Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  The Kendals had each of them selected a member of the Royal Family for analysis, and the adjective that they had chosen bore testimony rather to a nice sense of loyalty than either to their powers of discernment, or to any appreciation of the meaning of words.

  Then came the catastrophe that Mary and I, at least, had grimly foreseen from the start.

  Sallie, of course, was responsible. She really has very little sense of decency.

  “Imaginative, Temperamental, Unbalanced, Egotistical, Restless.”

  There was a short, deathly silence.

  “Did you mean it for Cousin Claire, Sallie?” said Martyn at last.

  One felt it was something, that he should even have put it in the form of a question.

  “Yes, but there’s something missing,” Sallie said, bright and interested and detached. She and her contemporaries dissect themselves freely, I believe, and they are always bright and interested and detached. “There were dozens of other things that I wanted to put down, all just as descriptive.”

  “My worst enemy could not call me egotistical,” said Claire in a trembling voice. “And it’s neither true nor respectful, Sallie, to say such a thing. A game is a game, but you show me that I’m foolish to allow myself to take part in this sort of amusement with you, as though I were of your own age. You take advantage of it.”

  “My mistake, cousin Claire,” said Sallie, not at all sorry, but evidently rather amused. “I just put what I really thought. It didn’t occur to me that you’d mind.”

  “Of course I don’t ‘mind,’ my child.” Claire’s voice had become a rapid staccato. “It makes me smile, that’s all. What do you mean by calling me ‘unbalanced’? I suppose there isn’t a woman of my age anywhere to whom that word is less applicable.”

  “Hadn’t we better play at something else?” said Dolly Kendal. “I knew before we began that if anyone put in real people, it wouldn’t be a success. That sort of thing always ends in somebody being offended.”

  “There’s no question of being offended—” said Claire, more offended than ever.

  “Mumma always made the rule, when we were children and used to play games like Consequences: Present company always excepted.”

  “I should call that dull. But perhaps it was safer,” Sallie conceded. “Shall we try the other game? Choose a person, and then each do his or her portrait, and compare them afterwards.”

  The Kendals looked as though they did not think this likely to be a very great improvement upon Sallie’s last inspiration.

  “Do me,” said Sallie shamelessly.

  “I think—” Mary’s gentle voice was unusually determined. “I think we will adopt Mrs. Kendal’s rule this time.”

  “Then let’s do that Mrs. Harter who goes to tea with Nancy Fazackerly. We all know her, don’t we?”

  “Only very slightly.”

  “All the more interesting.”

  “She really has personality,” said Claire, who had been silent, with compressed lips and a look of pain in her big dark eyes. I think she felt that no one was looking at her, and so gave it up.

  “But you’ve never seen Mrs. Harter, have you?” Mary asked me.

  “No, but carry on. Who is Mrs. Harter?”

  “Old Ellison’s daughter. You remember Ellison, the plumber?”

  “Quite well. Is this the girl with the odd Christian name?”

  “Diamond — yes. She married young, and went out to the East about five years ago. I don’t think she’s been to Cross Loman since. Now she’s here for a year, I believe, having left the husband in Egypt. The children have met her with Mrs. Fazackerly, and Martyn introduced her to me.”

  “In the old days, of course, you’d have seen her behind a typewriter in her father’s office?”

  “Exactly.”

  Mary smiled. The changes that the war has brought about in social intercourse do not perturb her in the least.

  She can afford to accept them.

  “Mother,” said Sallie, “have you finished Mrs. Harter?”

  “One minute.”

  The portraits, when they were read aloud, struck me as forming rather an interesting comment upon the person who had inspired them. Of the writers, only the two Kendals were negligible as observers of human nature.

  “Bad-tempered, Determined, Intelligent, Pushing, Handsome.”

  That was Martyn’s version.

  “Handsome?” ejaculated Sallie. Her own paper began with the word “Repellant,” and went on with “Determined, Ambitious, Straightforward, Common.”

