The Dangerous Years

By Richard Church

The capacity for and intensity of love are often considered by those in love as an exclusive prerogative. The difference between generations is a barrier to parents' understanding of their children's emotional problems and children, when they have grown up, feel automatically that any evidence of love or of sensual enjoyment is somehow embarrassing and indecent. Each group believes itself to have attained the age of reason even while knowing that its behaviour is unreasonable.
Mary Winterbourne, a widow of fifty and mother of a married daughter of twenty-five, believes herself settled in a solitary life, beyond emotional entanglement and indiscretion. At the same time she has to stand by helplessly and watch her daughter's marriage breaking up through the immature marital conduct of the young woman's infuriatingly athletic don of a husband. Mother and daughter accept a long-standing invitation to Paris, where, into the resignation of the mother's life and into the resentful dissatisfaction of the daughter's comes love, unwonted and yet welcome.
It is only the more disturbing because of its unexpected guises. To Mary it comes through a retired colonel who is in dubious circumstances. To her daughter, it comes to fulfil her marriage, through the agency of the colonel's nephew, a musical prodigy nine years old.
Richard Church's novel, first published in 1956, which is set in England, Paris and Switzerland is a penetration and intensely human analysis of the impact of love, dangerous at all ages, on markedly individual people who claim not only interest and tolerance but the active sympathy and affection of the reader. The poetry of the winter scene, so sensuously concrete, is ever-present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Feb 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781448214860

Richard Church

Richard Church was born in London in 1893. At the age of sixteen, persuaded by his father, he took a position as a clerk in the Civil Service where he worked for the next twenty-four years. During that time he worked tirelessly on his love of all things literary, devoting early mornings, between 5 and 7, and most of his evenings to writing and reading. In 1917 this hard regime was rewarded and his first volume of poetry, The Flood of Life, and Other Poems, was published. But real success and acclaim came only in 1926 with the publication of Portrait of the Abbot. In 1930 Richard gave up his position with the Civil Service and began a full-time writing career. He died in 1972, with over sixty books of poetry and prose to his name, having firmly established his position in English literary heritage.

Book preview

Chapter One

A Lonely Birthday

Mrs. Winterbourne had three letters on the morning of her fiftieth birthday. Being a person who loved to savour life to the full, she did not immediately open them, but examined the handwriting on the envelopes. One was from Paris, and she recognised the sender, Dr. Batten, who had been in the East Surrey Regiment with her husband at the Battle of Loos in the autumn of 1915, and had come home on leave shortly after, to call on her and tell her some details about his fellow-officer’s death, one amongst the fifty thousand in that ding-dong struggle which wiped out most of the young men from Limpsfield village, where she was still living in 1930.

The experiences of that battle, where poison-gas was again used, had affected Dr. Batten’s outlook on life. After the war he had married a French woman, and settled in Paris with the determination to specialise in respiratory diseases. Once a year he wrote to his friend’s widow. Now here was the fifteenth anniversary tribute.

Mrs. Winterbourne did not immediately open that letter. She knew it would be a polite repetition of its fourteen predecessors, carrying an invitation for her to come to Paris again—she had been once, in the first dark days immediately after the war when grief swelled afresh and drove her like an autumn leaf up and down the confines of her small world. Since then she had resumed control of herself and her destiny, as she thought, and anchored herself to the responsibility of bringing up her daughter Joan; a double responsibility now that the girl was fatherless.

The second letter was from Joan, twenty-five years old, and married to the man of her own choice, John Boys, a don at King’s College, Cambridge, whom she had met while she was an undergraduate at Newnham, during a winter vacation with a climbing party in Switzerland.

It was the fact that the third letter was from this son-in-law, that made Mrs. Winterbourne pucker up her still pretty brows. She was perplexed. Why did the children, as she called them, write each under separate cover? It was as ominous as sleeping in different rooms. She attacked Joan’s letter first.

Dearest, it began (habitually rather than emotionally), "a happy birthday, and I wish I could buy you the earth; but something is coming from The Stores by delivery van direct. If John were here I know he would include something intense, for he has always been more in love with you than with me. But he’s not here. Immediately the students went down he was off as usual to harden his muscles and reinforce his iron will. He’s walking in the rain along the Pennines I presume. I last saw him in studded boots and mossy flannel bags, with a rucksack containing a change of hair-shirt. He kissed the air somewhere about six inches from my carbolised face and with a wave of the hand was gone. I thank God I can’t go because I have a good excuse. I’m devilling for my Professor, digging into the Middle Ages again, Court Rolls and all that. And he wants the fodder urgently, to get his book done before some American rival steals his thunder.

