She smiled. “That’s a nice way to look at it… You’d better catch this
bus or you’ll be late.”
He nodded. And then at the last minute: “I wonder… do you know who I
am?”
She replied, in a rather puzzled voice: “Why, yes—you’re the Mayor
of Browdley, isn’t that it?”
“Aye,” he answered, with a slow smile. “And I’ll bet you’d never heard of
Browdley till Charles told you. That’s how important it makes me.” He gripped
her arm. “See you again soon, lass.” And then from the bus platform: “I’ll do
what I can. I dunno how, but I will.”
Inside the bus and all the way to Browdley, by various slow-train
connections that took all evening and half the night, George still did not
know how he would keep his promise, though his determination to do so surged
into the familiar dimensions of a crusade.
George might have a Machiavellian mind, as Charles had
said, or he might
have made a Jesuit, as Wendover had once said; but there were times when he
knew that nothing is more effective than the direct approach. So after
pondering long on the problem of how to help Charles, he decided that the
first step must be to meet Livia himself and judge what help was needed; and
to meet Livia the simplest method seemed to write and ask for a meeting.
She returned a characteristic brief note that he could visit her any time
he wanted while she was at Castle Winslow.
It was a week before George could arrange to be away from Browdley long
enough to make the trip, and once again there was the complicated
uncomfortable journey by a series of trains. He was not surprised when no one
met him at Castle Winslow station, and as it was fine weather and there were
no cabs he walked the three miles from the station to the lodge gates,
wearing down by sheer physical fatigue a mounting excitement over the fact
that at last, after over twenty years, he was about to see Livia again. It
was curious how something had lingered to produce that excitement still. He
remembered the months immediately after he had known definitely that she
would not return to him—how she had been on his mind night and day, so
that he had scarcely been able to work; he remembered how he would wonder
whether to avoid the Stoneclough road with all its memories, or to exorcise
them deliberately by the self-torture of walking there; and how for weeks he
would try the one method and then, in despair, the other. But for years now
there had been nothing particular to remember or to try to forget.
At the lodge an old man hoeing potatoes in a patch of garden pointed
further along the road when George spoke the name MRS. Winslow. “She’s at the
Dower House—that’s about a mile. Turn left at the signpost and then
it’s the first place on the right behind the trees. There’s a lot of kids
there—you can’t miss it.”
George walked on, puzzled at the reference to ‘a lot of kids’, and more so
when he came near enough to hear their shrill cries and screams. At length he
glimpsed a rather large rambling house, well set back from the road behind
tall poplars. In the space between the road and the building children of all
ages from three or four to ten or eleven were romping as in a school
playground.
George walked in and the children took no notice of him, but a buxom
middle-aged woman who looked like a farmer’s wife changed her direction
across the yard as he approached. He gave his name and repeated who it was he
wanted to see.
“I don’t know whether she will,” answered the woman doubtfully. “She won’t
see anybody as a rule. You’re not from a newspaper, are you?”
George assured her he wasn’t.
He waited till a moment later the woman beckoned him from a doorway. As
she led him through the cool interior she explained the presence of the
children. They had been bombed out of their homes in some of the big
industrial cities, and this was one of the rehabilitation centres set up by
the Government for the recovery of special cases—‘like shell-shock’,
some of them, she said. George knew all about it, for there was a similar
centre not far from Browdley, which he had visited. “And does Mrs. Winslow
help in looking after them?” he asked, eager for some clue to what he might
expect.
“Yes, she helps. She’s all right with the children.”
Presently the woman opened a door leading to a kind of verandah in which a
few children were lying asleep or strangely awake in open cots. That
strangeness was another thing George had seen before—the tense stare,
the twitching muscles; these were the worst cases. And beyond them, arranging
pots of geraniums along a ledge, was Livia. She wore a large, shabby straw
hat and a bright-coloured dress.
At the instant of recognition he gasped with the sensation of something
suddenly switched off inside him, but it was not pain any more; and as always
when he had seen her afresh after an absence, recognition dissolved into a
curious feeling of never having seen her before, but of experiencing some
primitive thrill that time had neither enhanced nor made stale; but it was no
longer a thrill entirely of pleasure.
