The Stepson

by Martin Armstrong

  She stood for a moment and looked about her incredulously. To her, the outward semblance of that place had become so overweighted with inner significance that she felt, as she stood there once again, that she was dreaming. The natural reality, as she stared at it, evaded and baffled her. Kate was no philosopher; her mind never delved into the significance of material and spiritual, outer and inner. She would have said, if anyone had questioned her, that reality consisted of people and trees and gateposts and roads, and that love and dreams and vague emotions were unreality. She would have said so, yet in saying so she would have belied herself, for her real convictions were not articulate. She accepted the working convention called common sense because it had never occurred to her to question it; and so the tide of memory and emotion which flooded the scene before her till solid things grew blurred and wavered under its ripples, dazed and baffled her. Her reality receded into a ghost; her ghosts grew real, overwhelmingly real, before her eyes. ‘I’m foolish with love,’ she thought to herself with a happy sigh as she went on her way; and her mind turned to her wedding-day, when she had driven past that spot with Ben and had for a moment allowed herself to dream that the old man at her side had been changed into young Graham.

  Young Graham! She pictured him again turning to latch the gate as they had come out of the Hall drive on their one walk together all those years ago; and then she pictured him as she had seen him half an hour before that, bending over that bed full of blue hyacinths. How clear that scene was in her memory! Again she stood there watching him, and as she watched he raised his body to stretch himself, and she saw his face. But how strange! What a funny thing memory was! For the face that looked at her now out of the past was not young Graham’s, but David’s. Yes, it was David who stood, in that picture of her mind, and stretched himself above the hyacinths. She tried to force her memory to call up young Graham, but it refused. She could no longer recall what he looked like. She had changed him into David, and as she pondered about young Graham she found that he had ceased to exist for her as a separate individual. David had swallowed him up. ‘Yes, memory’s a funny thing,’ she thought to herself. ‘It seems to take matters into its own hands.’

  Half an hour later she could see over the hedge the roofs of the inn, the post office, and the little shop of Penridge, and soon the road swung to the left and the village green began to open into view.

  She crossed the green, and the freakish church among its black trees and the meagre building of the school stood before her, and it seemed to Kate that it was not nine months, but nine years, since she had driven away with Ben in her grand blue dress and hat, and the school and her father, dry and correct on the doorstep, had receded from sight and mind. At this hour the Schoolmaster would be at afternoon school, and Kate wondered if she would find the house door locked. In that case she would walk a short way down the road till school came out, which, as she saw by the church clock, would be in twenty minutes.

  The noises of children’s voices and of boots shuffled on the wooden floor, of a book or some other heavy object put down on a desk, were heard through the open windows of the hollow Schoolroom - those three long, narrow windows which were a mean modern imitation of early English lancets; and just as Kate passed them, the top of the schoolmaster’s head, the thin grey hairs showing the baldness beneath, appeared for a moment above the high sill. That brief glimpse brought back to Kate the whole of her father’s character. How strange to think that he was there, within a few yards of her, utterly unaware of her presence. She stood on the doorstep of his house and lifted the latch.

