My Son, My Son

by Howard Spring

  And that was what I did. I was aware of nothing more till the driver was shaking me gently and telling me it was four o’clock.

  “No one’s come to this ’ouse, guvnor,” he said, “an’ the world’s beginnin’ to wake up.”

  I stumbled out of the car, feeling drugged and stupid, and there was not much sign of the world’s awakening. The moon was gone, and the touch of frost. The morning was raw, damp, and utterly black. But presently the sound of a hob-nailed boot echoed along the pavement.

  Then here and there pale lights appeared at upper windows and behind fanlights. Against the pewter of the sky the paler grey of smoke wavered from chimneys.

  “Early risers ’ereabouts,” the driver volunteered, speaking out loud now that the mystery had gone from the world and its grey misery had returned. “I don’t reckon it’s any good ’angin’ around any longer. I could do with a drop of ’ot coffee.”

  I agreed that there was nothing to wait for. I could picture the boozed magnanimous Pogson. “An’ Essex better stay the ni’. Goo’ ole Essex.”

  So we drove to a coffee-stall, and then the driver took me home to Hampstead. And for all the hobnails that had echoed through Camden Town, it was still dark when I got into bed and fell heavily asleep.

  26

  That was in January of 1914. When May came, Oliver’s birthday month, I, not having seen him in the interval, was sorely tempted to write to him and send him a present. But I thought of the five pounds I had sent him from Dublin, and of how it had come back, and that made me hesitate. Livia, I suspected, had been seeing Oliver a good deal, but I only questioned her about it once. Then she answered rather testily: “Of course I don’t see him every time he cares to ring me up. But I can’t help seeing him now and again, can I?—an occasional lunch...”

  Being convinced that she knew at this time more of Oliver’s mind than I did, I resolved to take her advice about this business of the birthday present. I called at her flat and found her up to the eyes in work, designing dresses for the revue with which Wertheim was now pressing forward. She kissed me dutifully, and was not very cordial, and asked me to sit down and smoke while she continued with her work.

  I lit my pipe. “Does it disturb you if I talk while you are working?” I asked.

  “So long as it’s just prattle. Then I can say ‘H’m’ or ‘Ah’ as the case may be. Nothing serious, please.”

  “But it is serious. I want to talk about Oliver. He’s eighteen this week.”

  She put down her pencil and lit a cigarette. “Yes; on Friday.”

  “I wonder whether this might be a chance to get in touch with him again—whether a present and a letter might help. Have you seen him lately? Have you any idea what his feelings about me are now?”

  “Bitter,” she said briefly. “I don’t think anything you could do would help—at the moment.”

  Then I burst out, formulating a thought that had been niggling in the back of my mind for a long time: “Why is it that he’s turned against me because I’m going to marry you, and yet is so friendly with you, though you’re going to marry me?”

  Livia crushed out her cigarette and stood up. “After all,” she said lightly, “I am the bone of contention.”

  “Contention!” I almost shouted. “What contention is there about it? For God’s sake, let’s get married and settle this wretched business once for all. We should have been married months ago. Once we’re married, Oliver will come to his senses. The way things are now is bad all round.”

  I got up in my agitation and paced across the room, paced towards a long mirror hanging on the wall there, and pulled up short, suddenly appalled at my own reflection coming to meet me. Gaunt, almost haggard with the anxiety of the last six months, a thin man with hollow cheeks and face too deeply lined, the hair at the temples turning from grey to white, elsewhere from dark to grey. And I thought of the golden-haired boy, knocking a cigarette on his finger-nail outside the office in Holborn, sauntering with the self-possession of a young confident god to keep an appointment under the clock.

  I turned, abashed, to Livia, who was watching me as though she divined the thoughts that were burning up my mind. I wanted to say: “You don’t love me. You have never loved me. You love Oliver, and he loves you. And that is right. That is as it should be.” But I did not say that. I could not say it. Instead, I took her suddenly, hungrily, into my arms, as I had never taken her before, all the thwarting I had endured from her stimulating a desperate wish to possess her. She remained for a time rigid, almost resistant. Then my heat melted her. Her body relaxed and she gave me kiss for kiss. She herself threw off the overall she was wearing and thrust my hand up under the loose jumper to the warm flesh of her straining breast. She pressed herself against me, limb to limb, each limb alive and passionate. So this is Livia! This, at last, is Livia! She said huskily: “Lock the door.” When I turned from doing so she was already pulling the jumper up over her head.

