“I’ve got to sit back and let Arundale’s relatives do it for me, because I can’t compromise what she wanted left alone. All her life keeping up appearances, doing the correct thing, and now she has to die the same way.”
“She chose it,” said George.
“She never had a choice, being the person she was. If my father hadn’t been killed…”
“You do know about your father?”
“Do you?” challenged Lucien jealously.—
And neither of them was speaking of John James Galt, though he had done his part well enough, no doubt, during the year or so he had been in the place of a father.
“I know the Galts re-registered you as theirs when you were only a few months old, presumably as soon as the adoption proceedings were completed. I’m reasonably sure that your real father must have been one of the Czech pilots who were stationed at Auchterarne during the war. I guess that he must have been killed in action in 1942. But adoption certificates carry only the Christian names given to the child, and the name of the adoptive parent. His name I don’t know yet. I shall get it eventually either from Somerset House or from the service records. But that’s unnecessary now,” said George gently. “You tell me.”
“His name was Vaclav Havelka. I know, because she told me about him. Vaclav is the same name we call Wenceslas. That’s why he gave her his Saint Wenceslas medal. He hadn’t got anything else to give her. He hadn’t even got a country, then, only a job and a uniform. He was twenty years old, and she was sixteen, nearly seventeen, and they met at some innocent local bunfight when her school was up there in Scotland. There wasn’t a hope for them. Her people were set on her getting into society and marrying a lord, or something, not a refugee flyer with no money and no home. So she did the one thing really of her own that she ever did, she gave herself to him. Maybe she hoped to force her parents’ hands, and maybe she might even have managed it, but it never came to that, because my father was shot down six months before I was born. After that, she didn’t put up much of a fight for me.”
“How much chance did she have?” said Liri in a low voice.
“Not much, I know. With my father gone she hadn’t got anybody to stand by her. She had to tell her folks, and they took her away from school quickly and quietly, and then set to work on her, for ever urging her to have it all hushed up, to spare them the shame, to think of her future, when she hadn’t got any future. She gave way in the end. She’d have had to be a heroine not to. She let them hide her away somewhere to have me on the quiet, and then she let me go for adoption. But she insisted on meeting the Galts before she’d sign. They were decent, nice people who badly wanted a child, she knew I’d be all right with them. So she asked them to make sure that I kept my father’s medal, and then she promised never to trouble them again, and she never did. And after the war they married her off to Arundale, a big wedding and a successful career, everything they’d wanted for her. You know how he first met her? He gave away the prizes at her school speech-day, the last year she was there. It must have been only a few weeks before my father was killed.”
A school speech-day, George thought, dazzled, why didn’t I think of that? The white dress, the modest jewellery permitted for wear on a ceremonial occasion, the radiance in her face – Arundale must have had that vision on his mind ever afterwards. And she without a thought of him, or of anything else but her lover, the bridal gift round her neck, and the child that was coming.
Liri was frowning over a puzzling memory. “But you know, what I don’t understand is that Mr. Arundale practically told me that his wife couldn’t have any children. Not in so many words, but that was what he meant.”
“Felicity told me the same thing,” said George, unimpressed. “That’s not so strange. Can you imagine a man like Arundale being open to the idea that the fault might possibly be in him?”
“No,” she agreed bitterly, “you’re right, of course. Even in the Bible you notice it’s always barren wives.”
“And how,” asked George, returning gently to the matter in hand, “did you come to meet your mother again?”
“It was at a party the recording company gave, about six weeks ago.” Lucien turned his face aside for a moment, wrung by the realisation of how short a time they had had together. “She’d lost sight of me all these years, but after I started singing she began to follow up all the notices about me. I kept my own name, you see, so she knew who I was. She began to edge her way into the folk world, to get to know people so that she could get to me. And I… it’s hard to explain. I’d grown up happy enough. After the Galts were killed it was the orphanage, of course, but that was pretty good, too, I didn’t have any complaints. They told me I’d been adopted, naturally, they always do that, because you’re dead certain to find out one day, anyhow. We had one committee-woman who’d known the Galts slightly, and she told me how this medal I had had belonged to my father, who was dead, and my mother had let me go for adoption. I never had anything against my father, how could I? But there was always this thing I had about my mother, pulling two ways, wanting her because after all you’re not complete without one, and hating her because she just gave me up when the going got rough. And then this one day, at this party, there I was suddenly alone in a corner with this beautiful, fashionable woman, and she said to me: ‘I’ve been trying for ages to meet you. I’m your mother.’ ”
He doubled his long hands into fists and wrung them in a momentary spasm of anguish, and then uncurled them carefully, and let them lie still and quiet on his knee.
“You can’t imagine it. Not even you, who’ve seen her. She wasn’t like she is… was… here. The way she said it, with a terrible kind of simplicity, sweeping everything that didn’t matter out of the way. I thought I hated her, I even felt I ought to hate her, but when it happened it wasn’t like that at all. It was like falling in love. The way she was, it wiped out everything. She wasn’t courting me now because I was a lion, she’d just found her way back to me because she couldn’t keep away any longer. All she wanted was to be with me. Edward – that was a contract, and she must keep it. You know? She was even very fond of him, in a way, and very loyal. But loving… I don’t think she’d loved anyone or anything but me since my father died.”
“And you?” asked George with respectful gentleness.
“It was queer with me. If I’d always had her I should just have loved her casually, like anyone else with a mother, and that would have been it. But getting her back like that, quite strange, and beautiful, and still young… and so lost, and to be pitied! Sometimes I didn’t know whether I was her son, or her brother, or her father. I knew I was her slave.”
Yes, of course, from the moment he saw that she was his. Her adoration might well have disarmed Lucifer, pride and all, grievance and all. She had loved her Gil Morrice better than all her kith and kin, how could he help returning her devotion?
“We had to meet sometimes, we couldn’t help ourselves. We had so much time to make up. But then there was Liri… Liri broke it off with me, and I knew it was because of her, but I couldn’t explain, you see, it wasn’t my secret. We could never let it be known what the real connection was, my mother’s whole life, and his, too, all this build-up, would go down the drain if we did. We must have been mad to start this week-end course, and bring the thing right here into the house. And it was awful here, always so many people, we never could talk at all. And I had to talk to her, I had to. Because when Liri followed me here I saw she wasn’t absolutely finished with me, I was sure I could get her back, but only by telling her the truth. And I couldn’t do that, even in confidence, without my mother’s consent.”