Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  Her correspondence with Duke Ayland had been the most interesting one that she had ever known, until they had fallen in love with one another. After that, it was impossible to deny that it had become perfunctory.

  She did not correspond regularly with anybody else, partly from lack of time, and partly because she had no very intimate friends. Although Laura could not be described as a man’s woman, she rather unfortunately possessed the distinction of not being a woman’s woman either, principally owing to her slender reputation as an author, which alarmed or alienated most of those who knew about it.

  “If I could only talk to somebody about it all,” she now thought unhappily. But there was nobody to whom she could state the bald facts of her predicament, without the certainty of finding herself coupled, ethically and intellectually, with the scandalous Bébée Kingsley-Browne.

  Presently she stopped thinking about Duke, and about herself in relation to him. Dinner was rather an unsuccessful meal.

  “She’s not a good cook, is she?” Alfred observed truthfully, but, in this connection, tactlessly.

  “I daresay not,” Laura returned. “But all the same—”

  A bad cook, she meant, and Alfred undoubtedly would understand her to mean, was much better than a cook who had given notice. They fell into their usual silence, and Laura made her usual effort — excellent in intention, but poor in execution — to transform it into an interesting and intelligent conversation.

  “I think the drawing-room covers ought to go to the cleaner’s. Unless we can afford new ones this winter.”

  “We cannot afford new anything,” Alfred said calmly. “This visit to London has just about dished our budget for the year.”

  “We couldn’t not have gone!” exclaimed Laura. “And Christine paid every single thing for the boys.”

  “I know she did. And I know we had to go. I’m glad we did. But we shall have to be a bit economical, that’s all.”

  “Shall we be able to have any painting done in the spring? The nursery passage is terrible — just where the little lamp always smokes.”

  “I’ll see if I can give it a coat of whitewash myself one of these days. But the difficulty is to find the time. This is just the time when things want doing in the garden.”

  “I haven’t planted my indoor hyacinths yet!” exclaimed Laura, in allusion to her solitary annual horticultural effort.

  Alfred smiled kindly. There was little to be said about Laura’s hyacinths save that she did not possess what is called la main heureuse.

  Then Laura said “What’s that?” with a start of apprehension.

  “What is what?”

  “It sounded exactly like—”

  She half rose out of her chair.

  “If it’s Johnnie, you can tell him that I shall come up and settle him if I hear another sound. I thought he’d given up that nonsense.”

  “But it wasn’t. It sounded,” said Laura in stricken tones, “exactly like the noise they made during the whooping-cough.”

  “I think it was your fancy. I didn’t hear a sound. Sit down again, dear.”

  Without a word Laura rose and rushed from the room.

  She had heard the sound again, and as she went upstairs and along the passage she recognised it beyond any possibility of doubt.

  The cough that belonged to Edward’s whooping-cough.

  Outside the door of the night-nursery, beside the bracket on which the little lamp that smoked stood smoking, was nurse, listening attentively.

  “It’s Edward,” she mouthed. “I don’t think it’s woken him — not from the sound, it hasn’t. But I really thought he was going to be sick.”

  “But he can’t have whooping-cough again!”

  Nurse shook her head.

  “It’s like that, whooping-cough is. They get quite well, and then suddenly they catch a cold, and it’s all to do again. Even after weeks.”

  “But it seems too bad to be true — the doctor never warned me. I wouldn’t have taken him to London if I’d had the least idea. There, hark at him!”

  Nurse shook her head.

  “That’s what it is.”

  Then she relented a little.

  “It won’t last, very likely. Just a sort of relapse, and then they pick up again. It’s catching a cold that does it.”

  “What about Johnnie?”

  “He may be quite all right. He had it very lightly, didn’t he? And he doesn’t get colds the way Edward does.”

  Laura, with a sensation that approached despair, told nurse to come and fetch her if Edward was worse in the night, and went down to her husband again.

