Mother’s Boy, page 17
She knew she had no right to complain, not really. He brought in money now and handed half his pay packet to her for his board and lodging and the rest. He was as clean and tidy as she had raised him to be. He was kind to Wang – although he also laughed at him – and took him for walks after work if she was working late. He even looked after the goldfish he had won her at the fair. But she felt herself excluded and found it hard to bear. She knew she was unjust. She had always hoped for a clever, special boy and he had grown into a clever, special man, which meant he could be prickly and difficult and knew exactly how best to wound her with his sharp tongue. If he had been ordinary, or what Miss Bracewell called ‘low wattage’, he’d have been married by now, like several of his contemporaries, and lost to her that way, and probably risking his health in the iron foundry, sawmill or tanneries.
There were often times now when she looked at Charles, or more often at his firmly closed bedroom door, and remembered the tale of the foolish woodcutter and his wife whose magically granted wishes all came true but in unexpectedly wrong ways.
In this last year, although his job at the Electricity Board was no more exciting for him than his job at the builders’ merchant’s, Charles had become quite the local star. First he had played Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance, then he had one of his short plays broadcast by the BBC. Laura had kept a copy of the Western Morning News with the headline, ‘Cornishman’s Play to be Broadcast!’ and been sent two more clippings by proud relatives. She had been impressed that Charles was paid twelve guineas simply for the right to broadcast and extra for adapting his script to make sense on the radio. And of course it was gratifying having so many people stop her in the street to tell her how proud she must be, and how they were going to be listening in.
‘Wherever does he get his ideas from?’ they asked, and, ‘Is it all about the two of you?’ Silly things like that.
She had assumed he’d have arranged to listen with his friends, the ones he discussed books with, and the play-reading group, but the evening came and she made a mutton pie she knew he liked, then realised he wasn’t going out, so they sat and listened together after supper. So as to give it her full attention she did no mending or knitting, although her fingers itched to be busy. Charles paced nervously about the room, interrupting now and then to laugh or to complain about a line said wrong.
It was very strange. Because there was nothing to watch, her mind’s eye saw the play happening right there in their front room at Tredydan Road. When the excitable young hero played the piano it was Charles she saw playing just across from where they were sitting. He even played one of the pieces Charles often played, a classical piece, not the dance tunes he was always having to learn for the band. And when the young man’s comic landlady came in and flirted and fussed, she saw herself doing things with food and tea things she often did, but saying things she would never say, and in a would-be genteel accent, like the waitress in Goodbody’s Charles and she had chuckled over. There was a girl in the play, who sounded pretty and no better than she should be, and another young, rather graceless young man, who was performing in a band with the two of them. The hero was in love with the girl who was meant to be engaged to the other man.
Try as she might, however, Laura couldn’t see her as any of the girls in either of the bands Charles played with, who could be vivacious but were all thoroughly sensible, hard-working local girls. The few girls Charles had ever asked out to the cinema with him had only been briefly mentioned and then dropped from conversation soon afterwards. When she had dared ask him about one of them and enquired if he was seeing her again he said, shortly, ‘She said I was too sarcastic,’ which sounded so likely Laura had forgotten to offer any words of motherly reassurance. He could be terribly sharp. Sometimes she worried he didn’t really like women very much and that it might be her fault.
Having started as a merry enough sort of comedy, the radio play took a very odd turn. It became evident that young Benedict, the pianist, harboured dark secrets. He made some strange references to repression and how much strength he took from it and then, for all his protestations of passionate love, he was revealed as a murderer on the run from a lunatic asylum.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Well done, you. Were you pleased with how they did it?’ which was the right thing to ask as he then spoke about the performances and didn’t ask her what she thought. She remained unsettled by the play because the identification between Charles and its frighteningly out of control, yet oddly gifted hero felt like a sort of warning.
She wasn’t the only listener to be at a loss for what to say. ‘Who’d have thought it?’ people told her in the days after. ‘A murdering lunatic and he seemed so friendly.’ Or else, as she had done, they simply said, ‘Well!’ then asked, cautiously, ‘Was he pleased?’
The unpaid commission to write the Nativity play came soon after the broadcast. She was very pleased that he had said yes. With all the doubting, questioning books he had taken to getting through his Left Book Club, and which she occasionally picked up and read herself, she was worried he might scoff and say no. He hardly ever came to church with her these days and had taken to asking her impossible questions like where was God in Hitler’s Germany, or what good had prayer done the victims of Franco? But he had taken the commission very seriously indeed. It should happen after Christmas, though, he said, and deal with the kings and Herod and the escape into Egypt as that spoke more to the arrival of evacuees and the horribly unstable state of things than the usual story of Joseph, Mary and the shepherds.
And then, of course, they had edged ever nearer war breaking out so that people started to ask her, ‘Is Charles’s play still happening?’
