The Northern Light

by A. J. Cronin

  This was Henry’s passion, his religion, if you like, his obsession: the England that was, and must one day be again. With quiet sincerity he loved his country, the texture of its earth, the very salt of the sea that washed it. He was not blind to the deterioration which, since the war, had changed the structure of the national life. Yet this could only be, must only be, a temporary aftermath of that Homeric struggle. England would rise again. Her history proved that she had survived even more devastating disasters, when the country lay spent and bloodless, when the outlook seemed clouded beyond hope. Somehow, because she was herself, she had generated fresh life, renewed the cycle of her great tradition and, refusing steadfastly to sink into obscurity, had emerged exultant in the end.

  Now the low outline of Sleedon lay before him. The spray was smoking against the breakwater of the harbour as he drove long the front, past the moored smacks and the drying nets, round the whitewashed coastguard station and up the cliff to David’s cottage.

  As he came over the sandy crest he saw Cora waiting at the gate. Bareheaded, blue-black hair flying about windblown cheeks, her dark red dress moulded upon her long limbs, she seemed to radiate that warmth and tenderness which had been the restoration of his son. She pressed his hand in both of hers, and even before she said it, he knew she was glad to see him.

  ‘How is he?’ he asked.

  ‘A proper good week. He’s upstairs now … at the writing.’ As they went in she glanced up at the attic window, from which there came the muted sounds of a Bartók concerto, ‘I’ll call him.’

  But Page was chary of disturbing David. His book, on pre-Islamic poetry, a subject that had interested him since he was at Balliol, was a stiff proposition. In the past six months he had taught himself three Arabic dialects and was now translating Kital al-Aghami, the Book of Songs. Better not risk breaking his concentration. Cora saw this hesitation. She smiled.

  ‘Dinner won’t be no more than half an hour, anyway.’

  The daffodils pleased her beyond Henry’s expectation. When she had admired and arranged them, in too tight a bunch, she led him into the garden, which lay at the back of the house, protected from the, prevailing breeze by a dry stone wall, and showed what she had done in the past week. A new vegetable plot had been prepared and neatly laid out in the somewhat stony enclosure.

  ‘And who did the digging?’

  ‘Me of course.’ She laughed happily.

  ‘Isn’t it too much for you? With the house, and the cooking … and David.’

  ‘Oh no … no. I’m strong, I am. And I’m right fond of the garden.’ She looked at him shly with real feeling. ‘You see, I didn’t never have the chance before.’

  When she left to go into the kitchen Henry paced up and down the narrow ash path, reflecting, without unkindness, on that ‘ I didn’t never.’ Well, what of it? He’d rather have a good-hearted young woman than a perfect grammarian, especially when that woman was Cora. Soon she was calling him from the back door.

  In the front room the table was laid with a freshly laundered cloth; the cutlery, carvers, and china – in fact, all the little things he had given them – were noticeably displayed; and a promising roast chicken lay crisp and golden on the dish. Cora, in all she did, showed a cheerful competence, an air of responsive willingness that plainly expressed her eagerness to please.

  As they waited, the long-playing record upstairs was switched off and a moment later David came in – a trifle aloof, as usual, yet Page saw at once that he was in one of his good moods. He looked well, too, and in spite of his usual queer rig-out – turtle-necked sweater, buff corduroys, and worn suède shoes – one couldn’t help thinking what a handsome chap he was – extremely tall, like Cora, though thin, still much too thin, with soft blond hair, a fair skin, and fine even teeth.

  ‘Work going well?’ Henry asked him, while Cora carved the chicken.

  ‘Pretty fair.’ He accepted detachedly the tempting arrangement of wing, Brussels sprouts, and mashed potatoes which she handed him, studied it for a few moments, then negligently took up a fork.

  ‘A new biography of Edward Fitzgerald came into the office.’

  David raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I thought you might like to look at it,’ Page murmured, in self-defence.

  David glanced quizzically at his father.

