Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  XXV

  Violet

  For days and nights to come, the question of the money that Barbara had paid for her clothes weighed upon Alex.

  She had no idea how she was to repay her.

  The money that had been given her in Rome for her journey to England had only lasted her to Charing Cross, and even her cab fare to Hampstead had been supplemented by Barbara. Alex remembered it with fresh dismay. Even when she had left Downshire Hill and was in Clevedon Square again, the thought lashed her with a secret terror, until one day she said to Cedric:

  “What ought I to do, Cedric, to get my fifty pounds a year? Who do I get it from?”

  “Don’t Pumphrey and Scott send it half yearly? I thought that was the arrangement. You gave them your change of address, I suppose.”

  “Oh, no,” said Alex gently. “I’ve never written to them, except once, just after father died, to ask them to make the cheques payable to to the Superior.”

  “What on earth made you do that?”

  “They thought it was best. You see, I had no banking account, so the money was paid into the Community’s account.”

  “I see,” Cedric remarked drily. “Well, the sooner you write and revoke that arrangement, the better. When did they last send you a cheque? In June?”

  “I don’t know,” Alex was forced to say, feeling all the time that Cedric must be thinking her a helpless, unpractical fool.

  “Write and find out. And meanwhile — I say, Alex, have you enough to go on with?”

  “I — I haven’t any money, Cedric. In Rome they gave me enough for my travelling expenses, but nothing is left of that.”

  “But what have you done all this time? I suppose you’ve wanted clothes and things.”

  “I got some with Barbara, but they aren’t paid for. And there are some other things I need — you see, I haven’t got anything at all — not even stamps,” said Alex forlornly. “Violet said something about taking me to some shops with her, but I suppose all her places are very expensive.”

  “They are — dashed expensive,” Cedric admitted, with a short laugh. “But look here, Alex, will you let me advance you what you want? It couldn’t be helped, of course — but the whole arrangement comes rather hard on you, as things are now. You see, poor Barbara is really as badly off as she can be. Ralph was a most awful ass, between ourselves, and muddled away the little he had, and she gets pretty nearly nothing, except a widow’s pension, which was very small, and the money father left. If you’ll believe me, Ralph didn’t even insure his life, before going to South Africa. Of course, he didn’t go to fight, but on the staff of one of the big papers, and it was supposed to be a very good thing, and then what did he do but go and get dysentery before he’d been there a fortnight!”

  Cedric’s voice held all the pitying scorn of the successful.

  “Poor Barbara,” said Alex.

  “That’s just what she is. Of course, I think myself that Pamela will make your share over to you again when she marries. She’s not likely to make a rotten bad match like Barbara — far from it. But until then she can’t do anything, you know — at least, not until she’s of age, if then.”

  Cedric stopped, and his right hand tapped with his spectacles on his left hand, in the little, characteristic trick that was so like Sir Francis.

  Alex had already heard him make much the same observations, but she realized that Cedric had retained all his old knack of reiteration.

  “I see,” she said.

  “Well, my dear, the long and the short of it is, that you must let me be your banker for the time being. And — and, Alex,” said Cedric, with a most unwonted touch of embarrassment breaking into his kind, assured manner, “you needn’t mind taking it. There’s — there’s plenty of money here — there is really — now-a-days.”

  Alex realized afterwards that it would hardly have occurred to her to mind taking the twenty pounds which Cedric offered her with such patent diffidence. She had never known the want of money, either in her Clevedon Square days or during her ten years of convent life. She did not realize its value in the eyes of other people.

  The isolation of her point of view on this and other kindred subjects gradually became evident to her. Her scale of relative values had remained that which had been set before her in the early days of her novitiate. That held by her present surroundings differed from it in almost every particular, and more especially in degree of concentration. All Violet’s warm, healthy affection for Rosemary did not prevent her intense preoccupation with her own clothes and her own jewels, or her innocently-assured conviction that no one was ever in London during the month of August, and that to be so would constitute a calamity.

