by C. P. Snow
‘Milly, you’re not to talk in front of Lewis.’
‘It won’t hurt him. He’s bound to know sooner or later.’
‘That’s as may be. I won’t have you talk in front of Lewis.’
I knew by now that there was great trouble. I asked my mother: ‘Please, what is the matter?’
‘Don’t you worry,’ said my mother, her face lined with care, defiant, protective, and loving. ‘Perhaps it will blow over.’
‘Your father’s making a mess of things,’ said Aunt Milly.
But my mother said: ‘I tell you, you’re not to talk in front of the child.’
She spoke with such quiet anger, such reserve of will, that even Aunt Milly flinched. Neither of them said another word for some moments, and one could hear the tick of the clock on the mantelpiece. I could not imagine what the trouble was, but it frightened me. I knew that I could not ask again. This time it was real; I could not run home and be reassured.
Just then the latch of the front door clicked, and my father came in. There was no mystery why he had been out of the house that night. He was an enthusiastic singer, and organized a local male-voice choir. It was a passion that absorbed many of his nights. He came in, batting short-sighted eyes in the bright room.
‘We were talking about you, Bertie,’ said Aunt Milly.
‘I expect you were,’ said my father. ‘I expect I’ve done wrong as usual.’
His expression was mock-repentant. It was his manner to pretend to comic guilt, in order to exaggerate his already comic gentleness and lack of assertion. If there was clowning to be done, he could never resist it. He was a very small man, several inches shorter than his wife or sister. His head was disproportionately large, built on the same lines as Aunt Milly’s but with finer features. His eyes popped out like hers, but, when he was not clowning, looked reflective, and usually happy and amused. Like his sister’s his hair was on the light side of brown (my mother’s was very dark), and he had a big, reddish, drooping moustache. His spectacles had a knack of running askew, above the level of one eye and below the other. Habitually he wore a bowler hat, and while grinning at his sister he placed it on the sideboard.
‘I wish you’d show signs of ever doing anything,’ said Aunt Milly.
‘Don’t set on the man as soon as he gets inside the door,’ said my mother.
‘I expect it, Lena. I expect it.’ My father grinned. ‘She always puts the blame on me. I have to bear it. I have to bear it.’
‘I wish you’d stand up for yourself,’ said my mother irritably.
My father looked somewhat pale. He had looked pale all that year, though even now his face was relaxed by the side of my mother’s. And he made his inevitable comment when the clock struck the hour. It was a marble clock, presented to him by the choir when he had scored his twentieth year as secretary. It had miniature Doric columns on each side of the face, and a deep reverberating chime. Each time my father heard it he made the same remark. Now it struck eleven.
‘Solemn-toned clock,’ said my father appreciatively. ‘Solemn-toned clock.’
‘Confound the clock,’ said my mother with strain and bitterness.
As I lay awake in the attic, my face was hot against the pillow, hot with sunburn, hot with frightened thoughts. I had added some codicils to my prayers, but they did not ease me. I could not imagine what the trouble was.
2: Mr Eliot’s First Match
For a fortnight I was told nothing. My mother was absent-minded with worry, but if she and my father were talking when I came in they would fall uncomfortably quiet. Aunt Milly was in the house more often than I had ever seen her; most nights after supper there boomed a vigorous voice from the street outside; whenever she arrived I was sent into the garden. I got used to it. Often I forgot altogether the anxiety in the house. I liked reading in the garden, which was several steps below the level of the yard; there was a patch of longish grass, bordered by a flower bed, a rockery and some raspberry canes; I was specially fond of the trees – three pear trees by the side wall and two apple trees in the middle of the grass. I used to take out a deckchair, sit under one of the apple trees, and read until the summer sky had darkened and I could only just make out the print on the shimmering page.
Then I would look up at the house. The sitting-room window was a square of light. Sometimes I felt anxious about what was being said in there.
Apart from those conferences, I did not see any change in the routine of our days.
