1
The Lights Turned green, and Arnold swung the Jaguar swiftly round the corner into Mill Lane.
At once Holmelea Mills came into view fifty yards away down the hill: a solid compact building in good repair, its many windows all unbroken, its white paint gleaming, its tall round chimney well pointed, emitting a neat though not excessive wisp of smoke, A. & J. Barraclough, 1815, inscribed in handsome green letters across the façade.
To see it always gave Arnold a feeling of pride and satisfaction. He’d saved Holmelea Mills; he, A. A. J. Barraclough, alone. True, in the old days, his grandfather’s days, the entry of BARRACLOUGH, AMOS and JANNA, in the Yorkshire Textile Industry directory, had given the names of three mills under their control and stated proudly: 35,000 spindles, 600 looms, dyeing and finishing plant for own use only, whereas now Messrs. Amos & Janna Barraclough neither spun yarn nor wove cloth nor owned three mills. All that was left to them was the original Holmelea property where Arnold’s great-great-grandfather had started the business with his brother in 1815, and the dyeing & finishing plant was very much for others’ use and not their own. But to have retained even so much had meant a tough, hard, protracted struggle, after the debacle of 1931; in fact it had meant pretty well all Arnold’s life to date. The sleeve of his elegant charcoal grey worsted suit, the cuffs of his admirable white silk shirt with the platinum links which Meg had given him last Christmas, his strong square hands skilfully handling the Jaguar’s wheel, all pleased him as he eyed them now, not for themselves but as symbols of his triumph over catastrophe. For catastrophe it certainly had been, that morning in 1931.
To understand how peculiarly awful it had been to be woken from a drunken sleep by his mother in hysterics and told that his father had shot himself during the night and the Barracloughs were ruined, it was necessary to remember not only Arnold’s life until that moment, but the history of Messrs. A. & J. Barraclough for the last hundred years. The original brothers had prospered exceedingly and presently built solid Victorian mansions for themselves and rows of Victorian cottages for their workpeople and sustained the village of Holmelea by their charitable donations and bequests; indeed the Barracloughs had quite simply been the village of Holmelea for the last hundred years. By 1931 they had long been county gentry, with public school educations and admirable accents. One branch of the family always named its heir apparent (so to speak) Amos, the other Janna; this Biblical nomenclature no doubt dated from way back in the 18th century during the Wesleyan Methodist movement, or perhaps even further to the days of the Civil War, when the West Riding towns took the Parliamentarian, Puritanic side in the struggle. But the Barracloughs had long forgotten this and could not now imagine themselves as ever having been other than good Church-and-State Tories. The Janna Barraclough of Arnold’s father’s day was killed in the first World War; Arnold’s father (Gervase Amos) married Janna’s sister and called his son Arnold Amos Janna. It was therefore clear that Arnold would inherit from his parents the whole of the might, majesty and wealth of Messrs. A. & J. Barraclough, and Arnold’s life was arranged on that assumption.
He went to a good public school and enjoyed himself there, being of a strong and handsome physique, broad-shouldered though stocky, spirited, daring and generous, quick-tempered when roused but pleasant and easy enough among his equals when decently treated. He was good at games though not superlative, and had enough native shrewdness to rub along in his lessons without appearing too much of a fool, though he never did any work if he could help it. He had no desire whatever to proceed to a university, and was relieved, though a little surprised, when his father did not press this.
He came back to the West Riding and found Holmelea Mills an awful bore. He supposed he should have to settle down to them some day, and he had an idea that when he did he might want to alter quite a bit of the organisation there. His father, grey-haired with a silky moustache, struck him as being just a trifle too soft and yielding to the heads of the various departments, for Arnold’s liking. But meanwhile, all this fuss about shades and patterns and finish was immensely tedious and—Arnold could not help thinking—rather low. He couldn’t help regretting that his family were engaged in trade. Of course, there it was and one must face it squarely and not pretend that it was otherwise, and the Barracloughs of Holmelea were undoubtedly important people in the West Riding. But it was far more enjoyable, more in his line, to ride, to rush about the country in his sports car, to dance, to drink, to pursue a few hot little girls here and there, than to sit at a desk and cope with tops and noils. It was understood that when Arnold became twenty-one he was to be made a director of the firm, and he perceived that it might probably be the decent thing for him to settle down then. He grimaced when he thought of it; he had never really known what unhappiness was and did not intend to, but as far as he allowed himself to indulge in such feelings, he experienced a repugnance to the prospect.
Accordingly he made up his mind that his twenty-first birthday celebrations should make a riotous finish. The family dinner was dullish but tolerable, the ball which followed went with a bang; then when all the guests had left but a few chosen friends of the male persuasion, Arnold went off with them to a place or two they knew where they could get liquor out of hours. They carried off bottles of whisky and some girls of the less reputable kind who had certainly not been invited to the ball, drove up to a place in Wharfedale where one could swim, and fooled about between girls and river until a young man drunker than the rest fell into the pool and was only rescued with some difficulty. This sobered them a little, though they staggered about for some minutes roaring with laughter at his dripping hair and the back of Arnold’s new dress suit which he had slit pulling the lad out of the river. They tore at the slit, Arnold joining in the joke lightheartedly, until the coat parted, when Arnold tore off the two halves and flung them separately into the river. He now found he was cold, and set off home with some determination. The others followed, but as they neared Ashworth and turned off towards their respective homes, they all drove up to Arnold’s car with much hooting, and insisted on sharing a farewell drink with him. He was thus decidedly muzzy when at last he used his new latchkey on the large door of Holmelea Hall and staggered up the stairs. In his bedroom he managed to tear off his collar but could not cope with the studs of his starched shirt front. The struggle to wrench them out made him violently sick; he vomited all over the carpet, threw himself on his bed still half clothed, filthy and sweating, and fell heavily asleep.
It was thus his mother found him when she ran in next morning. She cried: “Arnold! Arnold!” threw herself on her knees beside her son and beat at him with her fists. Arnold awoke to find his pretty, conventional, rather silly but lovable mother stretched across his body, looking like a harridan, some mad woman off the streets, with her greying hair dishevelled, her mouth a gaping circle of horror and her pretty face blanched and contorted almost out of recognition. A continuous thin scream shrilled out of her throat in an oddly mechanical way, as if she were not responsible for its production.
“Mother!” exclaimed Arnold, struggling to a sitting position.
“Your father’s killed himself, Arnold!” cried Mrs. Barraclough.
“No, no! There must be some mistake,” said Arnold soothingly.
