Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “For the child’s sake, at least, Robert ...” she must have repeated many times.

  (Neither she nor my mother ever understood the futility of repeating, again and again, words which had already failed of their appeal.)

  “A child whose mother can leave him, at four years old, is better without her.”

  “It was madness, Robert, but you know she’s not a wicked woman — my poor Mary. If you go and bring her back now, no one will ever know what has happened, and you can start a new life together, and try again.”

  “It would be useless.”

  “Don’t, don’t say that.” The tears must have been pouring down her old face by that time. “Oh, Robert, give her another chance. This will have been a lesson to her — won’t you forgive her and take her back?”

  Well, in the end she prevailed to a certain extent — that is to say, my father would not seek out the culprit himself, but he would allow grandmother to do so, and if she brought Mary home again properly repentant he would not refuse to receive her and give her the “chance “ of starting their married life afresh. “For the boy’s sake.” My grandmother must have repeated that phrase a hundred times at least, and it was certainly her pièce de resistance in the scene at Assisi with Mary.

  I’ve had a version of that scene from each one of them, and on the whole the accounts tally, although of course each viewed it — as they viewed everything — exclusively from the personal angle.

  My mother saw only a young, beautiful, misunderstood woman, goaded to frenzy in the grip of an uncongenial marriage, taking a desperate step in search of freedom. And then, even stronger and more touching in her relinquishment, finding the courage, for love of her child, to return to the house of bondage.

  And my grandmother, with equal inevitability, saw only a sorrow-worn woman, no longer young (but infinitely interesting), courageously undertaking a solitary journey, on a mission that should restore sanctity to a shattered home. And even as her urgent plea had shaken Robert’s defences, so her eloquence, her boundless influence and unfaltering understanding, must prevail with the slighter, more trivial personality of her daughter. The achievement of persuading Mary to return to her husband and child was, my grandmother told me, the ultimate justification of her existence, in her own eyes.

  As a matter of fact, I doubt if she, any more than the rest of us, felt her existence to be in any need of justification whatsoever — but she was addicted to phrases, and this one at least served as an indication to the magnitude of her effort.

  For Mary did not capitulate without a struggle. And it is in the details of that struggle that my reconstruction work comes in, for although each of the protagonists has quoted to me whole sentences, and even speeches, of brilliant oratory from herself and inadequate rejoinder from the other, I do not believe either of them. Accuracy, with that type, can never co-exist with emotion — and emotion, real or imaginary, is never absent.

  But this, I imagine, is more or less what took place in the sitting-room of the tinyalbergo at Assisi:

  “I’ve come to fetch you home, my child. You shall never hear one word of reproach — Robert only wants to begin again — a new life.”‘

  “Never, mother. It’s impossible. I’ve borne too much. I can’t ever go back to it. I must live my own life.” (Probably Mary had been reading The Doll’s House. People were discovering Ibsen in those days.)

  “Mary, it’s not five years since you and Robert were married, in the little country church at home, by our dear old vicar, who held you at the font when I took you, a tiny baby, to be christened.”

  It may have been at this stage that Mary began to cry. Anyway, I’m certain that my grandmother did. Any allusions, however irrelevant, to little country churches at home, and Mary as a tiny baby, were always apt to bring the tears to her eyes — and I’m sure that neither of them had thought for an instant of steadying their nerves by sitting down to a solid meal. So that tears must have been easier, even, than usual.

  “Robert doesn’t understand me — he never will.”

  “Darling, don’t you remember your early days together? The little things — little jokes, and allusions, and happinesses shared together? Does one ever forget?”

  “No.”

  Mary sobbed. “But I can’t go back to him.”

  I think that here, if my grandmother gave her a chance, she probably did make one — or part of one — of the speeches that she long afterwards quoted to me.

  She was intensely unhappy. Robert did not understand her, and she could not live in an unsympathetic atmosphere. She should go mad. All that she had ever asked of life was peace, beautiful surroundings, and the ideal companion.... If she went back to Robert now, after having found courage to make the break, it would be a repetition of the misery that had broken her heart during the past three years.

  (The hearts of my mother and grandmother both suffered innumerable breakages throughout their lives, neither of them ever seeming aware of the physiological absurdity of the expression.)

  “It’s braver to stay away than to go back and try and patch up something that can never be anything but a failure,” quavered Mary, with a momentary flash of insight.

  But of course grandmother couldn’t leave it at that. She had the justification of her own existence to think of, for one thing. I am quite sure that a fortuitous street- musician, rendering “Santa Lucia “ or “Silver Threads „ Amongst the Gold “ in the distance, would have broken down Mary’s frail barrier of honest thought, and have materially assisted my grandmother to her victory. Accessories were so absolutely essentials, to them both.

  But so far as I know, grandmother had to win on points, as it were, and received no extraneous help in the shape of sentimental appeals from without.

  She made her supreme effort.

  “For the boy’s sake, Mary , .. your little, little boy. Is he to be motherless?”

