James Hilton: Collected Novels by James Hilton
Nevertheless, he caught the nine-five to Mulcaster.
At the hospital the nurse on duty told him he could see the patient “now” if he wanted. He asked, because of her peculiar emphasis on the word: “What made him change his mind?”
“Well, I think it was because of what Dr. Briggs and I both said.” She blushed as she explained further: “We said you were awfully nice and that everybody liked you.”
George’s smile was a little ghastly, as if he had heard what might be his own epitaph. He answered: “Thanks for the testimonial…All right, I’ll see him. That’s what I’ve come for. Does he have many visitors?”
“None, so far. He’s only been here a fortnight.”
All this as they walked along the corridor. She opened the door and George followed her. The room was cheerfully bleak, and contained bed, side table, two small chairs, and a table in front of the window surmounted by a large bowl of roses. The shape of a human being was recognizable on the bed, but the face was so swathed in bandages that nothing could be seen of it, while the legs, similarly swathed, were held in an up-slanting position by an assembly of slings and frames. George was appalled, but the nurse began cheerfully: “Well…here’s Mr. Boswell again.”
George waited for her to go out, but she stayed, fussing around with the pillow and drawing a chair to the bedside, so he said the only possible thing, which was “Good morning.”
From the bed came a curious muffled voice returning the greeting.
“You’ll have to stoop a little to him, then you’ll hear better…His words get all tied up with the bandages.”
The voice grunted, and George placed his chair closer.
“There’s only one rule,” she added, finally moving to the door. “You mustn’t smoke.”
“I don’t smoke,” George answered.
When the door had closed on her George heard what might have been a sigh from the bed and then the question, abruptly: “Has she gone?”
“Aye,” said George.
“She’s a good nurse, though.”
“I can believe it.” And then after a pause: “I got your note this morning. It’s a bit quick to have taken you at your word, but I thought—”
“Oh, not at all. And don’t be impressed by all these bandages and contraptions. I’m not as much of a wreck as I look.”
“I’m glad to hear you’re getting on all right.”
“Yes, they seem to be patching me up. Would you mind giving me a tablet out of that bottle on the side table?”
George did so. He saw that the left hand was comparatively usable, though the skin was pink and shriveled.
“Thanks…they’re only throat lozenges.”
“I hope talking doesn’t bother you. I won’t stay long. I just wanted to bring you my good wishes.”
“Thanks…I can listen, anyway.”
But George for once found himself without chatter. He said, stammering somewhat: “There isn’t much else I have to say—except that I’m sorry we meet for the first time under these somewhat awkward circumstances. I used to know your father—slightly. I met him—once—several years before his death—”
“What?” The exclamation was so sharp that it discounted the enforced motionlessness of the body. And a rush of words continued: “What do you mean? His death! Have you heard anything? Who told you that? Have they been trying to keep it from me?”
George realized there was a misunderstanding somewhere, though he could not yet tell what. For a moment the wild thought seized him that this Winslow might not be of the same Winslow family at all. He said: “I’m sorry if I’m making a mistake. I was referring to Lord Winslow—the one who used to be Secretary of Housing—”
A strange muffled sound came from the bed, uninterpretable except as one of relief, though the words that followed were still tense with excitement: “You certainly have got it all balled up, Mr. Mayor…That was my grandfather.”
George described the rest of the interview to Wendover the same evening. “Aye, it was my mistake all right, but even when I realized it I didn’t realize everything else immediately, because he kept on asking me about his father—did I know anything, had there been any news, and so on—and of course I could only repeat what I’d heard from the man in London—that they’d both got out of Singapore in time. But then he told me they hadn’t been in Singapore at all, but in Hong Kong, where his father had a job.
“I didn’t stay long after that. I could see I’d put him in a nervous mood, and I felt it was my fault, in a way, for not verifying things beforehand. And I was a bit excited myself, because it was hard to realize that he must be Livia’s boy—and not more than twenty-two, if that…Charles, he told me his name was…I could have talked better to his father, if it had been him, but with the boy I felt tongue-tied…because as he went on talking it became clear to me that he hadn’t the faintest idea who I was—or rather who I had been in his mother’s life.”
“You didn’t tell him?”
“No, Harry, I didn’t.”
“He must have thought it odd that you should take all that trouble to visit him.”
“Aye, and he said so, before I left. He got quite cordial—in a nervous sort of way. He tried to apologize for having refused to see me the day before—he blamed what he called the superstition that provincial mayors are pompous old bores—‘I wonder why people think so,’ he said, and although it was a backhanded compliment, I knew he was meaning it all right. So I answered: ‘Probably because many of ’em are’—and we had a good laugh. Or rather, he couldn’t laugh, but I knew it was the same as if he was laughing…I promised to visit him again. He made a point of asking me to, if ever I was in that part of the world.”
