by A. J. Cronin
She remained with him till the first grey light of dawn.
That morning, after hilarious congratulations at breakfast, he took a walk to clear his head. He felt a trifle listless, but she was really the goods, he could scarcely wait until tonight, and of course there was the job, the money, and the future all secure. Damn it all, a fellow had to look after himself. In the dulled state of his mind, it was less difficult to shut out the past and think only of the future. Passing across the Howrah Bridge he leaned suddenly over the parapet and without looking, taking his hand from his inside pocket, dropped the two letters, still unopened, into the filthy, corpse-polluted waters of the sacred Ganges.
Part Three
Chapter One
Dawn comes early in the Swiss Oberland. Its hurtful brightness and the clanging of the cowbells awoke him. As he had feared, the pheno-barbitone had failed to act, and in those hours of wakefulness he had relived every moment of those fatal, youthful months until, tortured, at three in the morning be had fumbled for a capsule of sodium anytal, which had given him a brief respite of total blackout. Now, with throbbing temples, deadened by the drug, he faced the situation dully yet with almost desperate resolution, aware that, at long last, he must take the decisive step.
Wilenski had told him so, at that last consultation in New York, smiling down encouragingly, as he always did, with one arm across the headrest of the couch and lapsing into that caressing Southern accent which he used to untie the inner tangles of his patients.
‘You may have to go back one day, just to break that little old guilt-complex for keeps. Actually, you want to go back, partly because you’ve got a suppressed nostalgia for home, but of course mainly to see your – your friend and straighten things out with her. Well, why not? Better late than never. If things haven’t gone too well for her, you’re in a position to help. Why,’ his smile took on a genial slyness, ‘ now you’re a gay widower, if you find her still attractive, you could clear the whole thing up by marrying her – provided, of course, she’s free.’
‘She will never have married.’ He had no doubts whatsoever on that score, though he hoped she might have found happiness.
‘Keep what I’m telling you in mind, then. And if you feel you’re getting into trouble again, take my advice and go back.’
Yes, he would do it, and at once. Relief came to him with the reaffirmation of his decision. He pressed the bell and, after consulting the Swissair schedule, told Arturo to ring Zurich and reserve a seat on the two o’clock plane for Prestwick. He got up, shaved, dressed, breakfasted downstairs. Afterwards, while Arturo packed his valise, he smoked a pensive cigarette. He was taking only a few things, returning quietly, humbly, without the slightest fuss or ostentation, no Rolls, no signs of wealth, nothing. The thought, arousing sombre anticipation, injected his melancholy with a transitory gleam. As for the villa, in his absence, with a household so well organised, staffed by such trustworthy servants – he had hinted to them of an urgent business appointment – it was simplicity itself to leave, even at a moment’s notice.
The phone rang: he rose and went to the instrument. As he had expected, it was Frida von Altishofer.
‘Good morning. Am I disturbing you?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Then tell me quickly. Are you well … better?’
His frightful night made him long for a word of sympathy, but he knew this to be unwise.
‘Definitely better.’
‘I am so glad – and relieved, my friend. Shall we go walking this morning?’
‘I wish we could. However …’ he cleared his throat and delivered the polite fiction he had prepared: yesterday there had been a telegram, purely a matter of business, but upsetting, as she had observed, which he ought to put right by a visit to his British lawyer. He must leave this morning.
There was a sharp silence in which he sensed surprise, disappointment, perhaps even a hint of dismay, but quickly she recovered herself.
‘Of course you must go – such a man of affairs. But do not tire yourself. And come back soon, before I leave for Baden. You know how much you will be missed.’
