by Denton Welch
‘Yes, let’s,’ said Robert, pleased and relieved at the suggestion. He stood up and held the Princess’s chocolates and book, while she put a little more lipstick on her mouth. She saw in the mirror the pink stain on her teeth, and rubbed them in a workmanlike fashion with her thin handkerchief. Robert thought how foreign it looked, with its profusion of embroidered flowers, its large coronet and rococo initials. ‘It’s French or Italian,’ he thought. His mother’s handkerchiefs were plain, smooth, delicate, lovely.
The Princess Bonbon led the way and Robert followed a few paces behind, like her page or squire.
They climbed up to the boat deck where the biting wind struck them. The Atlantic, unbelievably monotonous and real, came as a shock too. It was an endless carpet, bulging and yielding, because of the draught along the floorboards beneath it.
Joey rushed at them, madly straining on his chain. The Princess, having brought nothing for him, gave him chocolate after chocolate out of her box. Joey swallowed them as if they’d been flies.
‘It’s no good,’ said Robert. ‘He’s too greedy even to taste them!’
‘Oh, the darling, darling, darling,’ said the Princess, dropping on her knees and clutching the scrambling Joey to her. He licked her face, mauled her chiffon scarf, bit the checked bag. Then he tore away to the extent of his chain, as if suggesting a ten-mile walk.
They marched him up and down the deck for about twenty minutes. They talked very little between themselves but a great deal to Joey.
‘Oh pet, petkin, petskin,’ cried the Princess, ‘I can’t bear to think I’ll be parted from you for six months in a few days’ time.’
At last they grew so cold without overcoats that they had to leave him. He whined dismally, danced on his chain, implored. The Princess’s heart was wrung. She turned quickly away and said, ‘Mr Barron’s asked me to his cabin for tea and drinks and dancing; come with me, Robert, and give me moral support.’
‘That’s where my mother’s gone,’ he said, suddenly remembering the whole ugly scene in the vestibule.
‘Do you like that Mr Barron, Princess?’ he asked, on impulse. He had never called her ‘Princess’ before. Now he seemed to warm to her and long for her to say something spiteful about Mr Barron.
‘I think he’s a very nice man, don’t you? So clever and quiet, and yet quite gay at the same time.’
‘Why does he smile like that?’
‘Like what, Robert?’
‘Sort of like a dead man.’
‘I think he’s rather nervous, like so many sensitive people.’
‘He offers my mother cigarettes and cocktails and he knows she thinks they’re wrong.’
‘He only wants her to have a good time. I think he admires your mother very much, and quite naturally. She is very attractive.’
‘Do you think so?’ Robert was delighted; the annoyance of Mr Barron was quite forgotten.
They reached the door of Mr Barron’s cabin and heard noises of amusement and gaiety. The gramophone was playing ‘My Cutie’s due at two-to-two on a big chu-chu.’
Robert pushed the door open for the Princess and stood back as he had seen grown-up men do. The room was very smoky. People were sitting on the bed and others had overflowed into Mr Barron’s private bathroom. He himself was mixing drinks while Robert’ mother was sitting childishly hunched up in a chair, pouring out tea as if she’d been hostess. She held out cups for anyone to take. She was like a charming eighteenth-century street hawker. The cups were her wares; her mouth, a little open, seemed to be singing their goodness.
There was a slight stir when the Princess came in with Robert. They brought a completely different, unconvivial atmosphere with them. Mr Barron hurried up, still holding the shaker, and in his nervousness offering it to the Princess to drink out of. She smiled her flat, plain smile. Nothing seemed to matter. She could not be happy. People began to chaff Robert and offer him sips from the various drinks; until one managing soul thrust her tea into his hand and forbade him to sip another cocktail or to eat another alcohol-soaked cherry. Robert refused even to look at his mother; but he knew that she had left the tea and had accepted an Old-fashioned cocktail. Then he knew that she was dancing with Mr Barron and that others were dancing too. All the couples could do was to circle on the small patch of bare carpet, but their activity set up a rhythm and vibration through the whole, fairly spacious cabin.
Robert lay down on the bed and shut his eyes. He felt a little sick from the cherries and the sips and the Princess’s pistachio chocolates. Someone tried to make him eat bread and butter, but he would not.
Fat tears squeezed out of his eyes. He tried to hold them in by shutting his eyes still tighter, but they always managed to wriggle out. He dashed them on to the eiderdown where they made little dark splashes.
The Princess Bonbon came and leant over him and saw that he was crying.
She said, ‘What is wrong, Robert dear?’ Then, feeling ineffectual, she went over to his mother and touched her shoulder as she danced with Mr Barron.
‘I think Robert’s rather overtired or feeling ill; shall I take him back to your cabin?’ she asked.
Robert’s mother immediately left Mr Barron’s arms and went up to the bed.
‘What is wrong?’ she asked rather coldly, bending down.
‘Go away, pig,’ he screamed, then turned over on his face and buried it in the eiderdown.
