Tony got up and wandered round the room. He opened the door and sniffed.
“How long will that rabbit take to cook?”
“Another half hour. I want the bones absolutely clean. We can’t risk leaving burying them until to-morrow night, and we don’t want to waste anything.”
Tony closed the door and sat down again.
“I haven’t blah-ed about it but I think you’ve been pretty marvellous. How you got that old cow Conrad out of the house . . .”
“That’s not a nice way to speak of her, she was a kind woman and wonderful with plants . . .”
“Don’t interrupt, you old what-not. It isn’t often I praise you so sit back and listen. I don’t know how you’ve managed to put all the family off, especially Virginia.” He was looking at Anna and saw her expression. “And don’t think I don’t know what that’s meant, because I do. I know it’s been hell getting food for me without old Doe knowing anything about it. The old skinflint only leaves you enough for a mouse and then wants to know why you’ve finished it.” He laughed. “I wish sometimes she could take a spade to a certain spot at the end of the bluebell glade. Not knowing you’re feeding a growing boy she’d have a fit. I don’t know how you’ve managed to sneak about buying food and even buying clothes for me without the police spotting you. You might have been the wrong side of the law all your life. I’ve always said you were the most gorgeous woman I know, but these last three months you’ve been a ruddy heroine. I’d like to do something for you to show you that I adore you. But you know, duckie, making you think that after all I’m not so bad isn’t the way.” Anna moved to answer but he stopped her. “Hold on. I haven’t finished. One day I’ll be caught. Nosey Doe will find a clue, or that old comic Pickering will notice something; after all, the summer’s coming; it won’t be so easy burying the food remains, there’s not much darkness at midsummer. One day some of our big-booted friends will drag me off—and I’ll have to finish my sentence—no remission this time as I’ve broken out—and then—well, God knows—I’ll push off somewhere, and I don’t suppose you’ll see much of me and it’ll be easier for you if, however soft a corner you’ve got for the wastrel son, you know in that head of yours that he was no good. You don’t want to brood around thinking, ‘’e was splendid reelly p’or boy but ’e never ’ad a chance.’”
“There’s no danger of that.”
“It doesn’t take the sort of virtues that would be respected in the ordinary world to be respected underground.”
“I can imagine that, but I would expect that much of that respect is based on usefulness. You were never useful to anybody . . .”
“Fair enough.”
“In the beginning when you first fell in with those men, what had you to offer?”
“I haven’t got a present for you for to-morrow, so you can have the story instead, but it’ll do you no good. Your youngest son may be the wastrel boy but he’s no fool. I know what you’re after. You’re saying to yourself, ‘He’s not all bad. There’s a streak of pure gold somewhere.’”
Anna began to knit again. She smothered a sigh at the proud complacency in Tony’s voice. It was that complacency—almost the pleasure he took in being what he was—which would be so hard to overcome.
“Never mind what I think. You tell me my Mothering Sunday story.”
“There was a chap I knew wanted to get out of the country quickly. You’ll have to take a lot of this a bit patchily, but there’s things there’s no point in telling you. Once the war finished there was a set-up for getting away if you knew the ropes and had the money. Mostly it means being shut up for days in a place the size of a box, being sick all over yourself and doing all you’ve got to do where you sit, so it’s no picnic, but this chap had a chance through a friend to go the posh way, a proper ticket and all, only he’d no clothes and no money. It’s easy enough to fake passports, but you can’t get anywhere without clothes and money. The news went round about him.”
“How?”
“Never you mind that, but you can take my word for it that when we want to pass on a bit of news we can send it better and quicker than telephones or telegrams.”
“They’re very slow these days.”
“If it comes to that the old tom-tom’s got nothing on our system. Clothes are one of the things it’s hard to come by. There’s a description out of stolen clothes, and any we have we need. You remember the ones I came here in.”
