Crescendo (5 page)

Accordingly he made up his mind that his twenty-first birthday celebrations should make a riotous finish. The family dinner was dullish but tolerable, the ball which followed went with a bang; then when all the guests had left but a few chosen friends of the male persuasion, Arnold went off with them to a place or two they knew where they could get liquor out of hours. They carried off bottles of whisky and some girls of the less reputable kind who had certainly not been invited to the ball, drove up to a place in Wharfedale where one could swim, and fooled about between girls and river until a young man drunker than the rest fell into the pool and was only rescued with some difficulty. This sobered them a little, though they staggered about for some minutes roaring with laughter at his dripping hair and the back of Arnold's new dress suit which he had slit pulling the lad out of the river. They tore at the slit, Arnold joining in the joke lightheartedly, until the coat parted, when Arnold tore off the two halves and flung them separately into the river. He now found he was cold, and set off home with some determination. The others followed, but as they neared Ashworth and turned off towards their respective
homes, they all drove up to Arnold's car with much hooting, and insisted on sharing a farewell drink with him. He was thus decidedly muzzy when at last he used his new latchkey on the large door of Holmelea Hall and staggered up the stairs. In his bedroom he managed to tear off his collar but could not cope with the studs of his starched shirt front. The struggle to wrench them out made him violently sick; he vomited all over the carpet, threw himself on his bed still half clothed, filthy and sweating, and fell heavily asleep.

It was thus his mother found him when she ran in next morning. She cried: “Arnold! Arnold!” threw herself on her knees beside her son and beat at him with her fists. Arnold awoke to find his pretty, conventional, rather silly but lovable mother stretched across his body, looking like a harridan, some mad woman off the streets, with her greying hair dishevelled, her mouth a gaping circle of horror and her pretty face blanched and contorted almost out of recognition. A continuous thin scream shrilled out of her throat in an oddly mechanical way, as if she were not responsible for its production.

“Mother!” exclaimed Arnold, struggling to a sitting position.

“Your father's killed himself, Arnold!” cried Mrs. Barraclough.

“No, no! There must be some mistake,” said Arnold soothingly.

His mother, gazing at him from very widely-opened eyes, fell silent and slightly shook her head. “I've seen him,” she whispered.

“But good God! Why?” exclaimed Arnold, clambering out of bed.

“We're ruined. It's the slump. It's been coming on for a long time, but your father didn't want you to know till after your birthday party,” said Mrs. Barraclough, sitting back on her heels and passing a shaking hand over her eyes.

This succinct statement proved to be the exact truth, to which the interviews of the next few wretched days merely added elaborations. Lawyers, accountants, bank managers, works managers, doctors, police inspectors, made the details clearer, but the main outline never changed: the Barracloughs were on the verge of going bankrupt to the tune of a couple of hundred thousand pounds, and Gervase Barraclough had shot himself because he couldn't face it.

So now the whole complex towering structure of the Barraclough affairs fell with a crash on Arnold's shoulders.

He was conscious from the beginning, and the impression continually deepened, that the Barraclough disaster was not viewed with very great sympathy in the West Riding. At the inquest Mrs. Barraclough's statement, taken down at her bedside (for she collapsed of course) and read in court, of her husband's recent insomnia under the pressure of his agonising anxieties, gave sufficient excuse for the inclusion in the verdict of the mitigating words
while the balance of his mind was disturbed
, and enabled Gervase Amos Barraclough to receive Christian burial, and public opinion approved of this—after all, he was a Holmelea Barraclough, it was more decent so. But Gervase Barraclough, with his rather over-gentle manner and his lisp and his silky moustache, had not, it appeared, been very popular with his textile colleagues. They impugned his textile knowledge in the familiar West Riding joke.

“Doesn't know woollen from worsted and never did.”

“Nay, that's going a bit far. But he hasn't run A. & J, Barraclough himself for years—left it all to managers. We all know what that means.”

“Aye, we do. He should have given up earlier, however. Banked when he could still pay twenty shillings in the pound.”

“It's a difficult decision to take, is yon.”

“It is
that
,” agreed men whose own positions in that terrible year 1931 were too shaky for them to consider any question concerning bankruptcy without discomfort.

