“We’re much later than we meant to be,” apologised Mrs. Crossthwaite. “The chauffeur was so stupid about finding the way — we’ve just been to the Kingsley-Brownes’, and I felt I couldn’t go home without returning your call. May I introduce my friend, Mrs. La Trobe? — Mrs. Temple.”
“Do come in, won’t you?” said Laura, thankfully remembering that at least she had “done” the drawing-room flowers the day before. “I’m afraid you’ve come in for a nursery-tea, my two small boys are on my hands this afternoon.”
“Dear little people!” cooed Mrs. La Trobe in a contralto voice. “I’m so fond of little people.”
Laura, ungratefully, took a violent dislike to Mrs. La Trobe.
“We really mustn’t stay to tea,” said Mrs. Crossthwaite, without very much conviction.
Laura exclaimed as though in dismay, the visitors protested, were over-ruled, yielded. Laura, with every appearance of graceful cordiality, conducted them to the dining-room where Edward and Johnnie waited for tea.
“How do you do?” cried Mrs. La Trobe without delay. “Dear little people!”
The dear little people, Laura was thankful to see, had reduced their persons to something approaching cleanliness, although neither had remembered the use of a hair-brush.
Tea was laid in the meticulously incorrect fashion peculiar to the house-parlourmaid’s afternoon out, with the milk-jug standing in the slop-bowl, and the brown and the white bread-and-butter jostling one another on the same dish.
“You have rawer a jolly view,” said Mrs. Crossthwaite, politely glancing from the window, whilst Laura made the tea and sharply parted the milk-jug from the slop-bowl.
Conversation was rather spasmodic.
Edward, who indiscriminately enjoyed any form of notice, marked his appreciation of Mrs. La Trobe’s advances by becoming slightly noisy and boastful, encouraged by her contralto laughs and ejaculatory praises.
Johnnie, more critical and less susceptible, was nevertheless determined to assert his own claims to attention, and attempted humorous interpolations.
Laura endeavoured to suppress both her sons without embarrassing the visitors, to talk politely to Mrs. Crossthwaite about the Women’s Institute, and to convey to Mrs. La Trobe that it was injudicious to exclaim openly upon Johnnie’s curls and Edward’s quaintness.
She heartily wished that Alfred would come in, and at last he did so.
At least, the children became quiet, although Laura, for the first time giving her full attention to Mrs. Crossthwaite, could dimly hear a further tender-hearted outcry of “Dear little people!” from her other visitor.
Mrs. Crossthwaite was civilly enquiring for Mrs. Temple’s sister.
Christine had returned to London, Laura explained. She was coming back to Applecourt later. By a natural transition of thought, she asked about the son from Uganda.
He was back. In London. He, also, was coming down again later in the summer.
“We hope to have plenty of tennis, when Jim is at home. You and your sister must come over. My girls would be so delighted.”
It faintly pleased Laura to hear herself bracketed with anybody’s girls, and she reflected with mild cynicism that Christine would certainly wish her to accept any invitation that led to “Jim.”
She did so.
Alfred and Mrs. La Trobe were less successful in pleasing one another.
It always took Alfred a little while to establish any sort of rapport between himself and a complete stranger, and it was evident to Laura that he was still rather resentfully wondering what Mrs. La Trobe’s name was, why she had come, and how soon she might be expected to go away again.
Mrs. La Trobe, on the other hand, was endeavouring to charm her host by an excessive display of purely feminine qualities. She said that she loved children, and she “was afraid that she wasn’t at all clever. I hear your wife writes; now that, to me, is so marvellous—” and that she didn’t drive a car because her wrists were really not strong enough for the gears, and that she had a tiny little house, and no servant bothers because she simply loved housework, and was really fond of cooking.
“I’m afraid,” said Mrs. La Trobe, with a smile, “that I’m just what the Americans call a home-maker.”