“Livia…” he said.
She looked up. “Hello, George.” She gave him an odd sort of smile. She had
not changed much in appearance—at least, not as much as he had
expected. She went on: “I didn’t think you’d be coming today when you didn’t
get here earlier.”
“I walked from the station.”
“Oh, didn’t Howard send the car? I asked him to.”
“Howard?”
“My brother-in-law. He probably didn’t do it deliberately. I mean he did
do it deliberately. I mean, he deliberately didn’t send the car. Just because
I asked him. He doesn’t like me. None of them do—except these.” As her
eyes ranged over the cots something came into her face that made George
reflect how beautiful she still was, provided one had ever thought her
beautiful at all.
“Well, it didn’t matter. I enjoyed the walk.”
“Come into the garden.”
He followed her. She had been taking cuttings from geraniums, planting
them in pots for the verandah, and without a word of apology or excuse she
now resumed the task, and with such concentration that George did not feel
she was giving him more than a part of her attention. At any rate, there was
to be no such dramatic or over-dramatic encounter as he had half expected,
and for this at least he was thankful.
He stammered: “I hope you’re well, Livia—after—after all
the—the trouble—you’ve had.”
“Oh, I’m all right. Poor Jeff, though. He’s in Japan, only nobody knows
where. If only the Government would send me out I’d find him—surely
it’s possible by submarine? They could put me ashore on a dark night—
like Casement in Ireland. Don’t they do that sometimes? Do you know anyone at
the Admiralty you could ask? I told Jeff I would… People thought I was
against his work—and so I was—because I could see all this
coming. In Hong Kong, I mean. The place stank of what was coming… And then
he had to go back into it all like a fool. I’d never have left him no matter
where he went, but they took him away. They took him away, George. I wish I
was with him still, even in a prison-camp. Where you are doesn’t really
matter. The earth is all the same.” She began to pick up a handful of soil
and sprinkle it into a pot. “I always liked planting things. Then you can let
history slip through your fingers—like peasants do. That’s why I want
Charlie to give up Cambridge and live on a farm.”
“To give up Cambridge?”
“Yes—what’s the good of it? We argued about it but he didn’t
understand. Nobody ever does. They argue and argue but they don’t FEEL. It’s
a little farm off the coast of Galway. I’d like him to settle down there and
rest from thinking, arguing, books… all that… dead things that have
caused all the upset…”
George watched her with curious intensity. She went on: “You don’t know
what the world is all about, George. You never did. All your meetings and
speeches—must have been thousands of them… what did they do? Or what
did they stop?”
George did not reply. The heedless fever of her voice had not only been
hard to keep pace with as a listener, but it had given him an inward tension
that left him without power or will to reply. Presently she exclaimed: “Well?
Don’t say you agree with me—that would be too amazing!”
He still couldn’t answer.
“Never mind,” she smiled, after another pause. “Tell me about
Browdley.”
“Browdley’s all right,” he managed to say, in hardly more than a
whisper.
“Not been bombed to bits yet?”
“Thank God, no.”
“Annie still with you?”
“Aye.”
“And Will Spivey?”
“Aye.”
“And there’s still the little garden I made?”
“It’s still there.” He added: “And Stoneclough too.”
She suddenly began to cry, but without any sound. The tears fell into the
soil as she went on filling up the pot. “Oh, George, what a long time ago! I
hope you’ve been happy.”
“YOU have, haven’t you?”
She nodded.
“I’m glad.”
“Yes… it was a thing to try for, wasn’t it? Love, I mean—not
happiness.” She stopped crying as abruptly as she had begun. “Poor Jeff… I
wish I knew someone at the Admiralty—Howard knows them all but he won’t
help. He doesn’t like me—Howard, I mean—Lord Winslow, that is. He
thinks I ruined Jeff’s career. And now he thinks I want to ruin Charlie’s.
Ruin… ruin… how can anyone make more than there is? I loved my father and
then I loved my husband and now I love my son… anything wrong in all that?
