The friendship with Sebastian Levinne prospered and throve apace. Half the zest of it lay in the secrecy that had to be adopted. Vernon’s mother would have been horrified if she had guessed at anything of the kind. The Levinnes would certainly not have been horrified – but their gratification might have led to equally dire results.
School time passed on leaden wings for poor Joe, cooped up with a daily governess, who arrived every morning, and who subtly disapproved of her outspoken and rebellious pupil. Joe only lived for the holidays. As soon as they came, she and Vernon would set off to a secret meeting-place where there was a convenient gap in a hedge. They had invented a code of whistles and many unnecessary signals. Sometimes Sebastian would be there before time – lying on the bracken – his yellow face and jutting out ears looking strangely at variance with his knickerbocker suit.
They played games, but they also talked – how they talked! Sebastian told them stories of Russia – they learnt of the persecution of Jews – of Pogroms! Sebastian himself had never been in Russia, but he had lived for years amongst other Russian Jews and his own father had narrowly escaped with his life in a Pogrom. Sometimes he would say sentences in Russian to please Vernon and Joe. It was all entrancing.
‘Everybody hates us down here,’ said Sebastian. ‘But it doesn’t matter. They won’t be able to do without us because my father is so rich. You can buy everything with money.’
He had a certain queer arrogance about him.
‘You can’t buy everything,’ objected Vernon. ‘Old Nicoll’s son has come home from the war without a leg. Money couldn’t make his leg grow again.’
‘No,’ admitted Sebastian. ‘I didn’t mean things like that. But money would get you a very good wooden leg, and the best kind of crutches.’
‘I had crutches once,’ said Vernon. ‘It was rather fun. And I had an awfully nice nurse to look after me.’
‘You see, you couldn’t have had that if you hadn’t been rich.’
Was he rich? He supposed he was. He’d never thought about it.
‘I wish I was rich,’ said Joe.
‘You can marry me when you grow up,’ said Sebastian, ‘and then you will be.’
‘It wouldn’t be nice for Joe if nobody came to see her,’ objected Vernon.
‘I wouldn’t mind that a bit,’ said Joe. ‘I wouldn’t care what Aunt Myra or anybody said. I’d marry Sebastian if I wanted to.’
‘People will come and see her then,’ said Sebastian. ‘You don’t realize. Jews are frightfully powerful. My father says people can’t do without them. That’s why Sir Charles Alington had to sell us Deerfields.’
A sudden chill came over Vernon. He felt without putting the thought into words that he was talking to a member of an enemy race. But he felt no antagonism towards Sebastian. That was over long ago. He and Sebastian were friends – somehow he was sure they always would be.
‘Money,’ said Sebastian, ‘isn’t just buying things. It’s ever so much more than that. And it isn’t only having power over people. It’s – it’s being able to get together lots of beauty.’
He made a queer un-English gesture with his hands.
‘What do you mean,’ said Vernon, ‘by get together?’
Sebastian didn’t know what he meant. The words had just come.
‘Anyway,’ said Vernon, ‘things aren’t beauty.’
‘Yes, they are. Deerfields is beautiful – but not nearly so beautiful as Abbots Puissants.’
‘When Abbots Puissants belongs to me,’ said Vernon, ‘you can come and stay there as much as ever you like. We’re always going to be friends, aren’t we? No matter what anyone says?’
‘We’re always going to be friends,’ said Sebastian.
Little by little the Levinnes made headway. The church needed a new organ – Mr Levinne presented it with one. Deerfields was thrown open on the occasion of the choir boys’ outing, and strawberries and cream provided. A large donation was given to the Primrose League. Turn where you would, you came up against the opulence and the kindness of the Levinnes.
People began to say: ‘Of course they’re impossible – but Mrs Levinne is wonderfully kind.’
And they said other things.
‘Oh, of course – Jews! But perhaps it is absurd of one to be prejudiced. Some very good people have been Jews.’
It was rumoured that the Vicar had said: ‘Including Jesus Christ,’ in answer. But nobody really believed that. The Vicar was unmarried which was very unusual – and had odd ideas about Holy Communion – and sometimes preached very incomprehensible sermons; but nobody believed that he would have said anything really sacrilegious.
It was the Vicar who introduced Mrs Levinne to the Sewing Circle which met twice a week to provide comforts for our brave soldiers in South Africa. And meeting her twice a week there certainly made it awkward.
