The Heart of the Family Read online

  “Even if we stopped worrying and overworking, would the emptiness that would leave do us any good?” asked Margaret. “People always think that if they lived in a different place, in a different way, they would be different sorts of people, but they never are.”

  “You are most depressing, Margaret,” said Lucilla.

  “I know,” said Margaret. “I always was, and I can’t change now. I must do something about those handkerchiefs, Mother. I left them soaking in salt and water.”

  “She’s right,” thought Lucilla when Margaret had gone. “I talk a lot of nonsense. But, all the same, if we can’t stop worrying and overworking we ought to worry and overwork in a different sort of way. That’s the sort of change that should be possible. What a problem! I’ll ask Hilary.”

  It was warm and cosy with the fire lighted, and she slept a little, lightly and fitfully, very much aware of Maurice. The awareness increased and became a sense of patient waiting on the part of the other. This she had not known before, for those in the world of light who waited for her had no need of patience. It could not even be said that they waited, for waiting, like patience, implied imprisonment in time. They were just there. She opened her eyes and it was not Maurice who stood beside her but his son David.

  They smiled at each other, and then he said, “Are you all right, Grandmother?”

  “Yes, David,” she said. “Are you?”

  Ever since his school days they had given each other this greeting when he came home. As a boy he had considered this form of words adequate and informative without being sloppy, but now he did not care whether he was sloppy or not and he kneeled down like a child beside her, his folded arms on the arm of her chair and his face buried in them. It was a ridiculous attitude for a middle-aged man, an attitude both extravagant and sentimental, but he was both extravagant and sentimental, and when he was with Lucilla he did not care. He loved her more than anyone else in the world excepting only his daughter Meg.

  Lucilla gently touched his silvery fair hair. Then she withdrew her hand and waited. With his face still hidden he wondered if when she was dead he would feel that touch occasionally or whether he would have to do without it. Probably he would have to do without it. Lucilla, aware of what he was thinking, knew he would, for it is not in such ways that the dead make their presence known. It would do him no harm to do without it, for he had done without very little in his life. Though he and Meg were, she believed, her best beloved in this world, she was now a little more critical of him than she had been. This new clairvoyance of hers had given her new insight into his mind and she found it most alarmingly egocentric. Even now, though genuine feeling had put him where he was, she knew that self-dramatization kept him there. He was well aware how charming they both looked in the flickering firelight.

  “Get up, David,” she said sharply.

  He got up, laughing, for like Margaret he enjoyed the reassuring tang of her occasional sharpness. Then he sat down beside her, took her face in his hands and kissed her. In the past she had enjoyed the caresses that her beauty called down upon her, but she was not now so fond of them as she had been. She wondered if Meg liked being perpetually kissed; she had sometimes fancied that she had seen an expression of patience on her small face. She believed that the very old and the very young are less fond of caresses than their admirers imagine. She fancied that at the extremes of life, when one was either coming or going, one felt a certain detachment from the possessiveness of the time between.

  Yet her love for David was not less because she saw his faults more plainly and was a little fatigued by his emotions. She loved him more, if possible. Pity for human frailty grew with knowledge of it, and in the case of one’s children and grandchildren, through heredity and upbringing, one was responsible for so much of it. Would David, whom she suspected of being increasingly unhappy as he revolved upon himself in alternations of self-dramatization and self-hatred, have been a healthier man if she had spoilt him less as a child? Would Ben, the grandson who came next in her love, be so tormented now by indecision if she had not always made up his mind for him when he was a small boy? As her earthly life drew to its ending it was not only the sins of others that she saw with such clarity, it was her own even more, especially those that had harmed the children. “Is it well with the child?” was the question that often kept her awake at nights. There were only two of the children towards whom she could bear herself without a sense of guilt: her eldest son Hilary, whose sanctity in his old age had the quality of light, life-giving but untarnishable, and her grandson Tommy, a magnificent young savage who at the opposite end of the scale had a polished marble hardness that had always seemed impervious to any influence whatever, good or bad.

  “Are you all right, David?” she asked again.

  “You’ve asked that twice, Grandmother. That’s never been in the game.”

  “You’ve been away so long. Five months.”

  “Without you or Sally or Meg to keep me on the rails. More than likely to get in the devil of a mess, you think?”

  He spoke with a charming airiness, meeting her eyes with that straight, keen glance that Meg had inherited from him, but he did not deceive Lucilla. He was in some sort of trouble, as usual. She hoped not emotional this time, for surely he had left that sort of mess behind him when he married Sally. Economic, of course, but that was habitual with him. Something else. Something that went deeper than falling in love or inability to pay his super tax. She told herself she would do her best not to try to find out what it was, remembering that when she came to Lavender Cottage to make her soul (whatever she had meant by that) she had laid down the burden of Damerosehay and David. Sally carried it now.

  “Where is Sally?” she asked.

  “Outside in the car. She wouldn’t come in. We’re on the way home.”

  “You’ve not seen Damerosehay yet? You’ve not seen Meg?”

  “Not yet. You first, Grandmother.”

