‘Somebody has to look after him,’ he retorted. ‘Will you bring him up? No. You couldn’t bring up a flower in May. Can I do it?’ He laughed dryly. ‘Soon be dead. So the place where he’ll be cared for, and get a good Christian education, is the Boxwell Orphanage. Never thought I’d need it for this little matter, but they’ll be glad to take him till he’s fifteen, after all I’ve done for them. Then you can find a way for him to earn a living.’
His scornful laugh made her doubt even more that it was right to put Emma’s child into such a place. ‘Isn’t there any other way?’
He was unhealthily excited. ‘Certainly. A very good one. Get a husband, and you can both adopt him.’ He drank half his wine. ‘If your husband’s a good man, he’ll be agreeable.’
Would he have done it? Not damned likely, she told herself. But such problems cleared his brain. Even at his most absentminded he could muster a man’s decisiveness. When they were children he would come back from visiting the orphanage he patronized (she only now heard its name) and say how lucky the inmates were in having found a refuge which did not require them to suffer for the sins of their parents. But Emma, Clara and John felt how awful it must be for such children, and their nanny of the time said that that was where all bad creatures went, and quite right too, because where would the world be if there weren’t such places for them to be hidden away in?
Children knew nothing, made up their own harrowing fears, and trembled at the wicked world of which they had no experience. Thomas would be provided for. Her father reassured her that it was the right thing to do. It was an orphanage, of course, but it was more like a home, certainly a great improvement on the one that he would have if it were possible for him to stay where he was – which it wasn’t. It would be like a boarding school, but starting younger. He would enquire about him now and again, and when the time came she would have to make sure that he was not entirely forgotten. Some time in the future he would be found, no doubt, tractable and presentable, and might spend the occasional weekend with her. She would talk to him, or take him out. She supposed he would be polite, and have lots to say. He would be glad of the change, and grateful to her for giving him some relief to life in an institution. In that sense she would do what she could. When he grew up she would see about a career for him. Her father said that from such places boys went into the army or the navy, or had their passage paid to one of the colonies or dominions. It seemed very suitable. There were no problems because they were trained to expect such arrangements. And what boy in his right mind, however he had been brought up, would want to stay in this country, considering the state things were? He didn’t know how lucky he was going to be.
‘I must get him put in,’ Percy said, ‘before it’s too late.’
‘Too late?’
‘While I’m able to do it. I shan’t live for ever.’
‘Don’t say that.’ To contemplate life alone, and all the shifts of place and spirit that it must entail, was as yet impossible, like looking over a cliff with nothing in the distance, and no sight of the bottom. In spite of his unpleasantness he was all she had, the last tree of familiar safety, and she knew by now that you loved people as much because of their faults as in spite of them.
‘You’re a big silly fool,’ he exclaimed. ‘Don’t you know that if you talk of one thing, you must think of another? I’ve left some of my money to a few charities, but most will go to you. I only hope you’ll take good care of it.’
‘I’ll be sure to.’ In a final gesture she touched his hand affectionately, but he pulled it away. If any contact was needed, he would be the one to make it. She felt revulsion now at his instinctive drawing back, shivered as if a cold wind had blown across her. How had her mother put up with this? She hadn’t, really, because she was not the person to do so. But Emma at least said that to offer affection only made him more cruel. You have to bully him and baby him, though to show that you really care, she said, don’t show him that you care in the least.
Perhaps he read her thoughts, for he seemed unable to look at her for a few moments. They were silent while the pudding was served. He tapped the dish with his spoon, each stroke getting louder. She didn’t wait for him to begin, but when he saw she had done so he stopped his maniacal banging and ate rapidly.
His absent-mindedness, and fits of childishness, became more frequent. She couldn’t bear to think of her father existing in a state where she would have to take over her mother’s role and bully him as if he were the child. She had read that old people who turned senile lived longer than those who did not.
He strayed too far on his daily walk, and was found in the street staring at the gutter. He picked up a cigarette packet, took out the picture card, and put it in his pocket. She discovered others in his desk. People round about were familiar with the foibles of this smartly dressed old man who walked along the street looking only in the gutter.
On her way to bed she went into the nursery, where a night-light was left burning. To disturb Thomas would be a blessing, because if he cried Audrey would come from the adjoining room and put him to sleep again. He would like such attention. There would be little enough from now on. Four neatly folded fingers went to his eyes. He turned, and the clean fresh smell of a new world came from his cot. The cot would afterwards go to the attic, though God knew what for. She wouldn’t stay long in that house. The sooner she was out the better. Too much had happened. She would find a flat at some place on the south coast.
His lips curled, and he tried to turn over. Discovering that he couldn’t, he was about to cry. Her large hand held his side, enabling him to complete the manoeuvre. Then he yawned, and seemed to sleep. She was alarmed at how he already looked like Emma. Why had she done all the things she had done? The question was foolish, as questions invariably were that came too late to get an answer. She put out the light and closed the door, feeling better when she had done so, as if her troubles had gone, and left her empty.
19
‘A woman came from the orphanage to collect him,’ Clara wrote on an undated sheet of paper which was folded into the book, ‘and though he didn’t cry – in fact he was quite happy, because he obviously didn’t know what was happening – Audrey did when she had to give him up. If I was sorry to see him go it was only because he was the last of Emma.’
At the bottom of the box was a pack of carefully written receipts for money sent by his grandfather to the orphanage. Tom perceived that at two hundred pounds a year the contributions had been generous, when in those days it must have cost little more than fifty to provide for an inmate at such a place.
The family had kept their obligations, so he could not complain. His career as a seaman hardly allowed him to grumble about any conditions of existence. Nor was he made that way. The fact of being alive, in work, and comfortable enough as an officer at sea was more than sufficient to be grateful for.
It was difficult to claim much connection with this family whose lives had been revealed. Neither, at the moment, did he feel any attachment to his mother. And the younger Clara seemed to have little in common with the formidable and elderly aunt he had seen perhaps two dozen times in his life. But then, he wondered, how much connection do any of us have at fifty with what we were at twenty-five?
In the last box he found a cigarette-card album, with pictures of different series stuck at all angles inside. Flowers, kings, film stars, birds, ships, cricketers and butterflies had been fixed unevenly. He assumed they were cards his grandfather had collected from the streets, and that they had been put there haphazardly by the old man’s hands. But the more he stared the more he knew that he himself had collected them, or begged them, or had been given them at the orphanage. Or he had traded them, because some had worn edges and turned-over corners.