Homing (3 page)

“Houses are like people, they hold you fast the same way,” Fitz acknowledged. “We’ve come up against that, with the Restoration work here at Williamsburg. People whose families have lived here for generations, like ours—they react in a funny way. Some of them hate it from the ground up, what’s been done to the town. Others are glad to know that the Rockefeller money is there to maintain the place as it should be when the old families die out or are forced to sell. Me, I’m glad. I can
remember
when ugly telephone poles went right down the middle of the street, and cows were grazing on the Palace Green.”

“Even I can remember that,” said Stephen. “I think it’s worth it, myself. Tomorrow I’m going to buy Evadne a block of tickets and take her straight round the guided tour. After that she can go back and potter to suit herself.”

“I look forward to seeing Jeff’s house,” Evadne said.

“You won’t need a ticket for that,” Fitz grinned. “Hagar
keeps it always as though they might be arriving any minute. There are even flowers in the rooms.”

“To Hagar it’s not an empty house,” Gwen said gently. “She feels that they are all still living there, even if all we can see now is their portraits.”

“I’ve heard about Grandfather Julian’s portrait.”

“It looks just like Jeff,” said Stephen. “Or perhaps I should say Jeff looks like the portrait.”

“Stevie,” Gwen began, out of what had lain heavy on her mind all evening. “What about Sylvia—if there’s a war?”

Stephen caught his father’s eyes and looked away, avoiding Gwen’s as well. It was bound to come—this question about his sister Sylvia, who was Jeff’s wife.

“Sylvia married a foreign correspondent, even if he is Jeff Day of Williamsburg, Virginia,” he said slowly, unwillingly. “If Jeff decides to stay in London and see the war, Sylvia won’t come away without him. You wouldn’t want her to, would you?”

“No,” said Gwen obediently, and sat silent among them, thinking of Sylvia, her youngest, and the house a few streets away where she might be living with Jeff, where they might have settled down by now, where there might have been a baby or two, by now….

There is always something about the youngest—especially when it is a girl—and Gwen drew a small secret sigh. Sylvia
living
in London with her husband—Stephen returning to it soon with his English wife—well, it was for them to decide, it was their lives they had to live. But in what a world, thought Gwen. And what did they really think, behind their frightening composure, their young, heartbreaking gaiety? How did they face up to their world, she wondered, hearing Evadne’s ready laughter, watching Stephen, relaxed and easy, sitting with his bride’s hand held unself-consciously in his.

The next day Stephen began conducting Evadne through the formal Restoration tour for the sake of her education. They listened gravely to the soft-voiced hostesses in their
eighteenth-century
gowns at the Palace and the Capitol, lingered to admire the immaculate charm of the Wythe House, and did not
succumb
to giggles at the stocks and the Gaol. They sauntered hand in hand down the wide central street, which runs seven-eighths
of a mile between Capitol and College, straight as a Roman road under the arching mulberry trees.

Unhurried, bemused by the off-season leisure of the
atmosphere
, they made the turning to the Day house, which had now come by inheritance to Jeff, the last of that name,
posthumous
child of sober-minded Miles by Fitz’s sister Phoebe. The last before Jeff to live there was Aunt Sue, who could
remember
Grandmother Tibby, who could remember Yorktown and George Washington. It was still Aunt Sue’s house when Jeff came there as a child in the twenties to recuperate from
rheumatic
fever. He was in Europe with Bracken when she died a few years later and left it to him. And as she had doubtless foreseen, inheriting the house had brought him back to Williamsburg and his childhood love for Sylvia.

Stephen unlocked the white door and they went into the big square hall with the stairs soaring up. There were vases of flowers, as Fitz had prophesied, and a small wood fire glowed behind a screen in the parlour grate. Evadne entered the parlour ahead of Stephen and stopped short, facing the mantelpiece.

“It’s
Mab!”
she said.

“What?” said Stephen stupidly, glancing round as though someone else might be there.

“That picture! It’s Mab! Didn’t you
know
?”

His eyes followed her pointing finger to the portrait of Tibby which had always hung in that room above the mantelpiece. When it was painted, by a pupil of Gilbert Stuart, Tibby was in her forties and the mother of three, and Dolly Madison in the White House was setting the style for rather buxom beauty. Tibby looked frail and childish in the high-waisted white satin gown which left her small arms bare above the elbow and was cut low over her small bust. As Stephen and Evadne stood rooted on the hearthrug the greenish eyes, black-fringed, of the portrait returned their gaze, alert and listening, like a third person in the room.