  The door opened and she went in. Everything inside was neat and clean as she had left it. His tea stood ready on the kitchen table; the teapot had been put down to warm in the fender and the kettle sang and steamed on the hob. Someone had been in and put everything ready. The Schoolmaster’s place was set where she herself had always sat with her back to the fire. He had moved from his old place to hers, no doubt so as to be able to reach the kettle and the oven without rising from his chair. That, it seemed to Kate, was the only change. The sight of the empty room and the waiting meal roused Kate’s pity. What, she wondered as she paused with her hand on the door-handle, while all those intensely familiar things reached out arms and feelers and took hold of her again, what had her father thought and felt in the time since she had left him? Had he missed her? Had he regretted their cold, inexpressive life together and wished, too late, that he had made a friend of her? Or had he adapted himself unreflectingly to the change, like some slow creature suddenly exposed to light and air when its sheltering stone has been overturned? It seemed to her now, as she thought of him, that her relation to him had changed — changed from that of a repressed and unloving daughter to a self-reproachful parent. Poor lonely creature! Surely there was a great deal that she might have done for him which she had not done. Then she noticed that after all there was a change in the room. In a corner near the window a small, rough table had been set, with a vice fitted to it, and going over to it she found on it a fret-saw and a thin square of wood with a pattern drawn on it in pencil. A little of the pattern had already been cut out. So he had taken up fret-work to fill in the hours when he was alone. Even to simple-minded Kate, this timid endeavour to protect himself against the emptiness of time and place seemed a melancholy and pitiful makeshift. She was on the point of taking up the fretted square when a sudden hubbub in the schoolroom through the wall told her that afternoon school was over. Mechanically she went to the fire, took up the teapot and, lifting the lid, put in the three teaspoonfuls of tea from the tin on the table. Then she filled the pot from the kettle and stooped to set it down by the fire. As she rose she heard her father’s feet in the entrance, and next moment the door opened.

  The Schoolmaster stood for a moment, peering as if dazzled.

  ‘Why, Kate,’ he said, ‘is that you? I wondered how the door came to be ajar.’ He held out his hand, and when she grasped it he laid his other hand on hers. ‘Why, this is a surprise,’ he said, and there was a tinge of pleasure in his colourless voice. ‘And how are you? You look well.’

  ‘I felt I must come over,’ said Kate, ‘and see how you were getting on.’

  He turned to the fire. ‘I will make the tea,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve made it, Father,’ said Kate.

  ‘For two?’

  ‘Yes, for two.’

  ‘I’ll just … There are some stewed plums in the larder.’ He went out and in a moment returned, carrying a glass dish, plates, spoons, and another cup and saucer.

  ‘It’s nine months since I went away,’ said Kate.

  ‘Not quite,’ said the Schoolmaster. ‘Thirty-five weeks yesterday.’

  His lips closed themselves precisely and Kate noticed the familiar vertical lines from the corners of his mouth to his chin. He drew up another chair.

  ‘You sit there, Kate, in your old place,’ he said, pointing to the place near the fire, ‘and pour out as you used to do.’

  And Kate sat in her old place and they acted again a fragment of their old life. Yet how different under its outward similarity was their relation now. It seemed almost to Kate that she was a middle-aged woman sitting with a middle-aged man whom she had known years ago. There was a sense of strangeness in this meeting again, for it was not a taking up of old sympathies, but a discovery of vague sympathies where before there had seemed to be none. They were in truth shy strangers, bettering their acquaintance.

  ‘It’s nice to be here again,’ Kate said as she handed the Schoolmaster his tea.

  He glanced at her quickly. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Does it really seem nice to you? And yet you were very glad to leave here. You didn’t think when you left, did you, that it would be nice to return?’

  ‘No,’ said Kate. ‘I wasn’t happy. I was glad to go.’

  ‘I never knew,’ said the Schoolmaster, ‘whether you were happy or not. You never spoke of your feelings.’

  ‘And you wondered sometimes what they wer
e?’ Kate asked.

  He nodded. ‘Often!’

  ‘But you never asked me.’

  ‘No I….’ He hesitated. ‘I found it difficult to …’ The old man blushed, as though making some intimate confession. ‘You see, Kate, it has always been difficult for me to …’ He made a helpless gesture with his hands.

  ‘It was a strange thing, wasn’t it,’ she said, ‘that we should live together all those years and yet know nothing of each other, like two shadows moving about the house?’

  ‘You always avoided me, Kate.’

  Kate nodded. ‘I couldn’t help it. You never seemed to expect anything else.’

