Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “Were you so frightfully keen about the party?”

  “It wasn’t so much that, but there’d have been such a lot of fuss about it, and they — all the others — had been so excited — and everything was ready — men had come all on purpose to bring the little gold chairs, Daddy, and to arrange the flowers and things — It would have been so dreadful, to stop it all.”

  “I see what you mean. And certainly it wouldn’t have doneme any good, as far as that went. But why didn’t you tell them afterwards, old man? Aunt Doreen wouldn’t have been angry with you, would she?”

  “Oh, no, she’s never angry.”

  “Well, then—”

  Colin colored faintly.

  “You see, Daddy, I didn’t know you as well then as I do now, did I? And the party was fun, and the conjuror such a very, very clever one.”

  He gazed up at his father with solemn, trustful eyes.

  “I quite and completely forgot all about the telegram till I woke up next morning,” said Colin.

  THE END

  WOMEN ARE LIKE THAT

  CONTENTS

  INTERLUDE IN THE LIFE OF A LADY

  THE SPRAT

  SQUIRREL IN A CAGE

  THE OBSTACLE

  OIL PAINTING —— CIRCA 1890

  THE LADY FROM THE PROVINCES

  COMPENSATION

  THE MISTAKE

  HISTORY AGAIN REPEATS ITSELF

  THE BREAKING POINT

  WE’RE ALL ALIKE AT HEART

  THESE THINGS PASS

  THE WHOLE DUTY OF WOMAN

  THE GESTURE

  THE INDISCRETION

  TERMS OF REFERENCE

  BUT IF IT HAD BEEN A FINE DAY — ?

  DEDICATED TO YOÉ

  AND THE IMPERISHABLE MEMORY OF THE CHESTER SQUARE DAYS.

  “When I go through Chester Square nowadays, it is for the decorous purpose of attending a Committee Meeting. I am, in fact, pretending to be Grown-Up. But the Square garden, and you and I, know better.” Extract from a private correspondence.

  INTERLUDE IN THE LIFE OF A LADY

  IF there was one thing of which Louise Lloyd-Jump was certain, it was that one could live in a suburban villa, and yet be a lady.

  It was solely in order to make assurance doubly sure on the point that she had added the euphonious Lloyd to the regrettable Jump, and joined them together by that mark of distinction, a hyphen. Those who spoke of her, in her hearing, as Mrs. Jump were no friends of Louise’s — but, fortunately, most of the people she knew were as particular as she was herself.

  The name of Louisa, that she had received at her christening, had been discarded by Louise even in her schooldays, for her refinement was not an acquired thing. It was innate.

  It was, unfortunately, impossible to say as much for Mr. Lloyd-Jump. Refinement, in him, was neither innate nor acquired. But it was being slowly pumped into him, after seventeen years with Mrs. Lloyd-Jump.

  In those seventeen years, they had accumulated all kinds of things, besides the hyphen. A four-figure income — earned by Mr. Lloyd-Jump before his retirement from business, and very competently administered by his wife — and a large villa in Metro-land — or within an hour of Hyde Park Corner, as Louise preferred to describe it — and a Buick saloon car. They also had a daughter of sixteen, who was friends at school with the cousin of a baronet, and a son, who understood about wireless, and knew how to mend the electric bells when they were out of order.

  Louise herself belonged to the local tennis club, to two bridge clubs, and to the amateur operatic society.

  She was forty-three, but looked much younger. She had a henna shampoo at the hairdresser’s every Saturday, and was regularly massaged and manicured. In a strict seclusion, that Mr. Lloyd-Jump was never allowed to penetrate, she did mysterious exercises, in her dressing-gown and without her rubber belt, for “reducing the lower back.”

  For years Mrs. Lloyd-Jump had thought what a nice thing it would be for them all to go abroad. It was absurd, never to have been out of England — and so many of Patricia’s schoolmates were taken to France or Switzerland for their holidays. It would sound very well, to refer to “the year we went to Italy.” For she had resolved upon Italy.

  Italy was artistic.

