James Hilton: Collected Novels (49 page)

“But you liked
her?”

“I loved her very dearly. She was a delicate, soft-voiced, kind-hearted, sunny-minded, but rather helpless woman—but then most women would have been helpless against my father.
He
loved her, I’ve no doubt, in his own possessive way. Perhaps a less loving and more thoughtful husband would have sent her to a warmer climate during the winters, but my father wasn’t thoughtful—at best his thoughtlessness became comradely, as when he insisted on taking her for brisk walks over the hills on January days. It was a cherished saying of his that fresh air would blow the cobwebs out of your lungs. It also blew the life out of my mother’s lungs, for it was after one of those terrible walks, during which she gasped and panted while my father shouted Whitmanesque encouragement, that she called in Sanderstead, our local doctor, who diagnosed t.b. My father was appalled from that moment and spent a small fortune on all kinds of cures, but it was too late—she died within the year, and my father, I have since felt, promptly did something about her in his mind that corresponded to winding up or writing off or some other operation that happens even in the best financial circles.”

He suddenly stood up and moved to the open window, staring out as if facing something that challenged him. “Those are the hills where he made her walk. You can see the line of them against the sky.” Then he turned abruptly and said he was sure I was tired and would want to go to bed.

I assured him I wasn’t sleepy at all.

“But you came in yawning.”

“Maybe, but I’m wide-awake now. The breeze is so fresh … You must have hated your father.”

He answered slowly: “Yes, I suppose I did. Freud would say so, anyhow. But of course when I was a boy and even up to my undergraduate days people only admitted the politer emotions.”

“The war changed all that.”

“Yes, indeed, and so many other things too.”

He was silent for a moment; then I went on: “You once told me about a certain day, sometime after the war ended, when you found yourself on a park seat in Liverpool.”

“When did I tell you that?” He controlled a momentary alarm, then added with a smile: “Ah yes, I remember—in your rooms at St. Swithin’s. I’m always garrulous after public speeches. … Well, if I told you, you know. That’s how it was. And don’t ask me about anything
before
the park seat because I can’t answer.”

“But how about
after
the park seat?”

He seemed relieved.
“After?
Oh, I can stand any amount of cross-examination there—I’m on safe ground from about noon on December 27, 1919.”

“I wish you’d begin your story there, then, and bring it up to date.”

“But there
is
no story—except my life story.”

“That’s what I’d like to hear.”

“How I Made Good? From Park Seat to Parliament?”.

“If you like to call it that.”

He laughed. “It’s mostly a lot of sordid business details and family squabbles. You don’t know the family, either.”

“All the same, I wish you’d tell me. The effort of setting it all out might even help you towards the other memory—if you’re still anxious for it.”

I could see the response to that in his eyes as he entered the light again.

“So you really think memory’s like an athlete—keep it in training—take it for cross-country runs? H’m, might be something in the idea. When do we start?”

“Now, if you’re not too sleepy. I’m not … Go back to that park seat in Liverpool.”

“But I told you about that once.”

“Tell me again. And then go on.”

So he began, and as it makes a fairly long story, it goes better in the third person.

H
E FOUND HIMSELF LYING
on that park seat. He had opened his eyes to see clouds and drenched trees, and to feel the drops splashing on his face. After a while his position began to seem more and more odd, so he raised himself to a sitting angle, and was immediately aware of sodden clothes, stiff limbs, a terrific headache, and a man stooping over him. His first thought was that he must have been drunk the night before, but he soon rejected it, partly because he could not remember the night before at all, partly because he somehow did not think he was the sort of young man to have had that sort of night, but chiefly because of a growing interest in what the man stooping over him was saying. It was a kind of muttered chorus—“That’s right, mister—take it easy. Didn’t ’ardly touch yer—it was the wet roadway, you sort o’ slipped. Cheer up, mister, no bones broke—you’ll be all right—wouldn’t leave you ’ere, I wouldn’t, if I didn’t know you’d be all right. …”

Presently, suggested by the muttered chorus and supported by the fact that his clothes were not only sopping wet but also muddied and torn, another hypothesis occurred to him—that he had been run down by a car whose driver had brought him into the park and was now leaving him there.

