“No,” I said. “It’s not a question of fear—”
“Right. So long as you’re sure of that. Here I am. I’m yours. It’s your job to keep me now you’ve got me.”
I had risen, too, and I put my arms about her and felt her head sink on to my shoulder. She began to cry without restraint. I held her close and whispered comforting words to her. My heart was smitten to see her so distressed. “Don’t keep on w-worrying me about r-reasons,” she sobbed. “I want to b-be fixed—safe.”
“You’ll be safe. You’ll be safe,” I murmured, “as safe as love can make you.”
She looked up at me with eyes brimful of tears. “Oh, Bill! I do like you so much. If I loved you, it would be wonderful.”
“You will. You will,” I promised her.
She managed a smile, reached up her lips to be kissed, and said: “Let me go to bed now. I’m tired out.”
*
In the morning there was no sign of the storm. The rain had ceased, the wind was gone. I looked from my bedroom window through the trees down towards the river. The trees were snared in nets of mist. The air was still and full of the drip and dribble of falling drops.
I went about my affairs with a head buzzing with thoughts of Livia. I commended to myself everything that I had done. It was excellent all round. She had said she wanted to be safe. She should be safe. What greater safety could there be than in marriage to a solid established person like myself? As for me, I wanted the woman—wanted her in every sense of the word. She obsessed my imagination as no other woman had done. The way she walked, how she looked, the way she spoke, the way her hair sat on her head and her hat sat on her hair; everything about her, the great things and the little things, had taken on for me the magical and momentous proportions of obsession. There was no arguing about it.
And Oliver? Well, it was best for Oliver, too, I comfortably assured myself. The idea of Oliver at sixteen being in love with a girl of twenty-one was monstrous, absurd. If I helped to cure him of premature notions romantic, so much the better.
I went down to breakfast and found Livia there before me, already busy with coffee and eggs and bacon. She kissed me, rather dutifully I thought. “Now,” I teased her, holding her tight, “a warmer kiss than that.”
She sat down at the table. “You’re lucky to get a kiss at all,” she said, “coming down to breakfast at this hour. Shall I pour you some coffee? I thought I should have to go without seeing you.”
“Go!” I said in dismay. “What do you mean—go?”
“Clear out. Partir. Vamoose. Abscond,” she replied, buttering a roll. “Can you spare Martin to take me in to Truro?”
“But why Truro at this time of day?”
“Because the train to Paddington stops there.”
“But today! The first day of our engagement? I thought we’d get about—see things.”
“You see! I told you you’d do no work with me about! No. As soon as I’m gone, you’ll settle down to your work. Please. Look what a lovely wretched day it is! Perfect for work.”
“Will you make a habit of running off just when I want you?” I asked miserably.
“I’m the most impulsive creature in the world. I don’t make habits. So you see, you’ll never be just one of my habits. That should be gratifying to a husband.”
She said it charmingly, but I was inclined to sulk. She shook a finger under my nose. “William Essex,” she said, “you’re no end of a great man and all that sort of thing; and I’ve told you frankly that, in getting me for a wife, that has been useful to you. But—I’m not allowing my great celebrated man to sulk and frown over what I choose to do. I won’t have that any more than if you were a Covent Garden porter. Now, what about Martin? My bag’s packed, and there’s just time to catch the train.”
I ordered the car. She gave me a much warmer kiss than the first one, and a moment later she was gone.
I had never formulated the thought, but deep in my mind, whenever I had considered the question of a second wife, had been the idea of someone completely different from Nellie. Well, it looked as though I had got what I wanted. And this very property of airy lightness, of incalculability, strangely charmed me as I made my way to my study and straightened out the notes for Act I of Every Street.
“You can see across the river now, Mr. Essex,” Sawle said as I was getting up from lunch. “You can read Captain Judas’s announcements.”
