Kept Page 17

  Chapter XV

  Father and Son

  As are the majority of political pacifists, Christopher Hammond’s father was in private life an exceedingly pugnacious person, and it was without enthusiasm that his son received half-way through October an announcement of his intention to visit London in the following week. “I shall be up,” he wrote, “for a couple of days, not more, on important business, and shall not have much spare time. We might dine together though on the Friday, and afterwards we could go back and see your flat. Your mother is, I need hardly say, most interested in it and is sure to ask me all about it. I shall expect you then, unless you wire me to the contrary, at the entrance to the Trocadero grill at half-past seven.”

  It was not a cheerful or a comfortable meal. The political situation was too acute to have permitted that.

  “No words can express,” Mr Hammond asserted, “my contempt for the treachery of the Liberal party. They have sold themselves to Toryism. They have betrayed us. From 1910 to 1914 we, the Labour Party, kept the Liberals in office. We held the balance of power. And we held it honourably. The Liberals have held it, and they have betrayed their trust. We shan’t forget. We shan’t forgive. They shall pay for this, the traitors, when our turn comes.”

  Angrily, vindictively, morosely, he thundered on, while the sole colbert on his plate cooled into a greasy, unpalatable paste. Christopher, for his part, was too worried by the approaching visit to his flat to derive any compensating pleasure from the excellence of the food and wine. It was going to be, he realised, an extremely difficult half-hour. One does not move from a small bed-sitting room in the Hampstead Road to a well-furnished three-room flat in Bays water unless one’s material position has improved considerably. And his had not. It was useless for him to pretend it had. His father knew his chief too well for that. There was no explanation as far as he could see for his presence there. What exactly his father would suspect he did not know. He had spent an industrious half-hour removing such articles as might provide those suspicions with a definite form. Before he left the flat he had turned the key fiercely of the bottom drawer of his writing-desk, and on all that it contained of powder puffs and scents and brushes, of beaded slippers and pale silk dressing gowns. He had taken before he left a long and careful reconnaissance of the position. Was there left a single incriminating article in the bathroom, the bedroom, or on the bedroom mantelpiece? Was there anywhere a trace of Manon? He did not think so. There remained the flat simply, with its thick pile carpets, its well-sprung, deep-cushioned chairs, its black framed etchings and lined rep curtains. The flat simply; but that in all conscience was enough.

  “As for Lloyd George,” his father was maintaining, “if I had my way that man would be expatriated. He used to say he was a democrat. Democrat,” he laughed scornfully, “I’ve no use for that sort of democrat. It’s going to be war to the knife between us and them.”

  His face grew hot and florid as he spoke. The stiff butterfly collar had grown limp and grubby under the pressure of that rolling throat. The black and white spotted foulard tie was riding up above the line of the shirt, and his coat had worked back into a ridge behind his shoulders.

  “And as for that MacDonald,” he continued, “I believe he’s worse. He ought to have moved a capital levy in his first week. He’s a traitor too.”

  “If,” thought Christopher, “he can work himself into this fury of indignation over the supposed incompetence of some wretched minister, what in God’s name will he have to say to me?”

  Slowly, through the interminable deluge of Mr Hammond’s rhetoric, the dinner passed beyond the stage of savouries and coffee. “And what liqueur would you like, my boy?”

  Christopher shook his head. “I’d rather not, thank you, father. Liqueurs make one feel thirsty.”

  “No. Very well then, I won’t either.”

  Mr Hammond spent several minutes checking the various items on the bill; he then called the waiter’s attention to a couple of mistakes and under-tipped him.

  “Teach him a lesson,” he said. “Now,” he said as they stood in the glow of Piccadilly, “what’s the best way to this flat of yours? A number nine bus, change at Hyde Park corner. Right. There’s one. Let’s jump on it.”

