Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “I know. Sylvia, my sweet, I’m so ashamed. I’ve made things difficult for you.”

  “It’s all right,” she repeated. “I think I’ll get it over quickly, and I’ll come out to you in the garden. Will you wait near the stream?”

  “I love you,” he whispered.

  “So do I.”

  “Sylvia, will you fetch me if I can do anything to make things easier?”

  “Yes. But it’ll be all right.”

  He wandered wretchedly into the garden.

  It was not Sylvia who came to find him half an hour later, but her mother.

  Claudia advanced with her light, quick step, moving so swiftly and youthfully that it caused him a second of strange surprise when he saw the lines graven on either side of her mouth and the slight discolouration beneath her eyes.

  “Will you come in?” she said directly. “I think you could help us. Sylvia and me, I mean.”

  Quarrendon without speaking fell into step beside her.

  “She tells me,” Claudia said, “that you and she have fallen in love with one another. I didn’t know. I hadn’t realized that at all. I thought you were attracted by her because of her looks and her youth. Even after last night I thought it was just that.”

  “No,” said Quarrendon as Claudia paused, as though expecting him to say something. “No, it isn’t just that.”

  “Can you explain, a little bit?” Claudia asked gently. “You see, I don’t think anything matters really, so long as we’re honest about it. My husband, as you’ve probably guessed, takes a rather conventional view of these things, and as for my mother—” she laughed a little, “well, it’s particularly unlucky that she should know anything about any of it. I don’t mean, you know, that she suspects you of anything worse than what she probably calls ‘compromising a young girl’ — but that’s quite enough to make her ask very seriously what your intentions are.”

  “A question,” said Quarrendon gravely, “that you, at least, have the right to ask.”

  “I’m afraid so,” she agreed. “However much I believe in letting my children live their own lives and buy their own experience, I’ve got to remember — we’ve both got to remember — that Sylvia is very young. You know that.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  He followed her up to the schoolroom, where Sylvia was.

  She moved across to Quarrendon’s side at once.

  Something in the gesture caused him to put out his hand and clasp hers strongly.

  “Mother’s being marvellously understanding and kind,” Sylvia said. “Only she doesn’t realize, exactly, that the thing that’s happened to us, Andrew, is so important. The sort of thing that changes all one’s life. She just thinks — don’t you, Mummie — that it’s something quite passing and — sort of trivial.”

  “You’ve known Sylvia three days,” said Claudia, looking at Quarrendon.

  It was not a reproach, but only a statement of fact.

  “Yes,” he said. “But she’s quite right. The thing that’s happened to us is important,”

  “Then,” Claudia said, “you want Sylvia to marry you?”

  Before he could answer, Sylvia had begun to speak.

  “That’s just it, Mother. We’re not sure we want to get married at all, and anyway we don’t want to be engaged and have a fuss and everybody knowing. This is something that only concerns Andrew and me and we haven’t decided anything yet.”

  He felt her small, strong fingers pressing his as though to reassure him as she spoke, and the gesture stirred him profoundly.

  “Do you feel that too?” Claudia asked Andrew in a low voice.

  He was torn between his passionate love for the valiant, loyal child beside him, and his own unshakable inner certainty that marriage, shackling his freedom and crippling his powers of work, was not and could never be what he wanted.

  That Claudia must think him a cad and a coward mattered very little, but that he must hurt Sylvia was unendurable.

  The sweat broke out on his forehead.

  “Sylvia is perfectly right,” he said hoarsely. “This is something that concerns only ourselves. I don’t mean that you haven’t the right to know — she’s living under your roof, she’s your child — but any decision should be hers and mine.”

  Claudia shook her head.

