Martha, Eric, and George Read online

He came back and sat down again. But now, as though the movement had cleared his head, his thoughts at last found their necessary focus: upon Martha.

  They were bitter. The fact was that Martha, his first and only love, had tossed him aside like—there was no other phrase for it—like a soiled glove. No dashing hussar abandoning a village maiden could have behaved more cavalierly. Not that Martha was in any other sense dashing, far from it; her outstanding characteristic was rather a blunt stolidity which only Eric in his innocence could have seen as virginal shyness. The trumpet that called her from his side had been no bid from some international impresario—(the female equivalent, so to speak, of “Ha!” amid the battle)—but so far as Eric could make out must have sounded more like the scrannel scrape of an easel across a studio floor.—Inexplicable, disarraying circumstance! Of course Martha was fond of drawing, she was an art-student; but much more easily could Eric have comprehended the lure of thousand-dollar gowns at Las Vegas—that is, if Martha had been able to sing.

  She couldn’t sing.

  Bitterly listing, as a discarded lover will, his lost one’s every disadvantage, Eric further reminded himself that no more could Martha cook. All those Friday evenings in the preceding autumn, when she’d been coming round for a proper English meal and then a proper hot bath, such as her humble student’s lodging couldn’t afford, had Martha ever offered to lend a hand in the kitchen? Not she.—Had she ever offered even to help wash up? Not Martha. Still Mrs. Taylor’s kindness persisted, she felt it her duty to extend a hand to a shy young English girl alone in Paris—and if she had been ill enough repaid then, thought Eric confusedly, how was she being repaid now!

  He was of course partly to blame. He admitted it. During a certain week of his mother’s absence he had undoubtedly—seduced Martha. But whose fault was it they weren’t married, to the palliation of their common misdoing? Naturally Eric would have preferred to get his step, to Assistant Manager, before taking on a wife; but hadn’t he instantly, or at least as soon as Martha returned from Christmas in Birmingham, assured her of his honourable intentions if anything … happened?

  The scene was as vivid as if it had taken place that morning: on a bench in the Tuileries Gardens, opposite the trompe l’oeil statue of Tragedy and Comedy …

  “You know if anything … happens, Martha, we can be married straight away? Of course you’d give up your painting—”

  And she left him flat. What she actually said Eric preferred not to remember. All he remembered was Martha’s back as, portfolio under arm, she stumped out of the Tuileries Gardens, out of his life.

  Or not quite all.

  From that wintry interview certain other words of his own re-echoed.

  “I want to look after you, Martha. To shoulder all your burdens for you …”

  Evidently she had taken him at his word.

  5

  It wasn’t any clap of a colleague’s hand, nor the abrupt contact with a ledger, that roused Eric from these painful memories, and reflections, but the reappearance of his mother.—To Eric’s surprise her whole aspect had changed. Her step was elastic; she was still pale, but with upon each cheek a patch of scarlet; her lips still trembled, but in a joyful smile.

  “Oh, my darling,” cried Mrs. Taylor, “it’s a boy!”

  In her eye gleamed the spark that lights bonfires, sets oxen a-roasting; whole villages, whole counties, could hardly have contained her overflowing benevolence, as there stood Mrs. Taylor rejoicing in the possession of a grandson.

  Eric also observed that she had her hat on.

  “Mother, you’re not going out?” asked Eric nervously.

  “But of course I am, dear,” replied Mrs. Taylor. “He’s as good as gold on my bed, but he can’t be left alone!—so I’ll just pop round to the English chemist for his formula, before you go back to the Bank.”

  Chapter Three

  1

  “Poppity-pin!” crooned Mrs. Taylor.

  It was about four that afternoon. Eric had long returned to the City of London (Paris branch) Bank—so punctually, in fact, there had been no time, during the few minutes that elapsed between his mother’s reappearance and his own departure, for any further colloquy. (Eric actually preserved an almost total silence; his whole bearing struck Mrs. Taylor as odd. She’d expected to find him hanging over Baby—not impatiently watching the clock. It had even crossed her mind that he might take the afternoon off.) His absence promoted nonetheless a singular, nursery peace; indeed the infant, after taking its bottle quite beautifully—just a little wind, easily patted up—should theoretically have been back in its carry-cot; but what grandmother could resist the pleasure of cradling a first grandson in her arms?

