“My dear, I’m glad — positively glad — that you’re going to have a change. You sometimes look to me quite worn out,” said Laura’s neighbour solicitously. “A rag! Neither more nor less than a rag!”
“Oh, I hope not!”
Lady Kingsley-Browne shook her expensively-turbaned head.
“A change is what we all need, from time to time, though I know how hard it is to tear oneself from the garden. How is yours doing now?”
“If we could only get a little really hot sun—” said Laura, who had learnt by long experience that this observation can almost always be made with perfect safety in an English summer.
Lady Kingsley-Browne met it with almost passionate sympathy, and rushed into horticultural details whilst Laura allowed her mind to turn once more to the anticipations that had held her imagination for the past fortnight.
Suddenly she realised that her interlocutor was no longer straying amongst begonias and petunias.
“I know you’re really interested, or I shouldn’t say one word, but after all, you’ve known Bébée ever since she was so high, haven’t you?” Lady Kingsley-Browne’s white kid glove appealed to an imaginary line somewhere about the level of Laura’s knees. “And I always think it’s such a joy to hear of a girl being settled”
“Yes,” said Laura, thoughtfully rather than assentingly. “Married, you mean?”
“Engaged, and then married, naturally.”
“It’s wonderful how much they enjoy themselves nowadays, it seems to me, without any of the responsibility that marriage brings,” murmured Laura. “Look at my sister!”
But Lady Kingsley-Browne had no desire to look at Laura’s sister, although she paid her the passing tribute of an indistinct murmur from which the words “charming” and “tennis” disconnectedly emerged.
“One likes Jeremy so much on his own account,” she mysteriously assured Laura. “The very best type of young Englishman, is what one always feels.”
“She brought him to Applecourt — I remember. He’s very — quite young, isn’t he ?”
“To us he may be, but of course he’s exactly the right age, really. About twenty-nine. And I’ve always been so fond of Felicia Vulliamy.”
“His mother?” hazarded Laura.
“His mother. They have such a lovely place in Norfolk. I’ve never seen anything like their azaleas — and the rhododendrons in June — they had the new variety before anyone else in England.”
She was off again, Laura rather unsympathetically told herself, and waited for a pause in which to interject:
“Is he the only son?”
“The only child at all. As a matter of fact, he will be one of the richest commoners in England. Poor Felicia idolises him. One felt she could only endure to surrender him to a girl of Bébée’s type.”
Laura’s astonished inward conjecture as to the discernment thus ascribed to Mrs. Vulliamy’s maternity was cut short by the approach of the London train.
“We must meet in town, dear!” cried Lady Kingsley-Browne. “I suppose you’ll be at the Chelsea Flower Show?”
Laura, who did not at the moment ever wish to see a flower again, except within the confines of a restaurant dining-room, waved enthusiastic agreement, and sought the far end of the train.
Her excitement was growing steadily, and, in a blind instinct of self-protection, she sought to mitigate it by seriously analysing, with the help of a pocket-mirror, the justice of Lady Kingsley-Browne’s description of her as a rag. On the whole, Laura decided, it was unmerited, especially with a hat on.
She took out a new and unused lip-stick, and applied it to her upper lip, but in such a manner that she could not really be sure if it had or had not altered the colour of her mouth.
In the luncheon-car she had one more glimpse of Lady Kingsley-Browne, emerging from First Luncheon as Laura approached Second Luncheon.
“Now be sure and look up the A. B. Onslows,” cried Lady Kingsley-Browne kindly and earnestly. “I know they really want you to, and he thinks your poems so delightfully clever. We must meet there.”
“Does she really suppose,” Laura rhetorically demanded of herself, “that one goes all the way to London for the sake of looking at flowers and meeting country neighbours?”
At Paddington Christine met her.
Unlike Laura, she had not been in the least half-hearted in the use of her lip-stick. She looked very pretty and very well dressed, and seemed enthusiastically glad to see her sister.
“Duke rang up, to ask what time you were arriving. I think he wanted me to ask him round to the flat to-night, but I didn’t in case you wanted to get your hair waved first, or anything.”
“I’m dining with him to-morrow night, anyway,” said Laura, who had wondered for days how she was to explain this engagement to Christine and now found it as easy as though she had been eighteen years old again.
Easiness was in the atmosphere of Christine’s flat, and was prevalent in everything that she and Laura said and did.
Domestic mishaps, if they occurred, did not matter. There were no servants, and the absence of them was not a calamity.
There were no children and —
At that, Laura’s mind jibbed suddenly and irrecoverably. She was incapable of allowing the thought to reach to its logical conclusion.
The next morning she went to the famous Mrs. Laid-law’s Registry Office, and was conducted to a small cubicle like a bathing-machine, where a chair with arms received her, in contradistinction to the upright and uncomfortable stool that awaited the candidates for her situation.
To each one of these, Laura, after a brief, dismayed inspection, made a short and faltering speech, describing the disadvantages of life at Applecourt, and the excessive quiet of the surrounding country. The candidates, for the most part, were scornful-eyed, middle-aged women, who asked curt and business-like questions.
