Джеймс Хилтон - So Well Remembered

Wendover smiled. “I get your point, George. But don’t over- simplify it. And don’t throw all your books on world affairs in the fire.”

“Oh no, I won’t do that. In fact when I’ve got the time I’ll study more of ‘em. I want to find out why we’ve all been let in for what we have. And I want to find out why folks ten times better educated than me have made the same mistakes.”

“Maybe because education hasn’t much to do with it, George.” Wendover added: “And another thing—don’t be too humble about yourself.”

George thought a moment, then came out with one of those devastatingly sincere things that endeared him to his opponents even oftener than to his friends. “Oh, don’t you worry—I’m not as humble as I sound. That’s what Livia once said…”

He did not often mention her now, and when he did the name slipped out casually, by accident, giving him neither embarrassment nor a pang. So much time can do.

But the remark gave Wendover the cue to ask: “By the way, heard anything of her lately?”

“No, I suppose she’s still out there.”

And then, after a silence, the subject was changed.

Even in Browdley by now the affair was almost forgotten, and George could assess with some impartiality the extent to which it had damaged his career. Probably it had lost him his chance at the general election of 1923, though his subsequent failure at two other parliamentary elections might well have happened in any case. Undoubtedly the divorce had alienated some of his early supporters, especially when (owing to the legal technique of such things in those days) it had been made to seem that he himself was the guilty party. Many of his friends knew this to be untrue, but a few did not, and it was always a matter liable to be brought up by an unscrupulous opponent, like the old accusation that he had put his wife on the municipal pay-roll. But time had had its main effect, not so much in dulling memories, but in changing the moral viewpoints even of those who imagined theirs to be least changeable, so that the whole idea of divorce, which had been a shocking topic in the twenties, was now, in the forties, rather a stale one. George knew that a great many young people in the town neither knew nor would have been much interested in the details that had so scandalized their parents.

Those details included Livia’s re-marriage, at the earliest legal date, to the Honourable Jeffrey Winslow, who had given up a diplomatic career to take some job in Malaya. Except that Lord Winslow died in 1925 and left a large fortune, some of which must have gone to the younger son, George knew nothing more. The Winslow name did not get into the general news, and George did not read the kind of papers in which, if anywhere, it would still appear. But when Singapore fell, early in 1942, he could not suppress a recurrent preoccupation, hardly to be called anxiety; it made him ask the direct question if ever he met anyone likely to know the answer and unlikely to know of his own personal relationship. “I think they must have got away,” he was told once, on fairly high authority. It satisfied him to believe that the fairly high authority had not said this merely because it was the easiest thing to say.

Those years, 1941 and 1942, contained long intervals of time during which it might almost have been said that nothing was happening in Browdley while so much was happening in the rest of the world. But that, of course, was an illusion; everything was happening, but in a continuous melting flow of social and economic change; the war, as it went on, had become more like an atmosphere to be breathed with every breath than a series of events to be separately experienced. Even air-raids and the threat of them dropped to a minimum, while apathy, tiredness, and simple human wear-and-tear offered problems far harder to tackle. But there were cheerful days among the dark ones, days when the Mayor of Browdley (re- elected annually owing to a war-time party truce) looked round his little world and saw that it was —well, not good, but better than it might have been. And worse, naturally, than it should have been. Sometimes his almost incurable optimism remounted, reaching the same flashpoint at which it always exploded into indignation against those old Victorian mill-masters with no thought in their minds but profit, and the jerry-builders who had aided and abetted them in nothing less than the creation of Browdley itself. Yet out of that shameless grab for fortunes now mostly lost had come a place where men could have stalwart dreams. George realized this when—a little doubtfully, for he thought it might be regarded as almost frivolous in war-time—he arranged for an exhibition of post- war rehousing plans in the Town Hall —architects’ sketches (optimism on paper) of what could be done with Browdley if only the war were won and the tragedy of peace-time unemployment were not repeated. And by God, he thought, it WOULDN’T be repeated— not if he had anything to do with it; and at that he wandered off in mind into a stimulating post-war crusade.

One day he was visiting a large hospital near Mulcaster on official business; as chairman of a regional welfare association it fell to him to organize co-operation between the hospital authorities and various local citizen-groups. He was good at this kind of organizing, and he was good because he was human; with a proper disregard of red tape he combined a flair for side-tracking well- meaning cranks and busybodies that was the admiration of all who saw it in operation. Indeed, by this stage of the war, he had won for himself a local importance that had become almost as regional as many of the associations and committees on which he served. More and more frequently, within a radius that took in Mulcaster and other large cities, his name would be mentioned with a touch of legendary allusiveness; somebody or other somewhere, puzzled momentarily about something, would say to someone else: “I’ll tell you what, let’s see if we can get hold of old George Boswell…” And if then the question came: “Who’s he?”—the answer would be: “Just the Mayor of Browdley, but pretty good at this sort of thing”—the implication being that George’s official position gave only a small hint of the kind of service he could render. And if a further question were asked: “Where’s Browdley?”—the answer to that might well be the devastating truth: “Oh, one of those awful little manufacturing towns—the kind that were nearly bankrupt before the war and are now booming like blazes.”

After a meeting of the hospital board George was taken over the premises, and here too he was good; he knew how to say cheery words to soldiers without either mawkishness or patronage. And if any of the men were from Browdley or district he would make a point of drawing them into neighbourly gossip about local affairs. It was noticeable then that his accent became somewhat more ‘Browdley’ than usual, as if HOW as well as WHAT he spoke made instinctive communion with those whose roots were his own.

On this occasion his tour of the wards was to be followed by tea in the head surgeon’s room; and on the way there, waiting with his nurse escort for a lift, he happened to glance at a list of names attached to a notice-board near by. One of them was ‘Winslow’. It gave him a slow and delayed shock that did not affect the naturalness of his question; she answered that the list was of patients occupying private rooms along an adjacent corridor— all of them serious cases and most of them war casualties. He did not question her further, but a few moments later, meeting the head surgeon and others of the hospital staff, he found himself too preoccupied to join in general conversation; the name was already echoing disconcertingly in his mind—Winslow… WINSLOW… Not such a common name, yet not so uncommon either. Surely it would be too much of a coincidence—and yet those coincidences DID happen. At least it was worth enquiry.