by Guy McCrone
Girl? Phœbe must be forty now, although Bel could scarcely think so as she sat looking at the back of that thin figure, over there in the window. The shirt-blouse, the dark, bell-shaped skirt, braided with a band of black velvet, the broad leather belt enclosing an almost too slender waist. Phœbe must feed up a bit, Bel decided irrelevantly. It wasn’t good to have a girl’s figure at forty. If she wasn’t careful, Phœbe would suddenly look skinny. And that would make her look old. As it was, there was a white thread or two in her shining black hair.
But she must really force her to say something. She couldn’t be allowed just to stand there for the rest of the afternoon, staring from this hilltop drawing-room at the distant chimney-pots of Partick, the far-away cranes by the docksides and the ships moving on the river.
“Well, Phœbe? What about Robin? I hope his cough is no worse, dear?”
With another quick movement Phœbe crossed to the fireplace and stood over her sister-in-law. “There was blood on Robin’s handkerchief the night before last, Bel,” she said in a tone that sounded almost accusing.
Bel looked up. She could see that Phœbe’s beautiful face was dark. A stranger would have called it sulky. But Bel knew it was not that. Phœbe’s odd, Highland eyes were pools of trouble.
Surprise and alarm made Bel’s next question sound foolish. “Blood, Phœbe? Blood from his coughing?”
“Do you think I would have told you, if he had only bitten his tongue?”
At once Bel discounted this retort. Its hard ungraciousness was only a further sign of unhappiness. For a time she lay back in her chair, watching Phœbe as now she paced back and forth like a caged animal. What was she to say to her? Attempt the task of sympathy? At times like this, Phœbe could be so difficult, so unpredictable. You had to be ready for anything.
But Bel was not ready for Phœbe’s next question.
III
“I suppose the family has always known that Robin is Henry’s real son?” The younger woman was standing now, stock-still in the middle of the room, looking fixedly at her sister-in-law.
Bel felt her colour rise. This was bewildering. “What on earth makes you ask that, Phœbe?” she said, playing for time.
Her memory went back some twenty years to a very young Mr. and Mrs. Henry Hayburn stepping down one December evening from the train that had brought them back on the last stage of their journey from the city of Vienna. She remembered her surprise at the sight of a child in Phœbe’s arms. Typically casual, the Hayburns had given no warning of its coming. She remembered Phœbe’s short, defensive explanation. “His parents were burned in the Ring Theatre fire, Bel. He’s our baby now.” The Hayburns had lost a child of their own. This adoption was natural. Bel and her husband had asked no more questions.
Thus strangely, and with little further talk, had Robin become one of the large Moorhouse circle. If others had gathered together to gossip, neither Bel nor her husband, Arthur Moorhouse, had joined in.
But now Phœbe was pressing her for a reply. “You all know about Robin, don’t you?”
“Phœbe, my dear! We know nothing! We took you at your word! At least, Arthur and I did. Why should we have done anything else? It was your business, not ours.”
“Yes, it was our business.”
“Besides, Phœbe, Robin has never looked at all like Henry. Well, now that I come to think of it, there may be a look, but I mean—”
Phœbe was bending over her writing-desk, taking an envelope from an inner drawer. She opened it and held out a photograph.
“Do you see any likeness there?”
Bel took it into one hand, and held her hand-glasses elegantly with the other. It was somewhat thumbed, and there was a faint streak of red where a stick of opera-girl’s face-paint had once smudged it. “Where did you get this?” She looked up.
“It was given back to us, along with Robin’s mother’s clothes, after we claimed her at the mortuary. Her own parents, Robin’s grandparents, were in the audience. They died in the fire, too. He had nobody left.” Phœbe was silent for a moment, busy with memories, then she added: “Robin’s mother was gassed. She wasn’t burned. That’s how we got her clothes and this photograph. She had it in the theatre with her.”
It was past Bel’s comprehension why Phœbe should only now, after so long a time, tell her of these things. She examined the photograph with great curiosity. It was a cheap print of a foreign-looking young woman, pert, very pretty and in the style of twenty years back, holding a baby in her arms. “Robin and his mother?”
