James Hilton: Collected Novels (18 page)

Polling closed at eight o’clock, and an hour later the count began in the Town Hall. George paced up and down amongst the green-baize-covered trestle tables, keeping his eyes on the mounting piles of ballot papers; his opponent was absent, preferring to spend the anxious hours more convivially in a hotel room across the street. The atmosphere in the Town Hall became tenser as it also grew thicker with tobacco smoke and the smell of wet mackintoshes.

Towards midnight most of the ballot boxes had been brought in from outlying districts and half the count was over, with George leading by a narrow margin. Watching the proceedings, he found it hard to realize that his fate lay in those slips of paper—his own fate and Livia’s. And then, whimsically, he thought of his election slogan—“A Vote for Boswell Is a Vote for Your Children’s Future.” It was a vote for
his
children’s future, anyhow, he reflected.

By midnight he knew what his fate was, for the last few ballot boxes, drawn from the suburban fringe where mostly professional and retired people lived, had contained a heavy preponderance of votes for Wetherall. The final figures were not even close enough to justify a recount; George had lost the election by a hundred and forty-eight.

As in a trance he received the impact of the news and went through the ritual prescribed for defeated candidates on such occasions. He stepped out on the balcony to make a short speech to his supporters, congratulated and shook hands with the victor, seconded a vote of thanks to the returning officer; it was all over by one o’clock in the morning, and the rain had not stopped.

As he was leaving the Town Hall Jim Saunders handed him a throw-away leaflet printed in the opposition colors that had been given eleventh-hour circulation throughout the town.

George scanned it over and shrugged more indifferently than he felt. “Poor stuff, Jim. And not even true. I’ll bet it’s not libelous, though.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that. But there’s a good many voters it may have influenced.”

It was an artfully worded suggestion that George had secured a municipal appointment for his wife—concealing the all-important fact that he had not even met her till after she took the job.

“It’s the sort of thing that swings voters,” Saunders went on. “Shouldn’t wonder if you’d have been in but for this.”

“I doubt it, Jim…” And all the way home George kept telling himself that he doubted it.

Not till he turned the corner of Market Street and saw the familiar printing office (now plastered, and how ironically, with adjurations to “Vote for Boswell”) did he contemplate the really worst penalty of failure, and that was having to tell Livia. He wondered if she would already have heard.

When he entered the house he waited to hear her voice, but only Becky came up to him rather forlornly; and then he saw a note on the table. It told him she had had to call the doctor early that evening and had been sent to the hospital.

An hour later he sat at her bedside, realizing that for a new and far happier reason this was one of the memorable days of his life. His child was born—prematurely, but thrivingly—a boy. And as he looked first at his son, and then at Livia, a great tenderness enveloped him, so that he took her hand and could not find words for anything in his heart or mind.

“I didn’t want you to come earlier,” she said weakly. “I wouldn’t let them tell you because I knew you’d be busy…

Is it over yet?”

“Why…don’t you know?” He realized afterwards that he had doubtless been left the job of breaking the bad news gently, but it seemed so trivial then that he answered outright and almost casually: “Aye, it’s all over. I lost. By a hundred and forty-eight.”

“You
lost
?” He was still so happy that the look of disappointment on her face startled him, especially when she added: “No luck, George. I said so, didn’t I?”

“
Luck
? Why, isn’t
this
luck?” And he pointed to the child.

Of course his own personal disappointment returned, though he knew he would not have felt it so keenly but for hers. She had, and always had, that curious capacity to weight or lift his mood with her own, to give him peace or no-peace at will. In his own mind the loss of the election need not have been tragic; after all, he was still young, and there would be other chances—possibly within a short time. But she made it seem tragic by the way she regarded it, and he, as if in defense of Browdley against this attitude, plunged anew into work for the town.

Foremost was his plan to stir some civic spirit among the richer citizens. There were no millionaires, but a few who were well off, and one was Richard Felsby, partner of Livia’s father and grandfather in the days when the firm had been Channing and Felsby. George had never been able to understand what exactly the trouble was between Livia and the old man, perhaps a family feud of some kind, certainly no concern of his own; and since Richard was over eighty, ailing, a bachelor, and the owner of some land on Browdley’s outskirts that would make a fine municipal park if given to the town, George called on him one evening—quite prepared to be kicked out unceremoniously, but unwilling to neglect even a hundred-to-one chance.