  So they went to Italy, all four of them, and walked round and round churches and galleries, with their heads poised at a most uncomfortable angle, and stayed in pensions where it was difficult to find baths and only too easy to find other things, and Mr. Lloyd-Jump hated it all very much indeed, and Ronald and Patricia said that the food was muck, and the films rotten old-fashioned things that every decent English picture-house had shown years ago.

  Louise, having organized the whole expedition, and being a conscientious and determined person, enjoyed it more than they did, but she could not enjoy it very much, because her shoes hurt her feet most of the time, and she felt self-conscious whenever she tried to talk Italian, and almost as much so whenever she heard Italians trying to talk English. “They don’t seem to mind making fools of themselves,” was her inward comment — and she did not admire the Italians for their singular lack of sensitiveness.

  Easter in Rome was unspeakably exhausting, for the Lloyd-Jumps did all the proper things, and went to hundreds of unintelligible and noisy ceremonies, that smelt of incense and of Italian humanity, and saw the Pope on a balcony, far above their heads — craning upwards, as usual, in a painful fashion — and said that it was a survival from the Middle Ages, and Poor old man.

  Then, just as they were going home — when, as Mr. Lloyd-Jump could not help feeling, the really satisfactory part of the trip would begin — Ronald developed a mild attack of typhoid fever. And they had to remain in Italy. But not in Rome.

  Heaven forbid. There were still hundreds of churches unvisited, and they would have had to do them.

  “Why shouldn’t we take a small house in the country, for the summer?” said Patricia, who had been reading “The Enchanted April.”

  “This term is dished, anyway, because of the infection business.”

  “You could go home with father, as soon as there’s no chance of your starting it yourself, and I could follow with Ron when he’s strong again.”

  But at this, Mr. Lloyd-Jump — for the first time in years — baulked. Italy, what with its insects, its Pope, and its typhoid fever, had simply trebled his original, ordinary, healthy British prejudice against foreign countries. He refused, in a devoted, self-sacrificing, and entirely annoying fashion, to leave his wife and convalescent son alone in Italy.

  So as soon as Ronald could be moved, the Lloyd-Jumps found themselves, through the services of Messrs. Thos. Cook, in a small white house, with hardly any carpets, and no water laid on, in a small and steep village, called Genazzano, that was incomprehensibly possessed of a Cathedral and a Miraculous Virgin.

  None of them really liked it, but they all found compensations.

  Patricia discovered that a little vineyard adjoined the garden, and that she might eat fruit to an unlimited extent. There was also an enormous collection of Tauchnitz novels in the house, left there by American tenants. Every day she took a Tauchnitz out into the vineyard.

  Ronald and his father played chess, under a thick arbour of vines at the bottom of the garden.

  Louise took walks in the heat, feeling that this would do a great deal more towards the reduction of the lower back than any amount of exercises in the bathroom at home — and so it did.

  They all said at intervals: “Isn’t it wonderful to really feel the sun” — (for none of them knew or cared anything whatever about such things as split infinitives) — but they all, except Louise, did their very best to get away from the sun, as the summer advanced.

  Louise, curiously enough, really liked the heat. She had never experienced real, scorching, penetrating heat before, and it seemed to revivify her. Her skin took on a warm brown glow, and there were lights in her hair far superior to anything that the henna shampoos had ever brought there.
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  Her walks became longer and longer.

  The country was extremely rocky, mountainous, and arid. Only peasants, donkeys, and occasional goats, were to be met with.

  “I suppose it’s quite safe, you wandering about alone like this,” Mr. Lloyd-Jump said gloomily to his wife.

  Ronald, who was a good-hearted boy, turned away his head to hide his smile at the idea that anybody so old as his mother could not go anywhere in perfect safety, and Patricia exclaimed: “What on earth could happen, unless mother lost her way? — and she wouldn’t do that. This might be the desert of Sahara, for all the adventures one ever meets with. I only wish one did.”

  “Hush, dear,” said her mother automatically. “It’s silly to talk like that.”

