Time and Time Again (31 page)

Yours affectionately

Lily

Charles put the letter back in the envelope, and of all the emotions revived and reviving in his heart the only one he could express in the words of thought was a rueful: Poor old Reg, so you didn't get her after all, did you?

* * * * *

A week or so later Charles gave up the Chelsea flat for good and, since he could not stay at his club indefinitely, found a house in Westminster, near the river and within walking distance of the Foreign Office. It was a larger establishment than he needed for himself alone, and after much speculation as to how such a plan would work, he invited his father and Cobb to share it with him. One of his reasons was that Cobb, though too old for much personal activity, would excellently supervise and supplement any other domestic staff that Charles might be lucky enough to get; he hoped at least for a woman to cook and clean. But the chief reason was Havelock who at last, in his eighties, was beginning to experience that slight diminution of the life-force which often visits men as early as their forties. Also, according to the doctor, he had had an almost imperceptible stroke; it made him cut down his daily walking from five or six miles to two or three. Even more importantly, it clouded his mind to a merely dull inertia at times when formerly he would have been zestfully foolish; it stilled the riot in his veins to a mere fracas. All of this Charles considered, without cynicism, to be a great improvement. Certainly a household arrangement that had many other advantages was thus made possible.

There was an added consideration in the likelihood that Charles himself would be away a good deal in the foreseeable future. He had been told, informally, that a delegation to America was on the cards and that he would be a member of it.

Charles went to America in the autumn of the year. Most of his time was spent in Washington, but he had the chance of a weekend at Parson's Corner, Connecticut, where Gerald was living with the Fuesslis. The leaves were turning and the country round Parson's Corner was very beautiful. Aunt Birdie had already returned to England and before doing so had told the boy about his mother; as everyone had hoped, he had taken it well. Almost too well, indeed, for Charles's equanimity; it made him realize that Jane, like himself, had had little chance to enjoy parenthood during the rootless years imposed by his career, and that losing her for ever had been easier for Gerald than separation from Aunt Birdie when the latter left Parson's Corner--for then, Mrs. Fuessli said, had occurred the real privation. But even that had only been temporary; Gerald had soon recovered. Throughout the weekend with the Fuesslis his son's innocent happiness made Charles both sad and glad. It also made him act, perversely, the role of the Galsworthian English gentleman that the Fuesslis expected him to be even while they laughed at him for it--as if this laughter was the only return he could give for their kindness and generosity. They would never guess it, he knew, but the social freedom of America was something he passionately envied--or rather, it was something he wished he could have been involved in from his own early youth; as it was, there were all the conditioned reflexes of his upbringing hard at work to point out the flaws--one of which was the mood in which the local paper reported his arrival under the headline 'British Blueblood Visits Parson's Corner'. It took him ten minutes to explain to Mrs. Fuessli that he had no blue blood, that his family was rather boastful of not having any, that blue blood was all nonsense anyhow, and that his father's title was the equivalent of Woolworth rather than Tiffany. But it took him the same ten minutes to realize that she would always continue to think of him as an English aristocrat, that she thought of all aristocrats as idlers and fortune-hunters even though they might appear to be rich themselves or to have jobs, and that her warm affection for Gerald was invincibly joined with a relish in sending Fauntleroy to the local nursery school where he mixed with all the other children of the town and was (everyone fortunately could agree on this) having a rare good time.

So Charles left Parson's Corner in deep gratitude and slight dismay, thinking alternately that Gerald's life in America would not matter much when the war was over and he could return to England, and the next moment hoping that it WOULD matter, very much indeed, and that the boy would get something out of it of lasting value. Of course there was nothing for him, Charles, to do but wait. That joke he had had with the Fuesslis about taking Gerald to dinner on his seventeenth birthday was really a symbol of a father as well as a son growing up.

