We said good-bye at the corner of his street, and I went on alone. It began to snow, and soon I was powdered white in front where I met the drive of the storm. When I arrived at The Beeches, I stood for a moment looking across at the house. The two great trees were heavily mantled with snow, and the white road ran on immaculate as a highway in paradise. There was an extraordinary stillness in which the ear suggested to itself the gentle patter of the falling snowflakes. Lights shone from the windows of my house, friendly as a sudden gleam seen in a fairy-tale wood. I had never before felt such happiness on reaching home, such a sense of a haven awaiting me, and of the strength within myself to maintain a place or quietness and beauty to which those dependent on me might turn. And by that, of course, I meant Oliver.
At this time of night, he was being prepared for bed, and it was my turn to bath him. Since he had been two, Nellie and I had bathed him on alternate nights, and not for a lot would I have given up the privilege of lathering and sluicing that dimpled body. His hair had never yet been cut, and it stood out like a halo of spun gold round his brow.
But that night when I got in he had already disappeared, and the sound of shouting and banging from the bathroom told that the bath was already in progress. I bounced up the stairs two at a time and burst into the steamy room filled with a babel of noises. The tap was running, Nellie was scolding, Oliver was beating the water with his feet, banging the sides of the bath with his fists, and howling at the top of his voice.
“Here, whose turn is it to bath the infant?” I shouted.
Nellie dropped the sponge, turned to me with her most infuriating look of long-suffering patience, and readjusted the pince-nez that had been swinging by their little gold hook from her ear. “He was naughty,” she said. “I told him that if he didn’t behave I’d bath him and put him to bed at once. And he didn’t behave.”
That was the sort of logical syllogism of behaviour that Nellie loved.
“Sometimes children can’t behave,” I said. “It isn’t in them.”
“Then they must learn to have it in them,” she answered.
We stood and glared at one another through the steam of the bathroom, quiet now save for the splashing of the tap. Sensing conflict between his elders, the child fell to silence and gazed with wide-eyed interest.
“It’s my turn to bath him,” I said doggedly. I took off my coat, hung it behind the door, and rolled up my sleeves. Oliver suddenly shouted: “Daddy’s turn. Said it was Daddy’s turn.” He began to beat upon the water with his fists in furious glee.
“He’s glad that you have defeated me,” Nellie said quietly. “I did what I thought was right. Will you put him to bed?” And with that she walked dourly out of the bathroom.
I had never put Oliver to bed before. Soaping and rinsing him was all very well; but after that Nellie took over and performed the mysteries of powdering and clothing him and brushing up the halo of his hair. Well, I wasn’t going to be defeated. I did all that I had so often seen Nellie do, Oliver all the time crooning with delight as though exulting in a male victory, and dabbing me in the face with his fists. At last I got him into his cot alongside our bed, kissed him good-night, and then, when I had washed, went down to dinner.
“Did you say his prayers?” Nellie asked.
“No, I forgot them.”
She went frowning upstairs, and, standing in the little hall, I could hear her through the open bedroom door. “Oliver, say after Mummy: ‘Gentle Jesus’...”
“Oliver not say.”
“Oliver say: ‘Gentle Jesus’...”
“Oliver NOT say. Daddy’s turn. Daddy didn’t say.”
There was a pause, then Nellie said: “Good-night, then.”
“Oliver NOT say goo-night.”
I had slipped into the dining-room before she got down, and I was ashamed to look her in the face. Dinner was a silent meal, and when it was done she set off for her weekly class meeting at the Wesleyan chapel along the road. I pulled aside the curtain of my study window on the first floor and watched her go down the long white garden path through the snow that was still falling. She paused for a moment at the gate and looked back towards the house, as though she would for once give up her precious meeting and turn back to the child from whom she had parted in ill-will. Then she went on, a grey responsible figure, and as I turned towards the hearth in the lovely room that Dermot had made, my heart was riven with pity for the woman whose wandering steps out there were symbolical of her separation from all the things that meant so much to me.
