“What sort of aged man is he?”
“Six years older than I am.”
It was a great relief to Laura to hear that he was not six years younger. It was nowadays her depressing experience that anybody who had achieved artistic success invariably turned out to be younger than herself.
Laura would have liked to know whether Duke Ay-land was in love with Christine, but Christine volunteered no information on the point. She and Laura visited Mrs. Sefton at the farm, engaged a bedroom, and sent for the piano-tuner from Quinnerton to tune Mrs. Sefton’s piano.
Then Christine wrote to Ayland, and two days later he arrived, and was bidden to lunch at Applecourt.
“Laura, this is Duke Ayland. My sister, Mrs. Temple.”
He was tall and dark, looking a great deal younger than his thirty-five years. His best feature was a sensitive and well-cut mouth, with admirable teeth. He was clean-shaven. His hair was brushed straight back off his forehead, but Laura noted with approval that it was cut reasonably short.
She hoped that he was comfortable at the farm. Mrs. Sefton was a nice woman.
A very nice woman, and he was perfectly comfortable. So grateful to Christine and her sister for arranging it all.
And the piano? It had been tuned two days before.
The piano was all right.
Alfred came in, Mr. Ayland was introduced, and shaken hands with. Alfred hoped that he was comfortable at the farm. Mrs. Sefton was a nice woman.
“Very nice indeed. Perfectly comfortable.”
“The piano was tuned two days ago,” said Alfred.
They went into the dining-room for lunch.
On the whole, Laura decided, she liked Ayland. He was quiet, and seemed to lack self-confidence — both unusual characteristics in a friend of Christine’s.
She enquired whether he played tennis. They hoped to have some tennis on Saturday afternoon, and would be so pleased to see him. Ayland accepted at once.
“Who else is coming?” Christine enquired.
“Bay-bay, and one of her young men — someone who’s staying there — I haven’t met him and I forget his name — and Major and Mrs. Bakewell.”
“Is that the mother of a child who dances? A woman with a nose?”
“Yes,” said Laura, tacitly admitting the justice of this description.
“Oh my God!” said Christine pleasantly.
“You remember her, then?”
“Quite well. I saw her last year, that time you sent me to the dancing-class with the boys. She told me that all her children had danced before they could walk.”
“How very unpleasant,” said Ayland gently.
“And do you mean to say she can really play tennis?” Christine enquired with insulting incredulity.
“She plays quite well. So does her husband.”
“Poor devil!”
“What is he like?” said Ayland. “Does he dance, too?”
“I’ve never seen him,” Christine admitted, “but anybody who’d married that woman would be a poor devil. Well, it’ll be great fun to see her again. I remember the first time I met her, thinking her utterly unlike any other human being on the face of the earth. I hope Saturday will be fine, Duke, and that they’ll all come. Especially the Bakewells.”
Saturday was fine.
Laura gave the servants final and reiterated instructions about the lemonade, the tea, and the necessity for postponing dinner, if necessary, in the event of any of her guests remaining on after half-past seven.
She went to the nursery to see whether Edward and Johnnie were resenting the preparations for a festivity in which they would have no share, and remembered too late that it was unwise to suggest discontent to them by begging them to be good.
“I wish you didn’t have visitors. You won’t be able to read to us this evening,” said Johnnie, making his mother feel remorseful.
She kissed them both and went to her room to change her frock as quickly as possible. Christine was already on the lawn, with Alfred and Duke Ayland. She was wearing pale green linen, knee-length, with inserted squares of drawn-thread work. Her fair hair was uncovered. Laura thought how young she looked.
Her own frock was of cream-coloured sponge-cloth, and she knew that it became her. But she had to wear a hat, because her hair otherwise became so untidy, and the blue brim made her look pale, she thought, and gave an effect of dark semi-circles beneath her eyes.
Or was her face always rather pale, nowadays, and were there always semi-circles under her eyes?
Laura frowned at herself in the mirror, and went downstairs without answering her own question. It had left a faint tang of bitterness behind it.
