Bobby’s Room by Douglas Dunn. Part 3.
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Henry had reckoned on eating alone in the dining room, like any other guest, but he ate with the Bawdens in their kitchen. ‘No aunts, no uncles,’ said Mr Bawden, as the old couple explored Henry’s family. ‘So no cousins, either. No great loss, if you ask me. A big scatter of kin makes you feel guilty at not keeping in touch, which you can’t do, you know, unless you’re a man of means and leisure!’
‘I’ve second cousins’, Henry offered.
‘I was closer to two of my second cousins than to any of my first, said Mrs Bawden.
I’ve never met them, said Henry.
‘Singapore’s a long, long journey, she said, pushing a bowl of cauliflower towards him.
‘Home-grown, said Mr Bawden. ‘We haven’t eaten a tinned vegetable in twenty years?’
As he lay awake in bed, Henry pondered his affection for his parents, and decided it was becoming as distant and routine as his parents’love of him. They were his parents, therefore he loved them; he was their son, therefore they loved him – it was as mathematical as that. Co-operation between them was beginning to thin out, like the darkness in the triangle of dawn now at the top of the curtains. His mother prodded him to be the scholar of his class at school, and was proud of his examination victories; but she nagged him for being too studious and staying in when he should have been outside and complained of his lack of interest in sport. They expected him to be perfect, but they neglected him.
He had a different room from the one he had slept in two years before. It was at the front of the house, under the eaves; from its protruding window he could look at a small wedge of sea and the right-hand tip of an island that could be walked to at low tide over the sands. Darkness turned to a transparent grey, and objects in the room slowly became visible. Shelves in an alcove contained dozens of books of boyish interest – books on ships and the sea, the Empire, foreign countries, warlike history, wildlife, fishing, landmarks in engineering and exploration, most of them heavy and already obsolete. There was a home-made model warship on a chest of drawers. Pictures on the wall did not quite cover the cleaner paint left behind from those that had been taken down. His dressing gown, on the hook behind the door, looked like another person in the room.
He imagined that the owner of the books was a long-lost son of the Bawdens, dead, probably, in the war.
‘Was my room your son’s?’ he asked Mr Bawden, who pointed to his ear as Henry began to repeat his question.
‘We thought you’d like it better than the rooms we let to the holidaymakers, he said. ‘Or she did. You’ll find out,’ he said, as if excusing himself in advance for any apparent lack of initiative on his part. ‘Mrs Bawden is the boss round here. She wears the trousers.’
‘Where is he?’
‘I haven’t the foggiest. Somewhere or other’ He jabbed his rake on the dusty ground. ‘It’s good soil for carrots. And there’s no better earth for potatoes.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘Good God, no. What gave you that idea? All that’s wrong with Bobby is that he’s a bit wayward when it comes to writing letters. What made you think he was dead?’
Henry was embarrassed, and with no way of explaining himself. Mr Bawden shrugged and retreated into his deafness and gardening.
Mrs Bawden was obviously told of Henry’s questions in the garden. At dinner she recounted Bobby’s travels – his letters from Australia, where he had spent three years, the good job in Hong Kong he’d thrown up on a whim in order to go to Canada. ‘We’re about due a letter from him soon’
‘What’s that?’ her husband asked.
‘I said we’re about due a letter from Bobby’ T’ll believe it when I see it, said Mr Bawden.
When Henry offered to do Mrs Bawden’s shopping, it seemed as if she had been expecting him to ask. She gave him a list, and he pedalled the two miles to the nearest shop on a bicycle that had been Bobby’s.
A family of five moved in, and stayed for three nights. They were boisterous, but their liveliness appeared toned down out of respect for someone else’s house. Mrs Bawden had that effect on people. Henry kept out of their way.
When he came down to say good night, Mr Bawden, alone in the kitchen with a book, directed him to the guests’ sitting room. He found Mrs Bawden there with the father and mother of the visiting family.
‘And this is Bobby in his uniform, she was saying.
‘My, he’s a fine-looking young man.’
‘And here’s another one, with some friends of his from the same ship.’ I’m off to bed now, Henry told her.
‘Good night, Henry!’
He was disconcerted by the sight of Mrs Bawden on the sofa, with a guest on either side of her, showing photographs of her son to people she had never seen before and might never see again. There was an amiable candour in her affectionate disappointment in Bobby, and it jolted Henry, who saw it as a failure of reticence, an openness that compromised her loyalty to her son. Snapshots of her son were being touted to strangers and were symptoms of an unhappiness she was too proud to notice.
‘Is it all right if I take a cup of cocoa upstairs with me?’ he asked Mr Bawden.
‘Help yourself,’ said the old man. Henry boiled the kettle and opened the cocoa tin. ‘What is it, through there?’ Mr Bawden asked. ‘Snapshots and airmail letters?’
‘What?’
‘My wife, what’s she doing?’
‘She’s talking to the guests.’
‘See any photographs?’
‘I think she is showing them photographs’
The old man went back to his book.
Henry wondered how Mrs Bawden selected the people who were treated to her photograph albums. Perhaps everyone was, and perhaps his parents, two years before, had been shown the same photographs, with the same pride, and had listened to the same reminiscences. He felt sure that the visiting couple would have asked who Henry was, and been told that his parents had gone to Singapore, that his father was a civil engineer, and that they had stayed at Netherbank and thought it an ideal place to board their son while they were away.
‘You ought to come home, Bobby,’ he said to the vanished son. ‘Not only does your mother miss you, but she talks about you to people she hardly knows.
Worse, she’s probably talking about me!’
There was a visitors’ book on the hall table. Besides putting down their names and addresses, guests over the years had written their comments in a column where remarks were invited. ‘We had a wonderful time. ‘Smashing food!’
‘Highly recommended!’ ‘Excellent.’ Henry leafed back to two years earlier. ‘First-class!’ his mother had written, in her bold, clear, self-assured handwriting. It was characteristic of her. Any time they travelled by train, his mother made it clear that they went first-class as a matter of course, and that some people did not – never would, never could.