Three Sons (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  Then his father came in and they could not speak of it, but all the time in his heart was the bitterness that Elma was shut away from him, the knowledge that he could never reach her, and he did not believe that this would ever be counteracted. Afterwards he was ashamed of the momentary emotion, ashamed that he had given way. He had intended never to let Carolyn know about it; if she couldn’t see with her own eyes that he was growing worse, why open those eyes for her? Then the thing had leapt out.

  He went to London, staying there the whole of the inside of a week, because he dared not go back to Polprinth, afraid of himself. He met Adam, who was making meticulous plans for his son’s future; everything in Adam’s life had to be cut to pattern, Eton, the Hall, the right entourage all the time. Luke lunched with Marty, who was now completely swept up in the affair with Marigold, whom he hoped to marry soon, only the law was never a fast worker.

  They were living together, and of course everybody knew about it, quite outrageous, but morals had not apparently affected him or his friends.

  As Luke walked down Piccadilly that afternoon, his hands in his pockets, he had a sense of complete indolence. Leisurely he summed up the situation. He doubted if either of his brothers was really happy, he most certainly wasn’t. But then when he came to sum it up, was anybody really ideally happy? He doubted that too.

  He turned the corner by Swan and Edgar’s, undecided what to do, for the blazing autumn afternoon would die early. At the moment it was hot as summer, only the flower baskets under Eros gave you the inkling as to it being October. He ran straight into Hilda. She looked just the same, a breath of pure country in the late summer crowd of London. In a throng of well-dressed people, she wore a tweed skirt and a rather shabby blouse, with a coat slung on to her shoulders. No hat. Yet at this particular moment Luke had to admit that there was something about Hilda’s face, with its sallow, yet wholly natural skin, and un-mascaraed lashes, that attracted him.

  ‘Fancy meeting you!’ he said.

  ‘I came up about the ‒ the divorce,’ she told him, and he noticed that she slurred over the word as though she was ashamed of it. ‘I’m catching the five-thirty back.’

  ‘Then we’ve got time for an early cup of tea.’ He took her arm. She looked tired he thought, London is very tiring to country people. He piloted her across the street up a side alley to a little tea shop that he knew of. At this early time of day it was not full, and they drew wheelback chairs into an ingle, having the place almost to themselves. The tea when it came was pleasant, with fresh toast and little homemade cakes, and Luke appreciated the homeliness of sitting here with Hilda.

  ‘What’s been happening to you?’ she asked.

  ‘My lungs are playing me up again.’

  ‘I thought so, Luke. Why don’t you face up to it and have proper treatment? You ought to go out to Switzerland, that is the only way.’

  ‘Switzerland?’

  ‘Of course. You can afford the best and you ought to get it. Like this you’ll never be really happy; start at the bottom rung and get the thing put straight. Hundreds of people are cured every year, you know.’

  ‘I doubt it. Arthur died.’

  ‘Arthur was a much older man, who had systematically neglected the trouble for years. You’re young. If you took it in hand now, you’d get the whole thing cleared up and finished with.’

  ‘I daresay, but I do so detest sanatoriums.’

  ‘Who doesn’t? Is anybody really keen on institutional life? But when the institution offers the only way out, there is no other route open to you.’

  ‘It’s the red tape and being messed about; not being able to get a drink when you want it, being cut off from everybody, and isolated. I’m afraid none of that appeals to me very much.’

  ‘But your choice lies between doing what Arthur did, or suffering a few months of red tape and general beastliness. Which do you choose?’

  ‘I daresay I’m a fool, but I prefer to take the risk.’

  ‘Oh Luke, do promise me that you’ll do something about it! You’re far too nice to go on shilly-shallying.’

  He was touched by her obvious solicitude for him. Hilda was a nice little thing really, and now when he came to compare her with the glamorous, flippant Marigold, of course there just was no comparison. Marty would soon sicken of that. ‘Isn’t there something I can do for you, Hilda?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. I’m going back to the Island. I shall always live in the Island now, perhaps that is what I want most. I know that I ought never to have left it. You can’t tear up roots when they are strong fibrous roots like mine. Besides, I’ve got Mother.’

