Now that Hitler's chief embroilment was with Russia, air-raids on London had almost ceased, though no one could forecast the duration of the respite and it was clearly impossible to relax any precautions. There was, however, an immediate burgeoning of social life--a pale but defiant shadow of what it had been before the war, yet in many ways pleasanter than those last sepulchral dinner parties of 1939, the tables then loaded with food and the conversation heavy with foreboding. Now, at the close of 1941, the tables were lighter but the talk was at least that of people who had proved something, if only the nature of themselves. Even the disasters of 1942 did not bring back the mood of that dismal year after Munich.
Charles still took his turn at fire-watching but the absence of raids gave him more time off, and he was frequently invited out. Jane had made him a good talker, often by knowing when and how to talk to him; but now, he must presume, it was for his own sake and for his own unaided efforts he was sought after--which surprised him at first. Perhaps, he reasoned, it was because his work placed him near the centre of events, and people hoped he would spill secrets (it amused him to pretend to be doing this while actually avoiding it with great care). Or else it was because he was alone and easy to fit in. The real reason was one so simple that he hardly considered it--people liked him. His manners were rather pre-war, they admitted, and the things he said were sometimes a bit too clever in an older-fashioned way, but he was a decent fellow, always ready to do you a favour, and really, some of the things he said were sound enough, if only they had been put less elegantly. He was also, people thought, quite tolerably happy after a tragedy that might well have broken him; but in this they were wrong. Charles was not tolerably happy; he was tolerably unhappy. That is to say, he was unhappy, but he had found or made it tolerable.
When his name was in the New Year Honours List there was much professional raillery. 'Oh God, look who's down for a C.B.E. . . . STUFFY ANDERSON!' But then, as an afterthought: 'Well, it was about time he got something.'
* * * * *
Havelock had another stroke in the summer of 1944; this one was more disabling, affecting his left side and preventing him from taking more than a stumbling walk around the neighbouring streets. Gradually his world contracted to the room in which he spent most of his time, and from which he could see Big Ben and the twin towers of the Abbey. His mind had achieved a level of tranquillity that had not much impaired the quality of the brain, and it was odd to speculate on the difference in his fortunes if this mental change could have been inflicted in early life, and without the physical. Charles formed the habit of visiting his father for an hour or so before going to bed, no matter how late he returned from work or a social engagement; the old man enjoyed it, being fairly sleepless and fairly sleepy at all hours of the day and night. He liked to hear Charles's comments on the events of the evening, and Charles would repeat any special titbits of conversation he could remember. Charles found that he often enjoyed these post-mortems himself--so one-sided compared with those that he and Jane had shared, yet an agreeable way to sort out one's own impressions aloud and over a final drink.
The buzz-bombs and V2s arrived, several within noisy distance of the house, but Havelock, though they failed to excite him in the old way, did not dislike them nearly as much as Charles did, and was able to rationalize the situation in terms that Charles had to admit were very rational indeed. 'At eighty-four you haven't got a life to lose. You have only a fraction of a life--and nobody would bet on it being more than a very small and vulgar fraction. So why should I worry?'
'Or I,' said Charles, 'if I could look at it your way. My own fraction's climbing down. Couldn't possibly be much more than a half--and not the better half.'
'Why not?'
Charles laughed and parried the question, but when he was alone it was one he put to himself. WHY NOT? He thought of his life up to date; it wasn't hard to imagine a future that might be luckier. On the other hand, with buzz-bombs putt-putting overhead, it sometimes wasn't easy to imagine a future at all. Perhaps only old people and youths were always ready to indulge such a luxury.