  All Cedric’s pride in’ his wife and love for her, in no way lessened his manifest satisfaction at his own success in life and at the renovated fortunes of the house of Clare.

  Both he and Violet found their recreation in playing bridge, Cedric at his club and Violet in her own house, or at the houses of what seemed to Alex an infinite succession of elaborately-gowned friends, with all of whom she seemed to be on exactly the same terms of an unintimate affection.

  Violet at night, when she dismissed her maid and begged Alex to stay and talk to her until Cedric came upstairs, which he never did until past twelve o’clock, was adorable.

  She listened to Alex’ incoherent, nervous outpourings, which Alex herself knew to be vain and futile from the very longing which possessed her to make herself clear, and said no word of condemnation or of questioning.

  At first the gentle pressure of Violet’s soft hand on her hair, and her low, sympathetic, murmuring voice, soothed Alex to a sort of worn-out, tearful gratitude in which she would nightly cry herself to sleep.

  It was only as she grew slowly physically stronger that the craving for self-expression, which had tormented her all her life, woke again. Did Violet understand?

  She would reiterate her explanations and dissections of her own past misery, with a growing consciousness of morbidity and a positive terror lest Violet should at last repulse, however gently, the endless demand for an understanding that Alex herself perpetually declared to be impossible.

  It now seemed to her that nothing mattered so long as Violet understood, and by that understanding restored to Alex in some degree her utterly shattered self-respect and self-confidence. This dependence grew the more intense, as she became more aware how unstable was her foothold in the world of normal life.

  With the consciousness of an enormous and grotesque mistake behind her, mingled all the convent tradition of sin and disgrace attached to broken vows and the return to an abjured world. One night she said to Violet:

  “I didn’t do anything wrong in entering the convent. It was a mistake, and I’m bearing the consequence of the mistake. But it seems to me that people find it much easier to overlook a sin than a mistake.”

  “Well, I’d rather ask a divorcée to lunch than a woman who ate peas off her knife,” Violet admitted candidly.

  “That’s what I mean. There’s really no place for people who’ve made bad mistakes — anywhere.”

  “If you mean yourself, Alex, dear, you know there’s always a place for you here. Just as long as you’re happy with us. Only I’m sometimes afraid that it’s not quite the sort of life — after all you’ve been through, you poor dear. I know people do come in and out a good deal — and it will be worse than ever when Pam is at home.”

  “Violet, you’re very good to me. You’re the only person who has seemed at all to understand.”

  “My dear, I do understand. Really, I think I do. It’s just as you say — you made a mistake when you were very young — much too young to be allowed to take such a step, in my opinion — and you’re suffering the most bitter consequences. But no one in their senses could blame you, either for going into that wretched place, or — still less — for coming out of it.”

  “One is always blamed by some one, I think, for every mistake. People would rather forgive on
e for murder, than for making a fool of oneself.”

  “Forgiveness,” said Violet thoughtfully. “It’s rather an overrated virtue, in my opinion. I don’t think it ought to be very hard to forgive any one one loved, anything.”

  “Would you forgive anything, Violet?”

  “I think so,” said Violet, looking rather surprised. “Unless I were deliberately deceived by some one whom I trusted. That’s different. Of course, one might perhaps forgive even then in a way — but it wouldn’t be the same thing again, ever.”

  “No,” said Alex. “No, of course not. Every one feels the same about deceit.”

  In the depths of her own consciousness, Alex was groping dimly after some other standard — some elusive certainty, that continually evaded her. Were not those things which were hardest to forgive, the most in need of forgiveness?

  Alex, with the self-distrust engrained in the unstable, wondered if that question were not born of the fundamental weakness in her own character, which had led her all her life to evade or pervert the truth in a passionate fear lest it should alienate from her the love and confidence that she craved for from others.

  Sometimes she thought, “Violet will find me out, and then she will stop being fond of me.”

