‘Oh dear,’ said my mother, wiping her eyes. ‘They are silly. I’ve always got something to watch.’
She was calmed, invigorated, made joyful by the sight. She had been so ambitious, she had hoped so fiercely, she had never found what she needed to make her happy – yet she had had abounding capacity for happiness. Now, when her days were numbered, when her vision was foreshortened, she showed it still. Perhaps it was purer, now her hopes were gone. She was simple with laughter, just as I remembered her when I was five years old, when she took me for a walk and a squirrel came quarrelling down a tree.
I came back to the bedside and took her hand. It occurred to her at that moment to tell me not to underestimate my brother Martin. She insisted on his merits. In fact, it was an exhortation I did not need, for I was extremely fond of him. My mother was arguing with her own injustice, for she had never forgiven his birth, she had never wanted to find her match and fulfilment in him, as she had in me.
There was a flash of irony here – for he was less at ease with others than I was, but more so with her.
Then she got tired. She tried to hide it, she did not choose to admit it. Her thoughts rambled; her speech was thicker and hard to follow; Martin Francis (my brother’s names) took her by free association to Dr Francis, and how he had come specially to see her that morning, which he would not do for his ordinary patients. She was tired to death. With perfect lucidity, she broke out once: ‘I should like to go in my sleep.’
Her thoughts rambled again. With a last effort of will, she said in a clear, dignified manner: ‘I didn’t have a very good night. That’s what it is. Perhaps I’d better have a nap now. Please to come and see me after tea, dear. I shan’t be a bother to you then. I like to talk to you properly, you know.’
My mother died in May. From the cemetery, my father and I returned to the empty house. I drew up the blind, in the front room; after three days of darkness, the pictures, the china on the sideboard, leaped out, desolatingly bright.
‘Milly keeps on at me about living with her,’ said my father.
‘I know,’ I said.
‘I suppose we shall have to,’ said my father.
‘I’m not sure what I shall do,’ I said.
My father looked taken aback, mournfully dazed, with his black tie and the armlet round his sleeve.
I had been thinking what I should do, when I sat in the house and my mother lay dying. I had been making up my mind while in the familiar bedroom her body rested dead. I was too near her dying and her death to acknowledge my own bereavement. I did not know the wound of my own loss. I did not know that I should feel remorse, because I had not given her what she asked of me. I was utterly ignorant of the flaw within, which crept to the open in the way I failed my mother.
At the time of my mother’s death I was as absorbed in the future, as bent upon my plans, as she might have been. My first decision, in fact, was more in my mother’s line than my own of later years. For it was a bit of a gesture. I had decided that I would not go to live with Aunt Milly.
When I told my father that I was ‘not sure’ of my intentions, that was not true. The decision was already made, embedded in a core of obstinacy. What I said about it, however much I prevaricated or delayed, did not matter. On this occasion, I had already, in the days between my mother’s death and the funeral, been looking for lodgings. I had found a room in Lower Hastings Street, and told the landlady that I would let her know definitely by the end of the week.
I should have to pay twelve and six a week for that room and breakfast. I was getting twenty-five shillings from the education office. I calculated that I could just live, though it would mean one sandwich at lunchtime and not much of a meal at night. Clothes would have to come out of Za’s money; that was my standby, that made this manoeuvre possible; but I resolved not to take more than ten pounds out of the pool within the next year. In due time I should have made another choice – and then that money meant my way out.
I knew clearly why I was making the gesture. I had suffered some shame through my father’s bankruptcy. This was an atonement, a device for setting myself free. It meant I was not counting every penny – and to smile off the last winces of shame, I had to throw away a little money too. I had to act as though I did not care too much about money. And this gesture meant also that I was defying Aunt Milly, the voice of conscience from my childhood, the voice that had driven the shame into me and had, at moments since, trumpeted it awake. If it had been anyone else but Aunt Milly who had offered to take us in, I believed that I should have said yes gratefully and saved my money.
