“Yes, Dermot,” I said. “I wish I could be as true to my job as you are to yours.”
“You see,” he went on, “wherever it came from, it’s there. I know about these things. I know when a thing’s right and when it’s wrong, and when it’s wrong I know how to put it right. I knew, as soon as I saw those pictures in Copenhagen, that they were great pictures. Nobody I’ve met agrees with me—not even you, you dense old fool. But they will. And I not only know great things when I see them; I can do great things in my own line. Can’t I?” he challenged me hungrily.
“Yes, you can,” I said, and I meant it.
“Well then. I’ve had to choose what channels I should put my energy into. And I’ve chosen for good and all. But I’m no less a patriot for that. I’m no less an Irishman for that. I can still give something to Ireland. All that I should have liked to do can still be done. If I have a son, it shall be done. I am not satisfied, I shall never be satisfied, with the position of Ireland under the muddy feet of your bloody country. My son shall not be satisfied with it. He shall go to Ireland, he shall learn to be an Irishman as I am not, as my father is not, as my Uncle Con is not, doling out his dollars like all the other damned American-Irish who wouldn’t come back if Ireland was a republic tomorrow. So now you know all about it. Now you know what I want most passionately in this world for my son.” His rare pale smile lit his face. “And what about you, Bill?” he said. “What’s your scheme for the next generation?”
I re-charged and lit my pipe before answering. “Well, Dermot, it comes to roughly what you want yourself. That is to say, I want to realise in my son all that I’ve missed myself. I’ve been poor in a way that even you have never known. I’ve been lonely and miserable and lacking in all that children should have in a decent world. If I have a son, I just want him to have everything. I’ll work my fingers to the bone to give him every damn thing he asks for, and seeing him enjoying it I’ll enjoy it myself and live my life over again from the beginning, but differently. Do you approve?”
He looked at me gravely, swinging his legs on the bench. “I don’t know,” he said. “You’ll spoil him.”
“I’ll chance it. I’ll give him a lovely life.”
And so, Rory, and so, Oliver, we settled your destiny for you, Dermot and I, sitting there in that room at midnight, with the smoke from our pipes dimming the light, and the merciful veils of the future dimming our eyes.
*
But Rory was not born that night. That time it was Eileen; and when Rory was born I was not so excited about it, because Oliver was born the same night.
Before we were married, Nellie always called me Bill. After we had got back from Blackpool she began to call me William. I hated being called William, but Bill was too frivolous for Nellie when she had fully entered into a matron’s estate. To everyone save Dermot and Sheila she called me Mr. Essex. “Mr. Essex says...” “Mr. Essex thinks...”
When little Eileen O’Riorden was three months old, and Dermot had resolved that Sheila must have a nurse for the children on whose room he was expending all his craft, I walked home from his house in Withington full of discontents. It was an August day, and the pavements sweltered. The nearer I approached to the heart of the town, the hotter I became, and when I turned left at All Saints and faced up the long street that led in the direction of home, my heart suddenly shrank within me. Everything was black and blistered, bone-dry and giving back the day’s heat like a desert. Not a tree, not a leaf, not a flower anywhere in sight. In all the side streets I could see men in shirt-sleeves and weary women sitting on their doorsteps or on chairs which they had dragged out on to the pavements. Pale, pinched children squabbled or played in the dust of the gutters. Strident voices from upper windows were calling some of them in to bed. The thought of Dermot’s home with its little garden, its few trees and bushes—not much, goodness knows, but so different from this—suddenly rushed upon me with a force which made me resolve there and then to have done with Hulme for ever.
In this mood I reached home, and walked into the living-room—the room that could be so cosy in winter with the curtains drawn and the firelight falling on polished wood and metal. But now, with the heat of the day imprisoned amid the plush upholsteries, with nothing but barren brick to be seen through the window, it struck me as intolerable. Nellie was reading with her back to the window. She got up as soon as I entered the room and said: “William, I’m going to have a child.”
