Time of Hope (9 page)

After that night, I made inquiries about George Passant. No one could tell me much: he had only come to the town in the previous autumn, was a qualified solicitor, was working as managing clerk in the solid, respectable firm of Eden and Martineau. He was very young, not more than twenty-three or four, as indeed one could see at a glance. Someone had heard a rumour that he led a ‘wild’ life.

Meeting George Passant was the first piece of pure chance that affected all that I did later. The second piece of chance in my youth happened, oddly enough, within a fortnight.

My mother was one of a very large family – or rather of two families, for, as I mentioned previously, her father had married twice, having four children by his first wife, and seven, of whom my mother was one of the youngest, by his second. For many years she had been on bad terms with her half-brothers and sisters: within her own mother’s family there was great affection, and they saw and wrote to each other frequently their whole lives long, but none of them visited their seniors or spoke of them without a note of anger and injury.

I had first heard the story in those talks by the fireside, when my mother let her romantic imagination return to the winter of 1894. It was then that she told me of the intrigues of Will and Za. For a long time I thought she had exaggerated in order to paint the wonder of the Wigmores. In her version, the villain of the piece was my Uncle Will. He was the eldest son of the first family, and my mother described him with hushed indignation and respect. His villainy had consisted of diverting money intended for the younger family to himself and his sisters. My mother had never succeeded in making the details dear, but she believed something like this: her mother had brought some money with her when she married (was she not a Wigmore?). How much it was my mother could not be sure, but she said in a fierce whisper that it might have been over fifteen hundred pounds. This money her mother had ‘intended’ to be divided among the younger family at her death. But Uncle Will had intervened with their father, to whom the money was left and who was then a very old man. Through Uncle Will’s influence, every penny had gone to himself and his two sisters (the fourth of the first family had died young).

I never knew the truth of it. My mother believed her story implicitly, and she was an honest woman, honest in the midst of her temptation to glorify all that happened to her. It was certainly true that Aunt Za, the oldest sister of all, Uncle Will and Aunt Florrie all had a little money, while none of the other family had inherited so much as a pound. It was also true that all my mother’s brothers and sisters bore the same grievance.

After twenty years of the quarrel, my mother tried to make peace. She did it partly for my sake, since Aunt Za was the widow of an auctioneer and thought to ‘have more than she needed for herself’. She had, since her husband died, gone to live near her brother Will, who ran a small estate agency in Market Harborough. My mother wanted also to repair the breach in order to show me off; but the chief reason was that she had deep instinctive loyalties, and though she told herself that she was making an approach purely for my sake, as a piece of calculation, it was really that she did not want any of them to die unreconciled.

Her move went about halfway to success. She visited Market Harborough and was welcomed by Za and Will. After that visit, birthday and Christmas correspondence was resumed. But neither Za nor Will returned her visit, nor would they, as she tried to persuade them, write a word to any others of the younger family. My mother, however, secured one positive point. She talked about me; it was easy to imagine her magnifying my promise, and being met in kind, for Za and Will had exactly her sort of stately, haughty manner. I was about fourteen at the time, and was invited over to Will’s for a week in the summer holidays. Since then I had gone to Harborough often, as an emissary between the two families, as a sign that the quarrel was at least formally healed.

On these visits to Harborough, I did not see much of Aunt Za (her name, an abbreviation of Thirza, was pronounced Zay). Her whole life, since her husband died, was lived in and round the church. She taught a Sunday-school class, helped with mothers’ meetings, attended the sick in the parish, but most of all she lived for her devotions, going to church morning and night each day of the year. I used to have tea with her, once and only once, each time I stayed with Uncle Will. She was an ageing woman, stately and sombre, with a prowlike nose and sunken mouth. She had little to say to me, except to ask after my mother’s health and to tell me to go regularly to church. She always gave me seed cake with the tea, so that the taste of caraway years later brought back, like a Proustian moment, the narrow street, the dark house, the taciturn and stiff old woman burdened with piety and the dreadful prospect of the grave.

