He was smiling, as we went past the two-storey terrace, front doors opening on to the pavement. It was no use preparing him for what he was going to meet: he would certainly find my father odd, possibly a strain, but that he would have to take. At the end of the row we came to a pair of larger houses, joined together. I pointed to the nearer one, and told him that was where I was born. It was dilapidated, but, to judge from the television aerials on the roof, inhabited by a couple of families. On the strip of earth inside the railings – which my mother used to call the front garden – the laburnum tree had become a blackened stump.
With a concentrated gaze Charles studied the front room window, the peeling paint, the carved inscription between the houses,
Albert Villas 1860
, and said nothing at all. Then he asked: “Could we go in, do you think?”
“I don’t think so, do you?”
“Perhaps they wouldn’t like it.”
The next house along the road had been built in the same period, but was larger and stood on its own. In my childhood it had belonged to my Aunt Milly’s husband: he had been a building contractor in a small way, and they were less poor than we were, and had often (offending my mother’s pride) been obliged to support us. When my mother died, by this time nearly forty years before, my father had gone to live with Aunt Milly, who was his sister. There he had stayed. Aunt Milly’s husband died, then she herself. They were childless, and, though she had willed their savings to various temperance societies, the house had come to my father. He had promptly let it off, keeping one room for himself: and there he had lived for the last twenty years.
I led the way to that single room – down an entry, through a gate, into a yard paved with flagstones. The architecture of Aunt Milly’s house, like that of my mother’s, was bizarre, as though space didn’t matter and the more levels the better, so that there was a one-storey range, with a twenty-foot-high chimney, floors at yard-level: while five steps up was a French window, opening straight into my father’s room, which led into the main body of the house. Behind the French window one could see a glow on the ceiling, fluctuating, not very bright although the afternoon was dark, which must come from my father’s fire.
“There he is, I expect,” I said to Charles.
We went up the steps, and I rapped on the window. (There was a much quicker and more orthodox method of entry through the front door, but my father did not like being a trouble to his lodger.) Shuffle of steps. Rattle of handles. The two sides of the window opened, and in between them, facing us, my father stood.
“Well, I declare,” he said.
His first action was to peer up at Charles, making tunnels with his fingers over his spectacles as though sighting some far distant object.
“I shall want a telescope to look at him,” my father said.
I was six feet, and Charles, at fifteen, was only an inch or two shorter. My father was a little man. In my childhood he had claimed to five feet four: but now, with extreme old age, he had shrunk an inch or more. Standing there, old wide trousers flopping on his boots, his head seemed to come no higher than our chests.
“I want a telescope, that’s what I do.” He went on clowning. He had always clowned, as far back as I could remember; he had been cheerful in his clowning then, just as he was now.
After we had sat down in the crowded little room – Charles on a chair on one side of the fireplace, my father on the other, me on the sofa where he slept at night – he was still talking about telescopes, but in a different vein.
“You know, Lewis, I’ve always thought I should like one.”
I asked him why: I knew that tone by heart.
“Well, you never know what you might find out.”
He had daydreamed all his life. Just for an instant he was the supreme astronomer, discovering – at an advanced age and to his own mild surprise – new secrets of the universe. Or perhaps overturning established conceptions, an activity for which he had always had a secret fancy. All through my boyhood he had read travel books, often the same book over and over again: then he was the fearless single-handed explorer, going where no white man had ever trodden – he had a special feeling that the Amazonian jungle was the place for him. I had discovered, on my last visit, that he still borrowed travel books from the library at the corner of the road. As he sat in his chair, I could see a dozen or so books on the shelf behind him: they seemed the only books in the room, the only ones he possessed or had borrowed. How many of those were about travel? Or what other sorts of daydreams did he have?
“You never know what you might find out,” he chortled. “But I expect I should find out something wrong!”
He went on chortling with satisfaction. He hadn’t spoken out of self-pity, or at least, if he had, it was a singular kind of self-pity, which consisted of referring to himself as though he were the most ludicrous of jokes.