  Patricia was argumentative by nature, and she also wished to prove to her parents — and especially to her mother — that she was no longer a child.

  “If it’s men that dad is so much afraid of your meeting,” she remarked, with the horrid crudeness of ignorance, “then I’m sure it’s safer here than at home. Though really I never can see why—”

  “That will do, dear,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Jump.

  She often found it necessary to tell Patricia that that would do — meaning that it wouldn’t do at all. Sometimes she had unhappy doubts whether, in spite of the cousin of the baronet, Patricia was growing up really ladylike.

  Since they had been at Genazzano, however, Louise had slightly relaxed her cult. It didn’t seem to matter quite so much in Italy, because, after all, there was nobody to see. It was the first time in many years that she had been free from the great necessity of proving to herself and her surroundings what a perfect lady she was.

  As a result of this relaxation, she became more natural than she had ever been since her fourth birthday.

  “You look extraordinarily well, Louise. It seems as if this place suited you,” said Mr. Lloyd-Jump.

  His wife agreed.

  “I think it does.”

  It was one of a succession of wonderful nights; with a glowing moon — (“very different from the London affair,” as even Mr. Lloyd-Jump conceded) — and a purplish-blue sky sown with silver, and wonderful, soft sounds and scents all round the arbour of thickly growing, twisted vines beneath which they were sitting.

  “I suppose they get this kind of weather all through the summer months,” said Louise.

  “Hotter than this, in August, very likely.”

  “How heavenly!” sighed Louise — who, at home, would certainly have been careful to say “How perfectly marv’llous,” which was what everyone was saying just then.

  She was very restless, and refused Patricia’s offer to go in and fetch her knitting for her. Ronald still went to bed early every night.

  “The mosquitoes are a bore. I think I shall go indoors,” said Patricia.

  “Wouldn’t you like to come in, too, mother?” said Mr. Lloyd-Jump, who occasionally forgot that his wife particularly resented this form of address.

  “No,” she replied with a strange curtness.

  But when Patricia had gone, she came and sat beside him on the wooden bench, and when she put her arm through his, Mr. Lloyd-Jump in a dim, and not particularly interested, way, supposed that she wished to make amends for her curtness.

  “These evenings — this whole country,” said Louise with a peculiar, nervous-sounding laugh, “makes me feel that there ought to be — that one has really missed — oh, well, I don’t know.”

  Mr. Lloyd-Jump did not know either, so he said nothing.

  This, very unreasonably, did not appear to satisfy his wife.

  “Wouldn’t this make a perfect place for a honeymoon?”

  “There’d be nothing to do,” he objected.

  “Except make love.”

  “And eat grapes,” idly added Mr. Lloyd-Jump, who was not interested, but was too kind to let even such a futile conversation as this one drop quite abruptly.

  “But, Harold—”

  Mrs. Lloyd-Jump paused, appeared to change her mind, and then said in a low voice:

  “Do you remember our honeymoon?”

  “At Frinton? I should think I do. I never was so cold in my life. That hotel must have been the draughtiest one in England.”

  “I suppose we’ve both changed a good deal, since then.”

  Mr. Lloyd-Jump, unenthusiastically, supposed so too.

  “I suppose I’ve changed?” said Louise, who seemed to her discomfited husband to have been seized with an indecent passion for personalities.

  “I suppose we none of us grow any younger,” he replied guardedly.

  “Can’t you say anything prettier than that, Harold?”

  “Louise,” said the goaded man, “what on earth is the matter with you? Anybody would think you were pretending to be a bit of a girl, trying to get some fellow to make up to her.”

  There was a dreadful silence.

  Mr. Lloyd-Jump felt that he had made use, in his last speech, of at least one expression that his wife would consider common, and this he sincerely regretted, for he admired her refinement.

