My Son, My Son

by Howard Spring

  “And I couldn’t, Bill. I stood there, fascinated. He had taken off his tunic. He kicked the key towards me. ‘Go!’ he said. ‘Go, or by God—’ Then he sat down in a chair with his head in his hands and began to sob. I went across and put my hand on his hair, and—and that was it.”

  “Thank you for telling me.” The words sounded idiotic as I looked at the white wreck of Maeve. “Don’t think about it any more. Let’s consider the present.”

  “There’s only one thing to be done at present. That’s go to bed, or I shall be no good tonight.”

  “Ought you to go on? Shall I ring up Wertheim?”

  “Only to wangle a ticket. I’d like to be there tonight. He’ll find you a place. Come round and bring me home afterwards. Will you?”

  *

  “Shall I try to get a cab?” I asked.

  “No. Let’s walk.”

  She put her hand on my arm, and we jostled through a little crowd clustered at the stage door. One man said simply: “Thank you, Miss O’Riorden.” Another stuck a book and pencil under her nose. “D’you mind, Miss O’Riorden?”

  “Come on,” I whispered. “Don’t let ’em bother you.” But she stopped and signed the book and showered smiles on the people pressing round her. “I hate to disappoint them,” she said.

  Then we were free. She took my arm again. “You and your opera-hat!” she teased me, looking up at me overtopping her small fragile figure. “You big important man! You don’t frighten me any more.”

  “Was I ever very frightening?”

  She gave my arm a sharp little hug. “Not so very,” she said.

  We walked in silence for a while, then she said: “Well, well. That’s that. That’s over now. Was I all right, Bill?”

  “Lovely.”

  “No one would have guessed?”

  “Guessed? Oh, that... No, no. No one.”

  She was very quiet after that, her little hurrying footsteps trying comically to adjust themselves to my long strides. I don’t remember that we exchanged another word till we came to the front door. It is those footsteps I shall always remember—like a child’s footsteps trying eagerly to keep up.

  I have said that her flat was above mine. At my door I said: “Good-night, Maeve. Unless you’d like to come in for a moment. A drink or a chat?”

  “No... No, Bill... Bill...?” She took the lapel of my coat and began to twist it in her fingers, looking up into my face. “Say—what you said this afternoon.” She whispered: “Say ‘My love.’”

  “Why, Maeve, my love, my darling,” I said, and bent down and took her in my arms. “Sleep well, my love.”

  I watched her go slowly to the turn of the stairs. “Good-night,” I called.

  “Good-night. Good-night, Bill. Good-bye.”

  *

  At seven the next morning Annie Suthurst came knocking at my door. One look at her distraught face set my heart racing. I did not wait for her to speak. She could not speak: she just stood there with her shaking lingers fumbling at a shaking mouth. I pushed past her and ran up the stairs, through the sitting-room to Maeve’s bedroom. She lay with one long white arm hanging out of the bed. Her head was fallen a little to one side. The face, framed by the black hair, looked childish and hurt and puzzled.

  At eight o’clock I rang up Sir Charles Blatch. He answered the telephone himself, and seemed surprised at my vehemence when I asked him to come round at once. “Yes—urgent—most terribly urgent.”

  I met him outside the door of my flat, and led him to the next floor. I had told Annie to stay in her own room. Outside the door of Maeve’s bedroom I paused. “You have wanted to meet Maeve O’Riorden,” I said. I opened the door softly. “There she is.”

  He went in alone. I shut the door behind him and waited for him in the sitting-room. He joined me about ten minutes later, and sat down beside me on a divan. His big rough-hewn face was moved as though Maeve had been his own child. “Poor little thing,” he said, “poor little thing. She looks so small.” He sat with one hand spread palm downward on each knee and looked thoughtfully at the floor between his feet. “You know, Essex, in all my practice, that’s the first suicide I’ve seen. You’d think she’d died in her sleep.”