He was, as usual, happy. Sitting beneath the mantelpiece, on which stood a marble clock flanked by photographs, some of the choral society of which he had been secretary so long, together with one of my mother, he did not look his age. His hair was white, but he had lost none of it: his great drooping moustache still, amid the white, kept a touch of ginger: the lenses of his spectacles, which he could not manage to put on straight, had not been changed since middle age. His pop eyes remained innocently amused. By some genetic fluke, he had missed the deep blue irises which were dominant in the family: his father had had them and all the rest of us: Charles’, as he watched my father vigilantly across the fireplace, in that light looked not indigo but black. My father’s had not faded, but were very light, which made him appear more innocent. Sitting down he also appeared bigger than he was, since his legs were short and his head out of proportion large.
A kettle was boiling on the hob between them. My father had so far paid no attention to Charles, except once or twice to address him, with impersonal cheerfulness, by my Christian name or my brother Martin’s. Charles, on the other hand, was paying complete attention to him. Charles had met a lot of people, some formidable, many what the world called successful: but his grandfather was different from any. This was a test, not only of instinctual ties, but also of insight. At the same time Charles, I had no doubt, was listening to my father’s soft Midland accent, of which Charles could hear the vestigial overtones in me.
“Well, young man,” said my father, abandoning nomenclature as he spoke to Charles, “I expect you’re ready for your tea, aren’t you? I know I am.”
Politely Charles admitted that he was.
“I’m always ready for my tea,” said my father. “If I can’t do anything else, then I can always get rid of my tea.”
He hooted with obscure gratification, and sang a few bars of a song I didn’t know, in a voice still disconcertingly strong. Efficiently, neat-fingeredly, like a man used to looking after himself he made the tea.
“One, two, three spoonfuls – and one for the pot,” he chanted. He shuffled round the room, and produced the tea things. He produced also a large plate of cakes, jam tarts, custard tarts, éclairs, marzipan. “I always say,” my father remarked, “there’s nothing like something sweet to your tea.”
I did not agree, but Charles did. He might be perceptive beyond his years, but he had a healthy fifteen-year-old appetite: and so, while I drank a cup of tea and smoked a cigarette, the grandfather and grandson, with over seventy years between them, sat on opposite sides of the fireplace – in silence, except for appreciative lip noises under the moustache – eating cakes. Not just one cake each, but two, three, four, half-a-dozen.
When they had finished the plateful, my father sighed with content and turned mild eyes on me.
“You made a mistake there, Lewis. They went down all right, confound me if they didn’t.”
Then he seemed to feel that some concession was called for.
“Still,” he said, “you’ve got on well, I must say that.”
He had, I was sure, only the haziest notion of my life. He may have realised that I had played some part in affairs: he ought to have known that I was no longer poor, for I had told him so. Certainly he had never read a word I had written. Charles, still vigilant, was wearing a surreptitious smile. Unlike my father, Charles knew a good deal about what had happened to me, the rough as well as the smooth. He knew that, since I left the official life, some attacks had followed me, one or two predictable, and one based upon a queer invention. Charles did not, as some sons would, imagine that I was invulnerable: on the contrary, he believed that this last situation he would have handled better himself.
“I often wish,” my father continued, “that your mother had lived to see how you’ve got on.”
Yes, I did too. Yes, I thought, she would have revelled in a lot of it – the title, the money, the well-known name. Yet, like Charles – though without the sophistication – she would have known it all; once again, the rough as well as the smooth. Anyone who raised a voice against me, she, that fierce and passionate woman, would have wanted to claw, not as a figure of speech but in stark flesh, with her own nails.
“That’s how I like to think of her, you know,” my father said, pointing to the mantelpiece. “Not as she was at the end.”
