Crescendo (20 page)

In the early 1950's Freeman was asked to design settings for a new play, the first by its young author to receive London production. Uncomfortably penetrating, full of
angst
, its popular appeal was doubtful and Freeman had been called in to give it the support of his name. Its disillusioned tone appealed strongly to Freeman, and he thoroughly enjoyed the preparation of the sinister and macabre sets, in the course of which he once or twice overruled the inexperienced young writer, he was sure for the lad's own good. At the first night, he saw well enough that the reception of the play was lukewarm; the audience's response seemed muted and the critics, though they stood about in groups as usual, were decidedly not engaged in animated discussion; they looked sour and said little. Opening the newspapers next morning, Freeman, all unsuspecting, was struck as by a sledge-hammer between the eyes. It appeared that the play had been
ill served by its settings
, which were variously described as
Victorian Gothic, heavily baroque, stale whimsy
, and
quite out of tune with the contemporary theme and writing
of the play. Freeman was stunned. His thick powerful fingers trembled as he turned over the pages, vainly searching for some more favourable comment on his cherished settings.

“Gay! Gay!” he shouted.

Gay came in—he was in bed, reading the papers and drinking his morning coffee. She chanced to be wearing a house-gown of a thin blue silk which Freeman had bought before the war in Paris, at the time of one of his greatest triumphs. The remembrance of this was bitter to him now. He looked into his daughter's troubled eyes and saw that she was perfectly
aware of the failure of his latest settings, that she had indeed expected it, been expecting such a failure for some time. Instantly his decision was taken.

“I shall retire from my profession, Gay,” he said. “I shall leave London.”

Gay said nothing, but seating herself on the bed by his side put her arms round him and rested her head on his shoulder.

“I've harmed that young man,” said Freeman gruffly. “I've put an unnecessary obstacle in the way of his career. I mustn't do that again, Gay. I'm not wanted here. I'm a nuisance. I shall take myself off somewhere—get out of the way of the younger men.”

“Nothing can rob you of your previous achievements,” said Gay softly in his ear.

It was true and it was the right line to take; the acceptance, frank and uncomplaining, of the common human lot: rise, triumph, decline. He had been lucky in that his period of maturity had brought him more than ordinary success; he must not grumble now that his greater height brought him a correspondingly greater fall.

He held to his decision to leave London, for he did not wish to be tempted to take further commissions. For a time he wandered restlessly about, looking at seaside resorts and picturesque country villages, Gay in faithful attendance. Then, chancing to hear in a London street—it was the day of some great football match at Wembley—a voice speaking with a Yorkshire accent, he laughed and said half-jokingly to Gay:

“I think I'll return to the home of my ancestors.”

“Why not?” said Gay.

So they came to Hudley, and searching the hills for some small house which would suit at once Freeman's sense of beauty and his wish not to impose too much housewifery on Gay, they discovered High Royd.

The tiny farmstead was in a shocking condition when they first came upon it, a mere ruin, with that dark desolate look
which long untenanted houses acquire. They saw it from the hillside road below, up which the car Freeman had hired in Hudley was conducted rather reluctantly by its driver at the direction merely of one of Freeman's whims. (He never drove himself nowadays; he had long since discovered that the combination of dreamy preoccupation with thoughts of designs, and sudden bullish charges to make up the time thus dreamed away, which formed his driving, was dangerous to the public and must be given up.)

“Stop!” cried Freeman suddenly.

The driver, grinning, stopped.

Freeman threw himself out of the car, thrust his burly body through the stone stile and clambered vigorously up the overgrown path to the old farmhouse. Gay followed, and after a moment so did the driver.

The door stood askew, its top hinge perished, and grass had invaded the stone flags of the front room. But the gabled roof, as Freeman discovered by climbing up to it, was sound except for a few strayed stone tiles, the stone staircase was firm, the bedroom floors not unrepairable; while even the driver was impressed by the magnificence of the view. Freeman enquired the name of the house and locality; a bus driver passing in the road below told him that the village over the brow was Blackstalls.