I wish I didn’t feel lonely here, in spite of the work. It makes me ashamed of myself, though I don’t know why I should be. Marriage should not be a one-sided affair. But I’m not grumbling. After all, fidelity is something to be thankful for in this libidinous age. And that is John’s strongest suit. He’s as faithful as Helvellyn, or The Rock of Ages. He could climb up his own constancy, and find it as formidable as the Matterhorn. It has its funny side. I mean the relationship, not the constancy. But I feel inclined to come home for a while, and to shut up the flat here in Cambridge, which is dreary in mid-winter after term finishes. It’s the coldest place on earth; and I begin to feel I would like a touch of extravagant, Latin warmth for once in a while. Dear old Limpsfield; I think of it now, a blaze of December colour along Titsey woods and along the secret brooks. And the bracken on the Common! Mother, I wish sometimes I’d never grown up and left you, or wanted things, and a person, so much. However, I must get on with the job. I will ring you up when it is done, and I may fulfil my threat to descend on you.

Mrs. Winterbourne read this through twice, and tapped it against her teeth, as though it were a coin to be tested. The puzzlement did not leave her brow. Obviously she was haunted by previous thoughts on the matter. This letter was a straw in the wind. She turned to the third.

Dear Mary, it said. She had absolutely refused, from the start of the marriage four years ago, to be called ‘Mater’ as John Boys had shyly tried to name her. And ‘Mother’ was a little too close for a man of nearly forty, a rocklike individual, son of the Church, devoted to his work as a physicist. Being shy, he was at first shocked that his mother-in-law should demand to be treated so unceremoniously. Being also inarticulate, he accepted gratefully.

"I’m taking a walk, to harden up a bit after term. The weather is just right for it; heavy rains against bouts of N.E. counter-blasts. Quite a struggle at times on the summits, with patches of fog. Not a soul about, except a shepherd here and there looking for strayed animals. One or two noble sunsets in spite of the inclemency. I wish young Joan were here; but she’s losing heart lately. Working too hard for old Watson. Can’t you have a word with her? I’ve tried, but she just freezes when I jockey her. I’d like to talk to you about this sometime. She’s been getting into a habit of biting lately. It’s been going on all the year; and I can’t understand why. We both have our work to do, and our lives are very full. Do you think it rankles that she got only a Second instead of the predicted First? If so, it wasn’t my fault, for I did my best to keep her nose to the grindstone during her last year, after we had met on that climbing expedition in 1924. But she was so keen on getting married that she would live in the future, and day-dream about it instead of plugging away at the job in hand. She could have got that First without ropes! Well, I must push on. I’m writing this in a scruffy little hotel near Scafell, after an early breakfast. Rain still falling, and growing colder. Good hardening weather! Wish you were here, relieved from all your good works for a while. The wind on the heath, brother! Happy birthday to you. Joan is doing something at The Stores."

The letter from Paris was opened last, and thoughtfully Mrs. Winterbourne first went to the window of her sittingroom, and looked across the woods. Rain was falling here too, steadily and musically, a quiet drumming on the roof of the old cottage, and a distant whispering among the bare twigs of the oaks and birches that stood around the clearing before the cottage. Suddenly she felt lonely. She would not allow herself to be disconsolate, however, and turned to Dr. Batten’s annual. It was, as she expected, the usual quiet reminder from a remarkable man. She had not seen him for over ten years, and during that decade he had been working at pressure, a dedicated soul, supported by his wife, a woman of some property, and a nurse during the war. The invitation to visit them in Paris was repeated. What made Mrs. Winterbourne marvel was that so slender an acquaintance could be maintained, without more to feed it. Dr. Batten must have had close contact with hundreds of casualties during that dreadful September in 1915, but he had remembered, and remembered with emotion, the occasion of her husband’s death on the barbed wire so unexpectedly thrust up by the Germans on Hill 70 in the heat of the battle. The names of that fatal neighbourhood were stamped on her memory: Loos, Hulluch, Cité St. Elie, Festubert, Neuve Chapelle, and the terrible Bois Hugo where the enfilading machine-gun fire drove back the 24th Division. Details were beginning to fade; but names stood like gravestones in the cemetery of the past. Among them lay her love, her marriage, Joan’s father. There had hardly been time to explore his nature. Was it perpetuated in their daughter, the forthright, somewhat tempestuous young woman, given to great indignations and equally great recoils?

