James Hilton: Collected Novels (37 page)

“And you think…his mother…?”

“That’s what
she
wants. I know it. I think he knows it too, but he can’t easily resist, for the time being—that is, till he’s recovered. She’s so strong.”

“Strong?”

“Yes, but there are two kinds of strong people. There’s the kind that make you feel strong yourself, and there’s the other kind that make you feel weak…She’s that kind. And he’s so sorry for her—naturally, on account of what’s happened. Everybody is—she’s a tragic figure…Which makes another reason. He’s had enough tragedy.”

George could sense the girl’s emotion from the way she suddenly stopped at the word “tragedy” and laughed, as if that were the only thing left to do. She said, after the laugh:

“Well, I’ve told you now. I don’t know what you can do, but you’re a friend of Charles and I took advantage of it. Don’t do anything at all if you’d rather not. I really haven’t any right to ask.”

Another bus was approaching along King’s Parade. George answered: “Nay, Julie, we’ve all a right to ask anything when it’s a matter of helping somebody.”

She smiled. “That’s a nice way to look at it…You’d better catch this bus or you’ll be late.”

He nodded. And then at the last minute: “I wonder…do you know who I am?”

She replied, in a rather puzzled voice: “Why yes—you’re the Mayor of Browdley, isn’t that it?”

“Aye,” he answered, with a slow smile. “And I’ll bet you’d never heard of Browdley till Charles told you. That’s how important it makes me.” He gripped her arm. “See you again soon, lass.” And then from the bus platform: “I’ll do what I can. I dunno how, but I will.”

Inside the bus and all the way to Browdley, by various slow-train connections that took all evening and half the night, George still did not know how he would keep his promise, though his determination to do so surged into the familiar dimensions of a crusade.

George might have a Machiavellian mind, as Charles had said, or he might have made a Jesuit, as Wendover had once said; but there were times when he knew that nothing is more effective than the direct approach. So after pondering long on the problem of how to help Charles, he decided that the first step must be to meet Livia himself and judge what help was needed; and to meet Livia the simplest method seemed to write and ask for a meeting.

She returned a characteristic brief note that he could visit her any time he wanted while she was at Castle Winslow.

It was a week before George could arrange to be away from Browdley long enough to make the trip, and once again there was the complicated uncomfortable journey by a series of trains. He was not surprised when no one met him at Castle Winslow station, and as it was fine weather and there were no cabs he walked the three miles from the station to the lodge gates, wearing down by sheer physical fatigue a mounting excitement over the fact that at last, after over twenty years, he was about to see Livia again. It was curious how something had lingered to produce that excitement still. He remembered the months immediately after he had known definitely that she would not return to him—how she had been on his mind night and day, so that he had scarcely been able to work; he remembered how he would wonder whether to avoid the Stoneclough road with all its memories, or to exorcise them deliberately by the self-torture of walking there; and how for weeks he would try the one method and then, in despair, the other. But for years now there had been nothing particular to remember or to try to forget.

At the lodge an old man hoeing potatoes in a patch of garden pointed further along the road when George spoke the name
Mrs.
Winslow. “She’s at the Dower House—that’s about a mile. Turn left at the signpost and then it’s the first place on the right behind the trees. There’s a lot of kids there—you can’t miss it.”

George walked on, puzzled at the reference to “a lot of kids,” and more so when he came, near enough to hear their shrill cries and screams. At length he glimpsed a rather large rambling house, well set back from the road behind tall poplars. In the space between the road and the building children of all ages from three or four to ten or eleven were romping as in a school playground.

George walked in and the children took no notice of him, but a buxom middle-aged woman who looked like a farmer’s wife changed her direction across the yard as he approached. He gave his name and repeated who it was he wanted to see.

“I don’t know whether she will,” answered the woman, doubtfully. “She won’t see anybody as a rule. You’re not from a newspaper, are you?”

George assured her he wasn’t.

