Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “Mummie, couldn’t you stop that noise?”

  “What noise?”

  “Outside,” said Johnnie pathetically. “Motors and things.”

  “You’ll get used to it, darling. Don’t think about it.”

  Johnnie, justifiably enough, received his parent’s counsel of perfection with contempt.

  “I suppose nurse’ll be back by the time we want to start for the Criterion?” said Christine aside to her sister.

  “I hope so. I told her to be.”

  “Shall I sit with them while you dress?”

  “They never do have anybody to sit with them,” said Laura doubtfully.

  “I haven’t any room,” said Edward loudly and suddenly, and pushed the dividing bolster with violence.

  Johnnie pushed it back again.

  “You go and dress, Laura. Keep still, boys, and I’ll tell you a story.”

  Laura dressed herself frantically.

  Her hair seemed lank and stiff, although she had washed it only two days earlier, the powder lay on her face in blotches, and on her nose not at all, and her neck and arms seemed suddenly to have become abnormally thin.

  “I’ve looked perfectly nice all these days — why should I suddenly turn into a hag just when Alfred and I are dining out together in London for the first time in years?” Laura silently inquired of her unsatisfactory reflection in the mirror.

  Her black dress made her look sallow, and emphasised the shadows under her eyes.

  Alfred knocked at the door, came in, and was appealed to by Laura.

  “What am I to do? I’ve never looked such a sight in my life. It’s this frock, I think. Black never suits me.

  “Well, well,” said Alfred kindly. “Don’t worry, my dear. After all, it’s Christine they’re coming to see, more than us, isn’t it? I dare say no one will look at your frock.”

  More dejected than ever, Laura went to the children while Christine went to dress.

  She came back in apple-green and silver, her fair hair looking quite golden, her mouth artificially — and most becomingly — scarlet.

  “Alfred is quite right,” thought Laura. “Why on earth should anyone look at me, or my frock?”

  She was very nearly relieved to know that Duke Ayland would not see her that evening. But the recollection that followed — that he would not see her on the following evening either, and that she was going home the day after that, made her miserable.

  Nurse as nearly as possible made them all late for dinner, since Laura refused to leave the boys alone, and Alfred refused to receive his guests without her, but she arrived breathlessly just as Christine announced coldly that it was eight o’clock.

  “I’m very sorry if I’m late, madam, it’s such a way from Balham.”

  Laura remembered Queen’s Park, where old cousin Louisa lived, and felt the parallel complete.

  The Temple dinner party was too strictly a family affair to be wholly successful. The relations of Laura and Christine did, indeed, congratulate Christine warmly and kindly, but they also displayed a faint tendency to wonder whether she had ever done anything to deserve so much good fortune. And again Laura was sensible of a slight disposition on the part of everybody to treat her as though she were Christine’s mother,

  They were all very kind, and very cheerful, but there was none of the abandon that had characterised the gatherings of Christine’s friends, as distinguished from her relations.

  Family parties, Laura reflected, never display abandon. Impossible to present to one’s relations any aspect of oneself beside the one to which they have always been accustomed, and which they expect. They labelled one, as it were, in one’s nursery days: “Mary’s Laura is so fond of reading,” or “little Christine is the quiet one,” and if, later on, one liked dancing as well as reading, or became animated, rather than quiet, they did not seem to notice it.

  Laura, in the view of her relations, had long been “Laura lives right in the country,” and they adapted their conversation to her supposedly rural point of view.

  It was comparatively early when the party came to an end, and the Temples and Christine returned to the Knightsbridge Hotel.

  “Good night,” said Christine. “Thank you so much for the party. I thought it all went off splendidly.”

  They heard her singing in her bedroom:

  “The more we are together

  The merrier we shall be.”

  “I suppose,” said Alfred, with some solemnity, to his wife, “that girls nowadays don’t have to be told things the night before their wedding?”

  “Certainly not,” said Laura. “They didn’t have to in my day, either.”

