It was a hot June day. From the dining-room, while I ate my lunch, I could look down the long garden and see the perambulator in the shade of the beeches. I liked it to be there, where I could see it and think of Oliver’s blue eyes gazing up into the wonderland of waving leaves, or of the green shade of the trees falling upon his closed eyelids, transparent and blue almost as the eyes beneath them. When I had finished lunch I wheeled the perambulator up to the front door, and Nellie took the child in and fed him at her breast. Then he was placed back in the perambulator, and I asked Nellie: “May I wheel him out this afternoon?”
She looked at me severely with her myopic eyes. “Can I trust you to be careful?”
“You can that.”
“Well, don’t be away for more than an hour or an hour and a half.”
Those were the early weeks when Nellie was the despot of Oliver’s destiny. I begged the boon of her as humbly as a prisoner might crave liberty from his warder.
A moment later I was pushing Oliver along the Wilmslow Road. It was the first time I had had him to myself. The pram was like a little gondola, hung high on big spidery wheels. It was stuffed deep with white bedding, and Oliver’s face lay upon the frilled pillow like a peach on tissue paper. I suppose I was a picture of the typical proud father. I was wearing a brown Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers and a straw hat. Imagine, too, my growing moustache. I was a tall, dark person, strong enough, but thin. I never considered myself handsome, and Nellie, certainly, was no beauty. I looked at Oliver’s bloomy skin, and the round delicacy of his cheeks, and the milky blue of his eyes, and the fine proportions of his hands waving ecstatically at life, and I pondered on the mystery of beauty.
So I went down the Wilmslow Road towards Withington, putting my educational theories into practice. No baby-talk. “Trees!” I exclaimed as we passed beneath the green branches that hung over garden walls; and “Horses!” I said boldly as they trotted by. A drover went along with his cattle shambling in the dust, and I thought with contempt of the unenlightened who would say “Moo!” “Cows, Oliver!” I said; but Oliver’s silken lids had fallen over his eyes and his head drooped sideways on his neck like a heavy flower on its stalk.
I had reached the gates of the large house called the Priory, when coming towards me from the Withington direction I saw Dermot, pushing a pram. He, too, was wearing the conventional “country” attire of the moment. Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers and straw hat. “I was bringing Rory to see you,” he shouted when he was twenty yards away.
“I was bringing Oliver to see you.”
Neither of us had seen the other’s son. The prams came to a halt alongside one another, head to tail, under the trees that hung over the Priory wall. Dermot bent over Oliver’s pram, and I bent over Rory’s. Rory was awake, feet kicking, knuckles fumbling into his mouth, grey eyes looking earnestly up at the leaves above him.
“This beggar’s asleep,” said Dermot. “I wanted them to meet.”
“Put your hand behind his back and lift him up,” I said.
So Dermot heaved Oliver to a sitting position and held him there, and I held up Rory. Oliver opened his eyes, and the two children gazed at one another for a moment, with solemn scrutiny. Then Oliver’s face puckered up in smiles, and Rory, after a doubtful moment, smiled too. They leaned towards one another, each dabbing at the other with unskilful and undirected hands. But soon their hands met and their fingers interlaced. They clutched, smiling broadly, till their dabbings drew them apart.
“Well, what d’you think of that?” said Dermot. “Shaking hands at one month! If these two don’t make good friends no one ever will.”
We wheeled the prams sedately about Didsbury for an hour; then Dermot went his way and I went mine.
*
Nowadays, of course, everybody keeps a snapshot record of his children’s progress. But photography then was a more cumbrous and ceremonial affair. I have to rely on my memory for snapshots, and there is no lack of them. My visual memory is very good.
I am sitting at the window of my study, looking down the long garden. A year has passed since the day when Rory and Oliver met. It is a hot, still day, and an extraordinary sense of contentment is in my heart. On the desk at which I sit is a novel called The Unkindest Cut. Theoretically, I am writing. Actually, I take up the novel and look again and again at the title-page. “By William Essex.” I can’t get over it. I never have got over it: the excitement of seeing my name on a title-page; but that first time it was like an exaltation. The book had arrived that morning, and here let me say at once that it didn’t do much except encourage its author. It was my second novel Grind Slow, Grind Small that gave me money and a reputation which, once earned, has never flagged.
Well, there I sat, dividing my wandering attention between the book, and the scrawled sheets, and the scene in the garden. A white semi-circular seat was under the beeches. Nellie and Sheila sat there, sewing, and our little maid was gathering up the tea-things from the table before them. The children were sprawling and shouting on the lawn: Maeve, who was now a beautiful and graceful child, Eileen, Rory and Oliver.
