In Stormont Road, heavy plush curtains were drawn across the windows at the front of Greywell and an old-fashioned black-ribboned laurel wreath hung on the door as though a funeral was about to take place.
Emily Hewetson accepted her daughter’s kiss and let her chafe her hands affectionately as she sat in the still, silent sitting-room where what Otis thought of as a kind of small shrine containing little mementoes of Max Hewetson had been set up on a table. A photogravure of Max in a wicker bassinet, taken with Martin; another of him holding the scroll of his law degree, and a third as an officer holding his cap in the crook of his arm. A medal ribbon, pocket watch, an army cap and swagger-stick, his own silver cigarette case engraved M.C.H., the silver and coral scent bottle which had been his present to Emily last Christmas, and the impressive thistle table decoration he had given to Martin and Emily as a wedding present – paid for on his mother’s account because he was then still a boy.
Otis stood before the arrangement and picked up the photogravure of Max in uniform. ‘Oh Ma, poor Max, are these his remains?’ She heard Emily’s sharp snort of irritation but did not turn. To Otis, none of this said anything at all about her uncle, about Hewey Hewetson. What it said was that a baby had been pushed in a bassinet, a stiff-backed and serious-looking young man had once worn cap and gown, and a stiff-backed and pompous-looking older man had been photographed wearing army uniform.
What would have befitted Otis’s memory of her Uncle Hewey would have been the Tippoo Badminton set and the Bumblepuppy pole he had brought in and set up in the back garden one wonderful summer; the Flexible Flyer toboggan that could swish downhill on the grass of the Heath; the set of nursery-tale magic-lantern slides, or the boxed football game of ‘Kick’ which Ma had wanted to return to the Army and Navy Stores. But even as she thought of these and the many other surprises with which he had been bounding into the house for as long as she could remember – books, boxes of Little Mary wafers and petit-fours, tickets for plays, ideas for pleasant weekend expeditions – she saw that, without Hew’s enthusiasm and sense of fun, those objects too would have lain there as lifeless as the swagger-stick and portraits.
‘How is Pa taking it? Where is he?’
‘He has gone to his office, and he is bearing up as one would expect. This same tragedy is visited upon many households at present. It is the supreme sacrifice for one’s country.’
‘Mother, I wish that you would not talk like that. It is cloying and insincere. You have made no sacrifice: it is Max who is dead.’
Emily Hewetson stiffened. ‘Otis, I have put up with much over these last five years. I was against you going to that college, but your father saw no harm. I was shocked when you said that you were going to take a teaching post. I cannot even begin to tell you how it affected me when your father broke the news that he had agreed to your taking rooms in… in… of all places that part of London. Oh, but he would have it that all young ladies of the New Style were idealists and that they must have their opportunities. I have never held with his liberal way of thinking. And I have been proved right: it has been the ruination of you.’
‘Oh Ma, please don’t talk such silly and over-dramatic nonsense. I am not ruined.’
‘Not ruined? When a daughter describes her own mother as silly?’
‘If you will only think of it, Ma, you will realize that I have never said that you were those things – I said that you talk like that, you say them. You are like too many women, utterances pop out of your mouth without the slightest consideration. The drawn curtains, the wreath and black ribbons, this shrine to Max…’
Scornfully, ‘It’s not a shrine. All these things are tokens of respect because there can be no funeral.’
‘Oh Mother! They are to impress the people whom you have probably invited for sherry after the memorial service.’
‘Is that what you think?’ Suddenly Emily Hewetson’s composed face crumpled. Tears welled in her eyes, hung there glistening and then trickled into the dip of her eye-sockets where they were absorbed by the dabbing of her ylang-ylang scented handkerchief.
‘Do you not know how to be womanly, Otis?’
At one and the same time, Otis wanted both to shake her mother and to comfort her. She did say silly and shallow things because it was expected, but she said them because to do so was in her nurturing and upbringing.
Otis suddenly thought of her maternal grandmother on the occasions when she had been taken to visit on her birthdays. Seated on a chaise-longue surrounded by her dozen children, helpless and cosseted, her life given to making as complicated a toilette as was possible before visiting or receiving other, equally cosseted, queen bees. A baby a year for twelve years and a lifetime of fittings, curling tongs, idle gossip and a husband who was seldom in the presence of his children except to oversee that they fitted the moulds of Empire Builder and Empire Builder’s adornment.