Phœbe nodded. “You can see a strong look of Henry in the baby’s face, can’t you? But he’s grown up like his mother, hasn’t he?”
“Yes. Exactly!” Bel held the card, fascinated. Robin Hayburn’s fine features, his quick dark eyes, his thick black hair, his odd, foreign look, were all here. The young woman’s face was round and merry. Now, at what must be about the same age, her son’s face was thinner, more refined perhaps, and male. But it was the same face.
Bel looked up once again at Phœbe. “Who was she?”
“Do you remember the name Klem? People we lodged with in Vienna just after we were married?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“She was the girl Klem. She was a singer.”
“And Henry—?” Bel stopped. No. She had no right to ask that. It was for Phœbe to tell the story, if she felt she must. Bel turned to look into the fire, avoiding her eyes. But what had happened? Her mind went back, seeking to remember the Hayburns’ return to Glasgow. In these first days, Phœbe and Henry Hayburn, having no home of their own, had stayed with herself and Arthur in Grosvenor Terrace. It was easy to explain Phœbe’s obsession with this foundling baby. Her own child could never be replaced, they said. But Henry? There had been no signs of coldness between Phœbe and her young husband. Rather the reverse.
Bel knew Phœbe as much as anyone could know her. She was a strange, passionate creature with a stiff pride and little compromise. What circumstances had joined themselves together to make it possible for her to forgive her husband and to take this child of his unfaithfulness into her arms?
But now, after a time, Phœbe was answering Bel’s unfinished question. “Henry? I had left Henry alone too long, Bel. You remember I stayed on here at home after I lost my own child. It was cruel of me. It was his child as well as mine who had died.”
“But, my dearest, you were ill!”
“I should have been ill in Vienna near Henry.”
Bel did not try to dispute this. She remembered, uncomfortably, that her own behaviour had, at that time, not been above reproach. She had been too possessive of Phœbe. Had not bothered to consider the young man who had been left in exile.
“Henry told me at once; whenever I got back to Vienna; told me he had been with the Klem girl.” There was a trembling moment before Phœbe added: “I couldn’t forgive him!”
Again Bel looked up quickly. An extraordinary thing had happened. Phœbe, whom she had scarcely ever seen weep, even as a child, stood before her weeping quietly. She was twisting a torn handkerchief in her fingers and letting the tears run unchecked. It gave Bel a measure of Phœbe’s present anxiety.
“Dearest! But why didn’t you come home to us?”
“No, Bel! I wasn’t going to ask help or tell anybody at home. One day I saw the Klem girl in the street, and knew she was going to have a child. I knew then what it meant to be jealous!” Phœbe took a step or two, tearing her handkerchief to ribbons as she went on: “I couldn’t forgive him, Bel!” She pointed at the photograph still in Bel’s hand. “That poor girl had to be carried out of the burning theatre and laid dead at my feet before I could forgive him!”
“Phœbe! You were very young! And, after all—” Bel got up and made to go to her.
But the younger woman eluded her, saying: “No, Bel. I am a fool!” Phœbe turned once more to the window, hating her own weakness.
Bel stood pondering for a moment, then she sat down again. It was possible for her
now to fit together this strange story that had taken twenty years to tell. Frustrated and affronted maternity. Anger. A stiff pride. Jealousy. Hatred of another woman who could bear her husband a living child. And then the breakdown of these things. The splendid victory for pity in Phœbe’s burning heart.
“Now you see what Robin is to me, Bel. Why he’s as much my child as if I had had him. More, I sometimes think.”
Bel saw. Phœbe had known no travail of the body to win this boy. But there had been a great travail of the spirit.
“You’ve been a long time in telling me this, Phœbe,” was all she could find to say.
“I didn’t think I would ever tell anybody. I suppose it’s because I’m worried off my head this afternoon, that I’m telling you now. Henry and I haven’t even mentioned it to each other for years. We’re just like any other husband and wife, and Robin is our son.”
