I admitted the charge. This was the room for those winter nights. Plenty of wall-room for books; plenty of hearth-room for logs.
“How much do they want for the place?”
He told me.
“Well,” I said. “I hereby invite you and Sheila, Maeve, Eileen and Rory to be my guests here throughout August. The place won’t be furnished, but I’ll have enough done by then to make it livable. We’ve never spent a holiday together, Dermot. And Rory has never spent a holiday with Oliver. I’d like it.”
“And so would I.”
“We’ll spend many holidays here together.”
“There’s nothing I’d like better,” said Dermot.
*
And so it was that it became a convention for the O’Riorden and Essex families to spend August at Heronwater. The one of those holidays that remains most vividly in my mind is that of 1906, when Rory and Oliver were ten, and Eileen was eleven, and Maeve was fourteen, and I was thirty-five. Dermot was a bit older than I.
To begin with, there had been trouble with Oliver that year. He and Rory were still at Miss Bussell’s, and on the last day of the term I allowed my walk to take me towards the school, so that I might meet him and walk home with him. But though it was past the time for school to end, I had not met him when I reached the school gates. I had seen other children walking homewards, so I went into the school to see if he was there. Miss Bussell saw me and called me into her private room, where Oliver was standing, flushed and defiant, side by side with Rory, whose forehead was creased by worry. He kept looking uneasily from Oliver to Miss Bussell and frowning in his queer grown-up way.
The white-haired old lady sat in her wicker chair, looking terribly perturbed. “I’m glad you’ve come, Mr. Essex,” she said. “I’m rather worried by a problem of conduct.”
Problems of conduct were dear to Miss Bussell’s heart. She had plagued me with a good many of them—problems for which growing-up was the only cure. I sat down prepared to hear of another peccadillo.
“You know,” said Miss Bussell, “I always give a prize at the end of term for some subject or other. I told the children last night that this term the prize would be for freehand drawing. They were to make their drawings this morning—anything they liked. Miss Dronsfield, who teaches drawing, examined the work during the lunch interval, and brought me Oliver’s as the best. But she didn’t notice what you can see for yourself if you look at this.”
Miss Bussell handed me the drawing. She had ringed it with red ink here and there, and clearly enough inside the rings you could see where Oliver’s pencil had failed to work over the incredibly light carbon tracing.
“I’m afraid,” said Miss Bussell, in her prim, acid way, “that Miss Dronsfield hasn’t seen this week’s Punch. But I have. And all that Oliver has failed to do is sign his work Phil May.”
I turned over in my hand the picture of the Cockney woman with her flaunting feathered hat and her tray of flowers. Miss Dronsfield must be a fool, anyway, I thought, to have imagined that a child would choose such a subject.
“Where does Rory come in?” I asked sadly.
“The incredible thing is,” said Miss Bussell, “that Rory, who was sitting next to Oliver, swears that he saw Oliver do the drawing on a clear sheet of paper.”
“Yes, I did,” said Rory, going very white.
“Will you, please, Miss Bussell, leave them both to me?” I asked. She nodded her head and looked relieved. “I don’t want to make a mountain of it,” she said. “Naturally, the other children don’t know.”
“Let’s walk home with Rory,” I said when we got into the street.
Both the boys seemed glad to be out in the air, away from the magisterial atmosphere.
“Well,” I said, when we had walked a little way, “it was cheating, Oliver. You draw very well. You could probably have got the prize without that sort of thing. Why did you do it?”
“Because I wanted to do something so good that Miss Dronsfield would always be saying: ‘Remember that marvellous drawing that got the prize!’ And that would make me work very hard.”
“I don’t see how that would help you. It wasn’t your marvellous drawing that took the prize. What’s wrong with saying: ‘What a marvellous drawing by Phil May! I must try and do one as good’?”
“It wouldn’t be the same thing,” he said. “The point is, I wanted other people to expect me to do marvellous drawing.”
