My Son, My Son

by Howard Spring

  “We’ve had some good times here, Bill,” Dermot said. “I shall remember them. The children. I shall remember all the fun we’ve had here with Oliver and Rory.”

  “And Maeve. There was a summer night I rowed her up the river, and there was a full moon, and we saw swans flying across it—strung out they were in a line.”

  “I was thinking particularly of Oliver and Rory,” Dermot said. “It’s all behind us now, you know, but I’m glad it’s there to think of. We had some good times with them.”

  “Yes, we had.”

  “The whole damn world is falling to bits, Bill. Did you know that? This is the big thing. This isn’t the Boer War this time.”

  I didn’t answer, and after a moment he said, as though it took some saying: “Bill, you’ve often heard me say ‘God damn England.’ Well, now I say ‘God help England,’ and that’s a prayer.”

  I looked at him, moved and surprised. He was standing with outthrust beard, his face pale, the cheeks twitching, not looking at me, looking across the water at the Jezebel, but I don’t think he was seeing it.

  “I’m glad to hear that, Dermot,” I said. “This isn’t a bad country.”

  “This is not a bad country,” he echoed. “I’ve spent my life here, and I know. If this country is in it—and I don’t see how she can fail to be—she’s going to need her men. I’d like Rory to be one of them. And begod,” he flashed, “we could have it out with you afterwards.”

  “You mean that? You’d like Rory—?”

  “I do.”

  “You’re too late, Dermot.”

  “Like you, Bill.”

  He said it without anger, in no way as a taunt. It was a simple statement of the truth.

  Dermot had taken me down to the river so that we should face this truth together: the truth that we had lost our sons.

  *

  That summer, in its fullness and in its autumn decline, was the loveliest I had ever known. I do not think this is an illusion, a nostalgic looking-back to Paradise lost. I have the clearest remembrance of day after lovely day, of evening after evening in which the light prolonged itself into blue magical dusks, and of splendid dawns arriving as if out of some inexhaustible benevolence. The summer and the autumn seemed to be the work of a God who must surely be very pleased with a creation he favoured so deeply.

  It was unendurable, this weather. Had thunder and lightning and blasts that stripped the trees come on that Sunday after Dermot had left I should have rejoiced in the sense of the appropriate, but when I awoke to the house empty of my friends, and saw the sun shining through the window, and heard the green stately indifferent trees gently rustling their wings, I felt abandoned and desolate.

  When I got downstairs I asked Sawle and Martin to have breakfast with me. They diffidently did so, but it was not a success. It was stressing the abnormality of the moment.

  But to be alone was torment. I went down to the landing-stage and sat there smoking my pipe, looking at the woods rising up behind the Jezebel, touched here and there with a rusty streak of brown, a patch of yellow or red, the first diffused sparks of the flame that would soon be running from one end of the wooded river to the other. It was heart-breakingly beautiful there, with the silky blue of the sky stretched over the woods, and the light raining in dancing drops on the water.

  The boats stood over their blue and white reflections on our side of the water. We shan’t want them again, I thought. They stirred memories that were wounds; memories of that visit when Nellie was alive and the boats were new, and the children saw them for the first time. “Boats! All our very own?”

  I thought kindly of Nellie and her timid faithful ways, and I made a mental note to tell Sawle to get rid of all the boats except the Maeve and her dinghy. They hurt me too much.

  Then I fell to wondering where Livia was and what she was doing; and I thought of that night in her flat when I had awakened and counted the little bony peaks that punctuated the ridge of her spine, lying like the main range of a delectable country that I had been permitted so briefly to invade and possess.

  At that I got up and shook myself. This way, I should go melancholy mad. I rowed out to the Maeve, took her down the river, and when I reached the Carrick Roads let her go all out, racing across the tranquil water where the gulls dipped and screamed, racing through the heartless perfect day from the loneliness and desolation that settled again grimly on the thwart beside me when the engine’s clamour subsided to a purr and the Maeve slowed towards the white bob of the moorings.