“Have you told Robin?”
“No. Why should we? We let him think we’re both his adopted parents.”
The rattle of a strange mechanism stuttering to a halt came up to them from the road outside.
“There they are!”
“I’d better go, Phœbe.”
“No, Bel. You had better stay to hear what the doctor says.”
“Do you want me?”
“You had better stay.”
Bel understood and was flattered. In her own fashion, Phœbe was begging for support. “Put that away again, dear,” she said, as she took up the photograph of the Viennese girl and her baby, thrust it into its envelope and gave it back.
IV
Bel Moorhouse had never been certain whether she liked her brother-in-law Henry Hayburn or not. This was not surprising, perhaps. Placed as she was at the centre of a large and ever-widening family circle, her interests were feminine and personal; her affections warm.
He baffled her. As the head of a flourishing engineering firm of his own founding, his preoccupations were constructive, executive and male. She knew he liked men better than women, and took care not to be mixed up in family politics, seeing them merely as a waste of time. He was bound up, indeed, more with things than with persons.
To Bel, Henry was a limited sort of creature, rather cold, and from a woman’s point of view not very interesting. In these twenty years she had often wondered what Phœbe saw in him. Now, however, as he came into his own drawing-room, followed by Robin, a spare, loose-boned man of forty-five in his weather-beaten cape, she found herself looking at him anew. There were, obviously, all kinds of things about Henry Hayburn she had missed. She was by no means sure she liked him better for what his wife had just told her, but the knowledge that the boy who followed him was the son of his body and not merely of his adoption gave wings to her interest.
“Well, we’ve got back, Phœbe,” Henry looked old. Bel caught a strained casualness in his voice. “Hullo, Bel. Where have you come from?”
Bel took this as a dismissal. Once again she got up. “You’ve got things to talk about. I’ll hear what the doctor says about Robin later.”
“No. She mustn’t go. Must she, Mother?”
“I’ve already told her to stay, Robin,” Phœbe said.
And this boy. He had come across to Bel and kissed her artlessly and engagingly. His manners were easy and had much charm. Even now, at this moment of tension, he thought of them. Bel’s own more downright children had been known to say that Robin Hayburn’s manners were too easy, too plausible. But Bel, liking good manners, had disagreed. They must remember, she had said, that Robin’s blood was foreign, however Scotch his upbringing.
But knowing now that his blood was only half foreign, that the other half of it came from this man who stood beside him, questions crowded into Bel’s mind. Robin looked frail today, frail and tired, yet, even so, he looked very like the young woman whose photograph she had held in her hand a moment ago. How would this boy develop? And what would become of him?
There was a pause. It was typical that the three Hayburns should be standing there together lost, somehow, inside the circle of their trouble. Phœbe seemed uncertain what she dare ask. Henry seemed uncertain what he dare tell her.
Bel’s quick sympathy rose up to help them. But she could not help without being firm. “You had better tell us at once about Robin, Henry,” she said.
Without bothering to take off his cape, Henry sat down on the edge of a chair, placed his bony fingers on his knees and said the few words he had to say awkwardly and without addressing anyone in particular. “The lungs are not very good. He says the boy’s to go south to a warm climate, if he’s to have a chance.”
A chance?
Henry spoke bluntly, as though, indeed, his son were not in the room. But they knew it was the stress of his feeling that had made his tone harsh.
For a time no one spoke. Bel looked at the Hayburns. All three had become dumb and wooden. And as she looked, the room began to swim before her vision. Taking hold of herself, she got up briskly.
“Well, things might be worse, mightn’t they?” she said. “If Robin has to go south to get better, you can afford to send him, can’t you, Henry? There’s nothing very difficult about that.”
Again it was typical of this odd trio that they did not show emotion. They had found support in Bel’s words. If Robin were ordered south, then south he must go. And in time he would be cured, of course, and come home again. They must take hold of that. Thus they could go on.
