“Have you it still? Could I see it?”
She had it with her always, for she could not destroy it, and yet she dared not leave it where it might be found. She gave it to him from her evening bag.
Sir Benedict read and .re-read it. “That’s what you call breaking off forever, is it?” said he. But Monica, who was weeping as she had not wept since Giles’ death, said nothing. He threw the letter into the fire, and in an instant it had gone forever.
“I believe that makes me what is called an accessory,” he said.
11
Sea-sickness has never been recommended for its tonic effect on the spirits, yet as Monica made her return voyage across the North Atlantic her distress of body was paralleled by a marked improvement in her state of mind. She could not account for it, and it was not like her to try. Confession to Domdaniel had been very helpful. She had wanted to tell someone of her guilt, and the only other possible person was Eccles, who would never have done. Not only was he convinced that he had killed Giles himself—though with the best of intentions—but he had gone on the booze, and could not be trusted to keep her secret. Still, he was a dear friend. He had given her the best of his sketches of Giles. It was the one which had appeared on the cover of the programme at the Commemorative Concert; Tuke had wanted it for his book, but Bun was determined that Tuke should not get it. This, and the fact that Aspinwall rather than himself had been asked to write the appreciation of Giles which appeared in that same programme, had made Tuke very waspish, and he had threatened to sue Monica for seizing the physical assets (a cardboard box of subscribers’ cards, five muddled files of dog-eared correspondence, a complete run of the magazine, and three cartons of assorted trash) of Lantern. But nothing would come of that. Nobody cared about Lantern any longer, save Raikes Brothers, who were trying to collect their bill from Mrs Hopkin-Griffiths. All that was behind her. And, to her surprise and shame, Giles seemed to be behind her, too. She grieved for him, but her guilt was retreating from her; he no longer appeared in her dreams. The numbness of her spirit was vanishing, and to her astonishment it left regret and bereavement, but little pain, behind it. When she stepped off the boat in Canada it was with the sensations of a widow, but not of a murderess. She was still sure that she had killed Giles, and that it was through grievous faults in her character that she had done so. But, somehow, she had accepted the fact. To that extent, at least, she had clarified her thinking.
Salterton, this first few days of December, was looking its grey worst. And her home, now that Ma was gone, was unwelcoming—not because of anything that was said or done, but because it was empty of spirit. Of course, there was the physical difficulty about beds. There were only two bedrooms; Dad had one, and Aunt Ellen the other. Monica declined the offer of a place in her aunt’s bed; sleeping alone or with a man had unfitted her for a tucking up with an elderly maiden lady who had two regular, resounding coughing-fits every night. Neither Dad nor Aunt Ellen was at home between half-past eight and half-past five, and what was Monica to do? She visited Alice once or twice, but that did not serve her turn, for when she was with her elder sister all London, all Paris, all self-possession and hard-won self-knowledge seemed to slip from her, and they quarrelled as bitterly as when they had shared the tiny bedroom at home. As bitterly? Far worse, now, for both had gained substance of personality. Alice was aggrieved that Monica had money; that it was money which had “fallen into her lap”; that her own ambition scorched mercilessly upon the need for a new and bigger house, whereas Monica had no such vital problem; that Monica had acquired high and mighty ways which (Ah, shade of Ma Gall!) could not possibly be real because she had not been born to them, and was therefore guilty of “sticking it on”. It was inconceivable to Alice that what had been learned, and thoroughly digested, could become more truly one’s nature than the attitudes and customs of the family into which one had been born. She was herself in flight from her family, but the ball and chain was always on her leg. She grudged Monica her freedom from this servitude, and believed that it had been easily won. A couple of visits to Alice were quite enough.
One obligatory evening, spent at the movies with George Medwall and Teresa Rook, and a silent friend of George’s, exhausted that source of companionship. She liked Kevin and Alex still, but could not conceal from herself the fact that they were a little afraid of her.
So there she was, sleeping on the sofa in the living-room of her father’s house, without even a place where she could stand her picture of Giles. She had to keep it in her music-case, and get it out like a miser his treasure, when nobody was at home.
