My Son, My Son

by Howard Spring

  “No,” she said tartly. “The tides come twice a day.” She fluffed her hair and shook her head as though she were annoyed at my persistence. “Naturally, we were there all night. It’s possible to make yourself comfortable. The hillside’s covered with bracken, and what with that and the rugs, we were quite well off under some bushes. There was a moon. It was hardly dark at all, and we were warm.” She seemed to be talking to herself now, to be re-living and re-enjoying an experience.

  “It must have been very upsetting for Dermot and Sheila.”

  “I suppose it was.”

  “I know pretty well where you must have camped. Do you know that if you climb up through those fields you come to a road, and that on the road you find houses with telephones? Oliver could have got through to Heronwater. He knows all I’m telling you. He knows all that country like the back of his hand. I suppose Dermot had his car there?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, it would have been easy for him to get to you by road.”

  “It sounds more and more—providential,” she smiled.

  But I didn’t like it. The more I heard of it, the less I liked it. I put down my pipe, walked across, and sat on the arm of her chair. She turned her heart-shaped face up and smiled at me. “You know, Livia,” I said, “this seems to me to have been a rather foolish adventure.”

  The smile faded from her face. She got up and left me stranded awkwardly on the arm of the chair. Colour mounted to her cheeks as she faced me from the hearthrug. “I don’t think it was foolish,” she said. “I’m not a child. I know what I’m doing.”

  “But Oliver’s little more than a child.”

  “Is he?” Her brows went up, and there was in the question a depth of meaning that shocked me. “He must have done a great deal of growing without your noticing it. I apologised to Dermot and Sheila for the uneasiness I caused them, and I’m sorry for that. But for the rest, I regret nothing that happened—nothing.”

  The strength of feeling in that repeated “nothing” made my heart bound. I slipped down into the chair she had vacated and lit my pipe. The rain had ceased, and in the sudden silence of the room there was a vibrant tension. Livia broke it by harshly rattling the curtains back from the window, revealing the wilderness of wet gleaming roofs, and letting the skylight blind run back with a snap. Daylight flooded the room, dimming the electric lamp that was still burning. Livia knocked up the switch with a defiant flick, and as the cold calm daylight gave everything solidity and proportion again, and the dirty sparrows fluttered and chattered in the roof-puddles, I felt as though I had awakened from a nightmare full of implications that were the more horrible because they were so illusive and ill-defined.

  *

  “Let’s have a look at you,” I said, and I was pleased with what I saw. Oliver had said he would whistle across the landing when he was ready and he had whistled, and I had gone to his room to see him in his first dinner-jacket. To reach his bedroom, I had to go through his sitting-room, and opening out of his bedroom was a bathroom. It was a convenient arrangement. He need disturb nobody, and nobody need disturb him. I wanted that house at Hampstead to be something final. I didn’t want to be always on the shift, and, while providing for myself, I had provided for Oliver. Here, surely, was a useful and necessary part of the machinery for his living. Soon he would go to Oxford or to Cambridge. He would decide what he wanted to do with his life, and here, during the vacations, and afterwards when he was done with the university, he could get on with preparations for doing it. I imagined a young student of law or medicine, or perhaps a young writer, thanking his stars for this excellent provision of quiet and privacy.

  Nothing was lacking. There was a comfortable desk, well-furnished: stationery, pens, ink, blotter. The bookshelves, which on two sides of the room went half-way up the wall, had been beautifully made in Dermot’s workshops. I had spent some thought in filling them. There was all sorts of stuff that I believed was calculated to stir a boy’s imagination, give him hints, open gates. At sixteen something should be happening to a boy’s mind. Sometimes, when Oliver was out, I would go into the room hoping to find open on the table or left lying on a chair some book that would give me a hint of the way his mind was tending. How I should have taken such a hint, fostered it, blown it to life! But so far, all I had found were books I had not bought, novels with garish pictures on their shiny paper covers: Guy Boothby’s Dr. Nikola, Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, that sort of thing. These and such-like seemed to be the whole of Oliver’s reading, and there were plenty of weekly journals lavishly illustrated with racehorses and lovely actresses. Since Oliver had come home for the Christmas holiday there had been no other signs than these of mental stirrings. He liked to loll in his large chair with his feet on the desk, the Heath spread before his gaze, and an occasional cigarette in his mouth.