I got up, took the photograph down, and showed it to Charles. It was a hand-tinted photograph, taken somewhere round 1912, when they were a little better off than ever after, and when I was seven years old. She was wearing a dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves: her black hair and high colouring stood out, so did her aquiline beak of a nose. She looked both handsome, which she could be, and proud, which she always was, sometimes satanically so. As I remarked to Charles, it wasn’t a bad picture.
What my father had said might have sounded sentimental, like a gentle old man lamenting the past and the only woman, the only happiness, he had ever known. On the contrary. My father was as little sentimental as a man could reasonably be. The truth was different. What he had said, was a plain statement. That was how, when he thought of her at all – he lived in the present and their marriage was a long time ago – he preferred to think of her. But it had been an ill-tuned marriage: for her, much worse than that. He had been the “wrong man”, she used to confide in me, and in my childhood I took this to mean that he was ineffectual, too amiable for the world’s struggle, unable to give her the grandeur that somehow she thought should be hers by right. Later I thought, remembering what I had submerged, that there was more to it. I could recall bitter words over a maid (yes, on something like £250 a year, before the First World War, she kept a maid): I guessed, though I should never know for certain, that under his mild and beaming aspect there was a disconcerting ardour, which came as a surprise, though a pleasant one, to himself. As their marriage got worse, he had, when I was quite young, found his own consolations. Since she died, it had puzzled me that he had not married again. Yet again I guessed that in a cheerful covert fashion he had found what he wanted: and that, on a good many nights, he had returned to this little room raising his robust baritone with a satisfaction, as though singing meaninglessly to himself, which as a child I did not begin to understand.
Charles was still looking at the photograph. My father made an attempt to address him by name, gave it up, but nevertheless spoke to him:
“She always used to tell me ‘Bertie, don’t be such a donkey! Don’t be such a donkey!’ Milly used to do the same. They always used to say I was a donkey!”
The reminiscence seemed to fill him with extreme pleasure. Charles looked up, and felt called upon to smile. But he gave me a side glance, as though for once he was somewhat at a loss.
The clock on the mantelpiece, in measured strokes, struck five.
“Solemn-toned clock,” said my father with approval. “Solemn-toned clock.” That was a ritual phrase which I must have heard hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. When she was hopeful, and her hopes though precarious were inextinguishable, it used to make my mother smile: but in a crisis it made her break out in jangled nerves, in disappointment at all the hopes frustrated. That evening, however, the sound of the clock set my father going: now he was really on his own; so far as he had any self-esteem, here it was. For the clock had been presented to him after a period of service as secretary to a male voice choir: and he had been secretary to similar choirs ever since, for nearly sixty years in all. This had been the theme of his existence, outside himself, and he proposed to talk about it. Which, with amiable, pattering persistence, he duly did. It was all still going on. Not so flourishing as in the past. What with television – he had refused to let us buy him a set, though there was a sound radio in a corner of the room – people weren’t so willing to give up the time as in the old days. Still, some were keen. There had been changes. Male voice choirs weren’t so popular, so he had brought in women. (That I had known; it had been the one political exertion of my father’s life; it took me back for an instant to my speculations of a few moments before.) He had managed to keep a group of twenty or so together. Nowadays they met for rehearsal each Sunday after service at St Mary’s, one of the churches in the town.
It was a quiet little obsession, but it gave him all the enjoyment of an obsession. I didn’t want to cut him short, but at last he flagged slightly. I could ask a question. Wasn’t St Mary’s a longish journey for him? It must be all of three miles.
“Oh,” he said, “I get a bus that takes me near enough.”
“But coming back late at night?”
“Well, one of our members, Mr Rattenbury” – (I wondered if Charles noticed that ‘Mr’ which my father had applied to each of his male acquaintances all his life) – “he usually gives me a lift.”
“But if you don’t get a lift?”
“Then I just have to toddle home on my own two pins.”
He rose from his chair, and exemplified – without complaint, in fact with hilarity – very short steps on very short legs.
“Isn’t that a bit much?” At his age, that was an understatement, but I couldn’t say any more. Even at this, his face was clouded, and I wasn’t going to spoil his pleasure.