*
I wonder if you will ever understand how I feel about pyjamas? When I was a child I always slept in my shirt. Worn day and night, it had to do duty for a week. Even when I was with Mr. Oliver I continued to sleep in my shirt. It was Dermot who said one night, soon after my arrival in Gibraltar Street: “Why don’t you buy yourself a night-shirt?” I did so; and I wore a night-shirt then until I married. But I bought pyjamas to take with me to Blackpool, and, as that was a honeymoon, they were rather special pyjamas. Whenever I thought of sleeping in my shirt, a shiver of retrospective shame would get hold of me. I became absurdly conscious where night-clothing was concerned. My pyjamas became at first more and more resplendent, then the “froggings” of coloured silk offended me, and I entered the period of plain sumptuosity: rich silken materials, unadorned, with dressing-gowns to match.
A week before Oliver was five years old I went up to London to see my publisher. After lunch I walked alone through the West End shopping streets, looking for something to give Oliver for his birthday. In the window of a child’s outfitters’ shop I saw a suit of pyjamas: plain black silk. There was a little dressing-gown of black silk alongside them, with a broad silk belt that was finished off by a crimson fringe. I bought the outfit and took it back with me to Manchester. Travelling first, with the small parcel in my suit-case on the rack, I thought what fun it would be to see Oliver in that apparel, with the slippers of soft red Morocco leather that, also, I had bought. It would help me to think with more complacency of the small boy sleeping in his day-shirt. It would help me to kill and bury that small boy.
It was a warm May day when Sheila came with Maeve and Eileen and Rory to the party that was to celebrate the two birthdays. The children played together on the lawn for an hour before teatime; and when Sheila and Nellie were preparing the tea-table in the dining-room, I smuggled Oliver upstairs and dressed him in the outfit of which I had said no word to anyone. I washed his face and brushed up his hair. He looked delightful in black and scarlet, tall already for his age and as straight as a young tree. There were times when his beauty startled me, and that afternoon was one of them. His face, with its vivid blue eyes, full red lips, and crown of golden curls, was like the face of a Reynolds angel. His playing about in the garden had heightened his colour, and the joy of his new splendour brightened his eye. He was as pleased as Punch, and as proud as a pasha, strutting about the room, and examining himself in the long mirror, his hands thrust into the dressing-gown pockets.
“Now we’ll show them how lovely you look,” I said, and we went downstairs with his small hand in mine.
They were already at the table. Nellie blinked from behind the teapot, and asked practically: “Where did Oliver get those clothes from? And why is he dressed for bed?”
“Sure his father’s showing him off. Can’t you see that?” Sheila demanded. “Is this his birthday present, Bill?” and when I nodded, she took Oliver on her knee and asked: “And doesn’t he look a fair treat?”
“He’s forgotten his manners,” said Maeve loudly, surprising us all.She was not a bit perturbed by the grown-up interrogation of our stare. Maeve was turning into a self-possessed young woman, as beautiful in her dark way as Oliver was in his.
“Just remember you’re Oliver’s guest, Maeve,” said Sheila. “You shouldn’t be finding fault with your host.”
Oliver put an arm round Sheila’s neck and looked triumphantly at the snubbed Maeve. But Maeve was not easily
to be snubbed. “It’s because we’re his guests that I think he’s forgotten his manners,” she said. “He should have shown us before tea where to wash our hands and—and that. Instead of togging himself up like—like... Oh, what is he like? He’s not like a boy. Ugly’s like a boy.” (Ugly was her name for plain, dark Rory.) “He’s just like something that makes me laugh. Ha, ha!”
It was one of Maeve’s remarkable qualities that she could laugh with complete conviction whenever she wanted to, just as a good actress can; and she laughed now, a long loud silvery laugh, pointing derisively at Oliver. She set Eileen off, and Rory, too, and in a moment all three of them had reached that uncontrollable state when they couldn’t have stopped laughing had they wanted to.