  “I’ve got her down as ‘Common,’ too,” said Claire. “Common, Self-willed, Good-looking, Obstinate, and Hard.”

  “What a pleasing aggregate!” said I. “Mary, what do you make of Mrs. Harter?”

  “Sincere, Unhappy, Reserved, Ill-tempered, Undisciplined.”

  “It’s queer,” said Martyn. “We’ve all been impressed by that woman more or less. And yet we’ve all noticed different things about her.”

  “Two people said she was common,” Sallie pointed out.

  “I don’t agree.”

  “Well,” said Dolly Kendal, “it’s not a very nice thing to say about anyone, is it?”

  This comment did not materially add to the value of the discussion and met with no rejoinder.

  “Mrs. Harter is common,” said Claire, with that air of finality with which she invests an assertion of her own opinion, particularly when it is contrary to that held by other people. “But she has personality. That’s why we’re all discussing her, I suppose — old Ellison’s daughter!”

  “She doesn’t look like old Ellison’s daughter,” Martyn observed, replying, perhaps, rather to the spirit than to the letter of Claire’s assertion. “It was a stroke of genius on his part to have christened his daughter Diamond.”

  Sallie looked intelligently inquiring.

  “Don’t you see how it suits her? The mixture of hardness and of depth, and the slight tinge of vulgarity that one can’t help associating with that sort of name — and, of course, the unusualness. By the way, didn’t anyone put her down as unusual?” Claire shook her head.

  “She may be good-looking, but she’s as hard as nails, I should say — and she’s common.”

  I began to feel that I should be interested to meet Mrs. Harter.

  Ellison, the plumber in Cross Loman, was a decent old fellow — he died a few months ago — a very ordinary type, of the tradesmen class. His wife had been dead many years and I knew nothing about her. I could not remember anything about the daughter except that I had always heard her spoken of by her full name — Diamond Ellison — and that the singularity of it had remained somewhere in the background of my memory.

  “I should like to see her,” I said.

  “You can see her if you go to the concert at the Drill Hall on the 14th,” Aileen Kendal told me. “She is singing.”

  “She’s musical, is she?”

  “I suppose so. Lady Annabel arranged it all.”

  “Why is Lady Annabel having a concert at all?”

  “Something to do with the Women’s Institute,” said Dolly. “You know she is always doing things for them, and she has quite worried Mumma about belonging, or letting us belong.”

  Mrs. Kendal still “lets” or does not “let” her daughters, in the minor as well as in the major affairs of life, although Blanche, the eldest, must be thirty-seven.

  “Mumma always says ‘Be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside’” Aileen solemnly quoted. “She says that women’s institutes are a new movement, and she wants to know rather more about them, before she gives them her support.”

  The Kendals are not naturally sententious, but when they quote either Puppa or Mumma, they become so to an unbearable degree.

  Claire, who is patient neither of sententiousness nor of quotations from other people, changed the subject.

  “I’ve taken tickets, Miles, of course. Shall you want to come? It will only be the
usual kind of Cross Loman concert.”

  “Everybody is going, as usual. Mrs. Fazackerly is taking her paying guest.”

  “Has she got one?”

  “Hadn’t you heard?” cried everybody, except my wife and Mary Ambrey.

  “He is a man called Captain Patch — quite young — and he is coming next week. Mrs. Fazackerly told us all about it after church on Sunday.”

  “She is coming up here to-morrow, so we shall hear about it,” said Claire.

  “I shall go to the concert,” I said decidedly, “if it’s only for the sake of seeing Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.”

  It occurs to me now, as I write, that perhaps that was the first time we heard their names thus coupled together — Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.

  II

  MRS. FAZACKERLY, who came up to see me the next day, lives with a very tiresome old father at Loman Cottage, just on the outskirts of Cross Loman.

  No one, in speaking of her behind her back, to anybody unaware of her history, is ever strong-minded enough to refrain from adding: “Her husband threw plates at her head.” The first time that this was said to Bill Patch, I remember, he inquired with interest if the late Mr. Fazackerly had been a juggler. It was explained to him then that the late Mr. Fazackerly had only been of a violent temper.