But
where?
His brain refused an answer, and when pressed offered a jumble of memories connected only with war—shell fire for headaches, a smashed leg for stiffness, no man’s land for all the mud and rain in the world.

He stood up, feeling dizzy, swayed and almost fell. The man had gone, was now nowhere to be seen. Then he noticed he had been lying down on sheets of newspaper. He stooped to peel one off the seat, hoping it might afford some clue, but the top of the page that would have contained a name and date was an unreadable mush, and the rest was rapidly softening under the heavy rain. He peered at it, nevertheless, searching for some helpful word or phrase before the final disintegration. Most of the letterpress seemed to be news about floods and flood damage—rescues from swollen rivers, people stranded in upper floors, rowboats in streets, and so on.

Then suddenly his eyes caught a paragraph headed “Rainier Still in Germany”—one of those mock-cheerful items that tired sub-editors put in to fill an odd corner—something about soaked holiday crowds taking comfort from the thought that somebody somewhere was faring even worse.

Now it is curious how one’s own name, or the name of one’s home, or a word like “cancer,” will sometimes leap out of a page as if it were printed in red ink. It was like that for the young man as he staggered through the deserted park towards a gate he could see in the distance.
Rainier Still in Germany
—
Rainier Still in Germany.
It was a challenge, something he had to answer; and the answer came.
“Impossible
—I’m
here,
reading a newspaper, and the newspaper’s in English—therefore this can’t be Germany.”

Presently he passed through the park gate into a busy thoroughfare. A tram came along, mud-splashed to its upper windows and sluicing swathes of water from the rails to the gutters. It was difficult to see through the spray of mud and rain, but on the side of the tram as it passed by he could just read the inscription—“Liverpool City Corporation.”

He walked along by the high railings till the park came to an end and shops began. Meanwhile he had been feeling in his pockets, finding money—coins and several treasury notes, amounting in all to over four pounds. Reaching a news agent’s shop he went inside and asked for a paper.

“Post
or
Courier,
sir?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

A paper was handed over. “Looks like you’ve had a fall, sir? Terribly slippery after all this rain. … Like me to give you a bit of a brush?”

“Er … thanks.”

“Why, you’re wet through—if I was you I’d get home and to bed as quick as I could. Like me to get you a cab?”

“No, that wouldn’t help. I don’t live here. But if there’s a tailor near abouts—”

“Two doors ahead, sir. He’ll fix you up. Say I sent you.”

“Thanks.”

He walked out, glancing at the paper as he did so. He saw that the date was December 27, 1919.

So now he knew three important things:
Who, Where,
and
When.

Two hours later Charles Rainier was in a train to London. He had had a hot bath and a meal; his clothes did not fit well, but were dry; and after a lightning headache-cure across a chemist’s counter he felt somewhat drowsily relieved.

Beside him were several more newspapers and magazines. As it was the end of December, some contained résumés of the events of 1919; and these at first he had found very astonishing. Biggest of all surprises was to find that the war had been over for more man a year and had ended in complete victory for the Allies; this was surprising because his last recollected idea on the subject had been that the Allies were just as likely to lose.

But that dated back to a certain night in 1917 when he lay in a shell hole near Arras, half delirious with the pain of a smashed leg, watching shell after shell dig other holes round about him, until finally one came that seemed to connect by a long dark throbbing corridor with his headache that morning.

Charles arrived in London towards dusk, in time to catch the last train that would get him to Stourton that night. The train was late in reaching Fiveoaks, which is the station for Stourton, and three miles away from it, as anyone knows who has ever received a letter on Stourton notepaper. From Fiveoaks he walked, because all the cabs were taken before he reached the station yard, and also because he hoped the cold air might clear that still-surviving headache. He was glad they were putting out the lamps as he gave up his ticket at the barrier, so that the collector did not recognize him.