Laura, who knew her husband’s opinion of any conversation in which personalities played a part, felt sorry for the guest, producing an effect so different from the one that she intended and expected.
She hastily turned Mrs. Crossthwaite over to Alfred, and herself became the recipient of Mrs. La Trobe’s confidences.
“Mummie, may I get down?”
“Not yet, Johnnie dear.”
Alfred rang the bell.
“Let Edward go,” said Laura hastily. “What is it — more milk?”
“Yes. No milk left.”
“Hilda is out,” Laura said, hoping that her husband would grasp the implication that the cook was neither willing, nor even desirable, as an answerer of bells. “Edward, run to the kitchen and get some more milk.”
“Are you a useful boy?” said Mrs. La Trobe. “I’m sure you’re mother’s useful boy.”
“Oh no,” said Laura lightly and insincerely, in order to bridge Edward’s smirking, but unresponsive silence. “Boys are never really useful, unlike little girls. One of them ought to have been a daughter. Run along, darling.”
“Dear little laddies!” ejaculated Mrs. La Trobe.
“Mrs. La Trobe is so devoted to children. I always tell her that I wonder she cares to stay with me at all, where there are no children in the house.”
Laura uncharitably surmised that Mrs. Crossthwaite’s combination of stupidity and good-nature must be valuable to Mrs. La Trobe. It could be trusted to present her in exactly that obvious light in which she wished to be presented.
Edward came into the room again and said brightly:
“There isn’t any more milk. Not a drop in the house.”
“What can have happened?” unhappily ejaculated Laura, although well aware of what had happened, since, owing to her own bad house-keeping, it had happened more than once before.
“If it was on my account, please don’t bovver. I really don’t want any more tea.”
Mrs. La Trobe, evidently anxious to display equal tact, glanced into her cup, which had unfortunately just been replenished from the teapot, and heroically declared that she liked it without milk, and had been told that it was far better for her, and that, in fact, she often did drink it like that.
“May we get down now?” wearily enquired Johnnie.
Laura assented, and almost immediately afterwards followed the example of her sons, unable to bear the sight of Mrs. La Trobe sipping gallantly, but with a wry mouth, at her milkless tea.
“Run upstairs, boys dear.”
“Shall you be able to read to us presently?”
“Yes. Run along.”
Alfred, at the open door of the hall, hesitated wistfully.
“One peep at the garden if I may, and then we really must go,” said Mrs. Crossthwaite.
The rain had long since left off.
The peep was vouchsafed, and Laura, by the time the car had been brought to the door by the uniformed chauffeur, was able to smile, and murmur hopes that next time it wouldn’t be quite so much of a picnic.…
“So lucky to have found you at all,” Mrs. Crossthwaite replied.
“There’s nothing I love like a nursery party. I’m devoted to little people,” declared Mrs. La Trobe, consistent to the last. The car, entirely noiseless, moved away.
Alfred Temple gazed after it disparagingly.
Laura hoped that he was going to speak, and waited, but after a few seconds he merely tipped his hat further over his eyes, and went away into the garden.
Laura sighed, feeling how much she would have preferred reproaches for her inadequacy as a hostess to such complete silence, although she was aware that it did not denote anything more than resignation on her husband’s part.
Then she saw that the
re was a letter from Duke Ayland lying on the hall-table.
Alfred’s silence, the absence of milk, and the comments that she feared her visitors were exchanging on their way home, all receded into insignificance. Laura, becoming eighteen years old again, caught up the letter and turned instinctively into the quiet of the empty drawing-room.
“Mummie, have the visitors gone?”
“Can you read to us now?”
The boys dashed tumultuously downstairs.
Laura thrust the unopened letter into one of the pigeonholes in her writing-table.
She read to the boys, and played a game of Happy Families with them, and pretended not to hear Johnnie addressing the coloured representations of Mr. Bones the Butcher and his family in a drawling contralto: “Dear little people, I am so fond of you.”
