Fox swung his spectacles and pursed his lips gravely, but Grimshaw burst in heartily: “Nay, it’d be a bloody shame if a boys’ rumpus led to all sorts of ’owdy-do...”
Fox interrupted stiffly: “It is Mr. Essex’s son who is now in question, Mr. Grimshaw. If you will please allow us...” and he rose and steered Grimshaw out of the room. “Well, don’t do anything daft,” I heard that forthright man expostulating as he disappeared down the corridor.
And Fox, I soon gathered, for all his pretended judicial weighing-up of the matter, was not going to do anything daft. There was some question of my joining the governing body of the school. I suppose my name would have looked well on the prospectus. Anyway, when I asked point-blank: “Do you want to expel Oliver, or would you like me to remove him from the school?” there was a lot of tut-tut-tutting and deprecation of over-hasty action. Some added discipline, no doubt, would meet the case. When I left, I was wondering not whether Oliver was good enough for Fox, but whether Fox was good enough for Oliver.
Oliver himself, in the school courtyard, was explaining to a group of admiring fellows, including young Grimshaw whose head sported a star of sticking plaster, that this was his father’s car and his father’s chauffeur.
19
There was a time when the idea of spending six months or more out of England, with plenty of money and no one but myself to please, would have fascinated me. Now it would fascinate me no longer. I had done it, and I was glad to be home again.
I had got rid of The Beeches, passed the winter in a quiet London hotel, taken Oliver to Heronwater for his Easter holiday, and then, when he was back at school, set out. I had found a house on the Spaniards Road, overlooking the Heath, and Dermot was to see to its furnishing and decoration. This was the end of old Moscrop. He had been in my life since I could remember any life at all. Now he was going.
I felt as excited as a child as I paced the platform of Victoria which was bustling and cheerful in the May weather. I had never been abroad before. There would have seemed to Nellie something a little immoral in going abroad, and so long as Nellie was alive the idea of going abroad alone had not entered my mind. And as my thoughts turned back to Nellie and to the grey streets of Hulme and to the flat depressing acres of Manchester’s Southern Cemetery, I saw Livia Vaynol, vivid and disturbing, hurrying along the platform. Maeve followed her slowly, and slower still came Dermot, more like Shaw than ever in foxy-red tweeds, and Sheila, a little out of breath, looking, I noticed for the first time, a shade on the stout side, sedate and matronly. I glanced from her to Maeve, and “Good God!” I thought, “Maeve must be twenty, and Sheila might easily be a grandmother.”
“Quite a deputation!” I mocked them, but in my heart I was glad they were there, glad there were a few people in the world to whom it seemed to matter that they would not be seeing me for six months or more.
The doors began to slam, and I got into my compartment andleaned from the window. Livia pushed a dozen newspapers and magazines through to me. Sheila and Dermot shook hands, and as I leant out to wave, Maeve suddenly stood on tiptoe and kissed me. “Good-bye, Uncle Bill,” she said. Then Livia Vaynol pulled her aside, crying, “Me, too!” and as the train gathered speed, through the scabby back-yards and tottering chimneypots beyond the station I sat back in my corner thinking, as though there were no such person as Maeve in the world: “Livia kissed me.”
I had no scheme, no time-table. I stayed where I liked as long as I liked and then passed on. By land and sea I visited most countries in Europe and some in Asia, and in Constantinople I decided suddenly to take a ship home. I had avoided tourist routes, and whenever possible had travelled on cargo boats. I did so on the homeward journey. There was one other passenger on the ship, and we met at dinner in the captain’s cabin. The captain introduced us— “Mr. William Essex, Mr. Josef Wertheim”—but, so far as I was concerned, there was no need for the introduction. I should have known Josef Wertheim anywhere. His fat, pale, dark face, bald head and brooding melancholy eyes were familiar to anyone who saw the newspapers and weekly magazines. I could well understand his presence on that ship. To avoid publicity would be a grateful thing to Wertheim.