  “Poppity-pin, Gran’s little treasure!” crooned Mrs. Taylor.

  The moment was far too delightful to spoil by thinking about Martha, so Mrs. Taylor didn’t. This involved no particular feat of will-power, merely a complete if unconscious surrender to wishful thinking. To possess a grandchild without the encumbrance of a daughter-in-law is many a grandmother’s unadmitted dream. “Dear Anne, dear Lucy, dear Susan!” cry the grandmothers—happy to welcome with small bottles of Chanel No. 5 at Christmas each necessary transmitter of a family face; but even happier to water with easy tears a rose-bush on an early grave …

  Certainly Mrs. Taylor didn’t hope Martha was dead, even though she’d never really liked the girl. (In any case, as she’d learned from Madame Leclerc, Martha was obviously alive that morning. It would have had to be a very sudden accident.) Mrs. Taylor simply forgot Martha: indeed, so all-absorbing was the sheer physical pleasure of holding a baby again, her thoughts had scarcely room for even such future delights as the transition from formula to sieved spinach, from sieved spinach to the first rusk. The minutes passed in a blissful, shared stupor; thirty at least, before there drifted across Mrs. Taylor’s inward eye any image to distract; and then only of a matinée-jacket.

  “I must begin knitting!” Mrs. Taylor told herself.

  The carry-cot actually contained a fairly complete layette—of no superfine quality, unembroidered, uninitialled, but at least, also, new, and like the feeding-formula a point in Martha’s favour. Mrs. Taylor sketchily admitted it—but preferred to visualize garments suited to the riper age of three or four months. A certain matinée-jacket knitted for Eric had been the admiration of every Streatham neighbour; as for bootees, she could toss off a pair a day. Happy, new-old, new-found employment! “I’ll run round to the English Wool Shop to-morrow,” meditated Mrs. Taylor; and still hadn’t settled the point of cap versus bonnet when the telephone rang.

  Fortunately it stood close by her elbow; she hadn’t to move. She lifted the receiver with precaution; it was Eric.

  “Mother.”

  “Yes, dear?” whispered Mrs. Taylor.

  “I can’t hear you, Mother. Can you hear me?”

  “Of course, dear, but I don’t want to wake him. He’s taken his bottle so beautifully!”

  “What did you say?”

  “He’s taken his bottle beautifully!” repeated Mrs. Taylor, slightly raising her voice.

  So, quite unnecessarily, did Eric.

  “Listen, Mother: how old would you say he was? More than three days?”

  “Good gracious, what a question!” exclaimed Mrs. Taylor indignantly—but pleased nonetheless that Eric was at last showing a proper interest. His tone was quite laughably urgent! “Three days? More like three weeks!” exclaimed Mrs. Taylor.

  “Then it’s probably prison,” said Eric—urgently.

  2

  As though quicker in the uptake than its grandmother, the infant roused. A hand pushed forth, vaguely signalled …

  “He’s trying to get at the telephone!” reported Mrs. Taylor delightedly.—“Now I can’t seem to hear you, dear. What did you say?”

  “Article 55—”

  “I’m sure you didn’t!” objected Mrs. Taylor. “I’m not as deaf as all that!”

  At the other end of the line there
was a slight pause before Eric, in all senses of the phrase, began again.

  “Mother.”

  “Well, dear, what is it?”

  “I’ve been talking to a man at the Bank, Mother, actually our legal expert. Of course I put it as a hypothetical case, and it’s not exactly his field, but he looked up the Civil Code. Article 55, failure to register a birth within three days, says not less than ten days imprisonment and fine of not less than four hundred francs. Or either.”

  Le flegme britannique is no myth. If Mrs. Taylor, in the rue d’Antibes, momentarily dropped the receiver, the reaction was physical rather than mental: thus abruptly haled, so to speak, from a wool-shop into the dock, she took but a moment more to reorientate, also defend herself.

  “Nonsense,” said Mrs. Taylor. “We couldn’t register him. We didn’t know in time—did we, Poppitypin?”

