My Son, My Son

by Howard Spring

  He glowered at the fire for a while, then went on: “I said nothing to my friends. They’d know soon enough, I thought. I waited for the row. I expected the papers to be full of it—the inquest and all that. And there was nothing—nothing except that Maeve was dead, and all the columns of praise. Then I knew that somebody had cooked it, and I guessed it was you.”

  I broke in eagerly: “Yes, I—”

  He interrupted me with the holding up of one big hand. “Please! Say nothing. There must have been a doctor concerned. I can see that. I don’t want to know. I only want to thank you. I’m glad you did it. I should have hated...”

  He broke off, frowning. Presently he said: “I did you an injustice. At first I thought in my bitterness that what you had done was to save Oliver’s skin. I apologise for that. You did it because you loved Maeve. Always and always. Those are Maeve’s words: always and always. I want you to know that, too. She always loved you, and believed that you loved her but that you were too blind to know your own heart. It’s a pity. I wish you had married Maeve. So much would have been so different. Because now...”

  He got up, leaving the sentence unfinished, but my own heart finished it for him. Because now Oliver and I have a matter to settle.

  He shook hands, and I went out with him to the landing. Still the shouting and tumult came up from the streets. “Armistice!” he said. “Now you’ll be able to give all your attention to the wild Irish.”

  I stood there till I heard the street door bang. I never saw Rory again.

  33

  Now that the long futility of the war was over, I remained in London for many months. I would never again open that big house in Hampstead; my flat would do well enough. I had taken an affection for the place. It was quiet, a good bolt-hole for one who had no more use for public occasions. There was the night, for example, when Choose Your Partner came to an end. It was late in the February after the Armistice, and, as it happened, the night was the second anniversary of Maeve’s death. Wertheim was anxious for me to be there, but I wouldn’t go. It was a grand occasion, I heard. Men who had known the show during leaves were there singing all the old songs with tears in their eyes. Wertheim went on to the stage at that moment when, before the interval, it was customary to sing When it’s with You, it’s Wonderful. He reminded the audience that Maeve had died two years ago; then they stood in silence for her, and instead of the song being sung by the girl who had taken Maeve’s place, Wertheim had Maeve’s picture thrown on a screen, and, looking at it, the audience sang the song in unison, pianissimo. I suppose it was all very moving, but I had no use for that sort of thing any more.

  I had a queer feeling that I had Maeve under my own roof. Once, when I was going to bed in the early hours of the morning, I heard light footsteps running up the stairs to the flat above mine. Just so I had many times heard Maeve run by, coming home late after the theatre. The steps were so like hers—so delicate and dancing—that my heart gave a great thud. I opened the door on to the stairway. The footsteps were still audible, and I stood listening to hear a key in the door above and the opening and shutting of the door. But I heard nothing except the steps, which ran lightly for a time and then stopped. There was no other sound.

  I never heard them again, but I listened for them every night.

  I was listening for other footsteps, too. I wanted to get away. After more than four years spent continuously in London I wanted to open up Heronwater again. But I stayed because I feared that Oliver might come and find me gone.

  “Why don’t you go out and get some fresh air into your lungs?” Annie rated me. But I wouldn’t go far; a turn round the Square, down perhaps as far as Piccadilly, then left into Bond Street, my feet unconsciously hurrying as I neared the corner of Bruton Street.

  “Any callers, Annie?” I would shout.

  “Callers! Tha’s not been aht o’ t’house five minutes.”

  The streets were full of emancipated men. Lorry drivers still wearing old British warms or long khaki overcoats, young flâneurs ogling the girls in Bond Street, not anxious, evidently, to settle down yet to the dull routine of earning a living. On a morning when already there was in the air a premonition of the spring that had not yet come, a ’bus conductor hung out by one hand from his ’bus to shout to a man he recognised on the pavement: “Wotcher, cocky! Better than the old Menin Road!”

  “Not ’arf it ain’t!”