  Time enough, time enough, I consoled myself. Here, in these surroundings, he will find himself one of these days. And what were you doing at sixteen? Well, I was lodging in Ancoats with the O’Riordens. I was earning my living. I was catching the flavour of Dermot’s enthusiasms. I was eating my way through all the good stuff in old O’Riorden’s book-cases. I was dreaming of making a fortune; I was beginning to scribble.

  Can you imagine Oliver doing any of these things? No, nor do I want him to. Time enough for that. But all the things you were not doing at that age he is doing already; dressing up to the times, smoking, making eyes at girls. I wondered how far he was going with that.

  Oliver turned round proudly from his dressing-table. He was shooting up in the most astonishing fashion. He must have been five foot ten, slender, graceful as a young tree. He had given himself a lot of attention. His longish curly hair was gleaming from the brush. His blue eyes had an almost childish diffidence as he stood there asking: “Well, will I do?”

  “Let’s have a look at you,” I said. “Yes. You can wear evening clothes with anybody.”

  “Who’s coming tonight?”

  “Your Uncle Dermot and Sheila. A man named Wertheim—I’ve mentioned him to you, haven’t I?—and his wife. I don’t know her. She’s an actress. They’re the only people you don’t know. Then there’ll be me and Livia Vaynol, and you and Maeve. Are you ready to come down now?”

  “Yes. D’you know what I was thinking as I dressed?”

  “What?”

  “Something you’d never guess. Something you’ve probably forgotten.”

  “Well?”

  “Do you remember when I was very small and you bought me a suit of black pyjamas? You came upstairs and dressed me in them. It was a birthday or something and Maeve was there to tea, with Rory and Eileen. We went downstairs hand-in-hand, and everybody laughed at me.”

  “I remember it very well. You never wore those pyjamas. Never. Not once. Good money wasted. Well, no one will laugh at you tonight.”

  “Rather not! I think I look pretty good.” He surveyed himself in the mirror. “Yes.”

  “Come on, then. We must be downstairs when people come.”

  We went out through his sitting-room, and I detained him for a moment, holding his arm. “You find this all right? You can work here?”

  “Top hole,” he agreed.

  “I see you have been doing some reading. What is it this time?”

  I picked up the book lying face downwards on the desk. It was another of the prolific Mr. Boothby’s—The Beautiful White Devil.

  “You seem to like this chap.”

  “He’s jolly good,” he grinned. “I wish you could turn out books like that.”

  “How do you know what I turn out? Have you read any of them?”

  “I’ve tried.”

  “But not got far?”

  “Not very.” Abruptly changing the subject, he said: “By the way, guv’nor, Christmas is coming. I wish you’d give me a good cigarette case.”

  “Gold? Jewelled?”

  “Don’t twit me. Something decent. Something you can offer people. You don’t mind my smoking,
do you? I’m not doing much.”

  “So long as you keep it in reason. Were you really thinking of tonight?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, put this in your pocket. It’s full. I make you a present of it now.”

  I handed him my gold cigarette case.

  “Oh, no,” he protested. “I can’t take yours.”

  “Take it. I don’t mind offering people a cigarette from a yellow cardboard packet. If they don’t like it they can lump it.”

  He put the case in his pocket. “Normally, of course,” he conceded, “I think you’re right. But when one’s wearing evening clothes it’s rather different, don’t you think?”

  I grunted, and we went downstairs together.

  *

  Dermot walked up and down the drawing-room, poking out his red beard inquisitively at this and that. He walked with his hands behind him, body bent forward, almost prodding with the beard. Occasionally he passed a hand over a table, fingered a curtain, stood back from a picture.

  “D’you remember those first things I made, Bill?” he suddenly demanded. “Those bookshelves for father, that dining-room table with the atrocious bulgy legs for mother? God! How I’ve got on! How I’ve got on!”

  “Let him stand up on a chair,” said Maeve. “He’s going to crow.”