  “No,” she said, and her voice was now very clear and decided. “Sylvia isn’t a woman of eight or nine and twenty. She’s almost a child still, without experience and without real understanding of what it is that you’re asking. It’s this, isn’t it? You want to see her continually, to make love to her, to absorb her imagination, and her thoughts, and her dreams, so that everybody else is excluded from her mind for the time being — and perhaps, later on, to become her lover. (I’m going to put this all into plain words. We’re going to get it absolutely straight.) What you don’t want, is to make the tie a permanent one — to marry. And you’re quite right. You’re a man of, I suppose, my own age. Sylvia is nineteen. You’re in love with her now, but what you really want is to follow your career, to go on with the life to which you’ve grown accustomed, to have the right to consider your own interests first, to spend your money as you wish to spend it, to keep your absolute independence. You’re quite right. It isn’t for you to marry any girl of Sylvia’s age. But what you can’t do, Andrew, is to have it both ways. That’s really what you’re asking for, isn’t it?”

  Her great eyes were boring relentlessly into his.

  Everything she had said was true, and yet he had the strongest conviction that she was speaking falsely. She wanted to separate Sylvia from him, but it was for reasons other than those that she had given.

  “Do you want me,” he asked, “to give up seeing her altogether? To have nothing more to do with her?”

  Before Claudia could answer, Sylvia had spoken.

  “Mother couldn’t possibly want that,” she said confidently. “She isn’t cruel and tyrannical. You’ve always said, haven’t you Mother, that we were to make our own decisions and to judge things for ourselves. You couldn’t possibly go back on that now, when this is the most important thing in my whole life. Perhaps it sounds rather silly to say that when I’m only nineteen, but it’s true. I can’t tell you exactly how I know, but I do know that it’s true.”

  Claudia smiled very faintly.

  “You’ve known him three days,” she said.

  Quarrendon felt a quick contraction of the muscles of the hand clasped within his own, as if those five words had revealed something to her suddenly.

  She said piteously:

  “Mother, don’t you understand?”

  “Yes,” Claudia said. “I see that you love Andrew. I don’t know — neither do you, none of us does — whether it’s something that will last and that may affect your whole life, or whether it’s only a vivid emotional experience, not a deep one. But my darling, darling child, whichever it is you’ve got to be hurt, and I wish to God I could take it for you. Don’t you see that — he doesn’t love you enough?”

  “That’s not true,” said Sylvia simply.

  “No,” said Andrew, “it’s not true.”

  He turned and looked at Sylvia. He saw that her eyes were brimming with tears, but her soft, childish mouth broke into a quivering, courageous smile as their eyes met.

  “I know it isn’t true,” said Sylvia. “I know you love me, Andrew — just as I love you. I don’t want us to get married, or anything like that. I don’t think I believe in marriage anyway. But I’m not going to give you up, unless you want me to.”

  Claudia put up her hand and pushed the hair away from her face with an oppressed, exhausted gesture.

  “Darling, you’re not old enough, and not sufficiently experienced, to take a decision like that. You don’t even realize what it would imply. How do you suppose Daddy would ever tolerate a situation of the kind you’re suggesting? Even from a purely practical point of view, it’s impossible.”

  “No,” said Sylvia. “If I get a job
, and go and live in London, it’s not impossible at all. What I do there is my own affair. I quite see about Daddy — I know he’d never understand — and I couldn’t live at home and do what he’d think wrong — but it was all settled, about my going to London, ages ago. If I don’t get one job, I shall go on looking till I find another. And then Andrew and I will be able to be together whenever he comes to London.”

  Claudia turned and looked at Quarrendon.

  He answered the look.

  “It was I who asked her if she’d do that. I asked her yesterday.”

  “You can’t do it,” said Claudia calmly and directly. “You can’t do that to Sylvia. You and I know, if she doesn’t, that it means breaking her heart sooner or later, and though the heart-breaks of nineteen don’t last, the things that they do to us last. They take something away — for ever. You can’t do that to Sylvia, if you love her at all.”

  “I do love her,” said Quarrendon.

  He saw that Sylvia was crying.

  She pulled her hand away from his, and brushed the tears from her eyes with a child-like gesture that caused them to run in long smears down her face. When she spoke her voice shook, and every now and then broke into a sob.

