Her thoughts rambled again. With a last effort of will, she said in a clear, dignified manner: ‘I didn’t have a very good night. That’s what it is. Perhaps I’d better have a nap now. Please to come and see me after tea, dear. I shan’t be a bother to you then. I like to talk to you properly, you know.’
My mother died in May. From the cemetery, my father and I returned to the empty house. I drew up the blind, in the front room; after three days of darkness, the pictures, the china on the sideboard, leaped out, desolatingly bright.
‘Milly keeps on at me about living with her,’ said my father.
‘I know,’ I said.
‘I suppose we shall have to,’ said my father.
‘I’m not sure what I shall do,’ I said.
My father looked taken aback, mournfully dazed, with his black tie and the armlet round his sleeve.
I had been thinking what I should do, when I sat in the house and my mother lay dying. I had been making up my mind while in the familiar bedroom her body rested dead. I was too near her dying and her death to acknowledge my own bereavement. I did not know the wound of my own loss. I did not know that I should feel remorse, because I had not given her what she asked of me. I was utterly ignorant of the flaw within, which crept to the open in the way I failed my mother.
At the time of my mother’s death I was as absorbed in the future, as bent upon my plans, as she might have been. My first decision, in fact, was more in my mother’s line than my own of later years. For it was a bit of a gesture. I had decided that I would not go to live with Aunt Milly.
When I told my father that I was ‘not sure’ of my intentions, that was not true. The decision was already made, embedded in a core of obstinacy. What I said about it, however much I prevaricated or delayed, did not matter. On this occasion, I had already, in the days between my mother’s death and the funeral, been looking for lodgings. I had found a room in Lower Hastings Street, and told the landlady that I would let her know definitely by the end of the week.
I should have to pay twelve and six a week for that room and breakfast. I was getting twenty-five shillings from the education office. I calculated that I could just live, though it would mean one sandwich at lunchtime and not much of a meal at night. Clothes would have to come out of Za’s money; that was my standby, that made this manoeuvre possible; but I resolved not to take more than ten pounds out of the pool within the next year. In due time I should have made another choice — and then that money meant my way out.
I knew clearly why I was making the gesture. I had suffered some shame through my father’s bankruptcy. This was an atonement, a device for setting myself free. It meant I was not counting every penny — and to smile off the last winces of shame, I had to throw away a little money too. I had to act as though I did not care too much about money. And this gesture meant also that I was defying Aunt Milly, the voice of conscience from my childhood, the voice that had driven the shame into me and had, at moments since, trumpeted it awake. If it had been anyone else but Aunt Milly who had offered to take us in, I believed that I should have said yes gratefully and saved my money.
I was fairly adroit, however, in explaining myself to her — more adroit, I thought later with remorse, than I had often been with my mother, and then I thought once more that adroitness would have been no good, neither adroitness nor the tenderest consideration. With Aunt Milly, it was not so difficult. I did not want to hurt her; I had become fond enough of her to be considerate. It would hurt her a little, I knew. For, in her staring blank-faced dynamic fashion, Aunt Milly had always been starved of children. She had felt maternally towards me and my brother, though it sometimes struck me that she used a curious method for expressing it. And she could not understand that she put people off, most of all young children, whom she desired most for her own.
She left my father alone with me after we came back from the cemetery; Martin had stayed at her house since before my mother’s death. Aunt Milly did not let us alone all day, however; she came in that night, and discovered us in the kitchen eating bread and cheese. She examined the shelves, notebook in hand. She was marking down the crockery which was to be transferred. It was then that I put in a word.
‘I don’t know, Aunt Milly,’ I said, ‘but it might be better if I went off by myself.’
‘I never heard of such a thing,’ said Aunt Milly.
‘I don’t want to be in the way,’ I said.
‘That’s for me to settle,’ she said.
She had turned round, her face impassive and pop-eyed, but tinged with indignation. My father was watching with mild interest.
‘I know you’ll put yourself out and never tell us.’ I laughed at her. ‘And take it out of us because you’ve done so.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I should like to come—’
‘Of course you would. Anyone in his sense would,’ said Aunt Milly. ‘You don’t get your board and lodging free everywhere.’
‘As well as a few home truths now and again. It would be very good for us both, wouldn’t it?’
‘It would be very good for you.’
‘I’ve looked forward to it.’
‘I expect you have. Well, I’m ready to have you. I don’t know what all the palaver is about.’
Aunt Milly took words at their face value; to cheek and compliments she returned the same flat, uncompromising rebuff; but sometimes they had just a little effect.
‘Listen, Aunt Milly, I’ll tell you. I expect I shall want to study—’
‘I should think you will,’ she said.
‘That does mean I ought to be on my own, you know.’
‘You can study in my house.’
‘Could you study,’ I said, ‘if you had to share a room with my father — or your brother?’
Aunt Milly was the least humorous of women, and rarely smiled. But she was capable of an enormous hooting laugh. She had also been conditioned to think, all her life, that my father ought to evoke laughter. So she burst into a humourless roar that echoed round the kitchen. My father obligingly burst into a snatch of song, then pretended to snore.
‘One of the two,’ he said with his clowning grin. ‘One of the two. That’s me, that is.’
‘Stop it, Bertie,’ said Aunt Milly implacably.
My father, still clowning, shrank into a corner.
The argument went on. I was ready to stick it out all night. I was as obstinate as she was, but that she did not know. I played all the tricks I could: I flattered her, I was impertinent, I stood up to denunciation, I gave vague hints of how I thought of living.
Those hints made her voice grow louder, her eyes more staring and glazed. I proposed to go into lodgings, did I — and how was I going to pay for them out of a clerk’s earnings? I described what I thought my budget would be.
‘You’re not leaving yourself any margin,’ she retorted.
‘I’ve got a little money in the bank now, you know,’ I said. I had been careless to speak so. It might have provoked a storm, about bankruptcy, my father’s debts, my duty. She would not have been restrained because my father was present. But it happened that my mother, before she died, had made her promise not to deter me from ‘taking my chance’. Aunt Milly prided herself on having dispensed with ‘superstitious nonsense’ — for after all this was the twentieth century, as she asserted in every quarrel with my mother. She would have said that she paid no special reverence to deathbed promises. If she kept this one, she would have said, it was because she always kept her word.
‘I won’t say what I think of that,’ said Aunt Milly, with a thunderous exertion of self-control. Then she indulged in one, but only one, loud cry of rage: ‘No wonder this family will come to a bad end.’