  ‘Don’t tell me you admire the Calif of East Anglia … the man who wrote that priceless couplet:

  ‘The ball no question makes ayes and noes.

  But here and there as strikes the player goes.’

  Page half smiled. He did not mind David patronizing him: it was no more than an attitude to which, as a classical scholar who barely missed a first at Oxford, he was surely entitled. Henry’s own education, cut short by a sudden recall to the office on account of his father’s illness, had been amplified by extensive reading, yet he had spent no more than two years at Edinburgh University, where Robert Page, who had been there as a student, insisted on sending him.

  ‘Khayyám isn’t too bad,’ he argued mildly. ‘Ruskin liked it.’

  David made a grimace, and brought out a string of Arabic.

  ‘That’s my opinion of old Omar.’

  ‘What does it mean?’ Cora asked.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know you well enough to tell you,’ David said, and went into fits of laughter so extravagant that Henry gave him a quick doubtful glance. Yet, recollecting those days when his son sat, head down and hands pressed rigidly between his knees, staring at the floor, fixed in a frightful depression, it was a relief to hear him laugh. The nights had been worse, endlessly without sleep, pervaded by fears of an unknown enemy. His military service had not been abnormally severe – he had fought in Crete, suffered an attack of dysentery in the retreat – yet the strain had produced an extreme sensibility which had persisted during his years at Oxford and ended, some eighteen months ago, in a serious nervous breakdown. Obsessive neurosis with a trace of paranoia, Bard called it, but Henry could not agree when the doctor insisted that he had noted pronounced neurotic tendencies in David as a boy – an outrageous opinion that almost broke their long friendship.

  But it made little difference now. Observing David’s elevated spirit, Page felt that this marriage, so extraordinary yet so fortunate, had saved him. A chance meeting on the front at Scarborough, where he had gone for vocational therapy, then, from weaving baskets with a blank face, he was home, still shaken, but restored, with a new confidence in the future. Doubly strange, since never before had he displayed any serious interest in women, least of all in one whose untutored mind was the antithesis of his own. Yet perhaps it was the very fact of Cora’s lack of education that had made the approach possible. Sunk in the depths of the abyss, he had stretched out instinctively towards the simplest creature within reach. How lucky that the hand he had grasped was Cora’s.

  After dinner, while she cleared the table, Page and his son sat talking by the window. Usually David was uncommunicative about his work, but today his reserve had gone; he was gay and open. The translation of one of his essays, ‘ The Land of Night,’ written during the war, had just appeared in the Mercure de France, and he produced a personal letter of congratulation which he had received from the editor. This recognition of his talent, a necessary stimulus for him, was also a secret encouragement to Page, who hoped that David might soon join him in making a finer thing of the Northern Light.

  It was their custom to take a walk together, but this afternoon David excused himself and went upstairs to work – he was eager to make full use of a book which he had on loan from the London Library and which was due to be returned the following day. Cora, however, already had her coat on, so she and Henry started off for the harbour.

  At first they did not talk. She had a gift of silent companionship which made him feel that he had known her for years. When they crossed the sandy cove, their feet crackling the dry, banked seaweed, and turned on to the breakwater, she took his arm, giving herself to the strong sea breeze wit
h a kind of joyful abandon.

  ‘You should have a warmer coat.’ He had noticed that hers was of worn serge.

  ‘I’m not a bit cold.’ Then: ‘Don’t you love it out here?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. It was a tonic to be with her.

  At the end of the deserted pier they stood in the shelter of the lifeboat station watching the circling and swooping of the gulls. The wide sea was before them; the wind came salt and keen from the waves. He had the strange sensation that he could remain there for ever. At last he broke the silence.

  ‘You’ve done a lot for David.’

  ‘He has for me,’ she said quickly. Then, after a pause, she looked at him, then looked away. ‘I wasn’t that happy neither when we run across one another.’