  Luke thought of Hilda’s mother at Marty’s wedding. A scraggy, gaunt woman, with an Edwardian dignity, a little bit comic, but gallant with it; and now, perhaps because he was older, the gallantry seemed to outweigh the comicality.

  When Hilda got up to go, drawing on her cashmere gloves, the only sort she ever wore, she said, ‘Please give my love to your mother; she was very nice to me. I wish you could have married somebody beautiful and charming, because she deserves a really worthy daughter-in-law.’

  ‘I can’t ever marry of course.’ And when he came to consider it, there was much in Elma like Hilda, though he had not recognized it before. Only Elma was a pixie-ish creature, faery and unreal.

  ‘I don’t see why not. If … Everything depends on the if, Luke,’ and then, ‘is there somebody you care for down at Polprinth?’

  ‘No, no, of course there isn’t.’

  She looked at him disappointedly. ‘I only thought there might be.’

  He did not know why he suddenly said it. ‘Yes, there is, she’s a child, a scraggy little thing in a print frock that doesn’t fit. She has the most awful hair-cut you have ever seen.’

  ‘But it doesn’t sound a bit like you, Luke?’

  ‘No, I didn’t think it was me, but it is.’

  Then jerking himself out of it, ‘I’ll think over what you’ve said, Hilda, my dear. You’re a damned good sort, and maybe sometimes I’ll write to you, unless you’d hate it.’

  ‘I’d love it,’ she said.

  XIII

  AVALANCHE

  Luke felt very miserable as he travelled homewards. His heart hurt him. Hilda had been affectionate and kind, he had never thought of her as being a sister, but there had been something that was sympathetically sisterly about her this afternoon.

  He tried to get hold of an idea for Marty’s portrait; for the moment he had nothing. It had got to be one of his problem pictures. Marty smoking a cigarette, and in the smoke rings Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth. Banal, of course. He would paint Marty smoking, and now he thought of putting him into the garden at Dedbury, on that same fringe of lawn which he personally liked so well, and behind him a single statue. Shakespeare? No, not Shakespeare, he decided. Then it came, and he knew that the foil must not be stone, it must not be the monument to a famous character, but the face of a living woman, peering at him through the trees, reproaching him for all the loveliness that he had locked up inside him and had lost. The actor smoked satisfactorily, but the woman, peering at him through the tree branches, saw only the man, and the man was dead in the career of make-believe.

  Could he get that over? Could he fashion it clearly enough in his own brain to portray it on canvas?

  He got back to Polprinth very late indeed, to the silent house. He went up by the balcony, swinging on the clematis because this form of entry intrigued him most. Yet when he lay down he could not sleep but was instantly wrapped in the deepest melancholy. He had the feeling that the bed became a grave and he a corpse. There was something about himself that he did not understand, something he could not fathom. The beauty of the night split about him in radiant moonshine, was so vivid that it emphasized the melancholy, for despair feeds on loveliness.

  But next day he forgot about it, and went out fishing with Elma, laughing at the child as she fell about the boat in her strange little scrambling way, her bare feet, and her eager lit
tle face with the tassels of hair flopping on her cheeks. Too big a gap breached their lives. He knew now that if he had been well he would have married Elma; not now, of course, she was only a child, but in a couple of years’ time. He could only think of her in terms of marriage, because she was the one who mattered. The others had been mistresses, but this child stood on a par with Carolyn.

  He felt better for the lazy afternoon. Yet again when he went to bed he could not sleep, and towards dawn got up and dressed. He could not lie here suffering any longer. He went into the village street with the moonlight lying in patches, and the first pallor of dawn in the East, a pearl flush, a mere hint of glory to come. No more. The tide was out in small green runnels of water, the sands moist with a moonbeam radiance of their own. He wore no shoes, and his feet sunk into their soft coolness. It was very pleasant.