Not for the first time in their lives did the Hayburns have reason to be grateful to Bel Moorhouse.
V
Robin climbed the narrow stair to his bedroom. He went up carefully, for his breath was not good these days. On the little top landing he halted, holding his door-handle as support for an instant, then he turned it and went inside.
His room was at the top of the house. The upper part of its walls sloped inwards, following the slope of the roof. It had two dormer windows, one on each side, whence, in good weather, Robin could see the Campsie Fells to the north of Glasgow, and to the south the Clyde, the Renfrew hills, and even, when it was very clear, the peaks of Arran. It was a large room, occupying all the available space up there immediately under the slates. It had perhaps, been intended as a billiard-room or a nursery. It was painted white and warmed by a studio stove. Here was Robin’s kingdom.
An intruder with some talent for deduction could have learnt many things about Robin merely by looking round. The floor was carpeted to the walls with thick grey felting, and in front of the stove, the doors of which could be thrown open to show the blaze, there was, in addition, a large rug, made of tweed and tartan rags, that Phœbe had once brought back from a Highland holiday. At one side of this was a deep wicker chair well supplied with cushions of rough mauve linen. The bedcover and curtains were of the same stuff and decorated with square, New Art leaves and roses. Like the woodwork, the furniture was painted white. Behind the door was a thick dressing-gown, and by his bed a pair of fleece-lined slippers.
The bedroom, one would say, of a cherished only son, who had no objection whatever to being cherished.
But the room had still more to tell about Robin. On his work-table under one window were one or two books on engineering and dynamics, together with several notebooks bearing Robin’s name. There was a current number of the Glasgow University Magazine. Robin, then, was a student, studying subjects that would fit him to enter the family firm of Hayburn and Company, Shipbuilders and Engineers.
But his bookshelf and the pictures he had bothered to hang showed other facets. Prints which might be called provincial and arty. An Aubrey Beardsley. An engraving of a full-throated pre-Raphaelite damozel. A Japanese scroll. His shelves contained some unselective romantic poetry, some modern novels, many classics, most of Stevenson, a published play or two by the up-to-date Mr. Shaw, a brown-papered covered book which, had the visitor pulled it out, would have revealed itself as the writing of Oscar Wilde. Several books of comment on literature and painting.
And had the
stranger had the further bad manners to rummage in the drawer of Robin’s table, he might have come upon a sheet or two of verse in Robin’s own scrawl; verse that was curiously sultry, and should, the stranger might feel, have been written in a language other than English. He might have found, too, a half-finished short story, not ill written.
The room of a young man, then, whose life was directed towards achievement in practical affairs, while his nature reached towards books, pictures and the passions, or at least the pleasures, of the mind.
Robin came in, shut the door and leant against it, a little picturesquely, perhaps. He was feeling very conscious of himself, conscious of his breathing, conscious of his heartbeats. He told himself that his life was in danger; in such danger, indeed, that he must leave home. He had, he told himself, come to a parting of the ways.
And yet he was not utterly cast down. He felt, in some measure, as though he were standing aside, watching that poor sick boy propped against the door there, examining his feelings one by one and savouring, not without interest, his predicament. A poor sick boy, he told himself a little falsely, who could not now go on with his life’s work, but must of necessity follow the paths of easy indulgence rather than take the harder and more manly way. It is nice, at twenty, to feel oneself unusual.
Where would they send him? To Italy? The French Riviera? Robin left the door and, wandering across to the stove, threw it open and sat down in the large wicker chair, warming his hands.
But now reality came upon him unawares. This was his room. He would miss it. He would feel strange away from it. And his foster-parents. Those two downstairs, who had brought him as a tiny baby from Vienna. He called them Father and Mother. They were the only parents he had known. He had taken them for granted, as children do. He knew that he loved them, particularly his “Mother”.
And his “Father”? He loved him, too, he supposed, though he had been near to hating him last night. Yet more and more, Robin, as he grew up, was coming to diverge from Henry. Why was it that now so often he found his father out of sympathy, found their ideas clashing?
