Young Phillip Maddison (7 page)

There they were, his favourite flowers, opposite his place at table, in a cut-glass jar with a silver rim—three dozen or so wild English violets, their stalks in clear water; and among them, in the centre of the deep purple petals, a solitary wood anemone, a wind-flower, fragile and white. Richard smiled with delight. Through the faint scent, instantly he perceived himself as a boy in the West Country, among happy brothers and sisters, bringing back from the woods the first violets of the year for Mother’s boudoir. For a moment he saw her face, as she stood at the window, in the room above and back from the porch, with its iron-studded oaken door.

Memory, through the sense of smell, induces the most piercing of all emotions of the past, since that sense originally was old in man when sight and hearing were new. It is startling, it is stilling, it is sad when old scenes thus return, as in resurrection, from the past. Momentarily overcome, Richard stood still, by the french windows. Mother, Mother!

“Hullo, Dads!”

Mavis, in blue-serge gym uniform, had come silently into the room on plimsoled feet. She flung her arms round his middle, jingling his watch-chain.

“Hullo, my gipsy! Got a kiss for your old Dads?”

Stretching up, she kissed him on the lips, the only place on his face—apart from nose, brow, cheekbones, and eyes—which was not rough and tickly. Richard had never shaved.

“Do you like the violets, Dads?”

“Yes indeed. I got their scent as soon as I opened the front door.”

“Would you like to have them, Dads?”

“How very kind of you, Mavis. But perhaps Mother would care for them.”

“She knows I got them for you, Dads.”

“Well, we’ll all enjoy them, shall we?”

He moved the glass eighteen inches or so away from his place at table, putting it in the centre of the tablecloth. Unaware of the child’s disappointment, he went on, “Where did you get them, Mavis, not round here, I’ll be bound!”

“Not very far away, Dads! You see, we were playing lacrosse in the Rec.—I mean the Recreation Ground—this morning, and I heard two of the girls talking about some flowers they had got for Miss Wendover, you know Dads, our games mistress. I smelt them, and they were lovely. They got them from the garden of that big old empty house that goes down to the river, you know, the one you told us might be haunted when we passed on the walk one Sunday, where nobody lives, and the carriages stand in the coach-house, all wet from the slates fallen off the roof. So my friend and I went and got some, and we found the white one under some trees in the wood—what is it, Dads? Mum says it may be a kind of Flower of Parnassus.”

“Oh no! That’s an ordinary windflower. The proper name is wood-anemone. We had lots of them growing in the woods at home when I was a boy. This one’s somewhat early, I fancy, for flowers are earlier in the west than here, owing to the Gulf Stream. Usually the anemones were out in force when the birds had laid, towards the end of April. We boys used to go through the woods with the under-keeper, looking for nests. It was safer, you see, to put them under broody hens. A wonderful sight it was, too, to look at twilight down the ride of one covert where the coops were, and see a row of lighted lanterns hung on sticks stuck in the ground. Can you tell me why the lanterns were there, now?”

“For people to see to ride by, Dads?”

“Oh no, my gipsy!” Richard laughed. “You see, a ride in a wood is a long clearing among the trees—though no-one would ride there in the rearing season, of course—but anyway, this particular ride was kept for the coops. And the lanterns were lit for—well now, try and guess!”

“Oh, I can’t, Dads! Do tell me!”

“Try and think, young woman.”

“Oh, I simply can’t. Unless it was for the hens to see by.”

“What, at night, when they were snug in their coops? Now what would they possibly want to see for?”

“Well,
what
for, Dads?”

“Ah, you must guess!”

“Oh, I simply can’t. The lights must be for someone or other to see by.”

“Ah, getting warmer!”

“The keeper?”

“A little warmer. He would not need to
see
the lights, I’ll give you that hint.”

The bright light suddenly ceased in the sitting or garden room. A rain-cloud covered the sun. A bird was singing in the top of the elm in the garden.

“He’s got a nest somewhere, I’ll be bound,” remarked Richard, going to the french windows. “Can you tell me what bird that is?”

“A thrush, Dads! I was named after a thrush, wasn’t I?”

“Yes, and it may well be after that very bird out there!”

Richard watched the slate roofs of houses beyond the waste ground shining again, as the cloud moved away.