His mother, gazing at him from very widely-opened eyes, fell silent and slightly shook her head. “I’ve seen him,” she whispered.
“But good God! Why?” exclaimed Arnold, clambering out of bed.
“We’re ruined. It’s the slump. It’s been coming on for a long time, but your father didn’t want you to know till after your birthday party,” said Mrs. Barraclough, sitting back on her heels and passing a shaking hand over her eyes.
This succinct statement proved to be the exact truth, to which the interviews of the next few wretched days merely added elaborations. Lawyers, accountants, bank managers, works managers, doctors, police inspectors, made the details clearer, but the main outline never changed: the Barracloughs were on the verge of going bankrupt to the tune of a couple of hundred thousand pounds, and Gervase Barraclough had shot himself because he couldn’t face it.
So now the whole complex towering structure of the Barraclough affairs fell with a crash on Arnold’s shoulders.
He was conscious from the beginning, and the impression continually deepened, that the Barraclough disaster was not viewed with very great sympathy in the West Riding. At the inquest Mrs. Barraclough’s statement, taken down at her bedside (for she collapsed of course) and read in court, of her husband’s recent insomnia under the pressure of his agonising anxieties, gave sufficient excuse for the inclusion in the verdict of the mitigating words while the balance of his mind was disturbed, and enabled Gervase Amos Barraclough to receive Christian burial, and public opinion approved of this—after all, he was a Holmelea Barraclough, it was more decent so. But Gervase Barraclough, with his rather over-gentle manner and his lisp and his silky moustache, had not, it appeared, been very popular with his textile colleagues. They impugned his textile knowledge in the familiar West Riding joke.
“Doesn’t know woollen from worsted and never did.”
“Nay, that’s going a bit far. But he hasn’t run A. & J, Barraclough himself for years—left it all to managers. We all know what that means.”
“Aye, we do. He should have given up earlier, however. Banked when he could still pay twenty shillings in the pound.”
“It’s a difficult decision to take, is yon.”
“It is that,” agreed men whose own positions in that terrible year 1931 were too shaky for them to consider any question concerning bankruptcy without discomfort.
Owing to this general insecurity and anxiety, the heroic gesture of the birthday ball was sourly received by the Holmelea creditors, who were deprived by it of a few hundreds of pounds which might have gone towards paying the Holmelea debts. On the other hand, the story of the “drunken orgy” of Arnold and his cronies on the very night of his father’s suicide spread rapidly through the West Riding, and excited a natural resentment against Arnold on his father’s behalf.
“Young wastrel,” was the general comment. “His father didn’t get much comfort from him.”
But this did not improve the general view of the Barraclough disaster. The West Riding contrived to dislike both Arnold and his father by saying that the whole Barraclough family was in decay. Burned itself out. Exhausted.
“They’ve had more than their three generations and it’s time they went.”
“The industry’s better off with out them, I say.”
“That’s right.”
Arnold was therefore somewhat chillingly handled. The manner of the family physician, Dr. Avery, when he offered the young man remedies for his aching head revealed that he knew and despised its origin only too well. The bank manager, to whom the Barraclough crash was a disaster for which he would pay dearly to his head office, remarked with a surface politeness which did not conceal his real contempt:
“I believe you knew nothing of all this?”
The department heads and works managers and foremen who attempted to explain to Arnold the complicated economic blizzard which had blown down A. & J. Barraclough broke off in the middle and concluded irritably:
“Well—you wouldn’t understand, Mr. Arnold.”
Wretched enough for any young man, to a fortune’s favourite such as Arnold had been this treatment was so utterly foreign to his experience that he simply did not know how to behave under it.
Worst of all was the funeral. The workpeople of Messrs. A. & J. Barraclough lined the streets and crowded the church. Arnold’s mother, though she seemed barely conscious and hardly able to move, insisted on being present. Arnold had almost to carry her up the church aisle, and down again when the service was over; there was a moment when her head seemed to loll towards his shoulder. This would have been bad enough before a sympathetic audience, but Arnold felt, in all the eyes so avidly fixed upon him, a terrible anxiety, an angry reproach—was not the whole livelihood of Holmelea village being buried, queried these eyes, in Gervase Barraclough’s coffin? In this atmosphere of barely suppressed hostility, of agonised suspense, Mrs. Barraclough dragging heavily on Arnold’s arm, the cortège (as they say) stumbled through the long grass to the Barraclough family vault and arranged itself round the open grave. It was here that the incident occurred which was to shape Arnold Barraclough’s life.
During the last few tragic days Arnold had been vaguely conscious of a soothing presence about his mother. A girl about his own age, with large quiet brown eyes, well-marked fair eyebrows and thick straight fair hair, she spoke very rarely; when she did so her voice was soft, quiet and slow. His mother clung to her and seemed to find her few words comforting. It became apparent to Arnold that Dr. Avery was not too pleased by the girl’s presence and made one or two attempts to secure a trained nurse for Mrs. Barraclough, which however came to nothing; it seemed the girl was the doctor’s daughter Margaret, who in his view was far too young for such a task and had nothing to do with the ill-fated Barracloughs anyway. Of course, remembered Arnold casually, he knew Meg; she was on the fringe of his circle of friends, had been present at the birthday ball; he had danced with her occasionally in the last couple of years, played tennis with her once or twice. But though she was well thought of by those who knew her well, she was not, he seemed to remember, beautiful enough or elegant enough or witty enough, did not drink enough or racket about enough, in a word did not glitter enough, to be in Arnold’s intimate group. She was just a nice ordinary girl who wore ordinary clothes, managed her father’s household—he was a widower and there were younger children—with quiet ordinary competence, and would doubtless presently marry some dull ordinary man. Meanwhile Arnold was grateful for her presence at the Hall, and it was a great relief now when she quietly stepped up and took Mrs. Barraclough’s other arm. Thus they stood at the graveside with Mrs. Barraclough drooping between them, and the Holmelea vicar began pronouncing the solemn sentences of committal.
The Barraclough vault was near the churchyard wall, and the wall was thickly lined with Holmelea villagers, who indeed filled all the lane beyond, silent and watchful.
“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed,” said the vicar.
A voice from the crowd rang out:
“He were a flipping coward!”
“Shame!” cried other voices immediately, while others again cried: “Nay, he’s right!” A rippling movement was set up in the crowd, as people turned about to see where the various voices came from. But the vicar, professionally accustomed to public crises, went on smoothly with the burial service, and after a moment the crowd subsided again into the decorum it thought proper to a funeral.