  And, knowing that her claim on Violet’s compassion was the strongest link that she could forge between them, she would dilate upon the mental and physical misery of the last two years, telling herself all the time that she was trading on her sister’s pity.

  Her days in Clevedon Square were singularly empty, after Violet had tried the experiment of taking Alex about with her to the houses of one or two old friends, and Alex had come back trembling and nearly crying, and begging never to go again.

  Her nerves were still utterly undependable, and her health had suffered no less than her appearance. Violet would have taken her to see a doctor, but Alex dreaded the questions that he would, of necessity, put to her, and Cedric, who distrusted inherently the practice of any science of which he himself knew nothing, declared that rest and good food would be her best physicians.

  Sometimes she went to see Barbara at Hampstead, but seldom willingly. One of her visits there was the occasion for a stupid, childish lie, of which the remembrance made her miserable.

  Alex, amongst other unpractical disabilities, was as entirely devoid as it is possible to be of any sense of direction. She had never known how to find her way about, and would turn as blindly and instinctively in the wrong direction as a Dartmoor pony turns tail to the wind.

  For ten years she had never been outside the walls of the convent alone, and when she had lived in London as a girl, she could not remember ever having been out-of-doors by herself.

  Violet, always driven everywhere in her own motor, and accustomed to Pamela’s modern resourcefulness and independence, never took so childish an inability into serious consideration.

  “Alex, dear, Barbara hoped you’d go down to her this afternoon. Will you do that, or come to Ranelagh? The only thing is, if you wouldn’t mind going to Hampstead in a taxi? I shall have to use the Mercédès, and the little car is being cleaned.”

  “Of course, I shouldn’t mind. I’ll go to Barbara, I think.”

  “Just whichever you like best. And you’ll be back early, won’t you? because we’re dining at seven, and you know how ridiculous Cedric is about punctuality and the servants, and all that sort of thing.”

  After Violet had gone, in all her soft, elaborate laces and flower-wreathed hat, Alex, with every instinct of her convent training set against the extravagance of a taxi, started out on foot, rejoicing that a sunny July day should give her the opportunity of enjoying Pamela’s boasted delight, the top of an omnibus.

  She took the wrong one, discovered her mistake too late, and spent most of the afternoon in bewilderedly retracing her own footsteps. Finally she found a taxi, and arrived at Downshire Hill very tired, and after five o’clock.

  Barbara was shocked, as Alex had known she would be, at the taxi.

  “Violet is so inconsiderate. Because she can afford taxis as a matter of course herself, she never thinks that other people can’t. I know myself how every shilling mounts up. I’ll see you into an omnibus when you go, Alex. It takes just under an hour, and you need only change once.”

  But that change took place at the junction of four roads, all of them seething with traffic.

  And again Alex was hopelessly at sea, and boarded at last an omnibus that conveyed her swiftly in the wrong direction.

  She was late for dinner, and when Cedric inquired, with his assumption of the householder whose domestic routine has been flung out of gear, what had delayed her, she stammered and said that Barbara had kept her — she hadn’t let her start early enough — had mistaken the time.

  It was just such a lie as a child might have told in the fear of ridicule or blame, and she told it badly as a child might have told it, stammering, with a frightened widening of her eyes, so that even easy-going Violet looked momentarily puzzled.

  Alex despised and hated herself.

  She knew vaguely that her sense of proportion was disorganized. She was a woman of thirty-one, and her faults, her judgments and appreciations, even her mistakes, were those of an ill-regulated, unbalanced child of morbid tendencies.

  When Pamela came back to Clevedon Square, Alex was first of all afraid of her, and then became jealous of her.

  She was jealous of Pam’s self-confidence, of her enormous security in her own popularity and success, jealous even of the innumerable common interests and the mutual love of enjoyment that bound her and Violet together.