He felt his mother’s hands on his shoulders and her warm breath on his neck. He wriggled his shoulders violently and kicked back his legs. He knew that he was about to make the most terrible scene. He had the sudden fear that his nervous excitement would make him lose control of his bladder. The shame, if this happened, would be terrible, but he also thought with detachment that it would be funny to wee-wee on Mr Barron’s soft bed.
‘Don’t be troublesome, Robert,’ his mother said briskly. ‘It is so bad to make scenes in public. People never do it. They think it very ugly and in very bad taste.’
This mention of good taste, correct behaviour and public opinion struck Robert as extraordinarily frivolous and wicked.
‘I don’t care what anyone thinks,’ he shouted into the thickness of the eiderdown; then he sprang up and ran into the centre of the cabin. The two or three dancing couples stared at him. He felt with horror the sudden warmth on the inside of his leg. His mouth fell open. He screamed some abuse at his mother, then with tears pouring down his face he ran from the cabin, slamming the door behind him.
He made straight for his own cabin; there he snatched up his towel and flannel and rushed to the bathroom. He locked himself in and gave himself up to a fit of weeping; then suddenly his heart went quite hard and he felt ashamed of himself. He got on to a stool and, crouching over, dipped his head deep into a basin of cold water. Afterwards he washed his clothes methodically and efficiently and pressed them against the hot-water towel-rail until they steamed and gradually grew dry. He dressed himself again and left, quite emptied, chastened, apart; a hundred miles from the world, the ship, his mother, everything.
He got ready for bed early and waited until the stewardess brought his hot milk and biscuits. She had also managed to filch a striped ice-cream for him from the dinner menu. She always brought him some delicacy, apart from the plain milk and biscuits. Robert thanked her and then, after she had made her few nice gossipy remarks and left, he went over to one of the portholes and threw the ice-cream as far out to sea as possible. Striped ice-cream of this sort made him feel sick, but he would never have told the stewardess this.
After he had cleaned his teeth as his mother had taught him (up and down, not across) he lay down on the bed and shut his eyes, still leaving the light on. He felt that he wanted to cry again, but the hardness in him poured contempt upon his other self and instead he began swearing at his mother with the worst oaths he could invent. The only real swear words he knew were ‘damn’ and ‘bloody’, and so he twisted and elaborated these with fanciful beginnings, endings, middles.
She got up and snapped the light off with a vicious flip: Robert gradually floated further and further into sleep.…
When he next woke the light was on again and he saw his mother in the middle of the cabin; she looked lost, unhappy and unwell. He knew that it was late. He knew that she had been dancing and that she was very tired. He wondered if she had drunk cocktails or champagne or any other intoxicating drink.
She came over to him gently, and he smelt the tobacco smoke which had soaked into her clothes from the choking air of the ballroom. It came out in waves, mixed with her scent.
When she saw that he still pretended to be asleep, she turned away to undress; then, as if too ill and exhausted to go on, she fell down on her bed and began to say fanatically but softly, ‘There is no life, truth, intelligence or substance in matter. All is Infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation.’
Robert knew how ill she must be feeling. She lay still holding on to the eiderdown, waiting in a trance to feel better.
He opened his eyes and looked at her; he could not go over to her or touch her, but he longed to help her. He formed his face and mouth carefully into the right shape and then began to sing very gently:
‘What is thy birthright, man,
Child of the perfect One;
What is thy Father’s plan
For His beloved son?’
He waited a moment to gather breath and to remember the second verse correctly:
‘Thou art Truth’s honest child,
Of pure and sinless heart;
Thou treadest undefiled—’
He had forgotten what came next. He was overcome with the beauty and sadness of his own singing. He was going to cry because his mother was ill on the bed. He wasn’t going to help her. He was going to cry.
He jumped angrily out of bed and crouched by her on the floor. He held her hand and arm fiercely. They neither of them said anything, but his mother was breathing deeply, trying to master her illness and pain.
‘Sing, darling,’ she said after a pause. ‘It’s lovely when you sing for me.’
He still held her arm tightly and untenderly, as if it were the spar of a ship and he a man in the water. He knew so many hymns, but only the first verses of them. He wanted to sing something so consummate and wonderful that his mother would turn over and smile and be happy for ever; but he knew that she was dying and that she could not save herself. He only knew this sometimes in a flash. At other times he would be completely hypnotised by her gaiety and liveliness into believing that she was not ill at all and that she would live for ever. Now he decided to sing,
‘Eternal Mind the Potter is
And thought the eternal clay;
The hand that fashions is divine,
His works pass not away.’
His mother was growing less tense; she sighed, turned towards him and smiled.
‘Don’t cry, darling,’ she said humorously, for the tears were now streaming down his face, ‘don’t cry, I feel so much better.’ But he could not stop, they poured down and he made no sound, only stared at his mother, his eyes boring deep down into her. He could not sing any more, he could do nothing, only watch his mother and let the tears stream down bitterly.