  Alfred knew to a week the difference in age between Laura and her sister, but even with him it seemed necessary to establish the fact that they really did belong to the same generation.

  The wedding of Christine and Jeremy, next day, was to Laura a bewildering, exhausting medley of subjective and objective impressions.

  She was, at one and the same time, the sister of the bride, the hostess, together with — strangely — the wealthy Mrs. Vulliamy, at a social occasion of some magnitude, the mother of two little pages, of whom everybody said, “Aren’t they too sweet?” and the wife of Alfred Temple, who farmed his own land in the depths of the country.

  And she was Laura Temple, loving, and loved by, Duke Ayland.

  She wished that she could have been aware of herself in one of these aspects, and one only.

  Her good looks, now for ever fallen between the two stools of Greek-nymph and woman of the world, were still under a cloud and she put on her coffee-coloured lace dress, and hat with a curving feather, very badly, because she was hovering helpfully between the respective toilets of Christine and the boys.

  “Madam, they look a picture,” said nurse, referring entirely to the boys.

  “That blue suits them both,” Laura answered with calm, for fear of making them vain, and gazing at them with untempered adoration in her face. But she knew, and she knew that nurse knew, that Johnnie’s curls — as usual — gave him a vast advantage over his brother.

  She was, in her heart, glad to remember that both the little girl bridesmaids were taller, older, and plainer than Johnnie, and that the hair of both was perfectly straight.

  Undoubtedly Johnnie — after the bride herself — would be the clou of the procession.

  Christine’s wedding-dress, her newly-acquired pearls, her lace veil with soft bunches of orange-blossoms on either side of her face, suited her admirably, and she had powdered her face artistically, and entirely omitted to rouge it.

  She was so calm that Laura thought she must be inwardly a little agitated.

  The sisters looked at one another, smiled, and then Laura kissed Christine, felt furiously indignant at the realisation that she wanted to cry, and said in a strangled voice:

  “You look perfectly lovely. Alfred is downstairs, quite ready, and he’s ordered the car to be at the door five minutes after we’ve started. I’m taking the boys now.”

  “All right,” said Christine, in a perfectly natural voice. “Tell Alfred to walk up the aisle slowly. I never can bear a bride who scuttles.”

  “How modern one gets,” thought Laura, absurdly, remembering the infectious agitation of all her own nearest relations on the occasion of her marriage to Alfred.

  She had supposed that in the church she would see Duke Ayland, since he had taken pains to inform her of the spot at which he intended to place himself, but actually, she saw only the most unexpected people, such as Poor Selina, in a hat entirely composed of pink and mauve orchids, and a vaguely familiar smile, above white kid gloves and gold bracelets, that suddenly identified itself as belonging to Mrs. LaTrobe.

  “Dear little people!” murmured Laura automatically.

  There was a red carpet, and a striped awning, and the usual crowds of people outside the porch, and a group of clergymen with bald heads and fluttering white surplices, inside it.

  Johnnie and
Edward and the two little bridesmaids stared at one another with hostility, were reluctantly compelled into partnership, and left in charge of their nurses and of a competent and elegantly dressed person whom Laura never remembered to have seen before.

  She turned into the church.

  “Mummie! Are you going away?”

  “It’s all right, dear,” said everybody, making reassuring signs to Edward.

  Laura looked round frenziedly for nurse, who nodded.

  “How does one wed?” she heard Johnnie inquire in loud, interested tones of the nearest clergyman, in accordance with his habitual instinct for focussing the general attention upon himself.

  The church seemed wonderfully full.

  A strange young man, with a face like a harlequin, murmured something that Laura did not hear, but to which she replied, “I am the bride’s sister,” and begged her to come with him.

  She obediently followed him up the church, to a front row of chairs, of which two nearest the aisle were vacant. In the corresponding row on the other side, she saw the bending form and aquiline profile of Mrs. Vulliamy, and the tail-coated outline of Mr. Vulliamy beyond her. A Vulliamy aunt, with diamonds, and two expensively-clad, attenuated daughters, were immediately behind them.

