James Hilton: Collected Novels (23 page)

Just before dawn one morning he dozed off in the chair and dreamed of his own boyhood, a dream he had had recurrently before, though never with such clarity. It was about his Uncle Joe, whom he had gone to live with when he was seven years old, and of whom he had had more fear (on one occasion only) than ever before or since of anything or anyone. What had happened actually, though not always in the dream, was that uncle and nephew had met for the first time at the house in Mill Street, when no one else was there. This was a few months after his father had died, a week after the funeral of his mother, and a few hours after the door had closed on his elder brother Harry, his elder sister Jane, and the furniture removers.

George had been the youngest of a family of six, with a gap so wide between himself and the rest that at the time he was left parentless all the others were grown-up and some of them married. Their bickerings about who should take care of him (each one having a completely plausible alibi) had made them jump at an unexpected offer from their mother’s brother, despite the fact that he and their father had quarreled years before over some point of behavior which (according to the latter) “just shows what a wicked man Joe is.” Nobody ever told George more than that; all Harry would add was an especially sinister: “You’ll find out soon enough, Georgie.” And when the Mill Street household was broken up, Jane and Harry watched the last of the furniture stowed away in the van, then looked at George as if it were somehow disobliging of him to be alive. Finally Jane whispered: “We might as well go now, Harry—George’ll be all right by himself till Uncle Joe comes—he said he’d be along as soon as he closed the shop.”

Which made an excellent excuse to go about their respective affairs and leave a boy of seven alone in an empty house in which both his parents had recently died, there to await (with no lights and dusk approaching) the arrival of a man he had never seen before, and who, from mysterious hints and rumors he had heard, must surely be some kind of monster.

And about nine o’clock this legendary Uncle Joe, having paused longer than he intended at the Liberal Club, came striding along Mill Street to knock at Number 24. George could not, at that moment of panic, decide whether he were more frightened of the darkness or of his uncle; he could only crouch under the stairs until the knock was repeated. Then he decided that the unknown peril was worse and that he would not open the door at all. But in the meantime Uncle Joe had gone round to the back of the house and found a door there unlocked, so that he simply walked in, stumbling and making a great commotion in the dark while he struck matches and called for George.

George saw his face first of all in the light of the quick-spurting flame—not, perhaps, the most reassuring way for anyone bordering on hysteria to encounter a feared stranger. He saw a big reddish face, with bristling mustaches, tufts of hair sticking out of the nose and ears, and eyebrows which, owing to the shadow, seemed to reach across the entire forehead.

The result of all this was that by the time Uncle Joe, groping after a series of wild screams that jumped alarmingly from room to room, finally traced them to the corner of an upstairs cupboard, George had fainted and the old man had used up all his matches.

The only thing he could think of was to carry the boy downstairs in his arms and thence out of the house into the street. They had reached the corner before George came to, where-upon Uncle Joe, panting for breath, gladly set him down on the edge of the curb with a lamppost to lean against. Then, being a man of much kindness but little imagination, he could think of nothing further but to relight his pipe while the boy “got over it,” whatever “it” was.

Presently George looked up from the curb, saw the big man bending over him, and, despite the now less terrifying eye-brows, would have raced away in renewed flight had there been any power left in his legs. But there seemed not to be, so he sat there helpless, resigned to the worst as he heard his captor fumbling around and muttering huskily: “Bugger it! No more matches—wasted ’em all looking for you, young shaver!”

Suddenly then, by a sort of miracle, the heartening message came through—that everything was
all right
; but only years afterwards was George able to reflect that in that same first kindly breath there had been the two things that had made his father call Uncle Joe a wicked man—namely, a “swear” and the smell of whisky.

All this was what
really
happened…but in the dream it did not always end like that; sometimes the fear of the stranger’s footsteps in the empty house lasted till the crisis of waking.

And now, years later, while his son lay desperately ill in the room above, George dreamed of this fear again, and was wakened by the doctor’s hand. “Sorry, George…but I think you’d best go up.”