The blood rushed into Arnold’s face. Between shame, sorrow and anger he simply didn’t know what to do, and had the greatest difficulty in restraining himself from rushing into the crowd and striking out right and left at those hostile faces. He raised his head to glare defiantly at them, and met Meg’s eyes. They were great, glowing eyes, he found, which were fixed upon him in a passion of feeling.
Arnold Barraclough was not usually a particularly sensitive or perceptive person, but his present great trouble had stripped away from him many layers of protective conceit and left him vulnerable, open to impressions. He looked into Meg’s eyes and at once knew all about her. She loved Arnold, she had long loved him, she would love him for always; she had come to Holmelea Hall to help Mrs. Barraclough because Mrs. Barraclough was Arnold’s mother. She agreed with the voices which condemned Arnold’s father as a coward, she desired with all her heart and soul that Arnold should not show himself such a coward, she had faith in him that he would not do so. Everything in his situation was all at once perfectly clear to Arnold Barraclough, and he knew exactly what he had to do. The scarlet cleared from his face and he held his head up and stood straight and still till the service ended, and then put his arm about his mother’s waist and held her firmly and conveyed her to the waiting car without any real difficulty. His face now looked pale, grave and stern. The crowd probably did not formulate to itself the idea that the lad had grown into a man in the last few minutes at his father’s grave, but it felt differently towards him and cast down its eyes with decent propriety as he passed.
Back at the Hall, there was a bustle of luncheon preparations, for suicide and bankruptcy notwithstanding, distant relatives had to be entertained. Mrs. Barraclough was entrusted to sympathetic aunts and cousins. Dr. Avery rather sharply declined to stay for the meal.
“We will go now, Meg,” he said, frowning.
“Yes, father,” said Meg in her slow equable tones.
“I’ll fetch the car. Wait here.”
“Yes.”
Luckily the doctor’s modest car was entangled in a group of others at the side of the house.
“Meg,” said Arnold.
He threw open the door of a small breakfast room. The wreaths had been received and listed there that morning, and crushed leaves and dropped petals and pieces of florists’ wire lay about the floor. Meg passed silently in and turned towards him.
“Meg,” said Arnold again.
The next moment, in the midst of all these wretched and sordid circumstances, with Arnold disgraced, ruined and despised, they were in each other’s arms, gripping each other fiercely, passionately, with all their strength, as if they wished to crush each other’s bones. They kissed and kissed again. It was not in the least like the other kisses Arnold had light-heartedly enjoyed, nor did he wish it to be so. It was entirely different; it was Meg; it was his whole life.
Dr. Avery could now be heard in the hall, enquiring rather crossly for his daughter. Meg withdrew quietly from Arnold’s embrace. She smiled at him. Without a word they parted. Henceforward Arnold Barraclough’s life ran on clearly determined lines.
His first task was to reduce the affairs of Messrs. A. & J. Barraclough to something like order by selling off everything he could sell and discharging the firm’s debts. This was not easy. The year being 1931 and the West Riding in the depths of one of the severest depressions it had ever known, textile mills and textile machinery were drugs on the market. The considerable Barraclough properties began to melt away for the price of a song. The whole lot would have gone if Arnold had not developed an immovable obstinacy about Holmelea. Whether it was because his ancestors had founded the firm there, or because he lived there, or because Meg lived there, or because of those hostile faces, those contemptuous cries, at his father’s funeral, Arnold could hardly say: but he dug in his toes about Holmelea Mills and stuck to them through thick and thin. He sold the other two mills, he mortgaged the Hall, he threw in all his father’s outside investments, his mother’s settlement, everything he could lay hands on; he argued with creditors, he shouted at accountants, he was rude to bank managers. He also gave up drinking and sold his sports car. In a word, he saved Holmelea Mills out of the Barraclough debacle, and eventually Holmelea Hall as well.
The next item on his programme was to marry Meg, and this proved not as easy as could have been desired, for Dr. Avery disliked the idea heartily. Not only was the doctor deeply devoted to his daughter and not at all eager to part from her, but he regarded Arnold as a callous, dissipated, spoiled young playboy, thoroughly unreliable and not fit to be trusted with any woman’s happiness. Accordingly he used Arnold’s deplorable financial situation as a lever to keep the pair apart. Gradually, however, Meg’s calm, quiet certainty wore him down, and as Arnold’s new steadiness confirmed itself the doctor began to like him better, though never regarding him as the ideal husband for his beloved daughter. But at last Arnold and Meg married.
It was not so much a question of mere happiness with them as of being whole together where they were incomplete, lacking each other, before. Then there was Meg’s miscarriage. But she recovered well and bore Arnold a son, Gervase Amos Janna, a delightful healthy fair-haired boy. Then there was the war—but Arnold survived it. Then there was the peace and the Welfare State—but Arnold survived those too. Mrs. Barraclough and Dr. Avery presently died off, after being carefully and affectionately tended throughout by Meg. So here was Arnold Amos Janna Barraclough in the summer of 1957, arriving at his solid, reputable, well-equipped mill, without a debt in the world, perfectly happy in his marriage, and except for the inevitable chances and changes of this mortal life, one would think no longer seriously vulnerable at all.
“Here we are,” said Arnold to the guest beside him.
But on the contrary, reflected Arnold grimly, twisting the wheel to take the Jaguar neatly into the mill yard, A. A. J. Barraclough is very vulnerable indeed. He is vulnerable through his affections. He is vulnerable through the third passenger in the car, the handsome lad in the back seat, Jerry, otherwise Gervase Amos Janna Barraclough, his seventeen-year-old son.
It had been a mistake, perhaps, to call him Gervase. Perhaps it was a calm defiance of public opinion, to call the boy after his unfortunate grandfather? Or perhaps a desire to retrieve, to justify, to ennoble the name? It was Meg’s doing; Arnold had been away in the Army when the boy was born. Meg was always quiet and reserved, not given (perhaps not able) to express her feelings much in words, and she had not expatiated on her reasons for naming the boy so, to her husband. But Arnold relied always on the essential Tightness of Meg’s feelings; he had relied on them on the day of his father’s funeral and every day afterwards, and had never found cause to think his trust mistaken. Besides, the boy knew nothing of his grandfather; it was absurd, it was mere superstition, to imagine that the mere giving of a name could influence a character or a destiny. All the same, Arnold rather wished that his son was not called Gervase.