I felt neither glad nor sorry, simply surprised, so surprised that I said nothing. Nellie asked: “Aren’t you glad?” and I said: “Yes, my dear. Of course. I hope it’ll be a boy.”
“I want a daughter,” she said.
“Well, whichever it is,” I told her, “don’t let’s have it born here. We’re well off, Nellie, and we’re going to be better off. Let’s get out of Hulme—now—right away—and let the child have a start in fresh air with something beautiful to look at.”
“But, William, I’d be lost. I’ve spent all my life here...”
I knew it all. I could have recited it for her; and I said no more that night. But the next day I wandered southwards along the Wilmslow Road. I came to a milestone which said “St. Ann’s Square 5 miles,” and that seemed to me a satisfactory distance. One wanted to be five miles from the heart of Manchester. I walked on again till I came to a little lane leading down to the Mersey, and just beyond that was a house standing back from the road at the end of a long narrow garden. A notice board said “To Let” and told me where I could get the keys. The agent wanted to accompany me, but I said I would rather see the house alone.
It was called The Beeches, and I knew I was going to live at The Beeches as soon as I had pushed open the front gate. It was a small friendly-looking house, and the length of its narrow garden gave it a remote and quiet air. So long was the garden that, though the two beech trees that gave it its name stood just within the gate, their shade was not daunting to the garden. The close-cut grass was thick and green; rosebeds had been cut in it and were full of blooms. The house was flat-fronted, of good red brick, with a window on either side of the porch and three windows above. Standing in the porch and looking back, I thought the road seemed a nice long way off, and the tall graceful beeches were both grateful to the eye and an assurance of privacy.
Before I had opened the door, I had begun to tell myself what I should do with the house. If there were no bathroom, one must be fitted. There must be four bedrooms: one for a maid, because Nellie would need a maid when she had a child to look after, one for the child, one for our bedroom, and one for my study.
As it happened, there were four bedrooms, and there was a bathroom. Under Dermot’s advice, I had the place decorated from top to bottom before a word was said to Nellie. It was not till November had come that I made pretence of wanting to take her for a drive. She thought it mad extravagance, but I protested sternly against the way she was carrying on: straining her weak eyes over the sewing of baby clothes from morning till night. “I don’t know why you don’t buy the lot,” I said. “We can well afford it.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “Catch me putting my baby into bought clothes. Men don’t understand these things.”
“I understand that it’s time you took an afternoon out of this house,” I protested, “and that’s the cab. I can hear it at the door.”
So we rolled in the musty old cab southwards along Oxford Street and the Wilmslow Road till we came to The Beeches. There we alighted. “Dermot’s got a job on in here,” I said. “Let’s go in and see him.”
I told the cabby to be back in an hour, and Nellie and I walked arm-in-arm for the first time up the long garden path of the house where Oliver was born. A few russet leaves still clung to the beeches and a carpet of them spread in gold and brown upon the lawn. It was a still day; it seemed to belong rather to late autumn than to winter. Chrysanthemums were still blooming before the front windows and under a tender blue sky the air was full of the sharp fragrance of burning
leaves.
The house had an occupied look, for all the curtains were up. Though I had a key in my pocket, I knocked at the door and Dermot opened it. Nellie and I stepped into the little square hall, which looked more welcoming than I had hoped. Dermot had had a small stove fixed there, and the fire in it now glowed upon us through amber talc. There was room for a little table on slender legs, on which a vase of roses was standing, and for a book-case and an easy chair which stood now companionably upon the carpet beside the stove. Dermot lit the candles on the table. “D’you like this, Nellie?” he asked. “I’m working for a very particular sort of gent.”
Then we went into the drawing-room. It was not yet furnished save for a table and a few chairs, but the fire was lit, and when we had drawn the curtains and produced lights the room looked inviting, especially as Sheila was there, kneeling at the fireplace toasting muffins. She had already prepared the tea.