‘Yes,’ she told them all. ‘Of course. We need it more than ever.’ But when war was declared she began to have doubts too. Surely, she thought, people would have more important things to do than dressing up? And when the director was called up it looked as though the project might founder, but Charles agreed to direct it, as well as playing the piano in its band. So now not only was The Coming of the Magi more ‘Charles’s play’ than ever but, by a kind of community magic rare in a town so divided into clans, clubs, churches and classes, it came to represent something far more important than a mere nativity. People who never normally got involved in such things came forward to help. Charles said the interest shown was a bit overwhelming and the performers were being made nervous by it. There was such demand for tickets that an extra performance had to be laid on.
Laura had chosen to come to the play on its last night, not wishing to burden Charles with any need to look after her on the first night, when he assumed she wanted to come, and knowing he’d be involved in a cast party tonight when it ended. She could slip off home alone afterwards if she didn’t enjoy it and wasn’t sure what to say. It was often hard to say the right thing with him, especially so when she was nervous of saying the wrong one. Gertie had been offered a ticket too, of course, but had chosen to stay home with Fred, who had not been sleeping well, and Laura was guiltily glad of having no company on the excursion.
It was strange walking up the steep hill to St Stephen’s and not heading on to Werrington, where she still worked occasionally. She only came to St Stephen’s on the rare occasions someone she knew had their funeral there. Used as she was to feeling, even obliquely, part of the home team down the hill in St Thomas’s, she felt stupidly nervous coming there. She hoped she would see familiar faces but knew most of her friends and family had been already, and she had been obliged to listen patiently while repeatedly being told all about it. She was very glad she had decided to wear her best navy coat and felt hat, as the first thing she saw on coming in was how many of the audience were in evening dress, quite as though this was a night at the opera, not a Christmas play in a small Cornish town.
She gave her name to the very upright couple running the box-office table, who insisted her ticket was complimentary and then, to her horror, had her shown to a seat in the very front row. Her instinct would have been to sit in one of the side aisles towards the rear, as she did in church, where she could enjoy looking about her but not feel on display. As it was, she felt exposed, so close to the stage; she couldn’t change places as the seats were reserved and she knew the performance had sold out. She concentrated on watching Charles and the band, who were playing a selection of carols, and tried to remember that most people would be paying no attention to her at all.
There was a slight commotion and a large group arrived, all in evening dress, and were shown to her row and the one behind. They had no idea who she was, of course, but she knew them for the Williamses from Werrington, presumably with guests still staying from their New Year party, and the Colvilles from Penheale Manor. Several of the men were in uniform, of course. Army. A tall young man turned politely to greet her as he settled in his place beside her.
‘Looking forward to this?’ he said.
‘Very much,’ she told him, adding, ‘That’s my boy playing the piano.’
She didn’t know why she said that and not that her boy had written and directed the play; it was just what came out. Perhaps she didn’t like to be thought a show-off?
‘Marvellous,’ he said, in that way upper class people did when they meant no such thing. ‘Well, three-line whip for us. Have to support local talent and so on.’
But then his attention was sought by the woman to his other side and he left Laura in peace. They all stood in honour of the mayor and his wife, arriving in their funny furs and chains. The lights were turned out briefly, to silence everyone, then came on again and the band struck up ‘God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen’ and, with much shuffling and chat and hasty discovery that they all had the words on their programmes, everyone stood to sing.
She knew the story, of course: the three Wise Men alerted by the star and travelling to Bethlehem, via Herod’s palace, Herod’s terrible slaughter of children and the flight into Egypt, and perhaps because she knew it so well she didn’t pay as close attention as she had to the radio play. With such a press of people in thick coats and with theatre lights shining, the hall because surprisingly warm but she was transported nonetheless.
The production had the probably rather clumsy charm of all amateur shows – she had never seen a professional one unless you counted the cinema – it was hard to take seriously as a king a man who sold you balls of wool – but then there were moments that took her breath away. The angel Gabriel was played by a young blonde woman of such striking severity you could believe she was more than human and knew things mankind could only guess at. And Charles, who had often said how he was haunted by the cries and shrieks of the poor animals in the abattoir up the road, had given speeches to ox and ass and sheep, whom she knew perfectly well from her programme were women she often saw in the queue at the post office or buying buns, and yet Charles’s words, and the utterly lifelike animal heads someone had made, rendered them strange and commanding. Her grand neighbour, who had giggled audibly on occasion, was struck silent and then muttered, ‘Marvellous masks. Marvellous,’ when the scene finished, in a way that told her he was fighting tears.
She knew nothing of poetry apart from hymns, but recognised that Charles had reflected the social differences in the story by writing the Kings’ scenes in solemn verse and the domestic scenes, the family scenes, in normal speech. And this was heightened by the Kings all speaking beautifully, like radio announcers, and the others talking with their familiar Cornish and Devon accents.
She would ask to read the script at home later. One moment of Charles’s writing really struck her. Near the beginning, when the Kings were speaking, they said, ‘We are the tired men of the stars, the thin moon, the glitter of other worlds in the tall sky.’