“And as it turns out, other people will now wonder, when you do a decent piece of work, whether it’s a copy or a tracing. Don’t you think you’ve been a little fool?”
He sighed and looked martyred. “I suppose so,” he said. “But I meant well.”
“And what about you?” I said to Rory. “Didn’t you see what Oliver was doing?”
Rory still looked white—more worried than Oliver, who seemed to see no reason why the matter should not now be closed. “I was putting myself on trial,” he said. “I was hoping she’d cane me. She did cane a boy once.”
I looked at him, mystified. “Supposing it was in Ireland,” he said, the words rushing out of him, “and Miss Bussell was the police, and I knew something that would get Oliver into trouble, perhaps something they’d shoot him for—they do, you know. Well, then I’d have to tell a lie so as to be loyal, wouldn’t I? If Miss Bussell hadn’t asked me, I wouldn’t have said anything. But she asked me whether I’d seen Oliver cheat, and suddenly I thought this was a trial, and I said No.”
What could I say to the child, so white, so earnest and over-wrought? In my heart I said: “God bless you, Rory, and God help you,” and to him I could only say: “I see. I thought perhaps it was something like that.”
We left him at the gate, and Oliver and I walked home. Miss Bussell, I thought, had been up against something that would have surprised her had she guessed it.
*
What are you to do with a child when you catch him out in wrong-doing? You are aware of so many tortuous streaks in your own makeup, so many small things and great things that you have kept hidden, and which, if known, would make the moralists recoil, that to cast the first stone at your own child would cause you to stink of the Pharisee. Perhaps self-complacency comes into it, too. Whatever those things may be that the world knows nothing of, you are, on balance, a decent person, Well, so will the child be, no doubt. The theft of his friend’s book? An attempt to bluff a silly drawing-mistress? Well, Academicians had been known to paint over photographs.
So I consoled myself as I walked after dinner that night over the hump-backed bridge that crosses the Mersey and on to Cheadle. There were so many things I could have done: all, it seemed to me, the inventions of human stupidity: I could stop Oliver’s pocket-money, I could send him to bed early for a week, I could take away small privileges. If I were completely demented I could lock him in a dark closet, or I could use a stick on him. At the thought of this, I broke out into a prickle of sweat and my footsteps quickened.
But behind my attempts at gay self-assurance there was a trace of fear, for Oliver’s misdemeanours were not spontaneous: they were worked out to the last detail. I remembered the case of The Cuckoo Clock; and I had found tonight, on looking for Punch, that he had carefully destroyed the traces of his small crime. The paper, which it was customary to leave lying on the hall table till the next issue appeared, was gone, I found it at last pushed below the rubbish of the dust-bin, and precaution had gone even further than that, for the Phil May drawing had been torn out, and doubtless burned.
So it was on the whole with a troubled mind that I returned home.
I was about to run straight upstairs to my study, as was my custom, when the drawing-room door opened and Nellie came out. It was twilight in the street, but in the house it was nearly dark: no lamps had yet been lit. She stood like a grey uneasy ghost in the doorway, and said: “What are you going to do about Oliver?”
“Do?” I said.
She went into the drawing-room, and I followed her. I sat down b
y the fireplace, but she would not sit down. She moved restlessly about the room for a while, then came to a stand at the window, her back towards me. She was a black silhouette between the drooping white of the curtains.
“Miss Dronsfield happened to be passing by,” she said tonelessly. “I was in the garden, and she stopped to talk. She told me what happened at school, and said you knew about it. You might have told me.”
“I didn’t see that that would help.”
“In what way do I help? Am I any help at all now? Do I matter?”
“My dear Nellie—”
She swung round, and demanded in a rising voice: “Why didn’t you tell me? Whether I’m anything to you or not, you great man, I’m the child’s mother, aren’t I? D’you think it doesn’t matter to me that he’s growing up a cheat and a liar?”