  “Listen, Mother. I do know what I’m talking about. I know that I love Andrew and that he loves me, and that that will always be worth whatever comes out of it, even if it’s what you call breaking my heart. I don’t want him to marry me. He’s told me why he doesn’t want to marry anybody, and he’s quite right. I understand. He’s told me that I may have to suffer — that both of us may. I don’t care. I don’t believe that suffering is a dreadful thing we’ve got to avoid. It’s one side of experience, just like happiness is the other, and that’s the greatest thing in the world, and Andrew — Andrew will give it to me.”

  She put her hands over her face, sobbing and crying.

  Quarrendon put his arm round her and gently placed her in one of the creaking wicker chairs. He knelt on one knee beside her. He could see nothing through the dimming of his thick lenses, and he took them off and looked up at her.

  “Sylvia,” he said, “will you marry me?”

  She shook her head vehemently.

  “No — no. You mustn’t marry anybody. You’ve got to be free.”

  A pang went through him as he realized afresh the truth implicit in her words.

  “We’ll make it mean freedom — for both of us. And I can’t let you go, Sylvia.”

  Claudia, suddenly unable to bear it, left them.

  3

  She went along the passage, hearing without noting the eternal blare of the radio from below, and went into her own room. She felt wretched and exhausted.

  Although it seemed to her that her whole miserable preoccupation was with Sylvia, and Sylvia’s emotions, yet her mind continually dwelt on the thought of Andrew Quarrendon.

  Then she’d been utterly wrong about him?

  He was not the academic philanderer that she had expected him to be, he was not particularly attracted by the thought of a close intellectual affinity with herself, as so many men had been. Her sincerity, her direct intelligence, her faculty for real and vital conversation, really meant nothing to him at all. But after all, she hadn’t expected him to fall in love with her. She had long ago faced the fact that sexual appeal, in herself had waned rapidly after the age of thirty. The men who liked her, who mildly fell in love with her — only she preferred to call it friendship — were attracted by quite other things. And it was those other things that kept them bound to her, regardless of the toll claimed and taken by the years.

  No, she hadn’t expected Quarrendon to fall in love with her. But she hadn’t expected him, somehow, to fall in love with anybody else.

  A housemaid came to the door — hesitated.

  “It’s all right,” said Claudia. “I’m going.”

  Feeling as if there was no refuge for her anywhere, she sought the library. The room was deserted, and the wireless turned off.

  As she sank into a chair, Copper appeared at the open window.

  “Well?”

  Claudia sat upright as if with a great effort. One could see her striving to dominate the lassitude that bound her.

  “Come in, Copper. I’ve seen them both. He’s asked her to marry him, but I don’t think he really wants to marry anybody, and she knows it.”

  “My God, if he doesn’t want to marry her, what does he want? Does he suppose she’s the sort he can keep in a flat in a back street somewhere?”

  “Don’t. What’s the use of talking like that? It doesn’t mean anything at all in a case like this.”

  “Supposing, instead of lecturing me,” said her husband disagreeably, “that you tell me what’s happened. Is Sylvia engaged to this blight?”

  Claudia shook her head.

  “I don’t think they’ve settled anything. I’ve spoken to them both as honestly as I could. It did make a difference — at any rate to him. But the decision, now, rests with Sylvia. I feel, more than ever, that I’ve got to do what’s really the hardest thing of all — leave her to live her own life without imposing my wishes, or even my views, on her.”

  “My God, Claudia, stop theorizing. If you’d brought that child up properly, I don’t suppose she’d be in this mess at all. And anyhow, there’s no sense in talking as if it was grand tragedy. She can’t be seriously attracted by the chap — and if she is it won’t last, at her age. But for heaven’s sake don’t go putting it into her head that there’s any question of her making a life-and-death choice. That’s all nonsense.”

  Claudia gave him a look of mingled weariness and scorn.