Or in these children… these have been ruined too, but not by love. I’ll
tell you what I do about them—are you interested?”
George murmured assent and she began to chatter with eager animation.
“They’re in need of almost everything when they come here—they have to
be clothed, as a rule, as well as fed—I get some of the older ones to
help in cooking and serving their own meals, also repairing their own
clothes—that is, if they can—and of course we grow most of our
own fruits and vegetables, so there’s always plenty of work in the garden.
But the worst cases can’t do anything at all for a time—they just
scream and cry and there’s nothing helps but when I talk to them, and I do
that. I talk nonsense mostly. When bad things are on their minds that’s all
they want to hear. Nothing serious. Not even politics.” She smiled. “Charlie
told me you were Mayor of Browdley now?”
George said that was so.
“You should have come here wearing your Mayor’s chain. To make the
children laugh. Always a good thing to make them laugh.”
George smiled back. “Aye, I might have.”
“You would, I know. You’re very kind. It’s just that you don’t think of
things, isn’t it? Or rather you think of too many other things…”
After that she continued to work on the geraniums for a long interval
—so long that George began to wonder whether she had forgotten he was
there.
But presently, with the air of a duchess at a reception, she turned to him
brimming over with graciousness. “It was so nice of you to come. And you’ll
come again, won’t you?”
“Do you—do you really WANT me to—Livia?”
“Of course. Any time. That is, before we go to Ireland…”
“You’re… going to take Charles… to Ireland?”
“Yes, for the vacation. And if I can I shall persuade him not to go back
next term—he only likes Cambridge because he’s got himself entangled
with a girl there.”
“WHAT?”
“Of course he doesn’t know I know, but it was plain as soon as I saw them
together. Poor boy… rather pathetic to watch him pretending she was just a
hospital nurse that came to give him massage treatment. Of course I don’t
blame HIM. In his state he’d be an easy victim.”
“You mean… you… you think she’s THAT sort of a girl?”
“I don’t care what sort she is, I’m going to put a stop to it.”
“Why?”
“Because I have other plans for my own son. It’s about time we got to know
each other—what with all the separations of school, and then the war…
and the peace isn’t going to be much better, for most people. Or are you
optimistic about it? You probably are—you always were about most
things… I won’t shake hands—mine are too dirty. But do come again
—before we go… Goodbye…”
“Goodbye, Livia.”
“And you will come again?”
“Aye.” He walked to the door, then hesitated and said: “My advice would be
to let that boy live his own life.”
“And marry the first girl he meets? That WOULD be optimism.”
He wasn’t sure whether she meant that such a marriage would be optimism,
or whether it would be optimistic of him to suppose that she would ever let
Charles do such a thing; and whichever she meant, he wasn’t sure whether she
were serious or merely ironic. Anyhow, he knew there was little use in
continuing the argument, the more so as she had again resumed the potting of
the plants. He said from the door, watching her: “I wish you were as good
with grown-ups as you are with kids, Livia. You’re doing a fine job with
these. Their parents’ll bless you for it.”
“Their parents are dead, George. Dead—DEAD.” Her eyes looked up, but
her hands worked on. “Fancy you not knowing that.”
George also felt he ought to have known it—though after all, why?
But Livia had always been like that, possessed of some curious power to
impose guilt, or at least embarrassment; and so he stood there in the
doorway, staring at her till he knew there was nothing else to say. Then he
walked off.
The woman who looked like a farmer’s wife accosted him as he was leaving
the house. “They telephoned from the Hall, sir,” she said, with new respect
in her voice. “His lordship wished to apologize about the car—it had a
puncture on the way to the station. But he’s sent another car to take you
back, and he also asked if you’d call and see him on the way.”
“Where would I find him?”
“The chauffeur will take you, sir.”
The Rolls-Royce swung into the last curve of the mile-long
drive and
pulled up outside the portico of Winslow Hall. It was an imposing structure,
in Palladian style; and George’s reflection at any normal time would have
been concerned with its possible use as state or municipal property; but this
was not a normal time, and to be frank, he did not give Winslow Hall a
thought as he entered it. He was thinking of Livia.