Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  Quite impossible.

  The boys went up to their nursery tea, Edward apparently quite satisfied by his mother’s conscientious but absent-minded pattings, and Johnnie still unmollified by her ardent caress to the top of his curls and her whispered promise of a story after tea.

  In the dining-room tea was a failure.

  Alfred was in that frame of mind in which nothing would serve him but to ring the bell — an act of despotism disliked at least as much by his wife as by the servants whom it was designed to summon.

  “Dear, what do you want?”

  “Haven’t we any jam in the house?”

  “Has she forgotten the jam?” said Laura coldly. “I suppose that as none of us ever eat it, she didn’t think it worth while.”

  “Ring for it.”

  “Please do ring, if you really want jam,” Laura replied icily.

  “How is she to learn, if we don’t tell her?” was the indirect retort of her husband.

  The house-parlourmaid appeared, looked quite as sulky as Laura had expected her to look at being disturbed in the middle of her tea, and replied impeccably that, if you please, sir, the jam was finished, and there was no more put out.

  “Then there’s nothing more to be said.”

  Laura sketched a movement of rising from her chair.

  “I can get the key and go to the store cupboard,” she said, with a perfectly genuine sense of martyrdom, to which she allowed full vent in her voice and expression.

  “It doesn’t matter,” replied Alfred, with slightly raised eyebrows.

  How trivial, and yet how infuriating, was life, with recalcitrant nurses and husbands and children, and nothing to look forward to ever, and at the back of everything an eternal sense of one’s own inadequacy.

  “I thought it would be rather fun to go to Brussels for a week this autumn,” Christine was saying. “An exhibition I want to see.…Some of us may make up a party. I think Duke is going.”

  With an inward start of mingled astonishment and gratification, Laura realised that she had forgotten all about Duke Ayland and his very existence.

  Perhaps after all it didn’t matter about Alfred, the nurse, and the jam.

  There might be something to look forward to, although Laura didn’t quite know what.

  “Duke is coming up on the chance of some tennis, after tea,” observed Christine.

  “I daresay you can give him a game if you don’t mind singles. I must do a little weeding, and Laura will want to be with the children.”

  Alfred’s agricultural proclivities led him to derive actual enjoyment from the process of weeding, to Laura’s ever-recurring amazement.

  “You’d better play tennis, Alfred,” said Christine. “Four is much more fun than a single. The children can pick up the balls. And Duke gets so very few chances of playing tennis. He’s always in London and always at work. He’s got to be, to make a living.”

  “Is he very badly off?” Laura asked.

  “Oh, very. But he’s only got himself to think of — no wife or anything like that, so it’s not so bad really. Duke hasn’t even got a mother or a sister to support.”

  Laura, obscurely, was glad to hear it.

  She was glad, too, that Duke Ayland was coming.

  And after that, when he did, they played no tennis. Alfred continued intent upon selecting what appeared to Laura to be small green plants growing in the midst of other small green plants that exactly resembled them, and then throwing them away, and Christine took the two little boys away into the paddock.

  Ayland sat down by Laura under the apple-trees.

  “Don’t let’s play tennis. You look tired,” he said in a voice of concern.

  Laura turned to find his eyes as full of concern as had been his voice.

  “Why are you tired?”

  She wanted to tell him that it was wonderful of him to have noticed her tiredness, but the sheer unexpectedness of his sympathy held her silent with surprise and gratitude.

  “I think you do far too much for other people, you know.”

  “I’m not tired now,” said Laura suddenly, smiling at him — and indeed she felt miraculously rejuvenated and entirely unfatigued.

  “The things that tire me are the things that bore me.”

  “Of course. Like all artists, you’re most terribly sensitive, aren’t you? One felt that directly.”

  Laura yielded to the insidious rapture of talking about herself exactly as she wished herself to be talked about.

  “If I’m sensitive,” she said slowly— “and I suppose you’re right — I can’t afford to own it to myself, far less to anybody else. I used to think that I could kill it altogether, by never giving in to it, and to a certain extent I’ve succeeded.”

