to get married.’
‘None at all till you’ve passed your exams,’ said Morcar, not taking him seriously.
‘It’s too bad!’ cried Chuff, suddenly almost weeping.
To see his carefree, somewhat insensitive, by his own declaration ‘tough’ grandson with his face thus distorted was painful to Morcar.
‘Now, Chuff,’ he began kindly. ‘You know you’re too young to marry yet.’
‘Lots of people get married at nineteen.’
‘The more fools they,’ said Morcar briskly.
‘Why can’t I do what I want? Why should I have to do what you say? I have some money of my own now,’ blurted Chuff.
‘Don’t insult me, Chuff,’ said Morcar angrily. ‘Money has nothing to do with it. If you’re fool enough to run off and marry Ruth, I shan’t do anything to stop you and I shan’t cut you off with a penny, so don’t make yourself into a martyr about it. I shall think you a fool, that’s all.’
‘Why?’ said Chuff in a milder but still tear-filled tone.
‘If you marry Ruth now in a hurry, everyone will say you had to, for the usual reason. Do you want to expose Ruth to that slander? I hope it is a slander?’ said Morcar sternly.
‘It - is - a - slander!’ shouted Chuff, crimsoning. ‘The maddening thing is,’ he added, ‘if it weren’t you’d give your permission and we could be married in a proper way.’
‘Yes, that’s true,’ said Morcar, laughing a little at this admittedly absurd paradox. ‘With great reluctance and disappointment, however.’
‘It’s no laughing matter to me,’ said Chuff, glowering.
‘Society has its rules,’ began Morcar.
‘They’re all nonsense, hopelessly out of date.’
‘Maybe. If you want to break them, you can. But in that case you can’t expect its support.’
Chuff threw himself about the room, muttering angrily. ‘You do what you like; why can’t I?’ he said.
‘Why do you want to gulp every pleasure down at once, in such a hurry? There’ll be a lot of your life left still, after you’re twenty-one.’
‘Maybe not,’ growled Chuff, sombre.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Atom bombs.’
‘Chuff, you never give a thought to atom bombs.’
‘Jonathan does, all the time.’
‘That’s Jonathan’s way. It’s not yours. It’s affectation to pretend you ever give them a thought.’
‘Why should I waste the best years of my life? I want to get married,’ said Chuff obstinately.
‘Pass your exams first.’
‘I’d get through them better if I didn’t have to go to the Mellors to see Ruth all the time. If she were at home with me, I should have more time.’
Morcar found himself unequal to a physiological discussion with his grandson - as to which in any case there might be two sides to the argument - so he put that aside, but allowed himself to see a picture of Chuff walking a bedroom at midnight with a teething baby wailing in his arms. He sighed.
‘I can’t consent, Chuff, really I can’t. You’ve two jobs on hand already, with the mill and the Tech. Marriage would be a third. Wait till you’ve finished your exams, do. It’s only eighteen months, after all,’
‘Eighteen months!’ wailed Chuff.
In a handsome dark green cardigan patterned across the shoulders in fawn (knitted for him, Morcar remembered having heard, by Ruth) Chuff looked very young. He also looked extremely unhappy. He still hung around in front of his grandfather, unable to abandon his hopes, moving uneasily from one foot to the other, his hands in his trouser pockets, his lower lip pouting. Morcar felt very sorry for him.
‘How should you like to be engaged?’ said Morcar kindly.
‘What would be the use of that?’ growled Chuff.
‘Ruth might like it - ring and all that.’
‘Well, there is that, of course,’ said Chuff thoughtfully. ‘She might like it. Girls do. It would be easier at the mill.’
‘It would,’ agreed Morcar.
‘Well,’ he began again. ‘It’s not what I want. I’ve asked for bread and you’ve given me a stone, that’s what I think. But we’ll get engaged now, and I’ll pass my second exam in summer, and then,’ he concluded with triumph: ‘I shall broach the question of marriage to you again, Grandfather.’
‘I shan’t promise to give my consent,’ said Morcar, alarmed to find that he appeared to have made some concession.
