Three Sons (Timeless Classics Collection) Read online

  ‘Now what’s he done?’

  ‘He’s dead. Suicide, they think. Awful, isn’t it?’

  ‘Suicide? Whatever for?’

  ‘Well, he’d lived pretty fast and we warned him that he would have to pull up. I suppose missing the boat to-night upset him, anyhow he’s out.’

  ‘Poor devil.’

  Marty’s role for the run. His, and the play had gone well. He had all the luck in this career of his. All the luck.

  With his first salary he went to Asprey’s and bought his mother a brooch ‒ a peacock, its tail spread in brilliantly-coloured stones. The salesman was kind.

  ‘Some people think that peacocks are unlucky,’ he said, debating on the wisdom of the choice, ‘and some young ladies are not pleased to receive them because of that, sir.’

  ‘This isn’t for any young lady. It’s for my mother.’

  ‘Certainly, sir.’

  She was pleased with it, she had no superstition about peacocks, and it looked lovely on her plain dark frock. ‘Nice of you to remember me, Marty, Adam would never have done that.’

  No, he thought, but Luke would! Luke is the one who is so very different, and she knows it.

  Now his life was completely career-ridden. It had to be that way, of course. Contracts sent him down to Denham for pictures, or to Portland Place for broadcasting. He absorbed himself in a deluge of acting, and it was sheer joy. There were fewer week-ends at Dedbury, but he could not help that, and perhaps enjoyed them all the more when he did manage to snatch one. There was that idyllic time when his father was on circuit (thank Heaven!) and he and Carolyn and Luke had the place to themselves. They even got rid of that absurd tutor who was supposed to be coaching Luke; Marty thought that the man was a gawk, though apparently he fitted in with his father’s idea of what was proper.

  It was a glorious summer’s week-end, motoring down last thing at night after the show, in the car that his father thought extravagant, but the cost of which was merely a drop in the ocean of Marty’s riches. He lay in bed late next morning, enjoying every moment, then changed into blue print slacks from Antibes, and a silk shirt and sandals. It was the type of summer clothing that Dedbury wouldn’t understand, but it was comfortable. Even Carolyn quibbled over it.

  ‘Marty darling, don’t you imagine they’ll think you’re a bit queer?’

  ‘The general opinion of the world on actors is that they are mad, isn’t it? Let them get on with it!’

  ‘Yes, but I have to live here.’

  ‘Sorry, Mummy, but I haven’t anything else to wear. I could of course go out without my trousers, but I think that might be worse.’

  How lovely was Dedbury as he strolled down the garden! The first blue and pink lupins were out, and the fat red cheeks of roses pressed against the face of the house. Down the garden the unpruned bushes of monthly roses were showing pink and smelling delicious. Marty and Luke sat in basket chairs on the lawn, in the shade of the beech trees, with the heat haze rising in the distance over the parkland, and the cows in clusters under the trees, tortured by the flies.

  Luke was in a gay mood; he had been born with one of those optimistic natures which are so delightful to live with. His gaiety was infectious.

  ‘If you ask me I did well in missing Eton and Cambridge, though not so well having old Smith-Wyman trotting round with me. I can’t even get into the Anchor without his being upset. He’s got a thoroughly nice mind, you know.’

  ‘So you go to the Anchor these days? You’re coming on!’

  ‘Oh, I’ve popped in there for months now. Old Preston is pretty decent.’ Old Preston ran the Anchor Inn and was married to a retired music hall artiste, too pink and too blonde, with a stupendous bust that made further work on a trapeze impossible.

  ‘Yes, old Preston is pretty decent, though I don’t suppose Daddy would say so.’

  ‘No. But then Daddy has turned very T.T. since he took silk; only a spot with his meals, nothing matey at all. We’ll pop along at opening time.’

  ‘Well, even the young grow up,’ said Marty, and wrote a mental R.I.P. to Luke’s infancy, setting it firmly in the ground never to be uprooted again.

