experimental years, and then, when he seemed to have lifted himself for the moment out of the rut of anxiety and poverty, his family was shocked and enraged by his announcement that he had married the woman Sophy, and that there was already a child, a boy, born several months before the ceremony. Little news came from him thereafter. Gray refused to speak of him or to meet his wife. Brand never wrote, and it was by haphazard means that they learned of the death of the little son when he was five years old. They had no details of the days and nights of agony, the travail of spirit and flesh that Brand endured as he watched the puny child struggle for his life, the twisted limbs and tortured pinched features—of all this they never knew anything. Six months later Brand and his wife and their three small daughters left Paris for London, where Brand obtained an insignificant post as draughtsman to some obscure firm, who paid him badly and worked him dishonestly. Sophy was again pregnant, though not, said malicious neighbours, on her husband’s account this time. Brand paid no heed to rumour, nor appeared to care what his wife did. He took no interest in his surviving children, to whom he seldom spoke. The family settled in a shabby, artisan quarter of Fulham, where the slovenly Sophy, a shawl over her disordered hair, could be seen gossiping with her less reputable neighbours, and buying canned food for her family, while the house was thick with dust and the children went neglected and dirty to their compulsory school, where they were consistently miserable, and were jeered at for their torn frocks and broken shoes. Early in life, however, they had adopted a stoic philosophy. Since their neighbours seldom allowed their own children to play with the little Grays, the latter rapidly gravitated to the level of the unkempt urchins whom they saw playing in the roads and grubbing among dust-heaps and drawing wooden sticks with great rapidity along railings, maddening the more sensitive in the neighbourhood, nor did they suspect that Sophy was more than normally neglectful or abusive. Quarrels between their parents they accepted without comment, even among themselves; when Brand came in they were apt to scurry out of sight. Their mother possessed the vicious temper and uncertain ways of the slattern, and they were often beaten or underfed when one of her bouts of inexplicable ferocity attacked her, or when, as frequently, she was under the influence of drink. Sometimes they were pitied by neighbours, who thought them half starved and blue with the cold, and would invite them to sit by their fires, and give them thick slices of bread and dripping or crusts spattered with a peculiar red jam. It did not strike either Brand or Sophy as strange that their uncle should be a prominent Member of Parliament, living at Belgrave Square, and their grandfather a country gentleman of independent means. The children, of course, knew nothing of their relations.
On the 23rd December, 1931, Gray received a letter from his younger son to the effect that he proposed to join their party for Christmas. The embargo against his presence had been lifted some years after his marriage, although Sophy never accompanied him on his visits to King’s Poplars. For this, Brand was grateful enough. His life with her in their inadequate quarters, the difficulty he experienced in escaping from her nagging tongue and her unclean ways, irked him even more than the conditions at his father’s house. Besides, he enjoyed twitting Richard on his childlessness and enraging Amy by his disregard of the household’s conventions. She counted every slice of bread and every ball of butter a visitor consumed, and it was amusing and at the same time satisfying to a man who was not accustomed to good food to irritate her as much as possible in this elementary fashion.
Gray had returned no answer to his son’s letter, and Brand, whose finances were in a worse way than usual, went down black and fierce, and determined at all costs to put his plan into action. He could expect no sympathy from any of his relatives, since this plan involved the virtual desertion of his family in order to enable him to return to Paris and resume his work there. He proposed suggesting that Sophy and the children—the last of whom he was convinced was not his child, whatever might be said about Anne—should pay a protracted visit to King’s Poplars, and so insanely bent was he upon the successful consummation of his endeavour that he contrived to persuade himself that he was putting forward a reasonable request. He found Eustace and, later, Richard in command of the field. His efforts to see his father alone were frustrated by both of these, and also by Amy; so that it was not until the party had broken up for the night—early, on account of the morrow being Christmas Day—that he found an opportunity for approaching Adrian.
From the outset the interview was stormy; Gray’s tone, while remaining suave, became increasingly sneering and bitter. Brand spoke fiercely and unwisely. Gray retaliated by giving his son his views on art, and the conversation closed in the manner indicated above.
Part II
The Journal of Hildebrand Gray
1
…And the extraordinary part of it is that it was nothing but an accident, much as if I’d smashed the milk-jug or dropped one of the dinner-plates. Even in my moments of panic I was able to appreciate that. It hadn’t any more significance than those trivialities. The significance lay in the consequences. And those hardly bore thinking about, in all the circumstances.
I was so much taken aback when I saw him slip down to my feet with so little sound it might have been a ghost falling, that at first I was incapable of realising what I’d done. I just stood and stared. I couldn’t believe that he was dead. When at last