  Somehow, in this bare statement Henry felt that she had honoured him with a confidence from the heart. Her reticence, an absence of that prattling communicativeness which he detested in women, had from the first endeared her to him. Yet he had noticed in her a humble longing for affection, a desire to attach herself to the family into which she had married, that suggested past hardships. Later this had been confirmed when she told him something of her life, how she had lost both parents some years before, had lived with an aunt in London, supported herself in a succession of underpaid posts. No note of self-pity had escaped her. But now it was as if, through her present happiness, there came the echo, faint yet unmistakable, of sadness.

  ‘You were pretty much alone?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘That was about it.’

  As a heavier gust came, Henry put a supporting arm about her shoulders.

  ‘I don’t want you to feel that way ever again. You belong to us now. And we’ll never let you feel lonely. My wife was speaking of that only yesterday … wondering if it wasn’t dull out here sometimes for David and you. You should come into Hedleston occasionally, both of you, to a dance.’

  ‘I don’t fancy the dancing much, I don’t,’ she said, then added, as though her remark might have sounded strange, ‘David don’t either … he’s not that sort.’

  ‘The theatre then, or a concert?’

  She turned to him.

  ‘You know I like it here. The quiet is the very thing I like. At night, in bed’ – she coloured suddenly, as if she’d said something wrong, but went on – ‘when the wind blows round the house and you hear the waves, it’s like being in a castle, if you know what I mean. I wouldn’t change Sleedon, not now I wouldn’t, not for any place else, anywhere.’

  It was time for them to leave. When they got back to Henry’s car he heard a record going in the attic; it sounded like Bruckner, the Fourth Symphony, in E-flat major, not his taste, but sure sign that David was seeking inspiration, so he decided he had better not go up. Unobtrusively, he slipped the envelope he left at the end of every month into Cora’s outside pocket. It was always a slightly embarrassing moment, although he tried to be dexterous, like a conjurer getting rid of a playing card, usually adding some fatuous remark by way of patter – these young people were proud, but they must live. This time he said:

  ‘That’s for some seeds for your garden.’

  But Cora did not smile. Her face, with its high cheek-bones and fine-veined, faintly hollowed cheeks, wore an odd expression. The wind had moistened her dark hazel eyes and swept a black tress across her brow.

  ‘You’re so good to us, you are, especially to me. You’ve made me feel … you make me …’ She could not continue. Suddenly, she came near to him and quickly, awkwardly, pressed her soft lips against his cold cheek.

  As Henry drove back in the grey dusk to Hedleston, slowly – there was no inducement to hurry – the thought of that impulsive caress warmed him all the way home.

  Chapter Three

  Monday was always a busy day – news accumulates over the week-end – and Page was at the office early. Instead of going directly upstairs he went into the copy room. This opened on to the cobbled yard, a large, old-fashioned, but well-lit room where most of the news staff worked. The premises were not large – in fact Henry had to rent the adjoining building for his printing presses – and they were old-fashioned, but they had been exactly so for many years; they suited him, and he liked them. Peter Fenwick, the assistant sub-editor, was standing with Frank, the copy-taster, by the Associated Press machine.

  ‘What’s in from Egypt?’ Henry asked, when they had said good morning.

  ‘The Canal’s still blocked,’ Fenwick answered. ‘ The Americans can’t get permission to raise the cement barges. King Saud had a talk with Eisenhower. He’s to get jet planes and more Cadillacs. Nasser’s still throwing his weight about … the Israelis won’t budge. We’re getting short of oil. The Edens have reached Panama …’

  Page listened in silence, every word reopening the wounds, still raw, left by that humiliating debacle.

  ‘What’s the home news?’

  ‘There’s a gruesome story in from Belfast. Double murder and suicide … wife, lover, and husband, all with their throats cut.’

  The details, which Henry ran through, were frankly horrible.

  ‘Spike it,’ he said.

  ‘A paragraph on the back page?’ Fenwick suggested.

  ‘No, not a line.’