Richard Felsby, dressing-gowned, nightcapped, and from a bedroom armchair, astonished him by saying, during their first minute of conversation: “Let’s not waste time, Boswell…When ye married Livia, ye married a problem, and it’s not a bit of use comin’ to me about it.”

“But—” George protested, and then let the old man have his say, since the saying might be of interest.

“And neither of ye need think ye’re going to get a penny o’
my
money, because I’m leavin’ it all to Sarah.”

George did not even know who Sarah was, and perhaps his look showed it, for Richard went on: “Sarah looked after Livia and her mother and father and grandmother and grandfather for the best part of sixty years…and where’d ye think she’d be now but for me?…Why, in the workhouse. That’s all Livia cared. I know the woman’s stone-deaf and cranky and no beauty either, but she deserved better than to be left stranded when Livia ran off to marry you.”

“I never knew that,” George gasped.

“Aye, and I don’t suppose ye know a good many other things. But it’s the truth, and ye can tell her so. Sarah gets my money, and if ye’ve come to talk me into anything else it’s not a bit of use.”

George then felt that his simplest disclaimer was to tell the old man frankly what he
had
come for, and now it was the latter’s turn to be astonished. It had clearly never occurred to him that he owed anything to the town, and George’s suggestion that he did so aroused a host of vaguely associated antagonisms—to mollycoddling and spoon-feeding and high taxes and socialist agitators and what not. But the odd thing was that as the interview proceeded, Richard Felsby found himself rather liking George personally. (He was not the first to fall under that spell, or the last either.) And when George rose to go, he grunted: “It’s all a pack of nonsense, Boswell. This boom that’s on now isn’t going to last, and when it’s over Browdley’ll need jobs, not parks.”

“So you won’t let go any of that land, Mr. Felsby?”

“Not a yard, except at a fair price…But ye can stay and have a drink, if ye like.”

“Thanks, but I don’t drink.”

“Just as well, because the drink ye’d have got here is tea…I’ve often caught chaps that way. To my mind it’s a misuse of the word that it should only apply to alcohol…So ye’re a teetotaler, eh?”

George nodded.

“Teetotal family?”

“Not all of ’em. My Uncle Joe drank plenty.”

“The black sheep?”

“Maybe, but I liked him better than some of the white ones.”

“Ye did?…Sit down, lad, and what about a cup?” George accepted, and then had a chance to verify that Sarah was indeed as had been described. Meanwhile Richard Felsby, who had enjoyed no such congenial human contact since the death of his best friend, Dr. Whiteside, made the most of the occasion and became almost garrulous. He admitted that he wasn’t a big “giver” (George had known this already), but when he did give, he said he liked to suit his own ideas—as when, for instance, he had offered an annual prize to the Browdley Grammar School for the boy who achieved “the best all-around lack of distinction.” “It was the prize I’d have won myself when I was there,” he chuckled asthmatically, “but they wouldn’t even let me offer it.” It appeared, too, that sometimes he amused himself by sending checks for small sums to people momentarily headlined in the news—the farmer who refused to let a fashionable Hunt cross his fields, the postman’s wife with her second set of triplets, and so on. “I reckon ye think I’m a queer sort of chap,” he added, after these confessions.

“Aye,” answered George, unconsciously giving his voice a riper Browdley burr to match the other’s. “Ye’re queer enough. And I suppose ye think
I’m
queer for wanting Browdley to have a park?”

“Oh, to blazes with the park—are we on that again?…I hear ye’ve got a baby.”

George nodded. “A boy.”

“Let’s hope it takes after you, then. Because I’ll tell ye this, Boswell, the Channings are queerer than you and me combined…Must ye go?”

“Getting late,” said George, with a smile.

“Drop in again some time.”

“Aye…but I won’t promise not to mention that park.”