  “I don’t know why you should be so good to me,” she said humbly. Nor did she. The days when she had taken her children’s and grandchildren’s devotion for granted had long gone by. Nowadays she took nothing for granted. Her slow relinquishment of earthly life had taught her that nothing was truly hers but the love of God.

  “You had a good tour in the States?” she asked.

  “I had what newspaper jargon calls a magnificent triumph,” said David wearily.

  “I’m sorry,” said Lucilla simply, and reflected that fame was most peculiar. Men worked themselves to death for it, yet when they had the thing it seemed to go sour on them.

  She took his hand gently. It was a fine hand, very like his father’s, supple and with a strength in it that was lacking in his body. Hands, she believed, were indicative of character. She thought there was a hidden strength in David that had not yet been fully tested, not even by the gruelling experience of war. Her hand in his felt light and brittle as an autumn leaf, and a pang went through him. How would it be possible to live without Lucilla?

  “There’s Sally,” she answered him. “Go and fetch her, David. It’s not right to leave that darling child alone out there.”

  “She wanted to rest,” said David. “Tired to death. This new little varmint that’s on the way is wearing her out.”

  He could not quite hide his exasperation. He had not wanted a third baby. Meg and Robin, especially Robin, were enough. But Sally was an incorrigible mother, and obstinate in it. But for young Christopher (Sally said he was Christopher) he would have come home to the comfort of a wife instead of a weary woman near her time. Lucilla was undisturbed by his exasperation. David was much older than Sally and they had their inevitable difficulties, but she knew that whatever their surface agitations all was well with their roots.

  Lucilla had difficulty these days in remembering the ages of her children and grandchildren. She had managed to grasp the almost incredible facts that her eldest son
was over seventy and that Ben and Tommy had both had their twenty-first birthdays, but there she stopped. How old was David now? She supposed he must be nearly forty, but she hardly liked to ask, for he had had spectacular good looks and she realized that he would not find it easy to relinquish them. Not that they were leaving him yet. The height and grace that he had inherited from her he would never entirely lose, any more than she had, and there was not much grey in his smooth gold hair, but his skin was far too lined for his age and the hard lines of cheekbone and jaw showed too clearly. In the light of the fire his face seemed full of almost fantastic contrasts, sharp highlights and pits of shadow. The little hollows in Meg’s face caused a gentle and friendly play of light and shade, but in her father’s it was as though one fought with the other. Though he held his body relaxed and still in the chair beside her, Lucilla knew it was only with an effort of will. His restlessness, so rigidly controlled, was giving her almost a sense of suffocation; a faint echo, she supposed, of the torment it was to him. “And yet you have everything in the world to make you happy,” she said.

  “Grandmother, you’ve always told me it’s not the things in the world that do make you happy,” he said lightly.

  “Are not Sally and Meg and Damerosehay in the world?” she asked him.

  “Yes,” he said, and smiled. “And yet not the part of them that matters, and I can’t find my way to the roots. Is not that the trouble with most people? The surface is arid, and we do not find our way to where the freshness is.”

  “I suggest that you need a good dinner, darling,” said Lucilla. “And a good night’s rest.”

  He laughed, suddenly grateful for her refusal to be deflected from trivialities. They were best at first, while one found one’s footing afresh in the place and among the people who were the same and yet not the same, because after long absence one was not the same oneself, and neither were they. The surface shifted perpetually, like sand, and bedrock could not be found.

  He wrenched his thought back from the unattainable thing and with a glance at his watch (“Twenty minutes,” Sally had said) set himself to talk amusingly for the ten that were left. The gift of being entertaining at will he had inherited from Lucilla, and she seconded him ably; yet all the time her mind knew with eagerness that somewhere in what he had said there lay the solution of her own problem.

  — 2 —

  Sally gave a sigh of relief. She was at ease again and the fears had vanished. “Just leave me alone for twenty minutes and I’ll be all right,” she had said to David. And he had done what she asked. Another man would have refused to leave her alone in the car, feeling faint and sick after the long drive. He would have made her come in and lie down on Margaret’s bed and be driven distracted by Margaret’s fussing. But not David. He had an intuitive knowledge of how to treat the suffering; if just feeling sick and frightened could be dignified by the name of suffering.

  “It can’t,” said Sally to herself. “Nothing that I ever suffer can really be called suffering. I don’t know the meaning of the word. I’ve always had everything. I have everything now.”

  It was quite true. She had been Sally Adair, the only child of John Adair, a fashionable portrait painter and wealthy man who had delighted to give her everything she wanted, and now she was Sally Eliot, the much-loved and indulged young wife of a man equally famous and equally prosperous. She had a beautiful home and two enchanting children and would soon have a third. She looked younger than her twenty-six years, and in spite of haphazard features, and a body too tall and muscular for grace, she was good to look at; with her red-brown curls, white skin and courageous golden eyes. Her unself-consciousness, her complete lack of pose, gave her a sort of grace, while her humility made her appear not quite so tall as she really was. She had a deep voice, with the Scotch lilt in it—a singer’s voice. Her big hands were clumsy with her needle and with washing up but wonderfully skilful with children and sick animals. She was a comforting sort of woman, warm and glowing when she was in health, serene and strong. She looked born to be what she was, a loyal and selfless wife and mother in whom intensity of loving managed to coexist with steady common sense.

