Tom had loved and accepted Alex, from his earliest childhood, with the whole of his heart, but he had never thought of her as his mother. Some simple person, Ruby perhaps, had told him early on that his mother was an angel, and thus he had pictured her, a curly-haired and rather boyish angel, recognizing her image in the hermaphrodite winged figures in the Victorian stained-glass windows of St Paul’s Church, which he occasionally visited out on walks with Ruby. Alex was something else, something wonderful and very powerful which he adored. Ruby was the dear animal being in whose smell he took refuge from power. George and Brian figured as dual fathers vying for his affection, then suddenly and incomprehensibly punishing. It was Brian who particularly set up as his moral mentor, correcting and admonishing, and leading him every Sunday to the Friends’ Meeting House. Meanwhile Alex watched these fraternal influences jealously, particularly irritated by signs of mutual affection between Tom and George. Tom early learnt to be tactful, even circumspect. This combination of rivalry and possessiveness and authoritarian love, the lack of stability between the rulers of his life, often made up, for the child, a difficult regime. Under these strains Tom could have been forgiven for being a sad crazy mixed-up boy, but he simply was not. His guardian-angel mother, always so young, had somehow preserved in him intact her own unquestioning faith in life, her capacity for joy, her vast indomitable self-satisfaction.
Tom did not reflect upon the dynamics of these various relationships which would have been (and indeed were) of such interest to (for instance) Ivor Sefton. He loved Alex, Ruby, Brian and George thoughtlessly and in differing ways which he apprehended but did not analyse. He did not want to bother his head about such matters, and if they ever started to puzzle him he would shake his head as if to send away a swarm of bees which seemed to wish to settle in his brain. They were easily dispelled. He hated rows and walked away from them and found (such was his felicity) that his nearest and dearest did not in fact want to involve him, had already instinctively invested him with a kind of blessed neutrality, a status of someone not to be enlisted or dragged into taking sides. His easiest relations were with Ruby and Brian. With Ruby his ordinary natural selfishness simply ran riot in the space which the servant opened to him. He never found himself wondering what she thought or whether she judged. Brian was an alien whom he loved and respected and who had quite convincingly played the role of father. (In a sense, Brian had been more resolute as Tom’s father than he was being as Adam’s.) He was not ‘close’ to Brian, but he knew that in a shipwreck he and Brian would know how to stand shoulder to shoulder. Alex and George were the ‘funny ones’. When Alex annexed Tom (not walking into Fiona’s room and seizing him from the cradle), Brian, in early independence, was beginning his long revenge upon his mother Tor having always so patently preferred George. George, meanwhile, especially unhappy at this period of his life, was taking his revenge on Alex for her possessive and undisguised affections. Alex, who pictured herself as a fighter, felt alone, menaced and rejected. Tom was the key, the godsend, the new love object. (Alan brought Tom to Belmont in his arms, the child clinging to the lapels of his coat like an animal; Alex had difficulty in detaching the fierce little claw-like hands.) Of course she loved and wanted the little boy for himself; love was always Alex’s game. She had coveted the child from the moment he existed, and no doubt her jealousy was salved by the triumphant possession of Fiona’s son. But she needed him too, instinctively, as a weapon against his two brothers, especially against George.
How far this plan of establishing a rival worked in practice was never clear; perhaps in a way it worked only too well. Brian was certainly annoyed, but his sense of duty consoled him here, as it had always done in his other trials. Brian, the owner no doubt of a difficult temperament, was actually capable of being cheered up by the exercise of rational activity. Tom was in danger from Alex’s emotions, from George’s ‘frightfulness’. Brian waded in, as if he had seen the child struggling in a river. He must be hauled out, shaken, dried, stood up, told what was what; and Brian could not help loving what he thus served and protected. George, in so far as he exerted himself in loco patris, did so with motives more obscure. Tom, as a child, was sometimes afraid of George, but only in a rather immediate sense. He was, on a few memorable occasions, at the receiving end of George’s violence. He felt no resentment, however. The strange thing was that while Brian, who was certainly more like George than Tom was, simply did not understand George at all, Tom did somehow understand him. Tom had not in his being one iota of that which made George what he was, but Tom saw and apprehended that, not intellectually or theoretically, but with (for of course he loved George) a loving intuition. This led the now adult, or almost adult, Tom to fear George in a new way and to fear for him. Something in this understanding led Tom to make the only conscious move he had so far made in relation to his family. In the obscure machinery of the familial stars and planets it was time for George to move back towards his mother. They were two of a kind, Alex and George, and Tom’s special task was in a sense done. The old pact between George and Alex had never really been broken. Tom began to move aside, to move away; and as he retired, George came quietly, loping on dark paws, into the space near Alex which Tom was leaving. As they thus passed each other, did they exchange a glance? Perhaps. If so, it was a very ambiguous one.
Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor was a comparatively new phenomenon in Tom’s young life. In general, Tom liked everybody and was friends with everybody, and in so far as there had been closer ties, these had tended to be contextual. His love affairs, which he thought of as ‘romances’, had been comparatively uncomplicated and unhurtful, largely because of the witty good sense of the girls concerned. (This was pure luck.) Tom did not yet possess the concept of a deep relationship except in the unconscious form of his connection with his family. The Irish boy was something of a novelty. He was two years older than Tom, at an age when two years counted for much. Tom had been vaguely aware of him as being a bit of an intellectual ‘grandee’, tipped to get a ‘first’, a gloomy proud solitary sort of fellow. He had a reputation for being arrogant and rude. He had never been rude to Tom, but then on the other hand he had never paid any attention to Tom whatsoever. When Scarlett-Taylor moved into the shabby and cheap lodging-house where Tom was living, Tom had felt dismay, even annoyance. However, his view of his fellow student soon began to change.
The first and most dramatic change had occurred on a drunken evening in December. Tom was setting out with some friends for a ‘pub crawl’ in central London. As they were leaving Tom’s lodgings they ran into Scarlett-Taylor. Out of an impulse of politeness and curiosity, since he still scarcely knew the Irishman, Tom asked him to join them. Rather to his surprise Scarlett-Taylor agreed, and accompanied them though with a silent and preoccupied air. The ‘crawl’ was to begin at the Black Horse in north Soho, to proceed through the more riotous pubs of south Soho, through Leicester Square, and down Whitehall to the river. The pubs were decorated for Christmas, noisy and rather full. Scarlett-Taylor said little but drank, Tom noticed, a great deal. First beer then whisky. The final objective was the Red Lion at the far end of Whitehall, but by the time they got as far as the Old Shades most of the others had disappeared, leaving Tom, finally, in charge of his rather drunken fellow lodger. When they arrived at the Red Lion it was closed. Tom and Scarlett-Taylor went on to the river, on to the bridge, then along the embankment. The tide was in and, leaning over, they could almost touch the water which was being whipped into wavelets by the east wind. Scarlett-Taylor’s spectacles actually fell off and were caught in mid-air. They began to walk back along Whitehall with their coat collars turned up. Tom, feeling the airy liberated bonhomie of the happily drunk man, took Scarlett-Taylor’s arm, but was not put out when his friend, as he now thought of him, quickly detached himself. Then Tom began, rather loudly, to sing. He had a pleasant modest baritone from which he derived considerable pleasure and which, when it did not seem too much like showing off, he liked to exhibit. He began to sing an Elizabethan song: If she forsake me I must die. Shall I tell her so? In the second verse Scarlett-Taylor joined in. Tom checked his own voice abruptly, stopped in his tracks and held on to a lamp post. Scarlett-Taylor possessed a marvellous counter-tenor voice.