by Mary Renault
“If you mean Chris, he isn’t a Communist, he’s Labor.”
“Please don’t split hairs, this is much too serious.”
“Let’s say, then, you’d do the same again?”
“If you’d been open with me, and told me what a shocking thing had just happened, naturally I should have dealt with the matter in a different way. But later on, when you were feeling calmer, I should certainly have pointed out to you that displays of that kind do attract these unwholesome people. Besides, I told you how much it upset me that you’d been so secretive about the play, and told me nothing till I arrived at the school. To say you meant it for a surprise was such a weak excuse. You must have known it couldn’t possibly please me.”
“In God’s name, why should I have known? Why?”
“When you’ve apologized for swearing at me, I’ll listen to what you have to say.”
“I’m sorry, Mother. But—”
“Very well; I hope it will never happen again. What is it you want to tell me?”
“I was asking you—why? Why should I have known? We’re not living in the first half of the nineteenth century. How was I to know you felt like that about acting, as if it were like prostitution or something? Sorry, but you know what I mean. I’ve met some actors, you do in Ouds, they’re just human beings doing a job. Why do you feel like this about it? I’m sorry if—if it’s something you’d rather not talk about; but you must have known I’d have to ask you sooner or later.”
“I see no reason for discussing it. I’m well aware that some people on the stage are quite pleasant and moral; they’re fortunate in having strong characters, I suppose. In any case, they’re professionals. Why drag in such a side issue?”
“You don’t really believe it’s a side issue, do you?”
“All I understand in that remark is its rudeness.” But she was pulling the white wool through her fingers, so that its pile turned to a thread.
“I could have been a professional for the last couple of years. I mean I was offered a job, at money one could live on if one had to. I can’t go on like this. Acting’s my thing, I’ve known that since the first time I was inside a theater. Why do you think I’ve dragged on since I came down, doing nothing; because I wanted to settle down into a local lad, like Tony? Whatever else I do, I’ll only rot.”
He realized, when he came to a stop, that he scarcely wanted all this to end, without knowing that what he feared was the physical reaction afterward. She was looking down; he glanced at her quickly, to gain an instant’s preparation. But all he could perceive was that she seemed to be emptied, to have become leaden and null, so that her face looked, strangely and frighteningly, more a thing of flesh than of mind. Then she laughed. It was not emotional laughter; it was, in intention, humorous, forgiving. It was like something cold creeping over his skin.
“Really, my dearest child, you’re so absurd that I shan’t trouble to be cross with you any longer. You’ll be telling me next that you want to be an engine driver. Now stop talking like a big baby, and getting excited about things that are over and done with. Just kiss me good night and go to bed, and we’ll say no more about it. Come along, dear.” She held out her hand with the palm upward, and lifted her cheek.
His face must have shown her, almost at once, her own reflection as clearly as a mirror. He felt this as their eyes met, and it was more than ever shocking that she continued to hold, with desperate fixity, the generous consoling look and the winning smile. Not only their falseness was horrible, because she had never in his life held out to him an insincere cajolement; but also their inexpertness, and the fact that she was afraid. While he was thinking what to say, his memory showed him the comparison which instinct had been thrusting off, his own thought so appalled him that he made a sharp movement of bodily withdrawal from it; but he could still see the woman’s face. After he had walked past her, it had occurred to him that she was perhaps hungry (she was ageing, and shabbily dressed) and he had gone back and given her something; on which, like an automaton, she had begun all over again. I must be going mad, he thought; and tried to black out the image with a convulsion of will. Then he remembered; she had said, “Come along, dear,” too.
Forcing his voice, he said, “We’d better get this over, Mother. I mean what I said, you know.”
“Nonsense, dear. You’re simply havering.” It was a word she had used in his childhood, a nursery joke. “I think when those doctors opened your head they must have filled in the hole with rubbish, I really think they must.”
The words pointed his mind to a refuge. The thought of Hilary possessed him suddenly; but it brought no comfort, for his struggling emotions twisted it to physical desire. He turned away; but this confronted him with his own face in the mantel glass. Hoping she would not see in the reflection that he had shut his eyes, he said, “I’m sorry you feel that way about it. But if you don’t care to give me any reason, I’m afraid I shall just have to use my own judgment, and go ahead.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
He swung round; at the change in her voice, everything in him had sprung on guard. It was as if he saw opening before him the precipice of his dreams, and a kind of vertigo were spinning him toward it. Better to leap than to fall.
“No, I don’t. How should I? Why haven’t you ever told me? Do you think I haven’t the guts to take it? I think it’s time I knew what my father did. I mean, besides dying for king and country and being photographed in a Sam Browne. What’s the other thing you think I shall take after?” The dead blankness of her face heightened in him the sense of pitching down into vacancy. He gripped the edge of the mantelshelf. “Did he dope, or keep half the Folies Bergère, or die of syphilis, or what? You couldn’t tell me anything that wouldn’t be a relief.”
He saw her turn white, and tried to be sorry; but he was feeling too sick to focus his mind.
