My Son, My Son

by Howard Spring

  Listening to Oliver describing these extraordinary proceedings that went forward in the blackness of a December night, his voice here in the boat sounding tranquil and detached, and thinking of that Hampstead house where I had made arrangements so complete for no wind to blow upon him, I felt, for all our proximity, that here was someone I had never known, someone whom now I should never know.

  He climbed into the water-tank and sat down upon the end of the suit-case. His feet were propped against one side of the tank, clear of the water. Sitting thus, with his head sunk on his chest, he was invisible. Before an hour had passed he realised that even superhuman resolution would not permit him to keep his legs up, with no support but their own muscular pressure against the side of the tank. Again and again they dropped; again and again he raised them; at last he gave it up, allowed them to rest on the bottom of the tank, under the water. In this position, worn out with anxiety, gnawed by hunger, he dozed through the night.

  With the first light of the morning he raised his head and looked about him. As far as he could see, a flat landscape of meadows lay around him. A few elms with a tall church spire pricking through them broke the monotony to the east.

  He bowed his head again on to his chest, faced now by the fearful prospect of spending the day doubled up thus in his tin box. He tried to prop up his feet again. They were numb with cold and dropped at once into the water. He cursed himself for not having had the foresight to take off his shoes, stuff his socks into them, and tie them round his neck. He had rolled his trousers up above his knees, but now his shoes would never dry.

  The light grew stronger. Men came to work in the station. Trains began to pass through. Now he dared not straighten himself. He had not realised what this was going to mean, but before long he could have cried with the agony of sitting still on a few inches of leather. “It must have been about nine in the morning,” he said, “that I suddenly plunged down on my knees, water or no water.”

  That was a relief, and throughout the day he was now sitting, now kneeling, but never knew a moment’s cessation of the strain of keeping his head low.

  Sometimes he slept, sitting on the edge of the suit-case, his head hanging towards his knees. The roar of expresses through the station would wake him up, shaking with apprehension, shivering with cold. His legs from the thighs down were blue and pimpled and numbed. He rubbed and rubbed, glad to have something to do.

  Men lounged and talked in the beast-pens below him. He could hear the very words of their slow, deliberate country speech. He was glad to have something to listen to.

  By noon he could feel no sensation of life in his feet, but his neck and back were strained and burning with the long muscular distortion of his bending. And his stomach was ravening for food. “I could have chucked the whole thing, jumped up and yelled.” But he gritted his teeth and told himself that now he had spent more hours in the tank than he had yet to spend.

  It was dark by five o’clock, but the station was not yet shut. By now he was down on his hands and knees, moving his head up and down like an animal in a stall in order to loosen the tortured muscles of his neck. For the same purpose, he writhed his back from side to side. His clothes were soaked from head to foot, but now he was long past caring for that. He was whimpering for the deeper dark as a child whimpers for the light.

  He left the suit-case when he climbed out of the tank. He could not feel the iron lattice with his feet. He let himself down hand over hand and when his feet touched the ground he collapsed as though he had no bones. He crawled on hands and knees till he was hidden by a hedge. Then he stripped himself naked and worked over his body, slapping life into his legs, harshly massaging his neck. At the end of an hour he was warmer, able to stand and walk. He dressed and made in the direction whence he had seen a light burning an hour ago. It was now extinguished.

  He reached the cottage and walked quietly all round it. There was no sign that anyone was awake, but the day and night in the tank had made another hour seem a small matter. He walked up and down on the grass verge of the lane that ran between the cottage and the high-road. He walked for an hour, his legs strengthening all the time.

  Then he opened one of the cottage windows. It was a kid’s job, he said, that you could do with a pocket-knife. In the cottage kitchen theembers of a fire were still burning. He put on a little more coal, took off his trousers, spread them over a chair, placed his shoes and socks on the fender. Then he found some bread and cheese, ate what he wanted and put the rest in his pocket. When his clothes were fairly dry he dressed again, and then his eye fell on a pair of trouser-clips, such as cyclists use, hanging from a hook screwed into the fireplace. He went out quietly to look for the bicycle, found it in a shed behind the cottage, and five minutes later was cycling west. From that moment the luck was with him, the last luck he was to know.

  *

  I woke with a start, not knowing for a moment where I was. The atmosphere in the bilge was disgusting, fetid with our breath and stale tobacco smoke. The lantern had guttered out, my mouth felt stale, my stomach retched. In the pitch darkness I could feel Oliver’s head resting against my shoulder. I could hear the slow, gentle drawing of his breath. We had talked and dozed, and waked and talked again, far into the night. Then we had fallen asleep, leaning against the ship’s timbers.

  I moved my hand and felt his hair, long and silky, the hair I had brushed so carefully that day before taking him down to the birthday party wearing his black silk pyjamas. It felt just the same. I fondled it very softly, fearing to wake him, and tears scalded my eyelids and then began to flow quietly down my face.

  O God! Don’t let him wake! Don’t ever let him wake again. And don’t let that lantern ever be lit. I don’t want to see his face. I want to feel his hair.

