I'll Never Be Young Again (36 page)

I settled myself down with a paper and began to read, and though I was excited about London and the book, I felt empty, somehow, dull. . . .

8

I
arrived in London about a quarter-past five. I knew that there were many small hotels round Bloomsbury way. I got hold of a taxi and told the fellow to drive me in that direction, and I would tap on the glass when I found somewhere I liked.

It seemed warmer in London than it had been in Paris. It was so different though, dreary, with a hint of fog. A lonely place to arrive in. It was difficult to see much in the dim light.The streets were very full, people standing in queues on the pavements waiting for buses. The shops looked weary and used, there was a general atmosphere of Christmas being over, and the whole cold month of January to be faced.

The taxi lumbered around Russell Square.The fog was thicker here, every house seemed to be an hotel, and none particularly inviting. I finally tapped on the glass before one in Guilford Street. A page-boy came out to take my bag. ‘Have you booked a room, sir?’ he said. ‘No,’ I said.

I had to follow him along to an office and look through a shutter at a woman in spectacles. She was difficult at first, saying it was full.

‘It will be for a week, probably longer,’ I said.

‘Oh! in that case . . .’ she began. I had to sign a book while she did things with keys.

‘Take the gentleman to No. 58,’ she said.

There wasn’t a lift, we trudged upstairs to the third floor. The boy showed me into a small room with a sloping ceiling. It was cold, no central heating. Stripes on the wallpaper and a thing in the fireplace like a fan. A maid came along with hot water in a brass can. I opened the window and smelt the fog. I could hear a newspaper-boy shouting at the end of the street: ‘Late night final.’

‘What time will you be called in the morning, sir?’ asked the maid.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Breakfast in the dining-room from eight o’clock on,’ she said.

I wanted to be back in Paris, going over to the Dôme for a drink. London wasn’t any good to me.

I went downstairs and there was a lounge with people sitting before a fire.There was an old lady with white hair, knitting, talking to a man in pince-nez. The rest were reading papers. I picked up a paper, but the news was not interesting to me, who had not been in England for so long. At seven o’clock a gong sounded for dinner, mournful and hollow. I sat myself at a little table in a corner. There was a vase of sad flowers. There were waitresses dressed in black, and no one raised their voice above a whisper.

I thought at first somebody was dead, but after a while I saw it was just England. The bread was cut in little squares from a tin loaf, and there was tepid tomato soup, followed by tepid cod, followed by tepid steak, fried potatoes and cabbage, followed by tepid castle pudding.

‘Coffee in the lounge, sir?’ asked the waitress.

‘No, thanks,’ I said.

I lit a cigarette and went and looked up the address of my father’s publisher in the telephone-book. I found it easily enough. John Torrence, Ltd, 33, Lower Bedford Street. Torrence himself was dead, but I remembered his partner, Ernest Grey, a tall thin fellow. He used to come down and stay at home. He would remember me. I wondered what story my father and mother had told after I ran away; whether they had said the truth or whether they had made up some tale of my having gone abroad. Grey used to come down about twice a year, and of course my father always saw him when he went up to London to attend some dinner or give a lecture. I would not make a long business of my letter. I would just ask for an interview, mentioning my book. I found a pen and some paper in the lounge.

Dear Mr Grey [I wrote], You will be surprised to get this letter from me. I have been abroad for nearly two years. I would be very grateful if you could give me an interview some time. The fact is, I have written a book, and a play too, and I should so much like to have your opinion and your advice. I shall be staying here all the week, and hope to have a reply from you soon.

I wondered if it seemed cool. I did not know how to write letters.

I posted it; he or one of his secretaries would open it in the morning. There did not appear to be anything to do now but wait. I went up to my room, bored, vaguely depressed.

I kept wondering what Hesta was doing.

 

I had never known London very well. Sometimes I had come up for a few days with Mother from home. We used to stay at the Langham Hotel. She would take me with her when she did her shopping. I remembered going to Shoolbred’s and Peter Robinson’s and as a special treat I was given an ice at Gunter’s.