  *

  All through the Monday Sawle and Martin went gravely about their affairs. We three existed there in the isolation of Heronwater as if in a vacuum. We saw no other soul that day. The weather again was hot and still. The very trees seemed to be as motionless as though all their energy were absorbed in the expectation of some mighty event. Martin had gone early to Truro and brought back all the newspapers he could buy. They echoed with the marching of armies. Serbia, Austria, Russia, Germany, all were astir. Germany had invaded Luxembourg. Moving west.

  Till that day, no word of the war had passed between me and Martin and Sawle. But when I went out after breakfast Martin was hovering anxiously near the door. “D’you think we’re going to be in this, sir?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. He went away with thoughtfully pursed lips and squared shoulders.

  And on Wednesday morning we knew we were in it. Martin asked: “Shall we be going back to London soon, sir?” and I knew what he meant. If I were not going back, he would be going without me. His worried face cleared when I said: “Yes, we’re going back today. As soon as you can get things ready.”

  There was no reason now for me to remain at Heronwater. Some voice which I knew had no sense in it had urged me to stay there till I had heard for good or ill whether Livia would come back. Now I knew that she would not come back. Her letter from Copenhagen had reached me that morning.

  She did not call me “Dear Bill.” She did not call me anything. I could imagine the debate she had had with herself as to what, in the new circumstances, she should call me. So she just plunged straight into the letter like this:

  “I am doing this because I must. You asked me once whether I loved Oliver, and I said I did not know. I think I was lying to myself even then. I have loved him from the moment I first set eyes on him, though, God help me, I expect little profit from it. But I have learned not to expect profit from love, and I have loved more than one man. I think it was the utter safety you offered me that I could not stomach, for I am too young to feel the need of safety. If I have done you wrong, it is not in robbing you of the marriage you expected, for that would have been small comfort to you, but in ever allowing you to expect it. For that I ask your forgiveness.

  LIVIA VAYNOL.”

  That was all. The letter was addressed from a Copenhagen hotel. I saw no reason to answer it.

  *

  It was from Wertheim that I learned of their Odyssey. He was frantically trying to get Livia back to England. Every day he wrote and telegraphed and telephoned, threatened and cajoled. “Soon! Soon!” he shouted to me one day. “She says ‘soon’! My God, what does soon mean to me?”

  I have never before seen Wertheim excited. Josie was with us. “Control your emotions, Jo,” she admonished him. “I don’t know what ‘soon’ means to you, but to me it means when one or the other of them has got it out of the system. Not a minute before.”

  She was a wise woman, was Josie. When she heard that they were making for Paris she nodded her head. “Now we shall see,” she said. “In Paris that young man will see something of the war: men marching, bayonets, girls cheering. That is going to mean something to a young man without a job. And he’s had her for three months now.”

  Josie was right. It was soon after this, at the beginning of December, that Wertheim said: “She’s back. She’s brought him with her.”

  A day or two later I saw them. I was crossing Waterloo Bridge on a raw blustery afternoon, darkening tow
ards twilight. The wind was combing cold ripples into the river, and water, air and sky were alike chill and foreboding. Coming towards me from the north side was a marching company of men, such as one saw then at almost every hour of the day: newly-attested men, not uniformed, marching to a station to set out for a training-camp. This was a mixed and ragged lot. A military band went before them, blowing heartily into the dank air, and they stepped out to it bravely enough: short men and tall, toffs and ragged hobbledehoys, men in caps, men in bowlers, men in felt hats, some neatly overcoated, some in threadbare coats. I could not have overlooked Oliver: no one could have overlooked him. He was the tallest man there and he carried his body straight and his head high. He had neither hat nor overcoat, and wore new blue tweeds. They struck me, because I had never seen Oliver in tweeds before. His fair hair was lifted by the light wind. Some obstruction ahead caused the column to halt, and as they stood there marking time, he did not look to right or left but kept his head up and his eyes fixed far ahead.