Maeve had ranged the three of them on cushions, forming a circle about her. There she knelt, scrutinising one face after another. “Eileen is fat,” she chanted. “Eileen is a fat dark baby. Eileen will be a fat dark girl. She will never be as beautiful as Maeve, because Maeve is an Irish queen.”
“Maeve is a conceited little monkey,” Sheila shouted. “You let other people tell you how beautiful you are.”
Maeve went on unperturbed. “Rory is a dark fat baby. He will be a dark ugly boy, but Rory is a good boy. Rory is a better boy than Oliver. Oliver is more beautiful than Maeve. Oliver has blue eyes and curly gold on his head. He is the most beautiful baby I have ever seen. But I do not like Oliver. If I put my finger in Rory’s mouth, Rory sucks it. But if I put my finger in Oliver’s mouth he tries to bite it. But he can’t bite yet because he is only a baby. But he will bite when he can.”
“And I don’t blame him,” said Sheila. “Some people want biting.”
Nellie said nothing, but even at that distance I could see that she was hurt and that her lip trembled.
*
It was a winter night, and I had come home tired. Winter or summer, whenever I went to town I walked there and back. I went up now to the Easifix works and offices only once a week. On the manufacturing and clerical sides the staff was excellent. They could do all that was needed to be done. For a number of years I had put all I knew into building up that business. I had no intention of spending my life on it now that I had obtained the men I wanted and trained them to do things as I wanted them done. But once a week I looked personally at the work of almost everybody employed in the Hulme factory and the Oxford Street offices. I never announced my coming, and no one knew on which day I would come. So everyone was kept up to scratch. I made a whole day’s job of it and always got home in time for dinner.
Though I was fagged with the day’s work, I walked home that night in a mood of excitement and exaltation. Grind Slow, Grind Small had been out for a week. Already it was evident that the book was going to have more than a moderate success. The reviews were enthusiastic. There was not a discordant note anywhere.
Dermot accompanied me as far as Mauldeth Road, but we had nothing to say to one another. I was full of my own thoughts and he, I knew, was pondering the biggest job that had yet come to him. A cotton king who had bought an estate in Hampshire and proposed to retire there had commissioned Dermot to go down and furnish and decorate the place. So we jogged along through the winter night, each busy with his own plans, Dermot pulling occasionally at the foxy-red pointed beard which he had grown during the last year.
We said good-bye at the corner of his street, and I went on alone. It began to snow, and soon I was powdered white in front where I met the drive of the storm. When I arrived at The Beeches, I stood for a moment looking across at the house. The two great trees were heavily mantled with snow, and the white road ran on immaculate as a highway in paradise. There was an extraordinary stillness in which the ear suggested to itself the gentle patter of the falling snowflakes. Lights shone from the windows of my house, friendly as a sudden gleam seen in a fairy-tale wood. I had never before felt such happiness on reaching home, such a sense of a haven awaiting me, and of the strength within myself to maintain a place or quietness and beauty to which those dependent on me might turn. And by that, of course, I meant Oliver.
At this time of night, he was being prepared for bed, and it was my turn to bath him. Since he had been two, Nellie and I had bathed him on alternate nights, and not for a lot would I have given up the privilege of lathering and sluicing that dimpled body. His hair had never yet been cut, and it stood out like a halo of spun gold round his brow.
But that night when I got in he had already disappeared, and the sound of shouting and banging from the bathroom told that the bath was already in progress. I bounced up the stairs two at a time and burst into the steamy room filled with a babel of noises. The tap was running, Nellie was scolding, Oliver was beating the water with his feet, banging the sides of the bath with his fists, and howling at the top of his voice.
“Here, whose turn is it to bath the infant?” I shouted.
Nellie dropped the sponge, turned to me with her most infuriating look of long-suffering patience, and readjusted the pince-nez that had been swinging by their little gold hook from her ear. “He was naughty,” she said. “I told him that if he didn’t behave I’d bath him and put him to bed at once. And he didn’t behave.”
That was the sort of logical syllogism of behaviour that Nellie loved.
“Sometimes children can’t behave,” I said. “It isn’t in them.”
“Then they must learn to have it in them,” she answered.
We stood and glared at one another through the steam of the bathroom, quiet now save for the splashing of the tap. Sensing conflict between his elders, the child fell to silence and gazed with wide-eyed interest.
“It’s my turn to bath him,” I said doggedly. I took off my coat, hung it behind the door, and rolled up my sleeves. Oliver suddenly shouted: “Daddy’s turn. Said it was Daddy’s turn.” He began to beat upon the water with his fists in furious glee.
“He’s glad that you have defeated me,” Nellie said quietly. “I did what I thought was right. Will you put him to bed?” And with that she walked dourly out of the bathroom.