Arturo drove him to the airport in the Humber utility car, thus setting the tone of moderation for the entire journey. In Zurich it was his custom to lunch at the Baur-au-Lac, but today he passed by that admirable hotel, telling Arturo, who expressed concern, that he would probably get some sort of snack on the plane. They were early at the airport but fortunately the plane was on time, and at two o’clock precisely it took off. As the D.C.7 soared through low cloud into the blue his fixed expression did not relax, yet a strange elation took possession of him. He was going back, at last, back after thirty years to the country of his birth. Why in God’s name had he delayed so long? – for there alone could he find peace of mind, a final liberation from that remorse which from time to time had fallen upon him like a dark oppressive cloud. A word came to mind, edifying and full of promise. He was not a religious man, but there it was; Redemption! He repeated it to himself, slowly, earnestly.
Suddenly, elevated though they were, his thoughts were interrupted. The pretty stewardess was smiling down at him in her smart blue uniform, serving the snack he had deprecated and which now appeared as an excellent meal appetisingly arranged on a tray; smoked salmon, a wing of chicken with braised celery, peach melba, and a glass of excellent champagne. After this, despite his wretched night, he felt more himself, and drowsed over the Irish Sea, but always with an eye for the landfall of the Scottish coast. Prestwick was sighted at half past six, in the indigo haze of an early twilight through which pinpoint lights had begun to sparkle. Their landing was smoothly perfect and, only a few moments after, he was hearing with quickened pulse the almost forgotten burr of his native tongue. Bareheaded, on the tarmac, he drew deep breaths of the soft lowland air.
Home, at last … home. Unconsciously he murmured the famous words of Rob Roy Macgregor: ‘My foot is on my native heath.’ Emotion flooded him.
Outside the customs shed the coach was waiting, and presently it set off, running smoothly through the Ayrshire farmland. Eagerly he kept rubbing the moisture from his window in the effort to snatch glimpses of the darkened landscape, scarcely realising the passage of time until the noise of traffic alerted him: they were at the air terminal in Winton.
He took a taxi to the Central Hotel where he secured a room on the quiet side, away from the station platforms and the noise of trains. Now it was late and he was tired. He ordered milk and sandwiches brought to him; then, after a hot bath in which for fifteen minutes he soaked, relaxing his tense nerves, he went to bed. He slept immediately.
Chapter Two
Next morning, awakening early to the thrilling awareness that he was actually in Winton, physically present, in the city of his youth, scene of his homeric strivings as a student, he had to damp down a great sweep of sentiment. He must be calm and judicious in his approach to this great turning point of his life. Yet as he rose quickly, dressed, and went down to breakfast in the warm, red-carpeted coffee-room, where for the first time in thirty years he tasted with relish real Scottish porridge and cream, followed, to the accompaniment of tea and toast, by an authentic finnon haddock, he was increasingly alert to the momentous prospects of the day.
Immediately he had finished his third cup of excellent tea he went to the lounge, took up the Winton Herald and, running through the advertisements, obtained the name of a motor hire agency. A small car, while inconspicuous, would facilitate his journey to Ardfillan and any subsequent movements which might be necessary. A curious inhibition withheld him from the obvious course of asking the head porter to arrange the hire, and instead he telephoned the agency personally. Could he have explained this vaguely irrational act? He was not known at the hotel, it seemed altogether unlikely that he would be recognised, yet all his instincts impelled him to concealment. At any rate, after requesting that the car, a small standard model, be delivered at the Central at the earliest possible moment, he was promise
d it, after some pressing, for one o’clock.
Restlessly, he looked at his watch: it was now just past eleven. With two hours to spare he went out, surrendering to the impulse to make a brief pilgrimage to the familiar places of his youth. The city, grey, cold, and soot-encrusted as ever, still with its overcast of smoke, showed few alterations from the days when he walked its drab and bustling pavements. At the corner of Grant and Alexandra Streets he boarded the yellow tram that would take him to Eldongrove Park. Outside the Park gates he got off, walked slowly through the gardens and, with increasing melancholy, up the hill to the University. But here, wandering through the shadows of the old cloisters, recollections of his student days were so painful and acute that, after a brief survey, he hastened from the precincts, passing at the lower gates the Gilhouse shop where he had sold his microscope to buy the ring with the little blue stone for Mary. His eye moistened. What a pitiful gift, compared to all that he could shower upon her now. Yet it had taken every penny he possessed. No one could have accused him of meanness or of the least foreknowledge of all that was to follow.