There was a small saloon on the ship, and after dinner we sat there and talked. I had a whisky and soda at my side, and smoked a pipe. Wertheim was a teetotaller but a large cigar was rarely out of his mouth. His reputation was tyrannical; it was said that he worked his artists to the bone. He had a genius for finding them everywhere: the latest Spanish dancer, the coming world’s champion heavyweight, the biggest giant and the smallest midget, jugglers, trick cyclists and troupes of equestrian acrobats: it didn’t matter to Wertheim what they were so long as they were the best in the world. I asked him if he had been scouring Asia for exotic talent, and he said No, he had been visiting his mother who, I gathered, lived in a small house in a suburb of Constantinople. He spoke of her with deep affection, and I felt a sympathy for the man, guessing a childhood which, for all its difference of environment, had been much like my own. Looking at Wertheim’s burly rigid body that seemed to move, when it moved at all, all of a piece, I had difficulty in envisaging the days of which a hint dropped here and there, of his young body lying on his father’s raised feet, thrown into the air, twirled barrel-wise, the father back-down on a carpet strip, a small sister collecting the offerings of a niggardly street audience.
The recollection did not move Wertheim to mirth. He never smiled. He merely let the story drop out in a few hints, then struck the bell at his side. To the steward who answered he did not give a look; he merely indicated without words my empty glass.
He asked me what I thought of Reach for the Sky, the musical show which he had on at the Palladian. When I said I hadn’t seen it, he apologised with grave courtesy for having taken up so much of my time with talk of his affairs and began to draw me out about my own books. He had read a number of them, and showed an understanding of life in the North of England that surprised me. He had put on several big shows in Manchester, and confessed that Manchester audiences frightened him. If you could get past them you were all right.
I said that I felt I had said everything that I wanted to say about Manchester. I wanted to settle in London and try my hand at a play.
“A play,” he said, looking gravely at the glowing end of his cigar. “That is something now.” He pondered, and added: “I have never done a play. That would be satisfying. Musical shows, circuses, boxing—yes, all that is amusing, and with wisdom one makes much money. But a play—that might be to make money and to satisfy something here—eh?” He tapped his enormous chest. “I have thought I would do it some day.”
“You have only to make it known, Mr. Wertheim,” I said, “and you’ll have a hundred young men of genius on your doorstep every morning.”
“Ach, I know, I know,” he exclaimed, throwing out his hands in a wide gesture of despair; and I thought of all the stories that were told of the sorrows of Wertheim. He could hardly stay at an hotel, it was said, without the chambermaids turning out to be chorus girls in disguise, anxious to display the beauty of their legs when they brought up the morning tea.
It was not till the last day of the voyage that Wertheim reverted to this conversation. We got on very well together, chiefly, I think, because we kept out of one another’s way all day, and met only in the evenings. He was as lethargic bodily as he was alert mentally. He liked to spend most of the day in his bunk with a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles on his nose and a book in his hand. After dinner we talked till midnight and became very easy and intimate with one another. It was on the last night that he said: “You know, Essex, I have been thinking about what you said—all those young men of genius on my doorstep with plays in their pockets. Well, here you’ve been, on my doorstep for days and you haven’t tried to interest me in that play you’re going to write.” He got up to go to his bunk and laid his heavy hand on my shoulder. “I like that. You let me see that play when it’s ready.”
He went
off with his heavy shambling walk, and I went to my cabin to give a look at the skeleton of the play on which I had been quietly working since I got aboard.
*
We came into London river at night. Wertheim at once went ashore, but I slept aboard. I had told nobody I was coming home, and the next morning I walked happy and unembarrassed about London which still had for me the lure of novelty. It was a grey and lowering November day, but any day was good to be home on, and the only thing I lacked was agreeable company for lunch. With that idea in my head, my footsteps automatically made their way up Regent Street, into Oxford Street, and through Orchard Street to Baker Street. In a turning to the right was the house where Maeve and Livia shared their flat. What more could I ask, to complete the benediction of homecoming, than the company of Maeve and Livia at lunch?