  His father might, Christopher thought, have stood a taxi. A cold bus ride was a poor sequel to a good dinner. If one had to economise it was better to economise in liqueurs. But then perhaps the Lancastrians were more accustomed to liqueurs than taxis. At any rate this grim, jolting journey would delay a little longer the moment of revelation.

  The approach to number eighty-nine Polchester Road was not markedly impressive. It was a nondescript sort of street. There were shops in it and a cinema, a couple of family hotels and a large block of flats. Mr Hammond strode down it with a free swinging step. He was digesting his dinner satisfactorily, and consequently was in a state of exuberant good humour. “It ain’t gonna rain no more,” he hummed, “It ain’t gonna rain no more.” “And you really find this part of the world more economical?” he said. “Myself I should have scarcely thought it would be. It must be a good quarter of an hour further from the city.”

  “The air’s better,” Christopher contrived to answer, and busied himself with a search for his latchkey. “Here we are, father,” he said, then added in a desperate rally, “I hope you’ll like it.”

  Number eighty-nine had been once a generously dimensioned house, and there had been found room when it had been split into flats to make of the ground floor, in addition to a small hall, two large sitting-rooms opening into one another, and a thirteen-foot bedroom. Never though had Christopher realised quite how large it was till he followed his father into the larger sitting-room and turned the switch of the top light. His father gave a gasp of surprise and stood standing in the centre of the room, his eyes travelling, as he turned, from floor to ceiling. Christopher’s effort to be the genial host was courageous but not successful. No reply was made to his suggestion that he should light the fire and fetch the whisky. His father was walking round the room examining each article like an agent making an inventory. He fingered the soft silk of the cushions and the rep curtains; he pressed with his hands against the springs of the sofa and the armchair; he tapped with his heel upon the floor to test the thickness of the carpet. He looked closely for the signature of the thin, black-framed etchings, and lifted to the light a small mahogany tea-caddy of which Manon had made him a house-warming gift.

  “Urn,” he said at last. “Now we’ll see the other room.”

  Without a word Christopher flung open the dividing door between the sitting-rooms. “What,” his father said. “Another sitting-room? Or do you sleep on that divan in the corner? That’s it, I suppose.”

  “No, father, the bedroom’s beyond. The door’s behind that screen thing there.”

  “Oh,” said Mr Hammond, and resumed his examination. He was conducting it more thoroughly now than he had done in the larger room. Not a single object escaped the process of valuation. Each article in turn was weighed and felt and prodded. “And now the bedroom,” he said. A couple of steps led down into what had been once a pantry. “Be careful, father,” Christopher warned him, “I’ll go on and turn on the light.” On his father’s face as he stepped down into the lighted room there was an expression of the most profound disgust. It was not perhaps, Christopher reflected, the sort of bedroom in which a north-country merchant would expect or hope to find his son. It was too obviously a woman’s room. A woman’s room from the oval pier glass, to the dressing-table with its five squared manipulation of lights and mirrors. A woman’s room with its wide low bedstead and hanging canopy of red satin, from the centre of which was suspended a gilt cupid bearing in his mouth the bulb of a reading lamp. Mr Hammond took one look at the room and then went out. His son followed him in silence.

  “Christopher,” he said when they were again in the farther room, “I know very little about rents in London, so on that point I will say nothing. The price of furniture
is, however, constant. The furniture in this flat is for the most part entirely new. Its value I should estimate between five and six hundred pounds. That I know. I know also something about business methods. I know that a man does not put six hundred pounds into such a concern as this unless he expects to make a pretty large and a pretty quick profit on it. I should in your landlord’s place expect a hundred pounds a year at least in rent for the furniture alone; I should be surprised if the rent of the flat was less than four guineas a week. You must be paying, that is to say, at least six guineas a week in rent. Your salary is three pounds a week. The allowance I send you is fifteen pounds a quarter. Your total income does not cover your bare rent. You are wearing; however, what seems to me an extremely well-cut and therefore expensive suit. How do you manage it?”