  “Instinctive self-protection. Don’t you see that if you, of all people, let yourself feel things as you could feel them, you’d go mad?”

  Laura did see. But her seeing was as nothing compared to the blinding, ecstatic satisfaction of knowing that Duke Ayland saw.

  “You’re putting into words things that I haven’t dared to let myself think, for years—” she faltered.

  It was true. One didn’t dare let oneself think about emotions that one never had the chance of experiencing. But now, all of a sudden, Laura not only dared to think and speak about them, but she wished ardently to speak and to think of nothing else.

  It appeared that her desires were shared by her companion.

  When a conversation of this description is embarked upon for the first time between two people, there is no reason, perceptible to themselves, why it should ever stop. Any interruption from without comes as a complete and unwelcome surprise. Laura had just said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, quite — I’ve never told anybody else—” when the two little boys came running up to say good night.

  Laura felt herself violently jerked back into the atmosphere that she had for years thought of as “real life.”

  Duke Ayland roused in her a fresh, silent access of appreciation by standing up to receive the good night handshakes of Edward and Johnnie.

  His manners were wonderful.…

  At the sight of nurse, in her grey-and-white, competently escorting the boys into the house, Laura’s latest anxiety took possession of her again. But even that remembrance held possibilities of alleviation.

  “Christine wants me to go to London at the end of the month, to see about a new nurse, as this one is unfortunately leaving.”

  “Oh,” said Ayland, “I was going to ask you if you ever came to London. I’m so awfully glad. Would you — if you haven’t got every minute booked up — is there a chance that you’d let me take you out to dinner one night?”

  “I’d love it,” said Laura, trying to sound kind, rather than enchanted.

  “If there’s anything you specially want to see, perhaps you’d come to a show afterwards?”

  “I’d like to very much indeed. I hardly ever see anything nowadays.”

  “If you’ll let me know what you most want to see, I’ll book seats directly I get back. I wish to goodness I wasn’t going on Monday, but I’m afraid I must.”

  “I wish you weren’t going. But you make me talk about myself a great deal too much. I haven’t done it for years,” Laura declared with truth.

  “Next time,” said Duke Ayland smiling, “I’m going to talk about myself, if you’ll let me.”

  It was curious, the extraordinary sense of intimacy the words conveyed.

  Or perhaps it was his tone.

  He stayed to dinner again, that evening, and afterwards they played paper games — tolerated, rather than enjoyed, by Alfred, who served, indeed, merely as a foil for the skill of the other three players.

  Playing at paper games was Laura’s only genuine accomplishment, and the environments of Applecourt had never offered any scope for it. She went up to bed feeling clever, and successful, and when she gazed earnestly at herself in the glass she felt, as well, that she was still pretty.
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  “What is thirty-four, after all, nowadays?” Laura found herself recklessly enquiring.

  She would go to London.

  To look for a nurse, certainly, but also to enjoy herself.

  She would go and see the A. B. Onslows. After all, they’d asked her to. It would be good for her writing.

  Laura began to take off her clothes — it distressed her to know that she usually wore at least three more garments than any other modern woman, but her circulation was poor, and it was a choice between that and a faint violet tinge to the tip of her nose — and as she did so, unconsciously fell under the obsession of a complex medley of thought, wherein improbable sartorial triumphs mingled strangely with encounters between intellectual affinities gathered together at the house of the A. B. Onslows.

  “A crinoline hat of very palest yellow, and yellow organdie and lace — a slim silhouette — the long amber necklace. ‘Mrs. Temple, I’ve always loved your work so much—’ Duke Ayland standing by the door, watching her.” “She looks so absurdly young!” Would it be out of the question to go to a decent place, and get a really lovely hat? After all, it’d come in for weddings, afterwards. And for yellow organdie and lace — Bond Street — Duke Ayland and the theatre. No one wore any sleeves at all nowadays, but no one — except Laura — had vaccination marks that showed. She looked her best by artificial light, provided that her hair had been properly cut, shampoo’d and waved. “Don’t you see that if you, of all people, let yourself feel things as you could feel them—”

  Laura snatched up her hand-glass, and examined her own reflection with passionate intentness. Whatever she might have looked earlier in the evening, she didn’t look tired now.