In the end, Lady Coomberleigh, softened by the immense donation to the Primrose League, took the plunge and called. And where Lady Coomberleigh led, everybody followed.
Not that the Levinnes were ever admitted to intimacy. But they were officially accepted, and people were heard saying:
‘She’s a very kind woman – even if she does wear impossible clothes for the country.’
But that, too, followed. Mrs Levinne was adaptable like all her race. A very short time elapsed before she appeared in even tweedier tweeds than her neighbour’s.
Joe and Vernon were solemnly bidden to tea with Sebastian Levinne.
‘We must go this once, I suppose,’ said Myra, sighing. ‘But we need never get really intimate. What a queer-looking boy he is. You won’t be rude to him, will you, Vernon, darling?’
The children solemnly made the official acquaintance of Sebastian. It amused them very much.
But the sharp-witted Joe fancied that Mrs Levinne knew more about their friendship than Aunt Myra did. Mrs Levinne wasn’t a fool. She was like Sebastian.
Walter Deyre was killed a few weeks before the war ended. His end was a gallant one. He was shot when going back to rescue a wounded comrade under heavy fire. He was awarded a posthumous VC, and the letter his colonel wrote to Myra was treasured by her as her dearest possession.
‘Never,’ wrote the colonel, ‘have I known anyone so fearless of danger. His men adored him and would have followed him anywhere. He has risked his life again and again in the gallantest way. You can indeed be proud of him.’
Myra read that letter again and again. She read it to all her friends. It wiped away the faint sting that her husband had left no last word or letter for her.
‘But being a Deyre, he wouldn’t,’ she said to herself.
Yet Walter Deyre had left a letter ‘in case I should be killed’. But it was not to Myra, and she never knew of it. She was grief-stricken, but happy. Her husband was hers in death as he had never been in life, and with her easy power of making things as she wished them to be, she began to weave a convincing romance of her wonderfully happy married life.
It is difficult to say how Vernon was affected by his father’s death. He felt no actual grief – was rendered even more stolid by his mother’s obvious wish for him to display emotion. He was proud of his father – so proud that it almost hurt – yet he understood what Joe had meant when she said that it was better for her mother to be dead. He remembered very clearly that last evening walk with his father – the things he had said – the feeling there had been between them.
His father, he knew, hadn’t really wanted to come back. He was sorry for his father – he always had been. He didn’t know why.
It was not grief he felt for his father – it was more a kind of heart-gripping loneliness. Father was dead – Aunt Nina was dead. There was Mother, of course, but that was different.
He couldn’t satisfy his mother – he never had been able to. She was always hugging him, crying over him – telling him they must be all in all to each other now. And he couldn’t, he just couldn’t, say the things she wanted him to say. He couldn’t even put his arms round her neck and hug her back.
He longed for the holidays to be over. His mother, with her red eyes, and her widow’s weeds – of the heaviest crape. Somehow she overpowered things.
Mr Flemming, the lawyer from London, came down to stay, and Uncle Sydney came from Birmingham. He stayed two days. At the end of them, Vernon was summoned to the library.
The two men were sitting at the long table. Myra was sitting in a low chair by the fire, her handkerchief to her eyes.
‘Well, my boy,’ said Uncle Sydney, ‘we’ve got something to talk to you about. How would you like to come and live near your Aunt Carrie and me at Birmingham?’
‘Thank you,’ said Vernon, ‘but I’d rather live here.’
‘A bit gloomy, don’t you think?’ said his uncle. ‘Now I’ve got my eye on a jolly house – not too big, thoroughly comfortable. There’ll be your cousins near for you to play with in the holidays. It’s a very good idea, I think.’
‘I’m sure it is,’ said Vernon politely. ‘But I’d really like being here best, thank you.’
‘Ah! H’m,’ said Uncle Sydney. He blew his nose and looked questioningly at the lawyer, who assented to the look with a slight nod.
‘It’s not quite so simple as that, old chap,’ said Uncle Sydney. ‘I think you’re quite old enough to understand if I explain things to you. Now that your father’s dead – er – passed from us, Abbots Puissants belongs to you.’
‘I know,’ said Vernon.
‘Eh? How do you know? Servants been talking?’
‘Father told me before he went away.’
‘Oh!’ said Uncle Sydney rather taken aback. ‘Oh, I see. Well, as I say, Abbots Puissants belongs to you, but a place like this takes a lot of money to run – paying wages and things like that – you understand? And then there are some things called Death Duties. When anyone dies, you have to pay out a lot of money to the Government.