  She was miserably ashamed of her feelings, and sought to conceal them, none the less as she became aware of a certain shrewdness of judgment underlying all Pamela’s breezy vitality and joie de vivre. She and her sister had nothing in common.

  To Pamela, Alex evidently appeared far removed from herself as a being of another generation, less of a contemporary than pretty, sought-after Violet, or than little Rosemary in her joyous, healthy play. Pamela could accompany Violet everywhere, always radiantly enjoying herself, and receiving endless congratulations, thinly disguised as raillery, on her universal popularity and the charm that she seemed to radiate at will. She could play whole-heartedly with Rosemary, thoroughly enjoying a romp for its own sake, and making even Cedric laugh at her complete abandon.

  “Don’t you like children?” Pamela asked Alex, looking up from the nursery floor where she was playing with her niece.

  “Yes, I like them,” said Alex sombrely.

  She had been reflecting bitterly that she would have known how to play with a baby of her own. But with Pamela and the nurse in the room, she was afraid of picking up Rosemary and making a fuss with her as Pam was doing, afraid with the terrible insecurity of the self-conscious.

  And she never would have babies of her own now. The thought had tormented her often of late, watching Violet with her child, and Pamela with her own radiantly-secure future that would hold home and happiness as her rights.

  But Alex concealed her thoughts, even, as far as possible, from herself.

  The married woman who is denied children may lament her deprivation and receive compassion, but the spinster whose lot forbids her the hope, must either conceal her regrets or know herself to be accounted morbid and indelicate.

  “I like babies while they’re small,” Pam remarked. “Don’t I, you little horror of a niece? Other people’s, you know. I don’t know that I should want any of my own — they’re all very well when they’re tiny, but I can’t bear them at the tell-me-a-story stage. I make it a rule never to tell the children stories at the houses where I stay. I always say, the very first evening, that I don’t know any. Then they know what to expect. Some girls let themselves be regularly victimized, if they want to please the children’s mother, and get asked again. I must say I do hate that sort of thing myself, and I don’t believe it really does any good. Men are generally frightfully bored by the sort of girl who’
s ‘perfectly wonderful with children.’ They’d much rather have one who can play tennis, or who’s good at bridge.”

  Pamela laughed comfortably at her own cynicism. “I must say I do think it pays one to be honest in the long run. I always say exactly what I feel myself, and don’t care what any one thinks of me.”

  Alex felt a dull anger at her sister’s self-complacent statement of what she knew to be the truth. Pamela could afford to be frank, and her boast seemed to Alex to cast an oblique reflection on herself. She gazed at her without speaking, wretchedly conscious of her own unreason.

  “Look at Aunt Alex, Baby!” mischievously exclaimed Pam in a loud whisper. “We’re rather afraid of her when she pulls a long face like that, aren’t we? Have we been naughty, do you think?”

  Alex tried to laugh, contorting her lips stiffly. Pamela jumped up from the floor.

  “Really and truly, you know, Alex,” she gravely told her sister, “you ought to try and make things less au grand sérieux. I think you’d be much happier, if you’d only cultivate a sense of humour — we all think so.”

  Then she ran out of the room.

  Alex sat still.

  So they all thought that she ought to cultivate a sense of humour. She felt herself to be ridiculous in their eyes, with her eternal air of tragedy, her sombre despair in the midst of their gay, good-humoured conventions, that admitted of everything except of weighty, unseasonable gloom.

  Pamela’s spontaneous and unwearied high spirits seemed to her to throw her own dejection into greater relief; her own utter social incompetence.

  She began to long for the end of July, when the household in Clevedon Square would be dispersed for the remainder of the summer.

  Pamela talked incessantly of a yachting invitation which she had received for August, and spoke of the difficulty of “sandwiching in” country-house visits for autumn shooting-parties, and Alex knew that Violet’s people were taking a house in Scotland, and wanted her and Cedric and the baby to make it their headquarters. She wondered, with a sense of impending crisis, what would happen to her.