Читать книгу Old Wine and New - Warwick Deeping - Страница 13

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Harry had been persuaded to go to bed and he had been the more easily persuaded because he was a page at the Ponsonby Hotel in Cromwell Road, and had been on his feet most of the day; also, he was devoted to Julia, and his devotion made him docile. He slept with his brother Bob, in the back room at the top of the stairs, but brother Bob was seventeen and full of swagger, and earning four pounds a week and spending it on swagger. He stayed out late. He was a swarthy, awkward, sensual young brute who wore yellow boots and flaring ties, and greased his hair, and spoke with a slight snuffle.

Julia had views upon Bob, even as she had views upon her mother. Harry was different; he had mischievous, soft eyes, eagerness, a kind of fragility; he was a clean and lovable child. His smile was like the buttons down his little blue jacket, and at the “Ponsonby” people smiled at him kindly.

“ ’Morning, Marwood.”

“Good morning, sir. Your paper, sir.”

He was a page in the book of the day’s good manners.

His sister had sent Harry to bed. Julia had other things to do, urgent, secret, significant things. She had read that last letter of Marwood’s and her eyes had given a dark gleam. She went into the kitchen and opened a drawer in which her father had kept an assortment of tools, a claw-hammer, a screwdriver, a couple of chisels, a gimlet and a box of nails and screws. She chose the screwdriver, and returning to the front room, she locked the door and moved the chiffonier aside. The floor-boards were stained, and in one of the boards she saw two faint lines running across the board’s length, the marks of a saw. She knelt down; she found the heads of the screws, and withdrawing them, she prised up the panel. In the little black oblong cavity, a small black, japanned box lay between two floor joists. Julia lifted it out, and letting it lie in her lap, she opened the lid.

Her father’s will.

She spread the stiff and crackling sheet. She read. The will was very brief and simple, and even its legal jargon could not cloud its blunt purpose. She noticed the date, and the names of the witnesses. Marwood had had this will drawn nine months ago when he had been at home on his last leave.

In it he left No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace and all the fitments and furniture absolutely to his daughter, also a sum of two hundred pounds. His wife’s name was not mentioned.

For half a minute she squatted there motionless. Her dark eyebrows seemed to come closer together; her right hand clenched itself. And then, suddenly, upon her stern young face tears trickled. She might be in confusion as to her emotions, but the thinking and purposive part of her saw life clearly through its tears. She felt very near to her father, nearer than when he had been the man about the house. She understood, as far as a young girl can understand, the moods and vagaries of a worried man who had a very indifferent mate, and a family to keep. She could remember him using these tools, pottering about in slippers, sallow and solemn and rather silent. He had had sudden strange rages, and days when he had been submerged in silence. She could remember a night when he had thrashed his elder son with a fury and a mercilessness that might have shocked her had she not been prejudiced against Bob. Poor, funny old Dad! The little house seemed suddenly full of him, and his hammerings and his slippers, and the big curved briar pipe, and his air of rather sullen wistfulness. They had been great pals. His pet name for her had been “Ju-Ju”. Almost she expected to hear his voice—“Come on, Ju-Ju. Half an hour and Battersea and back before supper.”

She had divined in her father a kind of secretiveness, as though the hiding of certain things had given him a whimsical satisfaction. He had had a streak of mystery in him, perhaps because his life was so very unmysterious, and like a boy he felt the lure of mischief. She could remember the way he would wink at her with an air of sallow gravity, and lure her out into the little back garden, and perhaps prod her with his finger, and whisper.

“What about a little skylark? Charlie Chaplin’s on. Let’s sneak out.”

She had known that her father’s secretiveness had been directed against her mother, but until the coming of the war she had not understood the inwardness of their hostility. Always she had sided with her father, and now, as she sat on her heels and folded up his last testament and put it back in the black box, she realized the significance of their comradeship. Something endured. Hatred and love could be signed and sealed to the purpose of life, and to the business of getting a living.

She replaced the piece of floor-board and the screws, and rising to her feet, pushed the chiffonier back into its place. She was grave, deliberate, determined. Her tears were dry. Unlocking the door she carried the box up into her bedroom, put it away in the bottom drawer of her chest-of-drawers, and covered it with underclothing. It would be safe there until the morning.

Julia Marwood was half-way down the stairs when she heard the front door knocker in action. The sound startled her, for the hand had not produced Scarsdale’s restrained rattat, but a summons that was ferociously playful. She expected her mother, and she expected that young swashbuckler Robert, but Robert even in his most swaggering moments did not knock like that. For a moment she remained leaning against the banisters. She had something of the air of a cat with her fur rising, and her eyes at gaze for the possible dog.

Then she went silently down into the passage, and gliding toward the door, stood listening, her head bent forward and slightly to one side. The curve of her neck had the tenseness of a bow. She put her hand to the key, but did not turn it.

She could hear voices, surreptitious, gloating, conspiratorial. There was a scuffling sound, a little giggling laugh. She withdrew her hand from the key, and stood back, and then with a sudden and savage shake of the head, she turned the key and the handle and drew the door open with a gesture of violence.

She saw her mother, and behind her mother a man’s brown slouch hat, the hat of an Australian soldier.

Her eyes met her mother’s. The mere defiance of that mutual stare was but brittle glass covering infinite and hidden secrecies. Nothing and everything had been confessed long ago and in silence, and between them tacit hatreds and scorns, accusations and protests, looked out from two dark chambers. The girl was motionless, the woman in a kind of smirk of movement, her hands unfastening the buttons of her black mackintosh. Her hat seemed tilted, and under it her bland, bold face had a jocund recklessness.

“Hallo, my dear.”

Julia stood back to let her mother in, but one arm was tense and waiting like a spring.

“Supper’s been ready. Harry’s gone to bed.”

Her mother silked her way in with her wet mackintosh gleaming. It had been raining. And instantly Julia slammed the door, and locked it, and did the thing so swiftly that the man in the slouch hat was left mute and effaced upon the doorstep. There was silence. The woman’s figure, arrested in its glide towards the parlour door, seemed to adhere to the wall.

A foot kicked the door. And again there was silence, and then the sound of a man saying foul things as he blundered down the steps. The two women did not move. The girl’s right hand was clenched as though she clutched a knife.