I slithered down the path to the landing-stage. The black hulk of the Jezebel loomed up through the still murky night. Painted in scarlet upon the planks of the hull I read: “The Great and Terrible Day of the Lord cometh.” “Sheep—rejoice! Goats—ah-ha!”
I didn’t like that last grim chuckle. The old man seemed to be smacking his lips as he contemplated the discomfiture of the unredeemed. I had intended to call on him, but this new turn was not encouraging.
“Have you seen much of the captain lately?” I asked Sawle, who had accompanied me to the water’s edge.
“Not so much, except when he was hanging overside painting that up.”
“It’s a long time since I saw him.”
“Ay, but he saw plenty of Oliver last summer when you wasn’t here. They were as thick as thieves. There was a night when Oliver didn’t turn up. Got stranded. You may have heard of that, Mr. Essex?”
I nodded briefly.
“Well, we were all pretty well worked up. Old Judas heard about it overnight—that they were missing. We didn’t know till the next day, but the old madman was out all night. What d’you think of that? Out all night, rowing about in a dinghy at his age! It was moonlight.”
“Yes, I heard so.”
“Well, he rowed from here to the Percuil river. Right down the roads, round by St. Mawes Castle, and right up the river! At his age! He was pretty well done up, I can tell you. And he found Oliver all right. What d’you think of that? Animal instinct, I call it. They took him on to the Maeve and gave him a ride back, towing his dinghy behind their own. I was down here when they come in. He stood up in the bows, waving his hat and shouting ‘The Lord’s anointed cometh! We have found the Lord’s anointed.’ Mr. O’Riorden said he’d like to do the anointing with strap oil.”
“It might have been a good thing,” I conceded, and Sawle grunted, “Ay, maybe.”
We gazed across the water at the enigmatic shell of the Jezebel.
“It was a pretty poor party altogether last year,” Sawle said at last, “without you and Mrs. Essex and Rory and Maeve. I missed Maeve. They tell me she’s becoming quite a famous woman.”
“She’s getting on.”
“She’s all right, she is. She’s a grand ’un. I missed her most. And I wouldn’t mind seeing that Mr. Donnelly again. He was a caution. They say Rory’s living with him now in Ireland. That’s a funny idea.”
But I was not prepared to discuss the humour of that idea with Sam Sawle. “I think I’ll pull across and see Captain Judas,” I said. “He’s bound to find out that I’m here, and he’ll expect me.”
I pulled the dinghy across the water in the utter stillness of the hushed, grey afternoon. There was no sign of life aboard. The ladder had been hauled in. The windows were fastened. The day was so quiet that I didn’t like to shout, and as I hesitated there, looking up at the frieze of gulls that decorated the rail, I made up my mind to suggest to Judas that he should arrange a bell, with the pull-rope hanging overboard. “You see, if anyone tries to surprise you by swarming up the rope, that will automatically ring the bell. If they’re unwelcome visitors, you can easily slash the rope and drop ’em into the river.” I’d put it to him like that.
I had to shout at last, sending the gulls wheeling and crying, and my voice echoing down the misty tunnel of the river. Then Judas came, his hair and beard seeming more abundant than ever, his eye more glittery, the caution with which he peered over the rail as great as a most nervous beast would use, fearing an enemy presence.
“Essex here!” I shouted, standing up in the dinghy with
one hand on the Jezebel’s side, and gazing upward at that wild apocalyptic headpiece, white against the grey ambiguity of the sky. The anxious face cleared, and the voice came down to me as thin as ever, but warm and welcoming. He threw open the port in the bulwarks, dropped the ladder, and a moment later I had scrambled aboard. He pulled up the ladder and closed the door, then took me by both hands. He didn’t come much higher than my shoulder, but there he stood like some game bantam, fierce yet joyous, driving his one piercing eye into my face. He was, as always, impeccably clean; a triangle of white handkerchief protruded from the breast pocket of his navy-blue jacket.