There was the theatre, too, when I grew older, the front row of the dress circle at a matinée, and then long, dull dinner-parties in the evening, when I must change into stiff clothes, and escort my mother to friends of hers and my father’s, where I never spoke a word, but sat glum in my chair, my ears tingling, my hands very nervous with the knives and forks.

There was a little sense of shame when, because of my youth, I left the dining-room with the ladies, and upstairs in the drawing-room my presence also seemed superfluous, so that I wandered awkwardly to a bookcase, pretending to examine the covers and bindings of the volumes, and I would overhear my mother saying in a low tone to our hostess: ‘Yes, Richard is a great reader.’

They would leave me undisturbed - Richard who would also write one day, they supposed. How nice if he had inherited some of his father’s genius, and they did not suspect that the row of books meant nothing to the solemn-faced boy who stood with his back turned to them, but that he was yearning to be free of their quiet atmosphere, free of the scraps of earnest conversation, and away somewhere, anywhere, in the streets of London, with other men and other women, doing strange things that they would never know.

So I had this memory of London, and another one too, a memory of hunger and distress, loneliness and poverty, black thoughts hammering at my mind, and coming to a bridge that spanned the river, leaning against this, staring down into the cold grey water, and the hand laid upon my shoulder and the voice in my ear.

This was a memory that lingered with me like a message of hope and a whisper of beauty, but it hurt because of the beauty. I did not want to think of it, nor of the shabby restaurant with the table in one corner, nor the twisting turning streets, the throb of traffic, the warm dusty air, the call of adventure round a hidden wall, nor the sudden swift vision of a ship at anchor amidst the lights and shadows of the Lower Pool. This was another London, belonging to another time; now I was a writer who would have business with a famous publisher, and I was living alone in an hotel with my MS. safe upstairs in a trunk and a woman waiting for me in Paris. Life was very earnest, life was very sane. I did not swing along the streets with my hands in my pockets, I sat over my lunch in the City, a copy of the
Spectator
propped against the glass in front of me, and I looked about me studying the faces of men. I went one evening to a Russian play, and ‘This is marvellous,’ I thought. ‘This is marvellous,’ but really I was not quite sure, really I wondered whether the dramatist had been laughing at me up his sleeve.

I clung to the illusion that I was very busy, I went over my MS. once more, I straightened the pages, and then I took it to a typing agency in the Strand, and left it with them, loath to be parted from it, but in two days it was with me once again, and this meant another reading through.

It looked different typed, braver, more mature. I read literary papers, I scanned the criticisms of recent books to see if there were any that resembled mine. I resented them all; it seemed to me too many people wrote in England, too many people had ideas.

On the Friday a letter arrived for me with the crest of John Torrence, Ltd, on the back of the envelope.

It said Mr Ernest Grey would be able to see me on Tuesday morning at eleven-thirty. This, and no more.The letter was typed by the secretary, signed with his signature. I supposed this was customary, I supposed I could hardly expect an answer from Grey himself.

Meanwhile, I must live till Tuesday. The dragging by of a weekend. It was winter, too. I went from cinema to cinema, bored by them all. I wondered how being alone in a city could ever have seemed an adventure to me, and a thrill. The atmosphere of an hotel, the mournful emptiness of having no one to speak to and nothing to do.

For the first time I began to envy people who had homes. A settled home, somewhere that belonged. Furniture one knew, things one had bought. Food that was not restaurant food. Clothes hung properly in wardrobes. I began to imagine a small house somewhere with a garden, and coming back to it, weary and content. I imagined not existing from day to day, but continuously, a calm even day of living. Things done for one, and one not being aware. The efficiency of servants, the pleasant monotony of order. I imagined Hesta with her hair rumpled, gardening, and then going in to change, and a maid bringing out to me an evening paper; or the comfort of dark evenings in the winter, the curtains drawn, a blazing fire, dogs about the place, sighing and stretching themselves, and Hesta lying on a sofa reading a book. I imagined the security of settled money, of a steady income, putting my car away in a garage, and coming into my own house, picking up my own letters in the hall. Looking about me, calling ‘Hesta?’ and then a child shouting from a room overhead, running on to a landing, peering through the banisters, and I glancing up, laughing, saying ‘Hullo!’