A fiftieth birthday spent alone, in familiar surroundings, is too ghost-ridden to be comfortable. Mrs. Winterbourne tried to busy herself, determined to throw off the depression that had settled over her after she had read the three letters, the only post that morning. Was she entirely forgotten by the rest of the world, the many acquaintances, the neighbours? What of the many people with whom she worked locally, and those in London, all of them fellow-folk in interests and matters of taste, members of the various societies working for peace, the several freedoms, the promotion of the arts and more enlightened gardening, a dozen activities in which she took part, with the intention of making the human family less bloody-minded and destructive? But no doubt all these good workers were more concerned with mankind as a whole, than with any single individual. She reflected modestly upon this, but it did her no good that day, and she had to confess to herself by the evening that the dear little cottage, the garden, the whole setting of her life for the past decade, were as unreal as a stage backcloth. A muggy drizzle fell after luncheon, and day faded out about three o’clock, beaten down by the tiny hammers of the rain thudding on what few leaves still hung on the trees. Why was I born in December? she asked Milly, her cook, who lived in the village and came in daily, cycling over the common and down the hill to the cottage in the woods.

Milly had not been able to answer this question; but she looked curiously at her employer, with whom she had been on friendly terms, unbroken by a cloud, ever since taking the job ten years earlier. During that time, Milly had married; but she would not give up her post with Mrs. Winterbourne, and there had been no arrival of a family to force her to do so. The relationship was a cool one, but it was serene.

You want a bit of a change, she said. "I always say that as soon as you start thinking about yourself, something must be wrong. It doesn’t do. Arthur got like that when he was away from work with shingles, and he properly got on my nerves. He began asking me questions about himself. It was uncanny, and I said so. I sent him off to his mother up North, and it did him a world of good. Just a change of scene, that’s all you need. It’s brooding, that’s the danger."

Milly’s bracing remarks were effective, and Mrs. Winterbourne determined to take herself in hand. She was indeed surprised at her weakness, one quite out of character.

As though to draw her back to her more normal condition, the telephone rang soon after dark, the first sound to break the day-long silence indoors and out. She heard Joan’s voice, distant, querulous.

Is that you, Mother? Look, I think I’ll come home to you for a few days. I’ve something I want to say, and I can’t talk about it on the phone. Is that all right? Am I putting you out?

Mary did some quick thinking, for her diary was on the desk in her dining-room: but she knew that not much was happening, amongst her several committees, most meetings having been put off until after Christmas.

Why not come to-morrow? she said, quietly, though she was relieved to have this mood of loneliness so happily broken. Let us meet in Town and get some of the shopping done on your way down.

This was agreed, and Joan rang off. Her mother knew better than to try to get more information out of her by questioning her, especially on the telephone.

The house was quieter than ever after that interlude, and the widow shut herself in for the night, alone there, in the midst of a countryside where she played so active a part with her good works, and her apparently selfless nature. A wind sprang up, flinging masses of dead leaves against the windows, where they scratched and rustled like ghosts, clamouring from the past. She went early to bed, and to her astonishment, found herself weeping as soon as her head touched the pillow. ‘Milly must be right,’ she thought. ‘Something must be done. I suppose it is my time of life. Well, I hope it won’t last long.’ And upon that practical surmise, she fell asleep.

Chapter Two

Battling Through Fog

Next morning dawned cold and misty. Below the open and rising ground on which the cottage stood, the woods lay scarved, vague masses of dark vegetation under a milky sky. Mary felt more cheerful, however, as she bustled about, preparing for the day in London. In spite of the cold, the Austin Seven started up immediately, and Mary drove to Oxted station with time to spare.

As the train approached London, daylight faded away under an overhead fog, but the line was clear, and the train arrived on time. Mary took the Underground to King’s Cross, and waited there until her daughter’s train came in, half an hour late.

She saw Joan in the distance, walking towards the barrier, striding past people, her head up, a newspaper in one hand, a brief-case in the other. She saw her mother and waved the newspaper, but in a dispirited way that set Mary wondering again.

You are tired darling, she said, looking up at the young woman’s handsome face, a feminine replica of that of the dead soldier-stockbroker.

"I am tired, replied the girl firmly, I’ve hardly slept for a week."

Mary took her arm, and they left the station, to come out into the dark Town.

Good God! said the girl. How very appropriate!

Why, Joan, whatever is the matter?

Mary stopped and turned to her, forcing the girl to stop too. She saw the over-intensity of those normally serene features, the emphasis with which Joan stood as though stamping the pavement into submission.

