TIM LEE, BORN LATE in their marriage to elderly parents, was the son of a don. His mother was a don’s daughter, and all the family’s friends were dons or appendages of dons, and a civilized, witty, intelligent, secure and privileged circle it was, very sure of its aims and of its position in the English picture.
Even when he was a little boy Tim found this life very dreary, and was not interested in the beautiful ancient colleges with their turf and their towers and their bells nor impressed by the wonderful old men, crusted with learning, about whom legends appeared in The Times.
Tim was too easily bored. That was the root of all his troubles and the anxiety he caused his family. He spent a great deal of his time asleep because he could never think what to do with himself when he was awake. He had no natural bent for any career and no ambition, and he was permanently discontented, for no reason that he could give. “Christ! Is that all?” was Tim’s attitude to life. “Not bad while it lasted, but … is that all?”
The only pastime that did not bore him was gambling, and the only company he could endure for ten minutes was that of racing touts, raffish commercials, slavish bartenders, a waiter with a tip for a race, a barber who could tell a dirty story, or chorus boys out of a job. Shady people, living on the extreme edge of honesty and security, whose lack of responsibility fed the lack of it in him, who temporarily lifted the leaden clouds of his boredom. The petty shifts and dangers of their lives excited him, as though he were watching sharp-eyed, stinking little animals picking their way through a jungle. He knew that they were what he called filthy fellows, but he never felt that he must renounce their company: the other sort of company bored him too much. The filthy fellows in their turn put up with him because he was handsome, amusing, unshockable and always had the price of a drink. His taste for low company distressed his family, who could not think where he got it from.
When he met Edie Kempe, daughter of a common old drunken estate agent in the town, at a party given by one of his low-class acquaintances, he fell in love with her more as a human being than as a woman. She carried a double charm for him: she was not a lady and it was impossible to imagine her being bored.
This thin dark pretty girl, neat and gay as a sailor, was extraordinarily popular with both men and women, not so much because she was kind (though she was certainly that) as because she cheered you up, people said, just to look at her. People felt that life, whoever else it got down, would never get Edie. She comforted people whom it had got down like the sight of a pretty picture or the sound of a cheerful tune.
Of course all the men she knew wanted to marry her (tempted by the prospect of having something to comfort them whenever they wanted comforting, which, as with most men, was pretty often) but Edie, in spite of the burden of her old father, did not want to settle down. Yet when Tim asked her to marry him the second time they met, without an instant’s hesitation she said yes. He was twenty-four, and she nineteen, and it was the autumn of 1913.
They got married first and told Tim’s people afterwards. Mr. and Mrs. Lee were naturally hurt by Tim’s secrecy and wished that he had chosen a lady, but they were prepared to make the best of the situation, suggesting that the young people should take a small flat near them and that Tim, who had taken a Second in History, should try for a job in a good preparatory school outside the town, backed by his father’s help.
But Tim refused, and Edie stood by him. They wanted to leave the town, which they both disliked, and go to London. There was a scene in which Tim showed a frighteningly cold ill-temper, and then he got his way. His father gave him shares bringing in two hundred a year and warned him that if the money were not prudently used he would get no more, and the two young people went off.
Tim’s parents were grieved: but they were also a little relieved. They, whose life was a web of responsibilities, had produced a son who was a monster of irresponsibility with a taste for shady company that bewildered them and a passion for games of chance that frightened them. He did not seem like a child of theirs at all. They had always been good friends, sufficient for one another, and now they drew even closer together. Three years after Tim’s marriage they were killed in a climbing accident in Skye, and Tim came into a little more money, and felt some secret relief, in his turn, that a few more roots had snapped. He did not lie to himself about his feelings, and knew that he had never tried to like his parents. They did not speak his language.
In London he did a few months schoolmastering at a bad day school, helping his salary with slices from his capital. He had sold the shares, and he and Edie had good times running around in a cheap car, dancing in cheap places, and going to pits at theatres. They were both happy, Edie because she had a happy nature, and Tim because he was not bored and because Edie was there, and in London there were plenty of places to gamble.
In August, 1914, Tim rushed into the Army, delighted at the prospect of some excitement, and late in 1915, while he was in France, the tiny dark-haired Amy was born—and with her, Edie’s sense of responsibility.
When Tim came home finally in 1916, with a convenient wound that would not let him go back, he found Edie changed. She was still unfussy, gay and casual about everything except Amy and her well-being, but that she took very seriously indeed. She was not so unreasonable as to force Tim to buy a house or stick in a job if he was bored with it, but she took to making rows about his beloved gambling, saying that they needed the money to buy shoes and holidays and good fresh food for Amy.
