George Passant’s voice was loud, strained, irascible, and passionate. He gave the entire lecture at a breakneck speed, as though he were irritated with the stupidity of his class and wanted to get it over. His voice and manner, I thought, were in curious contrast to his face, which wore an amiable, an almost diffident smile. His head was large and powerful, set on thick, heavy shoulders; and under the amiable smile, the full amiable flesh, the bones of his forehead, cheekbones and chin were made on the same big scale. He was not much over middle height, but he was obviously built to put on weight. His hair was fair: he was a full blond, with light blue eyes, which had a knack of looking past the class, past the far wall, focusing on infinity.
After that night, I made inquiries about George Passant. No one could tell me much: he had only come to the town in the previous autumn, was a qualified solicitor, was working as managing clerk in the solid, respectable firm of Eden and Martineau. He was very young, not more than twenty-three or four, as indeed one could see at a glance. Someone had heard a rumour that he led a ‘wild’ life.
Meeting George Passant was the first piece of pure chance that affected all that I did later. The second piece of chance in my youth happened, oddly enough, within a fortnight.
My mother was one of a very large family — or rather of two families, for, as I mentioned previously, her father had married twice, having four children by his first wife, and seven, of whom my mother was one of the youngest, by his second. For many years she had been on bad terms with her half-brothers and sisters: within her own mother’s family there was great affection, and they saw and wrote to each other frequently their whole lives long, but none of them visited their seniors or spoke of them without a note of anger and injury.
I had first heard the story in those talks by the fireside, when my mother let her romantic imagination return to the winter of 1894. It was then that she told me of the intrigues of Will and Za. For a long time I thought she had exaggerated in order to paint the wonder of the Wigmores. In her version, the villain of the piece was my Uncle Will. He was the eldest son of the first family, and my mother described him with hushed indignation and respect. His villainy had consisted of diverting money intended for the younger family to himself and his sisters. My mother had never succeeded in making the details dear, but she believed something like this: her mother had brought some money with her when she married (was she not a Wigmore?). How much it was my mother could not be sure, but she said in a fierce whisper that it might have been over fifteen hundred pounds. This money her mother had ‘intended’ to be divided among the younger family at her death. But Uncle Will had intervened with their father, to whom the money was left and who was then a very old man. Through Uncle Will’s influence, every penny had gone to himself and his two sisters (the fourth of the first family had died young).
I never knew the truth of it. My mother believed her story implicitly, and she was an honest woman, honest in the midst of her temptation to glorify all that happened to her. It was certainly true that Aunt Za, the oldest sister of all, Uncle Will and Aunt Florrie all had a little money, while none of the other family had inherited so much as a pound. It was also true that all my mother’s brothers and sisters bore the same grievance.
After twenty years of the quarrel, my mother tried to make peace. She did it partly for my sake, since Aunt Za was the widow of an auctioneer and thought to ‘have more than she needed for herself’. She had, since her husband died, gone to live near her brother Will, who ran a small estate agency in Market Harborough. My mother wanted also to repair the breach in order to show me off; but the chief reason was that she had deep instinctive loyalties, and though she told herself that she was making an approach purely for my sake, as a piece of calculation, it was really that she did not want any of them to die unreconciled.
Her move went about halfway to success. She visited Market Harborough and was welcomed by Za and Will. After that visit, birthday and Christmas correspondence was resumed. But neither Za nor Will returned her visit, nor would they, as she tried to persuade them, write a word to any others of the younger family. My mother, however, secured one positive point. She talked about me; it was easy to imagine her magnifying my promise, and being met in kind, for Za and Will had exactly her sort of stately, haughty manner. I was about fourteen at the time, and was invited over to Will’s for a week in the summer holidays. Since then I had gone to Harborough often, as an emissary between the two families, as a sign that the quarrel was at least formally healed.
On these visits to Harborough, I did not see much of Aunt Za (her name, an abbreviation of Thirza, was pronounced Zay). Her whole life, since her husband died, was lived in and round the church. She taught a Sunday-school class, helped with mothers’ meetings, attended the sick in the parish, but most of all she lived for her devotions, going to church morning and night each day of the year. I used to have tea with her, once and only once, each time I stayed with Uncle Will. She was an ageing woman, stately and sombre, with a prowlike nose and sunken mouth. She had little to say to me, except to ask after my mother’s health and to tell me to go regularly to church. She always gave me seed cake with the tea, so that the taste of caraway years later brought back, like a Proustian moment, the narrow street, the dark house, the taciturn and stiff old woman burdened with piety and the dreadful prospect of the grave.
I did not entertain her, as sometimes I managed to entertain Uncle Will. Yet apparently she liked me well enough — or else there was justice in my mother’s story, and Aunt Za felt a wound of conscience throbbing as she became old. Whatever her motive, she wrote to my mother in the autumn I entered the office, said that she was making a new will, and proposed in doing so to leave me ‘a small remembrance’.
My mother was resplendent with pleasure. It gratified her that she had brought off something for me, that her schemes had for once not been blocked. It gratified her specially that it should come through her family, and so prove something of past glories. As she thought of it, however, she was filled with anxiety. ‘I hope Za doesn’t tell Will what she intends to do,’ said my mother. ‘He’ll find a way to put it in his own pocket, you can bet your boots. You’re not going to tell me that Will has stopped looking after himself.’
My mother’s suspicion of Uncle Will flared up acutely eighteen months afterwards — in the spring of 1923, when I was seventeen and a half. My mother had been ill, and was only just coming down again to breakfast. There was a letter for her, addressed in a hand that could belong to no one but Uncle Will, a fine affected flowing Italian hand, developed as an outward mark of superiority, with dashes everywhere instead of full stops. As she read it, my mother’s face was pallid with anger.
‘He didn’t mean us to get near her,’ she said. ‘Za’s gone. She went yesterday morning. He says that it was very sudden. Of course, he was too upset to send us a wire,’ she added with savage sarcasm.
However, this hope of hers was not snatched away. My father and I attended the funeral, and afterwards heard the will read in Uncle Will’s house. I received three hundred pounds. Three hundred pounds. It was much more than I expected, or my mother in her warmest flush of optimism. Cheerfully, my heart thumped.
My father ruminated with content as we walked to the station: ‘Three hundred of the best, Lewis. Think of that! Three hundred of the best. Why, there’s no knowing what you’ll be able to do with it. Three blooming hundred.’
Almost for the first time in my experience, he was impelled to assert himself. ‘I hope you won’t think of spending it without consulting me,’ he said. ‘I know what money is, you realize. Why, every week at Mr Stapleton’s I pay out twice as much as your three hundred pounds. I can keep you on the right track, providing you never commit yourself without consulting me.’