Don’t ask me here, Mother. I can’t talk about it now. Let’s forget everything and concentrate on our shopping. There’s some sense in that, perhaps. Now where do we go first?

Mary was instantly overcome by the illusion of being the younger of the two, and she followed Joan in silence for a while, trying to control her anxiety. She studied the rebellious hair, which made a halo round the shabby toque. She observed how the broad shoulders stooped, as though shrinking from something unpleasant. She was so nervous that she could almost feel the pavement vibrating under the girl’s angry tread.

Where’s your luggage? she said.

"Oh God, I’ve left it in the train! Not even competent to manage that! Here, hold this and wait for me." She thrust the brief-case into her mother’s hand, and fled.

A quarter of an hour passed, while Mary stood outside the station, consumed by uncertainties, a forlorn figure in the gloom. Then Joan reappeared, carrying a small suitcase, which she held up triumphantly.

It had already got to the Lost Property Office. What a fool I am. This won’t do, Mother. Let’s pull ourselves together, after wasting all that time.

She was cheered by this small success, and kept this animation for the rest of the morning. Only once, during lunch in the restaurant of a crowded shop, did Mary venture to look enquiringly at Joan; but before she could speak, the girl took fright, having intercepted the glance.

Don’t look at me like that, Mother. I know what you mean, but we can’t talk here. I’m not sure of myself. I don’t possess your universal kindness. I’m really a wickedly selfish creature. You know that. You know how I bully you. It’s no use telling me …

I’m not telling you anything, Joan. Let us do as you say, and wait until we get home; if we ever do get home out of this dreadful atmosphere.

The fog had now come down, and penetrated even into the heated shops. It hung about among the lights, cloaking each bulb with a nimbus of sulphury shadow. Shoppers began to cough, to draw their collars close about their throats and chests. The traffic slowed down, its roar diminishing to a rubbery rumble.

We’d better make for Victoria station, said Mary, before the rush-hour begins.

But Joan objected. She made the excuse that there were thousands more gifts to be bought. This was an excuse for putting off the confession, and Mary at last rebelled. They reached Victoria to discover that other people were of the same mind. The station was packed with a crowd of parcel-encumbered shoppers. Blackboards with cancellations and new directions stood on easels. Overhead, under the dome, a thick cloud of chocolate-coloured smoke hung like a sagging tent. Beyond the station, all was dark, though the hour was only three o’clock. From time to time, if there were such a factor as time, a fog signal exploded, and yet another train rumbled to a standstill. Distant lowings from down-river suggested that tugs were in difficulties in and beyond London Pool.

The two women fought their way to a barrier and a platform where a lunch-time train still waited. They found seats, and sat there, in a cold coach, with their parcels about them, the racks being already filled. One thing, it teaches us patience, said a passenger. Mary, sitting pressed against her daughter, felt the girl’s body start, and she half-expected her to make some rude retort. She put her hand on Joan’s lap, and patted the firm flesh. There was no response. Joan was determined on being alone in the universe.

After two hours of great discomfort and cold, mother and daughter reached Oxted, and groped their way to the car in the station yard. But now it needed some persuasion, and Joan had to lift the bonnet, tickle the carburetter, and swing the handle a dozen times before the engine woke. The fog here was vegetable instead of mineral, but it was hardly less thick, and Joan had to drive in low gear all the way to the cottage. But she appeared to welcome the needed concentration, and hummed to herself as she peered ahead, hugging the verge of the road up through the back of the village, over the Common, and down to the great wood. Here, where the Weald opened, the mist thinned a little, revealing the nearer trees and bushes beside the lane. The headlights of the car struck the coloured trunks and sweeps of halfnaked fronds, making sudden flares of yellow, umber and gold, but tarnished gold. A falling leaf from time to time crossed the windscreen, screaming with light, then vanishing. Once an owl glided in front of the car, an unreal apparition that left behind it a cry that choked upon itself as though smothered by the drip, drip of the clinging mist.

Home at last, and thank you, said Mary, when Joan followed her into the cottage after putting the car away in the thatched stable. I thought we were doomed.

I never abandoned hope, said Joan. And so the mother and daughter kept up this pretence of cheerfulness, giving themselves another respite and taking comfort from the physical pleasure of being indoors, warm, wrapped in familiar surroundings, where every object had its intimate whisper of memory, wistful perhaps but no less endeared.