  I wished we could both die there, in the darkness below the Jezebel’s decks, with his head on my shoulder, his soft hair under my hand.

  *

  Suddenly his whole body twitched violently and his head was wrenched away. Then, as though he had recollected where he was, he sighed, and leaned back against me. “Hallo, Father,” he said.

  I could see by the illuminated dial of his wrist-watch that it was seven o’clock. I wiped my eyes furtively. I got up and heard my bones creak. “Gosh! I’m getting an old man,” I said, yawning.

  “Christ!” he said. “You’re not half as old as I am. I feel a million.”

  He pushed up the trap-door and a faint light fell upon his uplifted face. He looked a million: ashen from the airless night, scarred, dirty, unshaven. His hollow cheek ticked in, out, in, out, as regularly as the ticking of a clock. And his eyes were the eyes of a doomed man who knows it. “This might be the bottom of the drop,” he said suddenly; and I shuddered from head to foot.

  He remained standing there for a moment, one hand resting on the ship’s side, his grey face upturned to the grey light. Then he said: “I’d like to go up for some food, but I promised Judas to stay down here.”

  I knew he was afraid to go up. He was afraid of the light of day. “Give me a hand,” I said.

  He locked his fingers together. I put one foot upon the palms of his wounded hands, rested one hand in the tangle of his hair. He bore me lightly. He was very strong.

  In the body of the ship there was hardly more light than in the bilge. I pulled the curtains back from the windows and swung them open, taking deep breaths of the raw damp morning air. Mist was curling up in little smoky wisps from the river. I could scarcely see the opposite bank.

  I lit the galley fire and made some coffee, cut bread and butter. Then I called to him to come up, lay flat on the floor and reached a hand down to him in the pit. He grasped it strongly and I heaved him up, glad to be grovelling on the ground to help him.

  We sat at the table with Judas’s thin womanly china between us. It was not much of a meal, but it was many years since we had eaten together. He recurred to a thought that had troubled him before. “I don’t know why you’re doing this,” he said. />
  “Never mind why I’m doing it,” I answered. “Don’t you know that I’m very happy? I’ve got a son again.”

  The wounds round his eyes creased into little puckers of puzzlement. For the first—and last—time in his life I saw in him a resemblance to Nellie. It was identically her short-sighted bewildered look, and it moved me to the bones.

  “I don’t understand it,” he said. “I don’t understand it.”

  “Never mind,” I repeated. “There it is. If you had had a son you might know what I mean.”

  “I might have had,” he said. “Maeve might have had a son... Poor Maeve...”

  He buried his face in his hands. I could see the wound in his hand’s back and the fair disordered hair falling through his fingers.

  “Then it would have been so different,” he said, looking up with his white face cupped in his hands. “She became a sweet girl, and very beautiful. Did she speak to you about me? Did she get to like me?”

  “She loved you very much,” I lied.

  I began to clear away the things from the table. “Sit down, and let me do that,” he said. “You’re as tired as I am. We’re both worn out.”

  That was true. We were both worn out, and not by the events of the last few days. We were a couple of haggard, unshaven old men—my son Oliver and I. Now that the light was stronger, I could see my face in the mirror. I had not shaved for three days. I saw that if I let my beard grow it would be white.

  Oliver came out from the galley, and grasping the table edge, looked down on me. “Did you ever see Livia Vaynol again?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Never since the night you left her in Maeve’s dressing-room.”

  “Nor I. I treated her pretty badly.” He added after a pause: “But that was a habit of mine. There’s only one thing in my whole life that I’m glad about at this moment.”

  I looked at him questioningly.

  “I’m glad Mother didn’t live.”

  Then he dismissed all that with a shrug of the shoulders. “Had we better descend again to the underworld?” he asked.

  “It’s not necessary. Stay here where the air’s fresher. No one can see you, and we can see anyone who approaches the ship. What are you going to do?”

  He sat with his hands drooping between his knees. “Hang,” he said.

  At that, a cry was dragged out of me. “No, no!” I said. “Don’t say that! For God’s sake don’t talk about that, even as a possibility. We must think. We must devise some scheme...”

  He looked at me wearily. “Think! Believe me, I’ve done plenty of thinking. There’s just a possibility... just one dog’s chance. That’s what I came here for.”

  “Yes?” I prompted him, childishly, pitiably eager.

  “I knew I could rely on Judas. I thought that if he could hide me in the bilge till Jansen came in with the Kay, I might get away with it.”

  “Yes, yes!” I cried. “After all, he took you for one voyage, and there’s no reason why he shouldn’t take you for another.”

  “Oh, yes, there is,” Oliver objected. “Taking a passenger on a honeymoon is one thing. Helping a murderer to escape is another.”

  The brutal word seemed to strike me between the eyes. “He’ll do it,” I muttered desperately. “He’d do anything for Judas.”

  “Yes, I know. And Judas would do anything for me. On paper it’s perfect. But paper’s thin stuff. You could fall through it on the end of a rope.”

