A Prayer for my Son

Chapter 1. Snow-Shine For Arrival-2

'Here's John,' Janet said.

'Hullo,' John said, and then he held out his hand. 'How are you?'

She felt and shared his own sense of intolerable shyness. He did not in all probability realize all the implications of this meeting, but he knew enough of them to feel a deep awkwardness and possibly strong, urgent resentment.

She went forward and took his hand. 'How are you, John?' she said. She bent down and kissed his forehead.

He received her kiss as though he had known that this ghastly thing must occur. She realized that that had been one of the moments he had been dreading and that now everything would be a little easier. She realized, too, that to the virgin mind of Janet Fawcus all this was of a dreadful indecency--the unmarried mother greeting her bastard child--and suddenly she thought: 'How inconceivably stupid of me! Janet must have fought her father's decision to invite me here with all the force she possessed. I had never realized how abandoned she must have thought me.' She felt it exasperating that Janet should be present at her first meeting with her own son. She longed to have the courage to say, 'Leave us for a moment, won't you?' but she could not and the woman did not move. Something had to be done, the pause had already lasted too long.

'You have been skating, John, haven't you?'

His eyes were eating into her face. He was studying her with an absorbed attention, having forgotten completely all the rules of conduct, that you must not stare at strangers, and so on. His eyes never wavered from her face as he answered:

'Yes. The pond's been frozen for a week. I'm getting quite good.'

'John, dear,' Janet said softly, but he gave a little impatient wriggle of his shoulders.

'Oh! I'm not swanking, but Mr. Brighouse said so and he can skate like anything.'

'I live in Switzerland most of the time,' said Rose, 'so I get plenty of skating, or could have if I wanted it.'

'Why, don't you want it?' he asked, his eyes wider than ever, staring at her.

'Yes, but you know what it is,' she said, smiling, 'when you have so much of anything all round you, you don't value it in the same way.'

'No, I suppose you don't,' he said. 'It's like being an assistant in a sweet-shop. They get as bored as anything with chocolates and cakes.' He drew a quick little breath. 'I don't think I'd ever be bored with marzipan,' he said.

Janet pressed her hand in a little on his shoulder. 'Come, John,' she said.

And it was at that moment that Rose knew her first instant of sharp, intense rebellion. What right had this woman to tell her son to go at this moment? This was her moment. If the woman had had any kind of decency she would have left them alone together. Then Rose remembered. She smiled, looked him full in the eyes, nodded and lightly said:

'Good night, John. See you to-morrow.'

He said, his eyes still on her face: 'Yes. I hope the frost holds, don't you?' Then turned and went out with his aunt.

The room was very quiet. There was a gentle tap on the door. Rose said, 'Come in,' and a small, rather pinched-faced little maid stood in the doorway. She asked whether she might pull the curtains. Then, standing near the window, she asked whether everything was all right, please, miss?

'I didn't know,' she said, 'whether that would be the dress you'd be wanting to wear.'

Rose looked and saw--what she had not noticed before--that her evening frock was laid out on the bed, and that it was the smart one of grey and silver. She smiled. 'Oh, thank you. How nice everything is! But I think that I'll have the black one to-night.'

'Oh yes, miss. I didn't know.' And she moved very quickly to the drawer, brought out the black taffeta dress and put the other one away, then drew the heavy thick mulberry-coloured curtains across the windows and moved to the door. Again she said: 'Will that be everything, miss? Dinner's at quarter to eight.'

'Yes, thank you,' Rose said. 'What is your name?'

'Sally, miss.' The girl gave her a sharp, inquisitive look.

'I suppose,' Rose thought, 'they already know all about everything.' But there was more in the look than mere personal curiosity. It said not only 'I wonder whether all they say about you is true,' but also 'I wonder how much you know about us.'

There was something pleasant about the girl's face, something unagreeable too. But Rose felt, without having any real reason for her instinct, that this young girl was important in the house. While she dressed she had to struggle against the cold. The electric fire gave out heat, but the room seemed to contain cold as a well contains ancient water. The walls gave off cold so concretely that she could almost see it, and the cold from the world outside seemed to press in from the windows. 'I suppose,' she thought, 'it is the central heating I have been used to in Geneva that makes me feel this. I have never been so cold in my life before. It is as though there were something personal about it.'

When, however, she went down to the drawing-room, there was a great fire leaping wildly in the old dark fireplace, and all the many many things in the room leaped and sparkled with it. The room seemed filled with a kind of aimless chatter. Two clocks were ticking away. Two canaries in a gilt cage near the window were twittering. There was the noise of the fire. And behind all these things a kind of undertone, as though people out of sight were whispering together.