Havelock grew weaker gradually, and with the weakness came passionlessness, so that he could talk over old days and old issues without rancour. He told Charles once, quite calmly, that he had always been doubtful whether he were really his father at all, because the dates of his wife's return to him after their separation and of Charles's birth permitted the suspicion. Charles was not as shocked, or even as concerned, as he might have expected to be, but he was interested--and mainly because the idea seemed to offer a possible clue to many hitherto puzzling facets of Havelock's behaviour. He found also that the idea brought him closer to his father in sympathy, as if the spiritual tie of a revealed neurosis could be stronger than that of the body. He was almost disappointed when, on mentioning the matter to Cobb, the latter discounted it. The dates, Cobb said, made it nearly (though not quite) impossible, and besides that, there had been no whisper at the time, as would certainly have happened if any other man had been involved in the separation.
'Then why DID she leave him?' Charles asked.
'She couldn't stand him,' Cobb answered.
They were both unwilling to discuss the matter further, except that Cobb brought up the matter of the family likeness. 'It's not just looks, sir--as it was with Mr. Lindsay--it's something hard to explain, but it's there, and I notice it more as you grow older. Of course you're nothing like your father in tastes and disposition, and yet . . . well, I wouldn't have any doubts if I were you, sir.' Cobb added, perhaps as an implied compliment (or else the reverse, Charles could not be certain): 'He was very handsome at your age.'
'He still is.'
'Yes--and there's a look about him now--sometimes when he's dozing in a chair with the sun on his face--he looks--well, sir, he looks just like a SAINT.'
Cobb smiled at the notion, and Charles also smiled. SIR Havelock, yes--but SAINT Havelock was a bit too much.
When he next saw his father Charles gave him what he hoped was the good news, expecting him to take more comfort from it than Charles could himself, for he knew by now that if he had been supplied with irrefutable proof that Havelock was not his father, his chief feeling would have been curiosity about who had been. He often wondered why his relationship with the old man had entered a phase of such warm indifference, such affectionately cynical toleration. He supposed it was largely because it was too late for anything else, yet still in time to realize that if you forgive people enough you belong to them, and they to you, whether either person likes it or not . . . the squatter's rights of the heart.
* * * * *
There came the days of the German collapse, when a future-- personal, national, and world-wide--seemed to emerge from the clouds of doubt that had hung heavily for a decade. Presently Japan surrendered also; the war was totally over. It was the second such occasion in Charles's life, as in that of millions of others, and completely different from the first. There were no wild scenes, no bonfires to scorch the lions in Trafalgar Square, no celebrations that became riots. To Charles the big personal event was Gerald's return--a boy of nine with a decided American accent and a tendency to find fault with the way things were done in England. Charles knew no easy cure for this, but could not regard it as too deplorable, remembering as he did that England (and for that matter America too) had been made great by people who had found fault with the way things were done in England. But he felt there was some need to lessen a child's disappointment with a country whose cars and trains and ice-cream sodas were so small, so he took Gerald for a seaside holiday and hoped it made him feel happier. He could not be sure; the boy was not one for showing his emotions. Charles also talked to the headmaster of the prep school where Gerald would begin his first term in September. The head told him there would be several other new boys who had spent recent years across the Atlantic. 'They'll probably be ragged a bit at first.' (But later he wrote to Charles that it hadn't happened like that at all. 'So far from being a
t any disadvantage, the boys who have lived in the Great Democracy seem to have made themselves a sort of aristocracy that the other boys look up to. Remarkable.' Charles agreed that it was, but he was also much relieved.)
One other thing he had been slightly concerned about was how Gerald would get along with Havelock. Of course there would only be the school holidays to present any problem, and even these would not be spent entirely at the house; nevertheless there was just the doubt in his mind that always existed in any human affairs connected even remotely with his father. But again to Charles's relief, everything happened as he could have wished--indeed, more so, for Havelock captivated the boy to a degree that almost presented a problem of its own. Charles could take sardonic comfort from thinking how like Havelock it was to show that as a grandfather he could succeed where Charles as a father seemed to have failed. But at any rate, Charles had to admit it eased the transition from American to English life by giving Gerald a personal excitement.