“It’s Grandmother Tibby,” said Stephen at last, awed, “Julian’s wife.”

“It’s our Mab in fancy dress!” said Evadne. “Can’t you
see
?”

“I can now.” Stephen was looking unusually grave. “Come upstairs,” he said, and led the way. In the master’s bedroom at the top of the stairs, where generations of Days had been born and had died in the four-poster, he fronted her up to another portrait and said tersely, “Who’s that?”

“J-Jeff.”

“Mm-hm. It is also Julian. We all knew about the resemblance between them. You’re the first to spot the other one.”

“Jeff and Julian. Mab and Tibby. It’s—quite eerie,” said Evadne. And after a moment—“Do you think Jeff has noticed? About Mab, I mean.”

“He must have. He knows this house by heart.”

“And—Sylvia?”

“I wonder.”

They stood a moment more in contemplation of Julian, who Jeff was—the long chin and large, humorous mouth, the reflective grey eyes, the thick, brushed-looking dark hair with no wave in it. Then with one accord they returned to the
draw
ing
room like sleepwalkers and stood in front of Tibby, looking up. She had not changed while their backs were turned. Except that now she seemed to be waiting.

“We’re
not
seeing things,” said Evadne. “Stevie, I feel very queer. What would Mummy say?” She glanced round the bright, warm room. “Stevie, I feel—
haunted
.”

“Now, now. Mustn’t panic.” But he lit a cigarette without smiling.

“It’s when you think how Mab has always had such a thing about America,” Evadne went on, dropping into a corner of the sofa. “That’s what makes it so odd. Learning the family tree the way she has—making those scrapbooks of everything she can collect about Williamsburg—as though she
remembered,
you might say.” Evadne looked up at him with large, incredulous eyes. “Jeff—and Mab,” she whispered.

“She’s only a kid. Besides, Jeff and Sylvia have been in love all their lives, more or less.”

“But it’s not Sylvia who looks like Julian’s wife,” said Evadne. “It’s not Sylvia who repeats the pattern, like reincarnation—or do I mean atavism?”

“No,” said Stephen slowly, and glanced up as though the portrait of Tibby could hear. “I hope you don’t mean anything like that. Because it is Sylvia who has married him.”

They looked at each other a long moment and Evadne stood up.

“Isn’t it lunch time?” she asked matter-of-factly, and he glanced at his watch and said it was, almost, and they locked the white door behind them and walked back to Fitz’s house without mentioning the portraits again.

By mutual consent they said nothing at luncheon about Evadne’s discovery.

It was Evadne’s misfortune to have her birthday only a
fortnight
before Christmas, and a letter from Virginia arrived for her in time to be opened on Christmas Eve. She read it in Fitz’s drawing room, with the rest of them sitting round occupied with their own letters and newspapers—and every now and then she would share with them a few lines of Virginia’s report on the state of affairs in England since she and Stephen had sailed. Virginia wrote:

Then Evadne came to the postscript, without which Virginia could never send off a letter. She read it once over lightly, and again with a frown. And then she looked round rather helplessly for Stephen.

“There’s a bit more at the end,” she said, and responsive to her slightest inflection he rose and came towards her.

“The railway bridge,” said Stephen promptly, and—

“That’s funny,” said Fitz at the same moment.

“What’s funny?” Stephen inquired.

“Go far enough past the railway bridge along the Capitol Landing Road,” said Fitz, “and you come approximately to the place where the Mawes cabin stood.”

“Mawes?” It meant nothing to Evadne.

“Tibby Mawes, before she married Julian,” Fitz reminded her patiently. “Where she lived as a child. Where she was living when he came to Williamsburg before the Revolution began.”

“Oh,
no
!” cried Evadne, aghast. “Stephen, we’d better tell them!”

“Tell us what?” Gwen looked up quickly at her tone.

“Well, the fact is,” Stephen began unwillingly, busy with a cigarette, “Evadne noticed something, over at Jeff’s house the other day.” He glanced from his father to his mother, and went back to the cigarette. “We all know that Jeff is the image of Julian’s portrait. But what Evadne saw at once—and what Jeff must have realized before now—is that Mab looks exactly like Tibby.”