I had never known her so perturbed. She stood there at the window, grasping in her agitation a curtain in each hand, as though her emotion might overcome her and she needed support. “What are you going to do about it?” she insisted.
“I don’t see that we can do anything except give the boy our care and love.”
At that she laughed, almost hysterically. “Love!” she cried. “A pretty idea you’ve got of love! Do you call it love to bring a child up to think he can do what he likes without taking the conse-quences? Give him everything—more money in a week than I saw in a year at his age, more clothes than any child needs, presents, games, expensive schools, everything he fancies or dreams of—give it to him—that’s your idea of love. Well, it isn’t mine. Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.”
She came away from the window and walked excitedly up and down the darkening room. “Oliver is my child,” she said at last, “as well as yours. Bear that in mind. I know I’m nobody in this house. I know that the first thing you do when you come through the door is to dash up to your room as though I didn’t exist. But so far as Oliver’s concerned, I’m going to exist from now on. D’you hear?”
“What do you propose should be done about the present case?” I asked as calmly as I could.
She gave another of her strange hysterical laughs. “The present case! There’s more in it than the present case. You love the child so much that you can’t see what’s going on under your eyes, I suppose?”
In her agitation, her spectacles swung off her nose and dangled from her ear. She brushed at them impatiently and swept them to the ground. “I have found Oliver lying and thieving, and not caring if other people are suspected of his thefts. I have said nothing about it. You have always made the child’s upbringing your business, and now when he commits this crime in public, before his schoolfellows and teachers, you are going to do nothing about it.”
“Crime is a heavy word,” I said. “And as for his schoolfellows, they don’t know what happened.”
“Does that matter? Does your love only see wrong when it’s found out?”
“Don’t shout,” I said impatiently. “You’ll be heard in the kitchen.”
“Do I care where I’m heard? The kitchen knows well enough what you think of me. You think I ought to be in the kitchen myself.”
It was hopeless. Clearly, Nellie had for years been brooding on the gulf that there was no denying—the gulf across which we found it increasingly difficult to get at one another. And all this had surged up in her mind, complicated by her conviction that I was bad for Oliver.
I got up. “Quarrelling will get us nowhere,” I said. “What do you think should be done about Oliver?”
“I think he should be thrashed.”
“I don’t.”
“You haven’t got the strength to do your duty.”
“Put it that way if you like. If you have no other suggestion, I may as well go.”
I went. In my room I drew the curtains but did not light my lamp. I sat in the dark, in no mood to read or to write. I heard Nellie’s step pass the door, and assumed that she was going to bed. A moment later Oliver’s voice could be heard, murmuring uncertainly, as though he had been awakened from sleep. Then the voice sharpened to a cry of protest: “No! Don’t!”
I leapt from the chair, and as I hurried across the landing that divided my room from his, he gave a howl of pain. The door was open. Nellie had placed a lighted candle on the table. She had pulled back the bedclothes and stripped off his pyjama jacket. With her left hand she was holding Oliver face-downward on the bed. With her right she was lashing his back with a cane, “Cheat! Liar! Thief!” she cried. Her face was inhuman with cold fury. The child’s cries were terrible. They tore my heart, and every blow seemed to bite into my own shrinking flesh.
I was across the room in a stride, and seized her wrist as her hand was aloft for another blow. “Stop!” I shouted. “Are you mad?”
She turned towards me, panting. “I am doing your work,” she gasped.
Oliver had stopped shrieking when the blows ceased. He lay with his head buried in his arms, his body shaking with sobs. In the dim light I could see the weals livid on his skin. The sight raised in my heart a fury that almost blinded me. As on that night when the youth Ackroyd had terrified Nellie in old Moscrop’s shop, I felt an irresistible impulse to strike. I tore the cane from her hand and swung it up over my head.
She faced me calmly, though her cheeks were ashen and her breast was stormy with effort and emotion. “Strike me,” she said. “That’s all it needs now—strike me.”