I went as usual to school, and found my mother at midday silent and absorbed. My father went, also as usual, to his business. He took to any routine with his habitual mild cheerfulness, and even Aunt Milly could not complain of the hours he worked. We had a servant-girl of about sixteen, and my father got up when she did, in the early morning, and had left for work long before I came down to breakfast, and did not return for his high tea until half past six or seven.
For three years past he had been in business on his own. Previously he had been employed in a small boot factory; he had looked after the hooks, been a kind of utility man and second-in-command, and earned two hundred and fifty pounds a year. On that we had lived comfortably enough, servant-girl and all. But he knew the trade, he knew the profits, he reported that Mr Stapleton, his employer, was drawing twelve hundred a year out of the business. To both my parents, to Aunt Milly, to Aunt Milly’s husband, that income seemed riches, almost unimaginable riches. My father thought vaguely that he would like to run his own factory. My mother urged him on. Aunt Milly prophesied that he would fail and reproached him for not having the enterprise to try.
My mother impelled him to it. She chafed against the limits of her sex. If she had been a man she would have driven ahead, she would have been a success. She lent him her savings, a hundred and fifty pounds or so. She helped borrow some more money. Aunt Milly, whose husband in a quiet inarticulate fashion was a good jobbing builder and appreciably more prosperous than we were, lent the rest. My father found himself in charge of a factory. It was very small. His total staff was never more than a dozen. But there he was, established on his own. There he had spent his long days for the past three years. At night I had often watched my mother look over the accounts, have an idea, ask why something had not been done, say that he ought to get a new traveller. That had not happened recently, in my hearing, but my father was still spending his long days at the factory. He never referred to it as ‘my business’ or ‘my factory’ – always by a neutral, geographical term, ‘Myrtle Road’.
One Friday night early in July my mother and father talked for a long time alone. When I came in from the garden I noticed that he was upset. ‘Lena’s got a headache. She’s gone to bed,’ he said. He gazed miserably at me, and I did not know what to say. Then, to my astonishment, he asked me to go with him to the county cricket match next day. I thought he had been going to tell me something painful: I did not understand it at all.
Myself, I went regularly to the ‘county’ whenever I could beg sixpence, but my father had not been to a cricket match in his life. And he said also that he would meet me outside the ground at half past eleven. He was going to leave Myrtle Road early. That was also astonishing. Even for a singing practice, even to get back to an evening with a travel book, he had never left the factory before his fixed time. On Saturdays he always reached home at half past one.
‘We’ll have the whole day at the match, shall we?’ he said. ‘We’ll get our money’s worth, shall we?’
His voice was flat, he could not even begin to clown.
Next morning, however, he was more himself. He liked going to new places; he never minded being innocent, not knowing his way about. ‘Fancy!’ he said, as he paid for us both and we pushed through the turnstiles. ‘So that’s where they play, is it?’ But he was looking at the practice nets. He was quite unembarrassed as I led him to seats on the popular side, just by the edge of the sight-screen.
Soon I had no time to attend to my father. I was immersed, tense with the br
eathtaking freshness of the first minutes of play. The wickets gleamed in the sun, the bail flashed, the batsmen played cautious strokes; I swallowed with excitement at each ball. I was a passionate partisan. Leicestershire were playing Sussex. For years I thought I remembered each detail of that day; I should have said that my father and I had watched the first balls of the Leicestershire innings. But my memory happened to have tricked me. Long afterwards I looked up the score. The match had begun on the Thursday, and Sussex had made over two hundred, and got two of our wickets for a few that night. Friday was washed out by rain, and we actually saw (despite my false remembrance) Leicestershire continue their innings.
All my heart was set on their getting a big score. And I was passionately partisan among the Leicestershire side itself. I had to find a hero. I had not so much choice as I should have had, if I had been luckier in my county; and I did not glow with many dashing vicarious triumphs. My hero was C J B Wood. Even I, in disloyal moments, admitted that he was not so spectacular as Jessop or Tyldesley. But, I told myself, he was much sounder. In actual fact, my hero did not often let me down. On the occasions when he failed completely, I wanted to cry.