It was foolish, and she knew it was foolish, but Monica caught herself thinking that it was somehow inconsiderate of everyone she knew to be working when she herself was on holiday: she was so much a Londoner now in her own estimation that she supposed that people in smaller places must necessarily be less busy than herself. What a fool I am, she thought, when she surprised herself in this mood; I need a metamorphosis, like Lucius in Giles’ opera. I’m in great danger of a love-affair with Number One.
But if the welcome of her family was feeble, that of the Bridgetowers was unexpectedly warm. Diffidently, Monica had telephoned to Veronica to inquire after her health, and had at once been asked to dinner. So friendly was the atmosphere that she was able to say how much she hoped that the child Veronica was carrying would be a boy, and so plain was her sincerity that Solly and Veronica believed this, at first appearance, improbable statement.
“It’s extremely good of you,” said Solly. “Of course, we have hopes. You know that things haven’t been easy. But we aren’t pinning everything on it. If it’s a boy—wonderful! If it isn’t, it’s not the end of the world. I think one of the secrets of life is that one must give up caring too much about anything. I know that sounds terrible, but for a lot of people it’s the only possible philosophy. You blunt the edge of fate by being stoical. My Mother cared too much about having her own way; result—a remarkable artist gets her start—well, that’s what they say about you, Monica, so don’t protest—an extraordinary opera gets its first production. Neither of them things Mother would have foreseen or desired, to be truthful. She just wanted to let us feel the weight of her hand. Well, let’s not talk about it any more, or I shall be saying things like ‘It makes you think, don’t it’.”
Not only from the Bridgetowers, but from the Cobblers, Monica received a flattering and heart-warming welcome. And though she had not meant to do any work for a time, she began to do some daily practice with Cobbler, to get her out of the unfriendly little box that she called her home. There was no piano there, for Aunt Ellen had been compelled to part with hers; her new home had no room for it.
It was Cobbler who persuaded Monica to sing on the occasion of the fourth Bridgetower Memorial Sermon. “Come on,” he said; “you sang at the old girl’s funeral. Since then you’ve become the great interpreter of Revelstoke’s songs, among other things. This maybe the last of these memorial capers—I’m betting on a boy—and we want to do it up right. The choir is going to do Lo, Star-Led Chiefs—top-notch Christmas rouser—because the Dean wants to preach about the Wise Men of the East. Now, why don’t you sing Cornelius’ Three Kings from his Weihnachtslieder and top the thing off in style? We’ll shove it up a couple of tones, and show what you can do. Come on, be a sport! This may be your last year on the Bridgetower gravy-train; why not show you’ve no hard feelings.”
But Monica would not consent, until one day Dean Knapp telephoned and asked her so pleasantly to assist at the service that she could not refuse without seeming churlish. She still resented the Dean, because of Auntie Puss Pottinger’s rebuke, when she had spoken of him as “Reverend Knapp”. Well, it was high time to get over such nonsense.
High time indeed. On the morning of December the sixth, which is St Nicholas’ Day, and the day also of the Bridgetower Sermon, she went to Cobbler’s to rehearse, and found Humphrey and Molly in a great state of triumph and excitement.
“I was right,” shouted Cobbler, dancing in the middle of his chaotic living-room. It’s a boy!”
“What’s a boy?”
“Baby Bridgetower! Who else? Here safe and sound, everything screwed on tight, fingers and toes complete—even hair, I’m told by those in the know. You see what a prophet I am; I’m going to go into the business. Slip happy couples my card at weddings—’Five Months hence, Consult Cobbler; Put your Sexpectations on a Scientific Basis; Strictest Confidence Observed’. There’s a fortune in it!”
“But I thought it wasn’t due for another month or more?”
