Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  The other, a passionate, intelligent creature of violent moods, had speedily exhausted both Quarrendon and herself. They had parted, only to come together again, and part again.

  The final severance had been three years ago.

  Quarrendon had not deluded himself, then or at any time, that he was finished with emotional vicissitudes. He knew only too well that sooner or later the fatal spark would be struck again. He was not even sure that he would, wholly, regret it.

  Sheer chance had led him into Claudia Winsloe’s office. He had found her intelligence and vitality stimulating, and had been faintly flattered besides that she should take the trouble to make herself attractive to him — for Quarrendon was under no illusions as to his looks, his absence of social adroitness, and his middle-age.

  As he had told Sylvia, people always interested him. Claudia interested him very definitely. He felt that he would like to see her away from her office surroundings.

  She still interested him — but it was Sylvia, twenty-one years his junior, with whom he had now fallen in love. Quarrendon realized it with something like dismay, but it was dismay that was rapidly becoming submerged in sweetness.

  Her youth, her vulnerability, her transparent candour, all moved him profoundly. Her loveliness, although it gave him an exquisite pleasure, was perhaps the least factor in the growing attraction of which he was so acutely aware.

  When he found that Sylvia was drawn towards him, as he towards her, Quarrendon knew that he must fight a losing battle.

  4

  At Arling, Claudia was at her desk, a wild confusion of papers all round her, her fingers flying expertly over the keys of her typewriter.

  It was hot, and every now and then she pushed her dark hair off her forehead. But never for one moment did she relax.

  The parlour-maid appeared at the door and made a trivial announcement concerning the cook’s requirements.

  “I’ll come,” said Claudia.

  She took up her keys and went.

  As soon as she had re-established herself at her machine, the telephone-bell rang.

  The telephone was in a singularly inconvenient position in the hall.

  Claudia listened to a full exposition from the laundry concerning a bath-towel, once lost and now found.

  As she hurried back to her work, Mrs Peel rustled through the hall.

  “Darling, you’re doing too much. I can see it. You’ve no idea how over-strained you look, and it’s most unbecoming,” said Mrs Peel impressively. “I wish you’d have a look at these patterns and tell me what you think. It’s for the new cretonne covers in my flat.”

  They took the patterns to the window. Claudia looked at them carefully and without hurry. It was Mrs Peel who broke into their discussion a good many times in order to say that Claudia was too busy to attend to it now, and that she had better get back to her desk, and why, oh why, wasn’t she out in the fresh air giving herself a good rest?

  “It’s all right, Mother,” said Claudia, fourteen times.

  At last she was at work again, acutely aware of backache, eye-strain, and nervous exasperation. She was aware also, although much less consciously, of having lived up to her own ideal of a woman achieving, by sheer force of will, the next-to-impossible.

  She heard the car drive up to the door, and as she worked she smiled.

  It would be lovely for the children, by the sea.

  Maurice came in and stood beside her, a worried, wistful expression on his small face.

  “Are you just off, darling?”

  “As soon as the sandwiches are ready. Sylvia’s doing them. Have you got a lot to do, Mother?”

  “Not so terribly much,” said Claudia cheerfully. “I shall be through by one o’clock, and this afternoon I’ll come down and bathe.”

  “You won’t be too tired?”

  “Oh no,” said Claudia lightly. “You know I’m hardly ever tired.”

  Maurice’s anxious look seemed to deepen, rather than relax, at this optimistic pronouncement.

  “I wish you didn’t have to work so very hard. It seems such a shame.”

  “But you know, Maurice, nearly everybody has to work. I don’t mind it a bit, because it’s for all of you. If I can earn money it all helps to educate you and Taffy and Sylvia, and then when you’re older you’ll work for yourselves.”

  “And for you,” said Maurice.

  She kissed his little plain, freckled face.

  “Thank you, darling.”

  The horn of the car was sounded vigorously from without.