He had heard of my travels, and when he had taken me below he was all agog for news of the ports I had visited. The rest of my story didn’t interest him, but Havre and Marseilles, Stockholm and Copenhagen, Constantinople and Naples: all these were evidently bells in his head and they rang old tunes that he was glad to hear.
This was the first time I had been aboard the Jezebel in the winter, and I praised the captain’s quarters sincerely. The big room was as cosy as the snug of an old inn, with the fire burning brightly and the cushioned settles on either side of it inviting to repose.
“I think I could work better here than across at Heronwater,” I said.
“Ay, one can work,” he agreed. “But when will the work end? There is so much—so much. I did not get on very well with the Greek.”
I expressed my sorrow, and assured him, without seeing how it could comfort him, that I knew none of it.
“But now it’s going better,” he said. “I am in league with the enemy.”
He looked at me craftily. “Light your pipe and listen,” he said; and he told me how he had bought book after book, but the cursed language would not yield its secrets. So in Truro he had looked out a curate who was glad to augment his doubtless wretched stipend by giving him lessons in Greek. This had been going on twice a week now for a year. “Poor fool, I think. Little do you know whom you are entertaining unawares! But I sit there quietly and suck his brains, and it’s all high explosive—all dynamite.” The captain chuckled in his beard. “Woosh! Bang! Wallop! But,” he added despondently, “it’s slow work.”
He had decided that he must make his own translation of the Greek Testament. He produced his work, which had not yet advanced very far into the first chapter of the first Gospel. Already, it appeared, he had discovered enormous discrepancies between the Greek and the accepted translation, and it was not for me to inquire whether the mistakes were possibly his.
“Matthew, Mark, Luke, John,” he said. “But where is Peter? Not a word did that fellow commit to paper. Peter! Fishmonger! Probably he couldn’t write. But we’ll see. We’ll see. We’ll get him yet. Old Judas is on his trail. Ta-ta to the Triple Tiara. Excuse me a moment. I’ll make a note of that. It’s a good heading for a chapter.”
He wrote for a while in a book that he took from his breast pocket, then asked: “And how is the Lord God? Has He announced the date of His Second Coming?”
I looked at him coldly, and he shook his head. “It has not been revealed unto him,” he murmured; and then, with that quick birdlike agility of his, he leapt to his feet, putting the whole matter from him. “Tea!” he cried. “Come and see the galley.” And, as sane as any man in Christendom, he proudly pointed to the good work he had been doing with the paintbrush, making the walls of his galley shine.
In this happier, less exalted mood, we sat down to tea, looking out through the window at the winter-grey river, where a few white gulls dipped and flashed, and at the close-congregated skeletons of the trees on the opposite banks. It was then that I suggested the bell-pull to him. He discussed the idea very intelligently, pointing out that to bring the rope through the deck to a bell in his sitting-room, he would have to bore a hole in his deck and that would let in the rain. But he could overcome this difficulty, he said, by fixing a wire to the rope and passing the wire through the deck. That would need only an infinitesimal puncture. And, so keenly did the old man’s mind welcome anything to keep it in the realm of sanity, by the next day he had carried through the whole scheme. Being on the river in my dinghy, I saw him at the root of his ladder hauling on the rope and through his open window could hear the clear answer of the bell.
*
It had been my idea to be at my desk every morning at nine, to work till one, to spend the afternoon out of doors, and to read every night after dinner. But things didn’t work out like that after all. I began each day by writing to Livia. I found that there was an immense amount to say; the letter usually took an hour to write. Everything I had done and seen, the progress of the work; it all had to be told. I felt it was only half realised till it was shared with Livia. And when the letter was written I couldn’t get Livia out of my mind, so that it was not before eleven o’clock that I could begin work. Thus it came about that there was no reading, after all. I had to make up after dinner for the dilatory morning.
Livia replied regularly every day. Every time I read one of her letters, I had that feeling: that it was a reply. She never opened out, never let herself go; she just took my points and answered them or commented upon them. She was glad the weather was not too bad. She was delighted that the play was making progress. She was dismayed to find that writing to her was interfering with my work. So her letters went: always short, always subscribed “Yours with much love.”