I did not entertain her, as sometimes I managed to entertain Uncle Will. Yet apparently she liked me well enough – or else there was justice in my mother’s story, and Aunt Za felt a wound of conscience throbbing as she became old. Whatever her motive, she wrote to my mother in the autumn I entered the office, said that she was making a new will, and proposed in doing so to leave me ‘a small remembrance’.

My mother was resplendent with pleasure. It gratified her that she had brought off something for me, that her schemes had for once not been blocked. It gratified her specially that it should come through her family, and so prove something of past glories. As she thought of it, however, she was filled with anxiety. ‘I hope Za doesn’t tell Will what she intends to do,’ said my mother. ‘He’ll find a way to put it in his own pocket, you can bet your boots. You’re not going to tell me that Will has stopped looking after himself.’

My mother’s suspicion of Uncle Will flared up acutely eighteen months afterwards – in the spring of 1923, when I was seventeen and a half. My mother had been ill, and was only just coming down again to breakfast. There was a letter for her, addressed in a hand that could belong to no one but Uncle Will, a fine affected flowing Italian hand, developed as an outward mark of superiority, with dashes everywhere instead of full stops. As she read it, my mother’s face was pallid with anger.

‘He didn’t mean us to get near her,’ she said. ‘Za’s gone. She went yesterday morning. He says that it was very sudden. Of course, he was too upset to send us a wire,’ she added with savage sarcasm.

However, this hope of hers was not snatched away. My father and I attended the funeral, and afterwards heard the will read in Uncle Will’s house. I received three hundred pounds. Three hundred pounds. It was much more than I expected, or my mother in her warmest flush of optimism. Cheerfully, my heart thumped.

My father ruminated with content as we walked to the station: ‘Three hundred of the best, Lewis. Think of that! Three hundred of the best. Why, there’s no knowing what you’ll be able to do with it. Three blooming hundred.’

Almost for the first time in my experience, he was impelled to assert himself. ‘I hope you won’t think of spending it without consulting me,’ he said. ‘I know what money is, you realize. Why, every week at Mr Stapleton’s I pay out twice as much as your three hundred pounds. I can keep you on the right track, providing you never commit yourself without consulting me.’

I assured him – in the light, familiar, companionable tone that had always existed naturally between us – that we would have long and exacting conferences. My father chuckled. A trifle puffed out by his success, he produced a singular piece of practical advice.

‘I always tell people’, he said, as though he were in the habit of being deferred to on every kind of financial business, ‘never to go about without five pounds sewn in a place where no one can find it. You never know when you’ll need it badly, Lewis. It’s a reserve. Think of that! If I were you, I should get Lena to sew five of your pound notes into the seat of your trousers. You never know when you’ll want them. One of these days you’ll thank me for the idea, you mark my words.’

In the train, we found an empty third-class carriage. My father stretched his short legs, I my long ones, and we looked out of the window at the sodden fields, sepia and emerald in the drizzle of the March afternoon.

‘I don’t like funerals, Lewis,’ said my father meditatively in the dark carriage. ‘When they put me away, I wish they wouldn’t make all this fuss about it. Lena would insist on it, though, wouldn’t she?’

His thoughts turned to more cheerful themes.

‘I’ve got to say this for Will, they did give us some nice things to eat,’ said my father, as naturally and simply as ever. ‘Did you try the cheesecakes?’

‘No,’ I said with a smile.

‘You made a mistake there, Lewis,’ said my father. ‘They were the best I’ve tasted for a very long time.’

We did not go straight home, but instead crossed the road from the station and called at the old Victoria, which later became, for George Passant and me and the circle of friends we called the ‘group’, our habitual public house. My father suggested, feeling a very gay dog, that we should celebrate the legacy. I drank two or three pints of beer; my father did not like beer, but put away several glasses of port and lemon. He became gay without making any effort to control himself. Once he lifted his voice in a song, his surprisingly loud and tuneful voice. ‘No singing, please,’ called the barmaid sourly. ‘Don’t be such a donkey, Bertie,’ my father muttered to himself, mildly and cheerfully, imitating my mother’s constant reproof.

