§ 7
There was much to see to before the Preembys could go to Tunbridge Wells. There had to be quite a number of interviews with Mr. Sam Widgery at Woodford Wells and afterwards in the dingy offices of Messrs. Payne and Punter in Lincoln’s Inn. It was clear from the first to these men of affairs that Mr. Preemby was a child at business, but as they went on with him they realized that he was an extremely greedy and intractable child. It was six weeks before Mr. and Mrs. Sam Widgery could move in, sullenly and resentfully, to the Limpid Stream premises, and Mr. Preemby and his daughter could go on after a day or so in London to select a Boarding House at Tunbridge Wells.
Christina Alberta spent her early days as an orphan struggling against an unreasonable cheerfulness and a profound sense of release. She found her father ready to accept almost any explanation of her need to run up to London for a day and even disposed to be tolerant when she came home late. She had quite a little world of miscellaneous acquaintances in London; fellow-students and their friends, fellow-students from the London School of Economics and fellow-students at Tomlinson’s School and art students they knew and medical students they knew and girls from the provinces who had chucked their families and got typing jobs, and so on to models and chorus girls and vaguely employed rather older young men of the intellectual class. She met them in and about the class-rooms and in A.B.C.’s and suchlike places and in the New Hope Club, where there were even Labour politicians and men who claimed to be Bolsheviks, and she went to parties and duologues in studios in high, remote, extraordinary flats. It was tremendous fun, although a lot of it had to be snatched from the insistent claims and inquiries of Woodford Wells. And people liked her, they liked Christina Alberta, laughed at her jokes they did and admired her thundering cheek and never said anything about her nose. It was much more her natural world than the Taverners’ School people had ever been. Nobody seemed to mind that she came out of a laundry; for all they seemed to care about that sort of thing, she might have come out of a gaol. In between the excitements of student life she even did some reading.
In her first grief for her mother she tried not to feel a sense of new unstinted freedom in regard to all these adventures and experiences. Her Daddy in his grief, bless him! was smoking much more than he had ever done before; he was even trying cigars; he had no nose for tobacco reek in his daughter—or for anything of that sort. He asked few questions and they were easily answered. Long years of exercise had made him almost constitutionally acquiescent. Christina Alberta realized that within very wide limits indeed now she might do anything she pleased whenever she liked. She realized also that there was no particular hurry to do anything at all. All the others seemed to be running about in pairs like knives and forks. It suited her humour to stay detached.
And the world had altered. This break-up of the old home, the death of her mother, the disappearance of every control, except her credulous, inattentive Daddy, had jerked her forward from childhood to maturity. Hitherto home had seemed an eternal, indestructible thing, from which you started out for adventures, to which, whatever happened, you returned like a sea-rover to rest and where you went to bed and slept as you had been wont to sleep, secure, unthreatened. Now here the two of them, Daddy and herself, were in the open; no bolting place at all for them; anything might happen to them and might insist upon going on happening. She could now do just anything she pleased, it was true, but also she realized that now she had to take the unlimited consequences.
So that in spite of her sense of novel, unbounded freedoms, Christina Alberta found she did not go up to London any more than she would have done during her mother’s lifetime. Many of her most attractive friends, it is true, were away upon their holidays. And she found her father’s company unusually interesting. Every time she came back to him he seemed to be slightly enlarged and of a firmer colour and consistency. He reminded her of Practical Biology (Botanical Section) in the Taverners’ School, when you take a dried-up bean out of its package and put it in a jar with water and observe it under the influence of warmth and moisture. It germinates. And he was germinating.
Mother had kept him dried up for nearly twenty years, but now he was germinating and nobody could tell what sort of thing he might become.