31st Of February by Julian Symons Read Free Book Online Page A

Anderson’s personality combined strength and weakness in ways of which he was quite unaware. Such a combination is dangerous both to its possessor and to those who come into contact with him. Anderson, who was not by nature inclined to investigation of his own character, had become vaguely aware of this fact in the past few weeks.
    Anderson was the only child of a bank manager; and soon after his birth in 1909 his father and mother moved from a small terrace house in Wood Green to a new and more commodious establishment in Ealing. This house, in which the child grew up, was built in a modern Tudor style of architecture. It had an oak door with studs, imitation Tudor external beams and plaster, and leaded light windows. The fireplaces were modern with coloured tiles, except the fireplace in the lounge; which again was an imitation Tudor open fireplace in bright red brick. There was a wooden fence in front of the house protecting a neat small lawn, which Anderson’s father mowed on week ends during the summer. At the back of the house was another small lawn with flower beds. The house was called “Tudor Vista,” and it was situated in a road of similar houses, each of which, however, differed from the others in some small architectural details. Tudor Vista fulfilled the ambitions of Anderson’s parents. It gave his father a garden, modern plumbing and a touch of the picturesque, all of which had been lacking in the house at Wood Green. His mother was happy to move into such a really nice neighbourhood, with really nice people in it. The importance of this achievement could be understood only in terms of the background from which Anderson’s father and mother had escaped: on his father’s side the family had been small, unsuccessful tradesmen struggling with a grocer’s business; on his mother’s they had been, even more humiliatingly, in service. Anderson’s parents never spoke of these things; he learned of them through his maternal grandmother, who came to live with them when her husband died. When she talked to the child of the family in which she had been for many years second housemaid he was puzzled, and asked her why she worked for other people. “To make my living, silly,” she said, and told him of the great house near Wimbledon Common, the six servants that were kept, and the two gardeners – her husband had been one of them. “Like a park –” she said to Anderson – “the garden was like a park,” sniffing contemptuously at the little patches of lawn tended so carefully by Anderson’s father. In the child’s mind the garden was like Richmond Park, where he had once been taken for a picnic; great pies were eaten from spotless white cloths laid on the grass, fluid was poured from strange bottles into little metal cups, everyone always wore their best clothes, deer flickered in and out of the shade. He could see the park, but he could not visualize the great house she described with its wide stairway and splendid gallery nor understand his grandmother’s contempt for the small rooms and funny windows of Tudor Vista, and for the dainty teas provided by his mother for the ladies of the neighbourhood. Sometimes his grandmother appeared at these teas, and at the social evenings when a near-by husband and wife came round for a game of whist or auction bridge, interrupted after a couple of rubbers by a long pause for refreshments, neat little sandwiches or fragments of sardine placed upon fingers of toast. Hers was an awkward presence upon these social occasions, however, for she would not sit quietly nodding in the inglenook. “I think I’ll be clearing away now,” she would say, or “I’ll just be washing up while you play your hand of cards.” Mrs Anderson would say quite sharply, “Sit down, mother, do,” and would say that she had made the necessary arrangements for the daily woman, Kitty or Mary or Bessie, to come in that evening. There was not the slightest necessity for anybody to stir.