Oliver glowered for a moment at the three faces contorted by laughter, his own face slowly reddening with passion. He leapt from Sheila’s lap, tore off the dressing-gown and danced upon it in his red slippers. He pulled off the jacket of his pyjamas and threw that to the ground, too, and had laid hands on the girdle of his trousers, when Nellie picked him up and carried him kicking from the room. I leapt to open the door, and she gave me a bitter look as she went through. “This is your conceit, not the child’s,” she said in a low voice. “Your nonsense will ruin him.”
Nothing would induce Oliver to wear his pyjamas and dressing-gown after that. “Rory laughed,” he said with a scowl. It was the sight of Rory’s puckered-up face of a merry little monkey that had been too much for him. For Rory was beginning to be more important to Oliver than any of us.
*
Miss Bussell’s school was half-way between Dermot’s house and mine. Maeve had been going there for some years, and now Eileen began to go, too. Sheila’s nursemaid would set off in the morning with the three children and a mail-cart. This was for Rory to ride in when he was tired, but it was not often that Rory would admit that he was tired. He was short and dark, sturdy on his legs, with a growth of obstinate thick black hair, and those very dark blue-grey eyes that are smudged into some Irish faces. He was always merry and smiling, but there was a comical pugnacity about his square jaw and pudgy nose. He looked the sort of boy who would grow into a bruiser. Maeve’s name for him had developed into Ugly-Mugly.
The maid left the two girls at Miss Bussell’s, and then brought Rory on to The Beeches. She would take him back in time to collect the girls when school was over, and he would come again in the afternoon.
Oliver was always on tiptoe upon the low garden wall, peering over the iron railings that surmounted it, when Rory was due. He would dance with impatience at delay, and rush out of the gate as soon as his friend appeared. Morning after morning, sitting at my window, I saw the two of them run in from the road, come to a halt, panting, on the lawn, and shout: “Now!” They were like a whippet and a terrier, ready for fun.
They were aware that there was a war on. For weeks they played Britons and Boers, banging at one another with toy pistols from behind the boles of the beeches. Oliver loved to be an Englishman, and for days on end Rory had contentedly been a Boer.
We had reached the stage now, Oliver and I, of talking every night. The ritual was unchanging: the bath, prayers conducted by Nellie, a tale from Hans Andersen read by me, and then: “Let’s have conversations.” Oliver bounded up and down on his bottom in the cot as he propounded the formula. He loved conversations.
“Let’s have conversations about Boers,” he said one night. “What are Boers? Are they men?”
He looked at me with troubled young eyes, half-expecting to hear that they were fabulous monsters such as the fairy-tales told him about. I had always talked to him as gravely as to a grown-up, and I said: “Yes, Oliver, Boers are men just like me and Uncle Dermot. Perhaps braver than me.”
“Why are we fighting Boers?”
“Because we are greedy. They’ve got something that we want to steal from them.”
He continued to regard me with wide eyes, as though inviting me to continue this unexpected line of argument.
“You see,” I said, “the Boers are simple Dutch farmers. They went to live in the country where they are now just because it was a good country for farmers, and we didn’t mind that a bit. Then it was found that the country was full of gold and diamonds, and the greedy English wanted the gold and diamonds for themselves, so they picked a quarrel with the Boers so as to have an excuse to steal their country. And the Boers are brave men, trying to keep their country for themselves.”
Oliver went to sleep murmuring: “The Boers are brave men,” and the next day when the game was begun by Rory, who had for so long been so patiently a Boer, Oliver shouted: “You are English. I am a Boer.”
Stocky little Rory stood suddenly still and defiant in the middle of the lawn. “I am not a damned Englishman,” he declared. “I am an Irishman.”
He glared fiercely at Oliver. They faced one another, grasping their toy pistols in their hot hands. Suddenly Rory fired, exploding the “cap” in the pistol loudly in Oliver’s face. In accordance with the rule that whoever got in his shot first had won, Oliver obediently fell dead. Rory placed a foot on his chest and scowled at him. “Damned Englishmen,” he said.