‘Now, your father wasn’t a rich man. When his father died, and he came into this place, he had so little money that he thought he’d have to sell it.’
‘Sell it?’ burst out Vernon incredulously.
‘Yes, it’s not entailed.’
‘What’s entailed?’
Mr Flemming explained carefully and clearly.
‘But – but – you aren’t going to sell it now?’
Vernon gazed at him with agonizing, imploring eyes.
‘Certainly not,’ said Mr Flemming. ‘The estate is left to you, and nothing can be done until you are of age – that means twenty-one, you know.’
Vernon breathed a sigh of relief.
‘But, you see,’ continued Uncle Sydney, ‘there isn’t enough money to go on living here. As I say, your father would have had to sell it. But he met your mother and married her, and fortunately she had enough money to – to keep things going. But your father’s death has made a lot of difference – for one thing he has left certain – er – debts which your mother insists on paying.’
There was a sniff from Myra. Uncle Sydney’s tone was embarrassed and he hurried on.
‘The common-sense thing to do is to let Abbots Puissants for a term of years – till you are twenty-one, in fact. By then, who knows? Things may – er – change for the better. Naturally your mother will be happier living near her own relations. You must think of your mother, you know, my boy.’
‘Yes,’ said Vernon. ‘Father told me to.’
‘So that’s settled – eh?’
How cruel they were, thought Vernon. Asking him – when he could see that there was nothing to ask him about. They could do as they liked. They meant to. Why call him in here and pretend!
Strangers would come and live in Abbots Puissants.
Never mind! Some day he would be twenty-one.
‘Darling,’ said Myra, ‘I’m doing it all for you. It would be so sad here without Daddy, wouldn’t it?’
She held out her arms, but Vernon pretended not to notice. He walked out of the room, saying, with difficulty:
‘Thank you, Uncle Sydney, so much, for telling me …’
He went out into the garden and wandered on till he came to the old Abbey. He sat down with his chin in his hands.
‘Mother could!’ he said to himself. ‘If she liked, she could! She wants to go and live in a horrid red brick house with pipes on it like Uncle Sydney’s. She doesn’t like Abbots Puissants – she never has. But she needn’t pretend it’s all for me. That’s not true. She says things that aren’t true. She always has –’
He sat there smouldering with indignation.
‘Vernon – Vernon – I’ve been looking for you everywhere. I couldn’t think what had become of you. What’s the matter?’
It was Joe. He told her. Here was someone who would understand and sympathize. But Joe startled him.
‘Well, why not? Why shouldn’t Aunt Myra go and live in Birmingham if she wants to? I think you’re beastly. Why should she go on living here just so that you should be here in the holidays? It’s her money. Why shouldn’t she spend it on doing as she likes?’
‘But Joe, Abbots Puissants –’
‘Well, what’s Abbots Puissants to Aunt Myra? In her heart of hearts she feels about it just like you feel about Uncle Sydney’s house in Birmingham. Why should she pinch and scrape to live here if she doesn’t want to? If your father had made her happier here, perhaps she would want to – but he didn’t. Mother said so once. I don’t like Aunt Myra terribly – I know she’s good and all that, but I don’t love her – but I can be fair. It’s her money. You can’t get away from that!’
Vernon looked at her. They were antagonists. Each had their point of view and neither could see the other’s. They were both ablaze with indignation.
‘I think women have a rotten time,’ said Joe. ‘And I’m on Aunt Myra’s side.’
‘All right,’ said Vernon, ‘be on her side! I don’t care.’
Joe went away. He stayed there, sitting on the ruined wall of the old Abbey.
For the first time he questioned life … Things weren’t sure. How could you tell what was going to happen?
When he was twenty-one.
Yes, but you couldn’t be sure! You couldn’t be safe!
Look at the time when he was a baby. Nurse, God, Mr Green! How absolutely fixed they had seemed. And now they had all gone.
At least, God was still there, he supposed. But it wasn’t the same God – not the same God at all.
What would have happened to everything by the time he was twenty-one? What, strangest thought of all, would have happened to himself?
He felt terribly alone. Father, Aunt Nina – both dead. Only Uncle Sydney and Mummy – and they weren’t – didn’t – belong. He paused, confused. There was Joe! Joe understood. But Joe was queer about some things.
He clenched his hands. No, everything would be all right.
When he was twenty-one …