“If I were a man, Julian, grown-up as you are, I should thrash you for that. How dare you? How dare you stand here in his house, and use this—this filthy language about a man who was better than you’ll ever be? Yes, I won’t deceive myself, I know it now.” Feeling her voice slipping out of control, she waited to govern it. “He never did a disgraceful thing in his life. I wish I thought anyone would ever respect you as I respected him. But I’ve given up hoping for that. Every day of your life, I have wished that you had been—” She checked herself again, and finished, more evenly, “I have prayed every night that you might grow up to be something like him.”
He said dully, “But I didn’t?”
“If you had, you wouldn’t be making me so ashamed of you now.”
“But then, what has it all been?” He tried to say, “What is it that makes you hate me?” but, even now, the locks had not been loosened as deeply as that. “Was acting against his religion or something, did he tell you I wasn’t to have anything to do with it?”
“He certainly didn’t consider it an occupation for a man.”
“Of course not. I could have told you that. You’ve only got to look at his face. No, there’s something more, there must be.”
“Julian, I’ve put up with a great deal tonight. I really have no more to say. When you’ve slept, you’ll be sorry you made this scene; but you need not tell me so. We’ll both agree to forget all about it. Good night.”
Suddenly the thing with which he had planned to begin presented itself to his mind as a safe and easy retreat. There’s something different I had to tell you, Mother; I’m getting engaged. Why had it seemed so difficult? It beckoned now like a heaven-sent bolthole. He could hardly believe he had rejected it, till he heard his own voice.
“Very well, Mother. If that’s really all you want to say, I’m afraid what will happen tomorrow, among other things, is that I get out the car and go after a job. I’d rather know whatever it is you won’t tell me. But that’s for you to decide.”
He saw her gather herself together; but he could tell, before she began to speak, that she was putting
up a last screen, so he let himself relax for a little, to be ready when it was over.
“You’re my son, Julian, and I only say this because you force me to it. But if you think, you’ll realize that you have all the faults which would make that kind of life absolutely fatal to you. I’ve tried to train you out of them; but I’m afraid under the surface most of them are still there. You lack balance and self-control. You love admiration, though you cover it over; see how you’ve brooded over a criticism I made so many years ago. Without some discipline in your life, you’d become hopelessly neurotic. There’s another thing I’m sorry to remind you of, since I think we’ve conquered it; you were very untruthful, as a little boy. Such an artificial life would certainly bring that back again. And there’s this, too; though you’re not personally to blame for it, I’m afraid you must face this. Your looks are—no, perhaps it wouldn’t be fair to say effeminate. But they would certainly confine you in a class that—well, a few years ago one talked about matinee idols. The type that shopgirls wait for at the stage door, and no one else takes very seriously. They grow to live for that sort of public; and so, I’m afraid, would you; you lack the character to rise above it. You should have been a woman; I’ve wished, often, that you had been one.”
“I’m sorry, Mother, I’m afraid it still won’t do. I mean, that’s an old story, isn’t it, one way and another? And it isn’t what you’re really thinking about. We’ll leave it at that, if you want. But my mind’s made up, I’m afraid.”
He looked her in the eyes. The combined effort of exploration and defiance was as racking as some physical ordeal, like holding a weight on the outstretched hands. Just when it seemed about to crack him, she looked down, picked up the work in her lap. and turned it over.
“Very well.” Passing her fingers over the white edging, she said, “I should have known it would be useless. The evil in the world seems always to be stronger than the good. There’s some purpose in it, no doubt. Yes, make your arrangements, Julian. Will you go now, please? Good night.”
“Good night, Mother.” He would have bent to give her the kiss which, even when something was wrong, they had exchanged on every night they had spent under one roof. But she bent over her work, turning away. He crossed the room slowly to the door.
“Julian.”
The door handle had been in his hand when she spoke. As he turned back, he was thinking that if he had made the fraction more of haste which would have taken him into the hall, she would not have called again.
“Yes?” he said.
“Come back. I want to speak to you. Sit down, please.”
“I will in a minute.” He could no more have sat than he could have lain down and slept.
“I said I’d done everything possible to keep you from ruining your own life; but I realize now that it wasn’t strictly true. Facts do influence many people more than principles; I think you’re of that type. At least I owe it to you, I suppose, to try.”
“Yes?” he said again.
“You know I’m not a person who forms strong opinions without some very good reason. I hoped that might be enough for you. Once it would have been; you’ve changed very much lately. To show you I don’t speak simply from prejudice, I want to tell you about a man I once knew who had most of your weaknesses. He had certain gifts, as you have; and he abused them, as you want to do.”
“You mean he was an actor?”
“Yes. He could never have been anything else.”
“Most actors couldn’t, you know.”
“Will you be quiet, Julian, and let me speak?”
It was the first sign she had given of snapping control. Curiously, it acted on him in some degree as a sedative. He went over to the armchair on the other side of the fire, and sat down.
“I met this man during the war, when I working in France as a V.A.D. You remember my telling you about the base hospital, the Chateau St. Vaux. I was there at the time. There was a French H.Q. a few miles away, and he was attached there as a liaison officer; he was a Canadian, but with an English commission.”
