I dressed quickly then, gave a last look at Livia who was still sleeping and murmuring now in her sleep, and went out of the flat. I could not bear the thought of her seeing me as I then was.
I took a taxi to Paddington Station where I was shaved and then had a bath. I went to the hotel dining-room and ordered breakfast. With hot coffee and food in my stomach I felt better. I resolutely chased away the ghosts that could not but haunt me in that room: for this was the room where, often enough, we had all sat down to breakfast together: Nellie and I, Dermot and Sheila, Maeve, Eileen, Rory and Oliver, all on tiptoe, with the ten-thirty to Falmouth waiting without. Chase them as I would, the ghosts closed in on me. Suddenly I felt utterly miserable in that room, utterly abandoned and alone. I called for my bill and went gladly out into the street.
It was still only half-past eight. By nine o’clock I was back at Livia’s flat. She was at breakfast, looking as fresh as though she had come with perfect sleep through a night that had held no disturbance. She kissed me, but there was in the kiss none of the passion that she had shown when we lay together the day before. She inquired politely if I had breakfasted, and when I said I had, she sat down and tapped the top of an egg.
“Livia,” I said, “if I were to get through now on the telephone to Martin he could have the car here in an hour, with all I need for going away. Could you be ready in an hour?”
She laughed merrily. “My dear Bill, you look so grim! What is this you’ve been thinking out?”
“That it’s high time we were married. We can go down to Heronwater, find the nearest registrar, and have done with it.”
“You old Puritan,” she mocked me, complacently excavating the egg. “Do you feel you must make an honest woman of me?”
“For God’s sake be serious, Livia,” I burst out. “I want to make a happy woman of you, and a happy man of myself. We can’t go on like this. There’s no sense in it. It’s not fair to me. It’s not fair to Oliver. Don’t you realise that it’s playing the devil with my life, with everything I worked for and hoped for, when Oliver gets into the sort of trouble he’s in now?”
“You don’t suggest, do you,” she asked with dangerous calm, “that Oliver’s stealing to entertain me?”
“No no! Don’t twist what I say. But the boy’s all to pieces. He’s upset, restless, loose-ended. I don’t suppose he knows what he’s doing or why he’s doing it. If we were married, he’d have to come to his senses. We could take him in hand between us, get him back on the rails. Perhaps we could get him off to a university. Let’s have this thing settled now. If you won’t marry me at once, let’s have an understanding about when we shall marry. Give him something concrete and settled.”
“Are you thinking about him or yourself?”
“I’m thinking about both of us, and about you, too. We’re all three of us at a damn awful loose end that’s no good to any one of us.”
“I’m not,” she said with exasperating calm. “I’ve got work and to spare for Wertheim, and—”
“Oh, damn Wertheim!” I exploded unjustly. “I wish you’d never met Wertheim.”
“That’s very egotistical, Bill. It would have been nice to have me entirely dependent on my celebrated husband. I decline to go round with all those horse-faces who are smashing windows and tying themselves up to the railings at Westminster, but I’m all for women’s rights when I’m the woman.”
I could have ground my teeth in exasperation, but forced myself to keep calm.
“Will you marry me,” I asked, “when you have finished this job with Wertheim?”
“Yes.”
Somehow the answer surprised me’, and I was surprised, too, to find that I was sweating. I took out my handkerchief and wiped my forehead.
“When will that be?”
“I should be through in two months’ time—say the middle of July. I’ll marry you in August.”
It was incredible. We were talking as though we were arranging to go somewhere for the shooting. I could hardly believe it as I walked through the May morning across Portman Square. “I’ll marry you in August.”
27
I saw Livia’s tears again that night. She rang me up and asked me to take her out to dinner. “I want to tell you about Oliver,” she said.
He had spent the morning in a public library, answering advertisements for clerks. At lunch-time he appeared at the Café Royal, very spruce—“you know, Bill, his hair was shining, and his eyes were so blue. And his clothes—I don’t know how he’s kept them so perfect in that awful Camden Town house.”