  So here and there I saw them, the men who had come back; and soon the spring itself was in London, filling the kerbside baskets with anemones and mimosa, daffodils and tulips. And now my walks became a little longer, and as I went up the stairs to my flat I did not shout to know whether there were any callers. I knew there were none, that there would be none. Then I called on the firm that had stored my furniture and arranged to have a man sent down to put everything back into Heronwater, to air the house, and make it habitable again. I remembered that I had last seen it when waiting on there with Martin and Sam Sawle: waiting irrationally through a procession of superb autumn days to see whether Livia Vaynol would return. And then her letter had come from Copenhagen. Now, before returning there, I was waiting again: waiting this time to see whether Oliver would come back. I reflected bitterly that I had done a lot of that lately: a lot of waiting to see whether I was the sort of person to whom the young came back. Well, it looked as though I wasn’t.

  I rang up Dermot at his shop and told him I was coming to see him.

  “About time,” he said, “but all the same, make it short and sweet when you get here. I’m busy.”

  I hurried off, and in Bond Street ran into Eileen. Eileen at twenty-four was good to look at. She had never got over her comfortable dumpiness, but happiness and good-nature made her face a thing that, so to speak, put the top on that lovely May day. And she had good reason to be looking happy that morning. Her hand was laid on the arm of a tall, handsome boy whose hatless head was a tangle of dark brown curls. “Hallo, Uncle Bill!” she greeted me; and looking up shyly at her escort: “This is Guy Langdale. I don’t think you’ve met him. This is William Essex, Guy.”

  I liked the boy. I liked his frank blue eyes and his firm handgrip; but I was not so sure that I liked the excessive respect of his tone, as he said: “I’m delighted to meet you, sir.” Established... honourable... OLD... That’s what he thought me.

  We loitered there for a moment, talking commonplaces, and I noticed that Eileen was very well dressed and that her happy face was happier than ever. Well, good luck to you, Eileen, I thought, as I walked on. There hasn’t been too much luck coming the way of Sheila’s children. I had heard about young Langdale. He had gone to work for Dermot in 1914, looking after the art gallery which was part of the establishment. He was something of a painter himself, but I had gathered that Dermot thought highly of him as a business man, too. He had joined the army in 1916, and now here he was, back again. Yes, Eileen, the young come back to the young. I wish you a good innings.

  A girl took me up in the lift, and she was just a girl. She wasn’t a jolly tar, or a brigadier-general, or a grenadier of the Inkerman period. She was just a girl in a white blouse and a black skirt. “Merely not to be vulgar is so distinguished,” Dermot had once explained.

  My entrance startled him out of a reverie. He was sitting with both hands spread out on a perfectly clear desk, sitting bolt upright, gazing before him with the end of an unlit cigar chewed to ribbons in his mouth. A portrait of Maeve, by Guy Langdale—not a bad one, either—was on the wall before him. He didn’t seem to be looking at that, or at anything, though it may well have started his reverie. His face was haggard.

  “You look as if you want a holiday, my boy,” I said.

  “Well, since we’re exchanging compliments, Tyburn Tree is just round the corner. You look as though you were recently cut down.”

  He fell into a kind of irritable brooding for a while; then said: “I don’t like the damned news from Ireland.”

  “I haven’t noticed anything in particul
ar.”

  He snorted impatiently. “You wouldn’t. You haven’t noticed that what used to be peaceful police-stations are now forts, with steel plates instead of windows, with sandbags and barbed wire. You haven’t noticed that, despite all this, these police-stations are being burned down, and policemen shot, and that those who are not shot are resigning. Resigning, my boy, with the fear of God in their hearts, though a lot of ’em are pretty near the age for pensions.”

  “Well, because a lot of bobbies are resigning...”

  “Bill, you’re the most maddening fool. Don’t you know that Ireland has been governed by policemen as long as anyone can remember, and that the smash-up of the police force means that government is being destroyed all over the country districts? Soon there’ll be no government left except in a few big towns. And what happens then? Something will have to take the place of the police. It won’t be anything nice, believe me. Ireland isn’t gallant little Belgium, and I can’t see you bloody English getting sentimental about her, but, of course, this all means nothing to you. You haven’t got a son out there.”