“Don’t you intend to tell him?”
“Not just yet. I don’t see that it can matter much—to him. Or if it did, it wouldn’t help. You see he needs help. His nerves are all to pieces and he’s pretty low-spirited about things in general—I gathered that. Maybe I can cheer him up…and if he finds me a nuisance—then it’ll be easier for him to tell me so if he thinks I’m only the Mayor of Browdley.”
Wendover smiled. “You’d make a good Jesuit, George. You can find more reasons for doing what you want to do…”
George visited the Mulcaster hospital every week or so from then on. Not all the visits were on account of Winslow; some would have had to be made on official business in any case. But he found himself looking forward to them all, and not grudging the length of the journey, which meant less sleep, for it was in the nature of his own work that hardly any of it could be postponed, shortened, or abandoned. And gradually, as the youth continued to improve, there came to George the intense pleasure of noting definite improvements each time—the slow removal of bandages; the first time the cradles and slings were discarded; the first step from the bed to a wheel chair; and most of all, the lifting of the mind from despondency. All this took months, and the visits, though regular, could not last long. The Mayor of Browdley was curiously shy during the early ones—almost desperately afraid of intruding where he might not be really as welcome as it appeared—reluctant, it would seem, to believe that the invitations to come again were genuine. It was unlike George, who was so used to being liked, to have such diffidence; and yet there was in him all the uncertainty of a man in whom the touch of bravado masks only a deep humility and an awareness of personal inadequacy.
They talked of many things, from hospital gossip to world affairs, with no plan or aim in the talking; and this, perhaps, was as good a way to get to know each other as if either had deliberately tried. George was often tempted to lead the subject to Livia, but always forbore; he had an odd feeling of conscience about it—that his own concealment of identity could only be justified so long as he did not take such advantages. Sometimes, however, information slipped out without any probing. Charles liked to talk about the family home in Berkshire, the big centuries-old house that belonged now to his uncle, the inheritor of the title—“and thank heaven it do
George didn’t inquire what squeezing warbles was.
“And yet she could be the great lady too—doing the society stuff if ever she felt like it. I’ve often thought she’d have made a damn fine actress…And when she made up her mind about something, nothing on earth or under heaven would stop her…My God, the wires she pulled to get out to Hong Kong after the war started.”
“I thought you said he’d given up the job.”
“He had, but he didn’t much like farming, and after a year or so he went abroad again—for an oil company. Mother didn’t like it, but she followed him, and I didn’t see either of them again till ’thirty-nine, when they came home on six months’ leave. They were still in London in September, and Father offered his services to the Government, but they told him he couldn’t do better than go back to his job with the oil company. So he did—alone at first, because of the war and because Mother was mad with him for wanting to go back at all—but of course she soon followed as before. She always followed him everywhere, though I guess they neither of them expected to end up in a Jap prison camp.”
“End up?”
“Well no, I didn’t mean that. Oh God, I hope not.”
“You don’t really know what happened?”
“Not a thing—except that they were in Hong Kong when the Japs took over. That’s definite. All the rest is rumor.”
George caught the sudden tremor in his voice, and made haste to change the subject.
Once—and for the first time since the initial interview and misunderstanding—they mentioned the former Lord Winslow. “I don’t really remember him,” Charles said. “I think he disapproved of Dad’s marriage, or something of the sort. But from all accounts he was a very distinguished piece of Stilton in his way.”
George was not quite sure what this meant; besides, he was thinking of the phrase “something of the sort” and wondering how much, or little, it concealed. “A great authority on housing,” he remarked safely.
“So are you, aren’t you?”
George smiled. “I was one of six kids brought up in four rooms. Not a bad way to become a practical authority.”
“I should think it was also a pretty good education for your father.”
“Well, no—because he wasn’t interested in earthly houses so much as in heavenly mansions.” George chuckled.
“A good thing his son didn’t take after him, then. I hear you’ve done rather well for that town of yours.”
“Not so badly. I reckon Browdley’s five per cent better than it might have been if I’d never been born.”
“That’s modest of you.”
“Nay, I’d call it swelled head. Takes a lot for one man by himself to make five per cent of difference to anything.”
“Same in flying. The idea of the lone hero soaring into the blue on a mission of his own is a bit outmoded.”
“Aye, it’s all teamwork nowadays.” George added hastily: “Not that I’m much of an expert on military affairs.”
“Is anybody? What about all the so-called experts who’ve been wrong? About the Maginot Line, for instance?”
George sighed. “I was wrong about that too, without being an expert.”
“I suppose you were fooled by the last war—superiority of defense over attack, and so on?”
“To some extent. I couldn’t help remembering the Somme.”
“You were there?”
“Er…yes.”