There was a silence.

“I suppose there’s no sense in getting spooky about it,” Stephen continued then. “But the sort of—nostalgic feeling Mab has always shown about everything connected with Williamsburg does make you think even without this. Do you
know
where the cabin was?”

“It was near the Landing,” said Fitz. “You took the road which ran left of the Capitol.”

“But it’s not marked,” Stephen insisted. “That is—there’s no record. The Restoration people never heard of it.”

“Of course not.”

“Then how did she know?” said Stephen. “Or rather—why does she ask?”

The clock ticked perhaps ten times.

“What would happen if Mab ever came to Williamsburg?” Fitz wondered.

“Perhaps it would be better if she never did,” said Gwen.

T
HE
following August found Mab watching the approach of her fourteenth birthday with an impatience which the annual celebration had never roused before. The whole family as it were had their fingers crossed.

The Bank Holiday had gone by uneventfully except for the eerie feeling entertained by people like Virginia, who could remember 1914—and everybody drew a cautious breath and looked over their shoulder because it was during a wave of irresponsible optimism in England only last March that Hitler had suddenly marched into Prague. That did it, as even the children in England could see.

That was the end of even Chamberlain’s obstinate confidence that Hitler could be handled. England was angry right down to the ground, right to the last citizen. “’E’s broke ’is word,” they said in the pubs and the buses, as though it were the first time—but this time his word had been given personally to their Prime Minister at Munich. There was even talk of a change of
Government
if Mr. Chamberlain didn’t
do
something now. Mr.
Chamberlain
was furious too, if only in his schoolmasterish way, and before the end of March he had given Poland a guarantee that if Hitler moved on Danzig Britain would go to war.

Wise beyond her years in world affairs because of living in a family which allowed its young to mingle in adult society rather more than was customary in England then, Mab understood fairly well what they were all up against now. She had a father in the Home Office, her Great-Uncle Bracken owned the American newspaper for which Jeff was a foreign correspondent, her Great-Uncle Oliver had been for years at the War Office, and there were assorted cousins with Army and Navy connections.

Even if she had been less intelligently interested than she was, a good deal of it must have rubbed off on her. But it was because
of Jeff that she followed the zigzagging international fever chart with such anxiety. Now that Jeff was broadcasting to America as well as writing dispatches for Bracken’s newspaper, his job was likely to take him wherever things looked hottest. He had been in Vienna for the
Anschluss,
and in Prague during Munich, and Mab had begun to dread that next it would have to be Danzig, because everybody said the real shooting would start at Danzig.

“Correspondents are just like soldiers, they have to go where the trouble is,” said Sylvia, when Mab asked her privately what she thought about Poland. Even though she was Jeff’s wife, or perhaps because she was, Sylvia was firm about his obligations, and about theirs, which meant they were not to interfere in his assignments. “Bracken in his day went to the war in Cuba because his father had got too old to take the field work. Now Bracken has turned sixty, though that doesn’t seem possible, and it’s Jeff’s turn to go abroad for the paper, because Bracken has no son. It’s Jeff’s job,” said Sylvia. “It’s what he’s been trained all his life to do, as Bracken’s heir. We wouldn’t have him let Bracken down now, would we, just because there might be some shooting—”

But Mab knew that Sylvia was talking for her own benefit as much as to convince her listener. Inseparable especially when Jeff was away, they made a picturesque pair—Sylvia’s
long-legged
, honey-blonde beauty, and the thin, green-eyed child with straight dark hair held by an Alice comb.

“If we always wish him back hard enough,” Sylvia said, with her chin up, “he’s bound to come. We can only lose him if we let go and get frightened.”

They had had him safe at Farthingale at Easter time this year when Mussolini shot his way into Albania in two days—the man from Bracken’s Rome bureau covered that. But Easter was ruined because they all thought—
Now
? Then there was another perilous lull, during which people went on getting married in white satin, having babies, going to the races, even going abroad for holidays—everybody trying to behave just as usual, getting born, living, dying, and done with it, Virginia said—right through Whitsun without another crisis, until now even the dread anniversary of the Kaiser’s war slipped by with nothing more alarming than a notice in the papers of a blackout rehearsal to be held in England on the night of August ninth, alongside
another
list of those household supplies which should be in
everybody’s
emergency cupboard.