  Alfred did not reproach her for agitatedly dashing away from him, although she knew that he profoundly disliked and disapproved of both agitation, and of what he looked upon as undue anxiety about the children.

  He read The Field, and presently he fell asleep.

  Laura opened her letters, and found the usual proportion of bills, of advertisements, of business on behalf of the Nursing Association, the Women’s Institute, and the Girl Guides, and a note from Mrs. Bakewell, who wanted to come and hear all about the wedding. To this last there was a postscript:

  “Are your little ones attending the dancing-class this term? C. and Th. just longing to begin again.”

  Would Edward and Johnnie go to the dancing classes? There would be the same difficulty that there had been before about getting them to Quinnerton. It was too expensive to hire a car every week, and Alfred would not always have time to drive them.

  Perhaps it was better for them to go occasionally, than never at all.

  Laura looked at the clock.

  It was half-past nine.

  One of Laura’s convictions was that people living in the country, who went to bed regularly at ten o’clock every night, put themselves thereby in danger of turning — spiritually — into vegetables. Therefore some three-quarters of an hour must elapse before she could go upstairs. She thought of Duke Ayland, and of their passionate, and at the same time unsatisfactory, parting, and of the hope that she had not forbidden him.

  “But what do I mean to do?” Laura asked herself, utterly bewildered. For whatever course of action she might contemplate, it always seemed to her that she was determined not to follow it.

  “I hope to goodness the bath-water is hot,” said Alfred, waking suddenly.

  “You always have your bath in the morning.”

  “Not always. I want one to-night. But in any case, the water ought to be hot. I shall find out.”

  “Don’t ring!” exclaimed Laura instinctively.

  But he had already done so.

  Moments elapsed.

  “Oh, Alfred, don’t ring again! They’re probably gone to bed.”

  “Then they won’t hear me.”

  But after an interval sufficiently long to suggest that Mary had been at least on her way to bed, at the end of a day’s work, she came in.

  “Is the water hot?”

  “The bath-water?”

  “Yes.”

  “The bath-water isn’t hot. Not to say hot. We were going to ask you to have a look at the range, or something, in the morning. It’s been giving Ethel and I the most awful trouble.”

  Mary went away again, looking more aggrieved than ever.

  The fact that Alfred, also, was aggrieved because the water was not hot, evidently did not matter to her.

  “Do you know,” said Laura, a train of thought presented to her, “that Christine once said to me that she thought servants were rather like God — they live so close to one, and know so much about one. Only, unfortunately, they don’t love one.”

  “Like God?” said Alfred gloomily. “Ours are a good deal more like the devil, if you ask me.”

  Laura could not but agree with him.

  She took this exhilarating simile to bed with her, and although of the two subjects she would have preferred to think — however unsatisfactorily — about her unhappy and discreditable love-affair, she found that the atmo
sphere of the house was too strong for her.

  She fell asleep to the accompaniment of a quiet, reasonable, conviction-carrying rebuke that should convey once and for all to Mary and Ethel Laura’s standard of domestic requirements.

  She woke to the realisation — one become just too habitual, in the course of years, to be called a pang — that there was nothing to look forward to, and that it would be necessary very shortly to go to the kitchen and to order dinner.

  In the distance, the servants were moving — but it was a quarter-past seven, so they well might be — and farther away still, she thought she heard Edward cough — the raucous, open-mouthed, unrestrained coughing of a small, bored child wishful to attract notice.

  A single shriek, only faint because it was so far off, told her accustomed ears that Johnnie, as usual, had interposed his own infallible methods of wresting nurse’s attention from his brother to himself.

  “I must see about another daily governess for them, if Miss Lamb isn’t coming back this term,” thought Laura.

  Alfred had left her side long ago, without disturbing her.

  If Duke had been her husband?

  Laura neither pursued the question nor attempted to find any answer to it. Nothing was more certain than that to do so would be entirely futile.

  She was in love with Duke, undoubtedly, but she could not, at a distance of two hundred miles, remain in love with him indefinitely — nor he with her.