As a child Jerry—for this was the suitable, less high-flown, modern version of his name—had been everything a man could wish for a son: fair and healthy and merry, with plenty of friends always about him; equable in disposition, he betrayed none of the more disagreeable faults one had to watch for in little boys, for he was neither a bully nor a coward, did not cheat or lie, showed no excessive greed, could win without jubilation and lose without resentment. That the boy had never displayed any special brilliance in lessons did not worry Arnold. His own performances at school had been mediocre; of course he hadn’t tried very hard, but he knew quite well that he couldn’t have done much better if he had tried. Meg on the other hand had tried quite hard, but had not been brilliant either. They were ordinary people, with no special claims to intelligence but shrewd enough to hold their own; all they asked of their son was similar common sense and decent behaviour. Arnold therefore made no grumble when Jerry’s end of term reports, whether at the little private day school, or the “prep” and public school whose bills Arnold winced at but paid manfully, showed only a moderate level of attainment. He was a little surprised perhaps that Jerry seemed rather worse at mathematics and science than at literature and history, but there was not enough difference in the marks Jerry gained in any of these subjects to excite comment. The boy was not good at football, and this was indeed something of a disappointment to Arnold, who had been a scrum half of some fierceness in his day; but on the other hand Jerry wielded a graceful bat and played very successfully for his school at a surprisingly early age. At seventeen he was a quiet, gentlemanly lad, with a pleasant young face, fair smooth hair and serious grey eyes; he was devoted to his mother (which was very proper), took Holmelea and his position therein for granted (knowing nothing of his father’s struggles and his grandfather’s defeat), showed a little carelessness about money but nothing to speak of, and altogether was a highly satisfactory and much beloved son. Arnold did not know him very well nowadays, of course; Jerry had been away at school so much these last years, and in any case had a rather reserved disposition, like his mother, so that it was rather difficult to tell what he was thinking. But he was clearly a thoroughly good lad, whom Arnold looked forward to introducing with pride into Holmelea Mills when he left school.
And then suddenly everything changed. It changed in the Easter holidays of this year, after Jerry had been away to stay with a friend in London. The boy’s reserve seemed to have grown upon him unduly; he appeared positively morose, strolled about by himself with his head bent, kicking stones, for hours on end, spent days alone out on the moors, and so contrived engagements and excuses that, as Arnold realised when it was too late, he never once set foot in the mill. Even so, Arnold had not attached much importance to all this. Lads had their private disappointments and worries, just as men had, one should not intrude, one should let them live their own lives. Jerry’s moodiness would pass.
But it had not passed, and presently its cause had been made clear. On the last day of Jerry’s Easter holidays, the day before he was to return to school for his last term, Meg rushed out of the house to meet her husband the moment the car reached the top of the Hall drive at the end of the afternoon, and drew him through the open French windows into a small room known as the library—not that anyone ever read in it. Her eyes were wide with distress.
“What’s wrong, love?” said Arnold, kissing her.
“Arnold, I’m afraid this is going to be a great disappointment to you,” said Meg, her hands against his breast. “It’s Jerry. He asked me to tell you. He says he doesn’t want to go into the mill.”
It was certainly a blow. For a moment Arnold’s long hard struggle seemed a useless waste of time. His world seemed to crumble beneath his feet. Yes, for a moment he certainly felt daunted. He sat down heavily. Meg sat down beside him and took his hand.
“But why didn’t Jerry tell me himself?” said Arnold at length, perplexed.
“I think he’s a little afraid of you, darling,” said Meg.
“Afraid of me?” exclaimed Arnold, astounded. “What on earth for? Has he been getting himself into a scrape of some kind?”
“No. He’s just a little afraid of you. You can be rather fierce at times, you know, darling,” said Meg with a smile.
“Can I?” wondered Arnold.
He considered himself for a moment. Possibly his long years of struggle had in fact made him a trifle tough. But that his son, Meg’s son, should be so afraid of him as not to venture to tell him his ambitions, wounded him deeply. It was so unnecessary too. He voiced his views.
“He’d no need to worry,” he said, a trifle drily. “God knows I don’t want to force anybody into textiles if they don’t want to go. I’ve had too much trouble in them myself. I didn’t particularly want to go into them as a lad, so I could hardly blame Jerry for feeling the same. Besides, it may be better for the boy not to have all his eggs in one basket. He can earn an income outside Holmelea, and still draw the interest from his Holmelea shares.”
“Holmelea shares?” said Meg, wondering.
“After I’m dead, I mean,” said Arnold irritably.
“You’re so good, Arnold,” said Meg.
As always during the last twenty-six years, Arnold felt soothed, strengthened, supported, by Meg’s love.
“Well, what does Jerry want to do, then?” he said in a cheerful, sensible tone. “Some profession? Medicine, like your father?”
He gave a mental grimace as he contemplated the further long years of fee-paying which in that case lay ahead, but did not blench.
“No. Oh, no,” said Meg.
“Law, then?”
Like most business men, Arnold detested the legal profession as an establishment devised on purpose to prevent business men from doing sensible things, but he admitted that one had to employ lawyers in order to keep out of trouble from silly regulations, and lawyers always seemed to flourish.
“No.” Meg hesitated. “It seems to be something to do with literature and the arts,” she said at length.
“Literature and the arts!” exclaimed Arnold in capital letters. “But has Jerry shown any talent for that sort of thing?”
Meg said nothing.
“But, Meg, he hasn’t. You know he hasn’t,” said Arnold, now really troubled. “I mean to say—look at his reports! That fellow what’s-his-name, that play-writer, you know, was at school with me and you could see at once that he was out of the ordinary. Always at the top in English, and writing poems for the school magazine, and so on. A perfect fool in everything else, of course. Jerry hasn’t done anything of that kind! Or has he?” he added, suddenly remembering how little he really knew about his son.
Meg shook her head. Slowly and reluctantly, with head averted, she brought out that there was some young man whom Jerry had met in London while staying with his school friend there, who was engaged in doing everything that Jerry wanted to do, and Jerry wanted to go off to London with him and do it too.
“But good lord!” exclaimed Arnold, aghast. “What is it he wants to do?”
“I don’t know,” said Meg.
She turned towards her husband, and Arnold saw that tears stood in her eyes and her lips were trembling. Arnold had seen tears in his wife’s eyes on only one occasion before in their life, namely when they lost their first hope of a child some twenty years ago. (One of the good things about his wife, Arnold had often reflected, was that she was not given to frequent tears—unlike his mother.) He was thus very much upset to see Meg’s tears now, and put his arm round her protectively. His wife buried her face in his shoulder and quietly, without any fuss, in her own reserved and undemanding manner, wept as though her heart would break.
“Jerry says he feels at ease with this man Chillie—Chillie’s the only person in the world he feels at ease with. Why doesn’t he feel at ease with us any more, Arnold? We all love each other.”