Nurse, who might possibly have got back to Applecourt before six o’clock by catching an early train at Quinnerton, had not elected to do so, and Laura put her sons to bed. Theoretically, this is one of the most joyful and natural events in the day of a young mother and her children.
Laura knew this, and loyally tried to make her own feelings correspond to the knowledge. But, at any rate on nurse’s day out, it was never of any use.
Her back ached, the bath remained just too deep for her to bend over it comfortably, the boys seemed to have got out of hand, and she almost always found that it took her five-and-twenty minutes longer than it should have done to get them into bed.
On this occasion she wanted so dreadfully to read Duke Ayland’s letter that she informed Edward and Johnnie that they might play in the bath, as a treat, until she came back. Then she fled to the drawing-room.
It was not the first letter that she had received from Duke Ayland. It excited her even more than if it had been, because she knew now that it would contain the personal note she desired.
He omitted the formality of a stereotyped beginning, wrote mostly about books, his own work, and Laura’s writing, and ended with: “I am saving up such hundreds of things to talk to you about. Please don’t be even one minute late on the 27th. — Yours, M.A.”
As soon as she had skimmed the four pages, and re-read the last sentence five times, Laura found herself emerging from a kind of trance to the sound of hilarious shriekings and splashings that caused her to rush upstairs and into the bathroom again.
At last Edward and Johnnie were dried, clad in their striped Viyella pajamas, and tucked up into their respective beds.
Edward said his prayers with conventional gravity, Johnnie was discouraged by his mother in an attempt at melodramatic intercession on behalf of various improbable trespasses, and Laura shut the door of the night-nursery behind her.
There was barely time to change for dinner before the gong rang, and Alfred, coming in from the garden, said: “I must just go upstairs and wash. I shan’t change.”
“There isn’t time,” returned Laura frigidly. “The gong has just sounded.”
It annoyed her that Alfred should be unpunctual, it annoyed her that he should not change for dinner, and it annoyed her to realise that his not doing so implied an intention of returning to his gardening again as soon as dinner was over.
“I never used to mind little things,” she thought, remembering the light-hearted indifference of the days when she had not known responsibility.
The soup was not hot by the time they sat down at the dining-room table, but Laura could tell that it wouldn’t have been hot even if they had come in punctually.
“No one to change the plates?” enquired Alfred, raising his eyebrows.
“You know it’s her afternoon out.”
“Why do all the servants go out on the same day?”
Laura explained curtly.
“Must you ask people to tea on days when we have no servants?”
“Alfred, naturally I didn’t ask them to tea. Is it likely, with Hilda out and the boys on my hands? Mrs. Crossthwaite aggravatingly chose to-day for returning my call, and I suppose that absurd woman is staying with her. Of course, at Marchland it doesn’t make the slightest difference if two extra people turn up for a meal, but here it does, that’s all.”
“It doesn’t make any difference to the amount of milk we’re allowed, apparently.”
Laura received her husband’s small jibe with a joyless smile.
“I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it, dear, but whenever nurse goes out for the day, and you have those two boys to look after, by the time evening comes,” said Alfred impressively, “you’re fagged out. That’s what you are — absolutely fagged out.”
Laura, who had so often regretted and resented the fact that her husband never commented upon her looks, received this exception to the rule in an embittered silence.
“Well,” said Alfred as they rose from the table, “I shall do a little gardening.”
Laura went to the night-nursery, gazed at the sleeping Johnnie, forgot Edward, and ascertained by the presence of nurse’s hat upon the lid of the clothes-basket, that nurse had come back.
In the day-nursery she found her.
The information that nurse had accepted the situation offered by the lady at Bristol renewed Laura’s anxiety-complex on the subject of finding a substitute.
Someone who would be able to manage Johnnie. A good needle-woman, because Laura wasn’t. Fond of animals, because of Fauntleroy, and besides, the boys might have a pony one day. Young enough to run about and play.