It made her think of those times when she’d been walking Wang along Underlane on a clear night, and how the stars seen through the winter trees had made the night feel colder and comfortless. How had he done that? You would never say the sky was tall, and yet when Charles did, it worked and cast a sort of spell. She liked, too, that he kept involving the audience by expecting them to sing along, and having the hall lights turned up briefly so they could read the words to ‘I Saw Three Ships’ and ‘We Three Kings’; it made them feel part of the drama and reminded them there were still monsters like Herod, still young families forced to flee like the Spanish and now Polish and German refugees the Churches had been working to help and rehome. And the British evacuees, of course.
People enjoyed the villainy of Herod, who was wearing a turban made of a tablecloth Laura was sure she recognised, and they cheered uproariously after his curtain line, ‘I will worship him . . . with my sword!’ but it felt too real to her for laughter.
When the show ended with everyone on their feet to sing ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’, she was almost overwhelmed and had to mime the words rather than risk singing and hearing her voice crack. As everyone was taking their bow, animals clutching their beautiful heads under their arms and looking slightly flushed with hair awry, there were shouts of ‘Author! Author!’ and Charles was duly led out from the piano to bow. He looked so smart in his evening dress, but also about ten years old, and Laura felt a great rush of protectiveness towards him as he took little bobbing bows and had to lift off his specs as they were steaming up with emotion.
There was a great babble then, and a rush for the door and a simultaneous rush to press in the other direction to congratulate the cast, so Laura stayed where she was.
‘You didn’t tell me your boy was the author and director as well as the piano player,’ young Mr Williams said, while he waited for the rest of his party to leave their row. ‘You must be so proud, Mrs Causley.’
‘Oh, I am,’ she said. ‘I am.’ He had a kind face and the dark, bushy eyebrows of all the men in his family, and she knew he would have no inkling that she occasionally scrubbed his hall floors or starched his napkins. ‘Happy New Year, sir.’
‘Happy New Year to you, too,’ he said. ‘I’d better just . . .’ And he followed the others out into the aisle.
She wanted to congratulate Charles but there was such a scrum around him and the musicians and actors, and she knew she would see him at home later. Besides, she could feel her face beginning to burn with a hot flush and imagined herself stammering before him and his clever friends with her face running. She faced several more congratulations on her way out, at least twice from people she didn’t know, then found herself back out in blessed chill and anonymity under a canopy of stars. The glitter of other worlds in the tall sky, she told herself, amazed that she had somehow remembered the line. She could not have said how, but she recognised it had a similar ring to some lines in the Prayer Book that had always got under her skin like, But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy; lines that felt they had power in them, spells to hold evil at bay.
Gertie had been sitting in the kitchen, she could tell, as she had left a copy of Picture Show on the table there, but had now turned in for the night. Laura hoped she had enjoyed having the place to herself for the evening and realised it would be a kindness if she found a way of going out somewhere one evening a week, to give her and the baby some space. She made a plate of brown bread and butter, cut thin the way Charles liked it, and a pot of tea, drank and ate a little herself, then fell deeply asleep in her kitchen armchair. When she woke, Wang was snoring on her lap and Charles was standing over her in his best overcoat and smelling of beer.
‘Mother? It’s past your bedtime.’
‘I wanted to stay up,’ she said, ‘to say well done. Charles, it was so good. I was very proud. People kept telling me how proud I must be, which was silly really, as of course I was proud. But really. I was.’
He smiled and put a hand on hers, something he never seemed to do any more.
‘I made you tea,’ she said.
‘Oh, that’s long cold,’ he told her, ‘but this looks good.’ And he sat at the kitchen table to eat the bread and butter. ‘It’s always so much better when someone else makes it. I didn’t want it to end,’ he added. ‘The run of performances, I mean. It’s silly but I felt they were holding off the war.’
‘It will have meant that to lots of people.’
‘I’ve got my medical tomorrow,’ he said. ‘In Plymouth City Art Gallery. Of all the places to have to drop my trousers.’
‘You never said.’
‘Didn’t I?’
‘Are you settled on the Navy?’
‘Yes. Apparently I can be something called a writer, which sounds about right. I could never be a stoker like Joe. That takes brawn. And my maths and eyesight are too hopeless to man the guns like Ginger’s going to do.’
‘Ginger’s a gunner?’
‘Yes. Little Ginger firing huge guns!’
‘I thought they’d want him as a doctor.’
‘Well, he’s not gone to medical school yet, so his maths is more useful, calculating trajectories or what have you. Come on. Bed. You look done in.’
‘Yes.’
But she sat on there a while, watching him sing softly to himself as he riddled the stove and let Wang out into the yard for a pressure-reliever.
Laura prayed guiltily that Charles would fail his medical but, despite his poor eyesight, he was declared A1 and told to expect his call-up papers in the post any day. They had laughed at him, he said, when he asked if he could be a writer. ‘Oh, we’ll find something just as suitable for you,’ they said.
‘All the way home,’ he told her, ‘I was saying to myself, “I’m a sailor, I’m a sailor,” but it doesn’t feel remotely true yet.’
‘The uniform will help,’ she said. ‘And I expect you’ll get training.’