  “Something to crow about, my girl,” said Dermot, “and don’t you forget it. And don’t misunderstand me. When I say ‘got on,’ I’m not thinking of filthy lucre. I’m thinking of the mind—the soul—the imagination—all that.” He gestured vaguely with his white, longfingered hands. “They don’t know what they’re talking about, this generation that gets everything done for it.”

  Sheila smiled at him affectionately, and patted the hand of Maeve who was sitting on a footstool at her feet. “Let him be,” she said. “It’s just the way of him. He always was an orator.”

  There was a lot of grey in Sheila’s hair. She was making no pretence of being a young woman. She was dressed like a matron. Her face and figure were stoutening, but her eyes remained grave and beautiful. She held out her hands to the flames.

  The two girls were excited at the prospect of meeting Wertheim. “How does one tackle a rich Jew who has everything to give away that one desires?” Livia asked. “Does one say: ‘O Jew! Rich as thou art, the talents of thine handmaiden will enrich thee still further if thou wilt deign to employ them?’ Is that the line, or something more direct and slashing: ‘Look here, Ikey-Mo, my designs are pretty hot and there’s money in ’em?’ ”

  “When you see Wertheim,” I answered her, “you won’t think much of either of those lines. And here he is.”

  Dark, unsmiling, immense, Wertheim came into the room with his wife clinging to his arm. Clinging is the word. I had heard that Wertheim had married an actress, and, as I came to know the story later, the facts were these. Josephine Robbins was a New York girl who worked in a big store. It was the first of the stores founded by Dermot’s uncle, old Con O’Riorden. Josephine was stage-struck, worked like the devil, and at last found herself in the front row of the chorus. There she stuck. She had a lovely figure but the plainest and most homely face you could imagine. Nor had she any talent for anything but dancing, and she was no good at that except in a regiment. But Wertheim saw her, fell in love with her, and married her. He said she reminded him of his mother. From that moment, she wanted to forget that she had ever been a “chorus lady.” Nor did Wertheim want to remember it. So it was that Josephine’s clothes were always of the demurest, her deportment of the most serious. She was Josie to Wertheim; he was Jo to her; and they were a devoted and happy couple. She came into the room that night holding on to her mighty man like a slender and undistinguished bear-leader whom you would hardly notice in the presence of its sulky-looking powerful charge.

  This was the first dinner-party in my new house. I was anxious to make it a success, and, frankly, I was anxious to put everyone on good terms with Wertheim. I was careful when I made the introductions to mention the things about them that would interest him.

  “This is Dermot O’Riorden, my oldest friend. Perhaps you’ve seen his shop in Regent Street?”

  Wertheim nodded his head. “We have, haven’t we, Josie? Very expensive. Very expensive. But very lovely.”

  “This room is done by Mr. O’Riorden,” I explained. “Everything in it.”

  “Not everything,” said Wertheim, advancing to look closer at a winter landscape by Vlaminck over the fireplace. “Not this—eh?”

  “Well, I chose it,” Dermot said, “and induced him to pay a lot of money for it. I got on to these fellows early. They didn’t cost me much.”

  “And there’s something else that he chose but didn’t do,” I said, displaying the curtains. Wertheim gazed at them hard, making with his hands passes in the air that the decoration of the curtains seemed to suggest. “Yes. That is good now,” he admitted. “That is good. There is a sense of design here. Something original. I could imagine this done on the grand scale. In the theatre—eh? Curtains—very important.”

  “They are the work of Miss Vaynol here,” I explained and was rewarded with a “God bless you, my child,” look from Livia.

  “We meet all the talents,” Wertheim exclaimed, shaking hands.

  “Including Maeve O’Riorden, the actress,” I said. “She trained with Mary Latter, and was all through the run of Mid-Winter Harvest.”

  “Yes, yes. We saw it three times, didn’t we, Josie?”

  Josie nodded. She seemed to have no other role than that of agreeing with her husband. Seemed to: but as I got to know her better I found that she was his most effective dragon, too, and that no nuisance could come at him that had not first overcome Josie.

