V
We were happy again that summer, as the days and weeks passed by, but the shadow of the coming autumn was over us. We would remember suddenly in the middle of playing, and stop. One said without thinking, ‘We will do that in the winter—or when the nuts are ripe’—or something of that sort, and then remembered that Hugo would not be there.
Guy was very kind to Hugo.
He said to me:
‘I am sorry for Hugo. You see, I like school. It is different for me—but Hugo minds things more.’
Once, many years later, he said almost the same again. When he was in hospital and very ill, he said:
‘I am worried about Hugo—it is different for a tough fellow like me⸺but Hugo minds things more.’ And I remembered. It was like Guy, dear old Guy; he minded things quite enough in his different way.
The day came at last; the 22nd of September. The last week was a misery, but it passed too; and Guy and Hugo went off together.
Soon after that I left Yearsly and went to London to my grandmother, in Campden Hill Square. My mother was there too, mostly, but she travelled about so much that she did not really live in any place at all. She organized Women’s Trade Unions and societies for Citizenship and things of that kind.
My mother had been at Newnham and got a First Class in Economics. She was very clever and competent. She lectured in Economics too.
I was a disappointment to her, I know, for I was not clever, and not interested in those things at all. I don’t think she would ever have bothered about me much. I don’t think she would ever have cared about children or wanted to be with them. She had not time. And I am glad of that, for if she had cared more, she would not have let me go to Cousin Delia as she did, when my father died, for she did not like Yearsly nor the Lauriers. If she had kept me with her I don’t know what would have happened. I don’t know how I could have grown up at all.
But now when I went back for a bit, it did not matter. It was really my grandmother who counted, and I loved her. She used to be at Yearsly sometimes before, when I was there, and I had gone back to her always from time to time. She was my father’s mother, Mary Geraldine’s granddaughter. She was not different and hostile, as my mother was.
I think that my grandmother must have been a rather wonderful person. My father had loved her very much. I have seen letters he wrote to her from Afghanistan just before he died, and letters when he was a boy, before he was married. She had grown up at Yearsly in the strange time after Mary Geraldine’s death, when our great-great-grandfather was still alive and kept everything like a museum of his wife. His son and daughter-in-law lived with him and their two children. Yet they had not been oppressed by him. They had grown up unwarped and contented, loving their home and their strange old grandfather, and when my grandmother married the chain had not been broken. My father and Cousin John had been more like brothers than cousins, although they must have been very unlike in themselves.
I think now that my father’s marriage must have been a sorrow to her. I don’t think she can have liked my mother really, but in the time I remember she never showed it. She made it easy for my mother to come and go as she wished, with no constraint upon her. She never appeared to disapprove of her—not even of her neglect of me. Of course I did not understand these things at the time. It is only now, looking back, that I see what a difficult situation it must have been, and how well she dealt with it.
I don’t think it would be true to say that I disliked my mother. I admired her in a way, and I think her poor opinion of me had a very strong effect upon me. It was her own doing that I felt her so definitely in opposition to Cousin Delia, and that inevitably raised hostility in me. I think now that it was curious in so clever a woman that she did not conceal her feelings more.
It was only years afterwards that Grandmother told me of my father’s wish for me to go to Delia when he died. He had sent for Cousin Delia and asked her to take care of me, to have me with her at Yearsly as much as she could. My mother did not want me herself, but she could not forget this.