  *

  In her sleep Livia turned over. When I woke up I was gazing at the great dandelion clock of her hair. My nose was almost nuzzling into it; the warm hay-like smell of it was in my nostrils. Gently, so as not to wake her, I pulled down the bedclothes to delight my eyes with the sweet spectacle of her back, brown and silky. With my finger I traced the ridge of her spine, then ran the flat of my hand down her body. I could reach to the incredibly smooth skin behind her knee. Then up her thigh my exploring hand came, on to the slight convexity of her belly. She stirred, half-woke, pressed my hand into her flesh, then raised it till it was cupped round her breast. There she squeezed it again, sighed with happy exhaustion, and slept. Holding her thus, I, too, fell asleep once more.

  When I woke for the second time, the room was dusky, I was alone in the bed. The frame of the window showed like a dark cross behind the tissue of the curtains. The corners of the room were quite dark. I lay on my back, happy, relaxed, flooded with a sense of well-being.

  The door opened, Livia pressed down the switch which lighted a rose-shaded lamp on a table at the bedside. She pushed the heavy curtains across the window. The room looked delightfully warm and intimate. Livia wheeled in a tea-wagon, with a kettle hissing over a spirit-lamp, cheerfully tinkling china, and a plate of muffins under a silver cover. She sat on the edge of the bed and poured water into the teapot.

  “You’ll catch cold like that, you old Esau,” she adjured me, as I sat up in bed naked as I had slept. “Put this on.”

  She draped a ridiculous wisp of a dressing-gown round my shoulders. But I was not in the mood to feel a fool. I felt a conqueror. I laughed happily, and Livia laughed with me. She leaned over, put her arms round my neck and her lips to my ear. “I daren’t look you in the face while I tell you,” she whispered. “It was wonderful.”

  I held her tight while I whispered back: “Why wouldn’t it be, my sweet? It was the first time ever with a woman I love.”

  As I held her there, I could feel that under the dressing-gown she had nothing on. I pulled her arms out of the sleeves, and she sat up, her golden torso emerging from the blue silk held tight by the girdle.

  “That’s my idea of Hebe,” I said. “Now pour the libations.”

  She sat like that on the edge of the bed, giving me tea and muffins, now turned sideways to me, with one taut breast in profile, now full on with both the rosy peaks directed towards me. Now and then I reached out a hand to touch the softness of her flesh; to press gently the domes that stood out so white, so beautifully blushed with pink, upon the tan of her body. The clock ticking quietly on the table under the lamp was the only sound we could hear save our own muted voices and the gentle chatter of the kettle-lid. The world, and all the cares of it that had pressed upon me so heavily of late, seemed very far away. The clock said six-thirty.

  “My sweet,” I said, “I had no idea I had slept so long.”

  “You slept for nearly an hour after I got up. I bathed before I made the tea.”

  I put my arm round her waist, pulled her tow
ards me, and buried my face between her breasts. “You smell divine.”

  “It’s the bath salts.”

  “It’s Livia-Hebe, Hebe-Livia.”

  “And what does all-conquering Jove propose to do tonight?” she asked, sitting up, one hand pressed to the bed on either side of her.

  “What is the good of being a god if you cannot pull strings?” I asked, and took the tassel of her girdle, and pulled.

  *

  I have said before that Livia was good at making omelettes. It was at midnight, when I lay drowsily between waking and sleeping with her in the crook of my arm, that she suddenly sat up and said: “I’m going to knock up some omelettes. I don’t know about you, but I’m starved.”

  I grunted: “I don’t know whether I’m starved or not, and don’t care. I’m just happy.”

  “D’you realise that we went to bed without any lunch, that tea was a long time ago, and that we had no dinner? Omelettes, I say.”