  Neither tired nor sleepy.

  Always, she was both at the end of the day. A strange, quivering excitement made her feel as though she might lie awake, to-night.

  “Simply a passing gratification of my vanity. I’d better face it,” Laura told herself, with a pseudo-candour that was the height of disingenuousness.

  Her method of facing it was to get into bed, blow out the candle, and lie with her hands clasped beneath her head, recalling over and over again phrases and words and intonations, in her conversation with Ayland.

  To the apparent interminableness of this exercise the entrance of Laura’s husband put a check.

  He seemed surprised, not without reason, to find her wakeful.

  “Alfred, I’ve been thinking. Shall I go to London and stay with Christine, for a few days, at the end of the month?”

  “Why not? To look at nurses, I suppose?”

  “Yes. And I thought I’d go and see the A. B. Onslows.”

  “Is that the man with dyed hair that we met at Lady Kingsley-Browne’s ?”

  “The author.”

  “That’s what I meant.”

  “Duke Ayland suggested my dining with him one night and going to a play.”

  Alfred made no reply, and Laura’s heart seemed to leap into her throat.

  The silence became tense, unbearable.

  “Alfred,” said Laura faintly.

  He got into bed.

  “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Mind what, dear? I’m afraid I didn’t hear what you said.”

  “Duke Ayland taking me to a theatre in London,” murmured Laura.

  “A very good idea,” said Alfred.

  In a spasm of relief, self-reproach and impatience, she leant across the bed and kissed him passionately.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Before Laura’s visit to London, that she now looked forward to with a tremulous fervour that seemed to increase in proportion to her own conviction of its irrationality, there stretched a domestic track of more than habitual tediousness.

  Christine left Applecourt on the same day as, and in the company of, Duke Ayland.

  “I shall see you in a fortnight, darling,” she said to Laura. “It’s been lovely here. The only thing I’m sorry about is that Mrs. Crossthwaite and the son from Uganda didn’t return your call while I was still here. Be sure and follow them up, if she does, and have him to tennis next time I come.”

  “Good-bye,” said Duke Ayland in a low voice, gripping Laura’s hand and at the same time looking at her with the kind of look that should — but more often does not — accompany the gripping of a hand.

  “Only a fortnight before I see you in town,” said Laura, compromising with her conscience, that officiously smote her at the words, by giving them a jaunty intonation that disgusted her as she heard it.

  “I’ll write to you about time and place,” said Ayland, as eagerly as though he had not already said exactly the same thing five times within twenty-four hours.

  “Yes, do,” said Laura, with equal fervour and equal lack of originality.

  He went.

  “If you please, madam,” said nurse, “could I take a day off next week to interview a lady in Bristol?”

  “Certainly,” said Laura dejectedly.

  Nurse’s day off was no longer the hectic affair that it had been in Johnnie’s babyhood, when Laura had, as it now seemed to her, pushed the pram for hours and hours, in the hope of inducing slumbers that remained elusive, and the clothes of both the children had had to be changed again and again until neither the night-nursery wardrobe nor the linen closet would yield any further contributions, and Laura’s head had ached only less than her back, and from being a bright young mother in the morning, she had degenerated into a whining victim by the evening.

  But although that disturbing phase was over, it still remained a fact, partially acknowledged by Laura, that to be in sole charge of Edward and Johnnie, for one entire day, reduced their mother to spiritual pulp and physical exhaustion.

  Sometimes Laura addressed herself rhetorically in sentences beginning: “How about the village mothers, with half a dozen tiny children, and all the cooking and cleaning to do as well?”

