For all Mr Warrender’s generosity to her, Aunt James was still loyal to the scapegrace Stevie, and for more than twenty years had looked forward to his return. Mr Warrender knew this. No doubt it upset him. But he accepted it as another of Aunt James’s disconcerting eccentricities.
So when she saw in Vic’s appearance among them the return of the prodigal, the banished brother-in-law, she was making mischief. She was enlisting him in an alliance against Pa.
Vic decided (they were all so open about it) that he could take this side of the thing lightly, presenting himself as a victim, as Mr Warrender himself was, of the old girl’s crazy fits. But it worried him a little and made him more determined than ever to do nothing, whatever turn things might take, that could be construed as disloyalty to Pa.
He was helped in this by Aunt James’s inconsistency. There were occasions when her mind skipped sixty years rather than twenty and he became her own brother Bob, a spoiled and sickly child who had been killed in a riding accident when he was just the age that Vic was now. In this guise she would poke her tongue out and, snatching the bread off his plate, shout, ‘Let him go without, the little bugger!’ being pretty well certain that no one else could see him; or she would lean out and pinch him hard, daring him to cry out and show her up.
He did not know how to react. He felt a fool just sitting there and letting an old lady pinch him. He could hardly pinch her back. But the girls, who had put up with Aunt James’s tricks for as long as they could remember, were delighted, they thought it hilarious. Even Pa was amused, but did give him a look as if to say, ‘Well, you see how it is, old man. It’s the same with me. But what can we do?’
But he saw now why the girls asked their friends to the house only when Ma could guarantee that Aunt James would be out of the way, and why they had been so uneasy at first even with him.
Ellie wasn’t — or not for long. But Ellie was just a little girl, rather wild and tomboyish, glad to have someone new to play with and a boy in the house. Lucille he had to win.
He did it by not trying to, by letting her discover for herself how solid, how utterly loyal he was.
They were the same age, and she too was glad at last to have a boy in the house, though for other reasons than Ellie’s. At thirteen she was quite grown-up, or thought she was, and very aware of the power she had over people, only a little scared as yet of the consequences of it.
She did not set out to make a worshipper of him, but he became one. The little game he had been led into, of getting around the difficulties of her character, of impressing and pleasing her, became a habit, then a pleasure and a misery. Before long he was, he told himself, in love with Lucille, and in his usual way began to include her in the visions he gave himself up to of what his life would be.
She accepted this at first. She was just the age for it, for talking dreamily of ever afters and for being in love. But she grew up faster than Vic did; he could not keep up with her. He found himself, more often than he would have wanted, turning to Ellie for the rough-and-tumble games that the boyish part of him still hungered for, and he was hurt when Lucille drew her mouth down and mocked at him.
By the time she was fifteen Lucille Warrender had become a young woman, very demanding and wilful and with a tribe of followers. He did not despair when she began to go about with older boys. He knew he had a year or two yet in which to grow up. But he agonised, and wore such a long face that Ma, who saw all this and was increasingly fond of him, was at a loss. For all his stolidity he was easily hurt. And he had a romantic streak. Other people might miss it, but Ma didn’t. She didn’t know how to help him.
The fact was that she was scared of Lucille, who seemed to her too grown-up altogether. She thought too highly of herself. For days on end she would be all moods and little female fads and whims that Ma had no time for. Then suddenly there would be floods of tears and she would want to be cuddled and forgiven. She was neither one thing nor the other. She was proud and critical and unthinkingly cruel; not so much by nature as from inexperience. She did not know herself or how to act in a way that would spare either her own feelings or other people’s. It was Vic who bore the brunt of it.
‘After all, Vic, you’re not a stranger, are you, so it doesn’t matter.’ These were the words Ma used when she came up to his room, as in time she often did, to consult with him. ‘I can talk to you, Vic. Goodness knows, I can’t talk to the girls or Pa.’ She meant she did not want to alarm them with her fears.
She believed, young as he was, that Vic was tough and practical. Practical was one of her favourite words, and a great compliment. He would sit feeling pleased with himself, tough, compact, and yes, practical, while she gave herself up to visions of disaster. That was the word she kept flying to.
She was a worrier, Ma. With a magazine in one hand, The Bulletin or the London Illustrated News, which she would snatch up as a guarantee that she had something to do, and in the other a cigarette that she mostly forgot to smoke, she would prowl the house like an unhappy ghost, peering into rooms that her mother, in the days when they had five maids, had filled with whatnots and the souvenirs of travel — Venetian glass and little boxes and figurines in porcelain or Parian or bronze, that they could afford to keep dusted then but were impractical now. On Pa’s urging, and for reasons of common sense, she had cleared it all out, all the gloomy mahogany and velvet and bric-à-brac, and furnished the place in modern veneer.
The trouble was, she missed the old things. She would put her hand out for a bit of familiar furniture and be shocked that it wasn’t there. Or she and Meggsie would spend half a morning going through drawer after drawer looking for some old newspaper cutting she wanted to consult, or a bunch of artificial violets she thought she could use on a hat, or an earring to match one that had turned up again after seven years, and she would realise with a pang that she had left it in one of the sideboard drawers when it went off to Lawson’s to be sold.
This was her parents’ house, the one she had grown up in. What she had done, she felt, for all her talk of what was sensible, had been an attempt to drive their spirits from the place. She felt ashamed now. She ought never to have done it. And anyway, she had failed.
Standing at the long drawing-room window and looking across to the factory, she would feel her father there in the room behind her. He would be wearing a savage look and waiting, not too patiently (he had been a rough, uneducated fellow), for her to explain herself. What had she done with his splendid enterprise?
She thought of the answer she might give him. ‘For heaven’s sake, Pop, this is 1936!’ (As if this improvement on 1919, when he died, could stand against the other figures she would have had to give him, which these days were always down.) ‘I mean, there’s a depression on.’
All this was nonsense, of course. ‘I ought to have been a boy,’ she would tell herself, and she would tell Vic this too. ‘Then they would have taught me how to do something about it.’ But Stevie was the boy, and her father, in a fit of self-righteousness that was to be fatal, had destroyed that possibility by driving him away. So who was to blame? And why did she feel guilty?
Wandering about the house in her stockinged feet, elegant but careless, she could be there, as Meggsie complained, before you knew it — unless you smelled the smoke.
‘Lord bless the Irish!’ Meggsie would exclaim when Mrs Warrender appeared, anxious to have a sit-down at the kitchen table and go over some problem about the girls, ‘You scared the daylights outa me!’