Adrian Glynde

by Martin Armstrong

The three grown-ups contemplated him and exchanged smiles.

  “He’s a handsome little man,” said Oliver, “a dark-haired miniature of dear Sandy. There’s not a trace of The Baggage in him, thank God. Do you think he’s going to be happy here, Clara?”

  Clara nodded. “Perfectly. He was frightened of you at first, but he has taken to you enormously. I can tell at once with him.”

  The old man’s eyes glittered suddenly in the firelight. “Poor little chap. With no father and worse than no mother, he’s rather at the mercy of life.” Then his face hardened and the eagle came back into it. “And what is your latest news of The Baggage?” he asked. “Does she still favour you with her confidence?”

  Clara nodded. “Still!” she said. “And I can’t understand why. I have a letter about every three months. I have never disguised my feelings, always behaved to her like a disapproving school ma’am, and in fact, as regards the boy, I’ve always, as you know, taken a high hand.”

  Bob laughed. “That’s why Minnie likes you,” he said, “because you all but take a stick to her. Dogs are often the same. Both Rhoda and Betty adore Bishop the keeper, because he’s a martinet, but they’re barely civil to me who treat them like ladies. You brow-beat Minnie and she respects you: I try to be polite and amiable, and what’s the result? She just tolerates me to my face and despises me in her heart.”

  “But she probably knows too—because no one can say that Minnie is not diabolically sharp—that you simply think her a fool, while I can’t help being enormously entertained by her.”

  “Oh, I should be entertained all right,” old Oliver broke in, “if I could forgive her—which I shall never do—for making dear Sandy miserable. Performing cats, performing monkeys, performing vermin are all entertaining. Once, as a very small boy, I saw performing fleas at a show. Some were horses and drew a miniature barouche, two others were coachman and footman, and yet another—a cabinet minister or a duchess no doubt—rode inside. The only difference between them and The Baggage is that they didn’t know they were performing, whereas she doesn’t know we know she is performing. You say she is sharp, Clara: well, perhaps she is sharp enough to see through others, but her sharpness stops short of realising that others see through her. She mistakes her profound shallowness for depth. Nobody else does, however. Does she show any interest in the boy?”

  “Not in her letters to me. Her letters to me, you see, are all about herself—variations on a not very original theme. But once every half-year or so she recollects she is a mother and posts him an essay in the maternal—’ My own precious lamb,’ and so on.”

  “And what is the effect on the boy?”

  “Oh, he is glad of the Indian stamps. The letters simply surprise and puzzle him. Naturally he has almost forgotten her by now and can’t understand what all the fuss is about. He reads them through once and then leaves them about, and I collect them and put them away. One wonders why, if the lamb is really so precious, Minnie should be willing to leave him about as Adrian does her letters.”

  “Willing!” said Bob, laughing softly. “You are unjust to yourself, my dear Clara. You force her to.”

  “Yes, and how gracefully she submits. I know my Minnie better than you do, Bob. She prides herself on her skill in compelling us to look after him for her. The point is, of course, that both sides are willing to be coerced, which, as the boy is happy with us and would certainly be miserable with her, is fortunate.”

  “Fortunate indeed!” said Oliver. “Happy or not, with her he would certainly be in the worst possible company for a child. In fact, if the poor little devil succeeded in being happy with her, it would be so much the worse for him.”

  Clara laughed grimly. “He would at least have the distinction of being the first person who had.”

  “You gather, then, that the new husband isn’t?”

  “That, surely, is a foregone conclusion.”

  Oliver nodded. “Especially, I suppose, in India, where her field will be restricted and her activities, in consequence, the more intense.”

  “She hints at havoc in military hearts of all ranks. Her fatal attraction, you know!”

  “Ah, her attraction!” The old man’s lip curled. “She exercises it conscientiously, I admit, as a spinster exercises a poodle. But it’s of the kind, I should have supposed, that leaves the heart whole.”

  “Yet poor Sandy was bitten by it, and now the Colonel.”

  “True. And the Colonel, no doubt, is now suffering the consequences. She ogles all the young subalterns, of course, and makes herself and him ridiculous.”

  “Quite so. She speaks in her last letter of one,’ a charming boy whose only fault is that he’s a little too fond of me, my dear.’ Her letters reveal a brilliant court of which she is the queen.”