“Parents and children,” said Arnold gruffly. “When the children grow up they have to leave the nest, you know. Jerry’ll come round to us again when he gets a bit older.”
“It’s hard, Arnold,” said Meg.
“Yes, it’s hard,” agreed Arnold.
He felt sore all over. But the boy had a right to choose his own career. Men should do the work they wanted and marry the girls they wanted and pay the necessary prices for their choice, in Arnold’s opinion.
“Don’t worry, Meg. We’ll sort it out somehow. It’s a disappointment, but it’s not the end of the world. I’ll talk to Jerry,” he said staunchly. “If he really wants that kind of career, he’ll have to go to a university. I’m ready to start the boy off properly in any profession he chooses.”
Meg gave him one of those looks of trust and love on which his whole life had been founded, and he felt that this difficulty too he could conquer for her sake, as he had conquered all the rest.
The interview with his son, however, which he undertook that same evening, did not go off quite as well as he had hoped. Jerry stated with something like horror in his tone that he did not wish to go to a university.
“Very well, don’t,” said Arnold. “But what do you want, Jerry? I only want to help you do what you want, you know.”
Jerry, frowning and hanging his head, muttered that he wanted to go to London and live with Chillie.
“But what does this Charlie do?” persisted Arnold.
At this Jerry threw up his head and announced sharply, his fair face flushed:
“It’s not Charlie. His name is John. Chillie is a nickname.”
“Oh,” said Arnold. His tone was dry; with his practical, realistic view of life he tended to dislike nicknames, and why a man should abandon a decent solid name like John for a sloppy address like Chillie passed his comprehension. However, it was clear that Jerry thought Chillie extremely chic. Arnold experienced a pang of tenderness for his son’s youth.
“What does—he—do for a living?” pursued Arnold, not quite able all the same to utter the appellation.
“He writes and paints. He has a small private income, of course,” muttered Jerry, hanging his head again.
It was at this moment that Arnold began to wish his son was not called Gervase. The boy’s reserve, which Arnold had hitherto regarded as an inheritance from Meg, the mistrust of himself which he had been ready to regard as his own fault, now struck him as the kind of weak inability to face up to life he had known in his own father, which had contributed so greatly to the Holmelea misfortunes. Jerry’s obvious predilection for an unearned private income also struck him unpleasantly as resembling the conduct of the elder Gervase, who had maintained the standards of Barraclough gentility far longer than honesty dictated.
“Well, Jerry, I’m afraid I can’t provide you with a private, that is an unearned, income,” he said gravely. “You’ll have to work for your living.”
“Oh, of course. I thought perhaps just for a year or two—until I found my feet—it wouldn’t cost as much as going to Oxford,” said Jerry.
“Found your feet at what?”
“And perhaps to travel a little,” said Jerry.
Arnold sighed. He jingled the coins in his pocket thoughtfully.
“Look,” he said: “How would it be, Jerry, if you asked this friend of yours to come and stay at Holmelea?”
The sudden flash of happiness in his son’s face hurt Arnold more than anything in the last twenty years. How unhappy the boy must be at home, to take such joy in the anticipated visit of a stranger!
“Well, then, ask him for your long half-term weekend in June. Your mother and I only want your happiness, Jerry.”
“I know, dad.”
“We shan’t stand in your light.”
And so, last Friday afternoon Arnold came home from the mill to find that the guest had arrived. (Jerry having risen at the crack of dawn had contrived to reach home for lunch.) A shabby and bulging suitcase stood in the hall, and sounds of animated conversation came from the drawing-room. Arnold, feeling nervous, settled his tie and went in.
Meg, Jerry and Chillie were still at tea. Meg was pouring into one of the best Rockingham cups, Jerry stood attentively at her side waiting to hand it to his friend, Chillie with his arm stretched across the back of Jerry’s chair was gazing up at the tall fair boy.
Arnold was instantly and irrevocably convinced that the man Chillie was a sexual pervert. He was dark, bearded and though somewhat slovenly in dress not ill-looking, but Arnold had not spent a rather dissipated youth and several years in the army for nothing; he knew the signs.
He closed the door behind him; at the noise Chillie looked up and their eyes met, and Arnold knew that Chillie knew he knew. The whole affair was perfectly clear. In Chillie’s eyes Jerry was not only handsome but rich, and he intended to live for a few years, while the infatuation lasted, on an allowance provided by Jerry’s father. Arnold had the disgust for sexual abnormality often felt by strongly virile men of instinctive, unthinking disposition, and such a rage possessed him at the thought that Meg’s son should be mixed up with this dirty fellow that he could hardly contain himself; it was all he could do not to rush at Chillie and batter him with his fists.
“Well,” said Arnold. “Our guest has arrived, I see.”
Introductions were effected. Arnold sat down and declined tea. His manner was so grim that it was impossible not to notice it. Meg glanced at him beseechingly, Jerry with astonishment. The boy’s young face showed that he was completely unaware of the true nature of Chillie’s feeling for him. Arnold saw this with a thankfulness which left him weak. Arnold fixed his gaze on Chillie and kept it there. After a moment or two of this the man shifted about in discomfort, and at last said lightly:
“I’m afraid I’m not quite the friend you expected for Gervase, Mr. Barraclough?”
His tone, smooth, liquid, assured, was yet impertinent.
“He thinks he’s got such a tight hold on Jerry he needn’t trouble to be polite to me,” thought Arnold. Aloud he said roughly: “Well, I hadn’t expected a beard.”
“Arnold, dear!” Meg rebuked him.
Jerry coloured and said quickly:
“In Yorkshire that sort of personal remark is considered friendly and forthright, Chillie.”
He gave his father an angry glance. A satisfied smile gleamed for a moment on Chillie’s lips. For a moment Arnold was at a loss to interpret this sign of triumph, then he understood. “It’s his game to set Jerry against his parents,” he thought. “Once he gets the boy to London with him, he knows we shan’t let him starve.” Clearly it was Arnold’s line to combat this by being as pleasant, friendly and agreeable as possible. He smiled and said in a cheerful, kindly tone:
“Sorry if I was a trifle heavy-handed. It’s as Jerry says, in Yorkshire we pride ourselves overmuch on speaking our mind. Did you point out the mill to your friend as you passed, Jerry?”
Jerry frowned a little and said shortly: “Yes.”
“It wasn’t as large as you had expected, perhaps?” said Arnold mildly, turning to Chillie.
