“I daresay I shouldn’t have believed myself,” Laura declared sympathetically. “I can’t imagine what can have happened. Is it about Bébée?”
“Indeed it is! Have you heard anything?”
“Not a word.”
“But it can only be a question of time before you do,” said Lady Kingsley-Browne, again in tears.
“Is she going to have a baby?” Christine suggested — giving Laura a slight shock.
But the distraught parent of Miss Kingsley-Browne appeared to have passed beyond shocks. “No, she is not going to have a baby, as far as I know. But nothing could surprise me now — nothing in the world. Could you yourselves ever have imagined that any girl could behave so insanely?”
“You haven’t yet told us how she has behaved.”
“It seems so dreadful, put into words. Bébée — you know how fastidious she has always been, and what a choice of men she had always had at her feet — Bébée has fallen in love with a married man.”
“Is that all?” said Christine. “But heaps of girls do that nowadays. Nobody thinks anything of it, truly.”
“Is it A. B. Onslow?” Laura asked.
“Of course it is. Why, I can’t think. Of course I know he must be very clever, and Bébée has always been very clever too, but when she could have had a choice of young men—”
“What has happened to Mr. Vulliamy?”
“What could have happened, except that he has gone away? He never even proposed. She let him see quite plainly that she cared for nobody but Onslow. She — I suppose one ought to admire her for it — but she seems to have no shame about it at all.”
“I don’t think one ought to admire her for it in the least,” cried Christine. “It’s preposterous of her! What about poor Mrs. Onslow, after all?”
“What indeed! Of course, being married to a writer, she may be used — but on the other hand, he’s not young now.”
“It must be very much his fault,” Laura suggested, sacrificing both her fellow-writer and her own convictions out of pure compassion.
“The terrible thing is that it isn’t. At least, not now it isn’t, though I don’t say he wasn’t attracted by her in the beginning. Men are always attracted by Bébée instantly,” said poor Lady Kingsley-Browne, with a reviving flash of her slaughtered pride.
“I know they are,” Laura could afford to say.
“It’s always been she who was the indifferent one. There have been times, I assure you, when I’ve begged her to be a little bit kinder to people, simply for fear of their blowing their brains out, or something like that. One never knows, does one?”
“Never,” said Laura gravely, desirous only of calming the unhappy matron looking up at her with drowned eyes.
Christine was less single-minded.
“But about A. B. Onslow? Isn’t he — doesn’t he — you aren’t afraid of his blowing his brains out?”
“Indeed no. He is much more likely to blow Bébée’s brains out, from what I hear.”
“What a good thing! I don’t mean that, exactly, but surely, if he is being sensible, and not losing his head, it will put an end to the whole thing.”
“You would think so, wouldn’t you? Any rational person would think so. But Bébée, poor, poor darling — that I should live to say such a thing — is not rational. She says — she says that whether he knows it or not, they are necessary to one another, and — and that nothing will induce her to leave him until — she has made him realise it.”
A scandalised silence descended upon the room at this outrageous quotation, delivered amidst floods of tears, by the unhappy parent of its originator.
“Leave him?” said Christine at last in low, aghast tones. “Do you mean, then, that she has — has gone to him?”
“She went to stay there a week ago. I — I don’t think they invited her, exactly. Certainly Mrs. Onslow didn’t. But she went. And now they can’t get her to go away again.”
“I saw her there the other day, of course,” Laura exclaimed. “I didn’t know she was actually staying, in the house — but of course I saw her there.”
“How — how did they strike you?”
“I didn’t notice anything very unusual. Bébée was rather — rather inclined to sit in his pocket perhaps.”
“Yes, yes — I know she was.”
“She was very — very — in quite good spirits, wasn’t she?” Laura hesitated, as the recollection of Miss Kingsley-Browne’s unholy bloom and intemperate exhibition of her conquest rushed upon her afresh. “And he was more or less as usual — the fact is, I know him so little. Of course, one saw that they were on — on friendly terms, but, as you say, men are very apt to admire her.”
“There is hardly an eligible man in London that she couldn’t have had if she’d wanted him,” Lady Kingsley-Browne exclaimed, in impassioned exaggeration. “And to think that she should lose her head about a man who is really old enough to be her grandfather, and who doesn’t even encourage her!”
“I have never heard anything so dreadful in all my life,” Christine remarked, with entire conviction. “Do you actually mean that she has foisted herself upon that unfortunate man — to say nothing of his wife — and that nothing they can do or say can rid them of her?”
The visitor winced.
“You are putting it rather crudely, perhaps,” she said unhappily, “but — yes — in effect, that is exactly what she is doing.”
“She must be mad!”
“That is exactly what I said myself, when Mrs. Onslow — in despair, poor thing — rang me up on the telephone, to ask what they were to do.”
“What they were to do!” ejaculated Laura in her turn. “What more can they do, beyond asking her to leave the house — and that you say she won’t do. Can they — can he — possibly have made it clear to her that they had rather she went?”