We let Nellie into the secret bit by bit, and she rather grudgingly allowed herself to be persuaded. There was a Wesleyan chapel a few hundred yards down the road, and I think that helped. But Nellie was firm about furniture. I had for some mad weeks been contemplating a clean sweep of all that had been dear to the heart of old Moscrop. But we had at last to throw in the furniture to soften for Nellie the blow of removal. The one room that was completely new was my study. Dermot worked upon that with his own hands and made it beautiful. And when he had finished he took me to the door, landed a foot in my behind, and kicked me over the threshold. “There it is,” he said. “Now work in it, you lazy devil.”
*
On a May midnight in the following year when the beech leaves in the garden were in their loveliest green, I walked up and down, up and down, while a cold moon climbed over, and the leaves sighed and murmured, and a light burned steadily on in the window on the first floor. When they told me I could see Nellie and the child I crept upstairs with a heart near to bursting. I could feel it lamming my ribs, and it was not till I had left the room again that I realised I had hardly looked at Nellie. I brought out with me nothing but a memory of a small face with eyes serenely closed, and a little down-tufted skull, and a long thin hand, small and exquisitely shaped, into which I longed to pour the world.
A few hours earlier Sheila’s third child was born, and that time it was Rory.
Part II
11
It was a hot June day. From the dining-room, while I ate my lunch, I could look down the long garden and see the perambulator in the shade of the beeches. I liked it to be there, where I could see it and think of Oliver’s blue eyes gazing up into the wonderland of waving leaves, or of the green shade of the trees falling upon his closed eyelids, transparent and blue almost as the eyes beneath them. When I had finished lunch I wheeled the perambulator up to the front door, and Nellie took the child in and fed him at her breast. Then he was placed back in the perambulator, and I asked Nellie: “May I wheel him out this afternoon?”
She looked at me severely with her myopic eyes. “Can I trust you to be careful?”
“You can that.”
“Well, don’t be away for more than an hour or an hour and a half.”
Those were the early weeks when Nellie was the despot of Oliver’s destiny. I begged the boon of her as humbly as a prisoner might crave liberty from his warder.
A moment later I was pushing Oliver along the Wilmslow Road. It was the first time I had had him to myself. The pram was like a little gondola, hung high on big spidery wheels. It was stuffed deep with white bedding, and Oliver’s face lay upon the frilled pillow like a peach on tissue paper. I suppose I was a picture of the typical proud father. I was wearing a brown Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers and a straw hat. Imagine, too, my growing moustache. I was a tall, dark person, strong enough, but thin. I never considered myself handsome, and Nellie, certainly, was no beauty. I looked at Oliver’s bloomy skin, and the round delicacy of his cheeks, and the milky blue of his eyes, and the fine proportions of his hands waving ecstatically at life, and I pondered on the mystery of beauty.
So I went down the Wilmslow Road towards Withington, putting my educational theories into practice. No baby-talk. “Trees!” I exclaimed as we passed beneath the green branches that hung over garden walls; and “Horses!” I said boldly as they trotted by. A drover went along with his cattle shambling in the dust, and I thought with contempt of the unenlightened who would say “Moo!” “Cows, Oliver!” I said; but Oliver’s silken lids had fallen over his eyes and his head drooped sideways on his neck like a heavy flower on its stalk.
I had reached the gates of the large house called the Priory, when coming towards me from the Withington direction I saw Dermot, pushing a pram. He, too, was wearing the conventional “country” attire of the moment. Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers and straw hat. “I was bringing Rory to see you,” he shouted when he was twenty yards away.
“I was bringing Oliver to see you.”
Neither of us had seen the other’s son. The prams came to a halt alongside one another, head to tail, under the trees that hung over the Priory wall. Dermot bent over Oliver’s pram, and I bent over Rory’s. Rory was awake, feet kicking, knuckles fumbling into his mouth, grey eyes looking earnestly up at the leaves above him.
“This beggar’s asleep,” said Dermot. “I wanted them to meet.”
“Put your hand behind his back and lift him up,” I said.