George did not tell Livia about his visit, because he felt it would not please her, however well he could justify it. And a few weeks later he visited Richard again, partly in case there was any change of mind about the park, but chiefly because he was passing the house and was touched by a sudden vision of the old man’s loneliness in that upstairs room with no one to talk to but a deaf servant. A moment later, having acted on impulse, he was touched again by the evident warmth of Richard’s welcome.

“Sit down, lad, and make yourself at home…See this?” And he waved, of all things, a check he had been busy writing. “I’m givin’ it away for charity…Doesn’t it make your mouth water?”

George laughed, while Richard went on to explain that he was sending it to a man he did not know, but whose name and address had appeared in that morning’s paper—some fellow who had grown a hollyhock taller than his house. “Mebbe ye’ll drop it in the post for me when ye go, Boswell. He’ll get a nice surprise when he opens my letter tomorrow…Well, what are ye starin’ at me for? D’ye think I’m daft? Or don’t ye like hollyhocks taller than houses?”

“I like ’em all right,” answered George, “and houses too. I’ll count it as one of your
better
benefactions. Why didn’t ye make it a bit more, though? What’s a pound from you?”

Whereat Richard enjoyed the best laugh he had had in years, for despite his reputation for being tight with money, no one had dared to hint it to his face until George, in sheer naïveté, stumbled into doing so. But it made such an instant hit that George was never quite sure afterwards whether he kept it up out of candor or to give the old man more fun.

For he formed quite a habit of dropping in to see Felsby, whose house was not far from the Town Hall. The visits did not have to be long ones, and George enjoyed their brevity as much as the outspokenness of what was said on both sides.

“The trouble with you, George, is that ye think too much of yourself. I always thought ye did, ever since ye got on the Council. I’ve sacked hundreds of better men than you for a tenth of the things ye’ve said to me tonight.”

“Aye,” retorted George. “And ye’d sack me too, if I was an employee of yours. But I’m not. My father was, though, for the best part of a lifetime. Or the worse part, whichever way ye look at it.”

That sort of thing…

(George reflected afterwards that the old man must like it, or he would get offended; but then it occurred to him that he would have got offended already if he had thought that George really meant what he said, but he doubtless supposed he didn’t. Yet George
did
, in a way, and knowing this found himself up against a familiar dilemma: that to say what you mean without ever offending people is usually to say what you mean without making them believe you mean what you say—and what was the use of that? Well, maybe
some
use, sometimes. For, as a victim expressed
his
side of it once: “George tells you what a bastard you are, and you laugh, and then after he’s gone you suddenly say to yourself—‘Of course, George was only joking—it’s a good job he doesn’t really know I
am
a bit of a bastard!’ ”)

Richard was frank enough also. He once said: “George, I’m sorry for ye, married to a Channing. Her father was no good, and her mother wasn’t much better, and the life she lived up at Stoneclough that last year before he died—well, it was no Sunday School picnic, believe me.”

It was impossible to resent this, in its context, yet George felt impelled to answer defensively: “Oh, Livia’s all right”—before curiosity made him add: “She had a bad time, you mean?”

Richard Felsby said impressively: “There’s only one man who could have told you—and that’s Dr. Whiteside, and he’s dead. He never told me, for that matter—but I knew how he felt, because I remember what he said when he got news of her father’s death—‘Thank God,’ he said, ‘for everybody’s sake.’ …Well, well—maybe that’s more than I should have passed on. But I’ll tell ye this, George—the Channing blood’s had a streak of moonshine in it lately. That’s what made me leave the firm. I found I was getting too sensible for it.”

“You’re not as sensible as you think,” retorted George, allowing the conversation to become bantering again. He guessed it would be good policy not to press his inquiries at this stage, especially as the old man would doubtless return to the subject at a later meeting and tell all he knew. George had had enough experience of wheedling information to know that an air of not too much concern is the best wheedler. And besides, he must keep in mind the other object of his wheedling. So he added, still banteringly: “If ye
were
sensible ye’d give me that land for a park. Think of the taxes ye’d save.”

At which the old man shook and spluttered with merriment to a degree that quite possibly imposed a strain on his heart.

Suddenly it all came to an end.