I had never put Oliver to bed before. Soaping and rinsing him was all very well; but after that Nellie took over and performed the mysteries of powdering and clothing him and brushing up the halo of his hair. Well, I wasn’t going to be defeated. I did all that I had so often seen Nellie do, Oliver all the time crooning with delight as though exulting in a male victory, and dabbing me in the face with his fists. At last I got him into his cot alongside our bed, kissed him good-night, and then, when I had washed, went down to dinner.
“Did you say his prayers?” Nellie asked.
“No, I forgot them.”
She went frowning upstairs, and, standing in the little hall, I could hear her through the open bedroom door. “Oliver, say after Mummy: ‘Gentle Jesus’...”
“Oliver not say.”
“Oliver say: ‘Gentle Jesus’...”
“Oliver NOT say. Daddy’s turn. Daddy didn’t say.”
There was a pause, then Nellie said: “Good-night, then.”
“Oliver NOT say goo-night.”
I had slipped into the dining-room before she got down, and I was ashamed to look her in the face. Dinner was a silent meal, and when it was done she set off for her weekly class meeting at the Wesleyan chapel along the road. I pulled aside the curtain of my study window on the first floor and watched her go down the long white garden path through the snow that was still falling. She paused for a moment at the gate and looked back towards the house, as though she would for once give up her precious meeting and turn back to the child from whom she had parted in ill-will. Then she went on, a grey responsible figure, and as I turned towards the hearth in the lovely room that Dermot had made, my heart was riven with pity for the woman whose wandering steps out there were symbolical of her separation from all the things that meant so much to me.
*
I wonder if you will ever understand how I feel about pyjamas? When I was a child I always slept in my shirt. Worn day and night, it had to do duty for a week. Even when I was with Mr. Oliver I continued to sleep in my shirt. It was Dermot who said one night, soon after my arrival in Gibraltar Street: “Why don’t you buy yourself a night-shirt?” I did so; and I wore a night-shirt then until I married. But I bought pyjamas to take with me to Blackpool, and, as that was a honeymoon, they were rather special pyjamas. Whenever I thought of sleeping in my shirt, a shiver of retrospective shame would get hold of me. I became absurdly conscious where night-clothing was concerned. My pyjamas became at first more and more resplendent, then the “froggings” of coloured silk offended me, and I entered the period of plain sumptuosity: rich silken materials, unadorned, with dressing-gowns to match.
A week before Oliver was five years old I went up to London to see my publisher. After lunch I walked alone through the West End shopping streets, looking for something to give Oliver for his birthday. In the window of a child’s outfitters’ shop I saw a suit of pyjamas: plain black silk. There was a little dressing-gown of black silk alongside them, with a broad silk belt that was finished off by a crimson fringe. I bought the outfit and took it back with me to Manchester. Travelling first, with the small parcel in my suit-case on the rack, I thought what fun it would be to see Oliver in that apparel, with the slippers of soft red Morocco leather that, also, I had bought. It would help me to think with more complacency of the small boy sleeping in his day-shirt. It would help me to kill and bury that small boy.
It was a warm May day when Sheila came with Maeve and Eileen and Rory to the party that was to celebrate the two birthdays. The children played together on the lawn for an hour before teatime; and when Sheila and Nellie were preparing the tea-table in the dining-room, I smuggled Oliver upstairs and dressed him in the outfit of which I had said no word to anyone. I washed his face and brushed up his hair. He looked delightful in black and scarlet, tall already for his age and as straight as a young tree. There were times when his beauty startled me, and that afternoon was one of them. His face, with its vivid blue eyes, full red lips, and crown of golden curls, was like the face of a Reynolds angel. His playing about in the garden had heightened his colour, and the joy of his new splendour brightened his eye. He was as pleased as Punch, and as proud as a pasha, strutting about the room, and examining himself in the long mirror, his hands thrust into the dressing-gown pockets.
“Now we’ll show them how lovely you look,” I said, and we went downstairs with his small hand in mine.
They were already at the table. Nellie blinked from behind the teapot, and asked practically: “Where did Oliver get those clothes from? And why is he dressed for bed?”
“Sure his father’s showing him off. Can’t you see that?” Sheila demanded. “Is this his birthday present, Bill?” and when I nodded, she took Oliver on her knee and asked: “And doesn’t he look a fair treat?”
“He’s forgotten his manners,” said Maeve loudly, surprising us all.She was not a bit perturbed by the grown-up interrogation of our stare. Maeve was turning into a self-possessed young woman, as beautiful in her dark way as Oliver was in his.
“Just remember you’re Oliver’s guest, Maeve,” said Sheila. “You shouldn’t be finding fault with your host.”
