Джеймс Хилтон - So Well Remembered

“Why, of course not,” he answered, pleased that she should show such an interest. “But I doubt if anything’ll grow there.”

“We’ll see,” she said.

“I’ll give you a hand with it if you like.”

“No, there’s no need. Fred will dig it over, and then I can do all the rest myself.”

“What’ll you plant?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll get you some books about gardening if you like.”

“Oh no, no… I don’t want BOOKS.”

And there was just the hint of a barb in that. It was as if she had chosen books as a symbol of HIS world, just as flowers were to be of HERS. The books, too, were increasing all the time; some of them came as review copies addressed to the Guardian by publishers who did not realize how small and unimportant the paper was; many he bought, a few were sent him as chairman of this or that municipal committee. He had no collecting spirit, no special desire to make a show of what he had read. Yet as the books filled up the room, and new shelves had to be rigged till they covered most of the wall space, he could not help a little pride in them to match Livia’s pride (and his own too) in the transformed dumping- ground below. And his pride grew definite from the moment that Councillor Whaley, visiting him once while Livia was out, exclaimed: “George, I reckon this must be just about the best library in Browdley—in anyone’s house, I mean. What does your wife think about it?”

“LIVIA?… Why… why do you ask that?”

“Only because she once worked in a library herself—I thought maybe books were in her line too.”

“No,” George answered. “She likes gardening better.” And he took Tom to the window and pointed down to the rectangle of cleared ground. “She says she’ll plant roses.”

“Why, that’ll be fine.” And then as an afterthought: “Nobody’ll see it, though—except you. Maybe that’s the idea—to give you something to look at.”

George smiled. “I don’t know, Tom. But MY idea is that it gives her an interest in life. She needs it—since losing the boy.”

“Naturally. But I’ll tell you what, George, if you don’t mind plain speaking from an old bachelor.” He whispered something in George’s ear about Livia’s youth and having more children. “Aye,” George replied heavily, and changed the subject.

Martin’s death seemed to bring him into immediate friendship with Father Wendover. Neither ever referred to the curious ‘coincidence’ that both must often have recollected; nor did the priest talk much from the standpoint of his profession. He showed, however, considerable interest in George’s family background, and once he said: “You’d have made a fine upstanding atheist, George, if only your father had lived a bit longer.”

“Maybe,” George answered, “but Uncle Joe didn’t continue the training, and the result is I’m no more an atheist today than you are… Not that he was AGAINST religion, mind you. He even sent me to Sunday school.”

“Why?”

“To be frank, I think it was because he thought Sunday schools were a good way of giving kids something to do when they were too dressed-up to do anything else.”

“An appalling idea.”

“Oh, I don’t know. He was all right.” George mused for a moment. “It’s odd we should be discussing him, because I dreamed about him the night Martin died… Aye, he was all right. And he liked his Sundays too—in his own way. To my father they were days of gloom and mystery and foreboding, and that was the way he wanted ‘em, but to my uncle they were nice comfortable days when you had a late breakfast and took a walk along the canal-bank while dinner was cooking and then had a snooze in the afternoon and high tea at five o’clock—and that was the way HE wanted ‘em.”

“Did he ever go to church?”

“Aye, when he felt like it. It’s true he felt like it less and less as he grew older, but he still counted church as part of a proper Sunday programme. He used to say he’d attend regularly if only Aunt Flo were a bit better on her feet, and he’d have liked to put more in the collection plate if only he hadn’t lost so much in cotton investments, and he’d have been proud as Punch if I’d had a voice to sing in the choir—but I hadn’t… Altogether what he’d have liked to do was so well-meaning you could hardly call him irreligious, while what he actually did was so little that he interfered with nobody—not even me.”

Wendover, having watched George’s face during all this with a growing conviction that its look of guilelessness was sincere, now slowly smiled. “Is that your portrait of a good man, George?”

“Well, he was good to me,” George answered, simply.

Trade remained sluggish in the town, but the Guardian, owing mainly to Livia’s reorganization, began to show a small profit. George was then able to give her more money, but she seemed to care as little about it as about anything else over which he had any control. Yet she did not mope, brood, or look particularly unhappy. Nor did she nag, upbraid, or quarrel. It was merely that she seemed in some peculiar way to have withdrawn into a world of her own, where George was not invited nor could have followed her if he had been.

One evening early in 1921 he came home after a long day out of the town on municipal business, having left in the morning before she was awake. But now, hearing him enter, she came scampering down the stairs, and at the instant of recognition he gasped with the sensation of pain suddenly switched off inside him. Then, as always when he saw her afresh after even a few hours’ absence, recognition dissolved into a curious feeling of never having seen her before, but of experiencing some primitive thrill that the few years of their marriage had neither enhanced nor made stale. Whatever that was to him, it had been from their first moment of meeting and would be till their last; it was something simple that only became complex when he sought to analyse it. Just now he was glad to hold her in a brief hug of welcome and feel that everything was miraculously all right, even if it wasn’t, and that nothing needed explaining, even if it did.

He said he was sorry he was late, and she answered brightly: “Oh, that’s all right—the dinner won’t spoil. Lamb stew—can’t you smell it?”

He sniffed hard and joyfully; lamb stew was one of his favourite dishes, and he would relish it all the more from thinking that perhaps she had prepared it to please him.

“Ah,” he gasped.

“And we’ll have it in the kitchen to save time,” she said, evidently reaching an impromptu decision. “Annie—did you hear? We’ll all eat in the kitchen, so hurry up.”

That was like her; the knack of taking short cuts to get what she wanted —the quick plan, or change of plan, generally based on something so elemental that only a child could have avoided the mistake of reading into it more than was there. This eating in the kitchen, for instance, had nothing to do with any feeling on Livia’s part that Annie was an equal (only George could, and did, sometimes think of such a thing); really, it was just that Livia was hungry and, as with all her desires, could not bear to be kept waiting. George was generally amused by this, and often quoted the occasion when, having attended a Council meeting at which he presided, she had left exclaiming: “Oh, George, I’ll NEVER go to one of those affairs again! They drive me silly—all that proposing and seconding and moving the nominations closed and appointing a sub-committee to report to the next meeting… No wonder nothing ever gets done!” But something DOES get done, had been George’s slightly hurt rejoinder—unspoken, however, because he knew she would then argue that what he called SOMETHING was not much more than what she called next to nothing…