  He came silently home when the dawn was breaking, and shinned up the stanchion into his own room. Then he heard Carolyn and James were talking in the room alongside. The wall was thin, for once this had all been one large bedroom, partitioned off now. He paused in surprise, for it was unusual to hear them talking. Had they missed him, and was that the trouble? His curiosity overcoming him, and catching a chance remark, he listened for more, his face becoming stone cold, as he heard the truth.

  ‘For years I have lived in a convent,’ Carolyn was saying, ‘and you know it. When you married me it was to imprison me. As I grow older, and I see all opportunity passing from me, it hurts more.’

  And James’s voice, ‘I don’t know what you mean. I’ve been good to you, you are well off, you have a beautiful home, you have three sons.’

  ‘Well off? As though that mattered! A beautiful home isn’t important. I have three sons, I know, but Adam is like you, and Marty has his career. Really I have only the one son. Luke understands me.’

  ‘Very few women have that much. I can’t see what you’ve got to complain about; after all, none of the boys understand me.’

  ‘Could anyone understand you, James? I have never been able to touch you for years, and the dreadful part is that there are many more years ahead, which I am forced to share with you. It is too late now for me to get the emotional values that I want from life.’

  ‘You’re working yourself up.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you work yourself up when everything that was important was cut off from you? I want love, and warmth, and understanding, not a man who sits and stares before him and can hardly speak to me.’

  ‘Well, we’ve been married a long time; we’ve said almost everything there is to say.’

  ‘James, now you madden me!’

  ‘I suggest that you madden yourself?’

  She wheeled round at that. Luke could feel her quick vibration as she turned. ‘You suggest so much; you can do that with the witnesses in court, they don’t know you as I do. You’re nothing but a cheat, you married me and you give me none of the return that I have a right to ask.’

  ‘I’ve no idea what you are driving at.’

  ‘No, because you refuse to face any emotional crisis. Oh James, I’m so intensely miserable!’

  So intensely miserable! Luke walking the shore trying to forget his own unhappiness, and Carolyn lying in the next room with hers. He had got to do something to help her. He was quite decided on that point.

  Luke had always supposed that his parents never quarrelled, he had thought that his father’s wall stood firm, he had never thought that there might be scenes like this one.

  Life at Polprinth dawdled through a couple more weeks. Elma came out in the car with him. He’d never forget this time with her. He and Elma going in a motor boat up Falmouth harbour to see some lobster pots; her eager interest as she leaned over the side to the pots, her hair falling like heavy chopped silk. Or the caves they visited one afternoon, and the echo that caught her still immature voice, and sent it croaking back to her. Elma silhouetted at Land’s End, all that dark wildness, and her scrawny little breastless figure, the hair in a straight line. She held him by her complete indifference as to how she looked, her simple, childish charm, and he would never have believed that it could encompass him like this.

  ‘Please, may I write to you, Luke?’

  ‘Of course, and I’ll write to you.’ But he would have to let the letters gradually die out, for he would never dare go on with it.

  He went to the vicarage garden to say good-bye, with the dahlias in rich red blossom, and the dew spangled late on the cobwebs, and Elma in her old serge frock that with autumn replaced the print one. She put her arms round his neck with a childish gesture. ‘Oh Luke, I do love you so much. I don’t know why, but I just love you.’

  ‘You’ll grow out of it, little kid.’

  ‘I shan’t. I love Daddy. I love you just like I love Daddy,’ and she stood on tiptoe to kiss him.

  ‘Well, that’s fine!’ said Luke, and wished that his voice was steadier. Her kiss had fired his imagination more than all the passionate ones that he had gathered so recklessly. He wished to Heaven that things could be different, but they couldn’t be. Not yet, anyway. He left her standing in the garden in the russet frock that she had outgrown, a frock that showed her gaunt knees, and which was much too short at the wrists.

  ‘Oh Lord, this is pretty awful,’ he thought.