* * * * *

Charles reached London a few days before Pearl Harbour. It was another turning point of the war, and the second that year. He kept thinking of Parson's Corner and how the news must have reached the Fuesslis--how they would doubtless be trying to explain to Gerald what had happened. He wrote them a long letter immediately, a letter so warmly personal and intimate he hoped it would finally convince them that, blueblood or not, he was a human being. He didn't know (until years later, when he didn't mind) that they had proudly sent it to the local paper in which, printed verbatim and with editorial endorsement, it had convinced the whole neighbourhood that he was a great English statesman and patriot.

Now that Hitler's chief embroilment was with Russia, air-raids on London had almost ceased, though no one could forecast the duration of the respite and it was clearly impossible to relax any precautions. There was, however, an immediate burgeoning of social life--a pale but defiant shadow of what it had been before the war, yet in many ways pleasanter than those last sepulchral dinner parties of 1939, the tables then loaded with food and the conversation heavy with foreboding. Now, at the close of 1941, the tables were lighter but the talk was at least that of people who had proved something, if only the nature of themselves. Even the disasters of 1942 did not bring back the mood of that dismal year after Munich.

Charles still took his turn at fire-watching but the absence of raids gave him more time off, and he was frequently invited out. Jane had made him a good talker, often by knowing when and how to talk to him; but now, he must presume, it was for his own sake and for his own unaided efforts he was sought after--which surprised him at first. Perhaps, he reasoned, it was because his work placed him near the centre of events, and people hoped he would spill secrets (it amused him to pretend to be doing this while actually avoiding it with great care). Or else it was because he was alone and easy to fit in. The real reason was one so simple that he hardly considered it--people liked him. His manners were rather pre-war, they admitted, and the things he said were sometimes a bit too clever in an older-fashioned way, but he was a decent fellow, always ready to do you a favour, and really, some of the things he said were sound enough, if only they had been put less elegantly. He was also, people thought, quite tolerably happy after a tragedy that might well have broken him; but in this they were wrong. Charles was not tolerably happy; he was tolerably unhappy. That is to say, he was unhappy, but he had found or made it tolerable.

When his name was in the New Year Honours List there was much professional raillery. 'Oh God, look who's down for a C.B.E. . . . STUFFY ANDERSON!' But then, as an afterthought: 'Well, it was about time he got something.'

* * * * *

Havelock had another stroke in the summer of 1944; this one was more disabling, affecting his left side and preventing him from taking more than a stumbling walk around the neighbouring streets. Gradually his world contracted to the room in which he spent most of his time, and from which he could see Big Ben and the twin towers of the Abbey. His mind had achieved a level of tranquillity that had not much impaired the quality of the brain, and it was odd to speculate on the difference in his fortunes if this mental change could have been inflicted in early life, and without the physical. Charles formed the habit of visiting his father for an hour or so before going to bed, no matter how late he returned from work or a social engagement; the old man enjoyed it, being fairly sleepless and fairly sleepy at all hours of the day and night. He liked to hear Charles's comments on the events of the evening, and Charles would repeat any special titbits of conversation he could remember. Charles found that he often enjoyed these post-mortems himself--so one-sided compared with those that he and Jane had shared, yet an agreeable way to sort out one's own impressions aloud and over a final drink.

The buzz-bombs and V2s arrived, several within noisy distance of the house, but Havelock, though they failed to excite him in the old way, did not dislike them nearly as much as Charles did, and was able to rationalize the situation in terms that Charles had to admit were very rational indeed. 'At eighty-four you haven't got a life to lose. You have only a fraction of a life--and nobody would bet on it being more than a very small and vulgar fraction. So why should I worry?'

'Or I,' said Charles, 'if I could look at it your way. My own fraction's climbing down. Couldn't possibly be much more than a half--and not the better half.'

'Why not?'

Charles laughed and parried the question, but when he was alone it was one he put to himself. WHY NOT? He thought of his life up to date; it wasn't hard to imagine a future that might be luckier. On the other hand, with buzz-bombs putt-putting overhead, it sometimes wasn't easy to imagine a future at all. Perhaps only old people and youths were always ready to indulge such a luxury.