Laura never got as far as, “My second boy, I ought to tell you, is a particularly highly-strung child—” which was the preface that she had designed for the elucidation of her theories on education.
She said: “Well, nurse, I’ll write to you one way or the other, before the end of the week,” and one by one the candidates withdrew.
“I don’t think it’s going to be at all easy to find the right person for the boys,” Laura said to Christine at luncheon.
“How are the boys?” said Christine. “I’m afraid I forgot to ask yesterday.”
But Christine’s forgetfulness, Laura felt, was as nothing to her own, in having neither noticed nor resented the omission.
Whilst she dressed for dinner that evening, Laura dwelt with passionate earnestness on the thought of her own maternity.
It seemed a kind of safeguard.
For the first time in several years, she found her frock, her hair and her general appearance, adequate, and when Duke Ayland came to fetch her in a taxi, she was immediately aware that he, also, found her so.
“It’s simply splendid to see you again,” he said earnestly. “I’ve been so absurdly terrified that something would happen to prevent it.”
“So have I,” said Laura, quite involuntarily. “Where are we going?”
“I thought of the Roumanian Restaurant, unless you’d rather go anywhere else. It’s generally quiet there, and we can talk.”
A sudden panic seized upon Laura, and caused her to say:
“I haven’t talked to anybody about books since you were at Applecourt.”
“But it isn’t only about books that we’re going to talk,” said Duke Ayland gently.
He looked at Laura, and Laura looked at the motor-bus that was towering against the side of the taxi, and a breathless and significant silence descended upon them.
She heard Ayland catch his breath before he spoke again.
“You know, you don’t talk about yourself nearly enough. It would be much better for you if you talked about yourself a great deal more. Of course, to most people one would — or, at least, could — give d
iametrically opposite advice. But what I feel about you is that you suppress such a tremendous part of yourself, always and every day. Please stop me if you think I’m being too personal — I don’t mean to be.”
Laura took no advantage of the opportunity thus offered her for checking a conversation that was causing her genuine and serious alarm, considerable excitement, and a variety of disconcerting physical emotions.
Instead, she replied in a slightly choked voice:
“It’s true, of course. But don’t you see that I can’t let myself think about it? One goes on from day to day, and life is perfectly bearable, just as long as you don’t stop to think about — about the part that’s suppressed. I suppose my life is the same as that of thousands of other women.”
“That’s what’s so wrong,” Duke Ayland exclaimed. “It might be all right for those thousands of other women — but not for you. For a woman of your temperament, and your talents, and your sensitiveness, it’s all so absolutely wrong.”
“Don’t tell me that,” said Laura in a low tone. “My life is what I’ve made it, I suppose, and even if what you say is partly true — and perhaps it is — I can’t — I don’t — and in any case — But the only possible way is for me not to think about things, far less talk about them.”
All the evening, in the intimacy of a corner table, Duke Ayland and Laura Temple talked upon the topics designated by Laura as “things.” There were not very many people in the restaurant — but of such as there were, Laura was entirely unconscious.
She knew only that she had come to life again. Duke Ayland looked at her across the small table, and as often as her eyes met his, Laura felt the blood racing through her body.
She ceased to analyse, to examine her motives, and the strange discrepancy between them and her actions, and she ceased entirely and unprecedentedly to view the whole of life in the rather austere light of her own wifehood and motherhood.
Duke Ayland said nothing that directly recalled either.
He only gave Laura to understand, in that language of allusion so wholly alien to Applecourt, and so congenial to its mistress, that she was wonderful, magnetic, lonely, desirable, talented, adorable and the gallant victim of uncongenial surroundings.
Laura found herself seriously believing that this was the dispassionate, considered judgment of a man with a profound knowledge of women.
She wanted to ask him about his relations with women, and presently she did so, phrasing the question subtly, and not with directness.
“I’ve been in love, of course,” said Duke Ayland quickly. “I’ve never asked anyone to marry me, and I don’t think I’ve ever loved in earnest. It’s almost always been a physical affair.”
“The physical is bound to enter into it,” pointed out Laura, who had for years suspected herself of being gravely deficient in sex-magnetism, and was secretly afraid of being thought passionless.
“Of course it is. But the ideal is to combine the two — physical attraction, and mental affinity.”
“That’s the rarest thing in the whole world.”
“It is. When you’ve found it — well, you have the perfect union.”
Marmaduke Ayland and Laura Temple exchanged another look — one even longer, graver and more charged with mutual understanding than any of their previous looks. And something that resembled liquid fire rather than anything else raced afresh through Laura’s veins.
It was eleven o’clock before they moved from the corner table.
“Let me take you home in a taxi,” he urged.
Laura retaining memories sufficiently vivid, even if not recent, of the probable results of proximity and intimately personal conversation combined, replied that she would prefer to walk back to Bloomsbury.
Something in the look that he gave her — rueful, faintly humorous, and wholly tender — touched her sharply.
“Duke, I do like you,” she said, warmly and naturally.
“So do I like you — Laura.”