“Sit down, and have some coffee,” said Molly Cobbler. “And shut up, Humphrey, you’re being silly. As a matter of fact, it was a rather nasty business. Veronica has been awfully well during her pregnancy, you know. Not a bit like last time. So they weren’t worrying about a thing. But last night, somewhere around three in the morning, Veronica woke up and thought she heard a storm window rattling in another room. Now shut up, Humphrey—I’m telling this and I want to tell it my own way. The room in which she heard the sound was old Mrs Bridgetower’s room, which was queer, because nobody ever opens the windows in there; it’s kept just as the old lady left it, and Puss Pottinger sees that nothing is moved. But Veronica must have been confused by sleep—Humphrey, shut up!—and went in there. Solly woke when he heard a terrible scream, missed Veronica, and started to look for her. But he didn’t think of looking in his mother’s room until he had searched in several other places, and when he finally found her, she was on the floor in a terrible way—very badly frightened, a bit irrational and quite a way on in labour. Anyhow, they got the doctor, and he popped her right into old Mrs Bridgetower’s bed, and that’s where young Solomon was born at half-past five this morning.”
“And serve Ma Bridgetower damn well right,” said Humphrey. “She got the first child, but Veronica was too many for her this time. Now Molly, nobody’s going to convince me that Veronica didn’t have some kind of wrestle with that old woman in the middle of the night, so shut up! That’s love. That’s devotion, and I call your attention to it,” said he, shaking his head at his wife like a solemn golliwog. “Why don’t we whip over there right now and drink a toast to the infant trust-breaker? Better take our own bottle; the Bridgetowers aren’t always prepared for toasts. But there’s a better day coming on, if I may say so without giving Monny the fiscal creeps.”
So it was that about a quarter of an hour later Monica was in what must still be called Mrs Bridgetower’s drawing-room (for it never lost that character) drinking a toast to Mrs Bridgetower’s grandson. In spite of Cobbler’s efforts the feeling in the room was restrained, and Monica knew very well why it was so: the Bridgetowers, for all their goodwill and kind words, felt that they were taking from her money upon which she counted for another year, and were wondering how much she resented it.
Well, thought Monica, it’s up to me. I’m the one who has been trained to communicate emotion readily, and gracefully, and with an artist’s control. Unless this gathering is to be a wretched frost, I must supply the warmth. We’ve all got to grow up some time, so here goes.
“Is there any chance that I could see Veronica and the baby, just for a moment?” she said to Solly.
“As far as I’m concerned, certainly,” he replied. “The doctor did a lot of fussing earlier—apparently it’s unsanitary, or illegal, or inconvenient for the profession, or something, for a baby to be born at home; he insists on referring to the child as “a preem”; I think I’ve persuaded him that the worst is over and Veronica can stay here. Come on up.”
Old Mrs Bridgetower’s bedroom was not a pretty room, but it had much frowsty comfort about it, and old Ethel had made a fire in the grate; it was not needed, but it was very cheerful and a touch of childbed luxury. Already there were flowers from the Knapps and—marvellous in the telling—some from Miss Puss. Veronica was lying back on a heap of pillows, eating bacon and eggs.
“I know it’s unromantic for a gasping, new-delivered mother to be so hungry,” she said, “but I’ve had a long sleep, and I’m famished. Look at him. Isn’t he a pet?”
The pet lay in a small clothes-basket on a low table by the bed. Monica, who had never seen so new a baby, found it rather repulsive. But that was not what she had come to say.
“He’s adorable, and I wish him long life and every happiness,” said she, breathing a fairy-godmother muhd and bending over the basket. After all, said a voice, startlingly loud and familiar in her head, you’re giving this goblin upwards of a million dollars—not that it was ever yours. She started slightly, for it was the voice of Giles Revelstoke. Was he, like Ma, going to be one of the voices which complicated her life, and at the same time kept her romanticism from running away with her?
These thoughts did not interrupt her as she turned from the basket to the bed. She leaned over it and kissed Veronica gently; but Veronica was chewing at her late breakfast, and as she did not halt in time, Monica kissed an undulant, chewing cheek. They both began to laugh: Veronica because she was happier than she had been in her life; Monica because the inner critic had made her prima donna-like performance seem ridiculous. Stop behaving like Ludwiga Kressel, said Giles’ voice. And as they laughed, Solly and the Cobblers began to laugh, though they could not have said why, and Mrs Bridgetower’s bedroom rang with happy laughter. The embarrassment had quite gone, and Monica knew that nobody there was wary of her any longer.
