Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  At last Cedric said to her:

  “Have you any particular plans for August, Alex? I want to get Violet up north as soon as possible, she’s done so much rushing about lately. I wish you could come with us, my dear, but we’re going to the Temples’ — that’s the worst of not having a place of one’s own in the country—”

  “Oh,” said Alex faintly, “don’t bother about me, Cedric. I shall find somewhere.”

  He looked dissatisfied, but said only:

  “Well, you’ll talk it over with Violet. I know she’s been vexed at seeing so little of you lately, but Pamela’s an exacting young woman, and chaperoning her is no joke. I wish she’d hurry up and get settled — all this rushing about is too much for Violet.”

  “I thought she liked it.”

  “So she does. Anyhow,” said Cedric, with an odd, shy laugh, “she’d like anything that pleased somebody else. She’s made like that. I’ve never known her anything but happy — like sunshine.” Then he flung a half-smoked cigarette into the fireplace, looked awkward at his own unusual expression of feeling, and abruptly asked Alex if she’d seen the newspaper.

  Alex crept away, wondering why happiness should be accounted a virtue. She loved Violet with a jealous, exclusive affection and admiration, but she thought enviously that she, too, could have been like sunshine if she had received all that Violet received. She, too, would have liked to be always happy.

  She had her talk with Violet.

  There was the slightest shade of wistfulness in Violet’s gentleness.

  “I wish we’d made you happier, but I really believe quiet is what you want most, and things aren’t ever very quiet here — especially with Pam. I simply love having her, but I’m not sure she is the best person for you, just now.”

  “I don’t feel I know her very well. I mean, I’m not at all at home with her. She makes me realize what a stranger I am to the younger ones, after all these years.”

  “Poor Alex!”

  “You’re much more like my sister than she is, and yet a year ago I didn’t know you.”

  “Alex, dear, I’m so glad if I’m a comfort to you — but I wish you wouldn’t speak in that bitter way about poor little Pamela. It seems so unnatural.”

  Violet’s whole healthy instinct was always, Alex had already discovered, to tend towards the normal — the outlook of well-balanced sanity. She was instinctively distressed by abnormality of any kind.

  “I didn’t really mean it,” said Alex hurriedly, with the old fatal instinct of propitiation, and read dissent into the silence that received her announcement.

  It was the subconscious hope of rectifying herself in Violet’s eyes that made her add a moment later:

  “Couldn’t Barbara have me for a little while when you go up to Scotland? I think she would be quite glad.”

  “Of course she would. She’s often lonely, isn’t she? And you think you’d be happy with her?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Alex eagerly, bent on showing Violet that she had no unnatural aversion from being with her own sister.

  But Violet still looked rather troubled.

  “You remember that you found it rather difficult there, when you first got back. You said then that Barbara and you had never understood one another even as children.”

  “Oh, but that will all be different now,” said Alex, confused, and knowing that her manner was giving an impression of shiftiness from her very consciousness that she was contradicting herself.

  As Pamela’s claims and her own ceaseless fear of inadequacy made her increasingly unsure of Violet, Alex became less and less at ease with her.

  The old familiar fear of being disbelieved gave uncertainty to every word she uttered and she could not afford to laugh at Pam’s merciless amusement in pointing out the number of times that she contradicted herself. Violet always hushed Pamela, but she looked puzzled and rather distressed, and her manner towards Alex was more compassionate than ever.

  Alex, with the impetuous unwisdom of the weak, one day forced an issue.

  “Violet, do you trust me?”

  “My dear child, what do you mean? Why shouldn’t I trust you? Are you thinking of stealing my pearls?”

  But Alex could not smile.

  “Do you believe everything that I say?”

  Violet looked at her and asked very gently:

  “What makes you ask, Alex? You’re not unhappy about the nonsense that child Pamela sometimes talks, are you?”

  “No, not exactly. It’s — it’s just everything....” Alex looked miserable, tongue-tied.

