Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “We won’t talk about sad things like that, Lily dear,” said Eleanor brightly. “People needn’t be poor unless they want to, you know. They can always find work.”

  “Why hasn’t everyone got a house then? Why can’t that little boy live in a house like we do?” Lily demanded meditatively.

  There was a silence weighty with disapproval.

  Then Philip remarked simply and with finality:

  “Don’t ask foolish questions, my little pet.”

  Lily knew herself defeated and was guiltily conscious of having deserved rebuke by her deliberate pursual of one of the many topics that, for reasons never explained, should not be talked about.

  During the year that had elapsed since Vonnie’s death, the number of these subjects seemed to have increased enormously. Not only was Vonnie not to be talked about, but anything connected with death, funerals, and mortality generally must be avoided, and it was a general axiom that what Philip occasionally referred to as “sad, painful, distressing things” were never really fit subjects for discussion.

  Curiously enough, the nervous sufferings of Lily’s whole early childhood, culminating in the emotional crisis that she had undergone when Yvonne died, at this period deserted her. She was now merely sensitive in a petulant way, subconsciously antagonistic to all her surroundings, and obsessed by a resentful certainty that her father and mother did not understand her.

  This ungracious conviction she once haltingly attempted to explain to Eleanor, early faced with the endeavour that has defeated so many, that of avoiding the only form of words obviously designed to express what she wished to have understood, and finding instead some other formula in which it might be conveyed with equal lucidity and yet less outspokenness.

  The results were a number of self-contradictory statements from Lily, followed by tears.

  “But what is it that I don’t understand, my baby?” Eleanor urged her to return to the attack.

  “Me,” quavered Lily, suddenly explicit.

  Her mother winced very visibly indeed.

  Lily felt unutterably naughty.

  “My dearest,” said Eleanor at last, “how can a grown-up person not understand a little child? You’re talking nonsense, you know. There can be nothing in a little girl of ten years old that’s beyond the understanding of a grownup, experienced person. And to say that a mother doesn’t understand her own child, is to suggest something that can’t possibly be. Some day you’ll know what I mean.”

  “When?” said Lily.

  Eleanor’s absolute belief in the creed that she had enunciated perforce carried a certain conviction to Lily’s bewildered and undeveloped mind.

  “When?” she repeated.

  “When you have a little child of your own,” her mother replied simply.

  There was nothing more to be said.

  Until that far-away, unbelievable time when one would be sufficiently old to have a little child of one’s own, it must be taken on trust that all grown-up people, especially one’s father and mother, understood one perfectly, although they made one feel all the time as though they did not.

  Lily’s thoughts and her feelings became speedily more and more muddled and confused.

  Her discontent, which originated in sheer perplexity, took the form of argumentative and tiresome contradiction of the rules imposed upon her.

  “She used to be such a dear, little sunny thing,” cried Eleanor piteously. “Of course, I know there’s an awkward age for all children to go through but I never thought of Lily’s beginning it so young.”

  She cried and looked pale over Lily’s naughtiness very often, and Lily was tortured by remorse and self-accusations that were without any effect upon her behaviour.

  One day her father, who was tacitly supposed to know of her naughtiness, but to find it too grievous to be mentioned openly, spoke to her.

  “You will regret it bitterly later on, my child, if you grieve your mother just now. There are reasons which you can’t understand why she should be spared in every possible way, at present.”

  Were these specific reasons, or only the usual mysterious ones held over one’s head by the authorities, and generally supposed to have obscure reference to God?

  Lily presently came to the conclusion that some definite event was impending, and that she was supposed to know nothing whatever about it. Things were said to her of which it was obvious that she was intended to make general application only, and to which, with intuitive certainty, she instantly attached a special meaning.

  “You must always be a very good little girl to your mother, and pray to God that He may take good care of her.”

  Why should Father suddenly say that, when it was an old-established certainty that Lily knew she ought to be a good little girl, and had prayed for her mother every night ever since she could remember, as a matter of course?

  Sometimes it almost seemed as though they wanted to see how far it was possible for them to go, before Lily would make any sign of having noticed that there was a mystery.

  “Nurse, I want you to bring those things that I spoke to you about into my room this morning.”

  “Yes, madam.”

  And then five minutes later:

  “My little Lily must stay in the schoolroom and do her lessons very nicely this morning, and not go running about the house too much. Trot along to Miss Cleeve, my pet.”

  As though Miss Cleeve had ever dreamed of allowing Lily to run about the house during lesson time! Such a thing was quite unheard of, and Eleanor’s casual tone did not for an instant deceive Lily into supposing that the prohibition had been a casual one.

  On another occasion, a still more careless enquiry:

  “You know you must never come into upstairs rooms without knocking at the door first, don’t you, darling?”

  A rule that Lily had known and had been made to observe, since she was three years old.

  It appeared, therefore, that there was some urgent necessity for enforcing the rule now. Lily discovered that the door of the Blue Room was locked, all of a sudden.