  Oliver snorted. “Queen, indeed! A queen, like Euclid’s point, of no parts, no magnitude, but position. To be a Colonel’s wife covers a multitude of inadequacies.”

  Clara and Bob burst out laughing. The old man glanced at them sharply: then his eyes twinkled, his face suddenly thawed into a smile, and he joined in the laugh.

  The laughter roused Adrian. He stirred in his chair, and opened his eyes, and next moment the others, having recovered themselves, found him upright and smiling, watching them.

  III

  April sunshine and the cold pure air of early morning filled the garden; and the house, so plain and simple in its dignity, faced that purity unabashed, its formally-spaced windows shining in the curd-white stucco of its front. There was no sign of inhabitants, but the carefullykept garden, the gleam of the polished windows, some of them half-open, and from four of the chimney-pots a leisurely jet of smoke flowing straight upwards, told that the place was quietly alive.

  Presently the front door opened and Stock, the butler, in shirt-sleeves and a green baize apron, appeared on the doorstep and stood for a moment surveying the morning, framed in the pillared porch like the picture of a canonised bishop, green-robed in his Renaissance niche.

  In the large spare-room above the drawing-room, Clara, her long face wearing unashamed the unmitigated asceticism of early morning, sat up in bed in a faded heliotrope silk dressing-gown sipping a cup of tea. Invisible but for a dishevelled bunch of hair, Bob, who despised tea at such an hour, lay at her side, a motionless and shapeless chrysalis. “What a relief it will be,” she was thinking to herself, “if Father and little Adrian take to one another.” For Adrian was certainly a tie and a responsibility. Her very affection for the boy made him the more so. It was difficult to regulate one’s movements by school holidays. They always seemed to come just at the time one wanted to be away from home. Yet when the poor little chap relied on one so pathetically one hardly had the conscience to disappoint him and pack him off somewhere else for his holiday. She had hoped that the holiday he had spent, some time ago, with the Crowhursts would be a success. There were two little girls and four boys for him to play with there, and she had thought that the company of other children would be good for him. But when she had questioned him afterwards he had confessed, his poor little face hot with shame and twisted with emotion, that he had not enjoyed himself at all. “Not a little, now and then?” She had pressed him for proof that it had not really been so bad. But no; he had not enjoyed any of it: he had, too obviously, been very miserable. Yes, certainly he was a tie. Yet rather than pack him off to Minnie, who would certainly pack him off somewhere else at the first opportunity, she would do her best for poor Sandy’s sake, and for the boy’s sake too, to be within easy reach always at holiday time. But it was all very difficult, and if only it turned out that his grandfather, now that the ice was broken, would be willing to have him sometimes at Abbot’s Randale, it would be a weight off her mind. If people didn’t want children, they oughtn’t to have them. But of course it must have been poor Sandy who wanted the child, and, as their father had said last night, the little man was extraordinarily like Sandy—a miniature, dark-haired Sandy with a small, sad mouth in place of Sandy
’s jovial smile, and, in place of Sandy’s self-confidence, the timid, unspoken appeal for love and protection which was so disturbing, so heart-searching.

  It was this that Clara unconsciously desired to escape from. Unconsciously she resented this disturbing intrusion upon the otherwise unviolated privacy of her heart. She raised the lid of the teapot, peeped inside, and, with pursed ascetic lips and the slightly surprised lift of her brows, poured herself out another cup.

  At the other end of the house, old Oliver Glynde, reclining motionless with closed eyes in the slim fourposter hung with yellow damask, like an aged prince-bishop lying in state, was thinking, as he so often thought when idle, of his dead son. The little boy who had arrived on the previous afternoon, so like a sad miniature Sandy, had stirred up a cloud of memories and emotions which had lain, a sediment long undisturbed, in the dark pool of his mind. It was as if the wheel of time had swung backwards, the past returned, and Sandy as a little boy were alive again. But both the past and the boy—and this was what so moved and troubled him—were somehow harrowingly different, charged with a pathos which had been absent before. It seemed to the old man that this little boy silently and unconsciously reproached him for all these years of neglect. His heart ached with remorse. Why, he asked himself, had he neglected the boy all this time?

