“How are Edward and Johnnie, Mrs. Temple?” Cynthia politely enquired. “We haven’t come across them at the dancing-class lately.”
“It’s getting rather hot for dancing, isn’t it? I don’t think they’ll go again till September.”
Cynthia looked surprised and said: “Theodore and I don’t ever think it’s too hot for dancing, do we, Theodore ?”
“No, we never do. We dance in the garden sometimes. Shall we dance for you after tea?”
“Thank you very much,” said Laura, not, however, committing herself to any assent.
“You must come over to tea with Johnnie and Edward one of these days,” she added.
“Thank you, Mrs. Temple, we should like that very much. Do they play Mah Jongh?”
“Not yet.”
“They are rather small, aren’t they?” Cynthia said kindly. “But I daresay we could teach them.”
“We are so fond of the tinies,” said Mrs. Bakewell aside to Laura. “When we go to a party, we always have a crowd of babies round us immediately. Really quite wonderful, in that way.”
A ball went over the net into a distant flower-bed, and Laura was forced to admire the alacrity with which Cynthia and Theodore leapt up unbidden in pursuit, no less than the efficiency with which they found the ball and returned it to the players.
“Theodore is such a regular boy,” Mrs. Bakewell said confidentially to Laura. “Anything to do with a ball — it doesn’t matter what it is — and just the same with machinery!”
Whatever Mrs. Bakewel’s syntax, her meaning was clear.
“Johnnie cares more for books than anything else,” Laura said firmly. “He really has quite a good memory.”
“Has he — now has he!” Mrs. Bakewell absent-mindedly ejaculated. “I wonder where he gets that from. Up to seven years old, my treasures have always run wild. The doctor wouldn’t hear of anything else. There are brains enough there, he used to say — more than enough. Build up the bodies first, and you’ll find when they do begin, that they’ll get on all the faster. And I’m bound to say that he was right. Lessons have never been any trouble to us. I taught each in turn to read, at seven years old. Not a day before.”
“Johnnie could read quite well at five, but I don’t think it’s done him any harm.”
“Perhaps not. It’s difficult to tell, though. It’s later on that these things — but, of course, one can’t really say.”
“One can only do one’s best,” Laura assented, since the platitudes of a hostess are best met by platitudes from her guests.
“Indeed, yes, and that’s where one feels that our poor, poor friend has perhaps failed. And now this terrible retribution! (Darlings, run into the house for mother and see if tea is ready). Bébée — unfortunate girl — was always spoilt, and this is the result. Her life ruined, before she is thirty.”
Infinitesimal though Mrs. Temple’s regard might be for the object of Lady Kingsley-Browne’s over-indulgence, she found herself protesting at so trenchant a criticism.
“She is very foolish, of course — idiotic, and very badly behaved — but do you think that people’s lives are easily ruined nowadays? It seems to me that they can do almost anything, especially girls.”
“Everything is very lax, I quite agree, but I am not aware that tampering with the seventh commandment is ever looked upon lightly by decent people,” said Mrs. Bakewell with great directness.
Laura felt herself beginning to blush, whether for the outspokenness of Mrs. Bakewell, or from her own sense of guilt, she scarcely knew.
“Probably Bébée will come home again when her mother does,” she said hastily. “I daresay a great deal of it is only talk.”
Mrs. Bakewell shook her head and looked doubtful, but Cynthia and Theodore, gracefully bounding across the grass, came to tell her that tea was ready, and Laura’s tête-à-tête with her hostess came to an end.
For the remainder of the evening she played tennis very badly.
Such self-confidence as she could now boast had deserted her. The knowledge that her play was growing worse and worse, discouraged and disconcerted her, and discouragement and disconcernment, as usual, sapped her vitality, so that she felt herself becoming plainer and less attractive every moment.
It was a great relief to her when the Bakewells could be thanked, taken leave of, and left.
“I really think I’d better give up tennis altogether,” Laura dejectedly observed, in the well-worn phrase that is heard so often and so regularly every summer in rural circles. “I get worse and worse.”
“You were off your game to-day,” Alfred agreed, leniently.
“I don’t think I have ever been on it. If I ever have a daughter, I shall have her taught to play games, to dance, and to hold herself properly. I don’t believe anything else in the world matters.”
Laura’s husband, according to his wont, made no comment upon so rational and feasible a scheme of education.
The days slipped by, and already Laura’s stay in London had become dreamlike.
Duke’s letters, although she would scarcely have owned it to herself, were faintly disappointing. She did not wish him to write indiscreetly, and she knew that it was principally for her sake that he never did so, but nevertheless only the most reckless of letters could really have satisfied her, after the nature of their conversations together.
He still wrote about books, and about Laura’s work, and his own music, and he alluded — but guardedly — to their London meetings.
Laura, actually, sometimes found her replies difficult. As usual, she had not had any opportunity for reading books that everybody else was reading, until everybody else had nearly forgotten them, and she herself had done no writing at all since coming home. She found that her letters to Duke Ayland were becoming a patchwork of comments upon what he had written to her, and of humorously extravagant descriptions of domestic calamities and festivities at Applecourt. Rightly aware that this form of epistolatory wit is generally more amusing to the writer than to the reader, Laura bitterly assured herself that her letters resembled nothing so much as a most inferior imitation of Jane Welsh Carlyle’s.