'The fact is,' Rose reflected, 'this house is so old that you feel the past in it more than the present.' She stood, one shoe up on the fender, her skirts a little raised, warming her ankles, looking into the fire.

The door opened and a young man came in. He was slim and dark, with a bright intelligent face--that was all she noticed about him. He seemed to her a perfectly ordinary boy with that odd gesture of surprise that belongs to so many of his generation as though he were discovering that things were very different from what he had been told they would be. She noticed all this--his dark good looks, his friendliness and his rather surprised eagerness as he shook hands with her and said:

'My name is Michael Brighouse. I'm John's tutor. I know who you are.'

And she showed that at once they were friends when she said to him: 'And I know who you are. You are the first person John mentioned to me.'

'He is a jolly good kid,' Michael Brighouse said. 'I'd have known anywhere you were his mother,' he added, staring at her, she knew, with admiration and liking.

'He is very young for his age,' she thought, 'but we are going to be friends, and that is a good thing. I shall need a friend here.'

The door opened again and Colonel Fawcus came in. Her impression of him at once was of height and breadth rather than the stout Pickwick rotundity that she had expected. He must have been well over six feet in height, his shoulders seemed tremendous, and only his round, bespectacled red face and snow-white hair carried on the Pickwick illusion. But she was bathed at once in the full tide of his kindly congeniality.

He came forward with both hands outstretched and caught hers, and, all his face smiling even to his large, rather protruding ears, he said: 'Welcome, my dear Rose, welcome. How kind of you to come.'

She noticed that in some trick of light his round glasses caught the glare so that she could not see his eyes. What she did see were his mouth, his nose, his cheeks, his high red forehead and, above all, his ears. All these were smiling in a kind of ecstasy of welcome, but it was at that moment as though a blind man were greeting her.

'You know Brighouse?' he said, putting his hand on the boy's shoulder. 'I expect he has introduced himself.'

'Yes,' she answered, 'and I had heard of him from John before that.'

'Ah! you have seen John,' Colonel Fawcus said quickly.

'Yes. He came to my room for a moment.'

'And what did you think of him? It must have been extraordinary after so long.'

She realized that he intended to deny and hide nothing. He was welcoming her with all the facts on the table. She had not expected to find him so large, so strong, so breezy. She had known that he was kind.

Then Janet came in wearing a black dress that fitted her badly and emphasized her bony neck and her thin arms. She did not use any kind of make-up. Her nose was a little red, pinched with the cold, and there were faint streaks of purple veins on her sallow cheeks. But the great thing about her was that however plain she might be she did not care.

'She is full of pride,' Rose thought, 'of self-satisfaction. She knows just what she wants and always gets it. She is by far the strongest person in this room.'

The echoes of the gong rolled in the distance.

'Dinner, dinner,' Colonel Fawcus cried, as though he were announcing a wonderful new event that was about to change the world's history. 'Come, my dear Rose, you must, I am sure, be ravenous,' and the two clocks, the canaries and the undertone of whispering chatter repeated 'ravenous.'

Seated at the old mahogany table, the impression that Colonel Fawcus made was overwhelming. Sitting, he looked more massive than ever, more massive, more benevolent, more completely head of the family, more entirely commander of all he surveyed; and he surveyed, she noticed, a very great deal. His eyes were everywhere. While he talked--and he talked voluminously, words pouring from his lips--his eyes darted like fish in a pool up and down the room. You could feel that the maid, Sally, was immensely conscious of his supervision. Rose was interested to notice that here at the table Janet Fawcus counted for nothing. It was the big, hearty, benevolent man who dominated everyone. He talked to Rose exclusively, once and again saying genially:

'Well, Michael, what do you think of it?' or 'I am sure Michael would tell you the same,' or 'Michael knows what I feel about it.'

He spoke to her as though he were almost bursting with happiness at her arrival. She could not but wonder. She was of a generation brought up to regard simple kindness as extremely suspect. Let anyone be accused of the worst crimes in the human calendar and she would offer them the friendly protection of Freudian analysis. Just as the works of John Galsworthy, Sir James Barrie, Mr. Milne and other kindly creatures were to her pernicious, so if she were told that anyone was kind or good she assumed instantly that they must also be false and hypocritical. And yet here she was surrendering at once to kindness, goodness, benevolent hospitality, eager friendship, because that was what he was. It was long since anyone had shown her so plainly that he meant well by her. People did not show you that in Geneva unless they wanted something either s****l or financial.

'I do hope you will enjoy your time with us, Rose. Of course there will be John, who will be a host in himself, and we have neighbours who should interest you--the Parkins, for instance, eh, Michael?'

'Oh! the Parkins certainly,' said Michael, laughing.

'Who are the Parkins?' Rose asked.

'The Verdurins,' Michael said, smiling at her.

'The Verdurins?' she repeated.