  The picture appalled her — but her own inadequacy remained unaltered, whereas the village mothers went competently through their days.

  Nurse went to Bristol.

  The lady who wished to interview her chose a Saturday, the only day of the week upon which Miss Lamb did not come to give Edward and Johnnie their lessons, and the house-parlourmaid’s afternoon out. In the morning, the boys played in the garden, and in the afternoon it poured with rain.

  “We’ll play with the bricks in the nursery,” declared Laura cheerfully. This was a success for some time, until Fauntleroy, the terrier, dashed gaily into Johnnie’s elaborate construction and reduced it to a jumble of wooden bricks and blocks.

  Johnnie’s immediate reaction was to fly into a temper with the blameless Edward, whom he kicked and pummelled viciously.

  Edward, who was naturally quite a brave little boy, had learnt by experience that the onslaughts of his younger brother were entirely beyond ordinary methods of self-defence, and exasperated Laura by rushing behind her for protection.

  “Johnnie, you can go outside till you — Edward, don’t be such a little coward, stand up to him like a man — go outside till you’re quiet again, Johnnie.”

  Never meet opposition with opposition. Always speak quietly and calmly when dealing with a passionate child.

  Excerpts from Laura’s little books crowded in upon her mind, but however quiet and calm she might be, it was necessary for her to raise her voice almost to a scream in order to make it heard at all, and this produced the very opposite effect to one of quiet and calm, even to her own ears.

  Fauntleroy barked madly.

  At last, by exerting considerably more physical force than she herself, let alone the little books, thought really right, Laura got Johnnie and Fauntleroy both outside the door.

  Then, as not unusually happened, she vented her disappointment and anxiety about Johnnie in severely rebuking Edward.

  Edward sulked mildly, contrived, by a great and obvious effort, to shed a few tears designed to make Laura pity him, and characteristically defeated his own object by
suddenly catching sight of a candle-end in the waste-paper basket and exclaiming with enthusiasm:

  “Oh, look what I’ve found, mummie! May I have it?”

  “What for?” said Laura, listening to Johnnie’s shouts and kicks, now becoming perfunctory and spasmodic.

  “To use for my cooking.”

  “What?”

  “Miss Lamb makes us say ‘Pardon’ when we haven’t heard.”

  “Never let me hear you say ‘pardon,’ Edward. Say ‘I beg your Pardon’ or What did you say?’ Or even What?’ But not ‘pardon.’”

  “I’ll tell Miss Lamb,” said Edward, much interested in this conflict of authorities.

  “No, you needn’t do that. It’ll be enough if you remember what I’ve said.”

  Then Johnnie returned, declared himself perfectly good, was thankfully absolved by his mother, and lured by her into exchanging a tepid handshake with his brother as a symbol of renewed friendliness.

  The remainder of the afternoon was peaceful in so far as personal relations were concerned.

  Laura, dishevelled, unpowdered, and exhausted, shepherded the boys down to the dining-room as the gong rang for tea. As they crossed the hall — Edward and Johnnie vociferous, and Laura limply silent — a shining and completely noiseless car drew up before the open front door.

  “Look, a car,” said Edward.

  An elegant head was visible, and beyond it another head — less elegant but still unmistakably a head wearing the kind of hat suitable to paying calls.

  The elegant head turned in the direction of Edward, and a still more elegant hand waved at him in a beautifully new chamois-leather glove.

  Laura caught Johnnie by the shoulder, and said through her teeth:

  “Visitors have come. Go and tell cook to put extra cups and plates through the hatch, and anything there is to eat—”

  “Visitors!” echoed Johnnie in dismay. “Then can’t we have tea with you after all?”

  “Yes, you can — there’s nowhere else — only be very good. Go and tell cook, like a darling.”

  Laura’s urgency communicated itself to her son and he rushed obediently away.

  “Go and wash,” hissed Laura at Edward, and herself turned, with determined smiles, and a faux air of astonished welcome, to greet Mrs. Crossthwaite and her elegant friend.