The Hayburn Family

by Guy McCrone

  “She’ll be all right! Don’t bother about that. Write the acceptance and tell her after. Surely you know how to handle women by this time. ‘Bye. Must see you about these cost-sheets before you go for lunch, Uncle David. Some of these charges are just getting a bit too funny! Can I tell Polly the great news, then, Uncle Henry?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Good.” The junior partner of Dermott Ships went, banging the door.

  Behind him, the Chairman’s room settled back to peacefulness, as a mountain tarn settles back after a sharp squall.

  IV

  Henry took Wil Butter’s advice. On that same afternoon he sat himself down in his office to reply to Authority’s letter. He wrote in his own hand that Mr. Henry Hayburn was much favoured by Authority’s communication, and that there would be no impediment whatsoever to his acceptance of the honour proposed. Having done so, he slid the letter into his pocket, put on his Inverness and, walking to the nearest post office, bought a stamp and posted it. What drove him to this odd, boyish secrecy he could not have explained even to himself. Had this letter gone downstairs to be posted with the others, it is improbable that his clerks would have been interested enough to notice to whom it was addressed. And it is still less probable that, had they noticed, they would have felt the faintest impulse to steam it open and read what Mr. Hayburn had written.

  Henry had never been conceited. His engineer’s enthusiasm and achievements had gone to form his character and build up his self-confidence and force. Yet tonight there was something in him that made him shy of telling Phœbe and Robin immediately he got home. A feeling of guilt, perhaps, among other things, that he had not consulted with his wife before replying.

  But Robin’s quickness told him that his father had something on his mind. He could not have said why. But for those who live close to us, an untypical gesture, a dry cough, a burst of humming, may reveal tensions.

  Robin had spent a day that could not be called unhappy. He was a young man of vivid awareness. Awareness of himself, of events, of places, of people. An awareness that was, at most times, more detached than warmly sympathetic.

  This, the day following the verdict, had been, in its way, a pleasant void. Void of everything but warmth, comfort, and the knowledge that he need, in the near future, do nothing he did not want to do. He knew that his illness was serious. But yet, perhaps from the very nature of that illness, he was neither greatly cast down nor worried. For Robin, it meant a truce in the battle with his father’s ambition for him. Now he need neither study seriously nor—what he most loathed—work among the mess and rigours of the shipyard. Now he might wait to hear what was arranged for him, knowing it could be nothing unpleasant.

  They were sitting at the dinner-table when Henry exploded the news.

  “I’ve accepted a knighthood, Phœbe,” he said suddenly, his colour rising.

  “A knighthood, Father? From the Queen?”

  “I was talking to your mother.”

  Quite unabashed by this, Robin sat taking in the situation with excitement. An excitement born rather of curiosity than from any pleasure in the distinction his father had brought upon them. And what would his mother say? How would this affect her?

  Phœbe, a steaming tureen in front of her, was ladling soup into plates. She stopped for a moment, the ladle in her hand. “Well, I suppose if you’ve accepted it, you’ve accepted it,” was all she said.

  “Aren’t you surprised, Mother?”

  “Of course I’m surprised! I’ve never even thought of anything of the kind.” Phœbe went on with her ladling.

  “You don’t look particularly pleased,” Robin said.

  “Just what I was thinking,” Henry put in, glad now of Robin’s help.

  She took her time. “I wasn’t asked whether I would be pleased or not.”

  In the face of this important news, all three sat saying nothing for a moment. But now, Henry’s experience understood better than his son’s quickness what was passing in Phœbe’s mind. He saw her rising flush, the gleam in her eyes as they turned to meet his own. He saw that now it was Phœbe’s turn to remember old struggles; and that she was pleased for him.

  Thus Robin was surprised and at a loss when, upon his saying: “You must be glad, Mother! Why shouldn’t you be?” his father turned upon him sharply.

  “Don’t bother your mother, Robin! She’ll talk about it in a minute.

  “Does anybody else know?” Robin asked presently.

  “Your Uncle David and your Uncle Stephen. And Wil Butter. I went to see them about it today.”

