A Song of Sixpence

by A. J. Cronin

  ‘Well, Grace,’ she remarked mildly, ‘I suppose you have seen the paragraph in the Herald.’

  There was no point in denying this and Mother did not do so. I could feel her relaxing with relief at Miss Greville’s reasonable attitude. Not a sign of frenzy, hysterics or delirium.

  ‘I thought at first that I should ignore it,’ Miss Greville went on, ‘since it is, at best, a clumsy device. But on considering the matter more fully I have decided that action is necessary.’

  Mother had gone rigid again.

  ‘You realize, of course, that he, poor man, had no part in this. The whole scandalous affair is an intrigue, instigated by that woman with the connivance of the editor of the Herald and, in all probability, the provost of the town.’

  Brushing aside Mother’s attempted protest she continued, as moderately as before, but with a new note of gravity.

  ‘So I have written these letters … which you will be good enough to post for me, Carroll.’ She held them out and I found myself accepting them. ‘One is to Mr Lesly, another to his Bishop, the third to the editor of the Herald and the fourth to the town clerk. The final letter is to that woman.’ She paused, glanced significantly towards her dressing-table. I felt Mother start. The foils had been brought up from downstairs and their end buttons removed. ‘Yes, Grace, I have challenged her to a duel.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Mother cried. ‘You simply mustn’t do that.’

  ‘Even if I must not, I will.’ Miss Greville smiled, and in its vacuity, its total blankness, I knew it was the smile of an utterly demented woman, even before she added: ‘Naturally, dear Grace, I am relying on you to be my second.’

  I don’t know how we got out of that room. The moment we escaped Mother went straight downstairs to the telephone and rang Dr Ewen. He came in about half an hour. By that time, overcome by a sense of utter desolation, feeling like an idiot myself, I had retired to my burrow in the kitchen alcove. There I remained during the doctor’s visit, emerging only as I heard signs of his departure. As I locked over the banister of the stairs into the hall below I heard him say to Mother:

  ‘She will have to be certified and removed at once.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Three months later, sitting opposite Mother in the Winton train. I examined her covertly, trying to read her face. What I saw there gave me a sinking in my inside. I sensed that desperate measures were in prospect for us. Several times, in the hope of discovering the secrets that sealed her brow, I had made an effort to draw her into conversation and presently I tried again, using the visit we were now making to Castleton Asylum as an opening gambit.

  ‘Do you think Miss Greville will be better?’

  ‘I hope so, dear. We shall soon know,’ she answered, and lapsed again into silence.

  Defeated, I turned and looked out of the window, blind to the fleeting vista of the river shipyards, seeing instead the sequence of events that had brought us beyond the edge of disaster.

  Not long after Miss Greville’s removal her brother had arrived—tall, lean and bronzed, with a commanding manner and an appearance formidably correct. He had immediately taken charge and, after visiting his sister, and several interviews with her doctors, had terminated the lease of the maisonette and ordered the removal of the furniture to a depository. Towards Mother he was at first polite, then coldly polite, and finally merely cold. Campbell had his ear, he relied on her, the old family servant, and Campbell had never liked us. We had come solely on Miss Greville’s invitation, and Mother, even when we were living from hand to mouth, had never failed to pay her rent, yet we were made to appear as interlopers. In the end, just three weeks ago, a lawyer’s letter had arrived curtly giving us a month in which to vacate our apartment.

  True, with Miss Greville gone, and with the main part of the house dismantled, there was nothing to keep us at No. 7. But as the period of our notice began to run out, the uncertainty of our future increased. While maintaining a disturbing reticence, Mother was unnaturally active, not at the agency, where her work seemed almost to have ceased, but in sudden sorties to unknown destinations. Never before had I known her write so many letters: to Uncle Simon in Spain, to her brother Stephen who now had an appointment in the Civil Service in London, to Uncle Leo in Winton, and others to people I had never heard of in places as distant as Liverpool, Nottingham and Cardiff.