“You’ve seen it, then?”
“Yes, but he doesn’t know it.”
“So have I.”
We were silent for a moment, thinking of the long, grey vista of that satanic street.
“It’s amazing,” said Livia, “how bright and shining he keeps. He commands attention, you know. I’ve never been to a restaurant with any man who brings the waiters hovering more quickly, without a word, without a look.” She smiled, evidently recollecting many such occasions. “Were you like that when you were Oliver’s age?”
“I had never been into a restaurant at Oliver’s age, and if I had gone, I should certainly not have known what to do about waiters.”
“I couldn’t help admiring him,” Livia continued. “If I had been where Oliver is now—without a job, without a penny, at odds with everybody—why, I should be utterly crushed.”
I didn’t hurry her. I let her tell her story in her own way, and soon she got past this bright façade to the grim facts. Oliver was quite sure that he would soon get work. In the meantime, he was, as she had said, without a penny. She had tackled the matter in the business-like way I should have expected of her: told him he must pay his landlady what he owed her and keep the rooms as a base for job-hunting. She had promised to give him two pounds a week as long as he needed it. He had smiled. “Not give, Livia—lend.” Very well, then: call it a loan. And how much would he need to clear up the present mess? He thought five pounds would do, and produced from his pocket an IOU for that amount, already signed.
It was then that Livia got out her handkerchief and cried furtively. “You see, he had it ready. He knew that he was just there to raise the money.”
She took the IOU out of her bag and handed it to me, blinking back her tears. I indignantly tore it to pieces and dropped them into the ashtray. I took her hand and caressed it. “Livia, you mustn’t, my dear, you mustn’t do this. Oliver is my responsibility. As long as he needs money he shall have it—from me. Will you let me do this?”
“You really want to?”
“Desperately. God knows I want to do it. It’s little enough. But you must not let him know it is from me.”
She dabbed at her eyes and tried to smile. “Very well,” she said, and added, looking at me queerly: “You don’t deserve two bad eggs like me and Oliver.”
*
I was walking along Regent Street the next day—a fine blue and white day when I should have felt in the best of spirits. But I didn’t. A definite date had been fixed for my wedding, and not so far ahead. That should have made me gay enough, or at any rate should have lifted the feeling that wherever I moved a grey fog moved with me. I looked up at the clouds thin as lawn veils on the blue; I was conscious of the frolic wind blowing the women’s skirts and livening the air I breathed; but all the same, the thought of Oliver was more powerful than all other thoughts, and it darkened my mind.
Across the street was the long frontage of Dermot’s shop, now, as always, an attraction to loiterers. It was full of lovely things: furniture, fabrics, pictures, glass, porcelain, all unique. I lingered for a moment, letting my thoughts go back to the shop in Manchester, where the Gauguin, daringly exhibited after Dermot’s first visit to Copenhagen, had caused so much head-shaking; the shop over which were the offices of our toy company. It all seemed very long ago; it seemed to belong to a golden time, when life had more difficulties and yet was easier, the time before one was middle-ag
ed and feeling it.
I crossed the road and went through the swinging glass doors. Within, all was silent, the feet treading a deep-piled carpet. There was not in Dermot’s shop anything of the roar of the market, the hullabaloo of the vulgar popular “emporium.” Down long vistas the eye travelled, resting on lovely and expensive things, staged superbly. The assistants looked like attachés, the managers like ambassadors. A swift, silent lift, whose door was a grille of beautiful wrought-iron, took me to the topmost floor where Dermot had his office. It was the sort of office Dermot would have. It was beautifully carpeted. Every stick of furniture had been made not only in his own workshops but by his own hands. It was cosy and intimate without being crowded, without fuss. The linen curtains were Livia’s work. A Monet landscape was over the stone fireplace where, despite the warmth of the day, a fire was burning. Dermot sat before the broad expanse of his desk, but there was not a paper on it.
He jumped up and greeted me with outstretched hands. “Well, trying to catch me out again?” he demanded, waving his long bony hand towards the workless desk.