He saw at once, by a disagreeable flash in the man’s eyes, that he had hit the mark. Jerry’s calm assumption that the world was the oyster of any Barraclough of Holmelea had deceived Chillie into crediting the Barracloughs with a higher status than they now possessed. Chillie had let his disillusion show a trifle at the sight of the mill, and Jerry had seen it and been a trifle vexed. Arnold was pleased. The battle was joined. It was the greatest battle of his life, more important even than that earlier battle he had fought to save the Barraclough honour, and he meant to win. The great thing was to keep Jerry’s affection and trust, so that when the revelation about Chillie was finally made to him by his father, he would believe it.
“I’m afraid I know absolutely nothing about dark satanic mills, textile or otherwise,” said Chillie crossly.
“Well, we can soon cure that. If you wish, of course. Bring your friend down to the mill any time you like, Jerry. But only if it wouldn’t bore him. Each man to his trade, you know.”
“My father knows a great deal about cloth,” offered Jerry.
“Indeed?” said Chillie with an air of ineffable boredom.
“As much as you know about pictures, I dare say,” said Arnold cheerfully. “Or is it books?”
Chillie coloured and seemed a little uncomfortable. Suddenly he took a corner of his loose jacket between his fingers and offered it to Arnold.
“Is this good cloth, Mr. Barraclough?”
He meant to provoke Jerry’s father into a jeering “Yorkshire” answer which would shame Jerry. Arnold, who of course had perceived the poor quality of the stuff the moment he entered the room, bent forward and felt the jacket with a serious air.
“I’m afraid not,” he said pleasantly. “We could fit you up with something better than that at Holmelea, if you cared for it. You must come down some morning and we’ll see what we can find.”
“But wouldn’t that be damaged cloth, Arnold?” said Meg. “Sent back to you by the manufacturers?”
“A damaged piece isn’t damaged in every yard,” explained Arnold. “We could find a suit length of good stuff, I’m sure.”
“Is trade unionism strong in your mill, Mr. Barraclough?” demanded Chillie abruptly.
“Of course,” said Arnold impatiently. “I don’t employ any non-union labour. Who does, these days?”
The battle continued through the weekend. Chillie had a melodious voice, a fluent ease of speech, an admirable diction, and he gave these weapons the fullest possible play. His aim throughout was to make Arnold appear a mercenary, vulgar, greedy, bourgeois capitalist, an exploiter of his employees, a reactionary, a cumberer of the earth, a stupid ignoramus on all artistic matters; altogether unworthy, therefore, of his son’s love.
Arnold did not find these insinuations quite as difficult to counter as Chillie had evidently expected. He was not especially enamoured of the capitalist system, merely preferring it to any of the alternatives which had yet been suggested, and he was quite ready to discuss these alternatives in an unheated style. In matters of art he yielded gracefully to Chillie’s superior knowledge, contriving however to put a few questions of a probing kind which revealed to Arnold and Meg, if not perhaps as yet to Jerry, that Chillie had never done a hand’s turn of real work in any art whatever, in his life. To the anxious enquiries by Meg, in the privacy of their bedroom, as to what Arnold thought of Chillie, Arnold replied briefly that he was a bad lot, and must be prevented at all costs from carrying off Jerry.
“We’ll send the boy to a university,” said Arnold. “At a university he’ll meet men who really know what’s what in these matters, and then he’ll see what a phony poser this chap Chillie is.”
Arnold did not, however, as yet tell his wife the whole truth about Chillie and the nature of his designs on their son. The knowledge would upset Meg terribly, it would break her innocent heart in pieces—he felt he must save her from it if he possibly could. Besides, it would be so embarrassing for Jerry. Far better that the matter should remain quietly private between his son and himself. At the bottom of his heart Arnold knew that he was keeping Meg in reserve. If all else failed, he would have to tell her; her anguished outburst of grief would convince Jerry if nothing else could. But sons were apt to resent the frustration of their wishes by a parent’s grief. No, he would try not to tell Meg. He would be perfectly polite and considerate to Chillie as long as he was in the house, and the moment he was gone he would tell Jerry his suspicions. But the boy’s trust and affection must be retained, repeated Arnold to himself, so that Jerry would believe him.
Arnold had a great desire to take Jerry and Chillie down to Holmelea Mills together, so that they might see in each other’s company that the place was not in the least dark or satanic, but on the contrary extremely well-lighted and comfortable. The windows were large, the power mainly electric, the lighting fluorescent; the machines gleamed with speed and newness—he was always on the look-out for new machines, had bought another only yesterday; pieces of cloth were shot down slippery slides or wheeled about in neat trolley-carts, no man ever having to carry the weight of one on his shoulder. In fact, Arnold set such store on this visit to the mill that he made up his mind to insist on it if necessary. But no insistence was necessary; Chillie’s greed supplied the impetus. Arnold observed with sardonic amusement that Chillie wanted very much to come down to the mill and be fitted up with a suit length, while Jerry was ashamed of his father’s ham-handed generosity, as he regarded it, and took Chillie for walks on the moors instead. It was Chillie’s greed, too, which prevented any show-down taking place about Jerry’s project of living with Chillie in London. The boy often approached the subject but Chillie as often headed him off. Chillie had had second thoughts, Arnold surmised, and wanted the cloth and the comfortable weekend’s accommodation before he had to quarrel with his hosts.
Tuesday morning, the last of Chillie’s stay, was thus reached without the mill visit having been paid, and Arnold was afraid that he would be obliged to exert pressure to assure it, when at the breakfast table Chillie suddenly said in a petulant tone:
“I must see the Barraclough mills before I go.”
“There’s scarcely time before your train,” began Jerry, but Arnold interrupted.
“Come down with me,” he said. “I’m always there by nine. Bring your case—you can go on afterwards to Ashworth station. I’ll drive you. I have to call on some customers in that direction, some time today.”
“We needn’t trouble you, Mr. Barraclough. We can go by bus,” said Chillie, intending as usual to show his high-minded contempt for every luxury.
“Well, we can settle that later,” said Arnold impatiently. “I’ve picked out a few lengths, Jerry, for your friend to see.” (He could not bring himself to use the man’s absurd nickname, and Chillie’s real surname escaped his recollection.) He rose from the table, saying: “Get the car out, Jerry. Come along.”
So now the three of them were turning into the yard of Holmelea Mills.
“Here we are,” said Arnold again to Chillie, who sat beside him.