  A sudden blackout of the landscape, as the train roared into the low-level tunnel, indicated our approach to the Central Station. In a few minutes we were making our way up from the smoky platform, sunk in the very depths of the city, to Union Street and the yellow tram.

  It was a long, slow ride to Castleton—in those days, although the Corporation trams ranged far and wide, their speed was not excessive. But the day was sunny, and as we left the drab core of Winton, passed through the scattered suburbs, and emerged to the pleasant open countryside beyond, my spirits, always responsive to a prevailing green, lightened considerably. Castleton, still untouched, was a pretty little village. At the Asylum entrance, where the tram conductor put us off, two massively ornate gates were flanked by twin lodges set in the high surrounding stone wall. I felt a strange emotion, half anticipation, half dread, as I pulled the wrought-iron handle of the big jangling bell.

  Mother had a pass which she showed to the lodge keeper, and when it had been carefully scrutinized, he went to a wall telephone, whirred a little handle, and spoke.

  ‘It’s very hard to get in, Mother,’ I whispered.

  ‘But harder to get out,’ she answered sombrely.

  Eventually the keeper came back, smiled and nodded, the gates were unlocked.

  As we entered and began to walk up the broad sanded avenue that wound between tall beech trees towards the castellated mansion on the hill, I gave an exclamation of wonder at the extent and beauty of the estate. On one side a broad orchard of apple and pear trees was in full flourish, through which I made out a model farm with barns and haystacks, while on the other a rising stretch of parkland, studded with specimen chestnut trees, gave way at the far end to the more formal garden that fronted the house. We passed a croquet lawn, a row of tennis courts, a trellised shelter set between double herbaceous borders blooming with pink tulips. There seemed nothing to offend the eye until suddenly, on the skyline, I made out a long dark procession of plodding figures, some grotesquely bent, others gesturing, all exercising slowly, like a string of prisoners, with a nurse in front and another behind.

  At the main entrance we were now expected and admitted by a sister in dark blue uniform. Using a key, which was chained to her belt, with the dexterity of long practice, she took us through a series of doors, all without handles, along a wide thickly carpeted corridor embellished with ornate gilt furnishings and set at intervals with other heavy doors, all shut, then into a small end ante-room where she paused and, looking at me without enthusiasm, spoke in an undertone to Mother, who turned to me.

  ‘Sister thinks you had better wait here, Laurence.’

  Although I wanted to see Miss Greville, at least the real Miss Greville, restored to herself, I was not sorry to be left behind. This progress by key, locking us in, away from the bright outer world, the strange sounds, mumblings and shufflings, muted by heavy doors, the atmosphere, tainted by the commode, of discreet morbidity, even the black convoluted ornate furniture of the reception room in which I now sat—it was Buhl, a variety I had never seen before—all conspired to send a shiver down my spine, a sensation heightened by a sudden shriek, instantly suppressed, that me me jump from the spindly velvet-upholstered chair in which I had cautiously placed myself.

  Mother was a long time in coming back, but at last she re-appeared. In that instant through the open doorway I caught a sudden fleeting glimpse of a narrow corridor leading to another room, the door of which the sister was in the process of closing, and there, framed in that narrow aperture, was a strange, flaccid face, the hair cropped to the skull, the eyes staring yet vacant, meeting mine in a frightening exchange, without
a shadow of recognition. The shock of that unknown, unearthly face still vibrated along my nerves as Mother took my arm. I could not speak. I knew that I had seen my good friend Miss Greville, and that I would not see her again.

  Outside, Mother drew a long deep breath of the fresh spring air and, having thanked the sister and said goodbye, began to walk down the drive, still holding my arm. When we reached the trellised summer-house she said:

  ‘Let me sit here, Laurie. Just for a little while.’

  We went into the summer-house. Although I knew, I had to ask.

  ‘How is she, Mother?’

  ‘Hopeless, quite hopeless.’

  ‘What was she doing?’

  ‘Drawing up petitions, all day long, petitions that no one will ever see. And writing letters that will never be posted.’ She added, after a pause, as though to herself: ‘Now at least I know where we stand.’

  She rested her head on her hand and sat silent. I watched her uneasily.