I was fairly adroit, however, in explaining myself to her – more adroit, I thought later with remorse, than I had often been with my mother, and then I thought once more that adroitness would have been no good, neither adroitness nor the tenderest consideration. With Aunt Milly, it was not so difficult. I did not want to hurt her; I had become fond enough of her to be considerate. It would hurt her a little, I knew. For, in her staring blank-faced dynamic fashion, Aunt Milly had always been starved of children. She had felt maternally towards me and my brother, though it sometimes struck me that she used a curious method for expressing it. And she could not understand that she put people off, most of all young children, whom she desired most for her own.
She left my father alone with me after we came back from the cemetery; Martin had stayed at her house since before my mother’s death. Aunt Milly did not let us alone all day, however; she came in that night, and discovered us in the kitchen eating bread and cheese. She examined the shelves, notebook in hand. She was marking down the crockery which was to be transferred. It was then that I put in a word.
‘I don’t know, Aunt Milly,’ I said, ‘but it might be better if I went off by myself.’
‘I never heard of such a thing,’ said Aunt Milly.
‘I don’t want to be in the way,’ I said.
‘That’s for me to settle,’ she said.
She had turned round, her face impassive and pop-eyed, but tinged with indignation. My father was watching with mild interest.
‘I know you’ll put yourself out and never tell us.’ I laughed at her. ‘And take it out of us because you’ve done so.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I should like to come–’
‘Of course you would. Anyone in his sense would,’ said Aunt Milly. ‘You don’t get your board and lodging free everywhere.’
‘As well as a few home truths now and again. It would be very good for us both, wouldn’t it?’
‘It would be very good for you.’
‘I’ve looked forward to it.’
‘I expect you have. Well, I’m ready to have you. I don’t know what all the palaver is about.’
Aunt Milly took words at their face value; to cheek and compliments she returned the same flat, uncompromising rebuff; but sometimes they had just a little effect.
‘Listen, Aunt Milly, I’ll tell you. I expect I shall want to study–’
‘I should think you will,’ she said.
‘That does mean I ought to be on my own, you know.’
‘You can study in my house.’
‘Could you study,’ I said, ‘if you had to share a room with my father – or your brother?’
Aunt Milly was the least humorous of women, and rarely smiled. But she was capable of an enormous hooting laugh. She had also been conditioned to think, all her life, that my father ought to evoke laughter. So she burst into a humourless roar that echoed round the kitchen. My father obligingly burst into a snatch of song, then pretended to snore.
‘One of the two,’ he said with his clowning grin. ‘One of the two. That’s me, that is.’
‘Stop it, Bertie,’ said Aunt Milly implacably.
My father, still clowning, shrank into a corner.
The argument went on. I was ready to stick it out all night. I was as obstinate as she was, but that she did not know. I played all the tricks I could: I flattered her, I was impertinent, I stood up to denunciation, I gave vague hints of how I thought of living.
Those hints made her voice grow louder, her eyes more staring and glazed. I proposed to go into lodgings, did I – and how was I going to pay for them out of a clerk’s earnings? I described what I thought my budget would be.
‘You’re not leaving yourself any margin,’ she retorted.
‘I’ve got a little money in the bank now, you know,’ I said. I had been careless to speak so. It might have provoked a storm, about bankruptcy, my father’s debts, my duty. She would not have been restrained because my father was present. But it happened that my mother, before she died, had made her promise not to deter me from ‘taking my chance’. Aunt Milly prided herself on having dispensed with ‘superstitious nonsense’ – for after all this was the twentieth century, as she asserted in every quarrel with my mother. She would have said that she paid no special reverence to deathbed promises. If she kept this one, she would have said, it was because she always kept her word.
‘I won’t say what I think of that,’ said Aunt Milly, with a thunderous exertion of self-control. Then she indulged in one, but only one, loud cry of rage: ‘No wonder this family will come to a bad end.’