The name seemed to strike a note in Freeman's memory. Could this possibly be the hillside township where his mother had been bred and courted? Was there a reservoir in the neighbourhood, he enquired? There was indeed; but moorland reservoirs, in the hills round Hudley, were not so unusual as to constitute a means of certain identification. Freeman was the last person in the world, he told himself, to entertain superstitions or romantic fancies, and he put away the belief in an ancestral connection on his part with Blackstalls, with a laugh. Nevertheless, there was no harm in it as a mere fancy, and certainly he felt very much at home in High Royd.
He decided on the spot to buy it and settle there. Gay, as usual, was pleased with what pleased her father.

That afternoon, having “looked over”, as he said, two or three Hudley lawyers—that is, charged in and out of their offices with Gay at his side—he picked one to do the business for him. Freeman was a good judge of men—he had seen so many—and this one served him well. Somehow in the course of the preliminary negotiations for the house all his financial affairs came into the solicitor's knowledge—Freeman was only too glad to transfer all that tangle to somebody else's hands—and the man told him emphatically that he had not the money with which to buy High Royd, he must be content to rent it. Freeman was amazed.

“Not the
money
?” he exclaimed, incredulous.

The solicitor had prepared a lengthy statement which he proceeded to explain in a blunt and forthright style, tapping each item with a square Yorkshire forefinger.

“I don't want to know all these details,” said Freeman impatiently—details always cluttered a design—“Tell me the essence of the matter in half a dozen words.”

“In half a dozen words, then,” said the solicitor: “You've very little capital and no income.”

“Really?” said Freeman. “Well, that is a surprise!” He laughed heartily, so that the solicitor stared at him; then fell to ruminating. “No—after all it's not surprising,” he said at length ruefully. “I've earned plenty but I've spent it as it came.”

“You never had anything at the back of you,” suggested the lawyer in an absolving tone.

Freeman, recognising a local phrase but not quite sure of its meaning, looked interrogative.

“No savings—nothing left to you by your parents,” expanded the lawyer.

“No savings and nothing left to me by my parents,” agreed Freeman with a rather grim smile.

His solicitor, after a prolonged haggle with the owner of High Royd, a Mrs. Eastwood, arranged that Freeman should rent the place on a monthly basis for what seemed to Freeman an amusingly small rent. The solicitor also disposed of the lease of Freeman's London flat, paid all outstanding bills, tidied everything up generally and wished to invest the sum which remained so as to bring his client a steady if small income. But the income thus secured would be so ludicrously small that Freeman roared with laughter at the sound of it.

“No, no—put the money in the bank and let me live on it. I'll earn more long before it's finished,” said Freeman cheerfully.

The solicitor did all in his power to persuade his client against this course, but was eventually obliged to comply, shaking his head and uttering mournful prophecies as he did so.

Freeman enjoyed himself immensely moving into High Royd. He did a great many of the repairs and all the painting himself, so that the old house looked really charming—just like a Freeman stage-set for a romantic play, in fact, when his few treasured pieces—furniture, pictures, glass—were installed. (Few—Freeman had rolled too far and too fast round the world to gather much of the moss of possessions.) And he was happy there. He felt at home. He and Gay settled in and became domestic; they discussed curtains and acquired a cat. The superb view was a continual inspiration; he painted the landscape from all angles, and felt his understanding of life clarified by its wide vision of human activity against the background of the uncaring hills.