  “It’s no good, Copper. You don’t even begin to understand. Never mind. I’ll do what I can about Sylvia — you needn’t think about it any more. I imagine you’ll admit — even you — that I do want what’s best for my children. You’ll give me that, won’t you?”

  “I tell you what,” said Copper with great deliberation, “I can’t put things into words like you can, as you very well know, but there’s something wrong about you somewhere, Claudia. You may do all the right things, for the children — I suppose you do, God knows you’re clever all right — but you do them for the wrong reasons, or something. I don’t know what it is. But you just think it over.”

  So saying, he left her.

  Ten minutes later Frances Ladislaw, entering the room, found Claudia there in tears.

  She scarcely ever wept, and her tears had evidently exhausted her.

  “It’s all right,” she said, and summoned a smile for the reassurance of her startled friend. “It’s all right, Frances dear. One or two things combined to upset me, and I’m tired, perhaps — and then Copper came in.”

  “Claudia — I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” Claudia repeated, and she stood up, with the old weary gesture of pushing back her hair from an aching forehead.

  “He doesn’t mean to be unkind,” she said in a low voice. “But they’re rather incredible, sometimes — the things Copper says to me. I do everything that I can for the children — I’ve always done every single thing that I could for them, ever since they were born — but I suppose I make mistakes sometimes. Of course I do. Who doesn’t? I try to face them, and acknowledge them. But he — he waits until I’m anxious or unhappy, and then — flicks me on the raw.”

  “No, Claudia — no. Don’t feel that. Copper may hurt you sometimes — as you’ve just said, who is there that doesn’t make mistakes? But it’s not on purpose. He couldn’t hurt you on purpose.”

  “Oh yes he could,” returned Claudia, decisively enough. “Never mind. I’m used to it by this time, and I don’t let it interfere. One grows a protective shell, I suppose. And it doesn’t hurt as things that are true might hurt. Copper talks at random — just relieving his own impatience and dissatisfaction with quite meaningless accusations or reproaches. They don’t hurt,” repeated Claudia, “as they might hurt if they were true.”

  XII

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  Mrs Peel was wandering about searching, although she scarcely knew it, for somebody to whom she might talk of her grave apprehensions concerning her granddaughter Sylvia.

  Copper, to whom she had addressed a preliminary “Oh dear,” had at once walked away, and Mrs Peel had decided that he could not have heard her.

  Claudia was nowhere to be seen. Sal Oliver, whom Mrs Peel could not endure, seemed to meet her eye wherever she looked — but Mrs Peel and Sal Oliver were at least at one in their conviction that a tête-à-tête conversation between them could afford no gratification to either. With equal determination they ignored one another in spite of repeated encounters, until Sal at last accepted an invitation from Maurice to come and develop photographs with him in the cellar.

  What affectation, reflected Mrs Peel unjustly. She can’t really want to dabble about in a dark cellar.

  Irritated, she sought the library once more. Taffy was sprawling across the sofa, reading a book and eating caramels.

  “Ha, ha, ha, mais les hommes, les hommes sont rigolos!”

  This merry proclamation rang stridently through the room and assaulted the ears of mrs peel three times in rapid succession.

  “Really,” said Mrs peel.

  Taffy, looking very glum, rose without speaking and, still reading her book, walked across the room and turned off the wireless.

  “Where are the newspapers?” patiently enquired Mrs Peel.

  “It’s Bank Holiday. They don’t deliver any newspapers to-day,” Taffy reminded her.

  Giving her grandmother a glance full of hostility, she walked out at the open window.

  Really, the children!

  Mrs Peel sat on the sofa and thought how very odious children became the moment they ceased to be children.

  Even her own Claudia and Anna, although perfectly brought up, seemed to her just as tiresome, ungrateful, inconsiderate, and unreasonable as did Taffy and Sylvia, who had not been perfectly brought up at all, but quite the contrary. She gazed sadly about her and felt relieved when Frances Ladislaw looked in at the window.

  “Come in, come in,” said Mrs Peel. “I’ve not been downstairs very long, but I didn’t have a good night.”