  She felt a strange inability to question her father or mother, but she tried to entrap Miss Cleeve into an admission, unconsciously imitating the air of carelessness with which Eleanor had tried, as Lily dimly felt, to entrap her into asking some question, to which a reply might be given that would direct curiosity into an innocuous channel leading nowhere.

  “Oh, Miss Cleeve! Did you know the door of the Blue Room had been locked?”

  Lily gave a high-pitched, nervous giggle. “Perhaps the key’s been lost!”

  Miss Cleeve threw her a very sharp glance of which Lily pretended to be quite unaware.

  “Really, dear,” she said in a very even voice. “Keys sometimes are lost, you know. But there’s nothing to take you to the Blue Room, that I know of.”

  “Nurse goes in there sometimes. I’ve seen her coming out.”

  “I daresay she likes to see that it’s kept dusted and tidy,” said Miss Cleeve, in a preternaturally calm voice. “Now run and wash your hands for lunch, dear.”

  Lily felt thoroughly baffled by Miss Cleeve, and could not decide whether or not the governess had penetrated the motive of her artless enquiries.

  Because she felt ashamed of her own attempts at solving the mystery that was in the air, she was sure that she was being naughty again.

  When she went downstairs to the dining-room, her mother and Miss Cleeve were already there, talking in furtive tones to one another. Eleanor broke off the instant that Lily appeared and looked at her in rather a startled way, but Miss Cleeve, with the same determined naturalness with which she had spoken upstairs, uttered her final remark quite loud:

  “So I thought perhaps a word to the wise, Mrs. Stellenthorpe—”

  “Quite right, Miss Cleeve, thank you. I shall take care. Anyway it won’t be very long now before—”

  They both looked at Lily, who suddenly felt so uncomfortable that, to cover her own confusion, she almost involuntarily
cried out: “Before what, Mother?”

  Her mother and Miss Cleeve exchanged glances in a way that made Lily feel unutterably small and foolish and ignorant.

  To her deep mortification, she felt her face burning with angry scarlet, although without knowing why.

  “Poor little thing!” said Eleanor, and actually laughed, causing all Lily’s inchoate disconcertment to culminate in a silent, furious resolution, that never again would she ask any of them about anything, so long as she lived.

  The impassioned, childishly formed determination was not of a nature to endure. The inexplicable resentment that had caused it, Lily never forgot.

  She could not have told what sudden intuition first made her suspect the truth, but when Eleanor, with certain circumlocutions and euphemistic phrases, told her that she might pray to God to send her a baby brother, Lily felt that she had known all the time that this was what all the mystery had been about.

  “It’s a great secret and you mustn’t talk about it to anyone,” Eleanor whispered.

  Lily had no wish to talk about it to anyone. She was by that time thoroughly convinced that the arrival of a baby was something necessitating endless concealments and misrepresentations, and therefore of a highly shameful nature.

  She was sent away to the seaside with Miss Cleeve for nearly six weeks, and when they came back again, the little brother was established in a blue and white cradle, and the Blue Room had been unlocked and transformed into a night nursery.

  Lily gathered from various things that the servants said, that her mother had been ill, and that the illness was in some manner connected with the baby’s coming. The subject puzzled her, and troubled her thoughts very often, but she felt sure that it was wrong to desire enlightenment, and she knew that if she asked questions she would receive either jocular or untrue replies, or the shocked “Hush!” of enforced reticence.

  Eleanor having a horror of pet animals, from which she feared the contraction of mysterious and unspecified diseases of the skin, Lily was safeguarded from any direct encounter with the crudities of Nature. Her imagination therefore continued to evolve theories and explanations that her common sense rejected, but that frightened and distressed her none the less, and that sent her furtively in quest of the information which she believed to be illicit, to such forbidden books of reference as the “Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

  After Kenneth was born, Lily, to her unconscious relief, ceased to be the sole object in life of her parents, her governess, and her nurse. She spent less time in the drawing-room, and after Miss Cleeve had left for the day, remained in the schoolroom and read endlessly.

  “Not too many story-books, my little darling,” Eleanor occasionally said with a hint of disapproval in her tones, but as the books in the schoolroom were all story-books, and she was not allowed to touch the ones in the drawingroom, Lily continued to indulge her taste for fiction, although with the usual underlying feeling of guilt that seemed automatically to attach itself to whatever was pleasant.

  There were curious nuances, never put into words, as that to read a new story-book was more reprehensible than to re-read an old one, and even when a recent birthday had occasioned the arrival of some delightful blue or red volume, the very giver of it might be apt to exclaim, with a sound of vexation, on seeing Lily immersed in it:

  “Another new story-book!”

  Lily grew to be so apprehensive of these expressions of disapproval that sometimes she slipped the new book, with its incriminating, shining binding, into one of the brown paper covers that concealed the wear and tear of the old books.

  This manoeuvre was one day penetrated by Miss Cleeve, who did not seek any explanation of it, but merely told Lily on general grounds that she was a most sly child, and didn’t seem to know the meaning of the word “honour.” Lily wept and felt that it was true.