  “Yes,” I said, not looking at him, “if she’d had a weak heart, say. I suppose if she had been quietly seeing a doctor—keeping it to herself—for the last twelve months or so, and he had warned her that her heavy work at the theatre, with all this dancing and dining and sleeplessness thrown in, was very dangerous—if she had been seeing, say, you—then you wouldn’t be surprised to find she had died in her sleep?”

  He gave me a shrewd sidelong look. “No,” he said at last, “it would be in the usual course of nature to expect it.”

  “And in those circumstances, of course, there would be no difficulty about granting a death certificate?”

  He got up, stood looking down at me, fingering his chin thoughtfully. “I have no record of the case on my books,” he said, “because I was charging her nothing. She never came to my place in Wimpole Street. I always saw her here. It was purely a friendly arrangement, because I’d taken such a personal interest in her ever since you introduced us—about a year ago, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, about that, I should say.”

  “You wouldn’t have got my car out of me, you know, if I hadn’t liked her so much.”

  “No, of course not. I couldn’t have expected it.”

  “And I grant this death certificate the more readily because I was present when she died. What time did she get home from the theatre last night?”

  “Just before midnight.”

  “She must have been taken queer almost at once, because it was immediately after midnight that you rang me up... Oh, damn this pretence, Essex, I was rung up just after midnight, and I didn’t get in till seven. No one on God’s earth knows where I’ve been, and it may as well have been here. I saw her die as I warned her she would die...”

  He strode unhappily about the room. “If she were a nobody... but she isn’t. Think of the stink in the papers...”

  “I had thought of it. And I thought of our talk about suicide. She had good reasons, Blatch.”

  “The poor child. Tell me some day. Not now, not now. Well, I’ll spill no mud on her corpse... It was veronal... Who else knows?”

  “One old woman who was devoted to her. I’ll answer for her, Blatch.”

  Suddenly he asked with difficulty: “Was there a baby behind this?”

  I nodded. He wiped perspiration from his face with a large silk handkerchief. “I was—thinking of Roger,” he said. “He tells me he’s been about with her.”

  “It wasn’t Roger, Blatch. I knew about Roger. That was a year ago.”

  “The leave before last. Well, thank God for something.” He held out his hand. “Essex, I’m going to commit a crime, and you’re conniving at it. Let us both be proud. It will be as decent a piece of work as will be done in England today.”

  He left me then, and I braced myself for the long ordeal of the day. First, to ring up Dermot...

  NOTE.—It would have been impossible to give these particulars if Sir Charles Blatch were still alive. He died soon after his son Roger was killed in 1918. The circumstances of his death were such that it was necessary to hold an inquest at which a verdict was returned of “Death from Misadventure.” The posthumous book in which he advocated euthanasia, excused suicide in certain circumstances, and told fully the story of his mother’s death, created a sensation. He left no relative, and so no one will be injured by the disclosure here made.

  The person to be consulted was Dermot, to whom I had confided the facts only after Sheila’s death, which took place in 1930. He offers no objection to this publication.

  Part V

  32

  Annie Suthurst asked: “Will you be going out tonight, Mr. Essex?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Annie. No: I really don’t think I could stand it. They cheered and went mad when the war st
arted. Now they cheer and go mad because it’s ended. The two things don’t make sense to me.”

  “It’s like Mafeking night,” said Annie. “That didn’t make sense to me.”

  It wouldn’t. Annie’s husband had not lasted as long as Mafeking night.

  “I’ll make you a nice Lancashire ’ot pot,” she said. “When you’ve ’ad that, just stay in by your own fire and read a book.”

  And that was what I did, while the dervishes were loose without. When I went from the dining-room to my study, I found the curtains drawn, my chair pulled up to the fire, and my slippers on the fender. There, alongside the chair, was the little table with my pipes and tobacco jar and spectacles. Annie looked after me well.

  Too well by a long chalk, I thought, as I settled into the chair. She’s making a regular old codger of me. I’m only forty-seven.

  I put the spectacles on my nose, reflecting sadly that not so long ago I had exulted because I could do without them and Dermot couldn’t.

