Part 50 (1/2)

”You look tired. Poor Laming! It's a girl isn't it?”

He could only gaze at the floor. His leg was about to fall right off. His brain had gone rotten, like an egg.

”There's always the one you take, and the one you might have taken.”

He continued to stare at the eroded lentil-colored carpet ”Lie down and rest. I'll come back for you soon.”

Agonizingly he flopped onto the hard chesterfield, with its mustard-and-cress covering, much worn down in places.

In the end, she was with him again. She wore a short-sleeved nightdress in white lawn, plain and pure. Her hair had long been quite short. She looked like a bride.

”It's too hot for a dressing gown,” she said, smiling. He smiled wanly back.

”Let me help you to take your things off,” she said.

And when they were in bed, her bed, with the windows open and the drawn blinds carelessly flapping, she seemed younger than ever. He knew that she would never change, never disappoint. She did not even need to be thought about.

”Laming,” she said. ”You know who loves you best of all.”

He sank into her being.

His leg could be forgotten. The heat could be forgotten. He had sailed into port. He had come home. He had lost and found himself.

Growing Boys (1977).

What, you deny the existence of the supernatural, when there is scarcely a man or woman alive who has not met with some evidence for it!

LUCIEN.

It is, indeed, singular that western man, while refusing to place credence in anything he cannot see, while rejecting absolutely omens, prophecies, and visions, should at the same time, as he so often does, deny the evidence of his own eyes.

OSBERT SITWELL.

The first time it occurred to poor Millie that something might really be wrong was, on the face of it, perfectly harmless and commonplace.

Uncle Stephen, the boys' great uncle, had found the words, conventional though the words were. 'You're much too big a boy to make messes like that, Rodney. And you too, of course, Angus.'

'Angus wasn't making a mess,' Rodney had retorted. 'There's no need to bite his head off too.'

'Keep quiet, boy, and clean yourself up,' Uncle Stephen had rejoined, exactly as if he had been father to the lads, and a good and proper father also.

In reality, however, Uncle Stephen was a bachelor.

'I'll take you up to the bathroom, Rodney,' Millie had intervened. 'If you'll excuse us for a few moments, Uncle Stephen.'

Uncle Stephen had made no effort to look pleasant and social. Rather, he had grated with irritation. When Millie took Rodney out of the room, Uncle Stephen was glaring at her other son, defying him to move, to speak, to breathe, to exist except upon sufferance.

It was certainly true that the boys lacked discipline. They were a major inconvenience and burden, overshadowing the mildest of Millie's joys. Even when they were away at school, they oppressed her mind. There was nowhere else where they were ever away, and even the headmaster, who had been at London University with Phineas, declined to accept them as boarders, though he had also declined to give any precise reason. When Millie had looked very pale, he had said, as gently as he could, that it was better not to enter into too much explanation: experience had taught him that. Call it an intuition, he had experienced. Certainly it had settled the matter.

She had supposed that, like so many things, the headmaster's decision might have related to the fact that the boys were twins. Twins ran in her family, and the two other cases she knew of, both much older than she was, did not seem to be happy twins. None the less, until the coming of Rodney and Angus, and though she would have admitted it to few people, she had always wished she had a twin herself: a twin sister, of course. Mixed twins were something especially peculiar. She had never herself actually encountered a case, within the family, or without. She found it difficult to imagine.

Now, Millie no longer wished for a twin. She hardly knew any longer what she wished for, large, small or totally fantastic.

All that notwithstanding (and, of course, much, much more), Millie had never supposed there to be anything very exceptional about her situation. Most mothers had troubles of some kind; and there were many frequently encountered varieties from which she had been mercifully spared, at least so far. Think of Jenny Holmforth, whose Mikey drank so much that he was virtually unemployable! Fancy having to bring up Audrey and Olivia and Proserpina when you had always to be looking for a part-time job as well, and with everyone's eyes on you, pitying, contemptuous, no longer even lascivious!

But upstairs in the bathroom, it came to Millie, clearly and consciously for the first time, that the boys were not merely too big to make messes: they were far, far too big in a more absolute sense. Rodney seemed almost to fill the little bathroom. He had spoken of Uncle Stephen biting his head off. That would have been a dreadful transaction; like... But Millie drew back from the simile.

Of course, for years no one could have failed to notice that the boys were enormous; and few had omitted to refer to it, jocularly or otherwise. The new element was the hypothesis that the irregularity went beyond merely social considerations. It existed in a limbo where she and her husband, Phineas, might well find themselves virtually alone with it, and very soon.

Millie had read English Language and Literature and knew of the theory that Lady Wilde and her unfortunate son had suffered from acromegaly. That appeared to have been something that ran in Lady Wilde's family, the Elgees; because Sir William had been quite stunted. But of course there were limits even to acromegaly. About Rodney and Angus, Millie could but speculate.

When all the clothes had been drawn off Rodney, she was appalled to think what might happen if ever in the future she had to struggle with him physically, as so often in the past.

Re-entering the drawing room, Rodney pushed in ahead of her, as he always did.

Angus seized the opportunity to charge out, almost knocking her down. He could be heard tearing upstairs: she dreaded to think for what. It mattered more when her respected Uncle Stephen was in the house.

She looked apologetically at Uncle Stephen and managed to smile. When her heart was in it, Millie still smiled beautifully.

'Rodney,' roared Uncle Stephen, 'sit down properly, uncross your legs, and wait until someone speaks to you first.'

'He'd better finish his tea,' said Millie timidly.

'He no longer deserves anything. He's had his chance and he threw it away.'

'He's a very big boy, Uncle Stephen. You said so yourself.'

'Too big,' responded Uncle Stephen. 'Much too big.'

The words had been spoken again, and Millie knew they were true.

Uncle Stephen and Millie talked for some time about earlier days and of how happiness was but a dream and of the disappearance of everything that made life worth living. They pa.s.sed on to Phineas's lack of prospects and to the trouble inside Millie that no doctor had yet succeeded in diagnosing, even to his own satisfaction. Millie offered to show Uncle Stephen round the garden, now that it had almost stopped raining.

'It's quite a small garden,' she said objectively.

But Uncle Stephen had produced his big, ticking watch from his waistcoat pocket, which sagged with its weight. There was this sagging pocket in all his waistcoats. It helped to confirm Uncle Stephen's ident.i.ty.

'Can't be done, Millie. I'm due back for a rubber at six and it's five-eleven already.'

'Oh, I'm terribly sad, Uncle Stephen. Phineas and I have raised the most enormous pelargoniums. Mainly luck, really. I should so much like you to see them.' Then Millie said no more.

'My loss, Millie dear. Let me embrace my sweet girl before I go.'

He crushed her for a minute or two, then stepped back, and addressed Angus.