  “That means the news is round the family by now. They’ll all be jabbering like magpies!”

  Neither Phœbe nor Henry tried to censure this. The Hayburns lived a little apart, a little out of the main stream of Moorhouse politics. The boy had merely expressed a feeling shared by all three of them.

  Chapter Four

  NEXT morning, just after breakfast, Phœbe found Bel alone in the back parlour of her house in Grosvenor Terrace.

  As Bel Moorhouse and her husband Arthur had long regarded themselves as the centre of the family, Bel was gratified that Phœbe should come to her thus at once. It was natural and right. But really, the girl—Bel persisted in thinking of Phœbe as a girl—was behaving ridiculously. Having given the momentous news, she was looking positively glum.

  “But you must surely be delighted, Phœbe,” Bel insisted.

  “I suppose so. I know it’s a good thing for Henry, anyway.”

  “And then, of course, it will mean all kinds of new arrangements. The Partickhill house won’t be quite—”

  “We’re making no difference.”

  “Oh, no real difference, dear. I can see that. But you’ll have to—” Bel hesitated. What she wanted to say was that the Hayburns would now have to pull themselves together, to stop being so easy-going, to look to taking their places among the pillars of their city.

  “We won’t let it make any difference,” Phœbe said.

  Bel gave up. “Why, exactly, was Henry offered this honour, dear?” she asked a little tartly. “Oh, we all know he’s wonderful, of course. But why, exactly, now?”

  “Something to do with the war.”

  “And what did you say when he asked you what you thought about it?”

  “He didn’t ask me. He consulted David and Stephen, then came home and told me it was settled.”

  This, too, displeased Bel. Didn’t ask his own wife? And why David and Stephen? Why not Arthur? The idea of anything so important happening in the Moorhouse family with herself and Arthur left out of all consultation seemed to Bel like a slap in the face. Especially anything happening to Phœbe.

  For a moment, as she sat looking round her prosperous and polished Victorian parlour, feelings of uncertainty, of unsureness, mixed themselves with Bel’s annoyance. This room was in the best of taste, or so she had thought, twenty years ago. But now she wondered. Was that ball-fringed fireplace with the side drapings, was this mahogany furniture, round, solid, and covered with plush, becoming out of date? Were she and Arthur slipping? Were they, the centre of the family to whom everyone had so far turned for advice, approval, and a support, indeed, which had often been real enough to mean Arthur’s signature in his cheque-book—were they now coming to be looked upon as getting old and past consulting?

  Not if she could help it! Arthur was a vigorous sixty-three, and she was nine years younger. They were in the very prime of their lives.

  She pulled herself up, smiling the smile which Phœbe, undeceivable in most things concerning Bel, recognised as a challenge. “Well, Phœbe,” she said, “all this is simply splendid! I’m very proud, dear. And I’ll tell you what. I must arrange a dinner-party for you at once. I’ll telephone Henry to congratulate him and fix a date.”

  The family centre must not be allowed to move from Grosvenor Terrace.

  II

  That evening Bel hung up her telephone with a sigh of achievement. The knight designate had been d
ifficult to pin down. But Bel, knowing her man, had been well prepared for this. Henry’s: “It’s very nice of you, Bel, but well, I don’t just know how I’m placed,” had been met with a firm: “Nonsense, Henry! I’m fixing Thursday of next week. Now, is there any reason why you can’t come on Thursday?” Her question was shrewd. She knew that Henry’s mind, quick in business, was slow in things social. His: “Well, yes. Yes, I daresay on Thursday. Anyway, you can speak to Phœbe,” had been quite enough for his hostess to work on. “Splendid, Henry! Thursday.” And so it was fixed.

  Bel returned to the parlour, where her husband was sitting by the fire smoking his pipe and reading his paper. Arthur Moorhouse was, on the whole, well preserved. In the last years his hair and old-fashioned side-whiskers had changed to white, but his body was still lean and active. Tonight, however, he looked tired and his handsome face was showing, somehow, the first shadow of age.