  He wrote to her occasionally, and she sent him the most amusing childish letters, spelling was not one of her best points, vivid description was. In the spring Penelope had a daughter. Adam seemed determined to do the right thing. James was on circuit again, apparently completely recovered. Luke had postponed treatment.

  He had had a rather good winter on the whole, he considered, the cough not being too bad. Then he caught a bad cold in the spring, when a March gale was tearing at the heavily budded trees, and the cough came back and would not let him be. He tried to keep it from his mother, but she kept on suggesting treatment. He couldn’t do anything just now because the picture of Marty was going badly, it had been a pest from the first, and unless he got the right expression on the face of the woman peering through the tree branches, the whole thing lost its point.

  He had re-painted it half a dozen times already, a siren, an innocent child, a mature woman, an Eve. He could not decide in his own mind which it ought to be.

  He was sitting that night playing a double patience with his mother. He had felt very ill all day. There had been a funny little letter from Elma to start the morning well, full of the ‘son and Hair’ born at the Hall. As he played his final card, he felt his vision suddenly mist over for no reason; he began to cough, and felt for his handkerchief. He put it to his mouth and at the same time his heart started hammering, and the vision blurred more than ever. He had a dim recollection of people running into the room, and of Carolyn’s voice, grown strangely unreal, and assuring him that it was all right, when it obviously was far from all right.

  He supposed it must be a haemorrhage.

  Then everything blacked out.

  Luke loathed it when he first came to Switzerland and was alone there. Carolyn had travelled out with him, then returning for the first few months because the professor urged that he must be entirely rested. Lying there he knew what a dreadfully uphill grind it was going to be. He did not want to get well. That was the truth behind it all. He lay there hardly speaking, but full of moods, and dreaming of Elma and Polprinth and his brothers. Of Dedbury and the picture he had not finished, and which he supposed was still standing in his studio. He could not fit together the jigsaw pieces of it. Sometimes he saw a filigree key to the whole situation. That would unlock the door. There was something remote and lonely and different about him which he did not understand, and here in his illness it grew denser. He loathed the patience of his nurses, and the matter-of-factness of his doctors.

  Months passed.

  He did not know when it was that he turned the corner, it came so gradually that he was unaware of it. Sitting up a little while, and Carolyn coming back and renting a chalet in the valley. Potterin
g out. Seeing the late snows melt and the white crocuses under them. Smelling the scent of resin from the fir forests. The cherry blossomed, the gentians flowered. The woods smelt exquisite, and suddenly he realised that the nurses and doctors were his friends, not his enemies, and that he had been reborn. They had officiated at his birth, and he like the infant had detested the midwife who had slapped him into living. Now he could laugh at it.

  By the August he was a new man. The professor said that if he wished he could live in the chalet with Carolyn now, but he must be under supervision for at least another year. He was going to be well again. At first he wouldn’t believe it. He was one of their most successful cases, they said, he would be perfectly well. Hilda’s letters were encouraging, she still wrote. Unfortunately Elma was learning to spell, which made her scribbled little notes not one half so attractive.

  The chalet was charming.

  ‘This is like old times, Luke, only better than old times because the future has much to offer us.’

  The future was war.

  It came suddenly, almost within days, and at first they thought that it was an immense bluff that Adolf Hitler was putting over in a big way. Nothing much seemed to happen. At first the Swiss had been very anxious and had manned the mountain passes; then, as the easy-going winter drifted on, war did not appear to make so much difference; the hotels filled up for Christmas. Nothing very much seemed to happen, people prophesied that the whole thing was a ‘phoney war’ that would be over in the spring.

  ‘You don’t want to go back, Mummy?’

  ‘No, I’m here with you.’

  Then he asked her for the key. He laughed about it, said it was her Bluebeard’s key.

  ‘One day you shall have it,’ she promised.

  ‘Why don’t you want me to read that diary?’

  ‘Perhaps because nobody save myself has ever seen it. Perhaps because it is a very intimate part of me. It wouldn’t make you happy, you know, it even makes me rather miserable at times.’