Tim, who would have found this intolerably tiresome in any other woman, made excuses for Edie. He did not stop gambling, but he gave her as much money as he could possibly scrape up apart from his gambling, and as she made excuses for him, too, they were happy again.
Edie accepted the fact that Tim did not care much for Amy, whom he had never wanted. He found her an amusing little animal for five minutes, but he was not interested in her progress and if she cried he got furious. Edie did not resent this: she could give Amy enough love for both, she thought, and that was what she did.
As the little girl grew older, and the money that Tim earned by selling cars on commission, helping a friend run a night club, or an occasional bit of journalism, grew less and his savage boredom more easily roused, Edie became expert at whisking Amy out of his way and keeping her quietly employed with a book or her paper dolls … (Amy called them “cut-outs”) … and very clever at planning festivals and surprises on pennies. If anyone had asked Edie after ten years of marriage if she loved Tim, she would have answered “Of course,” and meant it. She was a simple woman who took the ups and downs of life for granted and she had not a strain of bitterness in her nature. Tim was the lover of her youth, he had given her Amy whom she passionately loved, and they had stuck to each other without either of them thinking twice about another man or woman, for ten years. Had anyone asked Tim the same question about Edie he would have said, “I suppose so. Yes, I think I must love her,” and as neither of them missed having possessions, friends or security so long as they could be together, with enough to eat, with Amy in good health to satisfy Edie, and Tim with an odd pound for his gambling, theirs may fairly be called a happy marriage.
Amy inherited her mother’s loving nature and her power to get happiness out of little ordinary things, but she was not so happy, and shyer. Her smallness made her afraid of people and of the world that seemed so huge. She suffered from a lack of fats and starch like all the babies born in the war-years, and though she was healthy, she was not robust. Edie fed her carefully, but she never “fleshed up” as Mrs. Beeding called it, and she remained very small and rather plain, with her pale complexion, straight features and large light-brown eyes, and her pigtail of fine dark hair with a ripple in it. Her hair and her pearls of teeth were her only beauties.
Edie was not a solemn woman. She brought Amy up very simply, with as little fuss as she kept house in whatever three-roomed flat Tim chose to dump his family down. Always put things away after you, she told Amy; change your shoes when you come in from a walk, keep your neck wrapped up in cold weather, brush your hair and wash your face and clean your teeth every night, no matter how tired you are. Don’t bolt your food. Be polite to old people. Be loving to little children and animals. Don’t answer back, count ten instead. (Yes, I know I do, but I’m grown up. It’s different for grown-ups.) Don’t walk on the grass except in the summer, when it’s dry. Try and change your underclothing twice a week. (One of the earliest pictures Amy remembered was her small knickers and petticoats, white flannel in winter, white cotton in summer, drying on the clothes-horse in front of the gas stove. Tim would dodge carefully round the horse three times, then snatch it up and carry it to a far corner, setting it down so violently that it quivered and a petticoat fell on the floor.)
Say your prayers every night, Edie told her little daughter. Our Father Which Art in Heaven, is the best one. It says everything you want, you see; asking God for your food, and to forgive you for being naughty, and saying you’ll try to do what He wants you to, and asking Him to save you from all the bad, cruel things in the world. But Edie did not tell Amy what the bad, cruel things were because she herself was not very conscious of them. They were all about her, but though she knew that they were there, they could not frighten her or make her feel that life was dreadful.
But Amy was frightened. When she and Edie went shopping she held on very tightly to her mother’s hand because the people were so big and bumped into her so hard. The sharp smell of fruit, the faint sick smell at the butcher’s, the choking wood and paraffin smell in the ironmonger’s, were all too strong for her and made her long to get outside the shops. The broad cruel wheels of the ’buses frightened her and the blunt snouts of motor-cars.
“There’s nothing to be frightened of, pet.” Her mother’s words went like a comforting song through her childhood. “Mother’s here. It’s all right.”
Edie read her daughter stories about brave men who fought Indians or rescued people from wrecked ships or rode for help through mountain passes where lurked the cruel savages. “Now you must be like that,” Edie would end cheerfully, slapping the book shut. “He wasn’t afraid, was he?”
“Wasn’t he ever afraid, once, Mum? Not one teeny, teeny bit, no bigger than that?” A finger and thumb of doll-like smallness were held out, almost touching, while Amy gazed up earnestly into her mother’s face. “Not once. Not one teeny bit,” very firmly. “Now you be like that too, lovey. God will always take care of you if only you aren’t afraid, and it will all come right in the end. You’ll see.”