  He leapt up at that and put his hand on my shoulder. “Sorry, Bill. That slipped out. Let’s say no more about it.”

  A telephone shrilled on his desk. He took it up and listened. “Speak to Miss Eileen about it. She’s got the whole matter in hand.”

  “There’s no Miss Eileen to speak to,” I said. “I met her in Bond Street in pleasant company.”

  Dermot threw up his wrist and consulted his watch. “She said she’d be in at eleven. It’s two minutes past. She must have come in on your heels. She’s a business woman.”

  He went over to the telephone. “For the next half-hour put all inquiries through to Miss Eileen. Tell her I’m not to be disturbed till eleven-thirty.”

  “There you are,” he said proudly. “What d’you think of that? And that will be done. One thing the war did. It taught me I had a jewel of a business woman under my own roof. She’s my under-strapper now in everything. I’m making her a director. Was she with young Langdale?”

  “Yes. Looks a nice boy.”

  “He’s got his head screwed on the right way. I shouldn’t be surprised if he’s a director, too, before long. Or does that strike you as too mercenary a wedding present?”

  “It strikes me as a good thing that one of Sheila’s children should be plain bread-and-butter.”

  He nodded his head in agreement. “And now what the devil have you come to disturb me about?” he demanded.

  “This is May,” I said. “In a month’s time Heronwater will be in order again. Neither of us has had a holiday for nearly five years. Come, and bring Sheila.”

  “And what about my work? Now that this damned war’s over and business is picking up a bit.”

  “Excellent experience for Eileen.”

  “She could do it. But that would mean we should be there with no children... Just you and Sheila and I...”

  We looked at one another, and suddenly the idea of being at Heronwater with no children struck us both with all its significance. Of course, they were no longer children, anyway; but, even so, they were gone. Maeve dead, and Rory married, and Eileen leaning on the arm of her tall beautiful boy; and Oliver God knew where.

  We were silent for a while. I pulled at my pipe and Dermot jerked his unlit cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “I wonder,” he said at last, “whether we’ve had our best times, Bill? There was one time I always think of—when Donnelly was there. That was a houseful? You and Nellie and Oliver—”

  “And you and Sheila and Rory and Eileen—”

  “And Donnelly and Maggie—”

  “And Sam Sawle and Martin. They were good fellows—”

  “Yes, and that old madman Judas over the river and his husky Viking friend in Truro. Remember him?”

  “I do that. It was a good time. But Maeve wasn’t there.”

  “Wasn’t she?”

  “No, no. She’d gone off with Mary Latter.”

  “She had so. I’d forgotten that.”

  “Well,” I said, “you’ll come? We’ll do our best, eh?—three old stagers.”

  “Yes. I wonder what’s happened to old Judas? Ever hear of him?”

  “Not a word. We shall see.”

  *

  He was still in the land of the living, and that is the only reason why I write of that holiday—to give some account of Captain Judas at that time.

  Dermot drove us down. One of Sheila’s maids and Annie Suthurst had gone on in advance by train. We should need no one else. Dermot would look after his own car and I could look after the Maeve, which had been overhauled. She and her dinghy alone were left of our little fleet. I sat at the back of the car with Sheila, thinking of the time when Dermot had first come by car to Heronwater. Oliver and I had waited for them at the gate, and there was Sheila, little Maggie Donnelly on one side of her and Eileen on the other, young and radiant with a great chiffon scarf passing over the top of a large hat and tied in a bow under her chin. Her dark hair was white with the dust of the Cornish roads, for it was an open car. Now, so that she might lean her head back more comfortably in the big close saloon, Sheila wore no hat at all, and her hair was white not with Cornish dust but with the sorrows of the short twelve months that had seen the imprisonment of Rory and the deaths of Donnelly and Maeve. Something was gone out of Sheila. Her face was still kind and thoughtful, her smile ready to encourage, but when there was no encouraging to be done and you caught her face unawares, there was an inward brooding which suggested a life counting over the past and not much concerned with the present. Maeve had been the child of her heart; and sometimes I had an uneasy feeling that the very intensity of her thinking about that loved girl would tell her the truth, that she would suddenly say to me: “What really happened to Maeve?” So that I was never now completely at ease in Sheila’s company.