  “Oh, Alex, do try and take things more lightly. You make yourself so unhappy, poor child, with all this self-torment. Can’t you take things as they come, more?”

  The counsel found unavailing echo in Alex’ own mind. She knew that her mental outlook was wrenched out of all gear, and she knew also, in some dim, undefined way, that a worn-out physical frame was responsible for much of her self-inflicted torment of mind. Sometimes she wondered whether the impending solution to her whole destiny, still hanging over her, would find her on the far side of the abyss which separates the normal from the insane.

  The days slipped by, and then, just before the general dispersal, Pamela suddenly announced her engagement to Lord Richard Gunvale, the youngest and by far the wealthiest of her many suitors.

  “Oh, Pam, Pam!” cried Violet, laughing, “why couldn’t you wait till after we’d left town?”

  But every one was delighted, and congratulations and letters and presents and telegrams poured in.

  Pamela declared that she would not be married until the winter, and refused to break her yachting engagement. She was more popular than ever now, and every one laughed at her delightful originality and gazed at the magnificence of the emerald and diamond ring on her left hand.

  And Alex began to hope faintly that perhaps when Pamela was married, things might be different at Clevedon Square.

  Then one night, just before she was to go to Hampstead, she overheard a conversation between Cedric and his wife.

  She was on the stairs in the dark, and they were in the lighted hall below, and from the first instant that Cedric spoke, Alex lost all sense of what she was doing, and listened.

  “...they’re wearing you out, Pam and Alex between them. I won’t have any more of it, I tell you.”

  “No, no, my dear old goose. Of course they’re not.” Violet’s soft laughter came up to Alex’ ears with a muffled sound, as though her head were resting against Cedric’s shoulder. “Anyhow, it isn’t Pam — I’m delighted about her, of course. Only Alex — I wish she was happier!”

  “And why isn’t she? You’re a perfect angel to her,” said Cedric resentfully.

  “I’m so sorry for her — only it’s difficult sometimes — a feeling like shifting sands. One doesn’t know what to be at with her. If only she said what she wanted or didn’t want, right out, but it’s that awful anxiety to please — poor darling.”

  “She always was like that, from our nursery days. You never could get the rights of a matter out of her — plain black or white — she’d say one thing one day and another the next, always.”

  “That’s what I find so difficult! It’s impossible to do anything for a person like that — it’s the one thing I can’t understand.”

  “Pack her off to Hampstead tomorrow,” Cedric observed gruffly. “I will not have you bothered.”

  “Oh, Cedric! I’m not bothered — how can you? She’ll be going next week, anyway, poor dear, and it may be easier for her to be herself with Barbara, who’s her own sister, after all. But I don’t know what about afterwards — when we get back.”

  “You’ll have quite enough to think about with Pam’s wedding, without Alex on your hands as well. Violet,” said Cedric, with a note in his voice that Alex had never heard there, “when I think of the way you’ve behaved to all my wretched family—”

  Alex did not hear Violet’s answer, which was very softly spoken.

  She h
ad turned and gone away upstairs in the dark.

  XXVI

  August

  Was it, after all, only for Cedric’s sake that Violet had kept her at Clevedon Square — had shown her such heavenly kindness and gentleness?

  Alex asked herself the question all night long in utter misery of spirit. She had craved all her life for an exclusive, personal affection, and had been mocked with counterfeit again and again. She knew now that it was only in despair at such cheating of fate that she had flung herself rashly to the opposite end of the scale, and sought to embrace a life that purported detachment from all earthly ties.

  “I will have all or none” had been the inward cry of her bruised spirit.

  Fate had taken her at her word, this time, and she had not been strong enough to endure, and had fled, cowering, from the consequence of her own act.

  Tortured, distraught, with self-confidence shattered to the earth, she had turned once again, with hands that trembled as they pleaded, to ask comfort of human love and companionship. Violet had not condemned her, had pitied her, and had shown her untiring sympathy and affection — for love of Cedric.