Their relation, I knew, had deteriorated with the years. It was held together now only by habit, law, the acquiescence of his temperament, the pride of hers, and most of all the difficulty of keeping two
ménages
for those as poor as they were. He did not mind very much. So much of his life was lived inside himself; in his own comical fashion he was far better protected than most men; his inner life went on, whatever events took place outside – failure, humiliation, the disharmony of his marriage. That day, for example, he had experienced happy moments as the accomplished financier and, later in the Victoria, as the hard-bitten man of the world. He was simple, he did not mind being laughed at, he was quite happy, the happiest member of the family, all the years of his life.

I got on with him as I had always done, on the same level, with little change since my childhood. He asked for nothing. He was grateful for a little banter and just a little flattery. It would not have occurred to him, now that I was in his eyes grown-up, to ask me to spend a day with him. If one came by accident, such as this outing to Market Harborough, he placidly enjoyed it, and so did I.

At last we went home. We got off at the tram stop and walked by the elementary school, the library, Aunt Milly’s house, just the same way as I had run in sudden trepidation that night before the war, when I was a child of eight. Returning from Za’s funeral, however, I was, like my father, comfortable with a little drink inside me. A cold drizzle was falling, but we scarcely noticed it. My father was humming to himself, then talking, as I teased him. He hummed away, zum, zoo, zum, zoo, zoo, zoo, pleased because I was inventing reasons for his choice of tune.

We were almost outside our house before I took in that something was not right. The gas in the front room was alight, but the blinds were not drawn. That was strange, different from all the times I had walked that road and seen the light behind the blinds.

I looked straight into the empty, familiar room. Above, in my mother’s bedroom, the light was also burning, but there the blinds were drawn.

Aunt Milly let us in. In her flat energetic way she said that my mother had had another attack that afternoon, and was gravely ill.

I went to see my mother late that night. Her voice was faint and thick, the lids fell heavy over her eyes, but she was quite lucid. I only stayed a moment, and left the bedroom with the weight of anxiety lightened. She seemed no worse than I had often seen her. None of us knew how ill she was, that night or the next day. We were so much in ignorance that, on the next evening, Aunt Milly set about attacking me on how I should dispose of my legacy.

I was sitting in the front room, below my mother’s bedroom, when Aunt Milly came downstairs.

‘How is she?’ I said. I had not been inside my mother’s room since early that morning, before I departed for the office.

‘About the same,’ said Aunt Milly. With no change of expression at all, she went on, her voice loud and vigorous: ‘Now you’ll be able to start making an honest man of your father. It’s high time.’

‘What do you mean, Aunt Milly?’

‘You know very well what I mean.’ Which, though she had momentarily startled me, was true. ‘You can pay off another ten shillings in the pound.’

I met her stare.

‘It’s the honest thing to do,’ she said. ‘You needn’t pay Tom’s share yet awhile. You can keep that in the bank for yourself. But you’ll be able to pay the other creditors.’

An obstinate resolve had formed, when she bullied me as a child, that I would never pay those debts, however much money I made and however long I lived. Now I liked her better, saw her as a woman by herself not just as a big impassive intruding face, an angry threatening voice, that filled the space round and wounded me. I liked her better; but the resolve had stayed intact since I was eight. However much Za had left me, I should not have used a penny as Aunt Milly wanted.

But I could deal with Aunt Milly by now. Once she used to hurt me, then I had toughened my skin and listened in silence; now that I was growing up, I had become comfortable with her.

‘Do you want to ruin me, Aunt Milly? I might take to drink, you know.’

‘I shouldn’t be surprised. Anyone who doesn’t pay his debts’, said Aunt Milly unrelentingly, ‘is weak enough for anything.’

‘I might be able to get qualified in something with this money. You tried hard enough to get me qualified as an engineer, didn’t you? You ought to approve if I tag some letters after my name.’

I said it frivolously, but it was a thought that was going through my mind. That too made me hang on to the money, perhaps it determined me more than the resolution of years past.