“Let’s have another nip,” said Cobbler; “Veronica too. But we mustn’t get stewed. There’s the Memorial Sermon at four-thirty.”
“You must all come back here afterward,” said Solly. “We’ll have a party—small but select. But—oh, hell, I suppose we must ask The Trust. Well, it’ll be for the last time. Tea for them, Ronny, from Old Puss’s Rockingham service.”
12
At twenty-five minutes past four that afternoon Monica was sitting on a small chair beside the organ console in St Nicholas’ cathedral; it was a position of vantage, for she could see all of the nave by peeping between two large pillars, but she was not likely to be seen. She felt silly in a purple cassock and a ruff, and she did not think that the veil on her head was becoming; still, it was what Cobbler wanted her to wear, and she would not be a complainer, as Anglicans seemed to attach so much importance to ritual dress. But if she had to wear costume, she wished it could have been a better fit, and did not smell so pungently of choir-boy. She was not to walk with the choir in procession: no women—apparently it was another Anglican caprice. “You’re to be dearly heard but not clearly seen,” Cobbler had said, and she was well enough content to slip into her place unnoticed.
Cobbler himself now joined her. “Let’s have a look,” said he, leaning over her shoulder to peep between the pillars. “Quite a good house; nearly a hundred; not bad for a weekday and a business day; old Nicholas, Bishop and Confessor, ought to be pleased; the late Louisa Hansen Bridgetower would have expected a bigger crowd for her memorial sermon, but she had no humility. There’s Solly… old Snelgrove… Auntie Puss; the Bridgetower Trust in force. You know, the cathedral will soon have its Bridgetower bequest? Wonder if I could get any of it to rebuild the organ? Well, here goes.” He played a brief flourish and then was silent, as the choir was heard in the distance, beginning the processional hymn.
The Dean read the lesson for the day, and Monica paid little attention after the words… thy voice shall be, as one that hath a familiar spirit… reached her ears. Like me, she thought; only I have two; Ma speaks to me sometimes, in her very own voice, so that I’m sure I’m not talking to myself, and today Giles has spoken to me twice, as though he were right behind me. Yet I don’t think I’m out of my head, and I’m certainly not a spiritualist. Will it always be so? Will I acquire other voices as I go through life? It isn’t frightening—not a bit—but it’s certainly odd. Is it perhaps my substitute for thinking—orders and hints and even jokes from deep down, through the voice and personality of someone I’ve loved—yes, and fea
red? I ought to make up my mind. Certainly before I decide what I’ve got to decide. But I’ve never been much good at making up my mind, and I’m rotten at deciding things, especially since I went away to study and got into such deep water.
Musing thus, she heard nothing of the Dean’s prayer in which he petitioned that God might make all assembled there mindful of the goodness and example of St Nicholas, bishop and confessor and (extraordinary juxtaposition, which the Dean deeply relished) of Louisa Hansen Bridgetower, and all others our benefactors. But she came out of her musing when Cobbler and the choir burst into the “top-notch Christmas rouser” in which Dr William Crotch of Oxford so melodiously bodied forth the eighteenth-century piety, the formal fervour, of Bishop Reginald Heber—
Lo! star-led chiefs Assyrian odours bring,
And bending Magi seek their infant King!
Here was splendour which glorified the dank December twilight and made the modest cathedral, for its duration, a true dwelling-place of one of the many circumscribed, but not therefore ignoble, concepts of God.
Solly, too, heard nothing of the prayer after the mention of his Mother’s name. If ever there were a time to make peace with his Mother’s troubled spirit, it was now—now that the son was born who would deliver him from the hard humiliating conditions of her will. Yet—did that spirit desire a reconciliation? What had called Veronica from sleep so early this morning? With what had Veronica struggled in Mrs Bridgetower’s bedroom, so that he had found her unconscious amid overturned tables and chairs? He was neither mad nor fanciful: he had no doubt who, or what it was that had sought to prevent the live birth of his son. He knew what it was, also, that was at last defeated.
It was a time for forgiveness. Against the strict prohibition of his faith, Solly prayed for his Mother’s soul.
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