  Alex rose haggard, in the morning. She wanted to be alone. The thought of going to Barbara in Hampstead had become unendurable to her.

  It was with a curious sense of inevitability that she found a letter from Barbara asking her if she could put off her visit for the present. The admirable Ada had developed measles.

  “Good Lord, can’t they send her to a hospital?” exclaimed Cedric, with the irritability of a practical man who finds his well-ordered and practical plans thrown out of gear by some eminently unpractical intervention on the part of Providence.

  “I’m sure Barbara never would,” said Violet, laughing. “Poor dear, I hope she won’t catch it herself. It’ll mean having the house disinfected, too — what a nuisance for her. But, Alex, dear, you must come with us! I’ll send a wire today — mother will be perfectly delighted.”

  “Couldn’t I stay here?” asked Alex.

  Cedric explained that the house would be partially shut up, with only two of the servants left.

  “I shouldn’t give any trouble — I’d so much rather,” Alex urged, unusually persistent.

  “My dear, it’s out of the question. Not a soul in London — you forget it’s August.”

  “But, Cedric,” said Violet, “I don’t see why she shouldn’t do as she likes. It will be only till Barbara can have her, after all — I suppose Ada will be moved as soon as she’s better, and the disinfecting can’t take so very long. If she wants to stay here?”

  “I do,” said Alex, with sudden boldness.

  “You don’t think you’ll be lonely?”

  “No, no.”

  “After all,” Violet considered, “it will be very good for Ellen and the tweeny to have somebody to wait upon. I never do like leaving them here on enormous board wages, to do nothing at all — though Cedric will think it’s the proper thing to do, because his father did it.”

  She laughed, and Cedric said, with an air of concession:

  “Well, just till Barbara can take you in, perhaps — if you think London won’t be unbearable. But mind you, Alex, the minute you get tired of it, or feel the heat too much for you, you’re to make other arrangements.”

  Alex wondered dully what other arrangements Cedric supposed that she could make. She had no money, and had never even roused herself to write the letter he had recommended, asking to have her half-yearly allowance sent to her own address and not to that of the Superior of the convent.

  But on the day before Cedric and Violet, with Violet’s maid, and Rosemary, and her nurse, and her pram, all took their departure, Cedric called Alex into the study.

  She went to him feeling oddly as though she was the little girl again, who had, on rare occasions, been sent for by Sir Francis, and had found him standing just so, his back to the fireplace, spectacles in hand, speaking in just the same measured, rather regretful tones of kindliness.

  “Alex, I’ve made out two cheques one to cover the servants’ board wages, which I thought you would be good enough to give them at the end of the month, and one for your own living expenses. You’d better cash that at once, in case you want any ready money. Have you anywhere to keep it under lock and key?”

  Cedric, no more than Sir Francis, trusted to a woman’s discretion in matters of money.

  “Yes, there’s the drawer of the writing-table in my bedroom.”

  “That will be all right, then. The servants are perfectly trustworthy, no doubt, but loose cash should never be left about in any case — if you want more, write to me. And, Alex, I’ve seen old Pumphrey — father’s man of business. He will see that you get your fifty pounds. Here is the first instalment.”

  Cedric gravely handed her a third cheque.

  “Have you a banking account?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then I’ll arrange to open one for you at my bank today. You’d better deposit this at once, hadn’t you — unless you want anything?”

  “No,” faltered Alex, not altogether understanding.

  “You will have no expenses while you’re here, of course,” said Cedric, rather embarrassed. Alex looked bewildered. It had never occurred to her to suggest paying for her own keep while she remained alone at Clevedon Square. She gave back to her brother the cheque for twenty-five pounds, and received his assurance that it would be banked in her name that afternoon.

  “They will send you a cheque-book, and you can draw out any small sum you may need later on.”

