Then the awful thought came to me that I had been sleeping in Gilbert’s bed. ‘Yes,’ I answered, and talked with measured enthusiasm of the possibilities of his joining a circus.
She nodded. ‘We have often thought of it.’
My enthusiasm – or whatever it was – seemed to please the landlady, and before leaving I went into the kitchen to say goodbye to Gilbert. With an effort to be casual I shook his large calloused hand, and he gently shook mine.
*
After forty weeks in the provinces, we returned to play eight weeks around the suburbs of London. Sherlock Holmes, being a phenomenal success, was to start a second tour, three weeks after the finish of the first one.
Now Sydney and I decided to give up our quarters in Pownall Terrace and take up more respectable ones in the Kennington Road; like snakes we wanted to slough our skins, shedding every vestige of the past.
I spoke to the management about Sydney for a small part in the next tour of Holmes, and he got it – thirty-five shillings a week! Now we were on tour together.
Sydney wrote to Mother every week and towards the end of our second tour we received a letter from Cane Hill asylum stating that she had fully recovered her health. This was indeed good news. Quickly we made arrangements for her discharge, and made preparations for her to join us in Reading. To celebrate the occasion we took a special apartment de luxe, consisting of two bedrooms and a sitting-room with a piano, fixed up her bedroom with flowers, and arranged an elaborate dinner to boot.
Sydney and I waited for her at the railroad station, tense and happy, yet I could not help feeling anxious as to how she would fit into our lives again, knowing that the close ties of other days could never be recaptured.
At last the train arrived. With excitement and uncertainty we scanned the faces of the passengers as they left the carriages. Then at last there she was, smiling and walking sedately toward us. She displayed no great emotion as we went to meet her, but greeted us with affectionate decorum. She evidently was also undergoing an adjustment.
In that short ride in a cab to our rooms, we talked of a hundred different things, relevant and irrelevant.
After the first flush of enthusiasm of showing her the apartment and the flowers in the bedroom, we found ourselves in the sitting-room looking breathlessly at each other. It was a sunny day, and our apartment was on a quiet street, but now the silence of it was uncomfortable and in spite of my wanting to be happy I found myself fighting back a depression. Poor Mother, who wanted so little out of life to make her gay and cheerful, reminded me of my unhappy past – the last person in the world who should have affected me this way. But I did my best to hide the fact. She had aged a little and gained weight. I had always been proud of the way Mother looked and dressed and wanted to show her off to the company at her best, but now she appeared rather dowdy. She must have sensed my misgivings, for she turned inquiringly.
Coyly I adjusted a strand of her hair. ‘Before you meet the company,’ I smiled, ‘I want you to be at your best.’
She looked at me, then took out her powder-puff and rubbed it over her face. ‘I’m just happy to be alive,’ she said cheerfully.
It was not long before we were fully adjusted to one another and my dejection passed. That we had outgrown the intimacy she had known when we were children, she understood better than we did, which made her all the more endearing to us. On tour she did the shopping and catering, bringing home fruits and delicacies and always a few flowers. For no matter how poor we had been in the past, when shopping on Saturday nights she had always been able to buy a pennyworth of wallflowers. Occasionally she was quiet and reserved, and her detachment saddened me. She acted more like a guest than our mother.
After a month she wanted to return to London, because she was anxious to get settled down so that she would have a home for us after our tour; besides, as she said, it would be less costly than travelling over the country and having to pay an extra fare.
She rented the flat over the barber’s shop in Chester Street where we had once lived, and with ten pounds bought furniture on the instalment plan. The rooms had not the spaciousness of Versailles, or its elegance; but she did wonders in the bedrooms by covering orange-crates with cretonne to make them look like commodes. Between us Sydney and I were earning four pounds five shillings a week and sending one pound five shillings of it to Mother.
Sydney and I returned home after our second tour and spent a few weeks with her. Although we were happy to be with Mother, we were secretly glad to get away on tour again, for Chester Street had not the requisite comforts that provincial apartments had – those little amenities to which Sydney and I were now accustomed. And Mother no doubt realized this. When she saw us off at the station she seemed cheerful enough, but we both thought she looked wistful as she stood on the platform smiling and waving her handkerchief as the train pulled away.
During our third tour Mother wrote to us that Louise, with whom Sydney and I had lived in the Kennington Road, had died, ironically enough, in the Lambeth workhouse, the same place in which we had been confined. She survived Father only by four years, leaving her little son an orphan, and he also had been sent to the same Hanwell Schools that