  “I suppose the girls are ready at last,” Maurice observed morosely. “I hope all your typing will get done quickly, and not be too difficult.”

  He walked away very deliberately, still unsmiling.

  It was Claudia who smiled, tenderly and proudly.

  Ten minutes later the telephone-bell rang again.

  She went to the door.

  “All right, dear!” called Mrs Peel’s voice, shrilly and nervously. “I’ll see what it is. Hallo, hallo, hallo!” There was a pause, fraught with agitation, for Mrs Peel was neither calm nor collected when telephoning.

  “Clau-dia!”

  “All right, Mother.”

  “No, don’t come, darling. No, it’s all right, I was only speaking to my — I’m afraid I can’t hear you. I think there’s something wrong with the telephone — —”

  “I’ll take it, Mother.”

  “It’s all right, dear. You go back to your writing. I think it’s someone who wants … Would you please tell me who’s speaking? I can’t quite hear. Harvey, or Jarvey?”

  “Jarvey the butcher,” said Claudia. “Give it to me.”

  “The line is very bad to-day,” said Mrs Peel severely. “It might equally well have been Harvey.”

  With an air of resentment, she handed the receiver to Claudia.

  “You know, darling, it isn’t right that you should have to do this kind of thing on the top of all your other jobs. You’re doing too much, and sooner or later you’ll suffer for it. You may not think so now, but the day will come.”

  These sentiments penetrated to Claudia’s hearing, rather than to her understanding, as she agreed with the butcher that it would be wiser to have a small leg rather than a large sirloin, in view of the weather.

  Then she replaced the receiver.

  “Copper ought to do far more than he does, to help you,” said Mrs Peel.

  Claudia shrugged her shoulders.

  Sal Oliver’s voice, cool and unexpected, sounded from the stairs addressing Claudia.

  “You’re not what I should call an easy person to help. There’s that to be said for Copper. Meanwhile I’ll read out that manuscript while you type it. You’ll do it much quicker like that.”

  “I thought you’d gone out.”

  “No. I haven’t gone out and I’m not going out.”

  “I can manage perfectly well by myself,” said Claudia rather coldly. “Honestly, Sal, I’d rather.”

  “I think you’d far better do it together,” announced Mrs Peel. “You’re only working yourself to death, darling. How is it going to help anybody when you go to bed with a complete nervous breakdown?”

  From this unanswerable question Claudia fled back to the library.

  The first hint of impatience betrayed itself in her tone as she curtly bade Sal: “Go on — I’m ready.”

  Sal Oliver, unmoved, began to dictate.

  They worked without interruption until the manuscript was finished.

  Claudia ran the last sheet off the machine, slammed down the carriage, and feverishly began to gather together typescript, carbon copies, and sheets of carbon paper.

  “I’ll sort those,” said Sal.

  “They’ve got to be clipped together.”

  “So I supposed,” said Sal drily.

  She took a handful of paper-clips out of the pen-tray and began to put the sheets together.

  Claudia flung herself back in her chair and passed both hands ac
ross her eyes.

  “Thank heaven that’s done. We’ll send them off from the post-office on our way down to the sea.”

  “You know,” said Sal, “you really are a perfect fool.”

  She spoke in chilly and detached tones and Claudia made no pretence of not understanding the meaning underlying the words.

  “I’ve never let a job down yet and I never propose to.”

  “You’ll have to, one of these days. You’re not superhuman, any more than anybody else is.”

  “I’ve never supposed I was superhuman,” said Claudia gently. “I’m simply a person — one of the few persons of my acquaintance — who knows the meaning of the word work.”

  “Fiddle,” said Sal, deftly adjusting the final paper-clip. “Most people know the meaning of the word ‘work’ quite as well as you do. Why shouldn’t they? But they don’t get the same kick out of making martyrs of themselves, and calling it work.”

  Claudia remained unmoved.

  “I suppose,” she said meditatively, “that you really do believe I enjoy working as I do, instead of, for instance, being with my children in the few short weeks in the year that I’ve got them at home.”

