I assured him — in the light, familiar, companionable tone that had always existed naturally between us — that we would have long and exacting conferences. My father chuckled. A trifle puffed out by his success, he produced a singular piece of practical advice.
‘I always tell people’, he said, as though he were in the habit of being deferred to on every kind of financial business, ‘never to go about without five pounds sewn in a place where no one can find it. You never know when you’ll need it badly, Lewis. It’s a reserve. Think of that! If I were you, I should get Lena to sew five of your pound notes into the seat of your trousers. You never know when you’ll want them. One of these days you’ll thank me for the idea, you mark my words.’
In the train, we found an empty third-class carriage. My father stretched his short legs, I my long ones, and we looked out of the window at the sodden fields, sepia and emerald in the drizzle of the March afternoon.
‘I don’t like funerals, Lewis,’ said my father meditatively in the dark carriage. ‘When they put me away, I wish they wouldn’t make all this fuss about it. Lena would insist on it, though, wouldn’t she?’
His thoughts turned to more cheerful themes.
‘I’ve got to say this for Will, they did give us some nice things to eat,’ said my father, as naturally and simply as ever. ‘Did you try the cheesecakes?’
‘No,’ I said with a smile.
‘You made a mistake there, Lewis,’ said my father. ‘They were the best I’ve tasted for a very long time.’
We did not go straight home, but instead crossed the road from the station and called at the old Victoria, which later became, for George Passant and me and the circle of friends we called the ‘group’, our habitual public house. My father suggested, feeling a very gay dog, that we should celebrate the legacy. I drank two or three pints of beer; my father did not like beer, but put away several glasses of port and lemon. He became gay without making any effort to control himself. Once he lifted his voice in a song, his surprisingly loud and tuneful voice. ‘No singing, please,’ called the barmaid sourly. ‘Don’t be such a donkey, Bertie,’ my father muttered to himself, mildly and cheerfully, imitating my mother’s constant reproof.
Their relation, I knew, had deteriorated with the years. It was held together now only by habit, law, the acquiescence of his temperament, the pride of hers, and most of all the difficulty of keeping two ménages for those as poor as they were. He did not mind very much. So much of his life was lived inside himself; in his own comical fashion he was far better protected than most men; his inner life went on, whatever events took place outside — failure, humiliation, the disharmony of his marriage. That day, for example, he had experienced happy moments as the accomplished financier and, later in the Victoria, as the hard-bitten man of the world. He was simple, he did not mind being laughed at, he was quite happy, the happiest member of the family, all the years of his life.
I got on with him as I had always done, on the same level, with little change since my childhood. He asked for nothing. He was grateful for a little banter and just a little flattery. It would not have occurred to him, now that I was in his eyes grown-up, to ask me to spend a day with him. If one came by accident, such as this outing to Market Harborough, he placidly enjoyed it, and so did I.
At last we went home. We got off at the tram stop and walked by the elementary school, the library, Aunt Milly’s house, just the same way as I had run in sudden trepidation that night before the war, when I was a child of eight. Returning from Za’s funeral, however, I was, like my father, comfortable with a little drink inside me. A cold drizzle was falling, but we scarcely noticed it. My father was humming to himself, then talking, as I teased him. He hummed away, zum, zoo, zum, zoo, zoo, zoo, pleased because I was inventing reasons for his choice of tune.
We were almost outside our house before I took in that something was not right. The gas in the front room was alight, but the blinds were not drawn. That was strange, different from all the times I had walked that road and seen the light behind the blinds.
I looked straight into the empty, familiar room. Above, in my mother’s bedroom, the light was also burning, but there the blinds were drawn.
Aunt Milly let us in. In her flat energetic way she said that my mother had had another attack that afternoon, and was gravely ill.
I went to see my mother late that night. Her voice was faint and thick, the lids fell heavy over her eyes, but she was quite lucid. I only stayed a moment, and left the bedroom with the weight of anxiety lightened. She seemed no worse than I had often seen her. None of us knew how ill she was, that night or the next day. We were so much in ignorance that, on the next evening, Aunt Milly set about attacking me on how I should dispose of my legacy.
I was sitting in the front room, below my mother’s bedroom, when Aunt Milly came downstairs.
‘How is she?’ I said. I had not been inside my mother’s room since early that morning, before I departed for the office.
‘About the same,’ said Aunt Milly. With no change of expression at all, she went on, her voice loud and vigorous: ‘Now you’ll be able to start making an honest man of your father. It’s high time.’
‘What do you mean, Aunt Milly?’
‘You know very well what I mean.’ Which, though she had momentarily startled me, was true. ‘You can pay off another ten shillings in the pound.’
I met her stare.
‘It’s the honest thing to do,’ she said. ‘You needn’t pay Tom’s share yet awhile. You can keep that in the bank for yourself. But you’ll be able to pay the other creditors.’
An obstinate resolve had formed, when she bullied me as a child, that I would never pay those debts, however much money I made and however long I lived. Now I liked her better, saw her as a woman by herself not just as a big impassive intruding face, an angry threatening voice, that filled the space round and wounded me. I liked her better; but the resolve had stayed intact since I was eight. However much Za had left me, I should not have used a penny as Aunt Milly wanted.
But I could deal with Aunt Milly by now. Once she used to hurt me, then I had toughened my skin and listened in silence; now that I was growing up, I had become comfortable with her.
‘Do you want to ruin me, Aunt Milly? I might take to drink, you know.’
‘I shouldn’t be surprised. Anyone who doesn’t pay his debts’, said Aunt Milly unrelentingly, ‘is weak enough for anything.’
‘I might be able to get qualified in something with this money. You tried hard enough to get me qualified as an engineer, didn’t you? You ought to approve if I tag some letters after my name.’
I said it frivolously, but it was a thought that was going through my mind. That too made me hang on to the money, perhaps it determined me more than the resolution of years past.
Aunt Milly had no humour at all, but she could vaguely detect when she was being teased, and she did not dislike it. But she was obdurate.
‘You can always invent reasons for not doing the right thing,’ she said at the top of her voice.
Soon I went upstairs to my mother. I expected to find her asleep, for the room was dark except for a nightlight; but, in the shadowy bedroom, redolent with eau-de-Cologne, brandy, the warm smell of an invalid’s bedroom, my mother’s voice came, slurred but distinct: ‘Is that you, dear?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was Milly shouting about?’