and more an authoritarian. She knew what was right, she knew what was best. Courteously he withdrew his criticism and his occasional admonitions.
Rachel, he thought, needed no help from him, needed no love from him. She was busy, happy, terrifically energetic.
Behind the hurt that he could not help feeling, there was also, queerly enough, a sense of pity for her. It was as though he knew that the path she was pursuing might be a perilous one.
On the outbreak of war in 1939, Mrs. Argyle's activities were immediately redoubled. Once she had the idea of opening a war nursery for children from the London slums, she was in touch with many influential people in London . The Ministry of Health was quite willing to co-operate and she had looked for and found a suitable house for her purpose. A newly built, up to date, house in a remote part of England likely to be free from bombing.
There she could accommodate up to eighteen children between the ages of two and seven. The children came not only from poor homes but also from unfortunate ones. They were orphans, or illegitimate children whose mothers had no intention of being evacuated with them and who were bored with looking after them. Children from homes where they had been ill-treated and neglected. Three or four of the children were cripples. For orthopaedic treatment she engaged as well as a staff of domestic workers, a Swedish masseuse and two fully trained hospital nurses. The whole thing was done not only on a comfortable but on a luxurious basis. Once he remonstrated with her.
'You mustn't forget, Rachel, these children will have to go back to the background from which we took them. You mustn't make it too difficult for them.'
She had replied warmly: 'Nothing's too good for these poor mites. Nothing!' He had urged, 'Yes, but they've got to go back, remember.'
But she had waved that aside. 'It mayn't be necessary. It may — we'll have to see in the future.'
The exigencies of war had soon brought changes. The hospital nurses, restive at looking after perfectly healthy children when there was real nursing work to be done, had frequently to be replaced. In the end one elderly hospital nurse and Kirsten Lindstrom were the only two left. The domestic help failed and Kirsten Lindstrom had come to the rescue there also. She had worked with great devotion and selflessness.
And Rachel Argyle had been busy and happy. There had been, Leo remembered, moments of occasional bewilderment. The day when Rachel, puzzled at the way one small boy, Micky, was slowly losing weight, his appetite failing, had called in the doctor. The doctor could find nothing wrong but had suggested to Mrs. Argyle that the child might be homesick. Quickly she'd rebuffed the idea.
'That's impossible! You don't know the home he has come from. He was knocked about, ill-treated. It must have been hell for him.'
'All the same,' Dr. MacMaster had said, 'all the same, I shouldn't be surprised. The thing is to get him to talk.'
And one day Micky had talked. Sobbing in his bed, he cried out, pushing Rachel away with his fists: 'I want to go home. I want to go home to our Mom and our Ernie.'
Rachel was upset, almost incredulous.
'He can't want his mother. She didn't care tuppence for him. She knocked him about whenever she was drunk.'
And he had said gently: 'But you're up against nature, Rachel. She is his mother and he loves her.'
'She was no kind of a mother!'
'He is her own flesh and blood. That's what he feels. That's what nothing can replace.'
And she had answered: 'But by now, surely he ought to look on me as his mother.'
Poor Rachel, thought Leo. Poor Rachel, who could buy so many things… Not selfish things, not things for herself; who could give to unwanted children love, care, a home. All these things she could buy for them, but not their love for her.
Then the war had ended. The children had begun to drift back to London , claimed by parents or relatives. But not all of them. Some of them had remained unwanted and it was then that Rachel had said: 'You know, Leo, they're like our own children now. This is the moment when we can have a real family of our own. Four — five of these children can stay with us. We'll adopt them, provide for them and they'll really be our children.'
He had felt a vague uneasiness, why he did not quite know. It was not that he objected to the children, but he had felt instinctively the falseness of it. The assumption that it was easy to make a family of one's own by artificial means.
'Don't you think,' he had said, 'that it's rather a risk?'
But she had replied: 'A risk? What does it matter if it is a risk? It's worth doing.'
Yes, he supposed it was worth doing, only he was not quite as sure as she was. By now he had grown so far away, so aloof in some cold misty region of his own, that it was not in him to object. He said as he had said so many times: 'You must do as you please, Rachel.'
She had been full of triumph, full of happiness, making her plans, consulting solicitors, going about things in her usual businesslike way. And so she had acquired her family. Mary, that eldest child brought from New York; Micky, the homesick boy who had cried himself to sleep for so many nights, longing for his slum home and his negligent, bad-tempered mother; Tina, the graceful dark half-caste child whose mother was a prostitute and whose father had been a Lascar seaman. Hester, whose young Irish mother had borne an illegitimate child and who wanted to start life again. And Jacko, the engaging, monkey-faced little boy whose antics made them all laugh, who could always talk himself out of punishment, and charm extra sweets even from that disciplinarian, Miss Lindstrom. Jacko, whose father was serving a prison sentence and whose mother had gone off with some other man.
Yes, Leo thought, surely it was a worth-while job to take these children, to give them the benefits of a home and love and a father and mother. Rachel, he thought, had had a right to be triumphant. Only it hadn't worked out quite the way it was supposed to do… For these children were not the children that he and Rachel would have had. Within them ran none of the blood of Rachel's hardworking thrifty forebears, none of the drive and ambition by which the less reputable members of her family had gained their assured place in society, none of the vague kindliness and integrity of mind that he remembered in his own father and grandfather and grandmother. None of the intellectual brilliance of his grandparents on the other side.
Everything that environment could do was done for them. It could do a great deal, but it could not do everything. There had been those seeds of weakness which had brought them to the nursery in the first place, and under stress those seeds might bear flower. That was exemplified very fully in Jacko. Jacko, the charming, agile Jacko, with his merry quips, his charm, his easy habit of twisting everyone round his finger, was essentially of a delinquent type. It showed very early in childish thieving, in lies; all things that were put down to his original bad upbringing. Things that could be, Rachel said, easily ironed out. But they never did get ironed out.
His record at school was bad. He was sent down from the university and from then it was a long series of painful incidents where he and Rachel, doing the best they could, tried to give the boy the assurance of their love and their confidence, tried to find work that would be congenial to him where he could hope for success if he applied himself. Perhaps, Leo thought, they had been too soft with him. But no. Soft or hard, in Jacko's case, he thought the end would have been the same. What he wanted he must have. If he could not get it by any legitimate means he was quite willing to get it by any other means. He was not clever enough to be successful in crime, even petty crime. And so it had come to that last day when he had arrived broke, in fear of prison, angrily demanding money as his right, threatening. He had gone away, shouting out that he was coming back and that she had better have the money ready for him — or else! And so –Rachel had died. How remote all the past seemed to him. All those long years of the war with the boys and girls growing up. And he himself? Also remote, colourless. It was as though that robust energy and zest for life that was Rachel had eaten into him, leaving him limp and exhausted, needing, oh so badly, warmth and love.
Even now he could hardly remember when he had first become aware how close these things were to him. Close at hand… Not proffered to him, but there. Gwenda… The perfect, helpful secretary, working for him, always at hand, kind, helpful. There was something about her that had reminded him of what Rachel had been when he first met her. The same warmth, the same enthusiasm, the same warm-heartedness. Only in Gwenda's case, that warmth, that warmheartedness, that enthusiasm were all for him. Not for the hypothetical children that she might one day have, just for him. It had been like warming one's hands at a fire… Hands that were cold and stiff with disuse. When had he first realised that she cared for him? It was difficult to say. It had not been any sudden revelation. But suddenly — one day, he had known that he loved her.