  “There’s no earthly reason why you shouldn’t knock off work altogether in August. I’ve always told you we could manage perfectly well.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t agree. Excepting yourself, there’s no competent executive person in the office. In any case, I’d rather work all the time than leave off and then begin again. One only gets unstrung.”

  “The alternative, as of course you know, being to go on until everything snaps at once.”

  “Those things are very largely a matter of willpower,” said Claudia superbly. “I haven’t any intention of letting everything snap at once.”

  “Haven’t you? Well, you’ve got an almighty crash coming one of these days. However, it’s your show — not mine. I’m a fool to gratify your egotism by talking like this.”

  “Sal,” said Claudia, in her most carefully impersonal tones. “I’d honestly like to get this straight. I’ve the greatest respect for your intelligence, and yet it seems to me so odd that you should — speaking, of course, from my point of view — have got me so utterly wrong.”

  The detached candour of this appeal was without any visible effect upon Sal.

  “I don’t think I’ve got you wrong at all,” she answered. “After all, I’ve worked with you for five years, and been down here off and on. I’ve seen you in relation to your work, and in relation to your family. But I admit that it doesn’t give me, in any way, the right to criticize you unasked.”

  “Not unasked at all,” said Claudia cheerfully. “I’m interested in what you think, and I’d like to go into it, some time. If I’m deluding myself, I’d very much better know it. I’m quite prepared to consider the whole question absolutely dispassionately. In spite of having been given only a miserable two out of ten for honesty, in the game last night,” she added, smiling.

  There was a pause as she took out a large envelope from a drawer and carefully began writing the Cambridge address.

  Still writing, and without raising her eyes, she added in a tone of casual enquiry:

  “It was you, I take it, who gave me that two, wasn’t it?”

  “No,” said Sal. “But I can tell you exactly who did.”

  “Can you?”

  “It was Andrew Quarrendon.”

  “How do you know?”

  “By a process of elimination,” said Sal drily.

  5

  When Quarrendon came back at three o’clock to fetch his hostess and the picnic tea, Sylvia sat beside the driving-seat.

  Claudia had just finished packing the tea-basket. It was the cook’s afternoon out.

  “I’m just ready!” she cried, flying through the hall with the two heavy baskets. “Here, I’ll put these in, and then go and get my hat on. I shan’t be a minute.”

  “There isn’t any hurry,” Sal suggested.

  She stood — hatless — by the car.

  Claudia was already half-way up the stairs.

  When she came down again Mrs Peel was hovering restlessly between the library and the open front-door. She was unable to decide whether she was, or was not, coming with them.

  “Is it very hot by the sea?” she enquired suspiciously.

  “It was lovely on the cliffs,” Sylvia said. “I suppose it was rather hot.”

  “We were sitting in the sun,” Quarrendon reminded her. His face had burnt to a lively scarlet.

  “Have you bathed?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t,” Quarrendon replied, and at the same moment Sylvia answered “Not yet.”

  “Not yet!” repeated Claudia in surprise. “What have you all been doing?”

  “The others have been swimming. We just sat on the cliffs and talked.”

  “I really ought to write to Anna,” Mrs Peel suddenly decided.

  “No, do come. We shall all be out — you can’t stay all by yourself, Grandmama.”

  “There won’t be room in the car, I’m afraid.”

  “Heaps,” said Sylvia vaguely.

  Mrs Peel yielded. She explained, in a short and involved speech, that it would be necessary for her to go upstairs first and fetch a hat and a pair of gloves.

  By the time she had said this, had gone, and had come back again, wearing a large shady hat and a pair of wash-leather gloves, and carrying a black watered-silk handbag, a parasol, an air-cushion, and a light dust-cloak, Claudia had reorganized the seating arrangements of the car.

  “It will be more comfortable for Grandmama if you go in the back, Sylvia, and let her sit in front. You and Sal and I can all fit in easily, and put the baskets on the floor.”