THE HAPPIEST TIME
Yes, it was one of the happy times of his life, perhaps the happiest; but he was not to know this, sitting there on a the low stool in front of the fire, eating his supper of bread and butter and hot milk, while his father read to him.
They were in the library, not a very large room but a lofty one, with a snug cushioned seat on top of the radiator in the wide bay-window. The long windows were curtained now in smoky purple velvet. The carpet was purple too; the pool, made by his father’s lamp, showed brilliant plummy violet. The rest, in shadow, seemed almost black in its consuming warmth. Round the walls were low bookcases with glass doors, and, above these, many old engravings of Peking’s Forbidden City made by a Jesuit missionary in the seventeenth century.
It could not have been called a beautiful room; the proportions were too clumsy and the furnishings too haphazard. But to the child, very much aware of his surroundings, it was beyond criticism. Was it not part of the house that had been built for his grandmother, the house that had harboured him all his long, crowded, eight years of life?
A stranger, seeing the room for the first time, would have found it almost impossible to tell where he was on the earth’s surface. England he might have guessed first, because there was an undeniable flavour of the later Victorian club about the heavy mouldings, the lofty ceilings, the windows and doors just a little larger than life, so that a man felt puny in opening and shutting them. But it was England with a twist. Where in England would one see quite such a lampshade—all exquisitely patterned gauze stretched over silk, trimmed with elaborate knots and tassels? Where would one find a long, shallow porcelain trough, filled with water and red-veined marble pebbles, in which strange bulbs grew, not quite like our narcissus? Their scent spread out secretly on the warm air in the room; it was the scent of a far country, strange, pure, delicious, unforgettable.
One was in China, of course; that is, if the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai can really be considered part of that country.
‘Don’t stop reading, Daddy,’ said the child, holding out a piece of bread and butter to the flames, so that the butter should melt and frizz, and the bread become delicately smoked. ‘But I want another cocktail, Flea,’ protested his father with comic querulousness. John Markham always called his only child Flea, because the child was small for his age, and because John Markham secretly considered the name Timothy affected, although he had allowed his son to be christened thus willingly enough, simply to please the passing whim of his wife, Rosa. He was pleased when he found that, as soon as the child was out of the grotesque rubbed-brick cathedral, no one ever thought of calling it anything but Tim. That at least was bearable; but for himself he would stick to Flea.
‘Didn’t you make enough, or did you drink too quickly?’ Tim asked, looking at the large empty cocktail glass.
‘I only made a thimbleful. Finish your milk quickly and we’ll go and mix some more.’
Tim gulped down the last drops obediently, then stood up in his pyjamas and padded woollen kimono. The Japanese designer had made a pattern of sparrows quarrelling and communing in and out and round about a flimsy latticework. When Tim turned his back, showing the whole of the design, there seemed to be an angry flurry of little birds.
Father and son went into the pillared hall, passed under the ponderous arches and entered the dining-room.
THE COFFIN ON THE HILL
Perhaps I was eight when my parents took me at Easter time up the river in a house-boat. I shall explain here that in China a house-boat is not a terraced barge, all plate-glass windows, white balustrading, frothy pink geraniums and ferns. It is a compact little motor
-launch fitted with saloon, tiny cabins, bathroom and galley. In it one can explore the canals and waterways.
Part of the fascination of that journey must be put down to the fact that I don’t know where we went. I only know that it was up the river Yangtze from Shanghai.
For days beforehand my mother superintended packing of food, clothes, rugs, bed-linen and drinks for my father.
Boy, Cook and Coolie were coming with us. When I went to visit them in the kitchen, they gathered round me and teased me, telling me not to fall in, or the drowned people would pull me down and keep me under. Although I took it as a joke, I shuddered too, seeing arms like water-weeds or octopus tentacles stretched up to grasp my kicking legs, dragging me down, not demonishly, but with a horrible, greedy sort of love, as though they wanted to keep me and gloat on me for ever. I thought of the dead faces; the eyes, the nose, the mouth eaten away by fishes. But they were still able to weep from the holes where their eyes had been, and cries locked in bubbles escaped from the shapeless mouths.
When I told my father about these drowned men, he said that the Chinese in old times described in this way the dangerous current, which was supposed to drag people down if they struggled.
I think he saw how much I had been dwelling on the subject, for he laughed at me and made me feel excessive and unreasonable.
At last everything was ready and we drove down in the afternoon to the Bund. The great mass of shipping on the river before Shanghai alarmed me. I felt that a small house-boat could never thread its way between all the steamers, junks and sampans; but as soon as we were on board, I was so enchanted that I forgot everything but the little world of the boat. I wanted to explore the whole of it at once, and so, to begin with, I did nothing but run up and down the deck in a mad, excited way. When I was a little calmer, I dived down the miniature companion-way and found myself in the saloon; but my mother was there, unpacking the silver, and I was afraid she might ask me to arrange the pepper and salt and mustard pots neatly in one of the little mahogany cupboards, so I darted past her and came to the first cabin.