  ‘If we stay here too long we may not get out.’

  She looked at me and smiled. I was amazed. Her expression had altogether changed, a transformation that seemed to wipe out that fixed distress, the disquiet and indecision not only of today but of all these past troubled weeks. She stood up and to my further surprise, for I knew how hard up we were, very cheerfully declared:

  ‘Let’s go, darling, and have a real, slap-up tea.’

  Outside the gates, in Castleton village, there was an excellent tea room above the local baker’s shop. Here Mother ordered tea and all the things I liked, hot buttered toast and a new-laid boiled egg, fresh wheaten scones, honey, and a plate of cream cakes. While she sipped the hot tea she kept pressing me to eat so that, under this repeated prompting, I ate all the cream cakes. She had watched me with a hovering smile but now, glancing round to assure herself that we were still alone in the room, she turned to me seriously.

  ‘Laurence,’ she said, ‘your mother is a failure.’

  A silence followed during which I felt extremely uncomfortable. Yet there had been no misery in her voice, merely a firmness that sounded almost defiant as she resumed.

  ‘The agency is finished. It was a wonderful idea of your father’s and now it’s gone. The mistake I made was not to sell it and realize something as your Uncle Leo suggested.’ As she paused to take a sip of tea, I had a sudden, fleeting vision of Mother and me singing for our supper in a wet Winton street. ‘I’m not going to weary you with my difficulties over the past years. I’ve always tried to keep them away from you. But you must have guessed them. It was no work for a woman, at least not for me. Sympathy doesn’t last for ever. It’s not a business asset. So all I have to tell you, and I must tell you, for you’re a big boy now, we have nothing left, nothing but our furniture, for which I’ve an offer of forty pounds.’

  My lavish meal may have given me courage to withstand this shock. Perhaps that was why Mother had fortified me. I felt nothing more than a queer blankness which drew from me, involuntarily, the only possible response.

  ‘So what are we going to do?’

  ‘You are going to Uncle Leo, and I am going to Wales.’

  This, being quite incomprehensible, was much worse. My expression must have warned Mother. She leaned forward, drew her fingers softly across my cheek and began persuasively, undramatically, to explain how extreme was our situation and how, after considering every expedient, this was the only way she could resolve it. I must leave school, at least for the time being. Uncle Leo had promised to take me and teach me his business so that at the worst, I should at least have something to fall back on. Her own case was more difficult. She had no qualifications for business, music was her only asset, and even so she had no teacher’s diploma, and now would never get one. Yet Uncle Simon, writing from Spain, had managed to obtain a place for her as music mistress at St Monica’s Convent, a girls’ school in Monmouthshire. Here, in her off-duty, during the next twelve months, she would have the advantage of attending special classes in Cardiff. She was going to take an intensive course and pass the examination to become a public-health visitor. Four of these appointments, a new departure open to women, were to be made in Winton and, through the intervention of a friend of Stephen’s on the City Council, she had been promised one of them if she could take her training and get her certificate within a year. She would then be sure of a regular salary in a position for which she felt herself fitted. We would be together again, and if I did not wish to remain with Leo, she would be able to send me to a tutorial college to renew my studies, so that later on I could sit the bursary examination for the University.

  Finishing on a high note of encouragement Mother looked at me entreatingly, while I tried to recover myself sufficiently to grasp the implications of this staggering proposal. I did not like it. Yet, through all the confusion of my mind, I could not fail to see how hard and painfully she must have tried, enduring all sorts of rebuffs, to put this plan together as a last resort. This, in part, tempered my resentment, as I said:

  ‘Why can’t I go with you to Wales?’

  ‘It’s not possible, dear.’ Mother forced a placating little laugh. ‘Not in the convent. You’ll be better off with Leo.’

  The possibilities of being with Leo in a real business had already flashed intriguingly across my mind, but I would not admit this, saying instead,

  ‘Uncle Leo is a queer fish, Mother.’

  ‘Yes, he’s perhaps a trifle odd in some ways. But I’m inclined to trust him, if only because he doesn’t promise us the earth.’