So Dermot heaved Oliver to a sitting position and held him there, and I held up Rory. Oliver opened his eyes, and the two children gazed at one another for a moment, with solemn scrutiny. Then Oliver’s face puckered up in smiles, and Rory, after a doubtful moment, smiled too. They leaned towards one another, each dabbing at the other with unskilful and undirected hands. But soon their hands met and their fingers interlaced. They clutched, smiling broadly, till their dabbings drew them apart.
“Well, what d’you think of that?” said Dermot. “Shaking hands at one month! If these two don’t make good friends no one ever will.”
We wheeled the prams sedately about Didsbury for an hour; then Dermot went his way and I went mine.
*
Nowadays, of course, everybody keeps a snapshot record of his children’s progress. But photography then was a more cumbrous and ceremonial affair. I have to rely on my memory for snapshots, and there is no lack of them. My visual memory is very good.
I am sitting at the window of my study, looking down the long garden. A year has passed since the day when Rory and Oliver met. It is a hot, still day, and an extraordinary sense of contentment is in my heart. On the desk at which I sit is a novel called The Unkindest Cut. Theoretically, I am writing. Actually, I take up the novel and look again and again at the title-page. “By William Essex.” I can’t get over it. I never have got over it: the excitement of seeing my name on a title-page; but that first time it was like an exaltation. The book had arrived that morning, and here let me say at once that it didn’t do much except encourage its author. It was my second novel Grind Slow, Grind Small that gave me money and a reputation which, once earned, has never flagged.
Well, there I sat, dividing my wandering attention between the book, and the scrawled sheets, and the scene in the garden. A white semi-circular seat was under the beeches. Nellie and Sheila sat there, sewing, and our little maid was gathering up the tea-things from the table before them. The children were sprawling and shouting on the lawn: Maeve, who was now a beautiful and graceful child, Eileen, Rory and Oliver.
Maeve had ranged the three of them on cushions, forming a circle about her. There she knelt, scrutinising one face after another. “Eileen is fat,” she chanted. “Eileen is a fat dark baby. Eileen will be a fat dark girl. She will never be as beautiful as Maeve, because Maeve is an Irish queen.”
“Maeve is a conceited little monkey,” Sheila shouted. “You let other people tell you how beautiful you are.”
Maeve went on unperturbed. “Rory is a dark fat baby. He will be a dark ugly boy, but Rory is a good boy. Rory is a bette
r boy than Oliver. Oliver is more beautiful than Maeve. Oliver has blue eyes and curly gold on his head. He is the most beautiful baby I have ever seen. But I do not like Oliver. If I put my finger in Rory’s mouth, Rory sucks it. But if I put my finger in Oliver’s mouth he tries to bite it. But he can’t bite yet because he is only a baby. But he will bite when he can.”
“And I don’t blame him,” said Sheila. “Some people want biting.”
Nellie said nothing, but even at that distance I could see that she was hurt and that her lip trembled.
*
It was a winter night, and I had come home tired. Winter or summer, whenever I went to town I walked there and back. I went up now to the Easifix works and offices only once a week. On the manufacturing and clerical sides the staff was excellent. They could do all that was needed to be done. For a number of years I had put all I knew into building up that business. I had no intention of spending my life on it now that I had obtained the men I wanted and trained them to do things as I wanted them done. But once a week I looked personally at the work of almost everybody employed in the Hulme factory and the Oxford Street offices. I never announced my coming, and no one knew on which day I would come. So everyone was kept up to scratch. I made a whole day’s job of it and always got home in time for dinner.
Though I was fagged with the day’s work, I walked home that night in a mood of excitement and exaltation. Grind Slow, Grind Small had been out for a week. Already it was evident that the book was going to have more than a moderate success. The reviews were enthusiastic. There was not a discordant note anywhere.
Dermot accompanied me as far as Mauldeth Road, but we had nothing to say to one another. I was full of my own thoughts and he, I knew, was pondering the biggest job that had yet come to him. A cotton king who had bought an estate in Hampshire and proposed to retire there had commissioned Dermot to go down and furnish and decorate the place. So we jogged along through the winter night, each busy with his own plans, Dermot pulling occasionally at the foxy-red pointed beard which he had grown during the last year.
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