Though still clear in mind, Havelock was weakening physically, and there came a time when he could put words on paper with less trouble than he could speak. This meant that one of his favourite pastimes was still available, and Charles often found him busy with the anthologies, composing new parodies of chosen poems. Some of his efforts were obscene or scatological in an earlier manner, but an increasing number were respectable, and a few were rather charming. On a September evening soon after Gerald had gone to school Charles came home late from a meeting and found Havelock bent sleepily over some pencilled pages. One, to his surprise, was in Gerald's handwriting--it was a poem the boy had learned at school in America--Joyce Kilmer's 'Trees'. Apparently he had told his grandfather about this and had obligingly copied it out for him, and now Havelock had been at work on it. Charles would not have disturbed him for conversation but the old man opened his eyes and pointed to his effort. 'Just imagine,' he muttered, slurring over the words with difficulty, 'they made him learn it by heart over there. It's not a bad poem, but it's not as good as all that. . . . Now read what I've made of it.'
Charles read:
I think however well you know 'em
Trees aren't as lovely as a poem;
No majesty of palm or pine
Can rival Shakespeare's mighty line,
Or grandeur of the sylvan glade
Equal the spell that Wordsworth laid;
Nor even in the Yosemite
Where tops of trees are out of sight
Can you find fairer things or finer
Than in the verse of Heinrich Heine:
Trees have been here since earth began,
But poems only came with man.
'Very pretty,' Charles commented, and might have left it at that had he thought twice. But it had been so long his habit to deflate Havelock gently whenever the occasion offered that even now he could not forbear to add: 'I'm afraid trees haven't been here since earth began, but they came earlier than mankind, so perhaps your point holds. Another flaw is that the last word of your seventh line isn't pronounced "Yosemite" to rhyme with "sight", but "Yosemmity", with the accent on the "sem".'
Havelock looked considerably put out. 'Oh? How do YOU know?'
'I've been there.' (He and Jane, en route to South America, had once travelled from New York to San Francisco and visited Yosemite on the way.)
'You have, eh? You've really been all over the place, haven't you?' Havelock went on, with a touch of irritation: 'So it's Yosemmity? Well, we'll just have to change lines seven and eight, that's all. But not now--I'm too tired. . . . You might give it a thought yourself, Charles, if you have time--you're a clever fellow. . . . I want to send it to Gerald with my Sunday letter.'
Havelock was already half-dozing and Cobb waiting to put him to bed. Charles said goodnight and went to bed himself. An hour later, while he was reading a detective story, an alternative couplet occurred to him:
Nor even in remote Yosemite
Where trees uprise to an extremity . . .
He didn't think much of this, but as there seemed no possible rhyme except 'extremity' it might well be as good as could be got. On the kind of impulse to please his father which came most often when they were not together, he tiptoed into the adjacent room, found him already asleep, and also the pencilled poem on the table beside his bed. Charles inserted the change, then went back to his own bed. But now he was wide awake himself, and vagrantly, with the theme of trees still on his mind, he thought of the trees so far from Yosemite and so much smaller, the little trees in Linstead, all planted by hand, the trees in Ladysmith Road that Mr. Mansfield had chosen, loved, and watched as they grew, and Mr. Mansfield himself, who would doubtless, given a choice of poems as well as trees, have preferred Joyce Kilmer's idea to Havelock's . . . Oh, the laburnum trees . . . He could not sleep for thinking of them, and of faces under their yellow blooms, and of the days and nights of his youth. . . .
In the morning Havelock was weaker and stayed in bed, but he had already seen the new lines and approved them, 'That's fine, Charles, that really does the trick. Now I can send it off to Gerald. . . . Thank you, Charles. Thank you very much.' His eyes began to moisten, but this happened frequently now, with or without an emotion. 'Thank you, Charles,' he said again. 'You're not only a clever fellow, you're a GOOD fellow.'