  At opening time they went down the garden sweet with the hot fecund smells of summer; warm earth, dark roses, and spilt honey all in one. They crossed the lane gratefully shady for the limes clustered closely with the elms. From the little church came the sound of an organ. Carolyn was inside, she always attended for the sake of the example, though really the days when this sort of thing was important seemed to have gone by. But Carolyn stuck to her principles, and even her sons could not laugh her out of it; not that Adam tried, he attended all services with her, following the text with such earnestness that although he did not know it, he did more to shake her faith than either of the others.

  The Anchor was already crowded, the public bar full, with Mrs. Preston swelling behind the counter and plying her beer engines industriously.

  ‘We’ll take it into the garden,’ said Luke, who knew the ropes. The garden stretched behind the inn, with small tin tables and chairs, half of them still overturned, but pleasant with old-fashioned flowers and made venerable by the proximity of the church from which the sound of the organ came. They sat down.

  ‘Arthur introduced me to this,’ said Luke.

  ‘Arthur Hardy? I didn’t know that he had ever been here.’

  ‘Yes, he has. He came to stay that year when Daddy went to Scotland, and we did have fun! He’s a homely person and awfully decent with it too. He had a little car we went everywhere in, you’d have thought a famous fellow like that would run a big car, but he didn’t. I think he was right. We got lots more fun out of the little one.’

  Marty stared at Luke. ‘But why did he come here?’

  ‘Well, why shouldn’t he? Mummy likes him a lot, so do I. It’s Daddy who is the stickler. He’s so smug. You never can get at him, you know, that stone wall business of his … Adam’s got it too …’ He drank up his beer. ‘Let me fetch you another, Marty.’

  ‘No thanks.’ Marty sat there fiddling with the tankard. ‘How did Mummy ever get to know Arthur?’

  ‘At Mum-Fussy’s. She knew him before she ever met Dad. They met at a garden fête, or something frightful, and they danced a barn dance together. Can you beat it?’

  ‘She wasn’t in love with him?’

  ‘Oh Lord, no!’ and he dismissed the idea. It was Marty who kept turning it over in his mind.

  They sat on with their beer, and the church clock striking the quarters, but they hardly needed it until the gate opened, and Carolyn herself appeared.

  ‘I guessed I’d find you here. Thank Heaven I had the presence of mind to park my prayer-book at home before I came to look for you. Talk about stepping from the sublime to the other thing …!’

  ‘Have a beer, Mummy?’ asked Marty.

  ‘No thanks, nor a nice port and lemon! Have you two boys nothing better to do than set this disgraceful example to the village?’ But her eyes were laughing.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Marty. ‘Mr. Preston agrees with me that all actors are bad lots, which is a nice thing, remembering that Mrs. P. was a trapeze artiste before her bust got too big for her.’

  ‘Really, Marty!’

  He grinned at her. ‘It’s all right, Mummy. Luke and I were sitting here discussing you and your lovers.’

  ‘My lovers?’ She sat down on the chair, putting her elbows on the table. ‘And how many lovers do you boys suppose I have had? Did it never occur to you that I should have to be a conjurer with the ability to produce a rabbit out of a hat, to find a lover in Dedbury?’

  ‘It did,’ said Marty, ‘only I thought you might have gone further afield.’

  ‘Well, drink up your beer and come along home. The maids get so ill-tempered if they are late in getting out on a Sunday.’ They went from the little inn garden, her hand resting lovingly on Luke’s. They were very alike, those two, thought Marty.

  Once his mother said to Martin, ‘I
always expected other women to come between me and my sons, but I never expected that their careers would separate us.’

  That was the time when he had been unable to get home for three months, because he was working so hard. ‘Truly, Mummy, it is a bit strenuous.’

  He had to get to Denham very early in the morning, and be made up whilst he was still only half awake. It would be better if he could get a house down there, but everybody was after houses, they weren’t possible to get. He had to admit that the actual work he did was dragged out in eternal hanging about, but the hanging about was tiring. Outsiders could not realise that at the end of the day all he wanted to do was to flop into bed. Marty was changing. He was developing the dressing-gown fetish, the too many cigarettes cult, and the irritability which came from overstrain.

  Anyway he was no longer immensely interested in Dedbury, when such a much wider vision had presented itself, for there nothing ever seemed to happen.