  “Mother.”

  “Well, dear?—How I wish you could see him!” exclaimed Mrs. Taylor. “He wants the telephone!”

  “Article 173, failure to notify the appropriate Mairie, gives up to eight days imprisonment or fine of up to three hundred and sixty francs. Or both.”

  “Well, of course I’ll notify the Mairie,” agreed Mrs. Taylor. “I’ll pop round first thing in the morning. You must just find out where it is for me.”

  “Mother.”

  “Dear, I’m sure he ought to go to sleep again!” protested Mrs. Taylor. “His little eyes—”

  “Mother, you still haven’t realized,” interrupted Eric desperately. “The fact is, so far as I can make out, and in the circumstances, he’s French.”

  3

  Le flegme britannique is no myth; but there are limits. Now indeed was all Mrs. Taylor’s composure—all her happiness, all her peace of mind—shattered; as the fearful sentence slowly penetrated only hysteria could have expressed her emotion. French? Against all the laws of nature, her grandson French? Subject not of proper Royalty but of a mere faceless Republic?—His anthem, instead of “God Save,” the wild revolutionary “Marseillaise”? “Never!” cried Mrs. Taylor aloud—clutching her grandson to her bosom. “Never!” cried Mrs. Taylor into the telephone …

  But Eric, presumably already too long absent from his desk, had rung off. She was a grandmother alone, unsupported; alone save for the hapless infant in her arms, alone to fend, from that innocent head, the wing-beat of Napoleonic eagles.—Mrs. Taylor wasn’t a normally imaginative woman, but as she now suddenly remembered Military Service, the image was as precise as in a Tenniel cartoon: both birds (there were two of them) wore small Imperial crowns. With equal precision (now in a sort of cinema-montage) she visualized death from frost-bite outside Moscow, and from thirst in some Saharan outpost of the Foreign Legion …

  She snatched at the receiver again.—It was a measure of her disarray: trained originally by her husband, then re-trained by Eric, never to telephone a man at his office, Mrs. Taylor availed herself of the instrument without a second thought.

  “Mr. Taylor? Who wishes to speak to him, please?” fluted a feminine voice from the Bank’s switchboard.

  “His mother!” cried Mrs. Taylor recklessly.

  —Did she or didn’t she hear a giggle, from the switchboard? In any case, there ensued a considerable pause before the voice fluted back.

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Taylor, we don’t seem able to find him. Will you leave a message?”

  Mrs. Taylor took a grip on herself. She was belatedly aware of its being a moment for discretion. But how to frame, in any unsuspicious terms, what was practically a shout in the dark? It was like trying to shriek in a low voice, to fend a blow in slow motion … However, by drawing on a long experience as secretary to the Judges’ Committee of the Streatham Flower Show, she succeeded.

  “Please,” said Mrs. Taylor. “Please say I’d like him to bring his friend back this evening for a little game of bridge—and to tell him it isn’t hypothetical.”

  Chapter Four

  1

  It may be said at once that Mrs. Taylor languished in no Gallic prison for so much as a day. The polite official at the Mairie would have been as horrified by the thought as at the thought of jailing his own grandmother. Fortunately he had no need to contemplate it: Mrs. Taylor, declaring an enfant trouvé the very day after the trouvaille, wasn’t subject even to a fine of three hundred and sixty francs. Nor was any objection raised to her taking charge of the babe—so obviously impeccable her standing and character. “It is a truly noble action madame performs!” congratulated the polite official; and if (observing Eric in the background) he also entertained more frivolous, less official notions, politely suppressed them till he got home to his wife.

  No one could have been more helpful, than the courteous official at the Mairie; nor any one less so, in Mrs. Taylor’s opinion, than the legal expert from the Bank.

  In this she did him an injustice. He was a financial legal expert. The integration of a French and English account—the channelling of currency across the Channel—was child’s play to him. He could convert guilders into ore in his head. Financially, he knew all the answers; only never before had been faced with so purely human a problem as how to convert a little French-born national into a little Britisher.

  “For French he undoubtedly is,” affirmed the expert courageously.—It needed courage, to meet Mrs. Taylor’s embattled eye. “However much, and naturally, it may distress you, any child born in France of unknown parents is, ipso facto, French.”