  Well, forty-seven. And turning into a bit of a misanthrope. Feeling more at home in the winter than in the summer, because in the winter there are firelight and drawn curtains and one’s own company. Grey now, not only in that spot over the temples that Maeve used to find attractive, but all over; and putting on no weight with the years: thin as a thread.

  Annie came in with coffee. “Now, don’t you get up, Mr. Essex.”

  But I got up, peering at her querulously over the spectacles. “Damn it all, Annie Suthurst,” I said, “what are you trying to turn me into! Why shouldn’t I get up? Is the creaking of my old bones so distressing to you?”

  “Nay, don’t harass your carcass, Mr. Essex. Ah’m sure you’ve got plenty to do in that old office of yours all day long. A rest at neet won’t hurt thee. Now, sit down wi’ a nice book. Ah’ll not worry thee again.”

  The fact was, of course, that Annie would always spoil me because she had never got over the miracle, as she thought it, that Blatch and I had achieved between us. The shame that had been averted from the memory of her dear Maeve... Annie had proved utterly reliable. Not even to me had she ever mentioned what had happened. We had stood side by side on that day which now seemed far off; that blustery day of late winter when Maeve was buried. On one side of the raw gash in the earth, to which the small body that a week before had been so gaily dancing had already been committed, I stood and held Annie’s arm, and on the other Dermot and Sheila stood side by side, not touching one another. Dermot’s head was up and his beard thrust forward and the eyes stared out of his pale face beyond and through us all. Sheila alone of us looked steadfastly down into the grave, even after the clods had begun to fall, lost, it seemed, in some reverie stretching back through the years, perhaps to that day when the old Fenian Flynn had held us with his wild eye and wilder tales, and Sheila had cried out suddenly that the child was stirring in her.

  And now the child lay there, having herself been quickened with child; and as, with Annie still clinging to my arm, I broke away from the people now putting on their hats and talking together—Wertheim, and Blatch with that baby-faced son Roger of his, and a few other officers on leave, and boys and girls from the Choose Your Partner company—I thought not only of Maeve but of that other life, life sprung from my life, so that a part of me seemed to have died with her and to have been buried there that March day without hope of resurrection.

  It all surged upon my memory as I sat in my room that Armistice night and listened to the jubilation. Even in the staid precincts of Berkeley Square the merrymakers came in arm-linked bands, shouting, blowing upon trumpets, singing the songs to which four years—four such years!—had given the sanctity of dire association. All through the evening the songs came up to me: Tipperary, When it’s with You, it’s Wonderful, Till the Boys come Home.

  There would be that, too. Oliver would be coming home. Around the chill of my heart a faint warmth awakened at the thought. Livia... would he want Livia now? Would Livia want him? I saw nothing there. And Maeve was gone. Did I remain? Did I count? I had yet to find out. I had written to him at his prison camp when Maeve died. Twenty months ago. There was no answer. I waited for six months, then sent him food and tobacco. There was no answer.

  *

  There was a ring at the door of the flat. I heard Annie Suthurst shuffle out from her bed-sitting-room and break into cries of pleasure. She came bustling into my room, so overcome that she forgot to knock at the door. “Coom in, Mr. Rory. Coom in.”

  Yes; it was Rory. “I’ll see you later, Annie,” he said, seeing that she hovered there, making ecstatic noises, unwilling to take her eyes off him. “You pop along for a moment. Well, Uncle Bill?”

  He stood grinning in his old diffident, deferential fashion. He was wearing a not-very-good-looking navy-blue suit, and with his big hands, grey eyes and rough black hair, with his short stocky body bearing down firmly on his feet, he looked like a young officer of the merchant marine ashore for the night.

  Our hands met in a hard grip. “Sit down,” I said. “You don’t change much, Rory.”

  “No, so Maggie says. She says I just—deepen.” He smiled deprecatingly. “You don’t mind having one of His Majesty’s convicts defiling your home?”

  “I was longing for someone to talk to, and I don’t think there’s anyone I’d rather talk to than you. How is Maggie?”