2
The moment Arnold entered Holmelea Mills he felt happy and at ease. This was his own stamping-ground; here he was appreciated and needed. He had hardly entered his private office—bright and sunny, with large windows overlooking the valley, and admirable modern appointments—before he was in the thick of business; his secretary presented him with a mass of opened letters, the telephone rang, the works manager came in, queries of every kind seemed to pour in upon Arnold, who answered them with ease and decision. During these first minutes Jerry and Chillie stood about the office in a rather hangdog style, very much in the way of the various people who hurried in and out and clearly feeling unwanted and insignificant. Between telephone calls, while he changed into his mill coat, Arnold urged them to sit down; Chillie took a chair and Jerry balanced himself on the end of his father’s desk, his fair head drooping disconsolately.
“Now!” said Arnold at length briskly: “We’ll go up and see what we can find in the way of a suit-length.”
He led the way to the lift. It was in motion, descending; it drew up and out stepped young Clifford from the cropping department.
“I was coming to fetch you, Mr. Barraclough,” said he in a serious tone. “Ernest says, could you come up to the cropping-room for a minute?”
“Something wrong, Cliff?” said Arnold.
Clifford coloured and muttered.
The four men crowded into the lift and Arnold pressed the button for the floor which held the cropping department. The lift drew up; Arnold pushed back the gates and strode ahead.
He saw at once that something was seriously wrong.
It was not only that Ernest Armley, his foreman cropper, stood by with a face as long as a grave-digger’s. Croppers as a category were often moody and difficult, and Arnold for one did not blame them. Their machines ran fast, and new ones ran faster every year. The process of shearing the surface of cloth to make it smooth always presented a difficult problem requiring skilled judgment; crop too little and the surface remained rough; crop too close and the fabric’s coherence was shorn away. A cropping-machine must be watched every minute of the eight-hour day; the cropper couldn’t ever relax and discuss last Saturday’s football match with the chap working next to him. Ernest was a particularly skilful, reliable and conscientious cropper; a glum look from Ernest was accordingly normal. But this morning all the cropping-machines stood motionless; the men stood round looking helpless and upset, and the gaze of all seemed to be centred upon some pieces of bright brown cloth with self-coloured raised stripes, which had just come through the newest cropping-machine and lay in loose folds (in cuttle was the technical term) in the cart at the far end.
“Well, Ernest? Something wrong?” said Arnold cheerfully.
“Mr. Arnold,” began Ernest in a solemn tone. (This form of address revealed Ernest’s length of service with the firm, reflected Arnold; he had worked at Holmelea Mills when Mr. Barraclough meant Arnold’s father. “I’m afraid there’s been a very serious mistake made here this morning.”
“Oh?”
“I’m afraid so. These Bedford cords here.”
“Well?”
“They have to be cropped very delicately, you see.”
“Of course.”
“Well, they’ve been cropped ordinary. The machines were set in the ordinary way, and it’s cropped them too clean. Too close, like.”
With a horrid sinking at his heart, Arnold strode round the machine and stooping down lifted an edge of the brown cloth. Ernest followed.
“It’s made them tender,” said Ernest, bending beside him.
Arnold took the cloth in both hands and pressed his thumbs down strongly. The cloth split by the cord stripe.
“Good lord!” exclaimed Arnold. “It’s as tender as tissue paper.”
“Aye, it’s a bad business,” said Ernest mournfully.
“The cloth can’t be worn. It’s useless. The manufacturer will invoice it up to us,” said Arnold.
“He will,” agreed Ernest.
His sad eyes roved, and Arnold perceived, what he had not before noticed, that every piece in the cart was brown, while heaps of other similar pieces occupied other trolleys at the side of the room.
“How many of these Bedfords are there?” he demanded.
“Thirteen.”
“And how many have you cropped too close, eh?”
There was an awful hush for a moment, then Ernest replied: “All t’lot.”
“Good God!” exploded Arnold, violently losing his temper. “They’ll cost me sixty pounds a piece! Nigh on eight hundred pounds! Do you think I’ve got money to throw away? Do you think I’ve got eight hundred pounds to throw down the drain?” (The money was just the cost of keeping Jerry at a university for a couple of years, he reflected furiously.) “How did it happen? Who set the machines?” he raged. “Don’t you know enough about cropping after all these years not to set the gauge too close, for cords? Ernest? Eh? I’m talking to you.”
“I weren’t here,” said Ernest sadly.
“Not here!” bellowed Arnold. The enormity of it suddenly struck him speechless.
“I missed my bus,” said Ernest in his heavy pompous tones, “and came late to mill. The lads here didn’t think on cords had to be treated special like, you see, so they just set to and cropped ’em ordinary.”
“I don’t know what you think, Ernest, but I think it’s about time we had a foreman cropper at Holmelea who’s on the job when he’s supposed to be,” said Arnold. He spoke savagely, fast and furious, and threw the end of the unlucky cord violently away from him. “Well! Whose are the pieces, eh?”
Ernest muttered the name of an old and valued Ashworth customer.
“I thought as much. Be a long time before he sends us any more. Give me the numbers, then. I’d better telephone him right away. May as well make a clean breast of it.”
Ernest withdrew a stump of pencil from behind his ear and began slowly and clumsily to write down on the back of an old label the reference numbers stitched into the end of each piece. The younger men, awed by the magnitude of the row, silently shifted the pieces about and turned up the head ends to help him. Arnold stood by, fuming. At length Ernest proffered him the list, saying heavily:
“I don’t suppose it’s much use, Mr. Arnold, to say I’m sorry.”
“I don’t suppose it is,” snapped Arnold. “A. & J. Barraclough have lost eight hundred pounds and a good customer, and you say you’re sorry.”
He stamped out of the department. He would liked to have slammed the door, but it was not of the slamming kind, being a heavy old swinging door, with a leather strap to keep it close where the years of use had worn it away. Lacking this means of expression, Arnold needed another so badly that he disregarded the lift, the gates of which Clifford was holding open with a subdued and deprecating air, and rushed down the stairs and into his office as hard as he could go. One or two workmen he met as he passed stared at his scarlet face in astonishment and grinned a little, backing up against the wall to get out of his way.
“They’ll grin on the other side of their faces when they hear what’s happened,” thought Arnold furiously, for it was not only the loss of the money but the slur on Holmelea’s reputation which wounded him deeply.
He strode into his office, snatched up the telephone and got at once into communication with the manufacturer of the unlucky cords.
“We’ve had an accident with them and they’re useless,” he explained. “No use blinking it.”
“It’s a nuisance. They were due to go to the States next week. How did it happen?” said the manufacturer, curious.
Arnold went into technical details. “The foreman was away and the men set the machines too close.”
“Well, we shall have to invoice them to you, Arnold.”
“I know. You’ll have to debit them to our account.”