I climbed the stairs to the top floor, and knocked at the door of the room I had visited several times before going away. It was a long room with a large skylight. Receiving no answer to my knock, I pushed open the door and saw Livia standing before an easel under the skylight. She was wearing a green overall. The nimbus of her hair shone, as improbably round as a dandelion clock, in the light that fell from above. With a brush full of sepia water-colour she was “squiggling,” as Sheila would have called it: producing upon paper pinned to a large board a series of flowing and somehow curiously related curves. Maeve was not in the room, and though I had been telling myself all the way to the flat that I wanted to take Maeve and Livia to lunch, I was aware of a leap of gladness at finding Livia alone.
“Good-morning,” I said, and Livia whirled round in surprise. Then, seeing me, she stuck her brush into a pot and hurried across the room. “Oh, the brown man!” she exclaimed, putting a hand on each of my shoulders and looking me up and down. “What a bit of holiday will do! Thinner, if anything. And greyer—but most handsomely grey. And brown as a gipsy. You look like a handsome colonel just back from service in the East—little clipped moustache and all.”
“Thank you. That’s the first time anyone has called me handsome, and I must say I like it.”
“Well,” she qualified, pulling me into the room and taking my hat and coat, “at least you’re thin. I always feel that if a man can’t be truly handsome, thinness is the next best thing.”
There was a healthy fire burning and an inviting divan stretched before it. I sat down, and Livia produced sherry. She sat at my side. “You know, this is really very charming,” she said. “I had no idea you were homeward bound, much less home.”
“I only got into the Thames last night, and I slept aboard.”
“Then I must be the first person you’ve called on.”
“You and Maeve. I called on Maeve, too, you know, though she isn’t here. I wanted to take you both out to lunch. But I seem to be interfering with some work.” I glanced towards the easel.
“Oh, that! Poof!” And Livia gave that comical push to her hair that had amused me in Manchester. “You wait till you see your house,” she said mysteriously.
“Have you been allowed to trespass?”
“I’ve seen one or two things. I have even,” she added proudly, “designed one or two things—the curtains.”
“Well, I’m glad to know that,” I said, genuinely pleased. “I suppose Dermot commissioned them?”
“Yes. He liked some of those things,” waving towards the easel, “and got me to do them on linen. They look nice.”
“I’m sure of it. I hope he paid you well.”
“Seeing that it’s an ‘exclusive design by O’Riorden,’ for which he’ll charge you, I hope you won’t think he paid me too well,” she said with a little malicious grin.
“I shall be really glad to have something by you in the house,” I assured her. “And now, what about lunch? Is it any use waiting for Maeve? Will she be in?”
“She will not,” said Livia. “The show she was in ended last week. She’d worked all the year with hardly a day off, and now she’s taking a holiday. She’s earned it.”
“Oh! Is she gone away?”
“To Ireland. She’s visiting her brother.”
“Rory. How’s he getting on?”
“I know nothing about him. I’ve never seen him, you know. All I can tell you is that Maeve’s potty about him. They write to one another two or three times a week, and not long ago I was present at a pretty little row between Maeve and her father. She wants the boy to be brought back.”
I sighed. “Yes, I know all about that. It’s an old, old story now. Well, let’s lunch alone. Café Royal?”
Livia got up and shook her head. “Oh, no—please,” she said. “I’ve just got you back after months of wandering in the wilderness, and now you want me to share you with a crowd of chatterers. Let’s have lunch here. I was just going to put out my own. There’s so much I want to know—where you’ve been, what you’ve seen, what you’ve done—”
I followed her into the kitchen. She put a cloth, glasses, cutlery, on to a tray. “Here, fix the table in the studio. I’ll knock up an omelette.”
She knocked up an omelette very efficiently, and with that and a crusty French loaf and butter, followed by fruit and coffee, we made a good meal.
“Light your pipe,” she said.