  “Wouldn’t Robert let me have him?”

  “No, my dear. How could he? I myself — the mother that bore you, Mary — I couldn’t think it right that a woman who had deliberately deserted her husband and home should have the care of a little, innocent child.”

  “Oh, my baby!”

  She sobbed and cried, but she had not yet capitulated. Grandmother, however, had gauged pretty accurately the force of the baby-motif.

  “Before I came away, on my long, lonely journey,” she said slowly, “I went up to the nursery, to say good-bye to Bobbie. He had on his blue overall — the one you embroidered for him last summer, Mary — was it only last summer? — and he was playing with his engine, on the nursery floor, his dear, round face was so solemn ...”

  “Oh, don’t — don’t”

  But grandmother, the tears streaming from her eyes, relentlessly continued: “Darling, his big blue eyes looked up at me, and his little voice asked: ‘Where’s Mummie?’ “ Did grandmother’s — even grandmother’s — conscience misgive her, at the quotation? That it was verbally correct, I have no doubt — but what of the intonation?

  My grandmother’s poignant rendering of “Where’s Mummie?” no doubt contained all the pathetic appeal of bewildered and deserted childhood throughout the ages...

  But mine — the original “Where’s Mummie? ...” I have no recollection of it, of course, but I do remember myself at four years old — a stolid, rather cynical child, utterly independent by temperament, and reacting strongly even then against a perpetually emotional atmosphere. And one knows the way in which small children utter those conventional enquiries which they unconsciously know to be expected of them ... the soft, impersonal indifference of the tone, the immediate re-absorption, without waiting for a reply, in the engrossing occupation of the moment...

  Mary held out for a little while longer, but the heart went out of her resistance after the pitiful sound of that “Where’s Mummie?” as my grandmother rendered it.

  She gave in “for the boy’s sake.”

  And my grandmother had justified her existence
.

  They travelled home together, and Mary averted anticlimax by quite a real nervous breakdown, that overtook her after she got home, before my father had had time to forgive her in so many words.

  So they began again — literally.

  It wasn’t, in fact, possible for them to be happy together, and they never were so. I grew up in the midst of scenes, tears, and intermittent periods of reconciliation. There was no stability about my childhood; and no reality. Undoubtedly I was the victim — far more so than my father, who presently sought and found consolation elsewhere, or than Mary, whom he thus provided with a perfectly legitimate grievance that lasted her until he died, fifteen years later. After that, she was able gradually to forget that there had ever been unhappiness between them, and to assume the identity of a heart-broken widow.

  Mrs. St. Luth, my grandmother, lived to be very old.

  “But useless old woman though I am, God gave me the opportunity of justifying my existence, when He let me bring a mother home to her little child....”

  I wonder.

  Thank god, I’m a modern.

  THE END

  THE WAY THINGS ARE

  First published in 1927, The Way Things Are tells the story of Laura Temple, a thirty-four-year old wife, mother of two young sons, part time writer, and member of the local gentry. In many ways she mirrors the life and character of the author herself. Laura’s time is occupied with her children, how to pay the bills, the impossibility of servants and everything else that goes into keeping up appearances. Nevertheless, when she meets Marmaduke Ayland, Laura soon finds she has a lover.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER I

  “Did I tell you what Johnnie said, after he’d had his reading-lesson to-day?”

  “No.”

  Laura embarked upon her anecdote.

  She had not intended, nor even wished, to tell it. She knew well that her husband did not want to hear it.

  Nevertheless, she told it. And her secret sense of her own futility and weakness took all conviction from the manner of her telling, so that even a much more amusing story than that of a five-year-old’s repartee would have been bereft of sense and all spirit.

  When the recital of his son’s witticism had petered out, Alfred Temple said, “H’m,” compromising between a short, unamused laugh and a curt ejaculation, and then he and Laura were silent again.

  They had been married seven years.

  Every evening after dinner they sat in the drawing-room, or, on those rare summer evenings when it was hot, in the garden, and Alfred talked not at all, and Laura, in spite of almost frenzied resolutions to the contrary, found herself preparing to talk — and often, indeed, actually talking — about the children, the servants, or the question of expense.

  Their elder son, Edward, was six years old, and Johnnie was five.

  Between nine and ten o’clock, Alfred Temple, as usual, fell asleep behind The Times, and Laura, also as usual, told herself that it was only a question of concentration, and that an occasional snore could not annoy her unless she allowed it to do so. And at the seventh snore she cleared her throat loudly and suddenly, and Alfred woke with a start.

  “I wish we could get the children in to the dancing-class at Quinnerton regularly,” said Laura.

  “They’re a bit young, aren’t they?”

  “Edward is just the right age. And it would be good for Johnnie. Besides, I like them to see something of other children.”

  “They’re always going out to tea.”

  “That’s another thing, we ought to ask the Allington children here, but nurse, for some reason or other, has taken a dislike to their nurse.”

  “I shouldn’t let nurse regulate your invitations, I must say.”