‘Ha!’ snorted Chuff derisively. ‘I’II go and tell Ruth now.’
He flung joyously from the room, but returned to put his head in at the door.
‘I shall be twenty in July,’ he said consolingly.
39. Loss of a Great Man
‘If mr churchill can stay in bed, surely you can, Grandfather,’ said Susie severely.
‘If you don’t you’ll be down with pneumonia again and have to go to Africa.’ said Mrs Jessopp.
Morcar hastily agreed to stay in bed. As a man who tried to be honest with himself and was fairly knowledgeable about his own motives, he inquired whether this quick agreement was due to his permanent reluctance to have Africa recalled to Susie’s mind or to his desire to subside into bed. The weather this last week had been really awful even for January: gales, sleet, rain, snow, hail, thunder, and again gales had made his customary winter visit to Copenhagen a real misery; planes had been grounded, ships buffeted, trains delayed. Hours spent on draughty platforms and in overheated airport lounges had resulted in a head cold so severe that even his agent’s ecstatic approval of the new scarlet and rose design had failed to cheer him. He decided that he wanted to stay in bed but his aversion to references to Africa in Susie’s presence was at the same time genuinely unselfish and a welcome excuse.
Being an invalid for a few days was agreeable. At first he lay supine, able to give his attention to nothing but sneezing, only too thankful to be alone, warm, and under no obligation to take any kind of action. The family doctor was brought by Jonathan to see him.
‘What have you come for? It’s only a cold,’ said Morcar irritably, sneezing.
The doctor thumped his chest and took his temperature, then told him he was correct in saying that he was ill with a cold only.
‘But if you’d gone about with it in this awful weather, you’d soon have had something worse,’ he said. ‘Stay in bed till the end of the week. I’m warning you: these overseas journeys are getting a bit much. You’re not as young as you used to be, you know.’
Morcar’s angry growl was interrupted by a sneeze.
After a few days, however, he began to feel slightly better, and able to take an interest in life again. Jennifer came to visit him; he took pleasure in her sophisticated elegance and her happy face. The Stanney Royd household took pains to cosset him, and he now enjoyed it. Mrs Jessopp proffered light savoury dishes which Susie placed, charmingly arranged, on an effective modern bed-table which Morcar had bought a few years before for his mother. Chuff with a look of pride in his own usefulness brought him cheques and letters to sign; he knew more about their import than Morcar would have deemed likely. Jonathan came up every evening and sat with him for a while, discussing the problems of his teaching career; he seemed easier to talk to, more approachable, than for some years past. On Thursday night two inches of snow fell, but thaw set in by Friday afternoon and Morcar felt cheered by the appearance of a few gleams of sun. He rose, and though still feeling tottery, managed to bath and shave and partly dress, and came down for an hour in the evening. His handsome dressing-gown and cravat of spotted dark blue silk were much admired - or at least, he thought with amusement, the children all played it that way - and this gave him undeniable pleasure. ‘Boosts the ego,’ he said to himself sardonically of their admiration; but all the same he enjoyed it.
‘I shall be back at the mill on Monday,’ he said with satisfaction. This fifteen per cent imports tax had made overseas customers angry and reluctant; he felt he was needed at his post to tempt them out of this attitude by the fine quality of his goods.
Saturday was cold but sunny; Morcar dressed and came down to lunch. The effort tired him a little, however; he was glad to get back to bed in the early evening, slept heavily throughout the night and on into the morning. Mrs Jessopp woke him with breakfast and the news that the weather, with customary English variability, had turned warm; it was a lovely sunny spring day, she said, and indeed Morcar could see through the windows, and feel in the balmy air, that it was so. The sunshine had tempted the young people to go off to the Lakes for the day, said Mrs Jessopp; they hoped he would not mind being left alone for the day, they had looked in on him three times before leaving but he was fast asleep. Morcar said heartily that he did not mind (though he did). What were Mrs Jessopp’s plans? Mrs Jessopp would of course be here to prepare his luncheon, she said; but if he did not mind, she would give him a hot meal in the middle of the day and then leave a cold one out for the evening, so that she could go to her eldest son’s for tea and chapel. To this Morcar of course offered no objection.