Anna could indeed remember. She heard again the sharp tap of a nail on the french windows. She had known in a moment who it must be. She had heard Mrs. Conrad in the kitchen filling the hot-water bottles. She had slightly separated the curtains so that Tony could see into the room and held up a warning finger. When Mrs. Conrad had gone up to the bedrooms she had opened the windows and told him to crouch behind her chair. He had not only been torn and ragged, but he had smelt. Very late that night, when she had got him safely into the old nursery and the door was locked, she had buried those clothes in the garden. She had not been able at the time to bury them properly. She had not the strength to dig a hole large enough, so she had merely lifted the compost heap and put them under it. The next night, Mrs. Conrad having been sent away on holiday, Tony had been able to slip out and dig a trench for them, and for food refuse, at the bottom of what Virginia had christened the bluebell glade, a spot chosen as it was outside what “Old Smith” considered his garden. Anna would not, even if a winter night in late December had been suitable for it, have gone with Tony to watch the interment for the clothes made her shudder. To know your son hunted was one thing; to see with your own eyes the state to which being hunted had reduced him was another.
“I remember.”
“Anyway nothing much was raised for him. Then one day I’m out on the prowl with a chap; he was picking up a car—I used to be taken on those jobs as I’m handy with a car—and I recognised the mews—‘My sainted aunt,’ I said, ‘a brother-in-law used to keep his car down here.’”
“Was it where George and Felicity keep theirs?”
“You’ve got it. Well, nothing much was said at the time, but when we get back there was a bit of a laugh about ‘James’s grand relations.’ Then suddenly this chap that’s going abroad said, ‘Would your brother-in-law give you some clothes?’ I’d never thought of going near any of you, but asked straight out like that, I said he might. There was a hell of a row; you see, I knew quite a bit and nobody knew much about me—then, of course, there was the risk that if I saw George he might hand me over to the police and I might speak out of turn—one way and another it didn’t look a very snappy proposition. But in the end I was told to go. Mind you, I bet I was watched and if there’d been any funny stuff everybody would have scattered. Just as I was leaving, the chap who wanted the clothes said: ‘If you see your brother-in-law tell him to put some cash and a bottle of whisky in with the clothes.’ Of course I didn’t even know if George was back in civvy street, and I was scared stiff of going near him, but I said, ‘Nothing easier’ and walked out. I was scared of the house so I went to the mews. I’d popped round there lots of times before the war when George lent me his car. When you come to some place where you’ve always walked about as if you owned it, it feels odd sneaking around. Funny thing, you can hang about for ever and nobody notices you if you don’t care a damn who sees you. But the moment it matters you think everybody’s looking at you. I felt so many eyes on me in that blasted mews that I nearly packed up. I walked along past George’s garage; funny thing, I remembered which it had been and I felt the door. It wasn’t locked so I thought I’d wait just in case George turned up.”
Anna could see that wait. The shabby figure of her son hiding in the shadows.
“Did he come?”
“Yes. Suddenly there was the car; a new one, he’s got a Jaguar now. Queer how George always manages to fix himself up all right. I followed it into the garage. Old George didn’t half ju
mp when I spoke.” Tony laughed. “Nothing changes him, though. You’d have thought he was expecting me.”
“What did he do?”
Tony imitated George.
“‘Anything I can get you, old chap?’ I told him what I wanted and why and he said, ‘We’ll take the car home. Look as though I’d forgotten something. Get in the back, old man. Lie on the floor. Throw a rug over you.’ We drove to the house and he went in. He locked all the car doors so no passing copper could get nosey. Presently he came out, threw a suitcase on the back seat and said, just as if I was staying at a club, ‘where’s the best place to drop you off, old man?’ I told him. We stopped somewhere near where I wanted to be and where there was nobody about. He said: ‘Think there’s everything in the case. The money and the whisky are on the top. Good hunting old boy,’ and he drove off.”
Anna had dropped her knitting into her lap. She was amazed by the story. How little you knew other people. George! Respectable George! Providing clothes and money to get somebody who might be a criminal out of the country!
“You do surprise me, Tony. I should have thought George was the last one to help a case of that sort.”
Tony gave his mother a shrewd look.
“I wouldn’t wonder if you’ve got George all wrong. Anybody might, just seeing him slopping round after Felicity, but he’s a good type.”
Anna would have liked to continue the discussion of George, but it was away from her purpose.
“What happened then?”
“I took the suitcase along. You should have seen their faces. Especially over the money and the whisky.”