  Laura gave him a look, and compressed the corners of her mouth into an expression of controlled patience.

  She was not really feeling impatient with Alfred, but it seemed necessary to let him know that she considered his opinion of no value whatever on the question of her relations with nurse.

  Alfred had sometimes said, and frequently implied, that Laura was ruled by her servants.

  Laura, in return, said and implied that Alfred did not know anything at all about the domestic problem from the inside.

  She often felt that Alfred did not understand her, and that he still less understood what a difficult and fatiguing affair life was for her, and it also vexed her to know that their ideas differed widely on the important subject of Edward’s and Johnnie’s upbringing, but nevertheless, Laura knew that she and Alfred were what is called “happily married.”

  Only, somehow, Laura was not happy, and she sometimes felt that perhaps Alfred was not happy, either, although he did not seem to think about it a great deal.

  It might, perhaps, have something to do with the undoubted fact that their income was not quite adequate to their demands upon it. Laura, copybooks to the contrary notwithstanding, knew well that riches can do a great deal towards contentment, and that pleasure in life is not produced in an atmosphere of unpaid bills and economical dinners. Sometimes Laura visualised herself as the wife of a man much poorer than Alfred — obliged herself to cook a great part of every meal eaten in the house, and able to afford only one maid, to help her with the children, and to keep the house clean, and to do the sewing. Of course, they’d be living in a smaller house, two reception, five bedrooms, and one bath, h. and c., and usual offices, half an acre of garden, a job gardener, and rent and electric light bill to pay.

  As it was, they lived at Applecourt, which had belonged to the Temples for three generations, and the house had nine bedrooms, two bath-rooms and three sitting-rooms, and two kitchens and a pantry, and a good deal of passage-way, and a staircase with two landings, and no lighting whatever.

  And there were — or, very frequently, there were not — a cook-general, a house-parlourmaid, and a children’s nurse. A gardener received thirty-five shillings a week and a cottage and helped Alfred with the cleaning of the car, and worked in the garden and in the kitchen-garden.

  Laura had been brought up in a house that entirely resembled Applecourt, except that it had been more comfortable, because everything had been much less expensive and difficult, in the time before the war.

  Throughout the war she had lived and worked in London, boarding very comfortably with an aunt who had a house in Wilton Crescent.

  Laura could speak French fluently, and play the piano not very well, and she had qualified as a masseuse in 1915. Ten years earlier she had supposed herself to be a good dancer, but the dancing of ten years earlier was not the sort of dancing to produce in a present-day ballroom — and Laura had learnt no other. Her tennis had also become inadequate, in much the same way. There were depressing times when she felt that her prettiness had shared the same fate as her accomplishments.

  At twenty, it had been a universally acclaimed prettiness, of a slim, Grecian-nymph type, a matter of outline and features rather than colouring. It seemed to her that she had altered wonderfully little, even in fourteen years. She was still slim, upright, and without any grey at all in her brown hair. There were faint lines round her mouth and round the corners of her eyes, but her forehead was smooth, except for two little vertical marks between her dark eyebrows.

  Her colour had never been very bright — she was paler now, that was all. And her face and hands were thinner.

  Nevertheless, Laura knew that, by some indefinable process, she had ceased to be very pretty. People n
o longer looked at her as though struck by her appearance.

  She sometimes rather forlornly told herself that her particular type of beauty was no longer in vogue. Girls, nowadays, didn’t look like Grecian nymphs.

  They had no particular features, but they had beautiful teeth — Laura’s teeth had always been too prominent — and good complexions, and they moved and held themselves well.

  Shingled hair suited them.

  It had not suited Laura, and she had compromised with a bob that always seemed to herself to be either just too long or just too short. She was still able to get most of her clothes ready-made — but she had to go to the better-class London shops for them. Never more could she hope to “carry off” a cheap, bright-coloured cotton frock, bought from the big draper’s shop in Quinnerton.

  These considerations formed a kind of vague, unsatisfactory background to Laura’s life. In the foreground were Edward, Johnnie, Alfred, the servants, the management of their home, and the Nursing Association, the Women’s Institute and the Girl Guides, of Quinnerton. The relative importance of these things, to Laura, was measured in terms of her own emotional reactions to them.

  Johnnie came first.

  Although Edward was her first-born, it was Johnnie that she loved best. Edward was a good little boy, not imaginative, mildly averse from any form of lessons, and finding his chief amusement in kicking at a ball, or in running rather aimlessly about the garden, making as loud and incoherent a noise as possible.

  Johnnie also made a noise — and a much louder noise than Edward’s — but it was never an incoherent noise. He was articulate, sensitive, passionate and intelligent.

  Alfred Temple said that Laura adored Johnnie, and in a sense it was true. But the term was only a relative one.

  Laura herself felt that Johnnie was her chief preoccupation, and the source both of her deepest discomfort and her sharpest joys, but at the back of her consciousness was a profound conviction that her own emotional capabilities had never really yet been fully roused.