  Yet it was just here, in her vocation of wife and mother, that she suffered and was afraid. She knew that David did not love her as much as she loved him, that he never had and never would, but that she had accepted with a humility that robbed her knowledge of bitterness. It was not in hurt pride that her trouble lay, but in the fact that after five years of marriage he showed her so little of himself. He had been a sick man when she married him, for upon his highly strung temperament the war had borne hardly, and in the first years of their marriage she had rested him and given him ease. But there it had stopped. He had seemed to move beyond her then. Loving each other, they yet seemed alone, he in new and hard experience that he could not share with her, and she in her fear that she was incapable of sharing it. What could she ever know of the peculiar torments of a nervous and highly gifted man? She seemed not to have a nerve in her body and, apart from bathing babies and singing in tune, her gifts were nil.

  And merely physical pain, that so frightened her, was something he had not experienced. But even had he known what it was like she could not, for very shame of what she considered her cowardice, have talked to him about her fear of it; for shame and because if he had known how childbirth terrified her Robin would have been their last baby. And she wanted others. Her longing for children, her unreasoning conviction that it was right to have them, was stronger than her fear. And her fear was a double one, because her children seemed to her an integral part of herself, the most precious part, and she shrank from pain for them more than for herself. And what sort of world was this into which to bring children? That was a question that David had asked her with bitterness when she had wanted Christopher, and she had answered steadily that even with the world as it was she still believed it was right to have children. Had they not immortal souls? But even while she spoke of their souls, and smiled at David, the thought of the pain of their bodies had gone through her like a sword.

  She wondered often why it was that she, who had never ailed in her life, should suffer so much in bearing children. Everyone, including herself, had expected her to have them easily, and instead of that the whole process was for her as difficult and humiliating as it could be. She had worked too hard and too long in the Land Army in the war, her doctor said, but sometimes she thought there was more in it than that, some reason that for want of a better word she called a psychological reason. And certainly the fact that she who was naturally courageous shrank from pain with such dread seemed always demanding an explanation that she could not give. It was not like her, either, to question bewildering fears in loneliness. Until David went away from her into his private wilderness it had not been her habit to question anything, and she had thought about herself as little as it is possible for a human being to do.

  But still came the wonderful moments, as now, when her body was suddenly at ease and her fears fell away from her and she knew, instinctively, that below the deserts hidden waters run to far green pastures. She rested a moment in the thought of them and then turned gladly to the beauty outside herself in which she had always found her joy.

  A fuchsia hedge grew just inside Grandmother’s low garden fence and burst into flower over the top of it, and now the delicate scarlet lanterns swung in the wind and glowed like flame in a sudden burst of sunshine. Each was fire and music, for the outer petals turned up crisply to show the purple bell within, with its clapper swinging low on the long stigma. The grass of Grandmother’s garden was vividly green after the rain and there was a second budding of roses by the porch. Across the lane from the low white cottage the great yews in the churchyard were so weighted with darkness that they did not move in the wind, but their bright red berries lit their gloom and the glow of the sun was on their trunks. Hilary’s red-brick vicarage was mercifully half hidden by the swaying cherry-trees that gre
w at the bottom of his garden, but Sally had long ceased to think of it as ugly; it housed Hilary, and the sight of it was almost as reassuring as the sight of Hilary’s stout form in its shabby cassock.

  Damerosehay, Lavender Cottage, the Vicarage and The Herb of Grace, the old inn on the river where Lucilla’s second son George lived with his family, were all Eliot homes and fortresses of strength to Sally.

  Awake one stormy winter’s night, and a little scared by the fury of wind and water, she had imagined them standing at the four points of the compass, so that whichever way the wind blew it would bring with it the thought of the particular brand of courage which each house stood for. Her own home, so battered at times by the great gales from the sea, was a west-wind house. The men and women who had lived there before the Eliots and whose stories David had told her—Christopher Martin, Aramanthe and old Jeremy—had had the courage of the west wind, the clean uncompromising strength of it.

  The Herb of Grace was an east-wind house; not the bitter east wind of winter but the wind that blows out of a clear dawn, sending banners of flame across the sky and the ringing and singing of falling water and birdsong chiming round the world. Ben, Tommy, Caroline, Jerry and José were all growing up at The Herb of Grace, and faced the world with something of the jovial welcome of the house itself, as well as with the laughing valiance of their youth. Come what might they always seemed ready for it at The Herb of Grace.

  And Grandmother at Lavender Cottage had now for them all the gentleness, the warmth and comfort, the steady quiet breathing of the south wind that refuses to be ruffled by adversity. And Hilary in his northward-facing cold vicarage was after a lifetime of austerity so disciplined that one could not imagine him breaking beneath anything at all that might occur.