There were only two points that were, so to speak, from Livia to me. “By the way, Maeve finds the flat rather small. She has decided she ought to have a place of her own. I told her, of course, about us. You wanted that, didn’t you? Yours with much love, Livia.”
That was one point, and I felt, somehow, I would rather have told Maeve myself. I ought to have told Maeve myself.
The second point was this. “By the way, I have just received a letter from Oliver, and it is pretty clear that he knows nothing about our engagement. Will you tell him, or shall I? Personally, I’d rather you did. Yours with much love, Livia.”
*
“My dear Oliver,—Livia Vaynol and I are engaged to be married...”
Dreadfully abrupt! “You may be surprised to know that Livia and I...”
“My dear Oliver,—I have noticed that ever since you met Livia Vaynol you have felt affectionately towards her, and I think, therefore you will be pleased to know...”
Pleased! My God! Would he be!
“It is now more than a year since your mother died...”
I tore that up, too.
*
“MY DEAREST LIVIA,—You said that by being here you would make it difficult for me to work. I wonder if you realise how much more difficult your being away makes it! If you were here, I could look up and say to myself: ‘There she is—sitting in that chair—reading that book.’ And then I would bend over my work again and get on like a house on fire. Or I would know that you were on the river, or gone into Truro to buy chops for dinner, or were giving Captain Judas a taste of heaven.
But as it is, I am unable to get through an hour without asking myself a hundred questions. Is she up yet? Is she brushing that lovely, absurd, adorable, altogether delicious poofy hair? Is she going shopping in Oxford Street? Oh, God! Let her be careful at the corners! Don’t let her be run over! Is she thinking—just one small crumb of thought spared for that humble sparrow, her bloke—is she thinking of him, working on his play, doing everything he knows to make it good, so that when the crowds get up and cheer on the first night, Livia will be pleased?
Oh, my love, do believe that all day long and every day a thousand, a million, loving, absurd and tender thoughts of you fly about in my head. God! What a fate for an eminent novelist—to be an aviary! That’s what I am, my love, a crazy cage filled with cheeping, chirping, fluttering thoughts of Livia Vaynol. You could still the whole riot with a kiss; but there you are, so unaware of your power to soothe me that you think your being away keeps my mind easy. Absurd delusion! I shall know no peace till I am home again and my love in my arms.
The play goes well. After all, having written it once, and having talked it over so thoroughly with Wertheim and made such sheaves of notes, there’s little to be done but write what is already clear in my mind. I sent Wertheim the first act, and he is very pleased with it. The second goes to him today. The third I begin to write tonight. I find writing at night here is delightful. Not a sound but the fire and an occasional moan of wind. Whatever time it is when I finish, I go out for five minutes’ air before turning in to dream of Livia, and my fellow scribe Judas has always outstayed me! This morning, it was one o’clock. His lights were burning steadily. What concentration there is when everything is focused to a point of madness!
But hurrah! and three big cheers for the glorious sanity of my love for Livia Vaynol!
For ever and ever your lover, servant, husband, BILL.”
*
“MY DEAR BILL,—Yes, perhaps it would be better if you told Oliver when you next see him. How good to know that you find Heronwater so congenial to your work and that Mr. Wertheim likes the first act! I’m sure he’ll like the second, too, and that you’ll soon be through with the third.
I find it hard to believe that my being with you would make all that difference, and you may rest assured I’m very careful of buses!
Poor Captain Judas! What a sad case he is! So sane at times, and terribly fond of Oliver. He seems to idolise him.
Maeve has found a flat and moves out tomorrow. She asked if we would be getting married soon. In that case, she would have stayed on and kept the flat after I had left. But I said we should not be hurrying things. Don’t you agree? Yours with much love, LIVIA.”
My Son, My Son Page 31