  No one, however, has ever heard Mrs. Fazackerly allude to the conjugal missiles that tradition has associated with her dinner-table. She is, indeed, wholly silent about her short married life. She was twenty-seven years old, or thereabouts, when she married and went to live in London, and it was five years later when she came home, widowed and childless, to Cross Loman again.

  About everything else Mrs. Fazackerly talks freely. We all know that she and her father are entirely dependent upon his tiny pension, and it is common talk in Cross Loman that Mrs. Fazackerly will sell anything in the world if she can get cash payment for it. Her astuteness over a bargain is only to be equalled by the astonishing unscrupulousness with which she recommends her own wares to possible or impossible purchasers.

  Many people disapprove of her, but everyone is fond of her, perhaps because it is a sort of constitutional inability in her to say anything except the thing which her fatally reliable intuition tells her will be most acceptable to her hearer.

  When she came up to tell Claire about her paying guest, she pretended that it was because she wanted to consult Claire upon the business side of the question. Claire, being naturally unpractical, and with far less business experience than Mrs. Fazackerly, was of course susceptible to the compliment.

  “I hope I have come to a satisfactory arrangement with him,” Mrs. Fazackerly said. “I think so. Of course, I couldn’t bargain with him, and I’m afraid, being entirely new to this sort of thing, that I shan’t be up to any of the tricks of the trade and may find myself making very little, if anything at all, out of it. He is to have the little spare room, of course — it’s delightfully warm, now that we’ve got the radiators, though I don’t suppose anyone would want a radiator on in the summer, but still, there it is, and so I thought I’d simply make an inclusive charge for heating and lighting.”

  “Lighting?”

  “We only have the humblest little oil-lamps all over the house, as you know, but I thought I’d move the blue china standard lamp into the spare room, and then it will always be there, although with Daylight Saving, he will hardly use it, I imagine.”

  “I see.” Something in Claire’s tone indicated that she was wondering upon exactly what grounds Mrs. Fazackerly had contrived to base her claims to payment for a radiator and a lamp that would be required to perform no other functions than that of a diurnal acte de presence.

  “I believe it’s professional etiquette to have a few items that are called ‘extras,’” pursued the prospective hostess. “So I explained that the use of the bathroom — unlimited use — would be an extra, and then little things like boot-blacking, or soap, I believe one ought to make a charge for. Laundry, of course, I wouldn’t undertake at all, with my tiny establishment, but it can go into Cross Loman with ours, and I can take all the trouble off his hands and separate the items, and go through his things when they come back. A very small additional sum would cover all that, as I told him.”

  “You seem to have thought of everything — —”

  “Well, one must, when one has no one to think for one,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, with her pretty, apologetic smile. “And I’m not very practical, and have had no previous experience, so that I do want to be on the safe side.”

  “I’ve very often wondered if I shouldn’t have done well as a business woman, personally. I am really, in some ways, extraordinarily practical,” mused Claire, following her usual methods.

  “Yes, I’m sure you are,” Mrs. Fazackerly’s voice denoted admiration and agreement. “I’ve always felt that about you. I shall come to you for advice, if I may, once I’ve fairly started.”

  Mrs. Fazackerly seldom goes to anyone for advice, but she has an unequalled capacity for making her friends and acquaintances feel as though she had done so.

  “About meals, of course, he’ll have them with us — except when he’s out, as I told him. I hope he’ll make simply heaps of friends here, and be out as much as ever he pleases. There won’t be any nonsense about people having to ask our leave before they invite him to lunch or tea or dine out. We shall,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, I feel sure with truth, “be only too delighted. And when he is in, I shall try and have everything as nice as possible for him. Of course, we live very simply indeed, but I told him that. I felt it was much better to be perfectly candid. And of course I know nothing about wine, so I thought I’d simply make that an extra, and have up what we’ve got in the cellar. It’s doing nothing there, but I’m sure Father would take some if it were actually on the table, and I expect it would do him good.”