  The reasons were various and complex. It was partly, he saw now, cowardice. Sandy’s death had been for him such a tragedy that he had fled from the contemplation of it and avoided all that might remind him of his irreparable loss. It was with this object that, immediately after Sandy’s death, he had left Abbot’s Randale and remained away, for the most part abroad, for five years. If he had liked his daughter-in-law, things would of course have been different; but he hated her. It was not merely, nor chiefly, that he disliked her personally: he bitterly resented the unhappiness she had brought to Sandy by her jealousy and her ridiculous delusions about her own fatal attractiveness. It was true that she had been violently attached to Sandy, but that had only made it the worse for him, for love, in a woman like Minnie, was little more than a fierce and exorbitant possessiveness that ruined the peace and happiness of the object of it. Oliver still believed that if Sandy had been happily married he would not have volunteered for that patrol from which he never returned. Sandy had been devoted to the little boy, and when he was in France he must often have consoled himself with the certainty that, if anything happened to him, his father would look after the boy.

  Tears stung the old man’s closed eyes. He faced the undeniable truth that his response to that trust had been to go away for five years and then, after his return, to ignore the boy for two years more. How had he contrived to allow himself to be guilty of such neglect of the creature that was dearest of all to his dead son? How, but by cowardice? Yes, he told himself now in his bitter self-reproach, it had been mere crude cowardice, fear of suffering. How unfeeling one could become through excess of feeling. It was a paradox, but true. Because it was so horribly painful to feel, one funked it, shirked feeling, and took refuge in heartlessness. But that, at least, was over now. He would devote himself to the little chap now as, in old days, he had devoted himself to Sandy. He sighed and stirred under the bedclothes. The thought that, as Clara had said last night, the little chap had taken to him, touched him deeply. What had he done to deserve the boy’s affection? He would see to it that they became great friends.

  In another room, a room on the east front which had once been Sandy’s, Adrian lay in bed with eyes wide open. On waking, his first feeling had been, as for many days past, one of apprehension. He felt vaguely that something unsettling threatened him. He opened his eyes and found himself in a strange place. There was no window where he was accustomed to see one when he awoke in the dormitory at Waldo. Had he got turned over on to the wrong side in his sleep? Had his bed itself revolved mysteriously in the night? He remembered now what it was that threatened him: it was the visit to his grandfather, the visit which had ruined his hopes of the coming holidays. Then he discovered that he was not in his school bed, but in a larger and much more: comfortable one. A mirror seen vaguely on an invisible wall opposite his eyes showed luminous green folds of a window-curtain, and as he stared sleepily at it the curtain moved, split like the thin rind of a fruit, and displayed a shining core of sunlight which dazzled him. A little breeze fluttered round the room like an invisible bird: then the curtains dropped together, shutting out the golden vision.

  But that brief invasion had put to flight all Adrian’s shadowy fears and left in his heart a glow of happiness and warm excitement. For with a rush of delighted recollection he had realised where he was. He felt that he must get up and plunge at once into this exciting new life.

  But perhaps it was not yet time to get up. Nobody had told him what time breakfast would be. Perhaps he ought not to get up till someone told him to. He controlled his impatience and lay still, his mind revolving a medley of thoughts and memories and anticipations. Would he be allowed to come here again for the holidays, he wondered. What a relief it would be to know that if ever he was disappointed again of his hopes of holidays at Yarn, he might come here instead of being sent to some strange, unhappy place, as he had been two years ago when he had paid that dreadful visit to the Crowhursts. How miserable he had been, not merely during the visit but before it when, just ten days before the holidays began, Aunt Clara had written to tell him that she and Uncle Bob would be away and he would not be able to go to Yarn. He had then for the first time realised that he was not necessary to Aunt Clara and Uncle Bob, as they were to him, and he had felt desolate and unprotected. He had put her letter into his pocket and had gone and locked himself into the lavatory, so that no one should see him crying. He had been longing for the holidays, and now the holidays were ruined and there was nothing left for him to hope for.

  How vividly he recalled his sensations, a cold, white, sour feeling of fear and loneliness inside his stomach, when—as he and Mr. Austin, the master who was to hand him over to Mr. Crowhurst at Victoria Station, stood waiting on the platform, after leaving the other boys—that strange, forbidding-looking man with spectacles and a short raggy beard had come up to them.

  “Are you by any chance Mr. Austin of Waldo School?” he had asked. “Good! I’m Mr. Crowhurst. And this, I suppose, is the young man. Well, come along, young fellow.” And, before Adrian had had time to realise what was happening, Mr. Austin had left him and Mr. Crowhurst was haling him off into the unknown.