He had used her Christian name for the first time. Laura was able to realise clearly and with sincere disgust, how out-of-date was the emotion roused in her by this so simple phenomenon.
But it was of no use. Her brain might function with all the clarity of 1927 but her emotional reactions remained those of 1912.
They walked through comparatively empty streets, and across crowded roads, and then into the large, dark Victorian square that held Christine’s flat, at the top of one of its highest houses.
And all the way, they talked.
Laura was enthralled by the mutually incompatible convictions that in one evening she and Duke Ayland had revealed themselves almost wholly to one another, and that a million such evenings would hardly suffice them in which to learn more.
It was impossible not to surmise a similar attitude of mind in Ayland when he asked her urgently:
“How soon can we do this again? Couldn’t you dine with me to-morrow?”
“Christine has some people coming after dinner.”
“May I come too?”
“I’m sure you may. Ring up and ask her.”
“Yes, yes, of course I will,” said Ayland feverishly. “But it won’t be the same thing as having you to myself. You’re not engaged every evening while you’re in town, are you?”
“No, I’m not,” said Laura truthfully. “I’d love to do this again. We’ll settle a date to-morrow, if you come.”
“I shall come all right.”
Laura drew out the latch-key that she had assured Christine she would not come home late enough to require.
“Don’t come up — no, truly. I’ll ring down here, and the door will be open before I get upstairs. Good night.”
She gave him her hand.
“I have enjoyed it—” murmured Laura. And again they looked at one another.
“Good night,” said Duke Ayland. “It’s been the most wonderful evening.”
Laura — dazzled, radiant, insanely exhilarated — went upstairs conscious only of the pressure that his hand had given hers and of words and phrases that he had uttered — reiterating themselves again and again in her memory.
Christine was sitting up in bed writing, when Laura knocked gently at her door and came in glowing.
“You look about eighteen. That is such a becoming frock, Laura.”
On this agreeable assurance Laura, shortly afterwards, kissed her sister and went to bed.
It seemed a perversity of Fate that she should be entirely wakeful in her solitude, whereas on some three hundred odd nights of the year, Alfred invariably found her sleeping profoundly soon after eleven o’clock.
“Now, I’ve got to think this out quite steadily,” Laura said to herself as she lay down.
Steadiness of thought, however, eluded her. She sought to induce it, and succeeded only in involving herself with a number of metaphors. She felt that she must steer between the rocks, swim against the current, stand by her guns, stay the course, and even — towards the dawn — follow the gleam.
Interspersed with her hazy conviction of these strenuous obligations, came one ardent recollection after another, of the way in which Duke Ayland had looked at her and the things that he had said. Then she went to sleep at last, and dreamt vividly, waking to an intolerably lively, if scientifically inaccurate, recollection of the less pleasing of Herr Freud’s theories as to the nature of dreams.
“Good God!” said Mrs. Temple earnestly, and rose with unwonted vigour.
A letter from the children’s nurse at Applecourt awaited her.
Dear Madam,
This is to let you know that the children are as usual. It rained yesterday but otherwise has been fine. Johnnie had one of his fits over his lessons yesterday and Miss Lamb requested for him to go to bed early but he seems all right to-day up to the present.
Both boys are well and send you their love.
Will write again in a day or two.
Yours faithfully,
Nurse.
Nurse, evidently
, had dutifully covered two sides of a sheet of notepaper, and felt that no employer could reasonably require more. It mattered nothing to her — it had probably escaped her notice altogether — that her undecorated reference to Johnnie’s “fit” over his lesson only served to awaken a never very-deeply dormant anxiety in the breast of his mother.
Laura visualised Johnnie in disgrace, punished, saddened, lonely, perhaps needing her. She knew herself to be absurd. Whatever the details of the “fit” it was now past and over, and Johnnie had very likely been the person in all his little world to be least disturbed by it.
There was also a letter from Alfred.
My dearest Laura,
I was very glad to hear that you arrived safely and found Christine flourishing. I hope she is making you comfortable and that you are having no difficulty in finding a suitable nurse.
It rained yesterday between three and five, but not enough to do any real good in the garden. Very close again to-day and I hope you are not finding London too hot. The boys are quite well, and send their love. Be sure to go to see the A. B. Onslows, or anyone else amusing. I hear Lady Kingsley-Browne is in London.
Your devoted husband,
A.T.
Laura reflected. “Very few men are really good letter-writers. Men do not like writing letters, nor even reading them. It’s really an extraordinary proof of how much Alfred does care, that he should write to me at all.”
It had long ago become instinctive with her to translate the inarticulateness of Alfred into terms of “caring.”
“Are the children all right?” said Christine.
“Quite, thank you. Johnnie seems — but I daresay it wasn’t anything. Alfred says that I must go and see the A. B. Onslows. They did ask me, in a way.”
“How in a way? Surely they either asked you or they didn’t ask you.”
“They did ask me,” Laura explained, “but I don’t suppose they really meant it.”
“That’s your inferiority complex again, my dear, that Duke is always talking about. Naturally they meant it. Will you ring them up this morning?”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 290