“Is it—is it—bad?”

“Pretty bad…this time.”

George went upstairs, still with the agony of the dream pulsating in his veins; and then, from the bedroom doorway, he saw Livia’s face. There was no fear in it as she glanced not to him, but to the doctor.

The doctor walked over to the bed, stooped for a moment, then looked up and slowly nodded.

One thing was now settled more definitely than ever; George would not leave Browdley, and if she should ever ask him again he would answer from a core of bitterness in his heart. But she did not even mention the matter. She seemed not to care where they lived any more, and if an absence of argument were the only test, then they were at peace during the days that followed. But George knew differently, and he knew that Livia knew also. It was no peace, but an armistice on terms, and one only tolerable so long as both parties fenced off large parts of their lives as individual territory.

They both grieved over Martin, and comforted each other up to the boundary line, but that was fixed, and beyond it lay inflexibility. When, for instance, she said a week or so later: “Tom Whaley telephoned while you were out to say that the Council reconvenes on the seventeenth—” George simply nodded, and went to his study.

She followed him, adding: “He wanted to know if you’d be there.” She waited for him to reply, then said: “I don’t mind you going, George. I don’t mind being left alone in the evenings.”

He answered: “Aye, I shall go.”

“Perhaps you’d better let him know then—”

“Don’t worry—I met him in the street after he telephoned you. I told him I’d be going.”

And there was finality in that.

He went to the meeting and found there an atmosphere not only of warm personal sympathy, but of eagerness to accept him as a prophet; so that he scored, almost without opposition, the biggest personal triumph of his career. The housing scheme he had urged for years went through the first stage of its acceptance that very night; even his bitterest antagonists gave way, while to his friends he became manifestly the leader of a cause no longer lost. There was irony (unknown to any but himself) that at such a moment of easy victory he had never felt grimmer in spirit. When he reached home late that night Livia was in bed, and he would not disturb her, for the news he had did not seem enough excuse; she could read about it if she wished (and there was irony there too) in the pages of the next
Guardian.
But the excitements of the evening had made him sleepless, so he sat up in his study till daylight, reading and writing and thinking and working out in his mind the terms of the unspoken armistice.

One afternoon he found her with Fred, the messenger boy from the printing works, busily engaged in clearing up the yard behind the office that had always (as far back as anyone could remember) been a dumping ground for old papers, cardboard boxes, tin cans, and so on. It was such a small area, enclosed on two sides by buildings and on the remaining ones by high brick walls, that nobody had ever thought of any other use for it. But now, when she saw his curiosity, she asked if he would mind her turning it into a garden.

“Why, of course not,” he answered, pleased that she should show such an interest. “But I doubt if anything’ll grow there.”

“We’ll see,” she said.

“I’ll give you a hand with it if you like.”

“No, there’s no need. Fred will dig it over, and then I can do all the rest myself.”

“What’ll you plant?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll get you some books about gardening if you like.”

“Oh no, no…I don’t want
books.
”

And there was just the hint of a barb in that. It was as if she had chosen books as a symbol of
his
world, just as flowers were to be of
hers.
The books, too, were increasing all the time; some of them came as review copies addressed to the
Guardian
by publishers who did not realize how small and unimportant the paper was; many he bought, a few were sent him as chairman of this or that municipal committee. He had no collecting spirit, no special desire to make a show of what he had read. Yet as the books filled up the room, and new shelves had to be rigged till they covered most of the wall space, he could not help a little pride in them to match Livia’s pride (and his own too) in the transformed dumping ground below. And his pride grew definite from the moment that Councillor Whaley, visiting him once while Livia was out, exclaimed: “George, I reckon this must be just about the best library in Browdley—in anyone’s house, I mean. What does your wife think about it?”

“
Livia
?…Why…why do you ask that?”

“Only because she once worked in a library herself—I thought maybe books were in her line too.”