“I’m sorry, but there it is.”
“I’m not trying to get out of it.”
“If you’re coming round this way today, Arnold, you might bring one of them with you. I’d like to see it—see the effect too close cropping has, you know.”
“I’ll do that,” said Arnold pleasantly, perceiving that he was being let off lightly.
“Right. Well, don’t take it too much to heart.”
“I reckon I shall take it several hundred pounds to heart,” said Arnold grimly, putting on a Yorkshire accent to carry off his loss as a joke.
“I reckon you will,” said the manufacturer in the same tone.
Arnold put down the receiver and sat still for a moment, cooling down. Ernest of all people to do a thing like that! The solemn, serious, reliable Ernest! Well, you never knew! Poor old Ernest!
“It’s the only mistake he’s made in all his time as foreman,” reflected Arnold. “But by God it’s a big one when it comes. I must say I’d rather he’d made a small one every year.”
He gave an exasperated sigh. I suppose I shall have to go up and have a word with him presently, he thought, but I’ll let them all stew a bit first. Now, let’s see; what was I doing before this happened?
Good God, he remembered suddenly, he’d been taking Jerry and that ghastly homo round the mill. He was on his way to the top room to find a suit-length for Chillie. He looked up in alarm at the office clock; well, there was plenty of time yet before the man’s train, fortunately. He sprang to his feet. But where were Jerry and Chillie? Had they stayed upstairs on the cropping floor, he wondered? Were they perhaps waiting for him there? He hurried out into the general office, calling for his secretary. She came towards him rather nervously, and said at once:
“Mr. Jerry and his friend have gone to the station.”
“Gone to the station?” said Arnold blankly.
“Yes. They went by bus.”
“There was no need for that,” exclaimed Arnold, wounded in his hospitality. “I meant to drive them—there’s plenty of time.”
“I said so to Mr. Jerry, but he was determined to go,” said the girl.
Arnold walked back thoughtfully into his private office and sat down at his desk. He looked out of the window, considering, and slowly the full enormity of what had happened flooded his mind. That he had promised Jerry’s friend a suit-length and failed to keep his promise was bad enough, but the real trouble was his explosion of wrath against that daft-head Ernest. He had shouted, he had sworn, he had not condescended to ask for an explanation of Ernest’s bus-missing; he had bellowed and stamped as if a few hundred pounds were all he cared about in the world. (He had unfortunately never mentioned the damage to Holmelea’s reputation, which would have appealed to Jerry’s young idealism as a more legitimate cause for wrath.) In a word, he had behaved exactly and precisely like the vulgar, mercenary, exploiting, capitalist boss which Chillie had spent the weekend trying to make him out to be, in the eyes of his son. Chillie must have been delighted.
It came to Arnold suddenly that he had a picture in his mind of Chillie looking delighted, smirking venomously all over his sly face, with Jerry beside him, white and contemptuous and horror-stricken. Was this picture a remembrance of reality, or an invention of fear? It was real, thought Arnold, wincing; he remembered seeing the two faces in the background during that very unfortunate speech in which he practically threatened to give Ernest the sack. Of course he hadn’t the least intention of giving Ernest the sack, but he had felt savagely angry and had meant to wound. He had felt so angry that for a moment he had forgotten Jerry, Chillie and Ernest’s long service, and in so doing he had, he now saw, lost the game for his son’s affection.
Arnold sat for some minutes by the window, his strong square hands, loosely clenched, lying on his desk. They were loosely clenched because he could not see how to continue fighting; he was defeated. His heart felt heavy and cold. He had failed Jerry. He had failed Meg. Of course he could probably manage to keep his son out of Chillie’s clutches, for the present at any rate. Jerry was under age and had no money of his own; short of very violent rebellion the boy would be obliged to obey his father if Arnold forbade him to join his friend, and a lack of money would be strongly operative in any case as regards Chillie’s willingness to receive him. But if Arnold exercised the rights of parentage and the power of money in this way, he would completely forfeit his son’s trust and affection. The only hope of retaining that affection was to convince Jerry that Chillie was worthless, that his father was a better man, more worthy of trust, than Chillie, and this hope Arnold had in the last hour destroyed. He struck his fist savagely on the desk and cursed Ernest; why the hell did he have to make an appalling mistake, the only one of his working life, on this particular day? Those confounded spoiled cords had hamstrung Arnold in his fight for his son’s future.
3
After a time Arnold roused himself with a sigh. He chose a handsome suit-length for Chillie and had it parcelled. He could not bring himself to go up and speak a soothing word to Ernest—indeed, if he saw Ernest while he was feeling as he did about Jerry, the word he spoke would probably not be at all soothing—but he sent a message for one of the cord pieces to be brought down. He drove into Ashworth with it in the back of the Jaguar, and discussed the details of the disaster in a lighthearted manner with its owner, though he felt all the time as if he could choke. He had a luncheon engagement with another customer at a hotel in Bradford, and kept it. But in the middle of the meal he felt he could bear his anxiety no longer; he excused himself and rose from the table and telephoned Holmelea Hall to find out whether Jerry was there. To his relief the boy was at the Hall, but Meg did not sound happy as she announced this. Arnold asked to speak to his son. There was a rather long pause, then Jerry’s young voice said crossly:
“Yes, father?”
“I’m sorry your friend went off without his suit-length,” began Arnold in his kindest tone.
“It’s of no consequence.”
“I’ve chosen out a good one for him,” continued Arnold, describing it in technical terms. “Now if you’ll just give me his address I’ll have it sent on to him at once.”
“I haven’t his address with me at the moment.”
“Then perhaps you’ll telephone it to the mill office this afternoon,” said Arnold. “Or give it to me tonight.”
“Please don’t trouble either way,” said Jerry shortly. “I don’t suppose Chillie really wants the cloth.”
“I do,” said Arnold.
“Well, that’s where we differ,” said Jerry. “Goodbye, father.”
He rang off. Father was not the fashionable word for a male parent these days, and Arnold had rarely heard it from his son, who usually addressed him by the more childish but agreeable appellations of daddy or dad. This change of address confirmed all Arnold’s fears. He went back to the table feeling more wretched than he had done since the morning of his father’s death, twenty-six years before. To conceal this from his customer he put on a jaunty air and drank a little more than usual.
This forced conviviality protracted their meal, and Arnold left Bradford a trifle late. He pushed the Jaguar hard whenever the traffic gave him a chance, and arrived at his next appointment on time but in a rush; hot, a trifle over-stimulated by whisky, profoundly uneasy and furiously angry with the whole universe, especially pseudo-artists.