  They bowed gravely to Laura, who bowed back again.

  The organ stopped and then began again. It played a well-known hymn that Laura recognised as the signal for the bride’s entrance. In a sudden panic, she looked for Jeremy, about whom she had altogether forgotten.

  But he was there, at the chancel steps, almost entirely indistinguishable, unless one knew him very well indeed, from his best man. But then, so are almost all bridegrooms.

  Alfred was conducting Christine up the aisle…not scuttling…and her bouquet, that Laura had not seen before, and that must have been mysteriously waiting at the very door of the church, made her look even more exquisitely bridal.…Then the children…

  But Laura really only looked at Johnnie, who was fortunately on the side nearest to her. He was the youngest, and the only one with a mop of curls, and he wore a serious, intent, innocent expression that made his mother want to burst into tears.

  Then he caught sight of her, and at his sudden, joyful radiance, Laura, whilst smiling back again, felt two enormous tears roll from her eyes.

  To cry at a wedding — could anything be more banal, sentimental and unmodern ?

  She bit her lip violently, and fixed her eyes upon the baldest and most prominent of the clergymen.

  The service proceeded, and Christine Fairfield exchanged her name for the less euphonious one of Jeremy Vulliamy.

  Laura was thinking of her sister, and of Alfred — who had said “I do” under pressure from the baldest clergyman, and had then looked rather appealingly at Laura, and come to occupy the seat next her — and of the boys, now fidgeting mildly, and of the words of the marriage service. But she was also thinking, retrospectively, of her own wedding.

  Had she been more in love than Christine now was, or less?

  Did it really matter whether one was in love or not?

  She had been glad to be married, but not radiantly happy.

  Not nearly as happy as on the evening when Duke Ayland had told her that he loved her.

  Being glad to be married was not the same thing as being radiantly happy because one was marrying a man with whom one was in love.

  Laura felt a pang of passionate self-pity, because she had not known that rapture, and would never know it.

  In order to stifle it, she reminded herself indignantly how much less becoming her wedding dress had been than Christine’s now was. There had been a veil over her face, too, and she remembered still how insufferably it had tickled the point of her nose.

  A discourse was beginning.

  Laura did not hear a word of it.

  She allowed Johnnie to come and sit on her lap, and saw smiles of indulgence and admiration turned upon his infantile charms, and ignored Alfred’s slightly disapproving shake of the head.

  Then the procession re-formed, and the young man with the harlequin face beckoned violently to Laura and Alfred, and to Mr. and Mrs. Vulliamy, to come into the vestry.

  Laura apprehended little or nothing of the brief interlude of document-signing that ensued, owing to her extreme astonishment at the fact that Jeremy, with courage and initiative, had kissed her.

  Perhaps Christine had told him to do it?

  Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” had resounded, Christine had taken Jeremy’s arm and had, with great presence of mind, remained stock still when Edward stood firmly on her train, and Alfred had lifted Edward off again, and Laura had found herself entering a perfectly strange motor-car with Alfred, wondering anxiously if nurse had been at hand to receive the boys. She did not see them again until after she had shaken hands with an immense number of people, all of whom seemed to arrive at the hotel very much at the same moment that she did herself.

  Then she found them at the buffet, eating composedly.

  Johnnie gave his mother a severe shock by remarking uncannily:

  “That Mr. Ayland is here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw him. He’s looking for you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just thought — Mummie, can I have one of those pink cakes?”

  People surged in, and Laura, strangely disquieted by Johnnie’s information, temporarily lost sight of him again.

  But she saw Duke Ayland.

  He came up to her.

  “What about this evening, Laura?”

  “The Vulliamys have asked us to dinner.”

  “And to-morrow?”

  “To-morrow we go home.”

  “Couldn’t you possibly stay on one extra day by yourself?”

  “Not possibly. There are the children — and anyway, I couldn’t. But I must see you again, Duke. Would to-morrow morning be at all possible for you?”

  “I’ll make it possible.”

  Laura saw Mrs. La Trobe coming nearer and nearer, inexorable as Fate.