The evening became night. To say that she gave in would not be true; but she acknowledged my intention, though with a very bad grace. To say that I had got so far without hurting her would be nonsense. We were set on aims that contradicted each other; they could not be reconciled, and no gloss on earth could make them so. But at least in Aunt Milly’s understanding we had not split or parted. She did not consider it a break. I had promised to go and have tea at her house each Sunday afternoon.
It was a warm, wet evening late in May when I first went as a lodger to my room in Lower Hastings Street. The room was at the top of the house, and was no larger than my attic at home. From the window I looked over slate roofs, the roofs of outhouses and sheds, glistening in the rain. Beyond, there was a cloud of sulphurous smoke, where a train was disappearing through a tunnel into the station yard.
I had brought all my possessions in two old suitcases – another suit, two pairs of flannels, some underclothes, a few books and school photographs. I left them on the floor, and stood by the window, looking over the roofs, my heart quickening with a tumult of emotions. I felt despondent in the strange, cheerless room, and yet hopeful with the hope that I saw so often in my mother; anxious, desperately anxious that I might have chosen wrong, and at the same time ultimately confident; lonely and also free.
There was everything in the world to do. There was everything in front of me, everything to do – yet what was I to do that moment, with an evening stretching emptily ahead? Should I lie on my bed and read? Or should I walk the streets of the town, alone, in the warm wet night?
Towards a Gamble
During the summer after my mother’s death I used to walk to the office in the warm and misty mornings; there was a smell of rain freshening the dusty street, and freshening my hopes as well, as I walked along, chafing at another wasted day ahead.
I ticked off names, names written in violet ink that glared on the squared paper. I read each date of birth, and underlined in red those born before 31 August 1908. I gazed down into the sunlit street, and my mind was filled with plans and fancies, with hope and the first twist of savage discontent. My plans were half-fancies still, not much grown up since my first days in the office, when I walked round the town hall square at lunchtime and dreamed that I had suddenly come into a fortune. I still made resolutions about what to read, or what prospectus to write for next, with an elation and sense of purpose that continued to outshine the unromantic act of carrying the resolution out. But there was some change. I had my legacy. I was angry that I could not see my way clear, I was angry that no one gave advice that sounded ambitious enough. Gazing down, watching the tramcars glitter in the sun, waiting with half an ear for Mr Vesey’s cry of complaint, I began to suffer the ache and burn of discontent.
Yet I was sidetracked and impeded by that same discontent. There were days when the office walls hemmed me in, when Mr Vesey became an incarnate insult, when I was choking with hurt pride, when Darby in all kindness gave me grey and cautious advice. Those were the days when I felt I must be myself, break out, not in the planned-for distant future, but now, before I rusted away, now, while my temper was hot.
It was a temptation then to show off, get an audience by any means I could, and at that age I could not resist the temptation. I scarcely even thought of trying, it seemed so natural and I got so fierce a pleasure. I had a quick, cruel tongue, and I enjoyed using it. It seemed natural to find myself at the ILP, getting myself elected on to committees, making inflammatory speeches in lecture halls all over the town. Only the zealots attended in the height of summer, but I was ready to burst out, even before a handful of the converted, and still be elated and warm-tempered as we left the dingy room at ten o’clock of a midsummer evening and found ourselves blinking in the broad daylight. The town was not large enough for one to stay quite anonymous, and some of my exploits got round. A bit of gossip even reached Aunt Milly, and the next Sunday, when I visited her house for tea, she was not backward in expressing her disapproval.
To myself, I could not laugh that attack away as cheerfully as I did most of Aunt Milly’s. I was practical enough to know that I was doing nothing ‘useful’. As I strolled to my lodgings (‘my rooms’, I used to call them to my acquaintances, with a distinct echo of my mother, despite my speeches on the equality of man) late on those summer nights, I had moments of bleak lucidity. Where was I getting to? What was I doing with my luck? Was I so devoid of will, was I just going to drift? Those moments struck cold, after the applause I had won a few hours earlier with some sarcastic joke.