“Had you any money at that time?”
“The odd shilling or two.” Tony leant forward and patted Anna’s knees. “Pack it up. Your youngest son wasn’t a blasted hero. If he’d sat down and drunk the whisky he’d have been picked up as drunk and disorderly and handed over the next day to a military escort. He’d nowhere to go at that time except back to his friends, and if you want to know, he never had the nous to open the case and pocket the money. I cursed the next day; that silly idiot George had his name in the suits and there were laundry marks and God knows what. ‘Come on, James,’ they said, ‘nice bit of needlework for you.’”
“I see,” Anna said and, in as far as it was possible for her to see a world outside anything she knew, she did see. Tony the joker, had on that night shown he could be trusted to stand by his friends. Perhaps they thought him a fool to part with everything he was given, but it would not be forgotten that he had done so. She tried to turn the Tony those men knew and trusted into the Tony his family had known. He had been an anxiety ever since he grew up. He had never stuck at any job for long and yet had periods when he appeared to have quite a lot of money. At the back of her mind Anna knew that for years she had been prepared for trouble. Nothing like what had happened, of course, but that he might get into a mess, probably to do with money. Yet up to the war nothing had happened. He had gone his mysterious way, bobbing like a cork from job to job and presumably cheque to cheque. Acting, filming, broadcasting, in on something good in the city, on the verge of making a lot of money in something to do with dog racing. Always well-groomed; always to be seen eating in the best places. Able to spend months in famous and exotic spots. There had often been pictures of him sunbathing with groups of déclassé nobility or theatre people. He seemed usually to stay with the sort of financiers whose methods of getting rich were extremely suspect. He always appeared to have innumerable girls in his life. Yet he never got engaged. The one solid, unaltering feature of his queer life had seemed to be his love for her. He was always coming down to see her. His flats in London came and went, so his permanent address was with her. It had been a surprise and certainly a relief when, almost as soon as war was declared, without prompting he had joined the army. Presumably some of his queer friends had influence for there was not at first any thought of making a fighting soldier of him. He wandered about, looking incredibly good-looking in uniform, from one town to another until about 1943 he came to rest, as he supposed, for the duration, in the War Office. But, either his friends had lost their influence, or Tony’s sins of omission and commission caught up with him; suddenly he was out of the War Office and with a training unit of his regiment on Salisbury Plain. It was not until that time that Anna had realised how comfortable in her mind she had become about Tony. She had ceased to worry about him. From the moment he was sent to Salisbury Plain she had not stopped worrying. There had always been signs when Tony was not going to stand something. He had talked about producers in the theatre behaving like tin gods, and who the hell did the B.B.C. think they were, anyway. And you could only live once, and if so-and-so thought he was going to get down to the studio at some god-forsaken hour just to sit on his backside and wait he’d got another think coming. Or someone had let him down; he’d had a dirty deal; old so-and-so had done him out of thousands. From Salisbury Plain came “The Colonel’s got it in for me.” “You’d think it was a crime not to have been at Dunkirk.” “Every foul job nobody else wants to do is landed on me.” Anna could read between the lines. She could imagine the soldiers Tony had landed amongst; men who were allergic to the Tony type; who probably found it a pleasurable duty to try and make a man out of him. She wrote to Henry and asked him to try and get Tony moved. Henry had been more sympathetic than she had expected. He did not know Tony well for Tony had been a baby when he had left home to join the army in the first war, but he had evidently kept an eye, even if a disgruntled one, on his young brother; he wrote that he could see why Anna was anxious but he was powerless to do anything. She had thought of writing to George asking him to see Tony on his next leave, for George liked soldiering, but decided against it. She had never known George well, and things were difficult enough in that house without adding to their worries. She would have gone to Simon for she was fond of him and had the greatest respect for him, but even while she was thinking of it Alistair was killed, and it was impossible to add her worries to his grief. Unable to do anything to help she had prayed that nothing would go wrong, while waiting to hear that it had. Her thoughts surprised her. She spoke out loud without intending to.
“I’ve never trusted you. None of us have.”