I concluded that Dermot had already begun the education of Rory.
12
I have pointed out that when you were walking along the Wilmslow Road towards The Beeches there was a lane that turned off to the right. It was very pleasant in those days. On the left was the high garden wall of a house, the red brick draped by the drooping branches of beech trees, and on the right you looked across parkland to a fine white stucco house. At the bottom of the lane were meadows through which the Mersey went a mazy twisting way between banks that had been raised very high to keep the floods out of the fields. From there I could see the red sandstone church at which my benefactor Mr. Oliver had ministered so long ago.
Not so long, either, when I looked at it in point of years; but when I went down to the meadows to play football with Oliver, it seemed an age since a boy of twelve began to sleep in Mr. Oliver’s loft and to learn to read and write. A boy whose life was so different from Oliver’s! There was always for me an intense satisfaction in that thought. It was difficult, looking up at the little eminence on which the church stood, not to snatch Oliver up and cry: “You shall have everything! Everything!” Because I was giving it all to myself through Oliver.
There was the question of football boots. It was in the winter after Oliver’s sixth birthday. He occasionally went out alone now, little jaunts down the village street and back. One day he returned to tell us that there were football boots in the boot shop and that the smallest pair would fit him.
“What do you want with football boots?” Nellie asked. “When you go to play football, wear your oldest boots. That will be a good way to wear them out.”
Nellie would never understand that there was no need to “wear out” everything. She disliked seeing clothes disposed of till they were threadbare, boots and shoes till soles were parting from uppers.
“But I want real football boots,” Oliver protested. “How can I play real football without real boots?”
“You’re having too much, my boy, that’s what’s the matter with you,” Nellie said severely. “It would do you good to be without a thing or two now and then. How many boys d’you think there are in the world who’ve got what you have?”
“But if Daddy can buy me things, why shouldn’t he?”
“All right. Wait till it’s you who have to do the earning.”
Nellie loved the boy with a passion that was deepened by her wonder that anything so beautiful should have sprung from her and me. But love to her carried with it a hard sense of duty. She had a Puritan fear of pleasure, and long ago she had reached the conviction that I was bad for Oliver. She never questioned my ruling in anything that concerned him. That, too, was part of her code. I was head of the household; my word was law; but before the law was promulgated she would try to have her say.
Oliver now gave me a downcast l
ook across the table, and for once I was inclined to back up his mother’s opinion. There was no doubt about it: he was more and more inclined to think that he had only to wish for a thing to find it in his pocket. I looked at him severely. “I had no football boots when I was a boy,” I said.
And that very phrase was my undoing. I thought of the football I had played as a boy; the goal-posts chalked upon the end wall of a cul-de-sac in Hulme, the ball a tight-bound wad of brown paper, the players a handful of pale-faced urchins, and the consequence of the game for most of us a clip across the ear from our fathers for kicking our boots to bits. Oh, what would one not have given in those days for a field, a football, and a proper pair of boots!
As if the devil himself had put the words into his mouth, Oliver said: “If you had none when you were a boy, why don’t you get some now?” and the idea of myself wearing football boots and playing with Oliver flashed so charmingly in my mind that within a few hours there we were, superbly booted, running down the lane that led to the Mersey meadows, dribbling and passing and banging the ball with satisfactory reverberations against the red brick wall over which the beeches drooped their winter arms.
It was a simple game we played in the meadow. We put down our overcoats for goals, and look turns at being goalkeeper. A few boys collected and joined us. The space between the coats was narrowed when a boy was “in goal,” widened when I was. It was a grand afternoon. I shouted with the boys, got as excited as any of them; and when the light failed, and the evening air grew chill, Oliver and I pulled on our overcoats and walked along the uphill lane hand-in-hand under the brooding trees towards lamplight and firelight and tea and muffins, and there seemed nothing so crazy in the world as the idea that a boy shouldn’t have all he wanted.
My Son, My Son Page 13