IV
1
Exactly as Taffy had surmised, Claudia finished her letters — they were nearly all business letters — and dressed herself with speed and skill.
Her black draperies, closely defining her slim figure and leaving her slender arms bare, were very plainly cut, and had cost a good deal of money. Claudia realized perfectly that, at forty-three, one had to spend money if one was to appear well dressed. And she cared a good deal about appearing well dressed. That was partly the result of upbringing, and partly the desire to attract, which was strong in her.
She dressed, powdered her face, put away her things, moving lightly and quickly. She was pleased at the thought of the large party that would sit down to dinner. Copper, after a few drinks, would be in a good temper instead of a morose one, and she herself, Claudia well knew, was always stimulated by an audience. The presence of Quarrendon, too, excited her faintly, but agreeably.
He had been attracted by her when they first met in her office. The second time he came, Claudia, only half by accident, had been on the point of going out. It was nearly one o’clock, and they had lunched together.
She had talked to him about her work, and asked about his own. It was Claudia’s boast that, unlike nearly all women, she could conduct a conversation that was free from personalities.
That was why men always liked her.
She felt sure that she had no illusions about her powers of attracting men. She never deluded herself that, because she was still good-looking in a distinguished — and out-of-date — classical style, people still admired her for her looks. How could they, when the world was so full of soft, unlined, pink-and-white faces, heads of bright, unfaded hair, and shining eyes? Claudia never wasted her money on ridiculous and ineffectual attempts to rejuvenate her appearance. She was content with — or at least resigned to — the knowledge that she looked exactly what she was — a highly intelligent, vital, efficient woman of forty-three.
An occasional pang of self-pity might from time to time overtake her, when she realized that she was tired, that she was working to the limit of her capacity and beyond it, and that her married life was not a happy one. Claudia told herself that she knew these passing weaknesses for what they were and was not deceived by them. Her clear-sightedness, she felt sure, was beyond question. It was her great asset, enabling her to make allowances for Copper, for her children when they required it, and for her mother when Mrs Peel’s mournful and unending commentary became unendurable.
In her own office, however, Claudia omitted — deliberately and of set purpose — to make allowances. The fury of intensity with which she attacked her own work, and accomplished it, set the standard there.
She always felt that nobody else put work, as she did, before every personal consideration, and although she seldom put the fact into words, she knew that everybody else in the office felt it too.
Claudia carefully drew her lip-stick across the well-cut lines of her mouth. It was not at all a bright lip-stick — only just enough to relieve the clear pallor of her skin. Not like Sylvia’s bold, pretty scarlet curves.
Claudia’s thoughts switched quickly over to the subject of her children.
She adored them.
Her relationship with Sylvia was a marvellous one. That was because she’d always, as a mother, been so very careful not to dominate her children. She’d let them make their own decisions, choose their own friends, live their own lives. She herself had just worked for them — was working for them still.
They knew it, and their love and admiration and trust was her reward.
Though Taffy … Taffy was going through a difficult phase. Claudia frowned at herself in the glass, then smiled. Sylvia, her eldest, and Maurice, her son, meant more to her than did Taffy. It was better to face the fact courageously.
She loved Taffy, because Taffy was her own child, but fundamentally they were not really in sympathy. Of Claudia’s three children she felt that Taffy was the only one to whom she had failed to impart her own passion for absolutely straight thinking.
Taffy, Claudia could plainly see, dramatized herself continually. It was a difficult tendency to correct, and Claudia owned to herself frankly that it was a characteristic she found peculiarly irritating. One of the few things about which it was very, very difficult to be entirely just, detached, and understanding.
“I suppose,” she thought, “that’s because my own bent is exactly the other way. I’ve been honest with myself all my life.”
She often made this assertion.
Her little clock struck eight and Claudia lightly pushed into place the dark waves of hair over her brow and went downstairs.
Quarrendon was just ahead of her.
His evening clothes bore a strange, mangled appearance, almost as though they had been slept in the night before. No doubt he had done his own packing, and done it very badly.
As they reached the foot of the stairs, he turned and spoke to her.
“I like your children.”
“I’m so glad,” she answered cordially. “They are nice, aren’t they? Don’t you think Sylvia’s pretty?”
“Oh yes. But I meant I liked them as people. Why do you call the second one Taffy?”
“She was christened Theodora. I don’t quite know how it came to be Taffy. She’s a queer child, in some ways. Easily the cleverest of them. In fact, the other two are not clever at all.”
Claudia was always careful to display the modern spirit of utter detachment in discussing her children.
“She’s the only one who’s like you, isn’t she?” said Quarrendon thoughtfully.
It surprised her that he should think so. He hadn’t, surely, just meant that it was because of her “cleverness” that Taffy resembled her mother? And yet, Claudia thought, she and Taffy had nothing else in common.
But after all Quarrendon, psychologist though he might be, hadn’t been in the house twenty-four hours yet.
It would be interesting to discuss the children with him later. She could trust herself not to bore him on the subject, as mothers in general were only too apt to bore their listeners — for the simple reason that they were unable to bring a completely impersonal judgment to bear upon the subject, as she had trained herself to do.
