Джеймс Хилтон - So Well Remembered

“Only because he might find you some work. I thought it was a stroke of luck when I met somebody who knew him—he’s very influential in the newspaper world, so Mrs. Wallington told me. And it would get us out of Browdley—that is, if he DID say he could find you something.”

George gritted his teeth and replied: “Aye, he said he could. He offered me six pounds a week in his London office—provided I learned enough.”

“Oh, but George, that’s—that’s WONDERFUL! You don’t make nearly so much out of the Guardian—not lately, anyhow.”

“Livia…” He stopped suddenly in the street and faced her. “Do you really mean you’d have me give up my own paper and all the work I do on the Council —just to have a job under a man like that? And WHAT a job— writing patent-medicine ads… Livia, would you REALLY have me do that?”

He knew what her answer would have been but for the look on his face, which made her temporize: “Maybe it isn’t exactly the life you’d choose. But I don’t choose the life I have, either… And why keep on saying ‘a man like that’? They can’t all be men like you.”

He began walking again. “Livia, let’s not quarrel. You did a silly thing, but I daresay you meant well. You asked this man to find me a job—you made yourself agreeable to him—you were pretending just as you were with Tom Whaley, weren’t you?” His eagerness to think so fanned a warmth between them. “I believe you really thought you were doing the best for me.”

“No… I was thinking about Martin more than you. That was the real reason.”

Then she told him the bare economic facts of his own household (which he had hardly guessed, so preoccupied had he been with the bare economic facts of the whole town)—the fact, for instance, that sometimes lately she hadn’t been able to afford the kind of food and clothing the child most needed, and had to make do with the second best. Though this was a condition common all over Browdley, and formed the subject-matter of countless speeches he made, he was nevertheless shocked to find it so close to his own personal affairs—not because he thought he ought to have been exempt from what afflicted others, but simply because it had never occurred to him. And once it did, OF COURSE, something must be done about it. But what COULD be done? —persisted Livia, coolly stemming his indignation. It was no use her asking for more money because she knew, and none better, that the Guardian didn’t make it; she knew also there were no more business economies possible. Nor were there domestic ones; she herself did all the house-work, and some of the office-work too, now that she knew how careless Will Spivey was. As she very calmly explained, it had become her honest opinion after George’s electoral defeat that it would be a wise thing to leave Browdley, even apart from her own desire to do so.

“But—my Council work, Livia—”

“Where’s it getting you?”

“I don’t know, but I’ve not been defeated in THAT… YET. I don’t have all my own way—after all, who does?—but I am ON the Council, pretty safely on too, judging by my last majority. And the job’s worth doing. I know you’re not interested in it—I don’t ask you to be, but do believe me when I say this—IT’S WORTH DOING… Livia, don’t hinder me in it—even if you can’t help me… And as for the extra things you need for Martin, you shall have them. Of course you shall—I had no idea you were doing without… I’d rather go without everything myself—”

“But you can’t, George. You don’t drink or smoke—there’s nothing you could give up… except Browdley. THAT’S your hobby, or your luxury —whatever you’d rather call it. And I don’t say you’re not entitled to it—you personally, that is—everyone has his own tastes. But what sort of a place is it for a child to grow up in?”

But that only gave him his own private cue for optimism, as she would have known if she had attended more of his meetings. For he answered, beginning quietly but with rising confidence as he proceeded: “Not such a bad place as it used to be… and I’ll make it better. You wait. You don’t know all the plans I have. And they’re not just dreams—they’re practical. I don’t tell you much—because I know you don’t want to hear about it— I WISH you did… but never mind that. Mark my words, though, I’ll DO things with this town. I’ll get the slums off the map. I’ll build schools… and a new hospital… I’ll… well, laugh at me if you like—I don’t care.”

She did not laugh, but she smiled as she took his arm. “I wouldn’t care either, but for Martin. You’d do anything for Browdley—I’d do anything for him.”

“So would I too—I just don’t see any conflict between them. Don’t you think I’m as devoted to the kid as you are?”

He was; but nevertheless in his heart he looked forward to the time when Martin would be a little older—old enough for the friendly father-and-son relationship to develop, old enough also to start the kind of education on which George set so much store. Whereas for Livia every tomorrow seemed a future far enough ahead and complete in itself; it was almost as if she hoarded the days of babyhood, unwilling to lose the separate richness of each one.

She was wrong, though, in saying there was nothing he could give up. There was, and he gave it up. She never knew, because she had never known anything about it at all. The fact was, after his electoral defeat George had gone back to his earlier ambition, the university degree. The long interval he had let pass meant digging over a good deal of old as well as new ground, but he tackled the job, as he did all his chosen jobs, with enthusiasm. Most of the necessary time he put in late at nights, in the room which he had now begun to call his ‘study’; and without actually telling Livia a direct lie, he allowed her to think he was busy preparing material for the Guardian. As she was generally asleep when he came up to bed she did not know how long he worked; sometimes it was half the night. He had a curious unwillingness to let her know what he still hankered after, partly because he was not sure he would ever succeed in winning it, but chiefly out of a sort of embarrassment; he was sure she would smile as at a grown man caught playing with a toy, for book-learning to her was something you had forced on you during youth and then were mercifully released from ever afterwards. She might also (a more valid attitude) feel that if he had such time to spare it would be better spent in trying to sustain his own precarious livelihood. Anyhow, he did not tell her, and having not done so, it was easy to give the whole thing up without a word to anyone in the world. There were the examination fees he would now avoid, and he could also sell some of the expensive text-books he had had to purchase. He did this and gave her everything thus saved, spreading it over a period so that she needed no explanation.

But the habit of reading in his study at nights continued—in fact, the whole habit of study continued, for it was something bigger than a mere competitive examination that had inspired George. The fringe of scholarship he had touched had left him with an admiration for learned men all the more passionate because he almost never met them either in business or politics; and there came to him, a constant vision, the memory of the dome-headed spectacled examining professor who had been so indulgent to him about the Pathetic Fallacy.

Perhaps Martin would grow up into a learned man—which was another reason for not discussing the matter with Livia.

One thing, however, became both an immediate and a practical ambition —that the boy should have a vastly different childhood from his own. Not that his own had been cruel or vicious; merely that, in recollecting it, he was aware of how far it had been from the ideal. Perhaps equally far from the worst that it might have been, in Browdley, for George’s father had always had regular employment in a job that set him among the aristocracy of cotton- mill labour—a spinner’s wage being at that time more than twice that of the lowest-paid. And though Mill Street became a byword later, it was no worse during George’s childhood than nine-tenths of Browdley; for the Boswells, like many other families, had lived in a four-roomed bathroomless house more because there were no others available than because they could not have afforded better. Anyhow, Number Twenty-Four, in which George was born, had been clean and decently furnished, and its occupants, though overcrowded, were never without enough plain food and strong soap and good winter fuel; they were “respectable chapel folk”, moreover, which meant that their children were nagged at without the use of technical bad language; and if the young Boswells feared their father too much, and their father feared his Heavenly Father, it was doubtless on general principles rather than for any more definite reason.