It was not quite the last conversation they had, but it was the last of the parodies, and Havelock's letter to Gerald enclosing it was the last of his letters to anybody. He did not get up again, and after falling asleep as usual one November night he was found by Cobb in the morning, half smiling in death, with no signs of distress or of a final struggle. 'One of the things you rarely see,' the doctor commented.
Charles visited Gerald at school to tell him what had happened, and the boy burst into tears with more display of feeling than Charles had yet observed in him--and much more (from what Aunt Birdie had said) than when he had learned about his mother. Perhaps it was because he was now older and the loss was more recent. Or perhaps, Charles had to admit, Gerald had been Havelock's last conquest--the last and by all odds the most innocent. Proudly the boy showed his father the poem and the letter--a really delightful letter, warm and lively and humorous. It also contained a postscript to which Gerald naturally paid attention--a promise to give the boy 'the gold watch that the Shah of Persia gave me'.
Neither Charles nor Cobb had ever heard of such a thing, but when Havelock's safe deposit box was opened, there it was, gaudy but undoubtedly gold--'presented to Havelock Anderson--September 10th, 1910'. Charles was still curious, and after some research discovered that Havelock had successfully represented the Shah in a claim against a London insurance company for jewels stolen from a Biarritz hotel.
Besides the watch the deposit box yielded other discoveries, including the most varied collection of worthless stock and share certificates Charles had ever seen. He had long known that his father dabbled in the market, but he had always assumed the existence of a solid preponderance of sound investments. Now it became apparent that Havelock had lacked financial judgment as he had lacked many other kinds; but what dreams he must have had, Charles reflected, riffling through the scrip of long-defunct enterprises concerned with everything from no-sag spring mattresses to unbreakable gramophone records! Even the cash obtained from the sale of Beeching had been thrown away in Japanese bonds on the gamble that Japan would stay out of the war. (And yet, Charles remembered, it was Havelock who had had the premonition that Beeching would one day burn to the ground, and earlier still, just after the First World War, it was Havelock who had scouted Charles's easy assumption of a lifetime of peace. . . . Perhaps Blainey's verdict applied as well, or at least as charitably, as any: all his life Havelock had been a rum fellow.)
After paying debts and taxes the estate was worth a few hundred pounds, no more. To Charles, who had enough of his own, this came as no personal blow or even disappointment, but it saddened him as a final symbol of his father's worldly failure. Of the spiritual failure that mattered so much mo
re, he hated to think at all, because at times he wondered if this were an inheritance that had passed to him in part already. He was in a lost and lonely mood as he settled up Havelock's affairs. He had never been certain that his feeling for his father amounted to love, but he missed him far more than he would ever have thought possible.
Household changes followed inevitably. Cobb, now over seventy, had a handsome bequest in Havelock's will if only there had been money to pay it. Charles arranged for him to retire on a comfortable pension, since a widowed sister in Scotland was ready to share a home with him. Charles then gave up the Westminster house and was looking for something smaller when he was suddenly offered another diplomatic post. It was still only a First Secretaryship and in one of the less important European capitals, but he knew how few such jobs were available, with a whole crop of new men coming up on the heels of the older ones. Seniority was no longer the overriding factor, and bright youngsters were sometimes drawn now from other fields and pushed high on the ladder without ever having had to climb it. Charles did not think this bad, but he did feel (modestly) that it made the profession of diplomacy less attractive for a man like himself, and if he had been young again perhaps he would have tried something else. But he was not young, and here was a perfectly good First Secretaryship to say yes or no to. He said yes, even though it meant an immediate departure from London and missing Christmas with Gerald in Cheshire, where Aunt Birdie had invited them.
* * * * *
The years passed. Charles did pretty well, he thought, and heard privately that some of the sly ironies he inserted into his briefs and memoranda were passed round the highest circles for amusement if not edification. But he had better be careful. Wit was apt to be dangerous in English life; nine times out of ten the Gladstones prevailed against the Disraelis--and he was only a duodecimo Disraeli.