  They had, at their evening meal, discussed the honour accorded to Henry Hayburn. Then together, here before the fire, Bel and he had been remembering old times. How Phœbe, Arthur’s orphan half-sister, still a little girl, had come to live with them. It must now be thirty years since. Her growing up. Her marriage.

  Finding Arthur in a softened mood, Bel had put forward her idea of a dinner-party. And she had been gratified by Arthur’s: “Telephone Henry, then, and see what he says.” Gratified because she knew that her husband could not much be bothered with such things these days.

  But now, tactfully, Bel did not announce her victory. She merely sat down on the other side of the fireplace, took up her sewing and said: “Anything in the news tonight, dear?”

  “Another fifty men ambushed in the war.”

  She looked up. “Killed?”

  “Aye.”

  She found it difficult to ask: “Anywhere near where Tom is?” Tom was their younger son.

  “No. No, Bel. I wouldna think so.”

  Bel went on with her sewing, raging in her heart at the son who had insisted upon joining up. But Tom had always been impetuous; had always insisted on getting into scrapes. And why were we fighting in South Africa, anyway? She had never been able to understand, though she never dared say so. “I thought Mafeking being relieved was going to make all the difference,” she said, without looking up.

  “It didna finish the war, my dear.” Arthur lowered his paper and looked across at his wife. A single tear splashed down and glistened on the hand that held her needle. Well, if your son insisted in going off to the war, it was more easy to bear if you didn’t make a fuss. He folded his paper. “Ye havena told me if Phœbe and Henry were coming,” he said, deliberately seeking to distract her.

  Bel took her husband’s meaning perfectly. And she was grateful. “They can come on Thursday. I’ll try to get everybody for then,” she said, determinedly regaining her composure. “And I’ve just been thinking, Arthur. After all, our family is so immense now, with nearly all the children grown up and some of them married. I think we ought only to ask the brothers and sisters with their husbands and wives. What the children call the Old Brigade.”

  III

  It was the night of the dinner-party.

  Young Robin Hayburn stood admiring the elegance of his own extreme slimness, fledged as it was in adult tails, white waistcoat, and pumps. It was reflected in the enormous mirror, with its gilded cupid frame and its marble shelf of ferns and palms, which covered and embellished almost an entire end of his Aunt Bel’s drawing-room.

  Robin, whose health in the last days had improved, superficially, if not fundamentally, from rest and enforced idleness, found himself standing here in the drawing-room alone. An untimely breakage in his Aunt Bel’s kitchen and a telephone call for help had brought him across early with a substitute for what had been broken.

  Robin was one who found interest and entertainment in almost anything. Now therefore he took to roving round the familiar room examining this and that.

  The bearskin rug before the white marble fireplace. Robin noted that the hair was wearing on the bear’s head. The handsome gilded clock beneath its glass dome. The knick-knacks on a table. Silly things, like a silver cowbell from Switzerland. An antique candle-snuffer; useless, since the room was lit by gas. A cut crystal box which held nothing. A genteelly expurgated copy of Robert Burns’ poems bound in green suede, with gilt ends and a crimson ribbon for a marker. A heart-shaped Dresden box, the lid of which was covered with tiny china flowers. He opened it. It contained a penny stamp which had been stuck on a letter, then pulled off again, a hairpin and a bit of string.

  As these things could not feed Robin’s curiosity, he turned to look at the photographs of Aunt Bel’s children. Young Arthur Moorhouse, whom Robin quite liked and who had been made by the photographer to look more important than he was. Arthur’s wife, Elizabeth, with her two young children. His soldier cousin Tom Moorhouse in mess uniform. His cousin Isabel, who was married to an Englishman called Ellerdale and lived in London. A large photograph in a handsome silver frame of Aunt Bel’s mother, old Mrs. Barrowfield, who had died some years ago.

  Queer how these people were his relatives and yet not his relatives. Robin turned about absently. Now what were these little figures in the china-cabinet?

  As he crossed the room to examine them, the door opened and his Aunt Bel came in.

  “I say, Aunt Bel! You look tremendous!”

  “I didn’t know you had come, Robin. Who let you in?”

  “The butler.”