From Eldongrove it was not far to the Blairhill tenement and, driven by his mood, he took the road over the hill down to the docks. Yes, his old lodging still stood, a disreputable barrack, grimier, even more sordid, than before. Gazing upwards he saw himself, as a youth, bent over his books behind that narrow garret window. How he had battled and endured, fitting himself for a great and wonderful career.
And what, in God’s name, had he made of his life? After noble beginnings, what had been the result? As he stood there, gazing upwards with an air of vacancy, a shaft of sincere compunction pierced him and he experienced not only genuine and bitter regret, but also an overwhelming sense of the futility of all that he had done since he left that attic room.
He had made a fortune, a large fortune, but how? Not as a brilliant surgeon, a specialist of the first order, esteemed and revered in his profession, but as a wretched pill-maker, a timeserving purveyor of popular remedies, of slight clinical significance, advertisements for which debased the landscape, and all sold at such profit over cost as to constitute a further imposition on the public. No, he must not be too hard on himself; some of his work – the group of analgesics he had developed from the phenothiazines, for instance – had been of value. Yet on the whole, what a burlesque of the career he had planned. Why, under heaven, had he done it? Why, above all, had he been such a foot as to marry Doris Holbrook?
Surely, on that fateful voyage, he might have foreseen her psychotic tendencies, realised that the moods he found so entertaining on board would be insufferable later on, that the physical excitements she offered him would quickly pall. His mind went back to the neat little Cos Cob house her father had set them up in, convenient to the new Connecticut offices in Stamford. She had adored it – for six months – then suddenly hated it. Their move to nearby Darien, at first an immense success, was soon an equal failure. She seemed incapable of settling down or of adapting herself to a new environment, and his refusal to move again had started her off on daily trips to New York, almost a commuter on the morning and evening trains. Then came her futile art and sculpture classes, her style of dress increasingly extreme, her new, ever-changing, dubious acquaintances with whom he soon suspected she was deceiving him. When he remonstrated there were recriminations, estrangements, shouts through locked doors, hysteric reconciliations. She wanted to go back to Blackpool – could one believe it! More incredible still was the fact that now she actually seemed to hate him. When, after a long interval, he had smilingly attempted to resume marital relations, she had picked up her ivory hairbrush and practically brained him!
But he was getting on fast. Divorce might mean a break with the Holbrooks; he managed to put up with her. After five years in Darien an act of appeasement by old Holbrook had given them Fourways, a handsome property in the Quaker Ridge district of Greenwich. Quieter, conservative people here, the garden club – he persuaded her to join – their modest entertaining; he had hopes that she might settle down. All an illusion. Gradually, through increasingly erratic and intractable moods, fits of violence and periods of amnesia, she passed into depressive delusions. Finally the moment when Wilenski, called in consultation, put a consoling hand on his shoulder.
‘Paranoid schizophrenia. She will have to be certified.’
And then, for fifteen years, he had been the man with a wife in a mental clinic, awaiting the results of the insulin and electroshock treatments, the slight improvements and deeper relapses, enduring the whole hopeless muddle, until the unmentionable relief of that terminal hypostatic pneumonia.
Was it surprising, in these tragic circumstances, that – himself walking the tightrope of nerve tension – he had needed, had thrown himself into, his work with Bert. There was nothing wrong with Bert, good, decent, genial Bert, who had always stood by him fair and square, helped him repeatedly in dealing with Doris, even admitted liability in the matter for having glossed over her adolescent attacks, and who, after old Mr Holbrook’s death, had given him outright an equal partnership in the rich and expanding American firm.
