My Son, My Son

by Howard Spring

  I had imagined that Wertheim and I would have an hour’s talk about the play, that perhaps I would read a bit here and there, and that then I would leave it for him to turn over in his mind. I hadn’t known my Wertheim. He sank into a great leather chair by the fireside, a cigar in his mouth, and commanded me to read. I hadn’t read two sentences of stage directions for the first act before he exclaimed sharply: “No!” and proceeded at once to let me see how little I knew about the facts of the stage.

  “Essex,” he said, “a friend of mine received a manuscript which began: ‘The curtain rises at the moment of dawn. A cock is crowing on a dunghill. Nearby, a hen, with busy cackling, lays an egg. Enter a farm servant who picks up the egg.’ Now try to see your stage and everything that’s done on it. I think we’ll have to alter those directions to read like this...”

  So we were at it from the word Go. Lunch was brought in, and I stayed to dinner, and after dinner we were at it again. It was eleven o’clock when I called a taxi and set out for the Spaniards Road. In my pocket I had a sheaf of notes; in my mind an immense respect for Wertheim. He had been through that play with a small comb. He refused to suggest a word of dialogue. That, he said, was my job. But he was ruthless in insisting when he thought dialogue must be cut. He could will himself into the audience, see the thing, and hear the thing, as from a theatre seat, and I knew he was right. It was an exhausting, illuminating day. “And now, Essex,” he said, laying his heavy hand on my shoulder as we came through the anteroom where Josie was reading a novel, “now we’re on the way to making something of it.”

  And we were. Every Street went on in the following spring—1913—and ran till the war broke and killed it. But by then Wertheim knew what Maeve could do, and that was the important matter.

  20

  When I look back across the gulf of horror—the world’s horror and my own—to the years before the war, that April of 1913 shines with an especial radiance. It seems now as though there was something fatal about it, as though we were all too happy. The gods couldn’t put up with it. Maeve, I think, was the only one in whose heart there was a premonition.

  There we incredibly were, she and I, dining in the Café Royal, redeeming the ancient vow that we would dine together on the night when she was to make her first appearance in a play I had written for her. We had to dine very early, so that she could go on to the St. John’s Theatre, where Every Street was to try its luck. That was a thing we had not thought of in those days—how early that dinner must be—for we had been very innocent in matters of the theatre. We were learning. We had had difficulty in getting away. Everybody had wanted us: Jo and Josie, Livia, Sheila and Dermot, Rory and Maggie Donnelly. They were over, those two, on the first visit they had made to England since Rory’s Irish apprenticeship.

  But Maeve and I had got away. We should all meet at supper, anyhow, to count our laurels or lick our wounds. We leaned back on the red plush, with coffee before us. I gave Maeve a cigarette and lit it for her.

  “Nervous?”

  She shook her head, and asked in her turn: “Happy?”

  “Very—but with a fearful joy. Shivering in my shoes.”

  “You did really write Every Street for me?” Maeve asked, suddenly clapping a hand over mine and looking into my face.

  “Yes. Isn’t Annie Hargreaves your part—down to the bone?”

  “I’m very pleased with it. Oh, Man, I’m so glad—so proud—this moment has come at last. But, you know,” with a valiant smile on her colourless face across which the scarlet of her lips made a vivid mark, “I didn’t think that when the moment came you’d be engaged to another woman.”

  “My dear—” was all I could say.

  She suddenly stubbed out her cigarette. “Let’s go.”

  *

  If my engagement to Livia was painful to Maeve, it was incredible to me. It had happened so suddenly. It was on the night that I have written about, when I had a few people to dinner, that I knew I loved Livia. I had loved no woman before. I suppose I had come as near to loving Maeve as a man can come while yet feeling use and wont in the way, and an affection too level and kindly for passion.