  “But he isn’t of unknown parents!” protested Mrs. Taylor. “And they’re both British! Good gracious, does every single foreign baby born in France have to be French?”

  The expert smiled. (At least he had done his homework—which was why he didn’t in fact appear in the rue d’Antibes until two evenings later. Rightly presuming his colleague’s mother in no danger of jug, he’d taken time to do his homework. It was another source of Mrs. Taylor’s unjust grievances. Eric, on the other hand, poured him a large whisky-and-soda.)

  “On the contrary,” said the expert readily. “If the relevant foreign law deems him a national, then French law deems him never to have been French at all.” He paused, while Mrs. Taylor’s face brightened. “Unfortunately British law takes a different view.”

  Mrs. Taylor’s face fell again.

  “You mean it just abandons a child?” she exclaimed indignantly.

  “Not at all,” reassured the expert. “Section 5(b) of the British Nationality Act deals with such cases expressly: all that is needed is registration within one year of birth at a British Consulate.”

  “One year—! Then what’s to stop us just registering him?” cried Mrs. Taylor—indignation transformed to joy.

  “Section 32.—What very excellent whisky this is!” approved the expert, in parenthesis. “Section 32, I’m afraid, equally expressly excludes any child born illegitimate …”

  It was a word they had hitherto, all of them, avoided. Hitherto they might have been discussing, in the phrase of Madame Leclerc, a little angel dropped from the skies.—Eric’s hand on the decanter, refilling the expert’s glass, slightly shook; Mrs. Taylor dropped her eyes. Mother and son, sharing the same ethos, felt the same shame. (If only Eric and Martha had been married!.—in which case, of course, the whole dreadful situation would never have arisen.) But Mrs. Taylor was doing battle for a grandson, whereas Eric had as yet barely recognized mere paternity; the former’s eyes dropped but a moment (Eric spilling whisky as much outside a glass as in) before she raised them again with that same frankness and simplicity that had so won the official at the Mairie.

  “I suppose he is illegitimate,” acknowledged Mrs. Taylor bravely. “And I can see it makes a difference. We both do, don’t we, Eric?”

  Eric nodded dumbly. His was a very embarrassing position.

  “Section 32,” agreed the expert, with a rather misplaced attempt at lightness, “undoubtedly knows its onions …”

  “All sorts of undesirable children might be registered,” glossed Mrs
. Taylor (she and the expert for once in such accord she overlooked the breach of taste). “I wouldn’t even argue with the Consulate.”

  “If I may say so, that’s entirely wise,” approved the expert. He gave Eric an encouraging look.

  “They’ve enough to do catching spies,” added Mrs. Taylor—rather destroying the force of her argument, but at least accepting the position with surprisingly good grace. (Eric returned the expert’s look gratefully.) “Very well, then,” said Mrs. Taylor, “I shall just adopt him.”

  It really seemed to her the perfect solution. To possess a grandchild without the encumbrance of a daughter-in-law is as has been said many a grandmother’s secret dream; the project had probably been formulating in Mrs. Taylor’s subconscious for days. Watching the faces of the two men—gratified by their surprise, waiting for it to turn to admiration—she uttered a long, contented sigh.

  So did the expert sigh, though on a different note.

  “I’m afraid that’s quite impossible,” sighed the expert. “Might I have a little more soda?”

  2

  Eric manipulated the siphon.—It was one of the most curious features of the session, as he afterwards recalled it, that with his child’s and indeed his own whole future at stake he was nonetheless able quite effortlessly to preserve the trivial courtesies. It struck him afterwards that he must have been numb. He might indeed have been mixing the customary mild tipple offered preparatory to a customary mild bridge-game. Mrs. Taylor, on the other hand—where was now that brief moment of accord?—all too obviously restrained herself from boxing the expert’s ears.

  “Unless you’re simply determined to make difficulties—” began Mrs. Taylor hotly.

  “Mother!” implored Eric.

  “—will you kindly tell me why?”

  Fortunately there is no ruffling an expert who has done his homework.

  “Because you have a son, my dear lady.”