In the library the customary background of sound was missing. Either Copper, or Sal Oliver, had ruthlessly switched off the wireless.
Claudia was vaguely sorry. She had felt that Quarrendon would see them all in a more characteristic light if the children were enjoying the privilege of their generation — incessant noise — with herself so curiously unmoved by it. Frances Ladislaw had already said how wonderful that was. Dear Frances!
She was talking to Sal Oliver now, her clear, pleasant eyes full of interest and something not unlike admiration as they rested on Sal’s smart black-and-white effect and extremely sophisticated make-up.
Claudia went up to them.
“Are you rested, Frances darling? I’d have come to fetch you downstairs, but I was writing madly up to the last minute.”
Sal moved away.
Copper was shaking up cocktails.
They were always a help in making people talk. Not that anybody was being particularly silent. Mrs Peel was moaning slightly — perhaps in admiration? — over Maurice and his snapshots, and Sylvia was talking to Quarrendon.
“You’re not listening to me,” cried Mrs Ladislaw unexpectedly.
“Yes I am! Oh, I’m so sorry. Didn’t I seem to be?”
Frances laughed.
“No, but it wasn’t at all important. Besides, I know you’ve got a lot to think about.”
“So much that I sometimes feel as if I should go mad. Not till the children are grown-up, though. I must see the job through.”
“Claudia, oughtn’t you to have a housekeeper: or a secretary or someone, to help you?” asked her friend earnestly.
“I couldn’t afford either,” declared Claudia. “Besides, I don’t think Copper would ever stand having
a stranger in the house permanently.”
“He would, if it was going to save you from working so hard.”
“Oh no,” Claudia shook her head. “He wouldn’t. You don’t understand.”
Frances looked perplexed and sorry.
“I’m all right,” said Claudia gaily. “In another ten years even Maurice will be grown-up, and then I can let everything go.”
“You do so very much,” murmured Frances Ladislaw. “I can’t think how you can go on.”
“I can’t either, sometimes. But one does.”
“Won’t Copper — isn’t there any chance of his getting a job?”
Claudia’s expression altered. Her whole face became overshadowed.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem very likely. I suppose he might.”
She carefully refrained from adding, as she might have done, that Copper didn’t seem to be trying very hard to get a job. It was so self-evident that Frances, like everybody else, must have seen it for herself.
2
“Dinner’s ready,” said Taffy at the door.
To the infinite distress of Mrs Peel, Claudia’s young village parlour-maid was assisted in some of her duties by the daughters of the house.
They went into the dining-room.
“Sit anywhere,” said Claudia — again disturbing the mind of Mrs Peel.
But it sounded worse than it was.
Mrs Peel sat down, firmly and correctly, at Copper Winsloe’s right hand, and Claudia had already smiled at Quarrendon and lightly sketched a movement that invited him to the place beside her. It didn’t matter so much, about the others.
And the dinner itself, though far from elaborate, was well cooked and served.
“You’ve still got Mrs Price. How fortunate,” said Mrs Peel to her son-in-law, referring to the cook.
“She’s quite good, isn’t she? I don’t suppose she’ll stay, they never do,” Copper observed callously.
“I can’t bear to think of poor little Claudia having servant troubles as well as everything else. She’s got so much on her shoulders already.”
Copper muttered an ungracious something or other — what it was she couldn’t hear — and turned to his other neighbour, Frances Ladislaw.
Mrs Peel, in dignified isolation — for she had nothing to say to Sal Oliver, on the other side of her — drank cold water.
3
The conversation was fairly general.
Claudia, an excellent and animated talker, dominated it for the most part.
Quarrendon, although saying little himself, turned his large head towards her almost every time she spoke, and his face crinkled into laughter frequently — for she could be very amusing.
Taffy sat on his other side. She kept up a low-voiced chatter to Maurice — but Maurice answered at random, and often not at all, for he was listening to his mother and the other grown-up people.
Presently Taffy spoke to Andrew Quarrendon.
“Which would you rather, play paper games after dinner, or go and see a talkie?”
“I’d rather do almost anything, than go and see a talkie.”
“I thought you’d say that. Well, it’s a pity. You miss quite a lot. Maurice and I are terrific fans. Not Sylvia, so much.”
“Tell me something about the fascination of the films,” suggested Quarrendon. “You see, I really know very little about the subject.”
“But you’ve been?”
“Oh yes. Several times.”
“Whom did you see?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“Haven’t you really? Do you know what the pictures were, then — what they were called, I mean?”
“One of them was a very bad version of Wells’s Invisible Man. Another was an inaccurate presentation — and a vulgar one at that — of part of the life of King Henry VIII.”
“Didn’t you think my Charles was marvellous?”
“Who is your Charles?” said Quarrendon, a glint behind his thick lenses betraying his lack of ingenuousness.
Taffy laughed.
“I’d crawl anywhere, any day, on all-fours, in any weather, to see my Charles act in any film,” she remarked earnestly.
“I always like an understatement,” said Quarrendon mildly. “It gives such an effect of austerity. Tell me some more.”