I wondered why I had ever despised these things, why they had once seemed pitiful and absurd. I wondered why the placidity of a home seemed necessary to me now, and why I no longer yearned for the turmoil of a ship upon the sea.

Once there had been a path across the mountains, and restlessness, and an urge to fight, and a dream of many women, and now there was a home that was my home, and peace, and relaxation, and no dreams but the reality of one woman. I did not know if it was I who had changed, or the world that had changed about me, but so it was, and I could not call back the dreams that had gone from me.

 

I stood on the doorstep of No. 33, Lower Bedford Street. I was shown into a room, where there were pictures on the wall and books on the table.

I felt shabby and wretchedly immature with my MS. under my arm, wrapped up very hurriedly in brown paper. This was where my father would stand perhaps, leaning on his stick, glancing about him at the prints, but supreme in his self-confidence, and then walking slowly to the other room where Grey would seize him by his hands, saying: ‘They surely did not make you wait?’

I waited, though, unimportant, rather foolish with my brown-paper parcel, and in ten minutes the door was opened and I followed a man along a passage to another room.

Grey was standing with his back to me, stooping a little, warming his hands at the fire. He turned round as I entered, he smiled, and I saw he had not changed.

‘Well, Richard,’ he said.

I went forward and shook his hand.

‘It’s very good of you to see me,’ I said.

‘No, no, I was glad to get your letter. A little astonished, perhaps, but glad. Sit down, won’t you?’

I did so, and was silent. I was not sure whether I should speak or he.

‘Where have you been all this time?’ he said.

‘I’ve lived in Paris now for over a year,’ I said, ‘but before then I travelled a bit, I saw round Scandinavia, I went on a ship.’

‘Quite an experience, I suppose,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I haven’t been to Paris for many years,’ he went on - ‘I dare say it’s all very changed now. Americanized and so on.’

‘I like it,’ I said.

I wondered why there was a need for this conversation.Wasn’t he going to ask me about the book?

‘Scandinavia I don’t know at all,’ he said; ‘it must be very wonderful, of course. Yes. The fjords and the midnight sun. Did you go very far north?’

‘Not as far as the Cape,’ I said.

‘Oh! you ought to have seen the Cape. So now you’re back in England again. How long are you going to be here?’

‘Well, it rather depends. . . .’ I began.

‘Have you been home at all?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘They don’t know you’re here?’

‘No.’

‘I was down there a few months ago.Your father was looking a little tired, I thought. Been overworking himself.We’re bringing out his new book this week.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. Finest thing he’s ever done, in my opinion. It’s an epic poem, you know, very long, quite different from his shorter pieces. There is a strength and a beauty in it that leaves you breathless. I had no idea he would produce something of this sort, at his age. His grasp of psychology is astounding and his understanding of human nature. He has called it
Conflict
.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘We’ve included three or four shorter pieces as well. There’s a lovely little thing, a description of a summer evening after rain, which literally gave me the impression of stillness, of silence, and the drip of water from an avenue of trees. I wish I had a copy up here.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘He’s the biggest man in the world of letters today, Richard. He’ll go down to posterity as the poet of the century; we all know that.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

He sat for a few minutes, staring before him, his thoughts busy with my father. I said nothing, I looked at the carpet, hugging my brown-paper parcel on my knees. Then he broke himself away, he smiled, he reached for a cigarette, and turned to smaller things.

‘Well, Richard,’ he said, ‘and what’s all this about your writing a book?’

It seemed to me I could see the vision of my father slipping away, remote, impregnable, on some far-distant plane, and here was I, humble and obscure, running hither and thither on the silly earth.