  He sank his head in his hands again, ruffled his hair. “Jansen’s no fool. Why, damn it all!” he shouted, suddenly erect and angry and excited, “don’t you see what it might mean to him—losing his name and his ship and his livelihood? Yes! That’s what it means now to help a man like me! You’d better clear out, too. It’ll do you no good if you’re found here. Get out while the going’s good. Go on!”

  “I’ll go and see Jansen myself,” I said. “I’ll beg him on my hands and knees. Why, good God! I could buy him up, ship and all. I’m a rich man. If he loses over this...”

  I had lost control of myself. I was standing up, shouting, quivering. Oliver put an arm round my shoulders, and a strange shudder compounded of joy and repulsion went through me at the touch. “Calm yourself,” he said. “I know you would do anything for me. I have always known that, pig-headed swine that I’ve been. I’ve always known you were there. There were times when I hated you, but I never doubted you. Is it any consolation to you to know that?”

  I nodded my head, unable to speak.

  “I’m glad,” he said, his grip round my shoulders tightening like a vice, “because now it’s too late. You can do nothing more. Look!”

  The arm that was not holding me shot out towards the window, the long scar pointing like an arrow. As I looked, his strong arm held me up, or I should have fallen. “That’s the end,” he said.

  He released me, and I gripped the edge of the table for support. My knees were like water. Oliver held out his hand. “We’ll say good-bye now,” he said.

  I took his hand. It closed on mine like iron, not trembling.

  “Oliver... Oliver...”

  It was a mere quiver of sound, the ghost of all that had been between us fluttering out of the body now dead.

  He was not afraid now. I could see that. His face was grey but stern, with the tick-tick again pricking the rigid muscles of his jaw.

  “Thank you for coming—and for everything,” he said. Then he dropped my hand.

  We stood face to face at the table, not speaking for a moment, listening to the engine of the motor-boat. The engine dropped to half-speed as the bows pointed in towards the Jezebel.

  Then he spoke again. “Don’t fool yourself with hopes. There’s no earthly chance. I want you to make me a promise.”

  I couldn’t speak. I looked at him in anguished silence.

  “Don’t come to see me in gaol when it’s all over. I shouldn’t like that. Promise?”

  I nodded.

  “This is better. We all loved this place—Maeve, Rory, all of us. This is a better place to say good-bye. I’ll go and throw the ladder down for those chaps.”

  He went up the stairs to the deck. I stayed where I was, sunk in misery. I don’t know how long I stood there, but at last, footsteps sounding, I looked up. I thought Oliver had come back.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Essex.”

  I believed it. The man seemed friendly and anxious to help. It was the plain-clothes officer I had seen watching outside my flat a few days before. With a rough gesture of goodwill, he pulled a cigar-case out of his pocket and held it towards me. I shook my head and sank on to a chair.

  “There’s no need for you to come into this at all,” he said. “The fellows in the boat haven’t seen you, and for that matter, neither have I. Understand?”

  He took my arm and gazed into my face.

  I nodded.

  “That’s all right, then. Good-bye to you.”

  He held out his hand and I shook it, scarcely knowing what I was doing. I must have lost my senses for a moment. When I recovered, I rushed to the window, in time to see the boat rounding the bend. Oliver was sitting in the stern with the man who had just left me. They had an absurd air of friendship. I might have been watching the Maeve setting off for Truro when we were all young and happy, and Maeve and Rory and Oliver...

  My hands clutched the window-sill as I crumpled to my knees and wept, for Oliver had turned, and waved his hand, and now I could see nothing but the river, grey and empty, and the trees that had forgotten summer.

  I did not remain after the boat had passed from sight. Judas’s dinghy was still at the foot of the ladder. I rowed her across to Heronwater and tied her up where Judas had left her the night before.

  There was nothing to wait for, nor any more need to conceal my presence. But I did not want Judas to know that I had been there. Nothing could come of that now. I hid myself in the shack and had not long to wait. He and Jansen came down the path from the house, talking noisily and excitedly together.
From behind the curtain I watched them get into the dinghy, saw Jansen pulling across the river with slow powerful strokes, and Judas in the stern pointing to the unusual fact of the dropped ladder.

  I sat down for a moment, wondering whether they had come to any decision, whether they had cooked any plot. Jansen was the sort of hare-brained fool who would try anything.

  Well, they were too late now, whatever they may have had in mind. I got up to go, saw Jansen step aboard, turn round, and playfully take the little captain by the collar of the jacket and heave him with one hand over the bulwarks. His great laugh came across the water, on which I had heard so much laughter in my time. When they were gone below, I ran up the path and a few minutes later the ’bus was taking me in to Truro.

  *

  There is nothing more to be said. They hanged Oliver in Strangeways gaol. I do not know whether a bell was tolled or a flag flown at half-mast or a proclamation nailed to the prison door. I only know that in the desolate street where, so long before, the people had sung and cheered as the Manchester Martyrs went to their doom, I lingered till, almost without seeing, I was aware that the small crowd had broken up and was drifting away.

  Then I, too, went, walking in the mournful weather down the squalid road that leads to the heart of the town. The trams crashed by, the pavements were lively with men and women marching in to their accustomed concerns. All the energy of another day was moving to its appointed ends.