  “I don’t think I shall need any,” said Alex, looking at the other two cheques he had given her, made payable to herself, and thinking what a lot of money they represented.

  “You will have a thorough rest and change with Barbara,” Cedric said, still looking at her rather uneasily. “Then, when we meet again in October, it will be time enough—”

  He did not say what for, and Alex remembered the conversation that she had overheard on the stair. With a feeling of cunning, she was conscious of her own determination to take the initiative out of his hands, without his knowledge.

  They did not want her, and they would want her less than ever, with all the approaching business connected with Pamela’s wedding in December. Barbara did not want her, self-absorbed, and unwearingly considering how to cut down more and yet more expenses.

  Alex had made up her mind to go and live alone. She would prove to them that she could do it, though they thought fifty pounds a year was so little money. She thought vaguely that perhaps she could earn something.

  But she gave no hint of her plans to any one, knowing that Violet would be remonstrant and Cedric derisive.

  Obsessed by this new idea, she said good-bye to them with a sort of furtive eagerness, and found herself alone in the house in Clevedon Square.

  At first the quiet and the solitude were pleasant to her. She crept round the big, empty house like a spirit, feeling as though it presented a more familiar aspect with its shrouded furniture and carefully shaded windows, and the absence of most of Violet’s expensive silver and china ornaments. The library, which was always kept open for her, was one of the least changed rooms in the house, and she spent hours crouched upon the sofa there, only rousing herself to go to the solitary meals which were punctiliously laid out for her in the big dining-room.

  Presently she began to wonder if the elderly upper-housemaid, Ellen, left in charge, resented her being there. She supposed that the presence of some one who never went out, for whom meals had to be provided, who must be called in the morning and supplied with hot water four times a day, would interfere with the liberty of Ellen and the unseen tweeny who, no doubt, cooked for them. They would be glad when she went away. Never mind, she would go very soon. Alex felt that she was only waiting for something to happen which should give her the necessary impetus to carry out her vague design of finding a new, independent foothold for herself.

  A drowsy week of very ho
t weather slipped by, and then one morning Alex received three letters.

  Cedric’s, short but affectionate, told her that Violet had reached Scotland tired out, and had been ordered by the doctor to undergo something as nearly approaching a rest-cure as possible. She was to stay in bed all the morning, sit in the garden when it was fine, and do nothing. She was to write no letters, but she sent Alex her love and looked forward to hearing from her. Cedric added briefly that Alex was not to be at all anxious. Violet only needed quiet and country air, and no worries. She was looking better already.

  Alex put the letter down reflectively. Evidently Cedric did not want his wife disturbed by depressing correspondence, and she did not mean to write to Violet of her new resolution. She even thought that perhaps she would continue to let Violet believe her at Clevedon Square or with Barbara.

  Her second letter was from Barbara. It was quite a long letter, and said that Barbara had decided to leave Ada at a convalescent home and take her own much-needed summer holiday abroad. Would Alex join her in a week’s time?

  “What do you think of some little, cheap seaside hole in Brittany, which we could do for very little? I wish I could have you as my guest, dear, but you’ll understand that all the disinfecting of the house has cost money, besides forcing me to go away, which I hadn’t meant to do. However, I’m sure I need the change, and I dare say it won’t do you any harm either. We ought to do the whole thing for about fifteen pounds each, I think, which, I suppose, will be all right for you? Do ring me up tonight, and let’s exchange views. I shan’t be free of a suspicion as to these wretched measles till next week, but I don’t think really there’s much danger, as I’ve had them already and am not in the least nervous. Ring up between seven and eight tonight. I suppose Violet, as usual, has kept on the telephone, even though they’re away themselves?”

  Alex knew that she did not want to go abroad with Barbara. She nervously picked up her third letter, which bore a foreign post-mark. When she had read the sheet of thin paper which was all the envelope contained, she sat for a long while staring at it.