The gates of the ground stood wide open, and we walked along the road, under the chestnut trees. Trains kept passing us, but my father was not inclined to take one. He was quiet, except that once he remarked: ‘The trouble is, Lena takes it all to heart.’
He said it as though he was asking me for support.
As soon as he got inside the house and saw my mother, he said: ‘Well, I’ve seen my first match! There can’t be many people who haven’t seen a cricket match until they’re forty-five—’
‘Bertie,’ said my mother in a cold angry voice. Usually she let him display his simplicity, pretend to be simpler than he was. That night she could not bear it.
‘You’d better have your supper,’ she said. ‘I expect Lewis can do with it.’
‘I expect he can,’ said my father. Nine times out of ten, for he never got tired of the same repartee, he would have said, ‘I expect I can too.’ But he felt the weight of my mother’s suffering.
We sat round the table in the kitchen. There was cold meat, cheese, a bowl of tinned pears, jam tarts, and a jug of cream.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve had much to eat all day,’ said my mother. ‘You’ll want something now.’
My father munched away. I was ashamed to be so hungry, in sight of my mother’s face that night, but I was famished. My mother said she had eaten, but it was more likely that she had no appetite for food. From the back kitchen (the house sprawled about without any plan) came the singing of a kettle on the stove.
‘I’ll have a cup of tea with you,’ said my mother. Neither of them had spoken since we began the meal.
As my father pushed up his moustache and took his first sip of tea, he remarked, as though casually: ‘I did what you told me, Lena.’
‘What, Bertie?’
‘I told Lewis that we’re worried about Myrtle Road.’
‘Worried,’ said my mother. ‘I hope you told him more than that.’
‘I did what you told me.’
‘I’d have kept it from you if I could,’ my mother said to me. ‘But I wasn’t going to have you hear it first from Aunt Milly or someone else. If you’ve got to hear it, I couldn’t abide it coming from anybody else. It had to be from us.’
She had spoken with affection, but most of all with shame and bitter pride.
Yet she had not given up all hope. She was too active for that. The late sun streamed across the kitchen, and a patch of light, reflected from my mother’s cup of tea, danced on the wall. She was sitting half-in, half-out of the shadow, and she seldom looked at my father as she spoke. She spoke in a tight voice, higher than usual but unbroken,
Most of it swept round me. All I gathered was the sound of calamity, pain, disgrace, threats to the three of us. The word ‘petition’ kept hissing in the room, and she spoke of someone called the ‘receiver’. ‘How long can we leave it before he’s called in?’ asked my mother urgently. My father did not know; he was not struggling as she was, he could not take her lead.
She still had plans for raising money. She was ready to borrow from the doctor, to sell her ‘bits of jewellery’, to go to a moneylender. But she did not know enough. She had the spirit and the wits, but she had never had the chance to pick up the knowledge. Despite her courage, she was helpless and tied.
It seemed that Aunt Milly had offered help, had been the only relative to offer practical help. ‘We’re always being beholden to her,’ said my mother. I was baffled, since I was used to taking it for granted that Aunt Milly was a natural enemy.
My father shook his head, He looked cowed, miserable, but calm.
‘It’s no good, Lena. It’ll only make things worse.’
‘You always give up,’ cried my mother. ‘You always have.’
‘It’s no good going on,’ he said with a kind of obstinacy.
‘You can say that,’ she said with contempt. ‘How do you think I’m going to live?’
‘You needn’t worry about that, Lena,’ said my father, in a furtive attempt to console her. ‘I ought to be able to find a job if you give me a bit of time. I’ll bring home enough to keep you and Lewis.’
‘Do you think that is worrying me?’ my mother cried out.
‘It’s been worrying me,’ said my father.
‘We shall make do somehow. I’m not afraid of that,’ said my mother. ‘But I shall be ashamed to let people see me in the streets. I shan’t be able to hold up my head.’
She spoke with an anguish that overawed my father. He sat humbly by, not daring to console her.
Watching their faces in the darkening kitchen, I craved for a distress that would equal my mother’s. I was on the point of acting one, of imitating her suffering, so that she would forget it all and speak to me.
That night, when I went to bed, I took the family dictionary with me. It was not long since I had discovered it, and already I liked not having to be importunate. Now I had a serious use for the dictionary. It was a time not to worry my mother: I had to be independent of her. Through the tiny window of the attic a stretch of sky shone faintly as I entered the room. I could see a few faint stars in the clear night. There was no other light in the attic, except a candle by my bed. I lit it, and before I undressed held the dictionary a foot away, found the word ‘petition’, tried to make sense of what the book said.
The breeze blew the candle wax into a runnel down one side, and I moulded it between my fingers. I repeated the definitions to myself, and compared them with what I remembered my father saying, but I was left more perplexed.
It was still the month of July when I knew that the trouble had swept upon us. My father’s hours became more irregular; sometimes he stayed in the house in the morning and sometimes both he and my mother were out all day. It was on one of these occasions that Aunt Milly found me alone in the garden.
‘I came to see what they were doing with you,’ she said.
I had been playing French cricket with some of the neighbouring children. Now I was sitting in the deckchair under my favourite apple tree. My aunt looked down at me critically.
‘I hope they leave you something to eat,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said, resenting her kindness. Then I offered her my chair: my mother had strong views on etiquette, some of them invented by herself. Aunt Milly rebuffed me.
‘I’m old enough to stand,’ she said. She stared at me with an expression that made me uncomfortable.
‘Have they told you the news?’ she asked.
I prevaricated. She cross-questioned me. I said, feeling wretched, that I knew there was trouble with my father’s business.
‘I don’t believe you know. No wonder everything goes wrong in this house,’ said Aunt Milly. ‘I suppose I oughtn’t to tell you, but it’s better for you to hear it straight out.’
I wanted to beg her not to tell me; I looked up at her with fear and hatred.
Aunt Milly said firmly: ‘Your father has gone bankrupt.’
I was silent. Aunt Milly stood, large, formidable, noisy, in the middle of the garden. In the sunlight her hair took on a sandy sheen. A bee buzzed among the flowers.
‘Yes, Aunt Milly,’ I said, ‘I’ve heard about his — petition.’
Inexorably Aunt Milly went on: ‘It means that he isn’t able to pay his debts. He owes six hundred pounds — and I suppose I oughtn’t to tell you, but he won’t be able to pay more than two hundred.’
Those sounded great sums.
‘When you grow up,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘you ought to feel obliged to pay every penny he owes. You ought to make a resolution now. You oughtn’t to rest until you’ve got him discharged and your family can be honest and above board again. Your father will never be able to do it. He’ll have his work cut out to earn your bread and butter.’