“I bet he’s got a nest somewhere near. Do you know how a mother thrush builds her nest?”

“Yes Dads, you told us on the walk last Sunday, don’t you remember?”

“Ah, but do you know the difference between the
masoning
methods of thrush and blackbird, when they build their nests?”

“Yes Dad, I remember. The thrush uses cow-droppings and bits of tinder wood to line its nest, but the blackbird puts all the mud in the bottom of his, before lining with little grasses. Oh!”

“Why, what’s the matter?” said Richard, his back to the room, as he drew pleasure from the new green of the elm at the bottom of the garden.

*

Mavis hesitated. She had, a moment before, caught sight of her brother under the table. Phillip’s face had looked out, making a frantic grimace, an anguished request not to be betrayed. He had slipped under when he had heard Father’s footfalls on the top step of three leading down from the hall to the passage below; and now was in an agony lest he be discovered, and be made to feel a fool, or worse, be rated for eavesdropping. He had hidden on sudden impulse, as a sort of joke; optimistic despite the fact that most of his jokes went wrong.

The last one had involved the spreading of jam. Father, during tea, had gone out of the room for a moment, and while he was out, he had put some apricot jam on Father’s bread and
butter. Mother had been having tea next door at Gran’pa’s. He had thought Father would regard the jam as a mystery; instead, Father had been cross.

“I wonder if Master Phillip has oiled his cycle and cleaned the chain, in preparation for our spin this afternoon.”

Phillip, under the table, waved a frantic hand at his sister to tell her not to look at him. Fortunately at the moment Mother called her to fetch the tray from the kitchen, and Father said, “Go and help your Mother, dear, like a good girl,” and then followed her out of the room, to wash his hands.

“Phew!” exclaimed Phillip, as he crept from under the table. Hearing Father’s footfalls going upstairs, he nipped into the kitchen, and washed his hands at the scullery sink. There was Timmy Rat, his pet, looking at him with pink eyes and twitching nose, behind the wire-netting of his box on the lid of the copper.

Timmy Rat was waiting to be scratched. Timmy Rat bolted out of its sleeping corner through a fret-work hole whenever it heard Phillip approaching, its tail knocking on the wood. Then standing up, its whiskered pink nose to the wire, it waited for Phillip’s finger, closing its eyes for pleasure as the tip gently touched the basic pink skin of its ear. Phillip was supposed to wash his hands after handling Timmy Rat, but he did so only when Father was about.

*

The white rat was in its third year of life. It had been a present from Richard to his son, when Phillip had won his scholarship. That he had allowed Phillip, from the first, to keep it indoors, was a great concession to his son, though no one in the house suspected it. Richard had bought the rat on an impulse of some emotion, recalled from the scene of the boy in bed, nearly in a delirium, from fear of failure, on the eve of the examination.

A concession, yes: for to Richard, cleanliness certainly was next to godliness. He had no belief in a future life, as preached in the churches, chapels, and missions of Mother Country and Empire, as he had no idea of the meaning of the epigram, God is Love. Standing alone, Richard’s whole living was devoted to doing his very best on all occasions. In money matters he was scrupulous to a farthing; his word was his bond; and whatever he did, in his own limited scope, he worked to the full extension of his powers. He lived austerely; he was a man of great loneliness,
because he could not compromise with the views, or worlds, of others.

In vain this uncompromising man had tried to make his son see that the greatest care, the strictest attention to detail, combined with punctuality, cleanliness, a proper appearance, and (ironically) due regard for other people’s wishes, were the only real basis of a happy and useful life. Canings, solitary confinement in bed with bread and water the only permitted nourishment, exhortations, pleadings—none of the ordinary ways of correcting an errant child in its early years appeared to have been of any use.

Yet on one occasion at least, the slow petrifaction of self had dissolved. On the eve of the scholarship exam, when he had visited his son in bed at eleven o’clock at night and found him with a temperature and on the verge of delirium, Richard had been astonished, bewildered, and touched by the despair, and anxiety to do the right thing, revealed by the cries of the little boy. He had related the moment to his own childhood; suddenly he had seen himself in his son, so that tears had come into his eyes—which of course he had concealed—as he perceived himself to be Father, a being with almost total power of happiness, or unhappiness, over the little mother and her three small children under his roof. He was his own Father over again!