  “A charming piece,” said Wertheim, “and we remember your part very well, Miss O’Riorden. And this, no doubt,” he added, bearing down on Sheila, who had shyly kept aloof, “is Miss O’Riorden’s mother. I can see that. I can see that this is what Miss O’Riorden will be like in a few years’ time, if she is lucky.”

  “Jo!” said Josie sharply.

  “Yes, Josie?”

  “Control your emotions.”

  “There!” he exclaimed with comical despair. “She thinks I am too much of the East. She has been reading Disraeli and Queen Victoria. Ah! When will they let us have a play about that: Disraeli, Gladstone and Victoria. Poetry, prose and the heart of a woman. There’s a theme for you, Essex! And this—this Phœbus in black trousers—whose son is this?”

  He took Oliver by the hand and gazed earnestly into his smiling and lightly flushed face.

  “Mine,” I said simply.

  “Ach, God!” said Wertheim, dropping Oliver’s hand and lifting his eyes to the ceiling. “To be young and beautiful! I never was either.”

  *

  I sat at the head of the table, with Wertheim on my left and Mrs. Wertheim on my right. Next to Mrs. Wertheim sat Oliver with Livia beyond him. He was very attentive to Livia all through the meal, exchanged hardly a word with Mrs. Wertheim and scarcely a look with Maeve who was opposite him. Poor Maeve, I am afraid, was left disconsolate, for she was sitting between her father and Wertheim. Wertheim recurred to the subject of the French Impressionists of whom Dermot had a splendid collection, some in his flat, some in the gallery he had opened at his Regent Street shop. This was a matter on which Wertheim was deeply informed, and the pair of them talked over Maeve’s head in the most shameless fashion. At last, Dermot threw even the pretence of courtesy to the winds. “Here, Maeve, change places with me,” he said, upsetting the arrangements I had carefully made; but now everybody seemed happy: Dermot and Wertheim swopping stories of the men they had known in the Paris studios when you could pick up dirt cheap pictures now declared to be masterpieces; Maeve and Sheila hobnobbing the more happily because they saw little of one another in those days; Livia and Oliver exchanging heaven knows what quiet sweetnesses; and Josie Wertheim and I.

  She astonished me by saying: “Jo tells me you are going to
write a play for him. I want him to do plays, you know. The big showman business is all very well, but I think he’s got more in him than making a nice background to show off girls’ legs.”

  This was pretty good from Josie, whose own adorable legs, though I did not then know it, had been her fortune. But Wertheim interjected a growl: “Essex, don’t let her run down the loveliest things God ever made—a woman’s legs. They kicked me into Park Lane.”

  Josie waited till he was deeply immersed with Dermot once more, then said: “Seriously, now that his mind’s turning to this, help me to keep him up to it. He’s talked a lot about you lately. He’s spent his life finding new things, and now that he’s thinking of the legitimate stage, he won’t look at the men who’ve had a long list of successes. He’ll find a new dramatist. It might as well be you. How is the play going? What do you call it?”

  “It’s finished. I don’t know yet what it will be called.”

  “You’re a quick worker!”

  “Oh, no, I had six months’ holiday. The thing was working in my head all that time, and bits of it had got written. During the voyage home I roughed it out. Since being back, I’ve been completely undisturbed and I’ve had nothing else to do.”

  “Would you like to tell me what it’s about?”

  I did; and Josie said: “You must call it Every Street.”

  “That’s splendid! That fits it perfectly.”

  “Are you free tomorrow?” she asked, rummaging in the handbag which she kept on her lap. She produced an engagement book. “Eleven o’clock?”

  I said that would suit me.

  “Very well, then.” She made a note in the book. “Bring the play with you.”

  I liked her intense practicality. I liked the way I found her the next day, sitting in an anteroom through which one reached Wertheim’s study that looked out on to a garden in which a plane tree held up its bleak winter arms to the sky.

  “You won’t be disturbed,” she promised, opening the door and allowing me to see Wertheim’s back, as he stood, hands behind him, brooding through the window upon the grey, grisly day; and I knew that we were indeed safe enough from any intrusion, with Josie posted on guard.