Owing to this general insecurity and anxiety, the heroic gesture of the birthday ball was sourly received by the Holmelea creditors, who were deprived by it of a few hundreds of pounds which might have gone towards paying the Holmelea debts. On the other hand, the story of the “drunken orgy” of Arnold and his cronies on the very night of his father's suicide spread rapidly through the West Riding, and excited a natural resentment against Arnold on his father's behalf.

“Young wastrel,” was the general comment. “His father didn't get much comfort from
him
.”

But this did not improve the general view of the Barraclough disaster. The West Riding contrived to dislike both Arnold and his father by saying that the whole Barraclough family was in decay. Burned itself out. Exhausted.

“They've had more than their three generations and it's time they went.”

“The industry's better off with out them, I say.”

“That's right.”

Arnold was therefore somewhat chillingly handled. The manner of the family physician, Dr. Avery, when he offered the young man remedies for his aching head revealed that he knew and despised its origin only too well. The bank manager, to whom the Barraclough crash was a disaster for which he would pay dearly to his head office, remarked with a surface politeness which did not conceal his real contempt:

“I believe you knew nothing of all this?”

The department heads and works managers and foremen who attempted to explain to Arnold the complicated economic blizzard which had blown down A. & J. Barraclough broke off in the middle and concluded irritably:

“Well—you wouldn't understand, Mr. Arnold.”

Wretched enough for any young man, to a fortune's favourite such as Arnold had been this treatment was so utterly foreign to his experience that he simply did not know how to behave under it.

Worst of all was the funeral. The workpeople of Messrs. A. & J. Barraclough lined the streets and crowded the church. Arnold's mother, though she seemed barely conscious and hardly able to move, insisted on being present. Arnold had almost to carry her up the church aisle, and down again when the service was over; there was a moment when her head seemed to loll towards his shoulder. This would have been bad enough before a sympathetic audience, but Arnold felt, in all the eyes so avidly fixed upon him, a terrible anxiety, an angry reproach—was not the whole livelihood of Holmelea village being buried, queried these eyes, in Gervase Barraclough's coffin? In this atmosphere of barely suppressed hostility, of agonised suspense, Mrs. Barraclough dragging heavily on Arnold's arm, the cortège (as they say) stumbled through the long grass to the Barraclough family vault and arranged itself round the open grave. It was here that the incident occurred which was to shape Arnold Barraclough's life.

During the last few tragic days Arnold had been vaguely conscious of a soothing presence about his mother. A girl about his own age, with large quiet brown eyes, well-marked fair eyebrows and thick straight fair hair, she spoke very rarely; when she did so her voice was soft, quiet and slow. His mother clung to her and seemed to find her few words comforting. It became apparent to Arnold that Dr. Avery was not too pleased by the girl's presence and made one or two attempts to secure a trained nurse for Mrs. Barraclough, which however came to nothing; it seemed the girl was the doctor's daughter Margaret, who in his view was far too young for such a task and had nothing to do with the ill-fated Barracloughs anyway. Of course, remembered Arnold casually, he knew Meg; she was on the fringe of his circle of friends, had been present at the birthday ball; he had danced with her occasionally in the last couple of years, played tennis with her once or twice. But though she was well thought of by those who knew her well, she was not, he seemed to remember, beautiful enough or elegant
enough or witty enough, did not drink enough or racket about enough, in a word did not glitter enough, to be in Arnold's intimate group. She was just a nice ordinary girl who wore ordinary clothes, managed her father's household—he was a widower and there were younger children—with quiet ordinary competence, and would doubtless presently marry some dull ordinary man. Meanwhile Arnold was grateful for her presence at the Hall, and it was a great relief now when she quietly stepped up and took Mrs. Barraclough's other arm. Thus they stood at the graveside with Mrs. Barraclough drooping between them, and the Holmelea vicar began pronouncing the solemn sentences of committal.

The Barraclough vault was near the churchyard wall, and the wall was thickly lined with Holmelea villagers, who indeed filled all the lane beyond, silent and watchful.

“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed,” said the vicar.