He realized that his return was bound to come as a shock, and he hardly knew what reason he could give anyone for his long and peculiar absence; he hardly knew yet what reason he could give himself. He was puzzled, too, by an absence of joy in his heart at the prospect of home and familiar faces; more than by any excitement he was possessed by a deep and unutterable numbness of spirit, a numbness so far without pain yet full of the hint of pain withdrawn and waiting.

Presently he turned off the main road. He remembered that turn, and the curve of the secondary road over the hill to the point where suddenly, in daylight, the visitor caught his first glimpse of the house. Often, as a boy, he had met such visitors at Fiveoaks, hoping that when they reached that particular point of the drive they would not be so immersed in conversation as to miss the view.

Now when he came to the view there was nothing to see, nothing to hear but an owl hooting, nothing to feel but the raw air blowing from the uplands.

He was glad he had sent no wire to tell them of his arrival. He had refrained because he felt the shock might be greater that way than if he were to see Sheldon first, and also because he hardly knew how much or how little to say in a wire; but now he perceived another advantage in not having sent any message—it preserved for a few extra minutes the curious halfway comfortableness of being alive only in the first person singular.

Towards midnight he reached the wrought-iron gates of the main entrance; they were closed and locked, of course, but there was a glow in one of the adjacent windows, and as he approached the small square-built lodge a gap in a curtain revealed a lighted Christmas tree. Odd, because he remembered Parsloe as a tight-fisted bachelor unlikely to spend money on that sort of thing—unless, of course, he had married in the interval; but that was odder still to contemplate—Parsloe married!

It was not Parsloe, however, who opened the door to his persistent ringing, but a half-dressed stranger—middle-aged, suspicious, challenging.

“Well, young man?”

“I’d like to go up to the house, if you’ll let me through.”

“We don’t admit anyone, not without you give your name and business.”

“I know, but you see …” He hesitated, realizing the difficulties ahead—his story, told cold with no corroborations, would sound sheerly incredible. Eventually he added, rather weakly: “If Parsloe were here, he’d know me.”

“Maybe he would, but he ain’t here—having been dead these fifteen months. You’d better be off, sir, dragging people out of bed at this hour.”

The “sir” was some progress anyway; a social acknowledgment that drunk or sober, honest or fraudulent, at least one had the right accent.

“Perhaps I could see Sheldon, then—”

“You can’t disturb Mr. Sheldon either—especially now.”

“You mean there’s a party?” (Of course there would be there were always big parties at Stourton through Christmas and New Year.)

Suddenly the question: “You wouldn’t be Dr. Astley, by any chance?”

Charles was about to ask who Dr. Astley was when he thought better of it and replied hastily, perhaps too hastily: “Yes, that’s who I am.”

But the lodgekeeper was still suspicious. Moving over to a telephone just inside the door, he wound up the instrument, listened, then began muttering something inaudible. Afterwards he turned to beckon Charles inside. “Mr. Sheldon says he’d like a word with you first, sir.”

“Certainly. I’ll be glad of one with him, too.”

Good old Sheldon—taking no chances. The voice at the other end was impersonally wary. “Dr. Astley? Have you come alone?”

No need to say anything but: “Sheldon, it isn’t Dr. Astley—whoever he is. It’s Charles—you know,
Charles.”

“Charles?”

“Charles who was … Oh, God, I don’t want to have to go into all that, but remember the Left-Handed Room? …
That
Charles.”

“Mr. Charles?”

“Yes—Yes!”

Long pause. Then: “I’ll—I’ll come along—immediately—if—if you’ll wait there—for me.”

“Good—but first of all say something to this fellow—he think I’m a fakes. Don’t tell him anything—just say it’s all right.”

“He handed the receiver to the lodgekeeper, who took it, listened a moment, then hung up with more puzzlement than satisfaction. “Well, sir, you’d better wait here, seeing as how Mr. Sheldon says so.”

“Thanks. And please understand that I don’t blame you in the least. One can’t be too careful.”

Somewhat mollified, the man brought forward a chair, then accepted a cigarette that Charles proffered. “Marsh is my name, air. If you’re a friend of the family, you’ll know of course there’s no parties this year on account of old Mr. Rainier being ill.”