He was therefore alone when, watching the evening news on BBC television, he learned that Churchill was dead. The greatest heart in England, as one speaker said, had ceased to beat. Churchill had died, quietly and with dignity, soon after eight o’clock that morning.
Morcar’s first feeling was of deep personal grief. He had loved this man, as well as admired and respected and trusted him. His next sensation was of shattering loss. This was indeed the end of an era. Morcar’s world broke up into fragments, black and jagged, which whirled beneath his feet and round his ears. Daunted, suddenly bereft of all his strength, he went quietly to bed and spent most of the night re-living, with an aching sadness, the incidents of his country’s finest hour. He saw the familiar pictures of Dunkirk beach, the flames of burning London, the families asleep on platforms underground, the flight overhead of the menacing V. Ones, with their short tails of fire; he heard the thud of anti-aircraft shells, the louder fall of bombs, the awful news of French surrender; over and over again he heard Churchill’s voice, staunch, warm, sustaining, love-able, holding together the decencies of the world. He saw Christina’s body lifted from the ruins of the Haringtons’ house, and felt the sharp enduring pang of her loss.
But all this was old now, old and past and over; Churchill was dead, the era was ended; Morcar belonged only to the past; his tale was done.
40. Decisions Needed
Having lain long awake, Morcar was thankful when his bedside clock at last registered an hour when it would be decent for him to leave his bed. He rose rather in the mood of a man condemned to death on the morning of his execution - without hope, all interest in life over, but determined to see the thing through with a decent calm. He dressed with especial care - ‘so as not to let the old chap down,’ he said to himself - put on a black tie and went downstairs.
The hour was early, but to his pleasure everyone in Stanney Royd had clearly felt as he did. They were all up -even Chuff, too often a lie-abed; they were all very neatly turned out - Jonathan had a black tie, Chuff disappeared and put one on; they were all very quiet and wore looks of unaffected sorrow. The three men’s political differences always necessitated the provision of several daily newspapers (Susie of course read Jonathan’s); this morning they all exchanged their various sheets, anxious to see how each treated their hero. Mrs Jessopp wept as she brought in the bacon. Jonathan began respectfully to inquire from Morcar details about Churchill; he must speak of him to his classes today, he said, and would be grateful for original anecdotes or accounts of what Morcar and other West Riding people had felt at the time. Morcar was able to make an abundant response to his questions, and was glad to do so; yet he was chilled by the ignorance and misunderstanding of the war period shown unawares by Jonathan, a highly intelligent, well educated and sympathetic young man, son too of one of the heroes of the time. ‘They’ve got it all wrong,’ mourned Morcar privately: ‘It’s history now and historians will
make a mess of it.’
This sadness was accentuated when as Chuff drove him down to Syke Mills he poured out - eagerly enough, Morcar granted - many further questions which showed all too clearly how appallingly he misconceived the actions of the time. From air raids to naval convoys, from Eisenhower to Belsen, his details were maddeningly mistaken - not grossly out of true but enough to distort the whole picture.
A deep sadness hung over the whole mill; men went about their work very quietly, without looking at each other. Morcar withdrew to his private office and surveyed the pile of correspondence awaiting him, with distaste. He felt he really had not the strength to cope with business, and toyed with the important letters which Ruth had displayed at the top of the pile, in a lackadaisical manner. The telephone rang in the outer office and Ruth put the call through.
‘Councillor Smethurst,’ she said.
Morcar’s pulse quickened. He remembered all too surely that Smethurst sat on the Highways committee. ‘This is it,’ he thought. ‘Good morning!’ he cried, artificially cheerful.
‘Harry, I just thought I’d let you know,’ said Councillor Smethurst quickly. ‘The Ring Road’s approved. We’ve heard this morning. It’ll be all in the newspaper tonight. My committee agreed that I should warn you. I just thought I’d let you know,’ he tailed off. Morcar was silent. ‘Harry!’ cried the Councillor urgently.
A Man of His Time Page 23