The Bakewells arrived in a large Armstrong-Siddeley car, Mrs. Bakewell smiling largely under a small and precariously-perched white felt hat, and waving a tennis-racquet. Her husband was a small, sunburnt civil engineer, with an expression that seemed oddly harassed in conjunction with his wife’s eager brightness.
“Howdydo, I’ll just turn the car round,” he said at once. “She’ll be all right in the shade — sure I shan’t interfere with anybody else here, Mrs. Temple? Flossie, you get out, will you, dear, and I’ll just turn the car round.”
Mrs. Bakewell descended, shook hands with Laura and Alfred, assured Christine that she remembered her very well indeed, and made the acquaintance of Mr. Ayland.
The same preliminaries were then gone through by Major Bakewell.
“Christine, won’t you take Mrs. Bakewell on to the court, and start playing at once? Let me see—”
Laura had arranged the sets carefully in her own mind, but she was not very good at remembering anything of that kind, and the alert readiness of Mrs. Bakewell’s eye was confusing her.
“Alfred and Mrs. Bakewell against Major Bakewell and me,” said Christine briskly. “Duke doesn’t mind waiting. Come on.”
“Do you really not mind?” Laura enquired of the young man left obediently standing beside her.
“Not at all,” he said gently. “I’m not a good tennis player. Tell me, is Mrs. Bakewell very good? She looks as though she were.”
“She is, rather,” admitted Laura.
“Please,” said Mr. Ayland, “please don’t put me in the same set with her. I could play with you and your sister, but not with her. That sounds uncivil, but I’m sure you know what I mean. She’d expect me to be a rabbit and I should be one. I’m very suggestible.”
“I know that feeling.”
“You don’t, do you? I should have thought you were always self-possessed, and strong-minded, and composed.”
Laura, who had in the past few years felt more and more conscious of being none of these things, was at this enveloped in an unwonted glow.
She looked responsively at Ayland, and found his dark eyes fixed upon her with an air of being positively and actively interested in what they saw that Laura had long missed from the eyes of her male acquaintances.
“You are not what I imagined you’d be, in the very least,” Duke Ayland said.
“Didn’t Christine tell you anything about me — about us?”
“A little, yes — but I meant your writing. I’ve always admired your work so much, you know.”
“But I don’t know!” Laura exclaimed, a little breathless. “Christine never said — I never even knew that you knew that I wrote.”
“I’ve wanted to tell you — only I didn’t dare — that one of your short stories—”
The Kingsley-Browne Humber swept into the drive, with Bébée Kingsley-Browne at the wheel and a tall young man in flannels lounging beside her.
Laura, from being a deeply interested and rather gratified woman, became a hostess, and a privately censorious one.
She saw in a moment that Bébée Kingsley-Browne was in the midst of an access of affectation — although, indeed, in the opinion of Mrs. Temple, her young neighbour was never at any time devoid of affectation. But this objectionable attribute was always increased by the presence of an admirer, and
it was but too evident that the tall young man was an admirer.
His name was Vulliamy and Bébée addressed him as Jeremy. Surely, thought Laura, such a combination was unthinkable.
Jeremy Vulliamy.
“Shall we come and sit down? They’ve just begun to play, so if you don’t very much mind waiting for the second set—” She led them to the striped black-and-orange canvas chairs set under the elm trees that prettily bordered the lawn, and as she moved forward something impelled her to exchange a glance with Duke Ayland.
The expression of interest was still there.…
Laura, that afternoon, played tennis better than she had played it for a long time. She played better than anyone, excepting the indomitable Mrs. Bakewell — (who impressed everybody by exclaiming, when she missed a very fast ball: “Dear me, it seems I can’t volley to-day!”)
“You’re playing awfully well!” Christine murmured to Laura. “What an ass Bay-bay looks trying to serve over-hand!”
Laura was conscious of deriving gratification from both these asides, although she refrained from verbal agreement with the latter.