That morning he cost me a gasp of fright. He kept playing – I think it must have been Relf – with an awkward-looking, clumsy, stumbling shot that usually patted the ball safely to mid-off. But once, as he did so, the ball found the edge of the bat and flew knee-high between first and second slip. It was four all the way. People round me clapped and said fatuously: ‘Pretty shot.’ I was contemptuous of them and concerned for my hero, who was thoughtfully slapping the pitch with the back of his bat.
After a quarter of an hour I could relax a little. My father was watching with mild blue-eyed interest. Seeing that I was not leaning forward with such desperate concentration, he began asking questions.
‘Lewis,’ he said, ‘do they have to be very strong to play this game?’
‘Some batsmen’, I said confidently, having read a lot of misleading books, ‘score all their runs by wristwork.’ I demonstrated the principle of the leg-glance.
‘Just turn their wrists, do they?’ said my father. He studied the players in the field. ‘But they seem to be pretty big chaps, most of these? Do they have to be big chaps?’
‘Quaife is ever such a little man. Quaife of Warwickshire.’
‘How little is he? Is he shorter than me?’
‘Oh yes.’
I was not sure of the facts, but I knew that somehow the answer would please my father. He received it with obvious satisfaction.
He pursued his chain of thought.
‘How old do they go on playing?’
‘Very old,’ I said.
‘Older than me?’
My father was forty-five. I assured him that W G Grace went on playing till he was fifty-eight. My father smiled reflectively.
‘How old can they be when they play for the first time? Who is the oldest man to play here for the first time?’
For all my Wisden, it was beyond me to tell him the record age of a first appearance in first-class cricket. I could only give my father general encouragement.
He was given to romantic daydreams, and that morning he was indulging one of them. He was dreaming that all of a sudden he had become miraculously skilled at cricket; he was brought into the middle, everyone acclaimed him, he won instantaneous fame. It would not have done for the dream to be absolutely fantastic. It had to take him as he was, forty-five years old and five feet four in height. He would not imagine himself taken back to youth and transformed into a man strong, tall and glorious. No, he accepted himself in the flesh, He grinned at himself – and then dreamed about all that could happen.
For the same reason he read all the travel books he could lay his hands on. He went down the road to the library and came home with a new book about the headwaters of the Amazon. In his imagination he was still middle-aged, still uncomfortably short in the leg, but he was also paddling up the rainforests where no white man had ever been.
I used, both at that age and when I was a little older, to pretend to myself that he read these books for the sake of knowledge. I liked to pretend that he was very learned about the tropics. But I knew it was not true. It hurt me, it hurt me with bitter twisted indignation, to hear Aunt Milly accuse him of being ineffectual, or my mother of being superstitious and a snob. It roused me to blind, savage, tearful love. It was a long time before I could harden myself to hear such things from her. Yet I could think them to myself and not be hurt at all.
My father treated me to gingerbeer and a pork pie in the lunch interval, and later we had some tea. Otherwise there was nothing to occupy him, after his romantic speculations had died down. He sat there patiently, peering at the game, not understanding it, not seeing the ball. I was not to know that he had a duty to perform.
After the last over the crowd round us drifted over the ground.
‘Let’s wait until they’ve gone,’ said my father.
So we sat on the emptying ground. The pavilion windows glinted in the evening sun, and the scoreboard threw a shadow halfway to the wicket.
‘Lena thinks there’s something I ought to tell you,’ said my father.
I stared at him.
‘I didn’t want to tell you before. I was afraid it might spoil your day.’
He looked at me, and added: ‘You see, Lewis, it isn’t very good news.’
‘Oh!’ I cried.
My father pushed up his spectacles.