Old enough to have a sense of responsibility.
Willing to do her own nurseries.
Laura snatched up The Times, and tore feverishly through the advertisement columns.
“Town preferred.”
“Baby from the month preferred.”
“Would travel.”
“Wages £70 to £80.”
At the last item, Mrs. Temple remembered what a very long while it was since any story of hers had brought in a cheque.
If she wrote more stories, and could sell them for better prices; she might be able to afford the wages asked by highly trained nurses and governesses.
By the time that her husband came in, Laura had not thought of a short story, but she had answered Duke Ayland’s letter, and two of the advertisements in The Times.
“I wish you’d look at what I’ve written in answer to two ‘Situations Wanted,’ Alfred,” she said.
“That seems all right.”
“Do you think I’ve said enough?”
“Too much, if anything.”
“Oh Alfred! I’d so much rather tell them the drawbacks beforehand, and then they can’t say anything afterwards. What do you think I ought to leave out?”
“I don’t say you ought to leave out anything exactly,” replied Arthur carefully. “I only meant that the whole tone of your letter was rather calculated to put them off, that’s all.”
“Oh, is that all?” said Laura satirically, and then they both laughed.
It was always a relief to her when they laughed at the same things, because it engendered a sense of companionship.
Laura was passionately anxious to believe that companionship played a large and important part in the married life of Alfred and herself. She put aside the facts that they differed upon the question of the children, that Alfred’s main preoccupations lay in the vegetable kingdom, and her own in the realm of the emotions, and dwelt firmly on the interests they held in common.
Sometimes — but not often — these were reduced to Fauntleroy and lawn-tennis.
Duke Ayland had in a fortnight shattered her carefully-cultivated attitude of mind.
His society had forced upon Laura that which she had resolutely made herself forget, for fear of missing it unbearably: the meaning of mental and spiritual affinity.
She wanted to see him again with an intensity that secretly frightened her.
“Am I in any danger of falling in love with him?” Laura asked herself solemnly, from time to time.
She never asked herself whether Duke Ayland was in any
danger of falling in love with her. Whatever the answer to this, Laura instinctively knew that it would dismay her.
She thought of the difference between herself and Christine.
Love affairs came naturally to Christine. She had had one, Laura knew, with a married man. But it had not been tragic.
“It’s utterly out-of-date to take things seriously,” Laura told herself, more seriously than ever.
Although less than ten years separated her from Christine she felt that she belonged to the generation that accepted, if it did not positively manufacture, tragedy, renunciation, and sublimity.
It was impossible to her to be genuinely flippant and detached where personal relations were concerned.
Laura, as usual obsessed by two conflicting emotions, despised and resented this peculiarity in herself, and at the same time admired and exulted in it.
In a frame of mind that entirely defied analysis she prepared to go to London. Nothing, to her surprise, happened to prevent it.
“Mind you enjoy yourself. Go to some plays, or something,” said Alfred at the station. Laura, touched and strangely self-reproachful, hovered for an incredible instant on the verge of an insane offer to remain at home and not go at all — but fortunately remembered in time that there was nothing more justly disliked by Alfred than a change of plans at the eleventh hour.
CHAPTER IX
The train sped onwards, and Laura held her library book open upon her knee, and supposed herself to be reading it, whilst a merry phantasy careered round and round her mind, in which she sustained a rôle not unworthy of an American film-heroine featuring the brilliant night life of Broadway. But of this she remained fortunately unconscious, with that part of herself that would most strongly have objected to it.
At the junction, Lady Kingsley-Browne was also awaiting the London train.
“How delightful, my dear — look, you’re dropping your book — are you actually going all the way to town? We can travel together.”
A discrepancy in the class of ticket purchased respectively by Lady Kingsley-Browne and by Mrs. Temple would, Laura well knew, defeat this amiable project, but she received it nevertheless with an assenting smile, which seemed simpler to accomplish than an explanatory refusal.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 289