  Alas, for the brief-lived romanticism of an attachment between a man and a woman, unsupported by even occasional proximity! Laura at last admitted to herself that she and Duke Ayland, in common with the vast majority of their fellow-beings, were incapable of the ideal, imperishable, love for which the world was said to be well lost.

  She would never give herself to Duke, but hers was not the Great Refusal that ennobles the refuser and remains a beautiful memory for ever.

  The children, her marriage vows, the house, the ordering of the meals, the servants, the making of a laundry list every Monday — in a word, the things of respectability — kept one respectable. In a flash of unavoidable dear-sightedness, that Laura would never repeat if she could avoid it, she admitted to herself that the average attributes only, of the average woman, were hers.

  Imagination, emotionalism, sentimentalism…what woman is not the victim of these insidious and fatally unpractical qualities?

  But how difficult, Laura reflected, to see oneself as an average woman and not, rather, as one entirely unique, in unique circumstances.…

  It dawned upon her dimly that only by envisaging and accepting her own limitations, could she endure the limitations of her surroundings.

  THE END

  A good many of the characters in this novel have been drawn, as usual, from persons now living; but the author hopes very much that they will only recognise one another.

  E. M. Delafield.

  DIARY OF A PROVINCIAL LADY

  In the late 1920’s Delafield became good friends with Margaret Mackworth, 2nd Viscountess Rhondda, a Welsh peeress, businesswoman and active suffragette, who made the author a director of Time and Tide, a British weekly political and literary review magazine founded in 1920, which started out as a supporter of left wing and feminist causes and the mouthpiece of the feminist Six Point Group. When Mackworth wanted some light “middles”, ‘preferably in serial form’, Delafield promised to think of something to submit. This led to the composition of her most popular and enduring work, Diary of a Provincial Lady, which first appeared in 1930. The largely autobiographical novel substituted the names of “Robin” and “Vicky” for her own children, Lionel and Rosamund. The novel takes the form of a journal of the life of an upper-middle class Englishwoman, living mostly in a Devon village of the 1930’s. The Provincial Lady deals with domestic disasters, the W.I., a dull husband, mutinous staff and the domineering Lady Boxe.

  The novel inspired several sequels that chronicled later portions of the Provincial Lady’s life: The Provincial Lady Goes Further, The Provincial Lady in America, and The Provincial Lady in Wartime. In these sequels, the Provincial Lady buys a flat in London, travels to America, attempts to find war-work during the Phoney War, and tours the Soviet Union.

  DIARY OF A PROVINCIAL LADY

  November 7th. — Plant the indoor bulbs. Just as I am in the middle of them, Lady Boxe calls. I say, untruthfully, how nice to see her, and beg her to sit down while I just finish the bulbs. Lady B. makes determined attempt to sit down in armchair where I have already placed two bulb-bowls and the bag of charcoal, is headed off just in time, and takes the sofa.

  Do I know, she asks, how very late it is for indoor bulbs? September, really, or even October, is the time. Do I know that the only really reliable firm for hyacinths is Somebody of Haarlem? Cannot catch the name of the firm, which is Dutch, but reply Yes, I do know, but think it my duty to buy Empire products. Feel at the time, and still think, that this is an excellent reply. Unfortunately Vicky comes into the drawing-room later and says: “O Mummie, are those the bulbs we got at Woolworths?”

  Lady B. stays to tea. (Mem.: Bread-and-butter too thick. Speak to Ethel.) We talk some more about bulbs, the Dutch School of Painting, our Vicar’s wife, sciatica, and All Quiet on the Western Front.

  (Query: Is it possible to cultivate the art of conversation when living in the country all the year round?)

  Lady B. enquires after the children. Tell her that Robin — whom I refer to in a detached way as “the boy” so that she shan’t think I am foolish about him — is getting on fairly well at school, and that Mademoiselle says Vicky is starting a cold.