  When we went into the drawing-room that night after sitting for a while over our cigars, I was conscious that the first face I looked for was Livia’s and that the first face Livia looked for was Oliver’s. He walked straight up to where she was sitting, took the cigarette case from his pocket, and sprang it open expertly. She took a cigarette; he lit it for her, and she patted the settee on which she was sitting. He sat down beside her, plucking with a dandy gesture at the knees of his trousers. “Phœbus in black trousers.” That wasn’t bad, Wertheim.

  Oliver had drunk no wine; I did not permit that; but his face was flushed and excited; his eyes shone; and the curls of his hair seemed almost to radiate vitality. No one, I thought to myself, could fail to be aware of his extraordinary physical attractiveness; and on the thought my mind pulled up with a jerk. Physical? That was the first time I had qualified, even in the secret thoughts of my heart, Oliver’s attractiveness.

  But what else did I know of him but the envelope that met my eye? I faced that squarely, and admitted that we had grown apart. When he was a child, I grew down to him. I did not stoop down to him. There was no condescension. It was a growth, as though I had been endowed with the happy faculty of shedding my years. I enjoyed our games as much as he did, and the happy explorations of ideas that he had called our “conversations.”

  There had been no “conversations” for a long time. It seemed to me that the time had come when my growth downwards towards Oliver’s mind must cease, and contact must now be established by his reaching up to me. He was on the verge of young manhood; I was ready, I was aching, to improve the first signs of his wanting me on wider, manlier terms. But there was no sign. Oliver the child had been my comrade. Oliver the youth had receded far from me. I saw him with sudden shattering clarity as beautiful, commonplace and vain.

  It is a fearful thing when one love wars with another. Watching him and Livia, hearing no word they said, seeing the understanding in their looks, their smiling acceptance of one another that tortured me with implications of secrets, experiences shared, I felt my heart turning over, because I knew then that I wanted Livia Vaynol for myself, and that my desire for her, and nothing else, was depreciating Oliver in my eyes.

  I knew that night, as I had theoretically known long enough, what it was to desire a woman. Liking, affection, even the brief stirring of passion that sweeps you into bed: since Nellie’s death I had known all those; but this was irrational, tyrannical, the dark fusing of body and mind in the desire to possess.

  Dermot was quizzing Josie Wertheim about a legend that had come to his ears that once, when she had been gardening at Wertheim’s country cottage, she had chased down the village street, long garden fork in hand, a girl who had tried to intrude into the quiet of Wertheim’s week-end. “One jab and four punctures,” Dermot cried ecstatically. “How could a girl with such a spread of stern hope to get into a chorus? What a forkful of ham!”

  “It was four jabs and one puncture,” Josie corrected. “That just shows the nonsense that gets about.”

  Wertheim was telling Sheila about his mother in Constantinople. She was listening with her beautiful serenity, as though she and the mother were contemporaries and Wertheim a small boy.

  I sat down beside Maeve. She put her hand over mine, a gesture she had used since childhood. “Well, Man,” she said, “it’s a lovely house, and it was a lovely dinner, and I thank you very much and hope you’ll be happy here.”

  “I’m sure I shall,” I said, and I told her of the play I had written for her and of Josie’s encouragement.

  “Does that please you?” I asked, patting her hand and looking down at the whiteness of her, rising out of the crimson velvet dress. Never any colour. White, sloping shoulders—perhaps a thought too thin—and the neck lifted up proudly between them, bearing the snow-white face, with its resolute lit
tle chin, its eyes that were both blue and black, like damsons, its red shapely mouth. Her hair was as black as coal, with no blue in it at all.

  “Dear Bill,” she said—she did not call me Uncle Bill any more—“it pleases me very much, but now the idea of having me in the play has got to please Mr. Wertheim—hasn’t it?—if he likes it.”

  “If he likes it, there is one condition on which he can have it,” I assured her. “And that is that Maeve O’Riorden plays Annie Hargreaves.”

  “You’ve always thought of me, and thought for me. I should never have been on the stage if it hadn’t been for you.”

  “And you still think being on the stage is the right thing?”

  “Oh, Man, how can you ask!” The look and tone made me feel happy that there was something I had done about which there could be no doubt.