“No,” George answered. “She likes gardening better.” And he took Tom to the window and pointed down to the rectangle of cleared ground. “She says she’ll plant roses.”

“Why, that’ll be fine.” And then as an afterthought: “Nobody’ll see it, though—except you. Maybe that’s the idea—to give you something to look at.”

George smiled. “I don’t know, Tom. But
my
idea is that it gives her an interest in life. She needs it—since losing the boy.”

“Naturally. But I’ll tell you what, George, if you don’t mind plain speaking from an old bachelor.” He whispered something in George’s ear about Livia’s youth and having more children. “Aye,” George replied heavily, and changed the subject.

Martin’s death seemed to bring him into immediate friendship with Father Wendover. Neither ever referred to the curious “coincidence” that both must often have recollected; nor did the priest talk much from the standpoint of his profession. He showed, however, considerable interest in George’s family background, and once he said: “You’d have made a fine upstanding atheist, George, if only your father had lived a bit longer.”

“Maybe,” George answered, “but Uncle Joe didn’t continue the training, and the result is I’m no more an atheist today than you are…Not that he was
against
religion, mind you. He even sent me to Sunday School.”

“Why?”

“To be frank, I think it was because he thought Sunday Schools were a good way of giving kids something to do when they were too dressed up to do anything else.”

“An appalling idea.”

“Oh, I don’t know. He was all right.” George mused for a moment. “It’s odd we should be discussing him, because I dreamed about him the night Martin died…Aye, he was all right. And he liked his Sundays too—in his own way. To my father they were days of gloom and mystery and foreboding, and that was the way he wanted ’em, but to my uncle they were nice comfortable days when you had a late breakfast and took a walk along the canal bank while dinner was cooking and then had a snooze in the afternoon and high tea at five o’clock—and that was the way
he
wanted ’em.”

“Did he ever go to church?”

“Aye, when he felt like it. It’s true he felt like it less and less as he grew older, but he still counted church as part of a proper Sunday program. He used to say he’d attend regularly if only Aunt Flo were a bit better on her feet, and he’d have liked to put more in the collection plate if only he hadn’t lost so much in cotton investments, and he’d have been proud as punch if I’d had a voice to sing in the choir—but I hadn’t…Altogether what he’d have liked to do was so well-meaning you could hardly call him irreligious, while what he actually did was so little that he interfered with nobody—not even me.”

Wendover, having watched George’s face during all this with a growing conviction that its look of guilelessness was sincere, now slowly smiled. “Is that your portrait of a good man, George?”

“Well, he was good to me,” George answered, simply.

Trade remained sluggish in the town, but the
Guardian,
mainly because of Livia’s reorganization, began to show a small profit. George was then able to give her more money, but she seemed to care as little about it as about anything else over which he had any control. Yet she did not mope, brood, or look particularly unhappy. Nor did she nag, upbraid, or quarrel. It was merely that she seemed in some peculiar way to have withdrawn into a world of her own, where George was not invited nor could have followed her if he had been.

One evening early in 1921 he came home after a long day out of the town on municipal business, having left in the morning before she was awake. But now, hearing him enter, she came scampering down the stairs, and at the instant of recognition he gasped with the sensation of pain suddenly switched off inside him. Then, as always when he saw her afresh after even a few hours’ absence, recognition dissolved into a curious feeling of never having seen her before, but of experiencing some primitive thrill that the few years of their marriage had neither enhanced nor made stale. Whatever that was to him, it had been from their first moment of meeting and would be till their last; it was something simple that only became complex when he sought to analyze it. Just now he was glad to hold her in a brief hug of welcome and feel that everything was miraculously all right, even if it wasn’t, and nothing needed explaining, even if it did.

He said he was sorry he was late, and she answered brightly: “Oh, that’s all right—the dinner won’t spoil. Lamb stew—can’t you smell it?”

He sniffed hard and joyfully; lamb stew was one of his favorite dishes, and he would relish it all the more from thinking that perhaps she had prepared it to please him.