Oliver put an arm round Sheila’s neck and looked triumphantly at the snubbed Maeve. But Maeve was not easily to be snubbed. “It’s because we’re his guests that I think he’s forgotten his manners,” she said. “He should have shown us before tea where to wash our hands and—and that. Instead of togging himself up like—like... Oh, what is he like? He’s not like a boy. Ugly’s like a boy.” (Ugly was her name for plain, dark Rory.) “He’s just like something that makes me laugh. Ha, ha!”
It was one of Maeve’s remarkable qualities that she could laugh with complete conviction whenever she wanted to, just as a good actress can; and she laughed now, a long loud silvery laugh, pointing derisively at Oliver. She set Eileen off, and Rory, too, and in a moment all three of them had reached that uncontrollable state when they couldn’t have stopped laughing had they wanted to.
Oliver glowered for a moment at the three faces contorted by laughter, his own face slowly reddening with passion. He leapt from Sheila’s lap, tore off the dressing-gown and danced upon it in his red slippers. He pulled off the jacket of his pyjamas and threw that to the ground, too, and had laid hands on the girdle of his trousers, when Nellie picked him up and carried him kicking from the room. I leapt to open the door, and she gave me a bitter look as she went through. “This is your conceit, not the child’s,” she said in a low voice. “Your nonsense will ruin him.”
Nothing would induce Oliver to wear his pyjamas and dressing-gown after that. “Rory laughed,” he said with a scowl. It was the sight of Rory’s puckered-up face of a merry little monkey that had been too much for him. For Rory was beginning to be more important to Oliver than any of us.
*
Miss Bussell’s school was half-way between Dermot’s house and mine. Maeve had been going there for some years, and now Eileen began to go, too. Sheila’s nursemaid would set off in the morning with the three children and a mail-cart. This was for Rory to ride in when he was tired, but it was not often that Rory would admit that he was tired. He was short and dark, sturdy on his legs, with a growth of obstinate thick black hair, and those very dark blue-grey eyes that are smudged into some Irish faces. He was always merry and smiling, but there was a comical pugnacity about his square jaw and pudgy nose. He looked the sort of boy who would grow into a bruiser. Maeve’s name for him had developed into Ugly-Mugly.
The maid left the two girls at Miss Bussell’s, and then brought Rory on to The Beeches. She would take him back in time to collect the girls when school was over, and he would come again in the afternoon.
Oliver was always on tiptoe upon the low garden wall, peering over the iron railings that surmounted it, when Rory was due. He would dance with impatience at delay, and rush out of the gate as soon as his friend appeared. Morning after morning, sitting at my window, I saw the two of them run in from the road, come to a halt, panting, on the lawn, and shout: “Now!” They were like a whippet and a terrier, ready for fun.
They were aware that there was a war on. For weeks they played Britons and Boers, banging at one another with toy pistols from behind the boles of the beeches. Oliver loved to be an Englishman, and for days on end Rory had contentedly been a Boer.
We had reached the stage now, Oliver and I, of talking every night. The ritual was unchanging: the bath, prayers conducted by Nellie, a tale from Hans Andersen read by me, and then: “Let’s have conversations.” Oliver bounded up and down on his bottom in the cot as he propounded the formula. He loved conversations.
“Let’s have conversations about Boers,” he said one night. “What are Boers? Are they men?”
He looked at me with troubled young eyes, half-expecting to hear that they were fabulous monsters such as the fairy-tales told him about. I had always talked to him as gravely as to a grown-up, and I said: “Yes, Oliver, Boers are men just like me and Uncle Dermot. Perhaps braver than me.”
“Why are we fighting Boers?”
“Because we are greedy. They’ve got something that we want to steal from them.”
He continued to regard me with wide eyes, as though inviting me to continue this unexpected line of argument.
“You see,” I said, “the Boers are simple Dutch farmers. They went to live in the country where they are now just because it was a good country for farmers, and we didn’t mind that a bit. Then it was found that the country was full of gold and diamonds, and the greedy English wanted the gold and diamonds for themselves, so they picked a quarrel with the Boers so as to have an excuse to steal their country. And the Boers are brave men, trying to keep their country for themselves.”
Oliver went to sleep murmuring: “The Boers are brave men,” and the next day when the game was begun by Rory, who had for so long been so patiently a Boer, Oliver shouted: “You are English. I am a Boer.”
Stocky little Rory stood suddenly still and defiant in the middle of the lawn. “I am not a damned Englishman,” he declared. “I am an Irishman.”
He glared fiercely at Oliver. They faced one another, grasping their toy pistols in their hot hands. Suddenly Rory fired, exploding the “cap” in the pistol loudly in Oliver’s face. In accordance with the rule that whoever got in his shot first had won, Oliver obediently fell dead. Rory placed a foot on his chest and scowled at him. “Damned Englishmen,” he said.
I concluded that Dermot had already begun the education of Rory.