Emily really had never stood a chance of being other than she was.
Otis realized that her own salvation had been a kindly father with liberal views and a carefree uncle who was close to her own age.
The sharp retort – And I have no intention of being womanly – that she had been about to make, disintegrated as she knelt down and put her arms about her mother’s knees. ‘I know that my tongue is too sharp, Ma. Things are out before I realize. I am sorry.’
She looked up to receive her mother’s forgiveness and met Emily’s unguarded gaze. It was snatched away at once, but for that second, Otis saw that her mother’s grief was genuine and deep – much deeper and more affecting than one should expect for a brother-in-law. Otis, rising from her knees, went and sat beside her mother and, putting an arm about her neck, drew her on to her shoulder as though she herself was the mother comforting the child. Amazingly, Emily allowed herself to collapse, and she buried her face in her hands and sobbed silently.
‘Oh, my poor, poor Ma. He…’ She cut off what had almost slipped from her mouth about her mother and her uncle.
With that one glimpse into her mother’s unshuttered mind, suddenly many things came clear. Grains of evidence, assembled from years of childhood observations, behaved like grains of silver nitrate under the action of developing fluid and an image came up.
Otis had been very young, and Max could not have been much out of boyhood, when she, awake but quiet in her nursery cot, had watched him unfasten Emily’s hair and bury his face in it and Emily had twisted around and, holding his ears, had kissed him tenderly. Then at some other time she had seen him in his shirt-tails in Emily’s boudoir, whereupon, seeing Otis watching from the landing that connected to the nursery, her mother had said that Uncle Max had a nasty boil that needed a plaster. Suddenly she remembered all the many other pats and strokes. One Christmas, when they had all gone carol-singing, Otis had watched by the lantern-light Uncle Hewey’s hand slowly sliding upwards under her ma’s bodice. Otis guessed that they felt that they were safe enough flirting in the presence of a young child, and so they were – until the long processing of the photographic plate was completed by Emily’s grief.
Emily guessed that she had given herself away to her clever daughter. What mattered? She had loved the boy, and not in the way she ought. The punishment for illicit love has always been that the lovers have no rights to public grief. She had loved him since he was little more than a schoolboy and she a newly-married young woman. She had always been too old for him, but he absolutely denied it, asking what difference the comparative ages of flesh and bone made when sensitivity was ageless.
He would touch her – she shivered at the thought: Do you feel that, Em? Which is your skin and which is mine? Which is the boy’s and which the woman’s? He was so very youthful and exuberant, yet with such an old head on those young shoulders. There had been times when it had seemed that their positions were reversed, that he was the responsible older one and she in giddy youth.
Their mild affair harmed no one. The one time when they had almost come to the point of burning their boats and turning the romance into an affaire, was when he had asked her to put a dressing on his back, and it had turned out not to be his back, but his thigh. Although he had still worn his underwear, she had seen that he was no longer a youth, but had abundant body hair and was fully masculine. How for a long minute she had had to restrain her own hands from reaching out to touch him. How fearful it had all been. Yet, how exhilarating. She had felt like an elegant courtesan in a French novel.
Otis said, ‘He was the kind of man it would be difficult not to love, Ma. Everybody liked him.’
Without thinking, Emily’s hand went to the locket that rested in the fold of georgette between her breasts.
Otis, guessing rightly that the locket contained not only Martin’s portrait, but that of Max also, was surprised that she did not feel outrage for her pa, nor anger at those moments of deception. What was outrageous was Max’s death.
‘You don’t have to go to the memorial service, Ma. It will be no end of an ordeal.’
The portcullis on their brief intimacy was lowered. ‘I do have to, Otis. That is the difference between us. You do what pleases you, whilst I do my duty.’
At the memorial service held in the little Wren church in Piccadilly that had, according to Emily, been Max’s favourite place to sit and ponder, Otis watched her mother behaving with perfect poise and graciousness to his friends and colleagues. When it came to the small reception at home, Otis did her duty as daughter of the house and then gathered her things and went quietly out to catch a bus, knowing that if Emily lived to be a hundred they would never again come as close as they had come that afternoon. It was the apogee of their friendship – from that point it could only fall away.