  Do I realise, says Lady B., that the Cold Habit is entirely unnecessary, and can be avoided by giving the child a nasal douche of salt-and-water every morning before breakfast? Think of several rather tart and witty rejoinders to this, but unfortunately not until Lady B.’s Bentley has taken her away.

  Finish the bulbs and put them in the cellar. Feel that after all cellar is probably draughty, change my mind, and take them all up to the attic.

  Cook says something is wrong with the range.

  November 8th. — Robert has looked at the range and says nothing wrong whatever. Makes unoriginal suggestion about pulling out dampers. Cook very angry, and will probably give notice. Try to propitiate her by saying that we are going to Bournemouth for Robin’s half-term, and that will give the household a rest. Cook replies austerely that they will take the opportunity to do some extra cleaning. Wish I could believe this was true.

  Preparations for Bournemouth rather marred by discovering that Robert, in bringing down the suit-cases from the attic, has broken three of the bulb-bowls. Says he understood that I had put them in the cellar, and so wasn’t expecting them.

  November 11th. — Bournemouth. Find that history, as usual, repeats itself. Same hotel, same frenzied scurry round the school to find Robin, same collection of parents, most of them also staying at the hotel. Discover strong tendency to exchange with fellow-parents exactly the same remarks as last year, and the year before that. Speak of this to Robert, who returns no answer. Perhaps he is afraid of repeating himself? This suggests Query: Does Robert, perhaps, take in what I say even when he makes no reply?

  Find Robin looking thin, and speak to Matron who says brightly, Oh no, she thinks on the whole he’s put on weight this term, and then begins to talk about the New Buildings. (Query: Why do all schools have to run up New Buildings about once in every six months?)

  Take Robin out. He eats several meals, and a good many sweets. He produces a friend, and we take both to Corfe Castle. The boys climb, Robert smokes in silence, and I sit about on stones. Overhear a woman remark, as she gazes up at half a tower, that has withstood several centuries, that This looks fragile — which strikes me as a singular choice of adjective. Same woman, climbing over a block of solid masonry, points out that This has evidently fallen off somewhere.

  Take the boys back to the hotel for dinner. Robin says, whilst the friend is out of hearin
g: “It’s been nice for us, taking out Williams, hasn’t it?” Hastily express appreciation of this privilege.

  Robert takes the boys back after dinner, and I sit in hotel lounge with several other mothers and we all talk about our boys in tones of disparagement, and about one another’s boys with great enthusiasm.

  Am asked what I think of Harriet Hume but am unable to say, as I have not read it. Have a depressed feeling that this is going to be another case of Orlando about which was perfectly able to talk most intelligently until I read it, and found myself unfortunately unable to understand any of it.

  Robert comes up very late and says he must have dropped asleep over the Times. (Query: Why come to Bournemouth to do this?)

  Postcard by the last post from Lady B. to ask if I have remembered that there is a Committee Meeting of the Women’s Institute on the 14th. Should not dream of answering this.

  November 12th. — Home yesterday and am struck, as so often before, by immense accumulation of domestic disasters that always await one after any absence. Trouble with kitchen range has resulted in no hot water, also Cook says the mutton has gone, and will I speak to the butcher, there being no excuse weather like this. Vicky’s cold, unlike the mutton, hasn’t gone. Mademoiselle says, “Ah, cette petite! Elle ne sera peut-être pas longtemps pour ce bas monde, madame.” Hope that this is only her Latin way of dramatising the situation.

  Robert reads the Times after dinner, and goes to sleep.

  November 13th. — Interesting, but disconcerting, train of thought started by prolonged discussion with Vicky as to the existence or otherwise of a locality which she refers to throughout as H.E.L. Am determined to be a modern parent, and assure her that there is not, never has been, and never could be, such a place. Vicky maintains that there is, and refers me to the Bible. I become more modern than ever, and tell her that theories of eternal punishment were invented to frighten people. Vicky replies indignantly that they don’t frighten her in the least, she likes to think about H.E.L. Feel that deadlock has been reached, and can only leave her to her singular method of enjoying herself.