‘Things aren’t going very well at Myrtle Road. That’s the trouble,’ he said. ‘I can’t say things are going as we should like.’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Milly says that it’s my fault,’ said my father uncomplainingly. ‘But I don’t know about that.’
He began to talk about ‘bigger people turning out a cheaper line’. Then he saw that he was puzzling me. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid we may be done for. I may have to file my petition.’
The phrase sounded ominous, deadly ominous, to me, but I did not understand.
‘That means’, said my father, ‘that I’m afraid we shan’t have much money to spare. I don’t like to think that I can’t find you a sovereign now and then, Lewis. I should like to give you a few sovereigns when you get a bit older.’
For a time, that explanation took the edge off my fears. But my father sat there without speaking again. The seats round us were all empty, we were alone on that side of the ground; scraps of paper blew along the grass. My father pulled his bowler hat down over his ears. At last he said, unwillingly: ‘I suppose we’ve got to go home sometime.’
The gates of the ground stood wide open, and we walked along the road, under the chestnut trees. Trains kept passing us, but my father was not inclined to take one. He was quiet, except that once he remarked: ‘The trouble is, Lena takes it all to heart.’
He said it as though he was asking me for support.
As soon as he got inside the house and saw my mother, he said: ‘Well, I’ve seen my first match! There can’t be many people who haven’t seen a cricket match until they’re forty-five–’
‘Bertie,’ said my mother in a cold angry voice. Usually she let him display his simplicity, pretend to be simpler than he was. That night she could not bear it.
‘You’d better have your supper,’ she said. ‘I expect Lewis can do with it.’
‘I expect he can,’ said my father. Nine times out of ten, for he never got tired of the same repartee, he would have said, ‘I expect I can too.’ But he felt the weight of my mother’s suffering.
We sat round the table in the kitchen. There was cold meat, cheese, a bowl of tinned pears, jam tarts, and a jug of cream.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve had much to eat all day,’ said my mother. ‘You’ll want something now.’
My father munched away. I was ashamed to be so hungry, in sight of my mother’s face that night, but I was famished. My mother said she had eaten, but it was more likely that she had no app
etite for food. From the back kitchen (the house sprawled about without any plan) came the singing of a kettle on the stove.
‘I’ll have a cup of tea with you,’ said my mother. Neither of them had spoken since we began the meal.
As my father pushed up his moustache and took his first sip of tea, he remarked, as though casually: ‘I did what you told me, Lena.’
‘What, Bertie?’
‘I told Lewis that we’re worried about Myrtle Road.’
‘Worried,’ said my mother. ‘I hope you told him more than that.’
‘I did what you told me.’
‘I’d have kept it from you if I could,’ my mother said to me. ‘But I wasn’t going to have you hear it first from Aunt Milly or someone else. If you’ve got to hear it, I couldn’t abide it coming from anybody else. It had to be from us.’
She had spoken with affection, but most of all with shame and bitter pride.
Yet she had not given up all hope. She was too active for that. The late sun streamed across the kitchen, and a patch of light, reflected from my mother’s cup of tea, danced on the wall. She was sitting half-in, half-out of the shadow, and she seldom looked at my father as she spoke. She spoke in a tight voice, higher than usual but unbroken,
Most of it swept round me. All I gathered was the sound of calamity, pain, disgrace, threats to the three of us. The word ‘petition’ kept hissing in the room, and she spoke of someone called the ‘receiver’. ‘How long can we leave it before he’s called in?’ asked my mother urgently. My father did not know; he was not struggling as she was, he could not take her lead.
She still had plans for raising money. She was ready to borrow from the doctor, to sell her ‘bits of jewellery’, to go to a moneylender. But she did not know enough. She had the spirit and the wits, but she had never had the chance to pick up the knowledge. Despite her courage, she was helpless and tied.
It seemed that Aunt Milly had offered help, had been the only relative to offer practical help. ‘We’re always being beholden to her,’ said my mother. I was baffled, since I was used to taking it for granted that Aunt Milly was a natural enemy.