Her tennis party was being a success. She did not, in so many words, tell herself that she, also, was being a success, but she was aware of it, and it inspired her. She caught sight of herself in the mirror in the hall on her way to tea, and was agreeably surprised to find that the blue hat, now that she was flushed and animated, suited her after all.
Miss Kingsley-Browne was telling everybody that she was to be bridesmaid at the wedding of a minor Balkan royalty in London.
“Rather a bore, in a way,” she declared, with preposterous affectation. “I’ve already been a bridesmaid seven times — no, eight, I think.”
“It’s expensive, isn’t it?” said Christine stonily. “My friends, I’m thankful to say, either get married in a Registry Office, or else just live in sin together.”
Young Vulliamy burst out laughing, and then glanced rather nervously at Bébée.
“I’m surprised to hear you talk of a Registry Office, Miss Fairfield,” said Mrs. Bakewell, tactfully ignoring the latter half of Christine’s speech, although Laura felt that it had probably surprised her a good deal more than the first. “It’s such an odd mistake, I always think, to talk of Registry for Registrar’s. And yet how many people do so!”
“Don’t let’s mention the word registry at all,” Laura begged. “It reminds me too much of hunting for a cook and never finding one.”
She was grateful to Duke Ayland, Christine, and Major Bakewell for laughing.
Mrs. Bakewell remarked instructively: “What I always say when people talk to me about the servant problem is — there is no servant problem.”
“How very unsympathetic!” said Christine.
Mrs. Bakewell’s indulgent smile veered round upon her.
“But not at all. Now look at me. I have no difficulties with servants. I never have had difficulties with servants.”
Alfred and Major Bakewell, unobtrusively, began to talk about the Government. Bébée and Mr. Vulliamy, more stridently, discussed plays.
It was left to Laura, Ayland, and Christine, to appear intelligently interested in Mrs. Bakewell’s method of ensuring efficiency in her domestics.
“The secret is very simple. They know that I’m not dependent on them. If the cook leaves: well and good, I go into the kitchen and cook the dinner. If the parlourmaid leaves, I clean the silver and lay the table, and even little Cynthia, mite as she is, can help me. If the housemaid leaves, why, let her leave is what I say. I can make the beds, and dust and sweep, and it doesn’t disturb me in the least. They know it. I say to them from time to time: ‘I’m not dependent upon any one of you. Make no mistake,’ I say, ‘I can do without any of you quite easily if I want to. The house will be clean and tidy, the Major’s meals well cooked, and served nicely, and everything will go on just exactly as well as usual, and rather better.’ And they know it’s true. It has a wonderful effect upon them.”
“May I ask, then, how long you’ve had your present servants?” said Ayland in a tone of respectful enquiry, that Laura hoped and believed to be gently ironical.
“Dear old Cookie has been with me — let me see, is it fourteen or fifteen years? — fifteen it is. The housemaid five years and the parlourmaid about the same.”
Christine’s eyes turned wildly to her sister, plainly demanding: “Is she speaking the truth?” and Laura gave a slight, reluctant nod.
Mrs. Bakewell, having thoroughly and successfully taken the wind out of everybody else’s sails, began competently to chew seed-cake.
The others, actuated by a common impulse, violently discussed Italy.
The Bakewells did not travel.
Italy led to music.
“I hear that you’re quite a musician, Mr. Ayland,” said Mrs. Bakewell suddenly and brightly.
Laura rose.
“If no one will have any more tea—” she murmured — and they returned to the tennis court.
Duke Ayland, lighting a cigarette for his hostess, said to her in an undertone that gave a curious intimacy to his words:
“Don’t ask me to play with Mrs. Bakewell. Please. She paralyses me. Can’t I play with you?”
Laura smiled at him confidently.
“If you want to.”
“Of course I want to.”
He was behaving to her as though she were a young girl, and it made her feel as though she was a young girl. They played together as partners, and Laura played brilliantly.
