by A. J. Cronin
‘I’m Mrs Finch,’ ventured the other, lingering on the doorstep. ‘Yes – Bessie Finch is my name.’
‘Indeed,’ returned Lucy, without encouragement. She had marked the recent arrival next door unenthusiasically; she had, moreover, endured one experience of neighbourly solicitude which it was not her intention to repeat; yet some artless quality in the other’s open face restrained her from closing the door.
‘You’re new here, I’m told,’ advanced Bessie again. ‘ Just like ourselves.’ It was clear that in her own vernacular, which Lucy was to learn later, ‘her tongue was just hanging out for a talk.’
‘Yes,’ admitted Lucy, in spite of herself, ‘we’re new here.’
‘I’m downright glad to make your acquaintance,’ returned Bessie frankly. ‘ You know, folks are not very sociable like on this stair. At least, that’s what I find. And I’m a sociable kind of a girl myself. Over at Whiteinch – where my mother keeps a fruit shop – there was always plenty of company about – we’re a well-known family, you see, having the business. It’s that old established, we’re well known over there! But here it’s different. And Mr Finch – that’s my husband’ – here Bessie blushed – ‘well, Mr Finch and myself are not long married. Mr Finch is away at his work all day, and sometimes he’s that tired when he comes in he can’t be bothered with much entertainment. I find it kind of dull sometimes.’
‘I’m out all day, too,’ returned Lucy discouragingly.
‘That’s your boy that I see about, isn’t it?’ persisted Bessie. ‘He’s such a nice young fellow. He lifted his hat to me on the stairs the other day – oh, the perfect gentleman, believe me. Mr Finch and myself were wondering what trade you were putting him to.’
At these words, which found the weakest point in the armour of her pride, Lucy’s hand paused in its decisive shutting of the door. ‘ My boy is going to the University,’ she asserted coldly. ‘I’m putting him in for medicine.’
Bessie Finch was visibly confounded; her eyebrows lifted from her simple brown eyes; she was silent for a moment, then she gave a little embarrassed laugh.
‘Mr Finch works for Lush & Co.,’ she advanced; ‘the whisky firm, you know – a splendid position he has, mind you, and excellent money forbye.’
Lucy’s smile was constrained. She had no interest in the ubiquitous Mr Finch, whom she had observed distantly as a fat little man who left behind him on the stairs a strangely spirituous odour; nor would she now willingly surrender to that instinct of friendliness which once – when she herself was a young and lonely wife – had strongly moved her.
‘Thank you for keeping my parcels,’ she said conclusively, pulling the door towards her.
‘It’s a pleasure,’ said Bessie, smiling once more. ‘Yes, I’m delighted.’ Yet something faintly agitated lay behind that smile, as though some inner nervousness still strove to unburden itself in speech. But Lucy gave no further opportunity for speech; inclining her head, she quietly closed the door.
She went into the back room and laid down her parcels, the trifling interlude of the encounter immediately forgotten.
She waited, and as she waited the muscles of her face drew rigidly downwards under the press of her anxiety. Her pride refused to admit that anxiety, yet immediately she heard his knock – he had not whistled, which she took instantly to be an unfavourable omen – she was startled by the sudden loud quickening of her heart. Stiffly, she went to let him in.
He looked pale and tired; a smear of ink marked his left cheek; and he said nothing as he entered. They went into the kitchen.
‘I’ve got something hot for you,’ she said precisely. ‘It’s ready now if you’d like it.’
He flung himself down on the bed within the recess – there was, of course, no sofa in the room – and stared at the ceiling.
‘Good!’ he said at length.
That single word, and the manner of its utterance, vibrated through her like a warm delight. Beneath the mask of her composure her heart kindled as she began to dish up the savoury stew she had prepared for him.
‘Well, you don’t take much interest,’ he said suddenly, after a moment, still contemplating that particular cornice with a factitious tranquillity. ‘Why don’t you ask me how I got on?’
She paused, his hot plate, held by a cloth, arrested in mid-air. ‘You did do well then?’ she enquired, raising her brows calmly. It was an arrant pretence of indifference; she felt her knees tremble weakly as she spoke.