  The rest of the news, which he read over quickly, was not inspiring. The Middle East situation looked worse: more trouble was undoubtedly brewing in Cyprus.

  ‘Anything else?’ he asked.

  Frank, whose job it was to ‘taste’ the copy from the machines and pick out anything affecting the north-eastern area, said:

  ‘How about this?’

  The sheet he gave Henry was a teletype of Saturday’s late Parliamentary proceedings. He had marked two lines in blue pencil.

  In reply to a question by Mr Burney Cadmus, North Eastern Boroughs, Mr Philip Lester replied for the Government that, so far as he was aware, there was neither substance nor shadow in the rumours circulating on what the Hon. Member had been pleased to term Project N.R.U.

  ‘Project N.R.U.?’ Henry looked questioningly from one to the other.

  ‘Never heard of it,’ Fenwick said.

  ‘N.R.U.’ Frank wrinkled his brow. ‘Could it be the National Railroads Union?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ Fenwick answered. ‘It’s probably a false run. That Cadmus is always flying off the handle.’

  Henry gave him back the sheet.

  ‘Still, put a follow-up man on it. Young Lewis, if you can spare him.’

  He went up the winding stone staircase to his office. Miss Moffatt, his secretary, who also dealt with the subscriptions, was sorting the mail. Elderly, of neutral appearance, rather like a retired school teacher, with a colourless complexion and greying hair, wearing, summer and winter, a clerical grey skirt and grey knitted cardigan, Moffatt was practically indispensable, doing all sorts of odd and important jobs without the slightest fuss. Brought into the office some thirty years ago by Robert Page, she had never quite accepted the son as his father’s successor. This morning her manner was decidedly ‘off’. Henry sensed at once that she had something on her mind. She gave him time to go through his letters, meanwhile unknotting a piece of twine from a parcel and rolling it into a neat, tight ball – she had a mania for petty economies, regarding string, half sheets of paper, and odd unused stamps as something in the bank – then, as he prepared to dictate, she said:

  ‘He’s been on the phone again.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Somerville.’

  Henry looked at her in surprise. ‘What did he want?’

  ‘To speak to you. When I said you weren’t in, and he obviously knew you wouldn’t be – the call came in at seven-thirty from Surrey – he left a message.’

  ‘Yes?’

  She took her memo notebook and read from the shorthand.

  ‘Kindly convey my personal regards to Mr Page. Tell him – that two of my executives will be in his neighbourhood next week. Say that I shall be most happy if he is good enough to permit them to call
upon him.’

  ‘There was a pause. In order to collect himself, Henry said.’

  ‘Go over that again.’

  She did so, and at the second reading it sounded even more extravagantly urbane. The perplexity which had troubled him on Saturday returned with renewed force. He felt vaguely worried.

  ‘What do you make of it?’

  Tightening her lips, Moffatt made a sharp gesture, angry and disdainful, with her head.

  ‘He wants to buy the Light.’

  ‘He did. He was under the impression it was for sale. I told him he was mistaken.’

  ‘He is not the kind who makes mistakes.’

  ‘Well …’ Henry said, at last, ‘even if you’re right it makes no odds. He may want to buy. But I certainly don’t want to sell.’

  ‘Is it as simple as that?’

  ‘Obviously.’ Because Page was upset he felt himself getting annoyed. ‘If the paper isn’t on the market how can it be bought?’

  ‘Do you know Vernon Somerville?’

  ‘Yes … at least I met him once.’

  ‘Then you no more know him than I know the man in the moon. At least you know what he publishes. Have you seen this morning’s Gazette?’

  All the London dailies came into the office; they were arranged on the long, brass-bound, mahogany table by the window. She took the Gazette and placed it in front of him. This morning, spread over the front page, was a luridly retouched flashlight of three blood-splashed corpses, two men and a pitifully half-naked woman, sprawled on the floor of a tenement room, while above, in inch-high type, screamed the headline THE PRICE OF PASSION.