  “Livia seems pleased with herself,” Maeve suddenly remarked, bringing my thoughts back to the focus round which they had been swaying. I looked across the room. Oliver had said something which left on his face a smile hovering between impertinence and doubt of its reception. Livia responded by reaching up a hand to tousle his hair. The whole scene bit into my mind: the long white arm, the sudden shift of the half-exposed breast, the fingers, sinking in Oliver’s curls, the light of affectionate raillery on Livia’s face. My hand gripped hard on Maeve’s, and she looked up with sharp surprise.

  “Tell me,” I said. “What do you think of Livia?”

  The surprise deepened on Maeve’s face. Her dark brows for a moment contracted and brought out a puckered frown that made my mind leap incongruously to a thought of Nellie. Then Maeve said: “She’s wanton.”

  “Good God!” I cried. “What an old-fashioned word.”

  “There are more modern ones,” said Maeve, and she got up at once to go and talk to Josie.

  *

  I threw the end of my cigar into the fire and walked across the room. Oliver rose from the settee. “I think perhaps Sheila would like a word with you,” I said. “You haven’t seen much of her this holiday.”

  He went away, exchanging a bright smile with Livia. I sat down at her side, aware that my heart was knocking and that I should have difficulty in controlling my voice. I was overpoweringly aware of her; of the perfume of her hair, of the long white lines of her arms, meeting now in hands cupped in her lap, of the swell of her breasts and the shape of her legs, emphasised by the hands pressing down the rich material of her dress, stretching it tight across her thighs.

  “I should like to drive you home tonight,” I said, and to me the words had a choked unnatural sound. She appeared not to notice that. “I had arranged for a taxi to call for me,” she said.

  “For you and Maeve?”

  “No. Maeve’s going home with her people for once.”

  Then the room and everyone in it seemed for a moment to black out. I was aware only of Livia’s hands lying in her lap, of her calm voice saying: “Maeve’s going home with her people for once.”

  I was hardly conscious that it was myself speaking when I said: “Taxis have been sent away before now.”

  “Or even shared.”

  The words brought me to myself again with an extraordinary sting of hope. “You mean—?”

  Her only answer was a clear ringing laugh. For one dreadful moment I thought she was going to tousle my hair as she had tousled Oliver’s. Then a parlourmaid came in and announced: “Miss Vaynol’s taxi.”

  She got up. “Good-bye. And thank you a thousand times. A lovely evening.”

  *

  Wertheim and the play kept me busy throughout that holiday of Oliver’s. I didn’t see much of Oliver except at meals. We went to a pantomime together, but it was a poor thing compared with the Manchester pantomimes; and once or twice we walked together on the Heath. But we never got near one another. He was at a stage which baffled me. I could not meet him on a child’s ground any more, because he was not a child; and he did not seem to have advanced a step towards meeting me on my ground.

  Walking among the gnarled thorns with their winter-rusty haws, watching the grey squirrels nip from bough to bough, I thought his eyes were as bright, unresting, as theirs; and he was as difficult to get hold of.

  “You’ll be finishing at school in a year or so, Oliver.”

  “Good egg.”

  “What about the university? Have you thought about that? Have you any reason for preferring Oxford to Cambridge, or for not wanting to go to either?”

  “Pogson’s going to Oxford.”

  “Yes, but you?”

  “Oh, I dunno. Is it a point to settle just yet?”

  “Well, I’d like to see ahead a bit. There’s the possibility that that sort of thing may not interest you at all. I don’t think one should go to a university just for the fun of it.”

  “You mean the place should be kept for the good old swotters?”

  “Well—I mean if we knew what you wanted to do, we could settle the best way to go about it. You might want to do something which made the Manchester College of Technology the place for you.”

  “Oh, God forbid! Manchester! Have a heart.”

  “Well, the law? Medicine—?”

  “Isn’t there plenty of time to make up my mind?”

  I had to leave it at that.