She urgently desired to see Ayland again, and had a quite irrational feeling that to do so would in some way clarify the whole situation.
“Anything would be better than to go on like this,” Laura sometimes wearily thought, but she did not particularise “anything” nor really know what she meant by it, since her determination not to break with Duke was second only to her determination that she would never wrong Alfred or the children.
With a vague consciousness that she was only marking time until her next meeting with Duke Ayland, Laura returned to her accustomed routine.
It was diversified in precisely the usual manner.
“If you please, ‘m, I don’t think the new nurse quite understands about the nursery slops. It’s her place to do them and not mine, I always understood.”
“Mrs. Temple, I’m really very sorry to trouble you, but I think I ought to let you know at once that next term I’m very much afraid I shan’t be able to go on teaching the boys. My mother’s asthma…”
“I haven’t been able to do anything with the kitchen stove this morning, ‘m. I think it must be the wind”
Dear Madam,
We beg to inform you that your account is now overdrawn to the amount of Twelve Pounds Fourteen Shillings and Sevenpence…
Dear Madam,
May we very respectfully draw your attention to the enclosed account which is now considerably overdue? As our Annual Audit of Accounts commences this week, we shall be greatly obliged by your cheque at an early date.
Assuring you of our best attention at all times.
We are, dear madam,
Obediently yours,
Harker & Co.
£2 4s. 8½d.
Laura, though far from exhilarated by such communications, found them less overwhelming than she had once done, since she had now a major preoccupation to distract
her attention.
At the end of the summer, domestic calamity again overtook her, and the married couple that constituted the staff at Applecourt, gave notice. Laura advertised, went to the Registry Office, wrote letters and sent telegrams.
It was all very familiar and unsuccessful.
The evenings, which had temporarily been animated by Laura’s numerous accounts of her experiences in London, degenerated again, and Alfred read The Times, and later fell asleep, while Laura battled silently with the dismal phrases that kept on rising to her lips and that were concerned exclusively with the servants, the children and the question of expense.
Then Lady Kingsley-Browne returned home, and Laura, actuated by mixed motives of genuine compassion and still more genuine curiosity, went to see her.
Bébée’s parent was in the rose garden, snipping off dead blooms and bestowing them in a large basket.
At the approach of Laura she raised a ravaged and exhausted, but composed face, and greeted her kindly.
“So nice of you to come, dear! Let’s sit down on the stone bench — it’s so wonderfully warm, isn’t it — and tell me all about yourself.”
“At the present moment, I’m, as usual, looking for a cook. I suppose you don’t—”
Lady Kingsley-Browne shook her head.
“I’m afraid not. And I’m so sorry you’re in difficulties again. I know what it means.”
From this, Laura silently dissented, the loss of a cook in a house where a kitchen-maid and scullery-maid remain, not being in her opinion, comparable to the loss of two servants from a house in which only two servants are ever employed.
“One has so much to cope with, one way and another, but the only thing is to be philosophical. Things pass. When I find myself out here, amongst all these dear things,” said Lady Kingsley-Browne, looking down at the dead roses in her basket, “I realise that it is so true that Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse! The only thing, is not to let oneself be overwhelmed.”
The melancholy resignation of her so materially-prosperous neighbour roused Laura to agitated pity. She murmured something entirely incoherent, that yet conveyed the suggestion of a question.
Evidently poor Lady Kingsley-Browne realised only too well that any question addressed to her at the present juncture by any intimate, could have only one bearing. Although her child’s name had not been mentioned, she replied at once:
“Oh yes, she’s gone. My one comfort is that Mrs. Onslow has gone too. Poor, poor woman! What a life! Standing between her husband and his infatuations! Though I can’t possibly pretend that this is his doing, or anyone’s except poor darling Bébée’s!”
“Is she as — as determined as ever?”
“Quite, I think. I get letters from her, you know. She’s always been sweet about keeping me informed of her movements. They are in New York.”
“I wonder she wasn’t detained on Ellis Island for moral turpitude,” was the sentence that sprang to Mrs. Temple’s lips. But aloud she said:
“When are they coming back?”
“Before the end of next month, I think. Perhaps by that time—”
Lady Kingsley-Browne’s voice died away without completing the sentence, but Laura had no difficulty in deducing the unspoken conclusion. Perhaps by the time the celebrated A. B. Onslow returned to his own country he would have hit upon some efficacious manner of ridding himself once and for all of the unprincipled and immodest young creature who now persisted, with such unparalleled tenacity, in linking her existence to his.
CHAPTER XIV
Some weeks after Laura’s return from London, Duke Ayland wrote and told her he was obliged to come down to the West of England for two nights on business. Could they possibly meet?
Laura, profoundly agitated, suggested that he should come and stay at Applecourt.