  “Don’t be foolish! You know he’s only a caterer’s man. You see, I thought that with fourteen to dinner—”

  “But I say, Aunt Bel, you do look tremendous!”

  Bel laughed. It was this kind of thing that made her like Robin. “Silly boy!” she said. “How can an old woman look tremendous!”

  “But you do! And you’re not old!”

  “I’m more than twice your age.”

  “That’s nothing. I say, your dress is awfully nice!”

  “Like it?” Bel turned herself about.

  “New?”

  “Bad boy! Don’t tell your Uncle Arthur. I’ve allowed him to think I got it last year.”

  “Told him, you mean?”

  “I said allowed him to think. He never notices anything.” Bel’s eyes sparkled with mischief. She examined herself with approval before the great mirror. And indeed she could not disapprove of her reflection. Not many women of her age had a figure like that. Her shining dress of black satin lay perfectly to it. The lines were severe and it was cut low. But it had long, tight sleeves of some black transparency which added—or so her dressmaker had assured her—to its sophistication. On her corsage were dark velvet roses. No. She wasn’t a bad fifty-four. It was remarkable what not too many potatoes, no toast at breakfast and careful corseting could do.

  Robin was standing back apprising her as an artist might apprise a picture. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “Yes. Very nice indeed!”

  “You don’t think it looks a little fast, do you?”

  Robin laughed. “Fast! How could it on you, Aunt Bel?”

  Bel turned to look at him. “You queer boy! I wonder where your parents got you?”

  “I’ve often wondered that myself. There are so many possibilities.”

  Bel’s colour rose. She crossed to the young man and patted his arm. “I’m sorry, Robin. I wasn’t thinking. I wouldn’t have said that if I had remembered.”

  “What? That I’m a waif and a stray?”

  Bel stood beside him, confused now. Robin’s frivolity had led her into thoughtless talk. She was afraid she might have hurt him. “Don’t say waif and stray, Robin,” she said. “You know very well you’re nothing of the kind.”

  There was something imp-like in Robin’s look as he said: “I don’t know. It’s fun to feel your blood is a bit of a gamble. I know my Austrian parents were singers, but that’s all. I don’t even know if they were nice or nasty, whether they were honest people or rascals. Only think, my dear Aunt Bel; they
may have been wickedly immoral!”

  Better informed now of Robin’s parentage than he was himself, Bel did not like this. She drew away from him, becoming a little chilly. “We’ll hope not, Robin,” she said primly, bending to rearrange the flowers in a vase. “I would hate to imagine you thought of your real parents with anything but sorrow and respect.” Then, pleased with her own moralising, she went on: “Still, it won’t do you any harm to keep your eyes open for the temptations that may be lurking in your blood, dear.”

  “Of course not, Aunt Bel.”

  Bel, enjoying herself, looked up from her flowers and took encouragement from Robin’s naughty earnestness. “Always shun questionable company, Robin, even if it is amusing. And the great thing is always to be straightforward and truthful, dear.”

  “Never ‘allow anyone to think’ anything, Aunt Bel?”

  Robin’s face was still so serious that Bel, as she looked at him, did not at once catch the echo. But suddenly there was a smile which broadened into gay impertinence. Was he actually daring to refer to her innocent strategy with Arthur over this new evening dress? Couldn’t he see that was something quite different? Now she was far from pleased. “I must see what’s happening downstairs,” she said coldly and left the room.

  IV

  Smiling to himself, Robin remembered he had been on his way to the china-cabinet when his Aunt Bel had interrupted him.

  The queer figures that had caught his eye were a row of little “moving” mandarins brought to Glasgow, no doubt, by Mr. Stuart Cranston, the tea importer who, following the vogue for Chinese and Japanese decoration, had extended his imports to include such things as oriental porcelain, Satsuma ornaments, and painted fans.

  Robin opened the cabinet and set the little mandarins wagging all at once. One nodded his head wisely, as he read from a tiny painted scroll. One shook a warning finger. One kept bowing his head in the obeisances of a courtier. A fourth waved a fan. A learned mandarin in spectacles kept making gestures of instruction.