  ‘No,’ said the Schoolmaster at last. ‘I didn’t expect anything else. Years ago, I … well … I gave it up, retired into my shell.’ He bowed his head and again his face reddened. It was evident that to talk thus openly about himself filled him with shame. For a moment they sat in silence, disturbed only by the faint murmuring of the kettle and the clink of Kate’s cup as she set it back in the saucer.

  ‘How was that?’ she asked tentatively; but it seemed that he had not heard her question. He sat with his bony hands clasped before him, his eyes fixed on his plate and a wintry smile faintly lighting his face.

  ‘We were great friends once, you and I, Kate,’ he said, ‘when you were a little thing. You won’t remember that. It was not until you were about eight that I … that we …’ He flagged again, and it seemed to Kate that she was talking to a timid child.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  For a moment he did not reply. He was not smiling now, but his eyes were still fixed on his plate, as if he expected to read the answer to her question there. Then his lips parted.

  ‘I don’t quite know,’ he said precisely.

  ‘Surely I wasn’t to blame,’ Kate quietly urged, ‘at that age?’

  He raised his eyes and spoke shortly. ‘I think your mother was to blame.’

  ‘Mother?’

  ‘She drew you away from me.’

  ‘Poor Mother,’ said Kate. ‘You think she put me against you?’

  He set his lips primly and a little grimly. ‘I thought so for years,’ he said. Then he made a gesture as though abandoning his old resentment. ‘What does it matter now?’ he said, sighing. ‘It is difficult to know what people do intentionally and what happens because it must happen.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kate, ‘and it’s difficult, as well, to do what you want to do, even if you want it ever so much.’

  His pale eyes raised themselves quickly to hers as if he were both surprised and grateful for her understanding.

  ‘Have you, too, found that, Kate?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘Always.’

  They had finished their tea and Kate found herself by mere force of habit clearing the table. ‘I’ll wash up,’ she said, taking up the tray.

  ‘Don’t trouble, Kate,’ her father answered. ‘Mrs. Gales always comes in at eight.’

  Kate left the tray in the scullery and returned. ‘You manage all right, then?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, quite, as you see.’ He waved a general indication of the kitchen.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kate, ‘the place is nice and clean.’ She did not dare to ask if he was happy. Had he ever, she wondered, been either happy or unhappy during the last fifteen years? Perhaps even he himself could not have told her.

  He went over to the table near the window. ‘I have taken up a hobby since you went away, Kate,’ he said, and he began to take some pieces of finished fret-work from under the table. ‘I find it a good thing,’ he said in that dry, correct tone which always used to irritate her so much, ‘to have something to work at sometimes’; and, bending meagre and hesitant beside her chair, he began to show her one by one the thin squares and oblongs of fretted wood. In Kate’s simple eyes they were very beautiful.

  ‘Why, Father,’ she said, looking up at him with surprise and admiration on her face, ‘however did you learn to do it so well?’

  He coloured with pride like a boy, examining each piece lovingly as she handed it back to him.

  ‘If you like them,’ he said, ‘I will make one for you. You shall have it next time you … That is, if you …’

  ‘Oh thank you, Father,’ she said. ‘I should love to have one. I shall be over again before long, you may be sure.’

  ‘Well,’ said the Schoolmaster, ‘I shall have to think it out. Perhaps I could work your initials into a design’; and Kate saw that he was delighted at the prospect of making something for her.

  He went to put the fret-work back in its place under the table, and Kate rose and began to put on her hat, saying that she must go. Then, having made herself ready, she turned to say good-bye. He stood before her embarrassed, and then reached out a hesitating hand. Kate took it and then, putting up her face to his, she kissed him; and as she crossed the green towards the Elchester road, she looked round and saw him still standing, spare, upright and lonely, in the doorway of the ugly little house. She waved her hand and he waved back, and soon she had turned onto the road and the school was lost to sight. Her heart was warm with something which she could not define. Was it happiness or sadness, or a blend of both? She knew at least that it was something which it was good to have felt, and that she had found what she had set out to seek at her old home.