  ‘Wouldn’t Uncle Bernard help us?’

  ‘Never,’ Mother said shortly. ‘And I would never ask him.’

  She was right. Bernard, with the best intentions and tears in his eyes, would promise us the earth and completely forget about us next day.

  A silence followed during which I examined our predicament, looking for an escape hatch through which we might both get out of it.

  ‘Mother,’ I said at last, though hesitantly, for this was a forbidden subject, though I had to broach it. ‘Wouldn’t it be possible for you … I mean didn’t you have a long letter from Stephen last week … couldn’t we go to your parents, your own family …?’

  I broke off, stopped in my tracks by the sudden colour that rushed into Mother’s face and then as quickly receded, leaving her paler than before.

  ‘Yes, Laurence, I had the chance to go back … but on conditions I could never accept.’

  I had a great curiosity to know what these conditions were but I did not dare ask. Instead, rather dismally, I began to reflect on our coming separation, which made me ask:

  ‘When is all this going to happen?’

  She took a quick breath and exclaimed spiritedly:

  ‘Not until we’ve had a jolly good holiday together.’

  I stared at her in stupefaction. Had misfortune turned her brain? And now she was smiling at me, with that same challenging, almost reckless expression, carefree too, as though a load had fallen from her shoulders.

  ‘Yes, I mean it, Laurie. We’ll go to the Highlands. We both deserve a holiday and need it. I’m taking the offer for the furniture and we’ll spend every penny of the forty pounds on ourselves. After that we’ll be all set up and fit for anything.’

  Before I could say a word she took up the little bell from the table and summoned the waitress by ringing it like mad.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  As we came out of the railway station Fort William lay under a raw mist that blanketed Ben Nevis and dripped from the slate roofs of the town. Looking about me while Mother arranged with a porter to deliver our luggage by hand-cart in the afternoon, I became afflicted by a strange, sinking premonition that this Highland resort boded ill for me.

  Ardshiel, the boarding establishment of our choice, stood halfway up the bill, a small, square, red sandstone house set behind a prodigious monkey-puzzle tree, in a neat garden overlooking the loch. Mother had favoured it because it was kept by two sisters, maiden ladies w
ho advertised its virtues, and their own gentility, in one telling word—select. Indeed, Mother’s judgement seemed justified by our rooms which, though small and on the top floor, she pronounced to be of an exemplary cleanliness. No sooner had she concluded her examination, which began with the bed-linen and ended with the water in the ewer, than the gong boomed startlingly for lunch.

  We went downstairs. Not more than ten people were seated at a long mahogany table in a bay-windowed room cosily furnished in worn red plush. At the head of the table a tall angular woman in black rose to greet us, explaining that she was Miss Kincaid. She then introduced us to the other guests, and to her younger sister, Miss Ailie Kincaid, who sat at the foot of the board. Seating herself again, she bowed her head, said grace devoutly and began to carve the joint. This I soon found to be the standard procedure, while Miss Ailie, at the other end, dispensed the vegetables, and later, the semolina pudding and prunes.

  Despite its plainness the food was good and hot, a welcome discovery corroborated by Mother’s quick communicative glance. I already liked the smaller, softer Miss Ailie, and although I was rather wary of Miss Kincaid—a totally unjustified prejudice—I saw nothing wrong with the other guests. All were decent Scots, middle-aged or elderly people and all, with two exceptions, women. Of the males, seated beside me on my right was a short, thick-set, red-faced man whom I had heard addressed as Baillie Nicol. He had a salmon fly, which I recognized as a Jock Scott, stuck in his lapel. And next to Miss Kincaid a little ghost-like old man with white hair had flitted in noiselessly in felt-soled slippers. During the meal he remained completely silent, keeping his eyes upon his plate and having considerable difficulty in controlling his false teeth. It took me some time to discover that he was Miss Kincaid’s father, and stone deaf, but in the meantime I was inclined to regard him as something of a phenomenon.

  Another curiosity which took my eye was a china pig with a slot in its back that stood in the centre of the table.