  She leapt out of bed and pulled me by the hair. “Come on, you too. Put on a few clothes. It’s cold.”

  We went into the kitchen, which a gas-fire soon warmed, and while Livia made the omelettes I laid the things on the red-and-black-checked cloth of the kitchen table. I loved doing it—laying knives, forks, plates, cups, saucers, so intimately for me and Livia. She swooped upon the table, removed the cups and saucers, replaced them with tall thin amber glasses, and produced a bottle of hock. “We’re not going to let the occasion down with tea,” she assured me. “You get on uncorking that.”

  I applied myself to the corkscrew, and as the cork came away with a plop, I started upright. “What’s that?”

  Was it a knock, or had the sound of the cork merely made me imagine it? But Livia had heard it, too. She turned out the gas-ring, and in the cessation of its singing we heard the knock again.

  Whoever was at the door could not hear our voices in the kitchen, for the sitting-room was interposed, but instinctively I spoke quietly. “Who on earth can it be at this time of night? Better ignore it.”

  Again the knock, louder, insistent.

  “Let ’em knock,” I insisted. “They can’t see the light in here.” But Livia, without speaking, shook her head. She had gone white, and her hand, holding a fork, clattered suddenly against the side of the gas-stove. She remained silent for a moment; then she said: “It’s Oliver. He won’t go away. I’ll have to let him in.”

  As she spoke, she regained her self-possession. The colour came back to her face. She laid the fork smoothly on the side of the stove. She whipped quickly from the table everything that suggested a meal laid for two. Knife, fork, plates, glass: all went at high speed to their places. Even as she thus swiftly worked, she said: “Get into the bedroom. Take the key with you, and lock it inside.”

  I felt crushed, deflated, humiliated. To have to conceal from Oliver the intimacies of my own life, to have to cut barbarously short the happiest experience of my manhood! I could not get into the bed. I felt absurd, outraged, in the clothes I was wearing: nothing but a collarless shirt, a pair of trousers and an overcoat. I huddled unhappily into an easy chair.

  Now Oliver was in the sitting-room, on the other side of the door near which I sat. There was a hint of arrogance in his tone. “You take a lot of rousing, Livia.”

  “My dear, forgive me,” she said. “I was in the kitchen cooking some supper, and the gas-ring in there sings enough to drown the last trump. And, anyway,” she added, with anxiety in her voice, “look at the time! It’s half-past twelve. I should have been in bed an hour ago if I hadn’t such a lot of work to get through. I don’t expect visitors at this hour.”

  There was a long pause; then Oliver said: “Can you put me up for the night? I’ve got nowhere to go to.”

  “But, my dear, what do you mean? Why can’t you go to your rooms?”

  “Because I couldn’t pay the rent last Saturday. I’ve bluffed along between then and now, but tonight the old slut showed me out. Said she didn’t want any shabby-genteel toffs sponging on her, and I could call for my things when the rent was paid. Nice, isn’t it?”

  I could imagine the defiance, the bravado, in his eye. I heard the rasp of a match as he lit a cigarette.

  “But you shouldn’t have let things reach such a pitch,” Livia said. “You silly boy, I could have paid your rent.”

  “You’ve paid enough,” he said; and that told me what I had long suspected. “You’d have been paying for a long time, perhaps, because I’ve lost my job. Otherwise, I could have paid for myself.”

  “But I knew nothing about that. I didn’t know you were working out your notice. They have to give you notice, haven’t they?”

  There was a long, significant pause. I could imagine Oliver sitting there, his hands dropping between his knees, the flick of cigarette ash to the carpet as he burned his boats and answered brazenly: “Not always. There were circumstances which made it impossible for me to insist on my rights.”

  “I see,” said Livia in a tiny voice. “You mean you had done something which caused you to forfeit your rights?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Oliver burst out testily. “What sort of life was it, anyway? I’m not sorry to leave it. Old man Pogson made me sick. I never heard such pi-jaw. If it hadn’t been that I was a friend of his son—a friendship which he must now insist should end forever—God! Anyone would think I was a thief. A piffling ten bob that I’d have put back at the end of the week—”

  I could swear that Livia was on her knees before him now, such pleading and reproof were in her voice. “Oh, Oliver, my dear, my dear! Why did you do it? It was so little—such a foolish little bit of money that I could have given you twenty times over.”

