“No. But I might write a line to Mrs. Onslow. It would be interesting to go there.”
“Of course it would. I’d love to go myself. Laura, what shall you wear for the party to-night?”
The conversation became animated to the point of feverishness, although exactly the same topic had been discussed between them twice already.
At ten o’clock Duke Ayland rang up and Laura heard Christine’s assurances that he might certainly come to the party at nine o’clock that evening.
“Or any time you like, after dinner,” said Christine. “What? Yes. Did you want to speak to her? Wait a minute, I’m not sure whether she’s in.”
Laura shook her head violently.
“No, I’m so sorry. She’s just this moment gone out. Any message? All right, we’ll expect you to-night. Goodbye, Duke.” Christine replaced the receiver.
She made no comment whatever on Laura’s unaccountable shake of the head, and looked neither more nor less detached than she always did.
Laura secretly admired Christine’s poise. She looked at her younger sister with impartial admiration.
Christine’s short, stiff frock of broderie anglaise suited her fair hair, and the warm sunburn of her face and neck and arms. Her square-cut bob with its short fringe, was exactly right. So were her silk stockings and flat-heeled Charleston shoes.
She combined individuality, and conformity to prevailing fashion, in her appearance.
“What are you going to do to-day?”
“My literary agent is taking me out to lunch. If you want to have yours here, we can lay this table before we go out. Only don’t touch any of the party food,” said Christine earnestly.
“Of course not. I’ll lunch at my club. I’m going to spend the morning at the Army and Navy Stores.”
“You get much more exciting things at Selfridge’s.”
“I know,” said Laura. “But they wouldn’t do, in the same way.”
As she put on her hat, she thought:
“I am like a curate’s wife, doing a day’s shopping in the market town, and going to the principal grocer’s shop because she always has gone to it.”
At the back of her mind, however, glowed the consciousness that no curate’s wife had ever been taken out to dinner in exactly the way that she had been taken out to dinner on the preceding evening. The remembrance of it coloured her day, aided by anticipations of seeing Duke Ayland again that evening.
“But,” thought Laura, with a recrudescence of her nocturnal frenzy, “I can’t go on like this. I must face the whole thing steadily, and not just let myself drift. Whatever happens, I’ve got to play the game, by the children and Alfred and — and everybody.” The feebleness of this conclusion dismayed her. It was a great relief to find herself amongst bath-mats, rubber sponges, and nursery toilette appliances. Laura gave them her whole attention.
Her day, on the whole, was agreeable, although she went to tea with an aunt who lived in Wilton Crescent, and the aunt, as is the custom of so many relatives, gave her to understand that she was making many mistakes in regard to the upbringing of her children, the solution of her domestic problems, and the selection of her clothes.
Laura could scarcely believe that she had once lived with Aunt Isabel, during the war, and had endured her with equanimity.
“After all — a home of one’s own—” thought Laura.
It was a wordless recognition of what Alfred had done for her in marrying her.
For Christine’s party, Laura put on a flowered chiffon frock that she had bought that afternoon. It was mauve-and-blue — a combination of colours that suited her. She found herself prettier than she had been for some time, and the conviction lent an additional animation to her face and voice. She felt radiantly alive.
Christine’s friends were people, mostly young, who wrote, or painted, or did secretarial work for celebrated authors.
The conversation, at first, was spasmodic. They drank coffee and smoked.
Duke Ayland arrived, and seemed to know everybody in the room. He sat down beside Laura, and on his other side was a medical student, whom everyone called Losh, who immediately began to talk to him.
Laura, in momentary isolation, studied the faces round her.
The girls, for the most part, looked overworked and over-strained, although three out of the four were pretty.
None of the men were in evening clothes, and the appearance of most of them was dusty. It would be difficult, Laura felt, to visualise any of them in the drawing-room at Applecourt, talking to Alfred about sugar-beet — or even about modern poetry.