A voice from the crowd rang out:

“He were a flipping coward!”

“Shame!” cried other voices immediately, while others again cried: “Nay, he's right!” A rippling movement was set up in the crowd, as people turned about to see where the various voices came from. But the vicar, professionally accustomed to public crises, went on smoothly with the burial service, and after a moment the crowd subsided again into the decorum it thought proper to a funeral.

The blood rushed into Arnold's face. Between shame, sorrow and anger he simply didn't know what to do, and had the greatest difficulty in restraining himself from rushing into the crowd and striking out right and left at those hostile faces. He raised his head to glare defiantly at them, and met Meg's eyes. They were great, glowing eyes, he found, which were fixed upon him in a passion of feeling.

Arnold Barraclough was not usually a particularly sensitive
or perceptive person, but his present great trouble had stripped away from him many layers of protective conceit and left him vulnerable, open to impressions. He looked into Meg's eyes and at once knew all about her. She loved Arnold, she had long loved him, she would love him for always; she had come to Holmelea Hall to help Mrs. Barraclough because Mrs. Barraclough was Arnold's mother. She agreed with the voices which condemned Arnold's father as a coward, she desired with all her heart and soul that Arnold should not show himself such a coward, she had faith in him that he would not do so. Everything in his situation was all at once perfectly clear to Arnold Barraclough, and he knew exactly what he had to do. The scarlet cleared from his face and he held his head up and stood straight and still till the service ended, and then put his arm about his mother's waist and held her firmly and conveyed her to the waiting car without any real difficulty. His face now looked pale, grave and stern. The crowd probably did not formulate to itself the idea that the lad had grown into a man in the last few minutes at his father's grave, but it felt differently towards him and cast down its eyes with decent propriety as he passed.

Back at the Hall, there was a bustle of luncheon preparations, for suicide and bankruptcy notwithstanding, distant relatives had to be entertained. Mrs. Barraclough was entrusted to sympathetic aunts and cousins. Dr. Avery rather sharply declined to stay for the meal.

“We will go now, Meg,” he said, frowning.

“Yes, father,” said Meg in her slow equable tones.

“I'll fetch the car. Wait here.”

“Yes.”

Luckily the doctor's modest car was entangled in a group of others at the side of the house.

“Meg,” said Arnold.

He threw open the door of a small breakfast room. The wreaths had been received and listed there that morning, and
crushed leaves and dropped petals and pieces of florists' wire lay about the floor. Meg passed silently in and turned towards him.

“Meg,” said Arnold again.

The next moment, in the midst of all these wretched and sordid circumstances, with Arnold disgraced, ruined and despised, they were in each other's arms, gripping each other fiercely, passionately, with all their strength, as if they wished to crush each other's bones. They kissed and kissed again. It was not in the least like the other kisses Arnold had light-heartedly enjoyed, nor did he wish it to be so. It was entirely different; it was Meg; it was his whole life.

Dr. Avery could now be heard in the hall, enquiring rather crossly for his daughter. Meg withdrew quietly from Arnold's embrace. She smiled at him. Without a word they parted. Henceforward Arnold Barraclough's life ran on clearly determined lines.

His first task was to reduce the affairs of Messrs. A. & J. Barraclough to something like order by selling off everything he could sell and discharging the firm's debts. This was not easy. The year being 1931 and the West Riding in the depths of one of the severest depressions it had ever known, textile mills and textile machinery were drugs on the market. The considerable Barraclough properties began to melt away for the price of a song. The whole lot would have gone if Arnold had not developed an immovable obstinacy about Holmelea. Whether it was because his ancestors had founded the firm there, or because he lived there, or because Meg lived there, or because of those hostile faces, those contemptuous cries, at his father's funeral, Arnold could hardly say: but he dug in his toes about Holmelea Mills and stuck to them through thick and thin. He sold the other two mills, he mortgaged the Hall, he threw in all his father's outside investments, his mother's settlement, everything he could lay hands on; he argued with creditors, he shouted at accountants, he was rude to bank
managers. He also gave up drinking and sold his sports car. In a word, he saved Holmelea Mills out of the Barraclough debacle, and eventually Holmelea Hall as well.