  I felt my throat contract with emotion. The brave music. The boys marching. Oliver! He had halted very near me where I leaned on the cold parapet of the bridge. If I had called his name he would have heard me. But I dared not. I dared not risk the sightless, unacknowledging turn of those blue eyes. The sergeant at the head of the column shouted “Forward! Quick march!” and the music and the men diminished on my hearing and my vision into the murk of the afternoon. I stood there in the wind whistling up from the river till the high golden head was gone from my sight and the last far notes and drum-beats merged with the customary drone of the city.

  *

  The encounter emphasised my loneliness. I continued to walk across the bridge feeling sucked and dry and withered. I was very lonely indeed. Oliver, Livia, Martin, Sawle: all were by this time gone. I could have found the companionship that these men had accepted. I was forty-three. There were men of my age dyeing their hair, swearing to a youth that had passed them, scrounging a way into the army by one deception or another. I could have done the same. But I did not do it, or at any time feel an inclination to do it. Later, my reputation as a writer got me work with the Ministry of Propaganda, and I wrote much that I remember neither with pride nor pleasure. There is no need to go into any of that now, but I write this to show that I had an occupation of sorts while the war lasted. But at that time I had not even this shadowy consolation.

  I had been suddenly overcome by the absurdity of a man in my position, with no family and no hope of a family, owning two large houses. I tried to sell the Hampstead house, but failed to do so. But I couldn’t live in the place. It had become a mausoleum. I had all its furniture, and all the furniture from Heronwater, put into storage, shut up both houses, sold my car, and for the first time since I married Nellie Moscrop all those years ago I was without the responsibility of a home.

  During those friendless, hideous early months of the war, when everybody about me seemed buoyed up by an enthusiasm—an hysteria?—which I was unable to share, I lived in a small obscure hotel, rarely venturing out, because I equally disliked the “God bless you, Tommy” scenes of the day-time streets and the sepulchral crawling about of people in the darkened thoroughfares of night: the most hateful confession, as it seemed to me, that man has yet made on the earth. I could not stand it when lighted windows, the loveliest symbol of peaceful men dwelling quietly about their hearths, were put out.

  Living thus alone, with no responsibilities, seeing no one but a few shabby strangers, doing no work, brooding upon the defection of Oliver and Livia and the more impersonal but bitter and obsessive tragedy of the war, I fell into a morbid condition of body and mind, a hypochondria in which I felt myself to be deserted by all the world, though I was deliberately concealing my whereabouts from those who could have helped me. I was hugging my griefs to me, inviting them to kill me, and they nearly did.

  My walk that afternoon on which I saw Oliver was typical of the sort of thing I was doing at that time. I had been over to the south side of the river because it was unlikely I should see there anyone I knew. I had wandered about among mean streets, filling my mind and my eyes morbidly with the flaming posters that invited the sheep to the sacrifice. I lunched meanly at a greasy little coffee tavern where the tables were covered with scabby white American cloth. I was piling the agony on to myself in every way I could devise. The encounter with Oliver was the last thing needed. When he had marched by, the wind seemed shrewder, the world more bitter and I made my way to the back-street hotel that was my lair in a spirit of mental and physical hopelessness which I savoured like an opiate.

  After dinner I was the sole occupant of the lounge—a dimly-lighted decrepit place with a handful of fire crumbling in the grate. An old black-beetle of a waiter came sidling in now and then, God knows why, flipped at this or that with a napkin, and sidled silently out again. Presently I gave a violent shiver, and pulled my chair nearer to the insufficient fire. That did me no good, and the next time the black-beetle crawled in I asked him to bring me whisky, hot water, sugar and lemon. There was no lemon, but I compounded a grog of sorts, drank it and went to bed.

  I slept badly. The shivers returned, so that at last I dragged myself out of bed and spread my overcoat on top of the eiderdown. Then I slept, and when I woke in the morning I was drenched with sweat. All through the day I slept and woke in fits and starts, and the only thing I was conscious of was the lightness and apparent largeness of my head that seemed like a balloon eager to lift my body out of the bed and float it away.