She only faltered when both the little boys, in clean holland smocks, appeared on the lawn.
Laura, looking out of the corners of her eyes to see whether they shook hands politely with the visitors or not, missed an easy shot, and forgot to apologise. Then Christine, who was not playing, appeared to be taking her nephews under her charge, and Laura, relieved, turned her attention to the game again.
But she played less well than before, and was relieved when the set came to an end, and she could hasten towards the deck chairs under the trees.
Johnnie, who had been behaving with quiet and decorum, immediately began to show off, breaking into a refrain that he knew, from agreeable experience, always caused a flattering commotion in the nursery.
“Oh, what a little short shirt you’ve got!
You’d better pull down the blind.”
On a second, and louder, repetition of the engaging refrain, Johnnie achieved his object.
Major Bakewell laughed, Edward imitatively began to sing also, and their mother turned pink and said, “That will do, boys. Where do you pick up these things?”
“My little children,” said Mrs. Bakewell, “have been taught how to sing. They can sing prettily, and in tune.”
“Can they sing, ‘Oh, what a little short shirt you’ve got’?” Johnnie enquired, quite unmaliciously.
“Certainly not. They sing pretty songs about the little squirrels, and the birds, and the great blue sky.”
Alfred Temple, at this, invited Mrs. Bakewell to play tennis again. She agreed to do so, but as she stood up remarked to Laura that one could never be careful enough, which Laura rightly interpreted as an oblique condemnation of the society that she permitted her children to frequent.
“Johnnie is a born actor,” she remarked unconvincingly, on the spur of the moment.
“Johnnie is a graceless young ruffian,” Ayland declared, coming to her assistance and sensibly lightening the atmosphere.
She threw him a grateful glance.
“Come on,” said Christine, “let’s play.”
For the rest of the evening, Laura’s attention was divided between her guests and her children. But underneath her pre-occupation, she was conscious of a faint, but wonderfully stimulating, glow of pleasure and excitement, because she saw that Duke Ayland was attracted by her.
He remained to dinner, when her other visitors had severally expressed appreciation and gratitude, and gone home.
“Don’t let’s change,
of course,” Christine said.
They sat agreeably under the trees, with a new and sudden sense of intimacy as they discussed the departed visitors.
“Do you think Bébée Kingsley-Browne pretty, Duke?” said Christine suddenly.
And Duke replied promptly and sensibly:
“Not in the very least.”
Laura’s already soaring spirits mounted perceptibly higher at this ungallant and unjustifiable verdict.
“Her young man was a prize ass, wasn’t he?” Christine went on, demolishing her fellow-players with whole-hearted thoroughness. “Only a prize ass would allow himself to be dragged round the country at Baybay’s chariot-wheels like that. She always has someone or other in tow, but they never last long.”
“Is she engaged to Vulliamy?” said Alfred.
“Good heavens, no. We should have heard of it fast enough if she had been,” declared Christine derisively. “It’s my opinion that Baybay would give her eyes to be seriously engaged, and no one has ever yet been fool enough to ask her.”
Laura, who found the conversation strangely exhilarating, realised, as the gong sounded from the house, that she had forgotten to go and say good-night to the boys.
Remorseful, she ran upstairs.
Afterwards she took off her hat, arranged her hair before the looking-glass, and powdered her nose, and went downstairs without a single misgiving about her own appearance, the appearance of her dinner-table, or the probable reactions of her servants to an extra place in the dining-room.
And all was well, from the cold chicken, the salad, and the junket and cream, to the complete absence of any interruptions from Johnnie.
After dinner, Duke Ayland played the piano, at Christine’s request.
She and Laura listened to him, and Alfred appeared to listen also — but after a little while he began, by degrees, and with a certain effect of absent-mindedness, to obtain possession of The Times, behind which he gradually vanished, presumably still listening, but perhaps less intently. Laura had the curious feeling that the player would not care if neither Alfred nor Christine paid any attention whatever to his music.
It was not to them that he was playing, but to her.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 285