  The path dropped sharply into a little hollow, a basin carpeted that December afternoon with sodden leaves, brown and yellow, and filled with mist in which the tree trunks were twisted gnomelike. A youth, with his checked cap knocked askew, was sitting on a fallen trunk, awkwardly clutching his girl, whose hair was radiant with a dew of pearls. We plunged down so suddenly upon them, lost in their wraithy world, that the girl looked up with sharp surprise and fear in eyes like a fawn’s, then buried her face in the boy’s neck. I hurried on, striking out at the leaves and flints with my stick, and as we reached the farther lip of the hollow Oliver momentarily paused, looked back, and I felt that if I hadn’t been there he would have stopped and stared. Well, there was something he was interested in.

  He continued to spend a lot of time sitting about in his room. I noted that Oppenheim’s The Mysterious Mr. Sabin and Bram Stoker’s Dracula were added to his library. Occasionally Pogson called for him with a car. They would smoke a cigarette or two in Oliver’s room. There would be a lot of guffawing, and then off they would go. If I asked Oliver at dinner where they had been, he would reply: “Oh, we just belted about. Poggy can make her go!”

  Pogson, pimply, with a downy upper lip, was a brewer’s son. I didn’t like him. He was at Oliver’s school and was leaving at the end of the summer term. He looked to me as though he should already have left.

  How much Oliver was seeing of Livia, where he saw her, I never inquired. She turned up at St. Pancras to see him off when the holiday was over. I was surprised to see her there. He introduced her proudly and proprietorially to Pogson whom she stared at as though he were a slug she had found unpardonably intruding on her cabbage at dinner. Oliver looked hurt, and whispered: “He’s Pogson of Pogson’s Entire,” as though that were almost equivalent to being Hodson of Hodson’s Horse. “I don’t care a damn whether he’s entire or in little pieces,” said Livia warmly. “Of the two I should prefer the latter.” Oliver’s blue eyes turned sulky, but she was very sweet with him and he went away, happy and smiling, with Pogson’s loathsome countenance—Hyperion and the satyr—craning out above his through the carriage window.

  Livia and I walked together out of the station, steamy and echoing with an incoming train. It was the first chance I had had to speak to her since the night of the dinner-party. I could have made a chance, but I had carefully refrained from doing so. I had told myself that I would wait till Oliver was gone, and now Oliver was gone—he was gone no farther than the tunnel beyond the station, but he was gone—and there was Livia at my side.

  *

  I said to her: “I’ve been working over a play with Wertheim.”

  “Yes. Maeve told me about it.”

  “Wertheim a
nd I have done all that’s possible together. I must finish it off alone now. I can do it in a fortnight.”

  “Good. I hope it will be a whacking success.”

  “I shall take it down to Heronwater tomorrow. I’ve never been there in the winter. Would you like to come with me?”

  “You’d never work with me about the place.”

  “Oh, yes, I should. I can do all that’s necessary by working between nine in the morning and one o’clock. Authorship, you know, is one of the soft jobs, though authors like to pretend that it’s arduous.”

  We stood beside my car, exchanging this banal chat, while my heart was beating so furiously that I wondered whether it could be heard by Martin, standing there with his face politely averted.

  “I’ve heard a lot about the pains of creation,” said Livia, keeping the game going.

  “All nonsense. A professional writer who can’t turn out a thousand words in a few hours is a bad workman. And think what that means. A thousand words a day; three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Give the poor hard-working chap the sixty-five days to play with—that’s two months’ holiday a year, and he still produces 300,000 words! Enough to fill three novels—more than anyone has a right to ask the public to accept. No. The successful novelist is on a soft option.”

  “Well,” with a little embarrassed laugh, “thank you for the inside information. Wasn’t that Pogson child loathsome?”

  “I’m beginning to be troubled altogether about Oliver’s friends.”

  She cocked her head up at me sharply. “Do you want my companionship in Cornwall to see whether I’m worthy? I’m not sure that I ought to come, anyway. My reputation’s bad enough as it is.”

  I took her by the elbow and led her along the pavement, away from the car. “Would it help to regularise the position if we were engaged to be married?”