My arm, lifted above my head, remained as though frozen, and then suddenly I felt the cane wrested from my hand. Oliver had leapt erect upon the bed. “Don’t!” he screamed hysterically. “Don’t hit my mother!” He lashed with the cane swiftly at my head, his face contorted with passion. I ducked, and took the puny blow on the shoulder. Then, as though all life had gone suddenly out of her, Nellie collapsed in a weeping heap upon the bed. Oliver threw the cane to the floor and knelt over her, fondling her and murmuring endearments. She cast herself full-length on the bed and took him in the crook of her arm. “Oliver! Darling—darling!” she sobbed, and he snuggled closer to her, crooning like a dove. “Mummy! Dear, dear mummy!”
I shook my head as though to clear it of illusions and went back to my room.
15
That was the first time that Nellie, Oliver and I were caught up simultaneously in an emotional storm. It was the last time. Following upon years of gloom and self-suppression, that adventure into aggression and assertion did Nellie all the good in the world. The next day the three of us were easier and friendlier with one another than we had been for a long time. It was a day of packing. We were leaving with the O’Riordens in the morning for Heronwater.
We had made that journey several times now, and taken two days over it. So we did that time. We were a regular caravan: four grown-ups, four children, our maid and one of Dermot’s. As Dermot had guessed it would, Heronwater had grown on me. I was beginning to feel my roots in the North weaken. I was spending money on the place. Some day I should have to furnish a house according to my own taste. At The Beeches I hardly left my own room except to eat and sleep. It was still too terribly old Moscrop’s house. And so it was that slowly I was gathering together at Heronwater the sort of establishment I wanted. I had taken a liking to Sam Sawle, the man whose boat we had hired when first we saw the place. He was a bachelor, fond of solitude, and, as I discovered, not prosperous. He was glad to find someone who could give him a regular wage and the sort of work he liked. He was handyman at Heronwater now. He kept the place clean and aired while I was away. He kept the lawn cut up on the look-out; he managed the electric lighting plant that had been installed, and kept the boats in order. There was a flotilla moored now on our little quay. There was the motor-boat which I had bought from Sawle and christened Maeve; there was her dinghy; there was Oliver’s sailing dinghy which he had named Rory, and Rory’s sailing dinghy which he had named Oliver; and there was a light praam belonging to Dermot.
Altogether, Sawle had plenty to look after. I had had one of the outhouses on the quay mad
e habitable for him. Its length had been split into two by a wall. In one of these rooms he cooked and lived, and in the other slept. He was a good man with the children. He was patient in imparting his great knowledge of everything to do with boats and small ships, and he had more knack than either Dermot or I in giving them confidence when it came to swimming. I thought of Sam Sawle altogether as one of my best investments. The Cornish holiday was one the children all looked forward to for months before it came; and it was always those activities with which Sam Sawle was associated that roused their liveliest expectations. He knew where the filthiest lug-worms could be dug for bait, and at what state of the tide to fish round the Lugo buoy, and he knew the captains of the great square-rigged ships that came into the Carrick Roads, and would sometimes get permission for the children to go aboard while the ships were still enchanted with the voyage that had ended. They would come back chattering of monkeys and parrots that the sailors had brought from abroad, and loved rolling grand names off their tongues; Antofagasta, Monte Video and San Francisco.
And there we were once more, the whole roistering tribe of us, clattering into the dark glass cavern of London Road station. We had a compartment reserved, but even so we were a jam. The children shrieked at the windows: “Good-bye, Belle Vue!” “Good-bye, Levenshulme!” “Good-bye, Stockport!” as the gloomy soot-smothered suburbs of Manchester slid by. They were all shouting except Maeve, who sat smiling secretly to herself. And I knew well enough what Maeve was smiling about. The children’s thoughts were leaping beyond tonight and seeing already the green waterway, and the little quay, and the flotilla that Sam Sawle would have made all bright and gay; but Maeve was smiling because tonight came before tomorrow and tonight we would be in London.
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