“I wouldn’t say that. None of you locked up the silver when I was in the house. George and Felicity often lent me their car and I don’t think they kissed it good-bye.”
“You know I don’t mean that sort of trust. What I mean is we had no faith in you.”
“Why would you have? What did I ever do to give you faith in me?”
“What chance had you if even your mother did not believe in you? I believe I gave up believing in you before you left school.”
“You did. I remember telling you I was going to be an actor and you said, ‘Yes, dear’ in exactly the same voice as you said ‘Yes, dear’ when I was little and told you I would be a keeper at the zoo when I grew up.”
Anna went back to her knitting. Lack of belief. Was that part of the answer? Had his brother officers believed in him rather than openly despising him would he have deserted? It was, for all the thinking she had done, a new line of thought. When Tony was on the run, and later during the trial, she had forced herself to remain, in as far as was possible, tranquil; to keep her mind, in spite of its horror of the publicity inflicted on them all, clear so that she could see, not Tony the criminal, but Tony her son. To face the fact that, through inherent weakness, supplemented by bad upbringing, she had given a useless wastrel to the community. Ever since he had come to her for sanctuary she had accepted that others had found qualities in her son that she had never known existed, but even to-night, planning to discover what those qualities were, she had not grasped until this moment that qualities alone were not the answer; that without somebody to believe in them only people of rare quality believed in themselves.
Tony, too, had been thinking . . .
“I was a blasted i
diot to take that revolver.”
That Tony had been armed when caught had been discussed endlessly. He had said in court that it was just a possession, never intended for use, as why should it be when he was fetching his sister. He had tried to make Anna see why he had carried it. “That Pole was a comic type. If I hadn’t taken the blasted thing when he offered it he would have been insulted. It was the best thing he had. Poor muggins, I bet he wished he’d never trusted me with it! Still, he’s safer without it. I always thought he’d kill somebody with it one day. Violent type.” Perhaps the jury might have believed the revolver was just a possession never intended for use. The police, as all the family knew from the questions they had asked, were certain it was not Tony’s; but that he could give a lot of useful information about the owner if he would. What the jury could not understand was why, if his story was true, did he mistake the house he broke into for his sister’s. A doctor had a night bell. People constantly rang it. The chances were his sister would answer it herself, but even if she did not he only had to ask for the doctor and she would come down. Why force a window? Tony, in all his talks with Anna had never really explained that. He said that he had got out of the way of ringing bells. That he was scared that it would be Freda Dixon who answered the door. That he had forgotten there would be a night bell. Probably the nearest to the truth was that he could not be sure it was Margaret’s house, and in any case, by the time he reached it he was stupid with cold and fright. Anyway, the whys did not matter; whatever his reasons they belonged to his past. It was his future which mattered. What a pity, thought Anna, that I feel so old and tired to-night. I see clearly in my head what I should say, if only I had the tongue to say the words, and enough energy to drive what I know into Tony.
“Thank you, dear, for your Mothering Sunday present. I’m very glad you told me that story. It has not only given me a new picture of you, but, incidentally, of George.” She paused, feeling for the right words. “You admit your time here is getting short. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to hide you here in the summer, nor can you for ever live in that shut up room. I have taken immense pains to hide you and you know the reason.” Tony moved impatiently. “I know, darling, I’ve bored you with the subject but I have to speak of it again, to-night. Don’t leave me just to go back to live like a wild creature. What’s the good of it? One day sooner or later you’ll be caught. Give yourself up but, before you give yourself up, see why you are doing it. I believe in you, Tony. The hard times you’ve been through have taught you a lot. This could be the crossroad in your life. You’ll have time while you are finishing your sentence to take stock of yourself. You are being punished; accept the punishment as earned, for it is, you know. Then decide on your future. You’ve a lot of talent in different directions. You are quite a good actor though that is rather a precarious career, but there are other things. You admit you enjoyed farm work at Wakefield. Why not farm? I have complete faith that if you decide to finish with the past and start again, and face your weaknesses honestly, and plan to overcome them, and make up your mind exactly what you would like to do, that I, with the help of the others, can arrange for you, with God’s help—and don’t forget that part, Tony—to have a happy, honourable life.”
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