‘Got on like a house on fire,’ he answered quickly. ‘It’s early yet to speak, of course. But I found the papers easy – dead easy. I sailed through the maths and did the English standing on my head.’ His enthusiasm grew with his own words. ‘Amazingly well I did and when I came out and spoke to some fellows they told me they’d done vile papers.’
She did not stir, but suddenly her eyes shone towards him; she had a flash of transient sympathy towards the sad mothers of those ‘fellows who had done vile papers’; then all her relief and pride welled into her swelling throat. For a moment she could not speak, but stood quite still, envisaging his lanky, recumbent figure with her transfigured gaze. In her tenderness his form became invested with a kind of pathos. She saw his bony wrists protruding from his insufficient sleeves, the shiny elbows of his suit, his pale face, and – lasting evidence of his endeavours, evoking a culmination of her emotion – ink upon his fingers and his cheek.
But now that he had achieved his effect a profuse account of the day broke from him in a spate of words; he described, with a reactionary detail, what he had done and the manner of its doing. She hung upon his quick speech, reflecting upon the virtue of her sacrifice in sending him to school at Laughtown, demanding of herself how she could reward him for having so long and so diligently applied himself. Yes, she thought, he’s stuck in nobly; as Brother Aloysius had said: ‘The willing horse never needs the spur.’ The spur, indeed, for a boy like Peter. As she served him with his meal and urged him eat his fill, this thought of recompense lay at the back of her mind. She wanted him to have some treat, some just reward for this victory which she knew that he had won.
Chapter Eighteen
During the next few days, bereft of the stimulus of the great event, Peter was caught in a backwash of apathy. It would be actually a full month before the results were known, and mean-while he had nothing to do. His humour changed; he hung about the house, commented moodily upon the hotness of the weather and the dustiness of the city streets. He lamented his lack of friends, his lack even of a bicycle which might have taken him into the coolness of the countryside. It was of course unthinkable that he should consort with the youth of the district, and she could not – ‘in the meantime’, she phrased it – afford a bicycle for him. Once, too, as she returned in the evening, she had observed him coming out of Demario’s saloon, where he had justifiably gone to quench his thirst with an iced drink. She became concerned; she dreaded that slack-droop which showed sometimes in his shoulders. Anxiously she felt that his health might be affected for lack of a change of air.
Then suddenly, out of the blue, arrived a letter. It bowled her over, she who had always denied her luck and asserted that fortune came to her only through her own endeavour. For it was a letter from Edward – expressive, though she knew it not, of a twinging sacerdotal conscience – a letter wherein he indicated that he had hoped to take Peter for a few days’ holiday, but now regretted his inability to do so. He had been recommended a voyage to Madeira on account of his liver, and in tangible evidence of his regret he enclosed a present of five pounds. It was like Edward, who detested being asked for money and preferred to give spontaneously and in his own fashion. But a five-pound note. She was staggered; the crisp feel of it between her fingers was like an ecstasy, so long was it since she, who dealt now in greasy copper and well-worn silver, had handled such concentrated wealth. She had an immediate instinct to conserve it, or to buy sensibly some much-needed article of furniture. Peter required at least a carpet in his room; h
er own bed, bought second-hand, already had sundered one defective spring. But passionately she put these thoughts away from her. A sudden recklessness took her – a madness. Though she felt her yielding to be weak, insanely weak, the circumstances which induced it were unique. Peter’s period of study, his present jaded looks, the enervating air of the city striking them both, the pricking conviction that in justice some relaxation was due to them, the fact that as an employee of H. & S. – despite her very recent assumption of that dignity – she would receive ten days’ holiday in July: all these factors swayed her. She saw in her mind’s eye, as she tramped languidly along the hot and squalid pavements of her district, a vision of the blue and dancing sea; she saw Peter and herself beside that sea; in her own words: ‘something came over her’. They could not achieve Madeira; but they could have a holiday none the less. They had earned it, had Peter and she, and go they would, if it took every penny of that five-pound note!
When she announced the news to her son, his eye brightened and his shoulders raised; he ceased instantly to execrate the weather, which became instead ideal for the coast. They talked in marine terms for the rest of the week, took a trip round the stations to study the various chromatic posters, and, after some enjoyable research amongst the railway folders upon the subject of excursion fares, decided, ultimately, upon Miss Tinto’s advice, to visit Doune. Miss Tinto knew a lady in that resort who ‘kept’ rooms – a Miss Tweedy – whose character and cleanliness she vouched for with a dogmatic bridle and a more than usually emphatic tightening of her lips.