He waited till a moment later the woman beckoned him from a doorway. As she led him through the cool interior she explained the presence of the children. They had been bombed out of their homes in some of the big industrial cities, and this was one of the rehabilitation centers set up by the Government for the recovery of special cases—“like shell shock,” some of them, she said. George knew all about it, for there was a similar center not far from Browdley, which he had visited. “And does Mrs. Winslow help in looking after them?” he asked, eager for some clue to what he might expect.

“Yes, she helps. She’s all right with the children.”

Presently the woman opened a door leading to a kind of veranda in which a few children were lying asleep or strangely awake in open cots. That strangeness was another thing George had seen before—the tense stare, the twitching muscles; these were the worst cases. And beyond them, arranging pots of geraniums along a ledge, was Livia. She wore a large shabby straw hat and a bright-colored dress.

At the instant of recognition he gasped with the sensation of something suddenly switched off inside him, but it was not pain any more; and as always when he had seen her afresh after an absence recognition dissolved into a curious feeling of never having seen her before, but of experiencing some primitive thrill that time had neither enhanced nor made stale; but it was no longer a thrill entirely of pleasure.

“Livia…” he said.

She looked up. “Hello, George.” She gave him an odd sort of smile. She had not changed much in appearance—at least, not as much as he had expected. She went on: “I didn’t think you’d be coming today when you didn’t get here earlier.”

“I walked from the station.”

“Oh, didn’t Howard send the car? I asked him to.”

“Howard?”

“My brother-in-law. He probably didn’t do it deliberately. I mean he did do it deliberately. I mean, he deliberately didn’t send the car. Just because I asked him. He doesn’t like me. None of them do—except these.” As her eyes ranged over the cots something came into her face that made George reflect how beautiful she still was, provided one had ever thought her beautiful at all.

“Well, it didn’t matter. I enjoyed the walk.”

“Come into the garden.”

He followed her. She had been taking cuttings from geraniums, planting them in pots for the veranda, and without a word of apology or excuse she now resumed the task, and with such concentration that George did not feel she was giving him more than a part of her attention. At any rate, there was to be no such dramatic or over-dramatic encounter as he had half expected, and for this at least he was thankful.

He stammered: “I hope you’re well, Livia—after—after all the—the trouble—you’ve had.”

“Oh, I’m all right. Poor Jeff, though. He’s in Japan, only nobody knows where. If only the Government would send me out I’d find him—surely it’s possible by submarine? They could put me ashore on a dark night—like Casement in Ireland. Don’t they do that sometimes? Do you know anyone at the Admiralty you could ask? I told Jeff I would…People thought I was against his work—and so I was—because I could see all this coming. In Hong Kong, I mean. The place stank of what was coming…And then he had to go back into it all like a fool. I’d never have left him no matter where he went, but they took him away. They took him away, George. I wish I was with him still, even in a prison camp. Where you are doesn’t really matter. The earth is all the same.” She began to pick up a handful of soil and sprinkle it into a pot. “I always liked planting things. Then you can let history slip through your fingers—like peasants do. That’s why I want Charlie to give up Cambridge and live on a farm.”

“To give up Cambridge?”

“Yes—what’s the good of it? We argued about it but he didn’t understand. Nobody ever does. They argue and argue but they don’t
feel.
It’s a little farm off the coast of Galway. I’d like him to settle down there and rest from thinking, arguing, books …all that…dead things that have caused all the upset…”

George watched her with curious intensity. She went on: “You don’t know what the world is all about, George. You never did. All your meetings and speeches—must have been thousands of them…what did they do? Or what did they stop?”

George did not reply. The heedless fever of her voice had not only been hard to keep pace with as a listener, but it had given him an inward tension that left him without power or will to reply. Presently she exclaimed: “Well? Don’t say you agree with me—that would be too amazing!”

He still couldn’t answer.

“Never mind,” she smiled, after another pause. “Tell me about Browdley.”

“Browdley’s all right,” he managed to say, in hardly more than a whisper.

“Not been bombed to bits yet?”

“Thank God, no.”

“Annie still with you?”

“Aye.”

“And Will Spivey?”

“Aye.”

“And there’s still the little garden I made?”