  Gradually she came to consider her passion for reading as another sign of her own depravity, much confirmed in this view by the grave pronouncements of her father, who said to her from time to time:

  “Dear child, you know you don’t want to have your little nose buried in a story-book at every spare moment.” It was the question of buying sweets, all over again. Certain propensities, for reasons never specified, were evidently so undesirable that the existence of them might not even be admitted. One was told that one didn’t want to do such things, and all the time was conscious of wanting to do them very much indeed.

  Evidently, such desires must never be openly admitted.

  The atmosphere became more and more charged with concealments, as time revealed more and more of the complexities of life.

  When Kenneth was nearly a year old, he caught scarlet fever. The infection was in the village. Miss Cleeve succumbed, and Eleanor, panic-stricken, sent Lily away by herself for the first time in her life.

  It was expressly explained that she was not going to school. No. There would never be any question of that. Lily was simply going to a beautiful peaceful convent, not at all far away, where she would be very happy with the kind Sisters and play with the pupils.

  The scheme was Eleanor’s. She had an ideal, totally unbased upon experience, of a convent school, that was of an extreme and highly sentimental picturesqueness. In her mind’s eye, mild-faced nuns paced perpetually up and down a garden, and innocent children, in a more or less permanent state of preparing for their première Communion, were instructed in the arts of music and embroidery and ancienne politesse française.

  She combated Philip’s strong objections to letting Lily go within the sphere of Catholic influence.

  “It isn’t as though she were older,” Eleanor urged. “She’s only a baby, Philip. And it will be for such a little while. Please God, we can have her home again by Christmas.”

  It was really the last argument that had most weight with Philip, and the desire that his wife’s mind should be at ease about their darling.

  Neither had the slightest conception of the utter unfitness for any form of independence in which they had brought up their child.

  Philip himself took her to the convent, emphatically telling her in the presence of the Mother Superior that she must always say her prayers night and morning just as she had been taught them, and that she was not to think of herself as having been sent to school.

  The reiteration of this last axiom rather disappointed Lily. It sounded much more grown up and like other girls to be sent to school, and school, according to many story-books, was an exciting place where one distinguished oneself easily and made interesting friendships and learnt to play games.

  Lily was afraid that a convent might prove to be a very tame affair, by comparison. In effect, she never did learn to play games there, since the only one in vogue — a complicated system of running about wildly in the playground from one chalk-mark to another, called The Rescue of the Holy City from the Infidels — proved beyond her comprehension from the first to the last day of her stay.

  Nor did she make interesting friendships, because any friendships at all were entirely forbidden and rendered impossible by a quantity of rules that were enforced by perpetual surveillance. Neither did she distinguish herself, excepting by the unprecedented number of humiliating and babyish mistakes that she seemed to be perpetually making.

  Lily, for the first time in her life thrown amongst other children, heard from their unsparing lips various brutal truths about herself: She was a most frightful baby for her age.

  Anybody could see that she’d been made a regular spoilt child of at home.

  It was most awfully affected, the way she was always using grown-up words.

  It was simply silly, always to get red and cry at the least little bit of chaff.

  It was perfectly indecent to wear such a disgustingly short frock — the nuns said so.

  Lily was only too thankful to exchange her brief velveteen skirts for a blue serge uniform dress, that flapped against her ankles and of which the collar-band scratched her neck.

  But even the uni
form did not save her from committing other outrages upon propriety, hitherto unsuspected. A brand-new category of sins sprang into being, all of them classed under the heading of Immodesty — a word that Lily had never heard mentioned before.

  Legs were particularly immodest. To show them, to cross one of them over the other, to mention them by name, was all highly immodest. So was any allusion to any part of the human anatomy below the shoulder-blades.

  There was an uneasy suggestion that it might at any moment become immodest to talk about any male creature other than a priest, the convent gardener, or one’s own father. Even brothers seemed to be better left out of the conversation.

  The hideous immodesty latent in the taking of a bath could only be defeated by a cold, shroud-like garment of white calico, that fastened just above the wearer’s collarbone, was buttoned at the wrists, and fell in folds to the ground.

  A bath, accompanied by a bath-chemise, was in readiness for each pupil once a week.

  Lily jumped trustfully into her first bath at the convent, pleased at finding that she was expected to take it without supervision, which she had never done before, got out again very quickly upon the discovery that the water, on a dank November day, was nearly cold, and dried herself imperfectly in the chilly amplitude of the bath-chemise, which she supposed to be a towel of a new kind. The same afternoon a scandalized nun enquired whether Lily was in the habit of taking a bath “without wearing anything?”

  “All naked? Yes,” said Lily, nodding assent.

  Then it appeared that not only was her practice immodest, but so was her language. The nun was not at all angry, she was very kind, but the vicarious shame that she quite obviously felt on Lily’s behalf, remained unforgettable.

  The affair could only be classed with Lily’s other great outrage against decency, which was never destined to pass altogether from her memory.

  The first time that she fell ill at the convent, which she did with the rapidity of a very much over-coddled child suddenly bereft of even ordinary supervision in the affairs of the body, Lily was sent to the Infirmary. She had fainted during breakfast.