Hurriedly Miss Tweedy was written to, and in due course Miss Tweedy replied, explaining her failure to find an objection against receiving Mrs Moore and son for the trifling consideration of thirty-five shillings a week – exclusive of baths, lights in bedrooms, blacking, high teas, and use of the kitchen stove. And so it was decided. The scorching heat of the city, heat that came up from the pavements through her shoe soles, which heightened the vile odours of the slums wherein she spent her day, became as nothing in the rapture of her anticipation. Methodically, too, she made her preparations. On the eve of their departure she packed their things in Peter’s trunk, and, countering his irony – he mentioned the word ‘honeymoon’ – she displayed an unexpected joyous repartee. She arranged, moreover, with a brigadier’s foresight, that Mrs Collins’s husband, again out of work at the docks and glad to earn a sixpence anyhow, should take their box to the station whilst they followed on by tram – an auspicious beginning, which would mean the saving of a clear two shillings.
Upon the morning – the momentous morning – it was fine. Mrs Finch, appearing unexpectedly upon the landing had promised blushingly and quite gratuitously to keep an eye upon the house. Kind of her, thought Lucy, in the indulgence of the moment. Down the street they went. At the corner they boarded that tram of so familiar a colour – but with how unfamiliar an emotion. She could not admit this to be the same vehicle which bumped her down to White Street. No; today its dull sides took on a cheerful and vermilion glow; even the conductor’s buttons scintillated with prismatic brilliance.
At the station Collins was waiting with the box, relieving those faint qualms which she had entertained upon his sobriety, and shortly they were seated in the train. They were off. The day was warm and sunny, the railway cuttings vivid with golden yellow of dandelions; the swirling steam white against the blue, actinic sky. As Lucy lay back and placed her cheek against the rough, warm cushion of the seat she had a sensation of release, an incredible lightness, a happy emanicipation in this quick passage from the town. It was as if she had forgotten, and now recognised with new delight the sweet greenery of the fields. Unbelievable almost that her eye, striking a patch of dandelion weeds upon a grass embankment, should leap to this sudden ecstasy. But it was so. After the sultry squalor of the city this journey was like a swift intoxication, a new realisation of the beauty of life, the awakening of an almost painful longing for its joys. She was silent, rather, when they arrived at Doune.
Miss Tweedy’s house, which they found with difficulty, far from the madding seductions of golf-courses and hotels, was situated at the sober end of the town; and Miss Tweedy herself was a sober little wisp of a woman, with a small head, a long limp white neck, large pessimistic eyes, and a drooping inflection to her thin voice. She welcomed them gently.
‘You found the house, I see,’ she declared dejectedly.
‘Yes – oh, yes,’ agreed Lucy pleasantly.
‘Everybody knows me,’ said Miss Tweedy with a melancholy pride. ‘ I’m a well-respected woman in the town. Not faddy on your food – I hope you’re not.’ She swept them with a lack-lustre eye. ‘Plain cooking is what I give. Plainest of the plain. But everything of the best.’
‘Yes! I’m sure,’ assented Lucy.
‘But the price of things,’ resumed the other, throwing her eyes upwards with startling effect. ‘It’s shameful. Everything a ransom now. Butter up twopence, sugar a penny, flour a halfpenny. How well-doing people are to live beats me.’ Under her challenging glance Lucy became faintly uncomfortable.
‘If you would like me to pay a trifle more than what we agreed. Miss Tweedy,’ she said, ‘ I’m perfectly willing to meet you.’
Miss Tweedy held up a limp, protesting hand.