Mab was staying with Virginia at Farthingale during August, while her parents went off on their usual summer honeymoon abroad, leaving their idolized small son at home with his nurse. Virginia was always delighted to have Mab to stay, and was equally pleased to be spared the presence of little Basil, a spoilt, precocious child inclined to whine.

Mab and Virginia checked through the emergency list again—pretty dull stuff for the most part—corned beef, matches, lentils, dried onions, cocoa, sugar, tea, American canned beans (for Jeff), tinned dog biscuit for Mab’s black cocker spaniel from whom she was never parted even overnight and whose name was Noel—not, as it was often necessary to explain, after Mr. Coward, but because he was a Christmas present. The newspaper
reminded
you that there would be a scarcity of table scraps and meat trimmings for dogs when you started eating out of tins. Sylvia had added birdseed to her list, in airtight containers, for the canary Midge who accompanied her everywhere, even on weekends, in a specially made travelling cage.

Virginia had promised that unless Something Happened they would send Miss Sim the governess home for a holiday in
Scotland
while they popped up to London for the birthday and bought a lot of clothes and generally let themselves go. Bracken had promised that if Nothing Went Wrong he would take them all to dinner at the Hungaria and to the nine-something show of
Good-bye,
Mr.
Chips.
And Jeff had promised that if everything was still All Right they would go to the Wednesday matinée of whatever Mab chose to see. A little to their surprise she had chosen, instead of the Drury Lane show which had music and dancing and Ivor Novello, to see
The
Importance
of
Being
Earnest
at the Globe. No one suspected that the answer lay in a chance remark of Virginia’s after attending the opening night—it took you back, said Virginia, to a time before Hitler, when the world was young and gay and a lot easier to live in. So the tickets back to Oscar Wilde’s world were already bought and in Jeff’s pocket.

Another of those random rumours ran round about some new crisis expected on August fifteenth—but nothing burst, and Jeff and Sylvia drove down for the weekend to take them back to Town. Bracken had a house in Upper Brook Street where the family came and went as to a sort of private hotel, and his wife Dinah was always there to pour out their tea, and a small devoted staff was ready to scare up a hot meal at any hour.

Staying at Bracken’s was in itself always a treat for Mab, because there was no nursery or schoolroom or governess routine there, and one was never treated like a child. Sometimes, if things were very busy and people were there from abroad, one even got to share a twin bedroom with Virginia or one of the girls, and there was grown-up bedtime chat and morning tea together.

It had been a wretched rainy summer so far, which was hard on the new conscript troops training under canvas—Jeff had done a story about that for the paper, though everybody knew it wasn’t really as funny as they made it sound. But for Mab’s birthday the sun came out and the drive up to London was delightful. Jeff was a trifle preoccupied with the news of a Russian-German trade agreement which had been completed last Saturday.

“The Germans are getting themselves out on a limb again,” he brooded as they travelled through the rolling Cotswold countryside. “The first thing we know they’ll have talked up another storm.”

“There can’t be much of anything coming up this week—Chamberlain has gone fishing,” Sylvia reminded him
comfortably
.

“He went fishing last year,” said Jeff. “Just before he went to Munich.”

“Now, Jeff,” said Sylvia, because of the birthday.

“Sorry,” said Jeff. “I was only talking out loud.”

They reached London in time for late lunch, accompanied of course by the spaniel Noel, who wore a blue bow on his collar for the occasion. They found Dinah alone and rather tight around the mouth. Bracken had telephoned from the Fleet Street office to say that he couldn’t make it home for luncheon. Mr. Chamberlain was back in London, said Dinah. Unexpectedly. There was to be a Cabinet meeting tomorrow.

Mab felt them looking at each other above her head. Jeff drifted away towards the telephone, while Dinah and Virginia escorted Mab to the dining room where a heap of gaily wrapped presents marked her place at the table.

“Don’t let’s wait for Jeff, he may be hours on that telephone,” said Dinah. “The one with the green ribbon is from Bracken. I’d advise you to open it first.”