“Perfectly clear, I gather,” said Lady Kingsley-Browne in a low and most unhappy voice. “She insisted upon quoting to me exactly what she had said to Bébée — I did not want to hear in the very least, but she insisted on telling me — and I assure you that if she said what she told me she said, nobody in the world could have failed to understand what she meant.”
“And Bébée wouldn’t go?”
“She said that she could perfectly understand Mrs. Onslow’s resentment, but that a — an admiration such as hers transcends anything like that, and that A. B. owes it to his work to — to — Her actual expression was, to take all that she has to give him.”
“Good God!” said Christine.
There was another silence, in which more, and worse, implications seemed to multiply themselves every moment.
“I am more sorry than I can say, and so is Christine,” said Laura at last. “Is there anything at all that we can do?”
“Yes — yes, I think there is. Of course, you must wonder why I’ve told you at all. It isn’t a story that any mother would tell for her own amusement, is it? But I can’t help thinking that you might possibly have some influence over my poor darling if only you would try.”
Laura, in spite of herself, made a gesture of horrified protest at the suggestion.
“Don’t, don’t say you won’t. You are my only hope, just now. You see, you’re literary yourself, and so she can’t say that you don’t understand about that side of things, as she does to me, and A. B. seems to have told her that he liked you, and thought you so very clever. I know you go and see them, and I thought perhaps you’d be so very, very good as to see Bébée, and perhaps talk to her, and bring her to reason. Please, please don’t refuse. I am in such despair.”
It was evident that she was, and not indeed without ample cause, Laura reflected.
“But what will the Onslows think?” she temporised feebly.
“They would go down upon their knees to anyone who would get her out of the house,” said the mother of Miss Kingsley-Browne, with the reckless outspokenness of sheer despair.
“I don’t see why she should pay any a
ttention to me.”
“She might. Girls will almost always listen to anyone who isn’t a relation. And she knows you’re clever, and that you write, and yet — if I may say so — you are so — so — so respectable. Married, and in the county, and all that sort of thing. Oh, I am being so stupid — but if you only knew how much I’ve cried, you’d understand.”
“I do understand. I’m so dreadfully sorry. I’ll try, if you like.”
“I can’t ever thank you enough. No, don’t come with me, please. I’d rather go down alone. I can pick up a taxi. I’m very grateful to you both.”
She tottered from the room leaving Christine and Laura looking at one another.
At last Christine said in a hushed voice:
“How utterly and absolutely incredible!”
“I don’t know. I’ve always felt that I could believe anything of Bay-bay.”
“Oh, good gracious, yes, so have I. I meant, how extraordinary to see poor Lady Kingsley-Browne in such a state. Reduced to asking us, of all people, for help. Poor, poor wretch! Did you see how she positively fled, after you’d said yes, before you had time to change your mind?”
“She showed her sense,” said Laura gloomily, “for if I’d had even one minute more in which to think, I should have said that nothing would induce me to take on such a job. What on earth am I to do?”
“You can only try, and if you do fail, there’s an end of it. But I can’t believe that even Bay-bay, if it’s put to her in black and white, will insist upon staying on with people who would go down upon their knees before anybody who would rid them of her, as her mother so explicitly put it.”
“I suppose that I had better go to-morrow morning.”
“Don’t let it spoil the theatre party for you to-night,” Christine begged. “If you can’t get it out of your mind, why don’t you talk to Losh about it? He adores anything to do with abnormality — and you needn’t say who the girl is.”
“I might, perhaps. He’s the one who told us about that — that unfortunate German, who had a complex about his grandmother, isn’t he?”
“Yes. Losh always tells one about cases of that sort. You didn’t mind, did you?”
“No,” said Laura doubtfully. “Oh, no. Not at all. Why should I? Everybody talks about everything now. Not so much in the country, though. In fact, hardly at all in the country. I don’t know what people will say about Bébée, at Quinnerton.”
“Bébée, of course, is being perfectly preposterous. But apart from her, do you think people in the country are still as moral as they used to be? For instance—” Christine looked away from her sister— “does anyone who is married already, ever have any sort of an affair, or would the skies fall?”
“I think,” replied Laura, with some deliberation, “that the skies would probably fall.”
It was a positive relief to discuss with Christine, however obliquely, the question that had been in the atmosphere between them for days now.
“Of course, it might be worth while to let them fall — but one would have to be quite certain that it was,” Christine said.
“Children and things.”
“Oh yes.”
“And exactly how much one could count upon the other person. It might so easily be a case of out of the frying-pan into the fire.”
“Do you mean divorce? That kind of thing?”
“Yes, that kind of thing. I mean to say, one would prefer it to be one thing or the other, I suppose. Not just meeting at a pub half-way between London and Quinnerton and saying it was the dentist, or any hole-and-corner business of that kind.”
Laura shuddered in entirely genuine disgust.
“What an extraordinarily offensive way of wording it!”
“Well, that’s what it would boil down to,” said Christine doggedly. “The only alternative that I can see, would be running away altogether, or else chucking the whole thing for good and all.”
“Which would you do?”
“Chuck it,” said Christine without hesitation. “If I did leave one man, it wouldn’t be in order to go to another man.”