“I’m just looking for company,” I said. “I suddenly felt lonely as I was passing the shop, so I came up.”
He looked at me sharply, the point of the beard raised, the acute nose almost visibly scenting. I knew that little which I did or thought was concealed from that penetrating intelligence. He laid a hand on my shoulder with an affection he had not shown for a long time. “You know, Bill,” he said, “since you came to London you’ve never been happy—not really happy.”
He was aware that Oliver had left home, though we had never discussed that matter. He was aware—but I am not sure how deeply aware—that all had not gone smoothly with me and Livia. His awareness of these things, his sense of the long bond between us, was in his eyes and his voice and in the sensitive fingers that rested now on my shoulder. “Old friend,” he said—and he had never used such an expression before—“old friend, it would do you good to talk about this and that.”
He spoke into the telephone on his desk, asking for coffee to be sent up. He gave me a cigar—“the sort we use,” he grinned, “when the deal is of over a hundred pounds”—and we took the coffee out on to a little balcony to which you stepped through his window. There were a couple of cane chairs, and a painted iron table, and a few tubs with bay trees and flowering plants. We were lifted up over London: a grey, smoking plain of roofs ran out before our view, punctuated with spires and towers and domes. The noise of the street came up muted and almost melodious.
We sat in silence for a while, then Dermot said: “I’ve got nothing to say to you. I’m here to listen. Go on now. Talk.”
And I did. Diffidently at first, then with gathering confidence and relief. A wonderful relief. This was what I had wanted. Too much had been bottled up in me. At the end of an hour I felt much better, happier even.
“And you’ve been keeping all this to yourself,” Dermot said then. “Well, I guessed most of it.”
“And I’ve told some of it to Maeve,” I said. “You know, Dermot, look back over my life as long as I can, I’ve had only three friends: that old parson Oliver that I’ve told you about, and you and Maeve.”
“Maeve,” he ruminated. “But you want to marry the Vaynol woman. Well, that’s how life is, and I’m not going to argue with you about it. But marry her—for God’s sake marry her quick. Don’t wait till August. And then there’s Oliver...”
He ruminated again, turning up the point of his beard and nibbling it thoughtfully with his teeth. “You can’t have him wandering about at a loose end like this, Bill. It’s damned demoralising. Taking a weekly dole from a woman... God in Heaven, man! Rory’d shoot himself first.”
I winced at the harsh truth of those words and Dermot put a hand over mine—that was Maeve’s trick, too. “Sorry, Bill. That slipped out. You send the young fool to me. I’ll give him a job. Have you seen the young sparks strutting about downstairs? I always insist on looks. He’s got looks, anyway. Yes; send him to me.”
“I can’t send him.” Hateful to have to admit that.
“No, of course not. Well, look, I’ll advertise in the Daily Telegraph. See that this woman calls his attention to it and makes him answer. We’ll hook him that way. And marry the woman! Marry her quick!”
We got up and wandered back into Dermot’s room. He picked up a newspaper from a chair and slapped the open page with his fingers. “See that? God damn England! Another nail in her coffin.”
I took the paper and looked down the column, Dermot standing there bristling at my side. I read of the Amending Bill to exclude Ulster from the operation of the Home Rule Bill.
“Marvellous, isn’t it?” Dermot snarled. “All the pukka sahibs, all the best people, all those officers at the Curragh who took the oath of loyalty to the king have told the king where he gets off. We do what we’re ordered to as long as it’s something we want to do, see, Mr. King? But don’t you step on our toes. Remember, we’ve got the guns. That’s the stuff to give the disloyal Irish. That’s the way to teach ’em loyalty, eh, Bill? So along comes this lovely Liberal Government, with the blessing of Mr. Bloody Redmond, and says: ‘Dear Boys, we wouldn’t offend you for worlds. If you want Ulster left out, it’s all one to us. Yours is the last word.’”
I thought he would have spat. Certainly he would have spat if he had been a spitting sort. But he just bristled. There was an almost palpable electric emanation of anger from him.