Duke Ayland, alone, was different. She knew it, although she could not look at him.
In a sudden pause, the voice of the medical student rang out:
“…and I said, ‘My dear girl, there’s nothing to be ashamed of! You’re abnormal, that’s all — simply and naturally, abnormal.’”
In an instant, the conversation had not so much turned upon, as rushed upon, the subject of abnormality. It seemed to be taken for granted that the only abnormalities worth discussing were those concerned with sex, and that these could not be discussed exhaustively enough.
Laura was thoroughly interested, quite determined that she was not shocked, and extraordinarily anxious to prove to Duke Ayland that she, also, could talk about sex with impersonal candour.
Words, hitherto met with by Laura only in the works of Havelock Ellis, hurtled enthusiastically through the room.
The atmosphere of Applecourt, and the nursery, and Alfred sleeping over The Times, seemed indeed remote.
CHAPTER X
Mrs. A. B. Onslow replied to Laura’s note by an invitation to lunch.
“Remember that you’re a writer yourself, and may be quite as celebrated as he is, one of these days,” said Christine firmly.
Laura went to Highgate.
The house stood on the top of a hill, with the famous garden surrounding it. Pergolas and lead statuary met the eye. A fountain splashed. Laura reflected: “It’s lovely — but it must look very cold in winter. Probably, however, they’re never here to see it in winter.”
She followed a rather austere butler through a square hall, a room that looked like a library, and into another, larger room, with French windows opening on to stone pavements and rock plants and a sundial and a plethora of roses.
Thus did the scene present itself to Laura, as she received the greetings of her host and hostess, and acknowledged introductions to people whose names she did not hear.
It was without enthusiasm that she saw detach itself from the background of confused first impressions a familiar maypole figure of slim and silk-clad arrogance, and heard the nonchalant recognition vouchsafed her by Miss Kingsley-Browne.
“Hallo, Bébée,” said Laura coldly. “I travelled up with your mother the other day.”
“Mummie always goes by train. I don’t know how she can bear it.”
Laura’s host came up to her.
It seemed more natural to see him in a black coat and grey trousers than in tweeds.
Laura perceived in his eye a gleam of that interest which any man, however celebrated, is apt to bestow on a woman of attractive appearance, and to withhold from one who merely has a literary reputation.
With a skill that she felt was habitual, he contrived to let her know with his first sentence that he remembered the circumstances of their previous meeting, and retained a vivid an ineradicable recollection of invaluable contributions made by Laura to the conversation on that occasion.
Against all reason, she felt dimly flattered and encouraged. They talked about books.
Then lunch was announced.
Mrs. Onslow, at the foot of a black oak table with twisted legs, upon which amber-coloured glass stood on cobweb lace, begged Mrs. Temple to take the chair next to A.B.’s.
Bébée was on his other side.
(“Her face is painted like a savage,” reflected Laura, with her usual injustice, and employing a totally unjustifiable si
mile for Miss Kingsley-Browne’s exquisite rose and vermilion.)
Laura’s other neighbour was a small, quiet American gentleman, who asked, with sense and firmness, to be told her name, and in return informed her with a grave smile that his own was Jenkins.
“Montague Edward Jenkins.”
“I have a boy called Edward,” said Laura.
“Indeed! And is he in the Army?”
“He is in the nursery,” said Laura, dashed. Mr. Jenkins looked disconcerted.
“Oh, of course, of course,” he agreed. “That would be so. And does he come with you to London?”
“No. I left my two little boys in the country with their father.”
In vain did Laura wish that she had not entered upon this familiar domestic vein. She found it impossible to abandon it.
Mr. Jenkins seemed anxious to make amends for his former tactlessness, and made minute enquiries into all the characteristics of Laura’s children.
“I’m sure,” said Mrs. Onslow with a kind smile, at a lull in the conversation, “that you’re talking about the children. I hear you’re such a wonderful mother.”
“It sounds like an earwig,” dejectedly replied Mrs. Temple.
