James.
James’s letters to me contrive to be slightly patronizing, as if he were an elder brother, not a younger cousin; indeed they sometimes achieve that well-meaning almost parental stiffness which makes one’s own doings seem so puerile. At the same time, these letters, of which I regularly receive two or three a year, always seem to me to combine a dull formality with the faintest touch of madness.
Perhaps at this point I had better offer some longer and more frank account of my cousin. It is not that James has ever been much of an actor in my life, nor do I anticipate that he will ever now become one. We have steadily seen less of each other over the last twenty years, and lately, although he has been stationed in London, we have scarcely met at all. The reference in his letter to ‘having a drink’ is of course just an empty
We rarely meet, but when we do we tread upon a ground which is deep and old. We are both only children, the sons of brothers close in age (Uncle Abel was slightly younger than my father) who had no other siblings. Though we rarely reminisce, the fact remains that our childhood memories are a common stock which we share with no one else. There are those who, even if valued, remain
When I was young I could never decide whether James was real and I was unreal, or vice versa. Somehow it was clear we could not both be real; one of us must inhabit the real world, the other one the world of shadows. James always had a sort of beastly invulnerability. Well, it goes right back to the start. As I have explained, I was early aware, through the sort of psychological osmosis of which children are so capable, that Uncle Abel had made a more ‘advantageous’ marriage than my father, and that in the mysterious pecking-order hierarchy of life the Abel Arrowbys ranked above the Adam Arrowbys. My mother was very conscious of this, and I am certain struggled in the depths of her religious soul ‘not to mind’. (She had a special way of emphasizing the word ‘heiress’ when she spoke of Aunt Estelle.) My father, I really believe, did not mind at all, except for my sake. I remember his once saying, in such an odd almost humble sort of voice, ‘I’m so sorry you can’t have a pony, like James…’ I loved my father so intensely at that moment and was at the same time conscious (I was ten, twelve?) that I could not express my love, and that perhaps he did not know of it, how much it was. Did he ever know?
As far as the material things of life were concerned the families certainly had different fates. James was the proud possessor of the above-mentioned pony, indeed of a series of such animals, and generally lived in what I thought of as a pony-owning style. And how I suffered from those bloody ponies! When I visited Ramsdens James sometimes offered me a ride, and Uncle Abel (also a horseman) wanted to take me out on a leading rein. Although passionately anxious to ride I always, out of pride and with a feigned indifference, refused; and to this day I have never sat on a horse. A perhaps more important, though not more burning, occasion of envy was continental travel. The Abel Arrowbys went abroad almost every school holiday. They drove all over Europe. (We of course had no car.) They went to America to stay with Aunt Estelle’s ‘folks’, about whom I was careful to know as little as possible. I did not leave England until I went to Paris with Clement after the war. It was not only their ponies and their wide-ranging motor cars that I envied here, it was their enterprise. Uncle Abel was an arranger, an adventurer, an inventor, even a hedonist. My dear good father was none of these things. My uncle and aunt never invited me to join them on those wonderful journeys. It only much later occurred to me, and the idea entered my mind like a dart (I daresay it is still sticking in there somewhere), that they did not ask me because James vetoed it!
As I said, the situation worried my father, I think, only on my behalf. It worried me on my behalf too, but also and quite separately on his. I resented, for him, his deprived status. I felt, for him, the chagrin which his generous and sweet nature did not feel for himself. And in doing this I was aware, even as a child, that I thereby showed myself to be his moral inferior. Although I had such a happy home and such loving parents, I could not help bitterly coveting things which at the same time, as I looked at my father, I despised. I could not help regarding Uncle Abel and Aunt Estelle as glamorous almost godlike beings in comparison with whom my own parents seemed insignificant and dull. I could not help seeing them, in that comparison, as failures. While at the same time I also knew that my father was a virtuous and unworldly man, whereas Uncle Abel, who was so stylish, was an ordinary average completely selfish person. I do not of course imply that my uncle was a ‘cad’ or a ‘bounder’, he certainly was not. He loved his beautiful wife and, as far as I know, was faithful to her. He was, as far as I know, an affectionate and responsible father. I am sure he was honest and conscientious in his work and in his finances, in fact a model citizen. But he was an ordinary self-centred go-getter, an ordinary sensualist. Whereas my father, although perhaps nobody ever knew this except my mother and me, was something quite else, something special.
None of this stopped me from rather worshipping Uncle Abel and dancing around him like a pleased dog. At least I did so when I was a young child. Later, because of James, I was slightly more dignified and aloof. Was my father sometimes hurt because I found Uncle Abel so picturesque? Perhaps. This thought saddens me now as I write with a special piercing sadness. He did not care about the worldly goods, but, though he never showed it, he might have felt sorry, again for my sake, that he was so much less of a ‘figure’. My mother may have intuited some such regret in him (or perhaps to her he expressed it) and this may have contributed to the irritability which she could not always suppress when the Abel Arrowbys were mentioned, or especially when they had lately been with us on a visit. They did not in fact visit us very often, since my mother felt that we could not ‘entertain’ them in sufficient style, and would embarrass them, when they did come, with aggressive apologies concerning our humbler way of life. We, I should add, lived upon a housing estate where loneliness was combined with lack of privacy. My visits to stone-built tree-surrounded Ramsdens were usually made alone, because of my mother’s horror of being under her brother-in-law’s roof, and my father’s horror of being under any roof except his own.
I must now, in mentioning my mother, speak of Aunt Estelle. She was, as I have said, an American, though where exactly she hailed from I do not remember to have discovered; America was a big vague concept to me then. Nor do I know where or how my uncle met her. She certainly represented to me some general idea of America: freedom, gaiety, noise. Where Aunt Estelle was there was laughter, jazz music, and (how shocking) alcohol. This again might give the wrong impression. I am speaking of a child’s dream. Aunt Estelle was no ‘drinker’ and her ‘wildness’ was the merest good spirits: health, youth, beauty, money. She had the instinctive generosity of the thoroughly lucky person. She was, in a vague way, demonstratively affectionate to me when I was a child. My undemonstrative mother watched these perhaps meaningless effusions coldly, but they moved me. Aunt Estelle had a pretty little singing voice and used to chant the songs of the first war and the latest romantic song-hits. (