  Christopher murmured something about having been lent the flat, then realising that such a confession would only intensify his difficulties, abandoned that defence, and remarked that he’d had a little luck lately. His father surveyed him with the most grave suspicion.

  “Betting?” he said.

  This was a source of unexpected affluence that had not, because of his complete ignorance of racing, occurred to Christopher. He welcomed the suggestion heartily.

  “Yes, father,” he said. “The turf. I didn’t write and tell you. I thought it might worry mother,” His confidence had returned in a sudden rush to him. That was a happy shot about his mother.

  “Um,” said his father, and the suspicion in his face changed to a tepid friendliness. “Making money on the turf, have you? Well, you’re cleverer than your father then. What are you backing for the” Caesarewitch?”

  Christopher could not think of the name of a single horse that was running in the Caesarewitch. “I don’t bet much on the big races,” he said. “I prefer the smaller meetings.”

  “Then you’ve nothing on the Cambridgeshire?”

  “No,” he answered hurriedly, “nothing on the Cambridgeshire.”

  “Then what are you betting on at present?”

  Christopher’s fingers began to play anxiously with the lapel of his coat. He wished his father would not be so persistent. “As a matter of fact, father,” he said, “I’ve decided not to do much betting for a bit. It’s tempting providence. I’ve had a first-class run of luck and the tide’s bound to turn. Don’t you think it’s wise, father?”

  “Very wise, my boy, very wise. And what was the race you made your biggest pile on?”

  Christopher’s eyelids closed over his eyes in a desperate attempt to remember the name of any horse that had won any race, to reconstruct a single line of those numberless conversations that he had overheard in buses, those numberless confessions of good fortune, of outsiders backed, of favourites that had justified a people’s confidence. Every day of the year he heard men speak of horses and races, of jockeys and starting-prices. And he could not now remember one item of it. He could not think of a single horse that had during the last year passed the winning-post with the field behind it. Tishy, Epinard, Sansovino, Donoghue. The names danced before him; but in what connection, at what races, at what price. It was no good, he could not remember. His mind was like a gramophone record that had been held before the fire.

  “What race did you say, my boy?” his father was repeating, and once again that look of anger and distrust was making its way back into his expression.

  Christopher drew a deep breath. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I got my biggest winnings down at Newbury.”

  “And on what horse, Christopher?”

  It was useless to retreat now. There are some things no one forgets, and a poor man cannot pretend that he does not remember the name of the horse that rescued him from poverty. “There were four as a matter of fact,” he said. “Leander, Maraschino, Eros, and what was the fourth—ah yes, Penelope.” Four good names, Chris thought, four sound, convincing sort of names, and there was no reason to suppose that his father would know enough of racing to know the winners of four small races at a small meeting. Unfortunately, the names had been too convincing. The horse Penelope happened to exist, and once some four months back Mr Hammond had had the good fortune to entrust it successfully with a sovereign. He rarely gambled, and when he did, invariably lost. Penelope was a shining and singular exception. He had felt ever since a personal interest in the animal. He had followed his career from race meeting to race meeting, and he knew that Penelope had never been near Newbury in its life.

  “Penelope,” he said, “was not running at Newbury this summer.”

  “No,” Christopher echoed, “no.” He paused meditatively. “No,” he said, “no, no more he was. You’re quite right, father, he wasn’t. An absurd mistake of mine. It wasn’t Penelope. Of course it wasn’t. It was Ulysses—a natural association, father, of ideas. Have you studied Freud at all? It’s the rage here, you know. Extraordinarily interesting how often those theories of his work. I’ve got a friend who dreamt that he was climbing over a stile on a wet day, and his doctor told him that if he wasn’t careful—”

  But you cannot digress even on a subject of which you are profoundly ignorant if a pair of ferocious eyes are staring at you with the unleashed fury of the militant pacifist. Christopher’s excuses and Austrian psychology faded as so many other dreams have faded into the cold atmosphere of reality. “Christopher,” Mr Hammond said, and his voice thundered as the voice of doom, “there is no such animal as Ulysses. You know nothing about racing. You have never made a farthing on the turf. Everything that you have told me is untrue. That is so, isn’t it?”