  All the way in the train he had sat looking out of the window, sick with apprehension, while Mr. Crowhurst read the paper or talked to a man sitting opposite them.

  “Not one of yours?” the man had asked, signing with his head at Adrian.

  “No. Son of a friend of my wife’s. His mother’s abroad, so he’s coming to us for the holidays. One extra doesn’t make much difference in our crowd.”

  At the mention of the crowd, Adrian’s heart had sunk.

  Then the awful arrival, with the six children dancing round and all shouting at once, and fat, kind, faded Mrs. Crowhurst putting her hand on his shoulder and introducing him to them all.

  “Children! Children! Be quiet for a moment and shake hands with Adrian.” Then, as each shook hands and stared at him inquisitively, she had said, in her sweet, too musical voice:

  “This is Milly. Now Wilfred. Now Elinor. Now Bobby. And this is Gerrard. And this is little Frankie. Give Adrian your hand, Frankie. There’s a good boy.”

  And then had followed the ordeal of tea in the nursery with its incessant noise and its strange, sourish smell of children. There Miss Chadwick, the nursery governess, had taken charge of the mob, and Mr. and Mrs. Crowhurst had disappeared. Adrian had had one very thick piece of bread and butter and, feeling too shy and too sick to eat more, had refused Miss Chadwick’s offer of another.

  “But, my dear boy, you’ve had nothing. This will never do. Just look at Frankie.”

  Adrian had lifted his eyes for a moment from his plate an
d glanced at Frankie, an impish little boy with a large mouth, made larger by jam, and mischievous eyes, whose whole face seemed to be employed in destroying a huge chunk of bread and jam.

  One of the girls, Elinor, had been niecr than the others. She had sat next him on that first occasion, and quite suddenly, half way through tea, she had said: “Have a bit of my cake,” and had broken her piece in two and put the larger half on his plate. Adrian had thanked her shyly and eaten it, feeling, for a moment, a little less isolated.

  After tea they had all gone down to the drawing-room, where Mrs. Crowhurst had read to them. What a relief that had been. Mrs. Crowhurst sat on the sofa and Frankie planted himself beside her, nestling up against her; and she had called to Adrian to come and sit on her other side. The rest sat about on chairs or on the floor, and all, for once, grew quiet while in her sing-song, musical voice Mrs. Crowhurst read them Old Saint Paul’s. Throughout his visit that peaceful half-hour was his one consolation. On the first evening he had looked forward to bed-time, for then at last, he supposed, he would be alone. But to his horror he found that he was to sleep with Wilfrid, Bobby, Gerrard, and Frankie in the Boys’ Room, another bare, homeless room with oilcloth on the floor and a great window wide open, and his worst fears came true when, as soon as Miss Chadwick had bidden them good night and left the room, they all got out of bed and began to pillow-fight.

  “Come on, Adrian,” Wilfrid had shouted to him when he pretended to be asleep. “Come on! Don’t be a mug!” And little Frankie, looking like a horrible little goblin in his blue flannel pyjamas, had echoed Wilfrid: “Don’t be a mug, Adrin!”

  But Adrian had turned away from them and made no reply, and after they had given his curled-up body one or two hearty thumps with a pillow, Wilfrid’s scornful voice had ordered: “Oh, well, let him alone!” and, except for an accidental pillow now and then, he had been left to his misery.

  It seemed to Adrian now, as he recalled that terrible month and suffered, as it were in echo, all the sensations he had gone through at the time, that nearly all his memories connected with the Crowhursts were connected with smells. There was the smell of the day-nursery. He could smell it now as strongly as if he were back at the Crowhursts; and the smell of stale slop-cloths that haunted the Boys’ Room; and the close, thick smell of the gloomy dining-room, a mixture of gas-stove, boiled onions, and crumbs in an empty biscuit-tin; and, worst of all, the reek of slops and drains in the combined bathroom and water-closet. He even remembered the smells of Mr. and Mrs. Crowhurst themselves. Mr. Crowhurst smelt of sweet tobacco and black boot-polish, and when Adrian sat beside Mrs. Crowhurst during the after-tea readings or when she stooped to wish him good night he noticed a faint aroma of stewed prunes.