  This arrangement, so excellent in itself, caused Mrs Peel to protest.

  She unselfishly urged everybody to move, to let her sit in the middle, to let her sit in the corner, to let her take the baskets on her knee, and to leave her behind altogether.

  At last she was persuaded into the car.

  Claudia took the seat next to Quarrendon.

  “Have you liked your morning?” she said. “It was nice of you to go with the children.”

  “I liked it. Is your work done?”

  “Yes, for the moment.”

  “Why don’t you employ a secretary?”

  “I can’t afford one. Besides, we haven’t got room in the holidays, when the children are at home. And I don’t think Copper would like it. He’d hate a stranger always in the house. Most men would, I suppose.”

  “You work very hard.”

  “I rather like it,” declared Claudia, too brightly. “I’ve got any amount of energy, you know. Besides—” she broke off for a moment and then spoke gravely and quietly, “I expect you’ve guessed that the children have got nobody to provide for them except me. They’re all dependent on what I can earn, practically. I’ve got a tiny private income — but it’s a very small one.”

  “Your husband can’t get any sort of job?”

  “He hasn’t had one for a long time,” said Claudia evasively. “I’d give anything if he could find something to do; but it’s nearly impossible, isn’t it, for a man of his age, who’s not been specially trained for anything?”

  “I don’t know,” said Quarrendon, apparently taking the question literally.

  “I’m afraid it is,” Claudia sighed.

  She was surprised, and a little disappointed, when he said nothing more.

  VI

  1

  Tea on the sands was a greater success than tea in the library at Arling had been on the previous day. Copper woke, after sleeping in the shade most of the afternoon, in a mood of amiability, and sitting next to Frances Ladislaw talked with her about South Africa.

  The others were cheerful. Even Mrs Peel, established on her air-cushion beneath her parasol, seemed to think well of her surroundings and accepted jam-sandwiches and tea from Claudia’s Thermos. The conversation drifted.

  Some
times the children joined in, and sometimes they conducted a side-current of their own — a rapid, unintelligible, allusive spate of words that no one but themselves could follow. When they spoke to their seniors, it sounded quite different. They were then audible and moderately distinct, and made use of co-ordinated words and phrases. And yet, Frances decided, they were perfectly at ease with their mother and with Sal Oliver. With their father they were less so, and with their grandmother less still.

  Quarrendon, who was sitting next to Claudia, spoke very little.

  When presently Sal Oliver spoke, energetically and with emphasis, of economic conditions amongst the unemployed, the remark met with instant failure.

  “In this country,” said Mrs Peel, “nobody need ever go short of food. To say anything else is absolute nonsense.”

  The conversation quickly reverted to subjects more immediately personal.

  Frances, saying little herself, sat and listened. She watched her splendid and gifted friend, Claudia, and a sense of growing dismay invaded her.

  Claudia was not happy, she was not wholly natural — in some queer way, she seemed not even quite real. There was a febrile, excited quality about her gay, animated manner and whenever one of her children addressed her she listened with full attention and answered with a carefully displayed detachment, as though anxious to impress on them her non-parental candour. It would have seemed more natural, Frances could not help thinking, if she had occasionally been absent-minded or even impatient.

  In the old days Claudia had been often impatient. The younger, more sweet-tempered Anna had suffered under Claudia’s tense, violent, and domineering ways. Even Frances, a frequent visitor at Arling, had not always been spared.

  Yet Frances felt that she had liked, and understood, the tyrannical, self-willed, youthful Claudia better than she did the mature Claudia, so self-restrained and so unreal.

  Frances was grieved, as she dwelt upon her own criticism, but it did not cause her to bemoan her own disloyalty.

  She was fond of Claudia: she would always be fond of Claudia. Nothing of that was impaired because she could not see Claudia as she had, in the years of their separation, seen her. And she reminded herself that there was much, probably, of which she knew nothing, to explain the new Claudia.