  “How is your father?”

  “He’s wonderful,” said Mrs. Fazackerly with determined enthusiasm.

  Her parent is nearer eighty than seventy, and is quite famous locally for the strength and the irrationality of his violent prejudices, but Mrs. Fazackerly gaily makes the best of him.

  It is her way to prepare strangers for an introduction to him by declaring brightly: “Dear Father is rather a personality, you know.”

  “Is he quite ready to fall in with your scheme — as to the paying guest, I mean?” Claire inquired delicately.

  “Oh, quite, I think,” Mrs. Fazackerly replied, in a slightly uncertain tone that conveyed to anyone conversant with her methods that she was adding yet another item to the long list of her deviations from perfect straightforwardness.

  “Of course, Father is not a young person, exactly, and one didn’t put the whole thing before him quite as one might have done, say, a few years earlier. But he took it all very well indeed, and Captain Patch is so nice, and such a thorough gentleman, that I’m sure we shall have no friction at all. And really, it’s impossible not to think what a relief it will be to have anything — however little — coming in regularly once a week towards the household books.”

  “It ought to be a great help.”

  “After all, it needn’t really cost more to feed four people than to feed three. A joint is a joint, and we always have one a week — and sometimes two. The amount of meat that even one maid can get through is inconceivable, simply. I don’t grudge it to her for a moment of course,” said Mrs. Fazackerly wistfully.

  She looked thoughtful for a few minutes, and then said sweetly —

  “That does remind me of one thing that I rather wondered about. What about second helpings?”

  “Second helpings?”

  “I know that in boarding houses and places like that, it’s an understood thing that there are no second helpings. Especially meat. But in the case of a paying guest, it seems to me that one really couldn’t think of anything like that,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, evidently thinking of it very earnestly indeed.

  Claire, who is lavish alike from temperament a
nd from a life-long environment of plenty, was eloquent in her protestations, and Mrs. Fazackerly thanked her very gratefully indeed, and said what a help it was to have someone to consult who always knew things.

  Although theoretically Claire, in common with the whole neighbourhood, perceives and regrets certain by no means obscure failings in the character of Mrs. Fazackerly, she finds it impossible not to like her very much indeed when they are together.

  “Let me know how it turns out, my dear. When does Captain Patch arrive?”

  “On the first of June.”

  “We’ll arrange some tennis for next month I hope.”

  “He ought to get quite a lot of invitations,” thoughtfully remarked Captain Patch’s prospective hostess. “I do want it to be pleasant and amusing for him, and he’s so nice I’m sure everybody will like him, and want to ask him to tea and tennis. Or lunch. I want him to feel perfectly free to accept all invitations, and I shall make that quite clear from the start.”

  One is always somehow exhilarated by a visit from Mrs. Fazackerly. Claire was able to retail an amusing and exaggerated account of the conversation to Mary, a few days later. She is an excellent raconteuse, and always makes a success of her stories, except in the case of the literal-minded Kendals. To them, a raconteuse is simply a person who does not speak the truth.

  The Kendals were candidly self-congratulatory at the prospect of having a strange man in the neighbourhood of Cross Loman during the coming summer.

  “It isn’t as if we ever saw a man down here,” they said, “especially since the war. There’s only Martyn Ambrey, who’s hardly grown-up, even.”

  “If only Alfred had friends!” groaned Dolly. “I’m sure Mumma has told him often enough to bring any of his friends down, whenever he likes, but he never does.”

  “Poor old thing, struggling along in an office all the time. I don’t believe he has any friends,” said Amy pessimistically.

  The Kendals are not given to illusions. They know well that Alfred is stolidly unattractive, unenterprising, and quite unlikely to provide himself, or his sisters, with interesting friends. And yet, in their matter-of-fact way, Blanche and Amy and Dolly and Aileen all vehemently desire that “something should happen” at Dheera Dhoon, and the only happenings to which they had ever been taught to look are matrimonial ones of the most orthodox kind.