She was considerably relieved by the laughter that ensued; and Edward and Johnnie were allowed to give place to a discussion on the latest volume of autobiography.
“You’ve read it, of course?”
“As a matter of fact, I saw it in manuscript,” returned Onslow. “It’s a stupendous piece of work. He had to go to Albania for six months to get the last half written.”
“Why Albania?” Bébée enquired, voicing Laura’s own curiosity.
“To get the right atmosphere. He can’t Write at all in England. He tried London, and Yorkshire, and Cornwall, and they were all hopeless.”
“He came to us for a little while,” said Mrs. Onslow, shaking her head. “I thought perhaps that if he had perfect quiet, and a room overlooking the river — and his meals, of course, whenever he could manage them — he doesn’t touch anything except black coffee and stewed figs — he might be able to work. But he couldn’t. He used to come down in the evenings looking ghastly, and say that he’d been in hell.”
Laura instinctively glanced round the table, wondering if her own inclination to comment flippantly upon so poor a recognition of hospitality was out of place.
She could not doubt that it was.
Bébée was looking soulfully at her host, but every other face wore an expression of concern for the difficulties that had momentarily overcome genius.
“It’s most curious, that inability to produce one’s best work except in the right surroundings,” said Onslow. “Personally, I can work almost anywhere, provided that I can get absolute quiet.”
“He really is wonderful,” his wife agreed. “I’ve known A.B. to sit down at Granada, and write in the hotel drawing-room or on the terrace of our tiny little villa at Capri. Surroundings make no difference to him.”
A lady in round, tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles spoke from the other side of the table.
“I prefer to write, or, rather, dictate, in bed. Many people, I know, find bed quite impossible. But I’m not strong, as you know” — Mrs. Onslow made a sympathetic sound of corroboration— “My wretched back won’t let me sit up for long. So I simply stay there until lunch time every day and dictate for two and a half hours, sometimes more.”
“Do you really?”
A. B. Onslow’s intonation expressed an almost incredulous admiration.
“Do you really? That’s extraordinary. And you don’t find that the ordinary sounds of the house are intolerable?”
“They are, of course,” said the spectacled lady quickly. “But I’ve trained myself to disregard them. It can be done, I assure you. There are double doors to my room, and no one is allowed to come near it until after twelve o’clock; I, of course, am invisible to everyone except my secretary, until I’ve finished the morning’s work.”
“To me, it’s so marvellous that you should be able to work like that to order,” Mr. Jenkins remarked. “Don’t you ever feel that you lack inspiration, and must put off work till the evening, say?”
“No. No. I never feel that. In the evenings I need people. The interchange of ideas — conversation — people. They stimulate me.”
“Wonderful!” said another lady, whom Laura had thought of as wealthy rather than talented, owing to her clothes and the fabulous size of her pearls. “I need complete silence and isolation. I often think of poor Carlyle, and his sound-proof room. And I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no such thing. I have a bungalow on the Sussex Downs, you know, to which I retire whenever I write. But even there, I’m sent nearly mad. A dog barks, or there’s a fly buzzing in the room. Never absolute silence.”
“Leave England,” advised her neighbour, a fair man with enormous and prominent eyes, and an enormous and prominent Adam’s apple, in whom Laura thought that she recognised a reasonably well known poet. “Leave England. It’s the only thing to do. I was six months in the Sahara last year.”
Laura’s head was reeling slightly.
Evidently, she thought, none of these talented people were bound by any domestic ties whatsoever. The lady who was sent nearly mad by the bark of a dog and the buzz of a fly could never have produced a Johnnie or an Edward, and subjected her reason to the far greater strain of existence in their neighbourhood. The tortoise-shell-glassed lady, who was invisible to everyone but her secretary all the morning, either possessed a supernaturally efficient housekeeper, or else no servants at all. The Sahara — Albania — Granada hotels — villas at Capri — Laura contemplated for one hysterical moment, announcing that whenever she wrote a short story, she found it essential to cross the Pacific Ocean in a balloon.