“French-Canadian?”
“On the mother’s side, I believe. He was almost bilingual. He came to us as a patient, but I didn’t meet him then. He had some slight accident with a motorcycle; minor injuries, but his face was quite badly cut. I was working in a different wing. The sisters used to make jokes about his face being his fortune, and say he was terrified that his looks would be spoiled; that was how I heard he was on the stage. I realize now, of course, that they criticized him to one another because they didn’t want it to be thought they were competing; when they were with him, I’m sure they behaved quite differently, But I was inexperienced for my age (I was twenty-five) and I imagined he must be getting very unsympathetic treatment. Besides, I was interested in another way. At that age I had a number of very stupid ideas; I think the most foolish was the value I set on good looks. That, I’m afraid, was partly my parents’ fault. In most ways they brought me up very strictly; but they were proud of my being considered pretty, and discussed it more than was really wise. When I was twenty, they commissioned a portrait of me, which was shown in the Academy that year.” Seeing him look up, she said, “No, I haven’t it now; I destroyed it, after they died.”
“Destroyed it?”
“Please don’t interrupt. What I was saying was that having been allowed to think looks so important in women (I don’t think I ever entered a roomful of people in those days without looking round to be sure that I was the most attractive girl there) I’d developed an even sillier idea that they were equally important in men. Just before the war, I refused a young man whom really I liked a good deal; I think simply on those grounds. I’d decided that if one had a gift of that kind, one had a duty to—Well, I tell you all this simply to show you how foolish my ideas were. However, I was telling you about this man.”
“What was he called?”
“His name was Andre O’Connell. We had a very good plastic surgeon at the hospital, who took trouble with him because he was an actor, and the cut left scarcely any trace. He was discharged without my having seen him; but being I suppose short of amusement—we were a good way from a town—he was continually coming over on one pretext or another, and eventually there was an evening party, at which I met him for the first time.”
She had been talking with her hands in her lap; now she picked up her wool, and began to work with it.
“I realized what the sisters had meant; his looks were—I should say, now, ostentatious. Though he was amusing, I could see at once that he was not much liked by the other men; but I put that down to jealousy. When he left the people he was with and crossed the room to speak to me I was pleased, though I think I regarded it as a right; I was vain, as I say. I thought his manner delightful at first; but shortly after, he suggested playing charades, because several of the men had leg wounds and were out of the dancing. That was what he said; of course what he really wanted was to show off himself. It was typical of him. He chose me first for his own team. I told him I had no talent whatever for that kind of thing; but he insisted on my acting a scene with him.
“And, instead of being helpful, he laughed at me for not having enough animation. I thought him extremely rude, and showed it. He apologized later, and asked me to dance. He danced very well, though rather showily, and we attracted notice, which pleased me, I’m sorry to say.
“After that, he managed to see a good deal of me in the next few weeks. No doubt he interested me partly because he was a type of man I should never have been allowed to meet at home. He had, of course, as I realized, no background whatever. His father and grandfather had run what was called a stock company, and his mother had been a music-hall singer, I believe. He himself was much more ambitious, as he often told me. Just before the war he had been in New York, and had had some offer he considered a good one, but by that time he had made arrangements to enlist. He seemed very little perturbed at missing the chance; he said that his looks would be enough to get him
started again, and after that he could shift for himself. He spoke as though that were a quite normal thing to say. I didn’t allow him to see I thought it bad form. He was very self-assured, and one is nervous at that age of seeming old-fashioned. As he was always ready to talk about himself, I said very little about my own family. He had the usual Colonial idea that people of our sort were very arrogant and hidebound, and I was afraid he—I allowed him to influence me in many ways. In the beginning, I had been interested in him because he belonged to a type I had set up in my own mind, but in time—What is it, Julian; where are you going?”
“Sorry. I’ll get a cigarette. I’m listening.” He opened the tallboy, and, though the box was under his hand, went through movements of searching for it.
“In time, as I say, it was different. Then, one evening, he—he behaved in a way which should have warned me, at once, of the kind of man he really was. Indeed, I think it did; but, shocked and horrified as I was, I made some excuses for him to myself; my own vanity, unfortunately, helped me to make them. However, I told him it was quite impossible for me to meet him again, and that I had no intention whatever of changing my mind. I think you’ll find the cigarette box on the second shelf. You had better bring it with you, when you fidget, it makes it very hard for me to think what I’m saying.”
He came back with the box, and after the cigarette was going, found it was an Egyptian, which he loathed. He continued, however, to smoke it.
“A few days later, I had a letter from him. I should, of course, have returned it unopened. However, I was weak enough to read it. He said in it that he was deeply ashamed of what had happened; that he should have known, and in fact’ had known, that I was not the kind of woman to tolerate it, but that his feeling for me had made him lose his self-control. He—didn’t put it, of course, quite as I do now. … He wrote that he had intended at the time to ask me to marry him—Julian. Don’t you realize your cigarette is touching the chair cover? I can smell it even from here. Do get an ash tray, please.”