Mary kindled the fire in the open hearth, and the flames from the paraffin sprinkled over the ashes lit up the Elizabethan brickwork, the door of the bread-oven, the gap of the salt-recess, the logs piled up and over the two seats in the chimney corners. As Mary went to draw the curtains, her cat appeared outside the casement, two eyes gleaming, and a coral-red mouth opening and shutting, the sound of the appeal cut off by the panes. She opened the window and he sprang in, his blue-grey fur bedewed, and his whiskers drooping. Shuddering as he walked, he made for the centre table, where he rubbed himself at an angle against a leg, purring and mewing together, protesting against the inclement weather and half-blaming his mistress. Joan stooped and roughly ran her hand along his coat, from head to tail, bringing it away wet and stuck with loose hairs.

The cottage was still lighted by oil-lamps, and the flat odour of them added to the rustic mood of the interior. With curtains drawn, the log fire now burning fiercely and hissing as it attacked the damp soot of the upper chimney, the two lamps casting pools of golden light and saturating the air with an almost visible texture of peacefulness, the two women forgot the outside world, and settled down before the fire, with tea and the opportunity for small-talk.

But the mother could wait no longer.

Now, darling. What is it all about? she asked, filling Joan’s cup again.

Joan hesitated, stared fixedly at the fire, clutched the cat on her lap and made it cry out in protest. She turned to her mother, who saw her breast rising and falling, shadowed and lit by fire-glow.

Look, Mother, she said at last. John and I can’t go on as we have done. I can see that I made the mistake of urging him into marriage. But I begin to feel that I might just as well have snatched a boy out of the Fourth Form. I wonder somebody hasn’t informed the R.S.P.C.C.

Don’t be facetious, Joan. It sounds so bitter. I can’t imagine what …

Joan suddenly changed her mood. Turning abruptly, she spilled the cat from her lap, and jumped up, to pace before the fire, marking the tiled spaces with her large shoes.

Well, the truth is, that our marriage is no marriage at all. We’ve had four years of this boyish comradeship, and I can stand it no more. It’s turning me into a crank, a monomaniac.

My dear child …

I know. It sounds quite indecent. But when a man lives with you and treats you one moment like a fellow-soldier, and the next as though you were a dangerous Lilith or Delilah creeping towards him with a pair of shears to strip him of his manly strength, what are you to do, as a woman—as a woman, Mother; and that’s the blunt truth?

Her voice broke, and Mary feared that she was about to burst into a flood of weeping; but indignation took charge again, and drove her to a further pacing of the floor. The logs on the fire collapsed, sending up a flight of sparks, and Mary got up, walked round her daughter and drew the logs together. The girl ignored this interruption, and spoke again.

This university life is all very well. I enjoy that. But when it is cut off from reality—you know what I mean? Yes, that’s what it comes to. John is so concerned with his magnificent physical condition, when he’s not in the laboratory, that he begins to look upon me as a menace. Nothing must come between him and his fitness for climbing. You know he’s joined the Alpine Club, and goes up there to read for one night a week? That leaves me out at least for that part of his life. And for the rest—well, you see that I’m trying to tell you, Mother. I’m only human, and I can’t stand it any more. I’ve been a fool over him. He says so himself; accuses me of spoiling my career at Newnham because of what he calls my emotionalism. Emotionalism! It makes me want to say something beastly, something that smells of the stable and mother earth. But there it is. One can’t do it. All I know is, we’ve got no children, and are not likely to have any.

Mary felt herself going colder and colder as she listened. She had no warmth of experience to draw upon. For the past fourteen years all her efforts of will had been directed to quelling the fires of nature. She believed that she must be direct and candid with the distracted girl.

I don’t know what to say, Joan. I had no idea of this. You both appeared to be so happy together, with your work, and your expeditions. Didn’t you meet on the mountains? Life has drifted away from, from … It is so long now since I had your father. We were happy enough; without question. All was so natural. You were born at the end of our first year. Then your brother died. That frightened us a little, but it made no difference to our relationship. You know what I mean.

She knelt before the fire still, gazing into the past.

But after I lost him. Yes, that was the end of things. I had to put all that behind me. I was afraid, Joan. I am afraid still, though I begin to grow old. An old woman, changing into something poor and strange. I don’t recognise myself. But I want to help you. I don’t believe in violence. You must not be …

"Don’t imagine I’m being headstrong, Mother. This thing has been growing for the past two years, though I’ve tried to hide it, dismiss it. The fact is, he’s not made for marriage. I love him, and he thinks he loves me. But all this