Voices in a Haunted Room

For a moment father and son stared steadily at each other. I was not sure of the look which passed between them. There was a certain glitter in Dickon’s eyes, something which made me think, fleetingly, that he was not altogether surprised. But perhaps I thought of that after.

Then Dickon spoke. He said: “You’re mad.”

“No,” said Jonathan. “Determined.”

Dickon went on: “I see. So it is a plan. Who is going to join this company of fools?

What about you, David?”

“Certainly not,” said David. “I have told them what I think of the idea.”

Dickon nodded. “It is a pleasant surprise to find that a little sanity remains in the family.”

“Sanity!” retorted Jonathan. “If sanity is devoting oneself exclusively to books and mathematics, then the world would not have progressed very far.”

“On the contrary,” contradicted David, “ideas ... thought and education have done more to advance it than rash adventurers.”

“I would contest that.”

“That’s enough,” said Dickon. “I suppose you have all been moved to this by the arrival of those refugees. You should have heard some of the stories they have been telling us. France has become a land of savages.”

“There are fine people there still,” said Chariot, “and they are doing all they can to save the country.”

“They’ll have a hard task. I warned them years ago that they were heading for disaster.”

“It’s true,” said my mother. “You did, Dickon.”

“Then they were preaching against us ... joining the American colonists. What fools!

Who can be surprised at the state they are now in?”

“I can,” said Chariot. “But it is no use trying to make you understand.”

“I understand well enough. You are not very profound, you know. You’re just a little band of idiots. Now that’s an end of the matter. I want to enjoy my roast beef.”

Silence fell on the table. Sabrina, who had come down for the joy of having Dickon at the table and seeing him enjoy his roast beef, looked a little strained. She hated conflict.

My mother was anxious too. It was such a pity. After being away, even for such a short time, she wanted to enjoy her homecoming.

Dickon said he wanted to see Jonathan in his study after the meal. When I went upstairs I heard them talking quietly there.

My mother came to my bedroom. She sat on my bed and looked at me sorrowfully.

“How did all this come about?” she asked.

I told her how they had talked and become so absorbed in their plotting that the rest of us did not seem to exist for them.

“It was Chariot who started it, I think,” I said.

“Chariot was always a patriot. He is his father’s son. It is a pity he and Dickon cannot get on.”

“I don’t think they ever would. They have a natural antipathy.”

She sighed and I smiled at her.

“Dearest Maman,” I said, “you cannot have everything in life, can you? And you have so much.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “I have, and Claudine, remember this when you grow older: one of the best things in life is to have your happiness when you are mature enough to enjoy it.”

“Well, that is the way you have had it.”

She nodded. “Don’t worry about these foolish young men. They’ll realize their folly.

Dickon will make them see it.”

But he did not.

They went off secretly the next day and nobody thought anything about them until evening when they did not return.

We spent an uneasy night and the next morning a letter arrived for Dickon from Jonathan.

They had arranged their passage in a boat calling at the Belgian coast and by the time Dickon received the note, they should be about to land.

A Wedding at Eversleigh

Our household was disrupted. Dickon raged and my mother was plunged into melancholy.

Although she had never been so close to Chariot as to me, and they had grown farther apart since her marriage to Dickon, he was her son, and I realized during the weeks which followed how his flight saddened her. She knew Chariot had never really wanted to stay in England, and she felt a certain guilt because she understood how frustrated he must have felt. He had come for a holiday-as we all had-and to have been forced to stay in England had angered him.

I had often heard him say that he wished he had gone back that time with my mother.

He would never have come away if he had. He would have stayed behind to fight. David said: “You would not have been there long to fight. You would have been just another in the long march to the guillotine.”

One remembered these conversations now; one remembered so much. Rides had lost their savour. There was no fear, no hope, of Jonathan’s springing out on me. He had gone.

What if he never came back?