  I awoke out of one of my dozes to find the day gone and the dreary room lit by a bedside lamp. I was aware that people were in the room, but I did not know that they were a doctor and Annie Suthurst. This had been achieved by a piece of detective work on the part of the hotel manager. It was characteristic of that wretched little hotel that the play-bill of Every Street still hung in the hall, though the play had been off for some months and Wertheim’s great musical show was settling down to its success. The manager knew that I was the author of Every Street, and, being alarmed about my condition, he decided to ring up someone who might be supposed to have an interest in me. He found Maeve’s name in the telephone book, and she was just setting off for the theatre when news of my illness reached her. So Annie Suthurst was sent for a doctor, under whose sedative I slept calmly that night, and awoke in the morning weak, clear-headed and feeling very foolish.

  Repentant, I think is the mood I was in when Maeve and Annie appeared soon after breakfast-time. I felt like a child who has been consciously playing the fool. It was over: there would be no more melodramatic nursing of sorrows.

  But that didn’t help me with Maeve. There I was, haggard and unshaven, in that frowsy room, and Maeve without stint told me what she thought of me. I had worried my friends unpardonably; I had caused her profound anxiety at a time when she ought to have had her mind on her work—“to say nothing,” Annie Suthurst broke in, “of draggin’ you round ’ere after t’theatre last night.”

  I think Maeve had not intended to say anything about that, and in fury at my learning that she had rushed to the hotel with the paint hardly removed from her face, as soon as the show was ended, she exclaimed: “Shave him, Annie. He’s disgusting.”

  “I will an’ all,” Annie said, delighted; and ignominiously I had to submit to her ministrations, thankful that I used a safety razor. She sponged my face and brushed my hair, and I felt so much better that I managed a sheepish smile. “I could eat something,” I said.

  I was allowed nothing but hot milk and dry toast, and then, Annie having miraculously made the bed and pillows comfortable, I was told to go to sleep again. Happy to be commanded, to be, after that morbid aberration, in competent hands, I did as I was told.

  Three days later, when I had got back from a tottering walk with Maeve in a spell of winter sunshine, she raised the question which she had already settled for me.

  “Where are you going to live now? You can’t stay in this place.”

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p; I said I would think about it. “I’ve been thinking for you,” she told me sharply. “It’s high time someone did. There’s a furnished flat on the floor below mine. It’ll be empty at the end of the month.”

  “Thank you. I’ll go into that. Who’ll look after me?”

  “Annie Suthurst, of course. My place doesn’t take all her time.”

  “I’ll speak to her.”

  “I’ve done the speaking, and taken the flat, too. All you have to do is go to Brighton and get some fresh air. When you feel well, come back. The place will be ready.”

  I kept the flat as long as the war lasted. When Maeve was dead, Annie remained with me.

  *

  I didn’t like the look of Maeve. I got back from Brighton on a crisp January afternoon, and she was at the station to meet me. For the first time since I had known her there was colour in her cheeks, or rather on her cheekbones: a pinkish suffusion that at first I put down to the sharpness of the air. Then I reflected that I had known Maeve in every sort of weather for years on end, and never had the matt pallor of her skin, which was healthy and attractive, shown any change of hue. I looked at her again, and thought her eye too bright, and when we shook hands her hand seemed dryly hot.

  She seemed to be affected intensely by the hectic atmosphere of the station. It was full of jostling men in khaki, and sad-eyed women who did nothing to hide their misery, and women bravely bright, talking of ordinary things. There was a knot of private soldiers, cheerfully boozed, singing songs to the accompaniment of a mouth-organ. The organist, an old sweat with his cap pushed to the back of his head, revealing a fine oiled quiff, looked old enough to have tasted the Boer War, and the songs of that war seemed to be his favourites. He played “Dolly Grey” and “Soldiers of the Queen”; and then one of his mates said: “Give us ‘When it’s with you.’”