And work apart, as a man sorely victimised, had he not been justified in devoting himself to himself: to set out to cultivate his personality, to study the arts, acquire languages, French, German and Italian to be precise, to dress with taste – in short, to develop himself into a finely mannered man, consciously dated in his style – in his reading he favoured the gracious Edwardians – a veritable ‘man of distinction’ who with his natural charm and ability to please could command, even in this appalling age when all sense of values had gone by the board, immediate interest, attention and respect. And of course, in his position, he had a physical obligation to himself, which as a well-read man he could sanction – if this were necessary – by quoting Balzac’s pointed letter on the subject to Madame de Hanska. He too had no intention of allowing himself to degenerate into impotence and imbecility! Naturally he recoiled from promiscuous adultery, from those brief and unreliable encounters that took place after cocktail parties in cars parked in the country club shrubbery. Chance threw him in the way of a quiet little woman – he had always preferred the small-boned type – a widow in her early thirties, blonde and of Polish extraction, her name Rena, who worked, humbly enough, as a binder in a Stamford commercial publishing house. His tactful approach produced surprisingly agreeable results. He found her both soothing and satisfying, neat, clean in her person, undemanding, and absurdly grateful for his, help. Soon a discreet and regular arrangement was reached between them. He even grew quite fond of her, in her own way, and though she was fearfully broken up when he left America, he had done the right thing with a generous settlement.
Yes, there had been good reason for the pattern of his life, yet though self-exoneration brought some relief his thoughts were still painful as he turned away and, descending Blairhill, made his way back to the Central. Here he could not even think of lunch. But, feeling the need of something in preparation for his journey, he took a glass of dry sherry and an Abernethy biscuit in the bar, after which he felt better.
The car arrived at the specified hour and when he had signed the necessary papers and paid the deposit he drove off. No need to ask the way. Free of the busy streets, he took the main western road, past the Botanic Gardens and the Westland playing fields, then on to the highway leading from the city outskirts to the lower reaches of the Firth. This, since his time, had been widened and improved, yet while now it bypassed the shipyards and steel works of the riverside industrial towns it still was the road that had taken him to Mary. He drove slowly, prolonging his sensations, though almost overcome by them as, one after another, known sounds and scenes broke upon him. That steady rat-a-tat from the yards, the hoot of the Erskine ferry boat, a long-drawn rusty wail from an outgoing tramp – these blended to a haunting dissonance that fairly ravaged him, as did the fleeting vistas of green woods and gleaming water, of distant purple mountain crests that sudden outward, up
ward sweeps of the way revealed to him. All, all brought before him, in sweet anguish, the image of the one woman he had truly loved.
Some thirty miles from Winton he reached the village of Reston and, turning off the main route, took the winding, narrow road that followed the widening estuary towards Ardfillan. His heart was beating like those shipyard hammers as he entered the little town, all so unchanged, as though he had left it only the day before. Still the same narrow strip of esplanade lapped by quiet waves, the iron bandstand, the tiny pier, the curve of low grey houses, the square church towers. So blurred was his vision, he had to stop the car momentarily. Oh, God, he had stopped exactly opposite that same wooden shelter where, when Willie was sent on the errand, he had taken Mary in his arms. He was in a turmoil, confused thoughts poured through his mind: would he find her greatly altered, would she recognise, let alone forgive him, was it even possible that she might refuse to see him?
At last he took himself in hand, drove further along the front and parked the car. Then, with lowered head, he walked up the lane giving access to the Douglas shop. He reached the familiar back street, lifted his head, then suddenly drew up. The shop was no longer there, instead, a high brick frontage from which a whirring of machinery emerged, confronted him. He had built with such irrational confidence on finding everything as he had left it that he was less disappointed than stupefied. After a few blank moments he moved further along the narrow cobbled way, and saw that a wide new cross street had been cut at right angles to the old, giving access to a large double-fronted glittering establishment with a neon sign: Town and Country Bakeries Ltd.
Motionless, he stood gazing at the trays of starkly coloured cakes which filled the windows, then he crossed the street and went into the shop. Two pert-looking young girls in mauve dresses with white collars and cuffs were behind the counter.