The moment of revelation had passed; to be shut-in, and forgotten in the press of material, or superficial, life. Even so, Richard had kept a white rat when he was a boy: that had been in the country, far from sewers and the diseases of a city: nevertheless, on the day following the news that his son had won a scholarship, he had visited a pets shop in Leadenhall market, under whose glass roof he had often wandered during his luncheon hour in the City. For a shilling a young albino buck rat was his, to be carried in a wooden cage and kept on the floor of the Messengers’ Box until he left the Moon Fire Office at six o’clock that evening.

Phillip had been greatly excited by the present. He had promised fervently to keep the box clean, the floor sprinkled with fresh sawdust half an inch thick, to be changed twice a week, regularly. Richard had explained about the risk of disease, with reference to the Black Plague and the cleansing Fire of London, both occasions being due to the Black Rat, he declared; for if people in the wooden City of those days had not been so insanitary
and careless, neither plague nor fire would have resulted.

“And then—who knows—perhaps I should not be one of the men in the Moon! For it was only after the Great Fire that the idea of insurance was born!”

Timmy Rat, to give the rodent its baptismal (under the scullery tap) name, had lived in its box on the lid of the scullery copper for almost two years now. It was graniverous and herbivorous. It kept itself clean by frequent washing. Even so, Phillip observed that fleas managed to exist among its hairs. Timmy Rat hooked an occasional one, after rapid scratching, in one of the claws of a hindleg. The little brown tormentor was promptly cracked between Timmy’s teeth: a slight but pleasurable shrimp-eating noise, while Timmy closed his eyes with satisfaction.

*

While he scratched Timmy’s ear, Phillip was trying to puzzle out why those lighted lanterns had been hung on sticks along the woodland ride in Father’s boyhood. Returning to the kitchen, he said to Mavis, “Be a sport, my gipsy, and say you just gave me a précis of what Father said to you in the sitting room. Else he’ll suspect I was under the table. On my honour, I only went there for a lark, not to eavesdrop, so I wasn’t doing anything wrong, was I, Mum?”

“That’s what you say!” retorted Mavis. “When you say ‘on my honour’, I always know you are fibbing!”

“Mavis, Mavis!” exclaimed Hetty. To Phillip, “It is best never to hide when grown-ups are in the room, Sonny. They may want to talk about other matters, beyond children’s understanding, you see.”

“But Mavis isn’t a grown-up.”

“No, but you weren’t to know that your Father might very well have sent her out of the room, and called me down for something, were you?”

“About me, you mean?” he asked quickly, his nostrils opening wider. “What have I done now?”

“Nothing dear, there’s no need to feel alarmed, I am sure.”

“Did you oil your old bike, Father wanted to know,” said Mavis.

“I heard him, dolt!”

“Then you were eavesdropping. Wasn’t he, Mum?”

“Only accidentally, Mavis. Not deliberately, I am sure.”

“Not like you did when those girls at your school had the violets out of the haunted garden!” retorted Phillip, antagonism in his tone. “I bet I know why you went, like the copy-cat you are, to get some! To give to your beloved Miss Wendover, whom you’re sweet on! I bet she was gone when you got back, so you decided to give the violets to Richard Edward Maddison, instead! Second-hand flowers!”

“Poof, a lot you know how other people think.”

“And a fat lot you know, too, Brother Smut!”

“Hush Sonny, hush, your Father may hear you! And I won’t have you use that common expression! I’ve told you before.”

“Phillip is common himself,” declared his sister.

“I bet I’m right about them stinking violets, anyway.”

“Phillip, how dare you! I shall tell your Father if you are not a good boy.”

“Father would laugh at you, in that case, Henrietta Turney. ‘Them stinking violets’ is what Jorrocks said, if you want to know. It’s in that old red book in the bookcase.”

“Well, even if it is, it isn’t a very nice thing to say just now, dear, after the kind way Mavis brought them home.” Hetty peered at the frying pan. “I do so hope these chops are done to your Father’s liking.”

She put down the pan, and opening the gas-oven door, felt to see if the plates inside were hot. A blast of torrid air struck her face, already flushed from cooking and the slight anxiety she always felt whenever her husband returned home, lest things should go wrong, and disappoint him.