  Luke was better, Adam was in a curacy in the East End, the only link was his mother. Occasionally she wrote about Adam.

  Adam says some of the slums are too awful, and last time he came home, he had nits. Daddy was simply furious. Nits don’t go well with silk.

  Marty smiled over that one! He thought it served both Daddy and Adam right, though it was a bit hard on Carolyn.

  He was cast for a short Shaw season, which was what he had always wanted. He was a success, but then Marty was made in the mould that spells success; he climbed up and up all the time, acting, still acting, always acting. Encouraging expensive tastes, he moved into a more luxurious flat, one that overlooked the park, with a blue and terracotta interior. He had employed one of those women who see futures and auras in colour, and she had told him that blue and terracotta were right for him. He wondered vaguely if there were anything in such an idea, it sounded all rather like Adam at the time he had been under Hubert Blair’s influence, at the Hall.

  Marty was developing tiny idiosyncrasies which all stars develop, because they are the foothold on success. If he had had the time, he would have stopped then, but there wasn’t the time. He had to go on. Damn Denham, he thought.

  Then he met Hilda.

  In his life to date there had been hordes of glittering stars, but all the women were too perfect, too pretty, and he became indifferent to charm. He met Hilda by accident. It was when he was filming and this time had had to go down to the Isle of Wight, for the picture demanded several shots with a background of the Needles.

  Marty spent four days in Ventnor in spring. Ventnor was not Marty’s idea, with nippy cold weather and a penetrating wind. For him Kipling’s ‘Violets of the Undercliff Wet with Channel spray’ were too cold, and too difficult to find. The people of Ventnor stared at his hair, obviously suspecting peroxide, and in the hotel bar he overheard a chance waiter alluding to him as ‘His Blondship’, which he disliked.

  Getting himself into a camel coat, he marched off indignantly in the direction of Bonchurch, very much irritated with the attitude of the world in general. As he neared the lake, his day seemed to calm, or perhaps he came more under the lee of St. Boniface Down. It might even have been that the quick angry walking had warmed him, but he saw the little grey church brooding over a country yard of daffodils growing as they can only grow in that island. He called a halt. When the woman who had interpreted colour for him had chosen blue and terracotta, she had omitted his favourite tint, the lovely amber hue of early daffodils. They stood between their sabre-shaped leaves, a maze of beauty such as he could hardly believe, and, attracted closer to them, he opened the gate and went inside the churchyard, believing himself to be alone.

  Then he saw the girl. She was tending a grave, a small plain girl with mid-brown hair framing a dark skin that was almost sallow. Although her features were even, they were pleasantly homely rather than rare. A basket of squat primroses was beside her on the path, and she was arranging them in small bunches on a slab of grey stone, which had been in the churchyard far too long to be the resting place of any close relative of hers. Looking closer, Marty saw that it marked the grave of Algernon Swinburne.

  Recently he had been reading some of Swinburne’s poems for a broadcast, choosing them particularly because they exhilarated him by their lilt of words.

  No thorn goes as deep as the rose’s,

  And love is more cruel than lust,

  he thought quickly. He went nearer. The girl calmly arranged her flowers, then glanced at him with a friendly, enquiring look, not resenting his intrusion but merely casually interested as to who it could be. ‘You’re not a relative?’ asked Marty.

  ‘Oh no. I love his work, and I feel that this little is all I can do.’

  ‘That’s nice of you! I’m an actor and I read his poems occasionally. There was something that Swinburne could do with words …’ He didn’t finish it.

  ‘Yes, wasn’t there?’ She got up, smoothing down the shabby, tweed skirt, and shaking tiny bits of gravel and grass from it. She wasn’t taller, yet no shorter, than Carolyn, and she wore serviceable, unlovely clothes. ‘You say that you act? Ought I to recognise you?’

  ‘I don’t think so. My name is Martin Hinde.’

  ‘But of course. I heard you reading Swinburne only the other night, and loved it. My name is Hilda Thorne.’ It was the very name that he would have put to her, simple, dead ordinary, but more attractive for those very attributes in contrast to his extravagant and extraordinary life.

  ‘We shall be having tea at home if you care to come?’ she said naturally. He did care.