But when A. B. Onslow turned to her with his charming air of finding himself in suspense until her answer came, she only said:
“Devonshire is very delightful, I always find.”
“Ah, you get beautiful surroundings there, and quiet and solitude!” he replied in a tone of understanding. “How wise of you, Mrs. Temple! But you don’t give your whole time to your work, do you?”
“No,” said Laura with some feeling. “Not my whole time. No.”
“That’s wise, too. Every creative effort ought to be followed by a period of absolute rest. The mind ought to lie fallow for a time. You’ve found that out?”
“Yes,” said Laura, and was preparing to say more when she perceived that Miss Kingsley-Browne was listening to her, with something faintly cynical in her meditative gaze.
The course of the discussion, stemmed by Laura’s unnaturally curtailed contribution, turned into other channels.
It became incumbent upon Mrs. Temple either to remain silent, or to pretend that she was as much au fait with contemporary French poetry as was the circle of the A. B. Onslows. From prudence, rather than from conscientiousness, she chose the former course.
And the moment she became silent, she began to think about Duke Ayland.
It was better than thinking about her own inadequacy as a conversationalist which had always, on similar occasions in the past, obsessed her.
Duke had not found her at all inadequate.
Bébée Kingsley-Browne, so obviously enslaving her rather more than middle-aged host, had not attracted Duke as Laura had done.
For the first time in several years, Laura looked at her expensively-clad and elaborately-coloured young neighbour without resentment.
It seemed to her that Bébée was making a display of the flirtatious terms upon which she found herself with the celebrated A. B. Onslow. She addressed herself exclusively to him, and called him “A. B.” with marked assurance, and made many allusions to a past and a present equally shared.
Mrs. Onslow, at whom Laura glanced, seemed to wear a very faintly harassed expression — that of one who sees the approach of a tiresome, but familiar, recurrent phenomenon.
After lunch, she took a seat beside
Laura, in the flagged garden, to which coffee was brought by the austere butler.
“Bébée’s mother is a neighbour of yours, I think? We met at her house, I know.”
“Yes. They’re our nearest neighbours.”
“The girl is a pretty creature,” said Mrs. Onslow, with, however, only a tempered admiration in her eyes.
“Very pretty. We always think her a little bit spoilt, though. I daresay it’s natural.”
“Oh, most natural. She’s attractive, and certainly pretty, though personally — so much make-up — but then, they all do it, nowadays. I often wonder why. I don’t think,” said Mrs. Onslow artlessly, “that really nice men admire it, you know.”
It seemed a little bit difficult to agree, and tacitly brand her host as something less than really nice, or to disagree, and emphasise his already evident infatuation.
Laura murmured.
Without making any definite statement, she found herself obscurely hinting at the existence of the eligible Vulliamy, and at Lady Kingsley-Browne’s high hopes that a safe anchorage would shortly receive the volatile barque of her daughter’s affections.
Mrs. Onslow brightened, and said that she believed in marriages, especially for girls, and when Mrs. Temple rose to go away, she was cordially invited to come again.
“No one can say that I’ve been an absolute failure there,” was the singular form of congratulation tendered to Laura by her own inner monitor, as she left the house.
She rehearsed to herself the witty and trenchant phrases in which she would presently, for Christine’s amusement, delineate her fellow-guests.
(Alfred was very seldom amused by accounts of festivities at which he had not been present — and still less by those at which he had, since in these he found inaccuracy, which he disliked.)
Christine was as appreciative as her sister had expected her to be, and as unmaliciously satirical on the inexhaustible topic of Miss Kingsley-Browne’s latest lapses from decent behaviour. Then she remarked:
“You’ll hardly believe it, Laura — I always say I have the devil’s own luck — but I have got an invitation for the theatre for us both. Do you remember Vulliamy?”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 291