‘Not a penny, Mrs Moore, and not if you went down on your bended knee,’ she said dramatically. ‘My terms are reasonable, and reasonable they will remain. There’s landladies – I could name them in this very street – that would jump at your offer. But me? No, Mrs Moore! Let them float about in their ostrich feathers if it gives them any satisfaction – I’ll keep my reputation spotless if it chokes me’ – she paused for breath – ‘but if you think you have been well done by when you’re leaving there’s nothing to prevent you giving sixpence for the lepers. For years I’ve helped to save the lepers – poor stricken mortals that they be.’ Again the little landlady drew breath, then, fixing a languid eye upon Peter, she remarked slowly: ‘Your son?’ Having received the inevitable information, she lifted a limp strand of hair from her pale cheek, placed it carefully behind her left ear. ‘I’m not saying but what it isn’t handy to have a doctor in the family. I’ve nothing against doctors. Oh, dear no! They do their best, I’ve no doubt. Sometimes they can and sometimes they cannot.’ She lowered her voice, added in a tremulous undertone: ‘They could do nothing for my nephew’s wife.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Lucy. ‘Is she ill?’
‘Was, Mrs Moore. Was,’ returned Miss Tweedy, solemnly and with a hollow emphasis. ‘We buried her last winter, and I laid her out with my own hands. She made’ – her lower lip quivered and she raised her eyes pathetically – ‘ she made the most beautiful corpse I have ever done, Mrs Moore. Like an angel. I put a arum lily in her little hand. Everybody said it was the last word. I have the touch, you see. I could have grat when they screwed her down – she was such a picture of loveliness.’ A light which was almost animated flowed into Miss Tweedy’s wan features as she spoke. She said: ‘Some day I’ll show you the locket the husband gave me for a token. He was most grateful – and a welldoing young fellow he is. Though he does mean to take another come Lady Day.’
There was a pause. Then with a sigh Miss Tweedy became more practical. She indicated the times of meals and the neighbouring places of worship, predicted a breakdown in the weather, warned them against dangerous bathing and late hours, then faded, with a drooping satisfaction, from the room.
An expressive silence followed her departure.
‘Beautifully dean, anyway,’ said Lucy, looking round cheerfully.
‘Anyway?’ queried Peter.
‘Well – she seems a little lowering herself, doesn’t she?’
‘“A arum lily”,’ he quoted pointedly.
They looked at each other, then gradually between them came a smile which widened, deepened into a burst of laughter. It mastered them, that merriment; they laughed and laughed.
‘A arum –’ he stuttered weakly, rollin
g helplessly against the mantelpiece. Lucy wiped the tears from her eyes.
‘Stop,’ she gasped at last, ‘she’ll hear you’; but her lips still twitched as she took up the tea-pot.
Yet Miss Tweedy improved upon acquaintance: some quality in her melancholy which purged it of depression: and her cooking and baking could not be surpassed. ‘Miss Tweedy’s buns’ became a byword ranking in incidence with ‘the lily’; and she ‘drew to Lucy’, as she herself expressed it, ‘put herself about’ for them, unburdened, too, her withered bosom of a family history of ponderous weight and lugubrious intimacy; a family history distinguished not so much by the remarkable achievements of its members as by the morbid significance of the lingering and painful maladies which had beset them and borne them finally to a happier land.
Nor did the weather yield to that first dire prediction, but maintained instead a succession of halycon days which passed with dreamy softness. Lucy did little; idleness was her chief joy. She liked above all to sit on the warm rocks and look out to the sea – not the blue ocean which her fancy had painted, but a grey, shimmering expanse of sea surging with a restless, endless insistency: waves licking the boulders at her feet – long dripping tongues of waves. The motive of the moving water, persistent, was like the motive of life; it became an inspiration to her, an inspiration not realised, but drawn in unconsciously by her acquiescent body, as she sat, passive and relaxed. A spring-board jutted from these rocks above a deep green pool, and here Peter bathed every morning. When he dived, the sight of his body arching the thin air gave her a strange romantic pleasure. His mocking phrase came back to her and made her smile. A honeymoon with her son – what an absurd idea! And yet?
When he was dressed he came up to her, his hair still damp, his towel draped manfully around his neck, and, after he had demanded her verdict upon the merits of his performance, they took a sharp walk along to the harbour for the benefit of his circulation. They were continually together. Occasionally he seemed to desire a wider field of amusement, and directed an envious eye towards some passing golfer carrying a bag of clubs upon his shoulder; at odd moments he had a momentary petulance against their limited exchequer, but she gave him for his pocket as much as she could afford; and, indeed, for the most part he was charming to her.