“But is it the last word?” he demanded, his eyes shining with fanatic light. “I’ll tell you this, Bill: it’s the last word necessary to do one important thing, and that is unite the south. They haven’t loved each other too much, believe me. But love isn’t necessary now. They’ve all got something to hate, and that’ll work just as well. Love for the same thing never makes allies. It’s always hate for the same thing.”
“And when the fight’s over the allies have nothing left but their hates. I’m not much of a politician, Dermot, but that’s why I expect there’ll be hell in Southern Ireland for a long time to come.”
“But a lot will happen in the meantime. Rory’ll see a lot happen in the meantime.”
“I expect he will,” I said.
*
All very well for Dermot to say: “Marry the woman at once.” The woman would not be married at once. But Dermot’s scheme for Oliver worked well enough. Livia told me that Oliver had found in it a matter of rejoicing because he imagined a personal score. He wrote to the box number under which the advertisement appeared, and when a reply came from O’Riorden’s he at first shied away. Then the idea lit him up. “But imagine! Getting a job off his own best friend! That would be something, Livia, eh?”
And Dermot told me of the interview at his office: Oliver looking—“Well, you know, Bill: not Angles but angels: like one of those kids, perfectly dressed by a modern tailor.”
It was a comfort to me to know that Oliver was working for Dermot and not for Pogson, and that Dermot encouraged rather than frowned upon the old name of Uncle Dermot, hoping through this intimacy to lead Oliver into confidences that might be twisted at last towards a reconciliation with me. But there he was not successful. He confessed as much to me sorrowfully. “Charm! Begod, Bill, he’s as charming as a spring morning; and then at the first sign of the cloven hoof when I drag in your name he hardens over like a winter day.”
I was still hopeful that time would cure that, and as the summer deepened I felt altogether happier, confident that a way would open out of the dead end into which my affairs had drifted.
Dermot thought that a definite effort should be made to bring me and Oliver together. “You’ve never seen the boy, Bill, except the time you talked to him on the pavement with his boozy pal. That was hardly a time for opening hearts. Now you must meet at my house.”
So he invited Oliver to dinner at Hampstead, not letting him know that I would be present, and he did not invite Livia. It was a Sunday night, so that Maeve might come, and Sheila a
nd Eileen were there. Just a family gathering which Dermot hoped would do the trick.
It was not a success. When I went into the drawing-room Oliver was already there with all the O’Riordens. He kept his self-possession marvellously. A quick shock of surprise flashed over his face, and then was subdued. He rose with easy good-humour, and shook hands. His grasp was warm and firm, as of a friend. It affected me queerly, for Oliver and I were not accustomed to shaking hands. “Good-evening, sir,” he said, and as he uttered that formal word which I detested I could have sworn there was a light of mockery in the candid blue of his eye.
I looked beyond him to where Maeve was sitting, and saw that with both hands she was gripping the arms of her chair, as though to force herself to remain in it. I could see that the moment was for her one of agony and suspense. Actress as she was, she had not mastered the moment with the almost insolent nonchalance of this smiling boy.
All through the evening he called Dermot “Uncle Dermot,” and addressed the others with easy familiarity. For me he reserved that chill formal word, speaking to me only when I spoke to him. They all tried hard to keep the tone of the occasion friendly and happy-go-lucky, as though nothing unusual was happening, except that once, while we were at dinner, Maeve took my hand beneath the cloth and squeezed it with affectionate reassurance.
When Sheila, Maeve and Eileen got up, Oliver said: “Will you all excuse me if I go now? I have an appointment in town.”
They politely demurred, but he went, with charming apologies and insistence. Three-quarters of an hour later I asked if I might use the telephone, and rang up Livia’s flat. There was no answer. I devised in my mind a score of reasons why there shouldn’t be.
*
It was in June—on Sunday, June 21—that this humiliating dinner was given by Dermot. Perhaps the adjective is not a good one. Grieved I was, and hurt and sorrowful, but even until the end I felt no humiliation from anything Oliver did to me. No more than I felt it from what Livia had done and was yet to do.
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