“But if you loved him?”
“I should be more likely to stay loving him, if we weren’t living together. Truly, Laura, I’m not being cheaply cynical. If one has married the wrong person, more or less — and after all, almost anyone feels like the wrong person after one’s lived with them for a number of years, I imagine — surely it’s better to go on, than to begin all over again with somebody else. It’s such waste of all the adjusting that one has learnt to do. Because the awful thing is, that one love affair is very like another. It gets to a certain pitch, and then — practically always — it declines. And it seems to me it would decline even faster than usual, if the woman knew all the time that she’d given up, say, her children for the sake of the man.”
A revulsion of feeling came over Laura.
“When you talk about giving up children, it makes one realise how utterly impossible and out of the question it would ever be, to do anything of the sort.”
“Of course.”
“I’m not speaking personally, but simply on general principles.”
“Yes, I know.”
“That sort of thing seems to be in the air, rather. What with Bébée and A. B., and one thing and another.”
At one thing and another, they left it.
But Laura knew that her younger sister, to whom she had never denied both shrewdness and candour, and to whom she was — more reluctantly — obliged to concede an experience of men wider than her own, had pronounced her verdict upon Laura’s problem of the emotions.
Christine’s theatre-party was a success, as her parties almost always were, whether she was the hostess, or the guest.
However improbable it might have seemed in advance that a quartette composed of Mr. Jeremy Vulliamy, Laura and her sister, and the psychopathic Losh, should derive intense and lively satisfaction from one another’s society, it came to pass that they did so.
The dinner was delightful, the play was amusing, and before the end of it Vulliamy had begged them all to come on somewhere and have supper and dance.
“Impossible for me, worse luck,” said the medical student. “I’ve got an abdominal at nine o’clock to-morrow. A chap with a—”
“That will do, Losh,” said Christine. “Laura, we could, couldn’t we?”
“I think I’ll go home, darling, if you don’t mind. Thank you very much, Mr. Vulliamy, but—”
“All right,” Christine interposed promptly. “I’ll go with you and we’ll make a night of it. You won’t sit up, will you, Laura?”
Laura’s lips assented, while Laura’s incurably Victorian mind recalled how she and Christine had learned, at their mother’s knee, that nothing was more fatal than for any girl to let any man perceive that she liked being taken out by him.
Vulliamy, however — and Laura now recalled that Lady Kingsley-Browne — in days other, and for herself, happier — had once spoken of him as the future richest commoner in England — Vulliamy lost none of his evident enthusiasm for Christine and her society.
Losh took Laura home.
He was an unkempt, untidy-haired creature, with a ceaseless flow of technical conversation, but he was likeable, and possessed a sense of humour.
His first observation was of that outspoken character to which Laura was by now becoming entirely accustomed.
“Christine’s got off with Vulliamy all right. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Well, I’m not surprised.”
“She is attractive, isn’t she?” Laura said, and immediately felt she was being like Lady Kingsley-Browne.
“She’s a darling, of course. I’ve been in love with her for years — with interludes, naturally. But I always knew she’d end by marrying a fellow with money. Vulliamy has money, tons of money. And will have more.”
“I believe so.”
“Well, he’s a good sort. I hope they’ll be happy.”
“But don’t you think you’re
going rather fast?”
“No. No, I don’t think so. I don’t know Vulliamy at all well — in fact I hadn’t seen him since we were at school together, I don’t believe, till just the other day — but I can tell he’s in earnest. You see, he was in love with a girl who let him down rather badly, and he’d got all keyed up about her, and then Christine came along, and got him on the rebound. Reaction. It’s a well known psychological phenomenon. The other girl, from what I can gather, is a nymphomaniac. Neither more nor less.”
“I see,” said Laura hastily.
“I don’t know whether you understand—”
“Oh, perfectly.”
“So it’s quite natural that he should be attracted by Christine, who’s an absolutely opposite type. So normal, sexually, as to be almost abnormal, in these days.”
“I think this is us,” said Laura, as the taxi stopped.
“Good night,” said Losh. “I say, don’t mind my saying so, please, and don’t think me interfering — I don’t mean to be — but I wish you’d read some Jung.”
“But I have.”
“Then read more. Talk about what you read. You know, you’re afraid of your biological fate — so many women are — and the only way to get the libido into the right channel is to take out the whole question of Sex and look at it. You’re not vexed with me?”
“No,” said Laura forbearingly. “I’m not vexed with you. But if you had ever stayed at Quinnerton, which is where I live, you would understand why I don’t take out the whole question of Sex and look at it. Good-night. Thank you for bringing me back.”
“Good-night. The best thing for you to do, probably, would be to leave Quinnerton.”
“I can’t. I don’t want to, either. Good-night.”
“Good-night. Inhibitions — especially sexual ones — can be—”
“Good-night,” said Laura for the last time, and went upstairs.
Greatly perturbed, she went straight to the looking glass.
Why should everybody, even casual young men, assume that she needed advice, that she was in a fog of uncertainty? Did they also know what it was about?
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 294