Havelock grew weaker gradually, and with the weakness came passionlessness, so that he could talk over old days and old issues without rancour. He told Charles once, quite calmly, that he had always been doubtful whether he were really his father at all, because the dates of his wife's return to him after their separation and of Charles's birth permitted the suspicion. Charles was not as shocked, or even as concerned, as he might have expected to be, but he was interested--and mainly because the idea seemed to offer a possible clue to many hitherto puzzling facets of Havelock's behaviour. He found also that the idea brought him closer to his father in sympathy, as if the spiritual tie of a revealed neurosis could be stronger than that of the body. He was almost disappointed when, on mentioning the matter to Cobb, the latter discounted it. The dates, Cobb said, made it nearly (though not quite) impossible, and besides that, there had been no whisper at the time, as would certainly have happened if any other man had been involved in the separation.

'Then why DID she leave him?' Charles asked.

'She couldn't stand him,' Cobb answered.

They were both unwilling to discuss the matter further, except that Cobb brought up the matter of the family likeness. 'It's not just looks, sir--as it was with Mr. Lindsay--it's something hard to explain, but it's there, and I notice it more as you grow older. Of course you're nothing like your father in tastes and disposition, and yet . . . well, I wouldn't have any doubts if I were you, sir.' Cobb added, perhaps as an implied compliment (or else the reverse, Charles could not be certain): 'He was very handsome at your age.'

'He still is.'

'Yes--and there's a look about him now--sometimes when he's dozing in a chair with the sun on his face--he looks--well, sir, he looks just like a SAINT.'

Cobb smiled at the notion, and Charles also smiled. SIR Havelock, yes--but SAINT Havelock was a bit too much.

When he next saw his father Charles gave him what he hoped was the good news, expecting him to take more comfort from it than Charles could himself, for he knew by now that if he had been supplied with irrefutable proof that Havelock was not his father, his chief feeling would have been curiosity about who had been. He often wondered why his relationship with the old man had entered a phase of such warm indifference, such affectionately cynical toleration. He supposed it was largely because it was too late for anything else, yet still in time to realize that if you forgive people enough you belong to them, and they to you, whether either person likes it or not . . . the squatter's rights of the heart.

* * * * *

There came the days of the German collapse, when a future-- personal, national, and world-wide--seemed to emerge from the clouds of doubt that had hung heavily for a decade. Presently Japan surrendered also; the war was totally over. It was the second such occasion in Charles's life, as in that of millions of others, and completely different from the first. There were no wild scenes, no bonfires to scorch the lions in Trafalgar Square, no celebrations that became riots. To Charles the big personal event was Gerald's return--a boy of nine with a decided American accent and a tendency to find fault with the way things were done in England. Charles knew no easy cure for this, but could not regard it as too deplorable, remembering as he did that England (and for that matter America too) had been made great by people who had found fault with the way things were done in England. But he felt there was some need to lessen a child's disappointment with a country whose cars and trains and ice-cream sodas were so small, so he took Gerald for a seaside holiday and hoped it made him feel happier. He could not be sure; the boy was not one for showing his emotions. Charles also talked to the headmaster of the prep school where Gerald would begin his first term in September. The head told him there would be several other new boys who had spent recent years across the Atlantic. 'They'll probably be ragged a bit at first.' (But later he wrote to Charles that it hadn't happened like that at all. 'So far from being at any disadvantage, the boys who have lived in the Great Democracy seem to have made themselves a sort of aristocracy that the other boys look up to. Remarkable.' Charles agreed that it was, but he was also much relieved.)

One other thing he had been slightly concerned about was how Gerald would get along with Havelock. Of course there would only be the school holidays to present any problem, and even these would not be spent entirely at the house; nevertheless there was just the doubt in his mind that always existed in any human affairs connected even remotely with his father. But again to Charles's relief, everything happened as he could have wished--indeed, more so, for Havelock captivated the boy to a degree that almost presented a problem of its own. Charles could take sardonic comfort from thinking how like Havelock it was to show that as a grandfather he could succeed where Charles as a father seemed to have failed. But at any rate, Charles had to admit it eased the transition from American to English life by giving Gerald a personal excitement.