  XVIII

  Kate’s visit to her father occupied her mind much during the following days. It had affected her profoundly, and she knew that it had profoundly affected him, and yet the words they had actually spoken, as she went over them in her memory, were, in comparison with the effect they had produced, extraordinarily dry and superficial. But what did that matter? The words, whatever their weakness, had sufficed to pierce the armour they had worn against each other all these years and to transform them from enemies into friends. It was strange to contemplate the change which had come over her own attitude. For Kate’s life had kept her a child in mind long after her body had reached womanhood, and all the time she had lived at Penridge she had retained the childish belief that all grown-up people except herself were strong and self-sufficient. She had never doubted that the father whom she hated was a strong, self-sufficient man whose coldness and austerity towards herself were the outward sign of his qualities. In her young ignorance it had never occurred to her that he could be other than he seemed, that under the stern exterior there cowered a timid, thwarted creature that craved for affectionate indulgence. If only he had dared to show her the weaker side of himself, how different those weary years together might have been. But that, as she now saw, was exactly what his weakness had made impossible to him. It was his weakness and defencelessness which had compelled him to assume the mask which had helped to make her life with him so joyless a thing. By the discovery of this, it seemed to Kate, she was at last delivered from the spell of her unhappy youth.

  As she thought over these things, she was sitting at the sewing-machine in the parlour window making a shirt for David. That commonplace task filled her with an extraordinary happiness: it was as if the whole of her being found expression in the work. This was the fourth shirt she had made since David had left The Grange: those that she had intended to make for Ben had in the meantime been neglected. Her thoughts flowed on, and under her hand the machine rattled and hummed, filling the room with a noise like the buzz of a huge frantic bluebottle.

  In the light of her new knowledge of her father she now considered Ben. He too had worn a mask for her, but what she had discovered under the mask was not an unsuspected humanity, but deceitfulness and lust. Yet, although in her father the hidden nature had proved to be the truer part, was this the case for every one? Might it not be that in some people the apparent nature was the truer and the hidden nature the less real part? It would surely be absurd to suppose that the true nature of every man was hidden, that no one was what he seemed to be. Life would be impossible under such conditions. Might it not be, then, that the truer part of Ben was the part he had always shown to her, and that the ug
ly secret she had stumbled on was the weaker and less real side of him? If only she could persuade Ben to be frank with her, even in the hesitating and stumbling way in which her father had been frank, might they not reach to a deeper understanding? Yes, mutual understanding was everything: a brave and complete frankness would make all misapprehension impossible; and she began to imagine a conversation between herself and Ben in which all that painful secret about Emma was confessed and abolished. She could now forgive him readily, she believed, if only he would open his heart to her and show her that he was truly sorry for his cruel deception.

  But suddenly Kate stopped working. The stream of her thought was arrested and the blood rushed to her face, for in a flash she had realized that, however frank Ben was with her, she herself could not be frank with him. How could she respond to his confession and repentance by telling him that she was in love with his son? To Ben it would certainly seem a monstrous thing that she should have fallen in love with this boy, and indeed, she told herself, it was a wicked and monstrous thing. But alas! although she told herself so over and over again, she did not believe it in her heart of hearts. Her heart, that fiery and untamable creature that follows its own instincts and will not submit to the laws of the world, cried out that her love for David was beautiful and good. Was it not by the superabundance of that love that she had been prompted to visit her father? And how fully that prompting had been justified. She paused, entangled among these cross-purposes, her mind bewildered between the reason which had proved her love evil and her heart’s burning conviction of its goodness; and in the face of that incontrovertible ardour her longing for frankness and understanding with Ben slid away from her unresisting, as snow slides from a laden bough when the thaw comes. For if her love made frankness impossible, then frankness had by that been proved the lesser good. Her love, at least, should be kept safe at all costs. She would live in it as in a secret world apart from the world of everyday life, leading there a blissful life of her own.