The family had always made a speciality of presents, ever since the days when Bracken’s father had sent his lavish Christmas
and birthday gifts through the Yankee blockade to Eden Day at Williamsburg even while the Yankee army was sitting in the town. Soon Mab was surrounded by loose tissue paper and ribbons, enchanted to find that Stephen and Evadne had sent a parcel, with American stamps, all the way across the ocean.

She was a lovely child to give to, knowing by instinct how to express her thanks, as well as having been brought up on Virginia’s parable of the Stingy Receiver, which she had drummed into the heads of all the young in the family: There was once a very old lady (Virginia would begin) who was
bedridden
but quite lively in her mind and heart, and enormously wealthy. She had no immediate family, so when the unknown daughter of a faraway niece was about to be married, the old lady made herself a divine game by taking over the trousseau as her wedding gift to the bride. Everything was brought to her bedside, said Virginia, until sometimes the coverlet and the furniture all round the room were strewn with fabulous
garments
, from the ivory brocade of the wedding gown itself to dozens of pastel-tinted, cobwebby under-things—shoes, hats, furs, gloves, even the luggage to put it all in. Each smallest item was inspected and chosen by the rich old lady in bed, regardless of expense, her eyes bright with anticipation of the bride’s no doubt speechless rapture as she in her turn beheld the same item when she unpacked it. Speechless was right, said Virginia. When the happily awaited letter of thanks was opened it read:

Well, what was wrong with that? Virginia would inquire rhetorically. Why was the dear old lady so disappointed that she cried?
Because,
said Virginia, that idiot girl never singled out one thing for itself—never said if the pink chiffon negligée made her look like a bonbon, never
mentioned
that the shoes and handbags were all meant to match, never said if she liked the blue suit better than the brown one, or if the sapphire velvet brought out the colour of her eyes—never indicated one particular gift out of all that lavishness which appealed to her in a special way, never named a favourite item. And
that,
Virginia would conclude impressively, was being a Stingy Receiver.

So Mab said all the right things, and still Jeff’s present had not appeared in the pile. She truly loved all her gifts, would not willingly have parted with any one of them—but it was always
Jeff’s present she looked forward to the most. It wouldn’t be lumped in with Sylvia’s, now that they were married. She knew there would still be something from him to her, as always. Even if war had already overtaken them, Jeff would have remembered to buy her present.

She could hear his voice on the telephone in the hall, talking to Bracken at the office—low, unhurried, but with now and then the comic querulous note he sometimes brought into it, especially with regard to Hitler and the Germans. It was a long
conversation
, as Dinah had anticipated. Perhaps when he came in to lunch he would have to say that the party for tonight was off—Bracken’s party at the Hungaria where the gypsy orchestra was, and the
Mr.
Chips
film to follow. Well, she could bear that, if there was another crisis on. Newsmen had to watch the tickers in Fleet Street and the radio monitors, they were all used to that in the family. So long as she had Jeff’s own personal present she could bear it.

Finally he came to join them, and their faces turned to him, grave and questioning, and he sat down in the empty chair at the table slowly, without meeting their eyes, still preoccupied by the news from Bracken. Gradually he became aware of a silence, and of the chaos of gift wrappings which foamed around Mab’s chair, and of the fact that they were all waiting.

“Oh,” he said, coming to by degrees, glancing round at them one by one—at Virginia with her short crisp curls, so slightly greyed, and her slender body which never used the back of a chair, and her alert, humorous, heart-shaped face which seemed to change so little with the years—at Dinah, that porcelain figurine of a woman, so exquisitely dressed, with fading red-gold hair—at his own dear Sylvia with her honey-coloured mane and eyelashes out to here, and her poised, dancer’s grace—at Mab, their darling, whose level green eyes were exactly like those in the portrait of Tibby at home, her smallness and her dignity and her unchildlike comprehension of the terrible world she had come to live in…. “Oh, yes,” said Jeff. “You thought I’d forgotten something, didn’t you? Well, that’s where you’re wrong.”

He took out of his coat pocket a small parcel, wrapped in white tissue paper. A ring? A pin? perhaps a bracelet? Jewellery was something new for Mab, but she had lately discovered in herself a secret longing for something really nice of her own—a
discriminating
ambition born of being allowed occasionally to wear
something of Virginia’s as a treat. If Jeff’s present was jewellery, how had he known that she was suddenly old enough to appreciate it? No one else knew. Jeff always knew things.