Ayland, by return of post, was very sorry that this was impossible. He stated the fact without attempting to produce any explanation for it. Could Laura possibly come as far as Great Quinn and have lunch with him?
Laura honestly believed that she considered this suggestion carefully for hours.
Then she said to her husband:
“Alfred, Duke Ayland is very anxious that I should go and have lunch with him at Great Quinn and — and look at the new University Buildings.”
‘What’s he doing at Great Quinn?”
“He’s coming down on business.”
“Ask him to come on here for a day or two.”
“He can’t.”
“Do you want to see the new University Buildings?”
“I should like to go,” said Laura, trying to be truthful.
“I can take you as far as Quinnerton in the car, and you can go on by the eleven o’clock train. Which day is it? Not the meeting of the Housing Committee, I hope?”
“Wednesday.”
“That’s all right then. I can manage that.”
Laura wrote and told Ay land that she would come, and became the prey of an excitement that nearly made her ill.
“This will have to stop,” she told herself solemnly. “I can’t go on like this. I had better say good-bye to him and let it be over. If I were a young girl — and free—”
A pang went through her for her irrevocably vanished youth and for the few and poor opportunities that it had ever afforded her of misbehaving herself.
Ridiculous and fantastic visions assailed her, just as she was going to sleep at night, of Alfred suddenly announcing that he had for years been in love with another woman, and that now he intended to leave Laura and the children and to marry her. Becoming slightly more wakeful, doubts assailed her even of the practicability of this solution.
Duke and the children seemed somehow a rather improbable combination, although he had been so nice to them. Edward, yes. You could give Edward a ball, or a Meccano set, or tell him that he should go out to tea with other children, and Edward was happy and generally good. But Johnnie — with his insistent demands for attention, his uncannily acute powers of observation, and his violent, incalculable temper! Impossible to suppose that Johnnie would ever endure the sight of his mother’s absorption in anybody but himself.
And if Alfred objected to the excess of time and thought bestowed by Laura on her younger son, surely Duke might be expected to resent it with equal intensity, and a great deal more articulateness ?
“But it couldn’t possibly happen, after all,” the semiwakeful half of Laura’s consciousness murmured, and she was deeply and irrationally relieved by the thought.
For the two days preceding that of her expedition, many things conspired to discourage Laura from any very great exhilaration of spirits.
“Mummie, can I go with you to Great Quinn when you go?”
“No, darling, I’m afraid not.”
“Then can I?” Edward, as usual, imitated his junior, in defiance of every law of probability.
“No, I can’t take either of you.”
“I wish you didn’t go away so often, mummie.”
“Darling, I don’t go away often.”
“You went to London the other day, for ages and ages. Shall you be back in time to have us downstairs before we go to bed?”
“I’m not — Well, I’ll try to be, Edward. Don’t kick the piano, darling!”
“Why not?” enquired Edward, looking astonished.
“Because it spoils it. I’ve told you often. Shall I see if Cynthia and Theodore Bakewell could come and spend the afternoon with you to-morrow?”
“No, thank you,” said Johnnie, shuddering affectedly.
Edward looked wistful, but Laura’s sympathies, as usual, were on Johnnie’s side, and she did not press the offer.
“Run out and play, darlings.”
Then Hilda, the departing house-parlourmaid, came in with a telegram between her fingers. Laura, who disliked correcting her servants because she imaginatively supposed that it must humiliate them, felt with relief that as she was to leave next day, it was not worth while to send Hilda back
for the salver.
She opened and read the message.
Sorry cannot arrive before Wednesday same train Johnson.
Laura felt herself turning pale.
“No answer. It’s from — It’s — Oh, Hilda, please tell the boy there’s no answer, and then come back here a minute, would you?”
During the brief interval in which this errand was accomplished, Laura re-read the telegram five times, and fully realised the extent of the calamity it implied. The new cook had elected to postpone her arrival. Instead of being “settled in,” as the official, if optimistic, phrase runs, by her mistress the day before her own expedition, she intended to arrive on the very afternoon when Laura had expected and decided to meet Ayland in Great Quinn.
“Hilda,” said Laura in a controlled voice, “the new cook whom I have engaged is unfortunately prevented from arriving to-morrow.”
“Is she, ‘m?” Hilda clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and looked amused.
“She is only delaying till Wednesday — at least I hope that’s all.”
“The day after to-morrow like,” Hilda suggested.
“Yes. The only thing that’s rather awkward is that I want to go to Great Quinn on Wednesday for the day.”
“It’s early closing day on Wednesday, ‘m.”
“Is it? But that wouldn’t make any difference. I mean, I wanted to see the new University Buildings.”
Hilda made no reply.
“I suppose your own plans are fixed up?”
“Yes, ‘m, they are.”
Of course they were. Laura reflected, not for the first time, how easy it was for servants to replace unsatisfactory employers, and how complicated the reverse process.
“I shouldn’t at all wish you to alter your arrangements in any way on my account, but if you hadn’t been actually settled, I should have asked you to stay on another twenty-four hours.”
“Yes, ‘m,” said Hilda, simulating perplexity.
“Why not speak to Price about it?”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 296