  “No!” he said sharply. “I’m sick of sponging on you. I’ve had enough of it.”

  “But what will you do?”

  “Find another job. There must be plenty of them.”

  “I’m not sure that it will be so easy—now.”

  “You mean Pogson won’t give me a reference? I shan’t ask the old swine. I’ll say I’ve never had a job before. I look young enough.”

  “But until you find another job?”

  “Couldn’t I stay here?”

  “You see how illogical you are, my dear. You said that you were sick of sponging on me. The little money you wanted wouldn’t have made any difference, but now you want my time and privacy. They’re far more important.”

  There was a moment’s silence; then Oliver spoke again—now in a new, caressing voice. “I’m sorry, Livia—my dear, my sweet. God, I’m useless! I know—don’t think I don’t know. I can’t understand why you put up with me; but please, please don’t turn me down now I’ve been wandering about town all night, trying to think of some way without troubling you, but there wasn’t any—not any at all. Let me stay tonight. We’ll think of something in the morning. We’ll see some of your friends: that chap Wertheim—people like that. There must be work.”

  Livia seemed to ponder. There was silence for a long time. “You’d better have some supper,” she said at last. “I was just making my own. Go into the kitchen and eat it. I feel too upset to join you. Then you can sleep on that couch. I shall get up at eight and expect to find you gone. Make some breakfast before you go if you like. I shall meet you at the Café Royal at one o’clock for lunch. Do you agree to all this?”

  Her voice was brisk, almost stern; then suddenly I heard sobs—heart-rending weeping. She had broken down completely, and I could picture her sitting there with her body shaking, her eyes streaming.

  “Livia—my sweet—my darling—”

  “Go away!” she almost screamed. “Don’t touch me. Get out. There are times when I hate you.”

  I heard the reluctant shuffle of Oliver’s feet towards the kitchen, and a moment later Livia was at the door of the bedroom. I unlocked the door; she locked it again behind her. I held out my arms to her, but she shook her head impatiently and climbed miserably into bed. We dared not speak. I pulled the clothes
up round her shoulders, tucked her in, and stood for a moment looking down at her still shaking body. Then I put out the light, went back to my chair, and, huddled in my overcoat, tried vainly to sleep.

  In the morning I heard Oliver moving about in the next room. It was a grey overcast day. The bedroom seemed cold and cheerless. I was aware of having dozed and wakened and dozed again throughout the night, of having felt cold, of pulling the overcoat about me. Now, as I stood up, my bones seemed to creak. My teeth suddenly began chattering. I felt an old man. The mirror did not comfort me. A strained, tired face, hollow-cheeked, stubbled with grey, stared at me and caused me to recoil in disgust. I felt rather sick and very hungry.

  Livia slept. I tiptoed to the bed and looked down at her. She lay on her back with one bare arm out—flung over the bedclothes. The black dry stains of tears were on her cheeks. She looked extraordinarily defenceless and pitiful. I had never seen her sleeping face before, for when I had wakened up in the bed yesterday afternoon her back was to me. There was not a line on her face. It was young, untrodden by the years. So golden she looked to me, but gold unminted, lacking the stamp and superscription of time. Tears which would make their channels now made only stains. Suddenly as I watched her she smiled, turned on to her side, and sighed. But she did not wake.

  There had been silence without for some time. Oliver, I guessed, had gone into the kitchen to make some breakfast. Now I heard the sound of his feet crossing the living-room. I held my breath as the handle of the bedroom door turned softly. But the key was turned. “Livia! Darling!” Oliver whispered. I imagined he must hear the beating of my heart as I stood there a few inches from him, picturing the fair head bent listening at the keyhole. “Darling! Darling!” he said again, as though this time he were ecstatically exclaiming to himself, not calling Livia. Then he went. I heard the outer door of the flat pulled to behind him, softly.