  “As well as can be expected,” he said grimly.

  I knew he was referring to Donnelly’s death, and that made me think of Easter, 1916—of Rory lying behind the parapet of a roof, picking his man, watching him twist and fall and shudder to stillness. Strangely, I had not thought of that till his remark brought it to mind. And looking at him now—at the great width of his shoulders and the steadiness of his hands lying in his lap like rocks—I still could not see this Rory as that Rory. I took my mind from the whole matter.

  “You’ll be able to marry Maggie now,” I said.

  “We are already married. She is staying at Father’s house. We thought there was no need to make a fuss, so we just got married, and we came across when it was all over.”

  “I wish you joy, Rory. Maggie’s a fine girl.”

  “She is that,” he said emphatically. “But that’s no reason why she or I should know anything about joy. It doesn’t matter about being a fine girl and having a fine country to live in. You can be any sort of damned scallywag so long as you kiss the boots of the British. Then you might find some joy. But Maggie and I don’t expect much joy. That’s why we came to see Father and Mother and Eileen. You never know.”

  “So you’re still in it? You’re going back?”

  Even as I spoke them, the words sounded flat and without meaning. The answer was there in Rory’s resolute pugnacious young face. He did not permit himself the indignation that I deserved. He said simply: “Yes. We shall go back. There’s a lot to be done.”

  He would neither smoke nor drink. He sat hunched into his chair and told me something about Donnelly. Maggie had been allowed to see him in gaol. “She told me,” Rory said, “that they didn’t cry. There wasn’t a tear between them. He wanted to know all she had been doing that Easter, and when she told him, he said: ‘That’s a good girl. Do the same thing next time. Because there will be a next time, and a time after that, till the last time comes. Then all these times won’t matter any more. And now kiss me.’ So she kissed him and came away.”

  “He was a good man,” I said.

  “He was the best man I have ever known,” Rory said, “the best and the bravest. The sort of man I should like to be.” He added after a moment: “So you see, we shall go back.”

  “Yes, I see that.”

  I puffed my pipe in silence for a while, feeling diffident and humble in Rory’s presence. His utter single-mindedness had that effect on me—of making me feel more humble than I felt with anyone else. I said suddenly, impulsively: “Rory, you don’t have to wait to be the sort of man Donnelly was. You’re the same breed, and as good a man as Donnelly any day.
You know, I’ve watched a lot of boys grow up in my time, and you’re quite the nicest boy I know.”

  The colour mounted to his cheeks, but he turned off the embarrassing moment with a laugh: “Ach, Uncle Bill, you’re thinking of that old poem, The Whitest Man I Know. To hell—no, I’m not that sort. But thank you all the same. I believe we do understand something of one another, you and I. Otherwise, I couldn’t say what I’m going to say now. But I came to say it, so here goes. Thank you for what you did for Maeve.”

  “But, my dear boy, I did nothing. I...”

  His grey candid eyes were looking me through and through. I hesitated, flustered. “I don’t know how you did it or exactly what it was you did,” he said. “But, you see, I know that Maeve committed suicide. And I know that no one knows that—not even Father and Mother.”

  I felt perspiration trickling on my forehead. I wiped it away with a handkerchief, got up and poured myself a drink. There was utter silence in the room, broken only by the light tinkle of the decanter against the whisky-glass.

  “She was going to have a child by Oliver.”

  I had taken a drink, and turned to face him as he said this. His head was sunk into his chest; his underlip was thrust forward and his eyes seemed to have shrunk to little points having the hard grey glitter of granite. Now I was seeing the Rory who had crouched behind the parapet, finger on trigger. Now a cold breath of doom seemed to be in the room with him. Sitting there, still hunched up and unmoving, he said: “She wrote to me from the theatre the night she died. She must have scribbled the note in an interval and given it to someone to post. I was already back in Ireland then. She told me what she was going to do and why she was going to do it.” He added simply: “You see, we were very fond of one another, and I was proud of Maeve. We told one another everything.”