  “We shan’t go till the one o’clock train. I am going to do some last shopping at the Army and Navy Stores. I’ll be at the entrance — Victoria Street — at half-past ten. I shall have about ten minutes to spare.…”

  “I’ve been looking for you, Mrs. Temple,” said the contralto voice of Mrs. La Trobe. “What a coincidence, isn’t it? Jeremy, whom I’ve known ever since he was a little chap, to be marrying your sister!”

  “Champagne, madam?” said the waiter.

  “I suppose I must, though really, I never do—”

  Under cover of Mrs. La Trobe’s smiling apologies Duke said low and rapidly:

  “All right. Only it’s a perfectly certain spot for meeting everybody one’s ever met in one’s life. Wouldn’t Westminster Cathedral be-?”

  Then he, too, was claimed by an acquaintance, and Laura was left in doubt as to where their rendezvous really was.

  “How’s Cousin Louisa?” she asked casually of Poor Selina next moment, and then, as she waited for the voluble reply, wondered whether it would not have been kinder to let Poor Selina forget all about Queen’s Park for the day.

  But Selina replied with every appearance of enthusiasm, that Cousin Louisa was wonderful. Laura found herself glancing surreptitiously at her watch. It ought soon to be time for Christine to go and change her dress.

  Laura felt extraordinarily tired, and knew that very soon her fatigue would show in her face and bearing.

  Suddenly, with an incredulous astonishment that momentarily revived her, she saw a slim, well-known figure towering above its neighbours, topped by the painted, insolent, undeniably lovely face of Miss Kingsley-Browne.

  “Bébée!”

  “Hello,” said Bébée unmoved. “How are you? Last time we met was at the A. B. Onslows’ — dear people!”

  Laura could think of nothing more brilliant than a bald affirmation in reply.

  “Mummie is here somewhere, with
Dr. Ernest Blog, a most wonderful man from America. You’ll meet him at home, this winter—”

  “Shall I?”

  “Christine looks topping,” said Bébée affably. “Jeremy’s frightfully lucky, as I’ve just told him. Of course, I’m rather mal-vue by his parents just at the moment, but as a matter of fact they ought to be grateful to me.”

  “Honestly, Bébée, I think that they are,” said Mrs. Temple candidly, in an effort to take the wind out of Miss Kingsley-Browne’s unjustifiably inflated sails. But Bébée’s eyes, according to their wont, were roving far away, above the head of her interlocutress.

  “There’s Ernest. I must go to him. Naturally, he doesn’t know anyone here.”

  Laura made a desperate effort to see Ernest, but without success.

  “We shall meet at home, I expect,” Miss Kingsley-Browne said without enthusiasm. “I know mummie will be dying to talk to you about the bulbs.”

  Laura’s first words to her newly-married sister, when she found herself upstairs in her room, were couched in the formula familiar to them both.

  “Did you see Bébée Kingsley-Browne? Could you have believed it?”

  “See her? Did I not!” ejaculated Christine. “Who could fail to see a giraffe like that? Though, I must say, she looked pretty. She must have a nerve of iron.”

  “She has. Poor Lady Kingsley-Browne!”

  “Unfortunate woman! She was in charge of Hogg, or Blog, or whatever his name is. I saw him, following her about like a dog.”

  “What is he like? Here — I’ll undo that.”

  “Laura, I think Jeremy’s mother is coming up in a minute.”

  “Shall I go? I shan’t mind if—”

  “No, no, truly. I want you. Here she is. I think—”

  Christine moved to the door, speaking rapidly over her shoulder.

  “Blog, my dear, is exactly two foot high. No wonder Bébée doesn’t want to walk about arm-in-arm with him, as she did with A. B.” Then she opened the door.

  Laura’s sense of confusion and bewilderment deepened more and more. She noticed vaguely how maternal Mrs. Vulliamy, in her shadowy way, had become, and how ingeniously Christine combined responsiveness with a complete absence of sentimentality in her own manner.