“What were you in—the poor bloody infantry?”
“No.”
“Artillery? Sappers?”
“No…I…er…I wasn’t in the armed forces at all.”
“War correspondent? You’re still in the newspaper business, aren’t you?”
“I was—in a small way—until recently.”
Charles laughed. “I won’t be fobbed off with a mystery! What were you in the last war, for God’s sake?”
George then answered the question that he had not been asked for a long time, and never went out of his way to encounter, but which, when it was put directly, he always answered with equal directness. “I was a conscientious objector,” he said.
There was a little silence for a moment—not an awkward one, but a necessary measuring point in the progress of an intimacy. And this was the moment that made George sure he was liked and not merely tolerated by the youth whose less injured hand moved slowly across the arm of the wheel chair towards him.
“Conchy in the last war, eh?” The hand reached out. “Shake, then. Because that’s what I might be in the next—if they have a next.”
George took the wrinkled burned-red hand, though he thought it an ironic occasion to have first done so. Presently Charles went on: “What happened? You had a bad time?”
“Well,” answered George, a little dazed at the extent to which they were talking as if they had known each other all their lives. “I was on the Somme, as I said, and that was a pretty bad time. My brother—one of my brothers—and I—were in the same Ambulance Unit. He was killed.”
“Driving an ambulance?”
“No. We were both stretcher-bearers.”
“Not exactly the safest job on earth.”
“No.”
“But you came through all right?”
“I was gassed—not very badly, but it led to pneumonia and a medical discharge. Probably saved my life in the long run.”
Charles said, with a touch of pathos: “What did it feel like—after that? When you were out of hospital, I mean, but still not well enough to do things normally? How did you get used to things again?”
“I didn’t, because the things I’d been used to before the war were things I didn’t intend to get used to again—ever…But of course in your case it’s different.”
“I don’t know that it is, particularly…But tell me about how you got started again. In business, wasn’t it? A newspaper?”
“Aye, but it sounds too important when you put it that way. Just a bankrupt small-town weekly. Nobody’s bargain, they practically threw it at me, but I thought it would help me in local politics.”
“And it did?”
George nodded. “I was lucky. One of those handy by-elections cropped up, and there I was—the youngest town Councillor Browdley had ever had.”
“How old were you then?”
“Let me see…it was April ’seventeen when they let me out of hospital, and the election was in the September following. I’d be thirty-one.”
“You didn’t lose any time.” Charles thought for a moment, then added: “Wasn’t it against you to have been a conscientious objector?”
“Quite a bit. The other side used it for all they were worth, but Browdley’s got a mind of its own in local matters—even in wartime.” George chuckled. “I was for lowering the fares on municipal buses before eight in the morning. That got all the factory workers.”
Charles smiled. “You weren’t a pacifist in the election, then?”
“I was if anybody asked me, but I used most of my eloquence on the bus fares.”
“The war must have been on your mind, though.”
“Aye, it was—just as it still is.”
After another pause Charles said thoughtfully: “So you think it’s wrong to take human life under any circumstances?”
“I did then.”
“You mean you don’t think so any more?”
“That’s about it. I’m not so sure of a lot of things as I was in those days. I don’t hate war any less, but the problem doesn’t look so simple for an individual to make up his mind about. Seems to me there are times when life’s less important than a few other things, and those are the times when taking it—and giving it—are the only things we can do. It’s the price we have to pay if we can’t get what we want any cheaper.”
“And what is it that we want?”
“I don’t know what you want, but if I had a boy I’d want a better world for him than either your generation or mine has had.”
“A world fit for heroes to live in, eh?”
“Nay, I’d rather call it a world fit for ordinary folks to be heroic in…And I can’t see it coming unless we win this war. I don’t see it necessarily coming even if we do win it…But there’s a chance if we do.”
“Quite a change in your attitude from last time.”
“Aye—but that doesn’t mean I regret what I did then. Seems to me I was right for a reason I couldn’t have foreseen. Doesn’t what’s happening now prove it? What good did that first war do—all the misery and butchery I saw on the Somme? What was it for? To save freedom? There was less in the world afterwards. To crush Germany? Germany was strong again within a generation. To fix Europe once and for all? Europe got unfixed again worse than ever…”
“I’ll tell you one thing it did, Mr. Boswell—it gave some of you chaps who survived it twenty years of a damned good time. It gave you twenty years of movies and dog racing and charabanc outings and stock-market gambles and holidays on the Continent and comfortable living—twenty years of the kind of fun we may not have, even if we do survive.”
George answered: “I didn’t have twenty years of fun. I had twenty years of trying to improve a little town called Browdley—trying to put up a few schools and pull down a few slums—trying to make some headway against the greed and selfishness of those old Victorian shysters who ran the place for half a century like a slave barracks…”