  We came to Heronwater in the evening, to the abiding peace and beauty that had smiled on unchanged through the agonies and convulsions of a continent. Sheila said she would rest till dinner-time, and Dermot and I walked out to lean on the warm stone of the balustrade where, that winter night when the rain hissed through the darkness and the wind volleyed like guns, Livia Vaynol had come upon me with the brimming cup that was so soon to be spilled. Then we went down the path to the water. It seemed as though the very leaves we had left were still upon the trees, and in our scrambling descent we recognised the very pebbles we knew so well. We came out upon the little quay of level greensward and looked upon the river drifting out on the first of the ebb. “Change and decay in all around I see.” Never were words less appropriate. All the visible world seemed to mock by its calm stability the change and decay that were in our hearts alone.

  “Nothing seems altered,” said Dermot, breaking a long silence. “Not even the Jezebel.”

  Not even the Jezebel. There she was, the ugly old black hulk, shored up under the opposite bank, looking as she had looked when last I saw her, that day when Judas was waving good-bye to Jansen as the Kay steamed by carrying, though I knew it not, Oliver and Livia to the beginning of their momentous adventure.

  I didn’t seek out the old man then; indeed, I didn’t know if he were aboard. We went back to the house, where Annie Suthurst was happy to be serving Sheila and Dermot again, and we had dinner, and then we sat in deck-chairs on the lawn, glad to do nothing after the long journey. Glad just to sit there and see the sunset smouldering behind the trees and to listen to the rooks settling noisily in for the night. Dermot held Sheila’s hand, and I saw them suddenly very clearly as people whose youth was finished, being kind and understanding with one another because they had done much and endured much together.

  The next day I took the dinghy and pulled myself across to the Jezebel. Hanging down her counter was the rope I had urged Judas to fix so long ago. I hauled upon it and heard the peal within the ship’s timbers. Presently a woman’s head leaned over the rails, and a voice cried delightedly: “Why, Mr. Essex—!
”

  It was Mary Latter, looking old and drawn. I knew that she had given up the stage. Her company still toured, but she did not tour with it. I had heard that she was settled in a flat somewhere in Kensington. She dropped the rope ladder overboard. I tied up the dinghy and climbed to the deck. “Well, this is delightful,” she said. “I haven’t seen a soul for a week.”

  A querulous voice came up the stairway. “Who’s that, Mary? Have a care, my girl, have a care. Don’t go letting every Tom, Dick and Harry aboard.”

  She took my arm. “Come down and see him. He’s in bed.”

  It was a nice little bedroom that the captain occupied. The walls were painted white. The windows were flung wide open and the daffodil-coloured muslin curtains fluttered in the fresh morning air. Captain Judas was sitting up in bed, with pillows piled behind him. Spectacles were on his nose and his small thin hand held a book. He looked tiny, a mannikin, in the big bed, with his hair and beard combed and glistening like fine silk.

  “It’s Mr. Essex, Father,” Mary said.

  I gave him my hand and was startled by the dry fragility of the claw he placed in mine. He looked at me long and earnestly over the spectacles, and asked: “Have we met before?”

  “Yes, yes, Father, of course,” Mary explained patiently. “Mr. Essex from Heronwater.”

  “It’s a long time since I’ve seen you, captain,” I said. “Before the war. Four and a half years.”

  “The war,” he said, speaking to himself rather than to us, “the war... They came upon me with swords and bows, and their spearmen rent me in sunder.”