“It’s still there.” He added: “And Stoneclough too.”

She suddenly began to cry, but without any sound. The tears fell into the soil as she went on filling up the pot. “Oh George, what a long time ago. I hope you’ve been happy.”

“
You
have, haven’t you?”

She nodded.

“I’m glad.”

“Yes…it was a thing to try for, wasn’t it? Love, I mean—not happiness.” She stopped crying as abruptly as she had begun. “Poor Jeff…I wish I knew someone at the Admiralty—Howard knows them all but he won’t help. He doesn’t like me—Howard, I mean—Lord Winslow, that is. He thinks I ruined Jeff’s career. And now he thinks I want to ruin Charlie’s. Ruin…ruin…how can anyone make more than there is? I loved my father and then I loved my husband and now I love my son…anything wrong in all that? Or in these children…these have been ruined too, but not by love. I’ll tell you what I do about them—are you interested?”

George murmured assent and she began to chatter with eager animation. “They’re in need of almost everything when they come here—they have to be clothed, as a rule, as well as fed—I got some of the older ones to help in cooking and serving their own meals, also repairing their own clothes—that is, if they can—and of course we grow most of our own fruits and vegetables, so there’s always plenty of work in the garden. But the worst cases can’t do anything at all for a time—they just scream and cry and there’s nothing helps but when I talk to them, and I do that. I talk nonsense mostly. When bad things are on their minds that’s all they want to hear. Nothing serious. Not even politics.” She smiled. “Charlie told me you were Mayor of Browdley now?”

George said that was so.

“You should have come here wearing your Mayor’s chain. To make the children laugh. Always a good thing to make them laugh.”

George smiled back. “Aye, I might have.”

“You would, I know. You’re very kind. It’s just that you don’t think of things, isn’t it? Or rather you think of too many other things…”

After that she continued to work on the geraniums for a long interval—so long that George began to wonder whether she had forgotten he was there.

But presently, with the air of a duchess at a reception, she turned to him brimming over with graciousness. “It was so nice of you to come. And you’ll come again, won’t you?”

“Do you—do you really
want
me to—Livia?”

“Of course. Any time. That is, before we go to Ireland…”

“You’re…going to take Charles …to Ireland?”

“Yes, for the vacation. And if I can I shall persuade him not to go back next term—he only likes Cambridge because he’s got himself entangled with a girl there.”

“
What
?”

“Of course he doesn’t know I know, but it was plain as soon as I saw them together. Poor boy…rather pathetic to watch him pretending she was just a hospital nurse that came to give him massage treatment. Of course I don’t blame
him.
In his state he’d be an easy victim.”

“You mean…you…you think she’s…
that
sort of a girl?”

“I don’t care what sort she is, I’m going to put a stop to it.”

“Why?”

“Because I have other plans for my own son. It’s about time we got to know each other—what with all the separations of school, and then the war…and the peace isn’t going to be much better, for most people. Or are you optimistic about it? You probably are—you always were about most things…I won’t shake hands—mine are too dirty. But do come again—before we go…Good-bye…”

“Good-bye, Livia.”

“And you will come again?”

“Aye.” He walked to the door, then hesitated and said: “My advice would be to let that boy live his own life.”

“And marry the first girl he meets? That
would
be optimism.”

He wasn’t sure whether she meant that such a marriage would be optimism, or whether it would be optimistic of him to suppose that she would ever let Charles do such a thing; and whichever she meant, he wasn’t sure whether she were serious or merely ironic. Anyhow, he knew there was little use in continuing the argument, the more so as she had again resumed the potting of the plants. He said from the door, watching her: “I wish you were as good with grownups as you are with kids, Livia. You’re doing a fine job with these. Their parents’ll bless you for it.”

“Their parents are dead, George. Dead—
dead.
” Her eyes looked up, but her hands worked on. “Fancy you not knowing that.”

George also felt he ought to have known it—though after all, why? But Livia had always been like that, possessed of some curious power to impose guilt, or at least embarrassment; and so he stood there in the doorway, staring at her till he knew there was nothing else to say. Then he walked off.