I did, and felt at ease and at home. Livia carried the dishes into the kitchen. I liked that. I detest seeing the débris of a meal lying about a room. While she was away the sky, overcast all day, darkened. Besides the skylight, there was one window in the room. It looked on to nothing but a tumble of roofs and chimneypots, and upon that wry landscape a heavy leaden rain began to fall. It rattled on the skylight, and, looking up, I could see it sliding past, giving me the impression of being under a little stream in spate.
Livia came out from the kitchen. She had shed her overall and was wearing a grey skirt and a red woollen pullover that fitted closely to her body. She reached up to a cord and pulled a blind that slanted down across the face of the skylight. “I can’t stand seeing this sort of weather,” she said, “and I can’t stand seeing the stars or the moon through that skylight. I always shut it out at night. Maeve laughs at me. But I hate to feel an immensity above me when I’m shut in. Now this one,” she added, pulling the curtains across the window. “Ugh! Those grey roofs under the rain!”
She threw some coal upon the fire and then sat down on a comfortable chair over to my right. “There!” she said. “Isn’t that better? Isn’t that cosier and more human?”
The room was filled with a comfortable dusk, livened by the leaping flames. “Now,” she prompted me. “Tell me of strange cities and marvellous seas.”
I would much rather have told her how glad I was to be there, how enchanting I found her company; but I repressed that desire and did my best at a lively travel lecture. When I told her of my meeting with Wertheim she became excited. “There’s a man to know, now,” she exclaimed. “What a thing it would be to design for a show by Wertheim! Stage settings, dresses—couldn’t something marvellous be made of it?”
“Poor Wertheim!” I laughed. “No wonder he looks pale and sad and travels on cargo boats. Everybody wants to use him or to be used by him. You want to design for him. I was dying to talk to him about a play, but thought it better policy not to. And above everything else, I want him to see Maeve act and give her a good push off.”
“Let’s think of something for Oliver while we’re at it,” she chaffed me. “What can Wertheim do for him?”
“I don’t know yet that Oliver has any talents Wertheim can use. You and Maeve have. I have. But what about Oliver? Tell me, how did you get on with him?”
During my absence that summer Dermot had looked after Oliver’s holiday. Rory had remained in Dublin; Maeve’s play was still running; so the party at Heronwater was small: Sheila and Dermot and Eileen, Oliver and Livia Vaynol. I gathered from letters I had received that Oliver had invited Livia.
“Who wouldn’t get on with him?” Livia now asked. “I think he’s the most marvellous person for ge
tting on with that I’ve ever met. Perhaps, after all, Wertheim isn’t his man. You ought to put him into the diplomatic service.”
Once she was launched, she talked for a long time about Oliver. There was one adventure that evidently remained vividly in her mind. Oliver had taken her out in the Maeve after dinner, and though Sam Sawle had warned him about tides, he had made a mess of things. He had taken the boat up the Percuil river on a falling tide—a mad thing to do. They had thrown out an anchor and gone ashore in the dinghy.
“It was a marvellous night,” Livia said. “There was a huge moon, and you know up that river in the evening it’s as quiet as the grave.”
“It would be,” I said, “with the tide falling. Certainly no one in his senses would be there to disturb you at such a time.”
Livia looked up sharply. “You sound cross.”
“He seems to have been inconsiderate,” I said, aware that I was feeling very cross indeed. I didn’t want to hear the end of the adventure, and yet for the life of me I couldn’t leave the subject alone.
“I suppose while you were ashore the last of the tide went?”
“It was all right for the dinghy,” Livia said. “We rowed alongside the Maeve, and there was water under us, but the Maeve’s pretty heavy. She was on the mud. We had to get back ashore. It was lucky there were plenty of rugs.”
“Lucky! It sounds providential,” I said, and again across the darkened room, with the rain tap-dancing on the skylight and the fire flickering, Livia looked up sharply at the tone of my voice.
“Providential,” I repeated. “To provide for. To cater. To prearrange.”
“You mean, you think Oliver—”
“Well, one doesn’t usually, when going for an after-dinner run, provide for a night out,” I said bluntly. “You must have been there all night. You’d get no more water up that river till the morning.”
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