On the material side, too, in spite of its remote situation the little farmstead was not too uncomfortable. Pure water from the Blackstalls reservoir gushed from the kitchen tap and the Hudley Corporation gas which lighted the sparse lamps in the road below had been brought up the slope to High Royd at some past time—the pressure was apt to be fitful, but the
convenience for lighting and cooking great. A bus ran along the road up to Blackstalls once an hour and thence returned down to Blackstalls Bridge, where one could catch a bus either to Ashworth or Hudley. In the winter the Blackstalls bus sometimes stopped its journey much lower down the hill, daunted by the snow and ice above, and this was inconvenient; but then where in the West Riding were buses not sometimes in the winter daunted by ice and snow? In a word, as Freeman and Gay often said to each other in congratulatory tones, High Royd had all the advantages of the top of the hill and lacked few of those at the foot. A telephone would have been a boon, and a supply of electricity an improvement, of course. But the Hudley Corporation was adamant about the possibility of a telephone—the nearest wires were a couple of miles away down the hillside—and Freeman's lawyer was adamant about the impossibility of installing an electric plant, producing such huge estimates of the expenditure necessary that even Freeman was convinced and abandoned the scheme.

Not that money was in short supply at first. The articles Freeman had previously scorned to write for lack of time, he now gladly composed—or rather, he talked about the selected subject to Gay, who put down a draft which he then corrected and illustrated. He was also invited to give a course of lectures at the Hudley Technical College; the fees were amusingly meagre, of course, but when one was living so very quietly, really they were quite astonishingly useful.

It was during these lectures that he came to know Peter Trahier—an event of which he was never certain whether it was more boon or bane.

The course was entitled
Art and Civilisation
. It was not within Freeman's power to give a formal, logically constructed lecture on some well-defined aspect of any subject; his method was to stand up and, beginning with some well-known characterisation of the period he was supposed to be discussing, roam up and down the centuries saying whatever came into his head.
He did not care in the least whether he “stuck” or not, and freed from this inhibiting anxiety he never seemed to lack material; he strode up and down with his hands in his pockets, enjoying himself immensely, while his deep strong voice rolled along, discoursing of the theatre, the arts, and life in general. His anecdotes were always spicy and often highly contemporary, introducing familiarly great figures whose names were a source of awe to his young hearers. His generalisations were stimulating, and he was always on the side of the anarchic against the authoritative, the free as against the established. In a word, he was just what the more intelligent and public-spirited of the Hudley Technical College students wanted, and his lectures, after the first, were crowded. Peter was studying economics, civics, statistics, the law of meetings and such dull matters in preparation for the political career he hoped to make, and (as he admitted frankly later) he dropped into old man Freeman's art course rather contemptuously—it would probably have little to offer to a keen, well-informed young Marxist like himself, but it was free, extracurricular, had caused a lot of talk; one might as well see what was going on.

Freeman noticed him at once. The lad was good-looking, almost striking indeed in appearance; tallish, with thick well-brushed sandy hair, and very lively grey eyes. The eyes were full of intelligence, decided Freeman as he strolled up and down the dais and observed Peter's quick response to his jokes and provocative paradoxes—Peter laughed always just a second before any other student, his reactions were just so much quicker than those of anyone else in the room. At the close of the lecture the lad asked some really admirable questions, well worded and spoken in a pleasant voice, and when the chairman closed the meeting, Peter came up to Freeman and continued the discussion ardently, admiration beaming from every feature of his agreeable young face. This admiration, this understanding, this ease of expression, were very
warming to Freeman, who discovered that the provincialism of his native town had been really rather chilling to his heart. Peter had to be driven away from Freeman almost by force by the chairman, and it was only natural that Freeman, laughing heartily, had called out to Peter over the intervening heads as they parted:

“Gome and see me, my boy!”

“When?” shouted Peter.

“Oh, any time—Sunday afternoon.”

Sure enough on Sunday afternoon Peter turned up, though the rain was pouring and the wind blowing as only on Black-stalls Brow could rain pour and wind blow. The young man's cheap raincoat was extremely wet, his sandy hair dark and ruffled, his cheeks bright red, when after a struggle with the elements and the criss-crossing lanes he eventually reached High Royd; it seemed he had walked from Hudley. He declined the offer of dry clothes from Freeman—probably, thought Freeman shrewdly, because clothes tailored for the burly Freeman would make the slender Peter Trahier look foolish—but accepted the kitchen towel from Gay to dry his face and hair.