“Have you honestly never seen Garbo — or Norma Shearer — or Gary Cooper?”
Claudia, at the foot of the table, turned round.
“It’s a great blow to my pride,” she said, with mock solemnity, “that my family is completely film-struck. Film-stars, to this generation, are what musical-comedy stars were to ours, I suppose.”
“Oh dear,” said Mrs Peel. “Lewis Waller.”
She added nothing more.
It seemed enough. Her attitude towards Lewis Waller and his erstwhile unparalleled vogue was clearly indicated, and it was not difficult to gather that, further than Lewis Waller and the matinée-idol, her mind had failed altogether to register the march of dramatic popularity. Claudia began to speak to Quarrendon about modern plays.
Taffy relapsed into complete silence.
4
After dinner — and after Sylvia had dealt with the wireless until a reasonably subdued accompaniment of orchestral music from London had been provided for the conversation — they played games.
“I shall be very bad at this kind of thing,” Frances Ladislaw confided to Sal Oliver. “I suppose they’re all terribly good at it?”
“I’m afraid they are, rather. But it won’t matter in the least. I’m bad too.”
Claudia had produced pencils and slips of paper.
“Shall we begin with Twenty Things?” she suggested. “That’s easy.”
“I know that one,” Frances murmured joyfully. “You each suggest a heading in turn — an animal, or a battle, or a famous man, and they all have to begin with the same letter. Isn’t that it?”
“That’s it,” said Sal. “Afterwards, everyone reads out their list, and duplicates have to be crossed out.”
“Are we ready?” asked Claudia. “Let’s try and think of original things, not just battles or admirals or famous people. We’ve had those so often.”
A thoroughly disapproving “Oh dear” came quietly, but angrily, from her mother.
“Maurice, you’re the youngest. You start.”
Maurice was ready.
“A chemical.”
“Very well. Taffy?”
“A quotation from Shakespeare. A and The don’t count.”
“I’ll say a botanical term,” Claudia observed.
“Frances, what’s yours?”
Mrs Ladislaw, with some courage, declared for a battle. Sal supported her, in the spirit, by saying: “A character in history. Any nationality.”
Claudia smiled, and wrote busily.
Copper, as regardless as Frances of previous instructions, gave them: An English town. Sylvia took them to a higher level with: A character out of Thackeray. The standard fell again with Mrs Peel’s prettily worded suggestion of a Sweet-scented Flower, and was brought up once more by Quarrendon’s more original, if less charming, request for a Famous Murderer.
It was a reasonably successful game, although Claudia and her children obviously enjoyed it better than did their visitors, with the possible exception of Quarrendon.
Mrs Peel, however, definitely disliked it. She challenged other people’s inspirations, defended indefensible ideas and errors of her own, and maintained, in the face of all opposition, that Thermopylae was the name of a well-known Greek writer.
When Taffy offered to fetch the encyclopaedia, Mrs Peel rose and said that she should go to bed. She had, she declared, been fighting against a bad headache all the evening.
Maurice politely opened the door for her, and she went.
Sal said quietly to Frances Ladislaw: “It’s a curious thing, but whenever any family plays paper games, it almost always ends in somebody’s either being sent to bed, if young, or goin
g there of their own accord, if old.”
Nevertheless they went on playing paper games. Claudia was very amusing and brilliant, and the children frightfully intelligent.
Presently Taffy suggested a game that they hadn’t, she said, played for ages.
“You make out a list of qualities — good and bad — and mark people as you think they deserve, with ten as the maximum. One’s got to be honest. Nobody knows who puts what, and then each total is added up and one sees where everybody stands.”
“What fun,” said Copper satirically. “This is getting a bit too intellectual for me. Come on, Betsy.”
He walked out unceremoniously.
“Wait a minute,” said Claudia. “Does anybody want the Second News? It’s on now.”
Her ear was apparently trained to distinguish the time-signal through the noise of any number of people talking and laughing at once.
“I do,” said Sal.
She was obliged to move close to the radio in order to get it, even after Sylvia had adjusted the wave-length. It never seemed to occur to the Winsloes that other people might not possess the remarkable faculty of their mother and themselves for attending to several things at once.
The suave and cultivated tones of the B.B.C. announcer gave them various pieces of information.
Maurice, looking regretful, rose, said goodnight, and went to bed.
“Cricket: At the close of flay to-day — —”
“All right,” said Sal. “Shall I turn it off?”
“We can get something from Paris,” Sylvia suggested. “Dance-music or something — I’ll put it on very softly.”
Presently a muted rhythm crept over the air. An attentive ear could distinguish the accompanying words: “Last week we said Goodbye”
“Now!” cried Taffy. “What qualities are we going to give marks for?”
“Is this really a good game?” Quarrendon enquired of his hostess.
Claudia laughed.
“It all depends. I shouldn’t play it with my mother, for instance. My children enjoy it, but then I’ve always allowed them — encouraged them — to criticize other people quite freely — themselves included.”
“And yourself?”
“Oh yes. The last thing I want is to be on a parental pedestal, like the Victorian parents. I want my relationship with my children to be as honest as possible.”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 428