  Mrs. Lloyd-Jump was battling with a senseless, bewildering and altogether agonized, sense of bitter disappointment. She had not, for one instant, seriously supposed that Mr. Lloyd-Jump, after seventeen years of married life — during sixteen of which they had taken one another completely for granted, in every possible way — would begin to make love to her. He had never done so with any abandon, even on the draughty honeymoon at Frinton. But she was in the grip of an overwhelming conviction that someone ought to make love to someone, on such a night, and in such surroundings. She had not yet lost her nerve and her head to the extent of admitting that by “someone” she really meant herself.

  She decided that the sun must have been too much for her, and went indoors, to the great relief of her husband.

  But next day, once more, the sun was too much for her again.

  Or something.

  In this colloquial fashion did Louise in her own mind try to account for the strange obsession that had taken hold of her.

  She felt that Genazzano cried aloud for romance.

  The dim, hot evenings, under the green tunnel of the vines, the heady scents that seemed intensified by the starlight, and the soft, mysterious sounds made by unseen creation, were an ideal setting.

  But a setting what for? Louise could not help asking herself. Mr. Lloyd-Jump lived only for the moment when they should leave Italy — and when he spoke at all, which was seldom, it was about the badness of the water, the oiliness of the food, and the amenities of his own suburb.

  Ronald ate and slept a great deal, discussed the Continental edition of the Daily Mail rather languidly with his father, and did cross-word puzzles.

  Patricia wrote picture postcards to the Games Mistress at her school — on whom she had a “crush” — ate quantities of fruit, and took to manicuring her nails.

  And Louise continued to go for walks and to try, more and more wildly, to induce her husband to make love to her.

  She felt that she was being unladylike, and it distressed her very much, but worse was to follow.

  From being unladylike, she became almost depraved.

  One morning, she found herself cutting a large piece out of the front of a blue crepe-de-chine afternoon frock that had served her for best at many a bridge party, and that she had taken for every-day wear in Italy, in order to finish it off.

  She pretended that she was doing this for the sake of being cooler, but when she had put a tiny little fold of blue net all round the now square decolletage, she put the dress on and gazed at herself in the glass.

  Her neck was still firm and beautiful, and if it lacked the whiteness of Patricia’s, it was better set upon her shoulders.

  Louise had never supposed herself to be a pretty woman—” I hope I should never be mistaken for anything but a lady,” was as far as she had ever gone — but she did know that her hair and her shoulders were her best points.

  Her
hair was very thick, and naturally curly, so the fact that it now wanted cutting did not detract from its beauty, and only made her look younger and less sophisticated. As for her shoulders, it was years since she had seriously considered them. But she went so far as to rip the sleeves out of the blue crepe-de-chine frock, so that her arms were left entirely bare.

  She thought how nice she looked, and how amazingly young, and she wondered if she could induce her husband not only to think so, too, but to say so.

  But no.

  Mr. Lloyd-Jump did not notice her frock — Patricia did, and looked disapproving — and at supper he talked about the shortage of indoor sanitation on the Continent — by which he really meant in Genazzano.

  Then he said: “Thank the Lord we shall be out of this place in another day or two” — and Ronald and Patricia simultaneously exclaimed “Oh, good!” and they were all silent again. It might have been supposed that Louise, after all this, would have abandoned any hope of erotic adventures, but the moment that she found herself alone with Harold, out of doors, under the insidious arbour, her romantic desires sprang into agitated life once more. She sat down unnecessarily close to him, and let her shoulder touch his. Mr. Lloyd-Jump, without unkindness, but in a matter-of-course way, moved.

  Impossible to pursue him up the bench.

  Mrs. Lloyd-Jump, who was by now entirely desperate, said suddenly and boldly:

  “Since we married, Harold, have you ever been attracted by anyone else?”

  She hardly knew what reply she expected, since she had never for one instant suspected Harold, with or without reason, of even the most transitory infidelity.

  So that it gave her a slight shock when, after a pause, he said:

  “It depends upon what you mean by attracted.”

  “Well” — she — drew a long breath— “for instance, have you ever wanted to kiss anybody?” She would have liked to say “anybody else,” but felt no security that Harold had ever particularly wanted to kiss her, any more than she had wanted him to do so (until this fatal Italian journey), although they had exchanged the customary marital civilities.