  Christopher nodded his head. There was a point at which concealment became merely foolish. “You are quite right, father. It was quite untrue.”

  “Then where, Christopher, where does the money come from to support this flat?”

  Christopher did not answer. He did not propose to tell his father where the money came from. And when one bluff has failed, it is injudicious to attempt another.

  “I am your father, Christopher, I demand to know.”

  “And I am twenty-eight years old, and I have the right to make my own arrangements.”

  It was many years since Mr Hammond, except at political meetings, had been contradicted to his face.

  “Really,” he said, and as though overmastered by the effrontery of the assault, sat down suddenly in the room’s largest chair, his head leant back, and as he did so a curious perplexed expression replaced the look of indignant anger. He moved his head from side to side and sniffed once or twice hard. Puzzled and surprised Christopher stood watching him. Then with a sensation of alarm he understood. There was one trace of Manon that he had not removed, the black silk, gold-tasselled cushion that lay always on the back of the chair in which she sat, the cushion which had become impregnated with the rich scent of her neck and shoulders, and which often on lonely evenings he held with closed eyes against his cheek, imagining in the breath of that rich scent that she was close to him. It seemed to him a desecration that his father should be sniffing now contemptuously at something that was in its way a part of her.

  “Pshaw!” Mr Hammond said. “That explains it then. A woman.”

  “No, father, no,” said Chris hurriedly. “Not that. Not a woman.”

  “If it’s not a woman then what is it? Good God I Christopher,” and he jumped to his feet, his face contorted with horrified disgust. “You don’t mean to tell me—you’re not one of that crowd, Christopher?”

  “Heavens, no, father!” he almost shrieked the repudiation.

  “Because if you are,” his father was continuing, “my son or not my son, I’d have you flung into gaol for it. That’s one thing I will not stand for. If I thought you were one of that crowd, Christopher—”

  In spite of the moment’s harassment Christopher had never in his father’s presence felt more impelled to laughter. Manon would go into convulsions when he told it her.

  His father relapsed into his chair, the discussion had reached its climax and he realised i
t. It could only now degenerate into an unseemly wrangle. As chairman of more than one board he had come to recognise the moment at which further discussion is unprofitable, when the question must be put and a vote taken. There was a moment’s silence, then he rose, walked out into the hall, put on his coat, and stood a dramatic figure in the doorway.

  “I see, Christopher,” he said, “that you are resolved not to tell me how you can afford to live in a style that we both know to be in advance very considerably of your income. You have a right, you say, to make at your age your own arrangements. I do not deny it. But you have not the right at the same time to make your arrangements and to receive an allowance from a parent who disapproves of those arrangements. You must be independent financially if you are to be truly independent, and that independence, I understand, is the privilege that you are claiming. From this week my allowance to you will cease. It will be restored to you when you return to your former way of life, or when you decide to give me the explanation of your present way of life. A son has the right to be supported by his parents as long as he is content to remain under the guidance of his parents. When he decides to follow his own road, in opposition to their wishes, he must make it for himself. That is all I have to say, Christopher. I’m sorry. The subject will not be referred to again between us. Good night, my boy.”

  Ten seconds later the front door had closed behind him. “Damn!” thought Christopher. “That’s the worst of parents, they make you feel such a swine when they’re decent to you. In his way, I suppose, he really likes me. I couldn’t have told him though. Damn, oh damn, oh damn!”

  He did not when he next saw Manon describe the affair as he had intended to describe it, and as actually he supposed it to be, as a piece of dramatic comedy. He told her the facts simply; that his father had asked questions he could not answer, and because he could not answer them had withdrawn his allowance.