So Amy grew up with Captain Scott and the boy riders of the Pony Express for her heroes, and later on Lindbergh and the first airmen to make solo flights across deserts and oceans; and the films she liked best were Westerns. She was not brought up like a boy, for she played no games at school except a little genteel netball and all her private pastimes, such as cutting out paper figures or writing stories, were peaceful and quiet, but her mind, partly because of its natural turn and partly because of Edie’s training, was very unlike the minds of other little girls of her age and had a boy-like directness.
Just after Amy’s eleventh birthday, when they had been at Highbury eight months, Edie was sitting one day in the sitting-room of the Highbury flat, letting down the hem of her daughter’s gym tunic and thinking about her. If only she can get over this nerviness, being afraid of the traffic and all that, and Tim doesn’t chuck up his job with that old scream of a Prize and she can stay on at school, she ought to be all right, bless her. She’s grown a lot this term, but she’s no thinner than she was last, and that’s a good sign … now I suppose this ought to be finished off with prussian binding … I’ll just run round and get a bit. Shan’t fag to change my shoes, even if they do let water. Edie slipped on her coat and hurried out into the rain in her house shoes. She caught a cold that turned to influenza, and in a week she was dead.
The grief that fell upon her husband and daughter was dreadful, and the worst part of it was that they could not comfort each other, because they had never loved each other; and now that Edie, who loved both of them so much, had gone, they were like two strangers, suffering the same misery under the same roof, yet each quite alone.
At first Tim did try to be kinder and more affectionate to Amy, because he knew Edie would have wanted him to, but it was no use. He never had been any good with the kid and she so got on his nerves, creeping about the place looking like a tiny old woman, that he soon gave up and relapsed into his own wretchedness. He had plenty to do keeping himself sober enough to do his day’s work without being sacked, and then getting through the evenings somehow with the help of drinks and gambling and Old Porty, and for the first few months after Edie’s death he saw very little of his daughter. Slowly, very slowly, the ghastly wound made by death began to ache less unbearably. Then boredom and restlessness fell on him like twin demons; for not only had Edie been the only person he loved, but she had made life endurable for him; while she was there he had felt there was some point in the business of living. Now she had gone, there was none. He kept his job because they would have starved if he hadn’t, and Edie wouldn’t have wanted Amy to starve, and to starve would be even more boring than to drag on in the job. But he did not care if he lived or died. Many men say as much: he meant it.
A year after Edie’s death, they were both beginning to get used to it. Amy’s grief no longer offended her father’s sensibility quite so violently, for she had learned to keep her feelings even more to herself than was natural to her as a reserved child; and Tim was discovering how to keep the nicest possible balance between drunkenness and sobriety, being never quite sober yet showing none of the signs of being drunk and thus having the best of both worlds.
She kept out of his way as much as she could. She had to get breakfast for them both, but he was usually out in the evenings and a good deal at week-ends with Old Porty and the rest of the boys, so it was easy for her to avoid him. He gave her thirty shillings a week for housekeeping, and thirty to Mrs. Beeding for the rent, and kept three pounds for himself. Amy did the shopping after she came home from school, and the cooking, and kept the rooms tidy, and once a month Mrs. Beeding scrubbed them over.
It was a regular, quiet, busy life. If only she had not missed her mother so dreadfully and had not been afraid of her father, Amy would have enjoyed it; and she did manage to enjoy school and sometimes going to the cinema, pasting up her pictures and slowly filling exercise books with long exciting stories.
Only there was no one to read them to, now. She went on reading them aloud, pretending that her mother was there listening, because often she got so interested that she forget anyone was supposed to be there, but it always ended in the same way, with her head down on her arms in an agony of tears.
Tim knew that she wrote stories. He never asked her about them and she never spoke of them to him, but he was not so unobservant as to think his daughter a dull, stupid little thing because she was quiet; her school reports on all subjects, from Botany to Needlework, were rather surprisingly good. His attitude to her would have been the same had she been a beautiful, lively, glowing child. He did not like children; they bored him, and it was too much trouble to get to know his own. Poor monkey, was his tenderest thought of her; she doesn’t have much of a life. But she seemed content enough. He knew she fretted for her mother, of course. … Christ, so did he. There was nothing to be done about that. But she had her bits of things, and her school and that little horror Mona Beeding to run around with. It was a pity about her accent, and her thinness, but a man couldn’t be expected to hold down a job nowadays and be a dry-nurse into the bargain, and she would have to take her chance, that was all.