  Hilda Thorne lived with her mother in a small terrace above Bonchurch. They were out-of-date houses, with cream facades and grey slate roofs, but Marty liked the steps that led to each door, and the tiny gardens bright with bulbs, scillas, crocuses, and daffies in clumps. A flowering currant grew under the parlour window. Inside the rooms were poky, with a preponderance of Staffordshire china dogs, of samplers, amateur seascapes, and the impression of frayed rose silk behind the carved frontal of a cottage piano. Hilda’s mother was a quiet woman in the late fifties, tall and scrawny-bosomed, with an old-fashioned high-collared blouse, amply propped with celluloid on either side of her throat. But she was erudite in a late Victorian way, and both she and Hilda charmed him by their simplicity, filling a cavity in his own full life.

  Marty was in the mood to meet his fate. This small constricted room was the very setting for his big scene, because it was so smally different. Here were no property baskets, no jangle of voices, no directors, no chorus, no cameramen, no microphone. Hilda talked Swinburne to him, and he was lost in the labyrinth of lovely, tortured words. Before an hour was over Marty was lost.

  He liked the place, and walked home later, his hands dug deeply into the camel coat pockets, his heart high. But he had to think.

  Martin made stupid excuses to see Hilda Thorne again, pandering to a sudden, rather overwhelming love of the Island that had come to him, and of the people in it. He found himself with lines of Swinburne for ever running through his head:

  The kind wise word that falls from years that fall,

  ‘Hope thou not much, and fear thou not at all,’

  and did not know why he thought them. They went to Freshwater together, and walked on the down with the Tennyson memorial high above them. It ought to have been ‘In Memoriam’ that filled him; instead, it was,

  I will go back to the great, sweet mother,

  Mother and lover of men, the sea.

  I will go down to her, and none other,

  Close with her, kiss her, and mix her with me.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hilda, sensing his mood, ‘he could do queer things with words,’ then quite quietly … ‘I trod the grapes, I have drunken the wine!’

  There was Yarmouth with its small smugglers’ quay, the old cottages at Shanklin, and walking back along the cliff arm in arm. Quite soon, before he could really count the friendship in weeks, Marty said, ‘I love you. It’s crazy. It’s much too quick, but I can’t help i
t. I just love you.’

  ‘Yes, I thought you did,’ she said. She wasn’t flirtatious, she wouldn’t know how to coquette, and he loved her more for that.

  ‘What are we going to do about it, because I want to marry you?’

  ‘Well, what can we do?’

  ‘I suppose you’d hate to leave your mother and the Island?’

  ‘Yes, yes I would, but I can’t expect to take them both wherever I go.’

  They were sitting on a seat near to the cliff edge, with St. Boniface rising up behind them. The bleached grasses grew in a ragged fringe and the little trees were blown back from the sea into distorted shapes by the prevalent wind. A tamarisk made a frittered hedge beside them, and beyond lay the sea, calm and stretching out to the coast beyond the horizon.

  Mother and lover of men, the sea.

  ‘We could always have a house in the Island?’ he said.

  ‘Of course we could.’

  ‘You couldn’t let it stand between us?’

  ‘No, Marty, I don’t want to do that. I know that places are important, but we matter so much more.’

  His hand went along the seat seeking hers and holding it fast. ‘Dearest Hilda. I’m glad you said that. Yes, we matter.’

  VIII

  THE HUSBAND

  Hilda had loved him from the first, because she was the gentle type who loves but is never ravaged by a violent emotion. She was the Enid to Marty’s Geraint. Marty had never thought that he would love, and was swept off his feet. If she loved the Island, then they must arrange to keep a little house in the place, somewhere where they could always return for holidays and be together. An escape hole. If her mother wished it, then let her come and live with them in London, he suggested. But Mrs. Thorne did not wish it. She wanted to stay in the terrace above Bonchurch with the Staffordshire china dogs, the samplers and the piano with its frayed silk frontal.

  Matters simplified themselves. Hilda was prepared to share his life in London, at Denham, wherever fate led him. He brought her down to Dedbury on the first official visit. It was at a time when James was in bed with shingles, and annoyed about it, because he had planned a holiday to the Lakes.