We listened, and laughed sometimes, and were encouraged to comment.
But we might not think independently. That we learnt very early.
To assert an opinion contrary to my grandmother’s, drew down instantly that form of snubbing against which children are most completely powerless — a sharp, wounding satire.
“Yes, my darling, that’s your little opinion, is it? But as I happened to have lived in the world a few years longer than you have, don’t you think it’s just possible that I may be right and you be mistaken?”
One couldn’t stand up against it, of course.
After a time, I know very well, I came to believe that it was wrong — a kind of sin — to let my immature judgment differ from my grandmother’s in anything.
So we grew up — if anything so stunted can be called growing-up.
We were even taken to London — and the contemporaries of my grandmother told us how much she had been admired in her youth. We met a few girls, with whom we had nothing in common. I think they, and we, were mutually frightened. We were taken to a ball.
Like other girls, I had had my foolish dreams, born of vanity and of romance. Frederica, I know, was more detached, and less egotistical than I. But even she, in secret, may have looked forward to some magical release — some unforeseen flowering.
Both of us, I know now, had pretty faces, of a joyless, pallid, Rossetti-like type. But we were tall and thin and round-shouldered. We could not dance. We could not talk, as other people talk, for we laboured always under the immense, overpowering weight of self-consciousness laid upon us by the repression under which we had always lived.
Above all, we could not enjoy.
My grandmother, characteristically, was impatient, and vexed at our lack of social success. “No wonder,” she said to me once, with quite unconscious brutality. “I don’t believe you’re ever really natural, either of you. Can’t you be less stiff, less absurdly self-conscious?”
Her words used to come back to me, to torment me, and make me a thousand times more stiff, and more self-conscious.
She was old.
She no longer enjoyed society, where she met younger, and cleverer, and more important people, and in which the little set that she had once dominated had long ago ceased to exist.
She took us back again to Scorpe, to Miss Batten, to the Mungar road. We were allowed to walk along it by ourselves, now.
That was the only difference.
Strangely, incredibly, the years went on.
Still in terms of the oil-painting, in the heavy gilt frame, I see us in tightly belted tweed skirts, that flapped against our ankles, in striped shirts with high collars and ties — in cotton frocks with “Peter Pan” collars — in the absurd hobble-skirts that accompanied huge picture-hats — steadily moving away from the youth that might once have been ours.
In 1915 my grandmother had a stroke. One of us must stay with her — the other one might have gone to the “war-work” of which so much was made. But I overbore Frederica. I made use of the method that my grandmother had always employed — the personal appeal. I told her that I could not bear to be left alone, and that we must be together or I should go mad.
Frederica said that she would stay at Scorpe, and I could go.
But I would not.
In secret, I could not face the torture that it would have been to think of Frederica all alone at Scorpe, except for the semi-sentient thing that was my grandmother, and Miss Batten, whom we did not like.
It was the old obsession, the tormenting, morbid anxiety of our early days, when we had nothing to think about except our own and one another’s nervous reactions. And I would not let Frederica go whilst I stayed at Scorpe. I said that I could not bear it, alone. I knew that reason would compel her. The real reason — that I knew that she would be tired, and perhaps ill, working amongst strangers — I said nothing about.
Perhaps she guessed it. We had come to have an uncanny sensing of all one another’s thoughts and feelings, so that neither of us could ever really hide anything from the other.
I don’t know how it might have been, if we had separated from one another then. Sometimes in a dim, vague way I thought of marriage, that came to other women — but I knew it was not for us. We could not have been separated. Neither would have let the other live an independent existence.
Through the war years we remained on at Scorpe. Often I hid the newspapers from Frederica because I did not want her to be made miserable by the horrors they described.
Once, I remember, she protested in her gentle tentative way — the effort causing her to turn white round her mouth and nose, as she did, when — as so rarely happened — she opposed her will to mine. She said, then, that she thought I never wanted her to grow up. I did not realize that she was a woman and not a child.
“What you’re doing to me is a little what grandmother did to us,” said Frederica. I made her un-say it afterwards and declare that she hadn’t meant it — but I never forgot.
Lately, I’ve remembered again and again.
When Frederica and I were entering upon middle life we were still living together at Scorpe. My grandmother left it to us, jointly, on condition that we lived there and kept Miss Batten with us. And of course we did. There was nowhere else we could go.
Last year, Frederica had an illness. Almost every day I asked her if she was tired, or had a headache, or a sore throat, for she had dark lines under her eyes that made me anxious — more anxious than ever. But she always said No — then one day she fainted, and I sent for the doctor.
He said that there was “nothing organically wrong” but it seemed to me that he kept her under observation for a very long while. He kept on and on coming to see her. He was quite a young man and was supposed to be very clever and modern.
I had told him, right at the beginning, that I did not want Frederica to be frightened or made anxious. I said she was very highly strung — and a sick pang of apprehension went through me when he quietly agreed: “Very highly strung. I can see that.”
“But she has always been quite well. You don’t think there’s anything really wrong?”
“I don’t say there’s anything really wrong, physically. Your sister is anaemic — under-vitalized — but she’s not ill,” he answered carefully. “Then, what is it?”
“Has she anything on her mind — that you know of, that is?”
I laughed scornfully.
“If she had, I should certainly know of it. Frederica wouldn’t want to hide anything from me — but if she did want to, she couldn’t. Why, I know every one of her thoughts. I can sense them, almost.”
“I see,” he replied, in a curious, colourless tone. “You’ve never been separated?”
“Never for a single day.”
“I want your sister to have a complete change,” he said then, abruptly.
“To the sea?”
“If she likes the sea. Or London, if she likes London. Or better still somewhere abroad.”
We had never been abroad.
“I’ll talk it over with her. Expense is a consideration — but still, it could be managed.”
“That’s excellent. It isn’t a bad time of year for Switzerland, you know. Your sister doesn’t sketch, I suppose?”
“No, we were never taught—”
“Oh, well, there’s plenty to be done without that. Walks, and drives, and plenty of pleasant society.”
I said nothing. Frederica and I had never been successes in any society even in our youth. Certainly we should not be so now.
“How soon could you go?”
“Well, we’ll talk it over.” I thought his inquiry rather absurd. He had just said that Frederica was not ill.
“I should like it to be as soon as possible,” he insisted.
“I’ll find out first if she would like the idea,” I said coldly. “Then we can manage something, no doubt.”
He looked at me rather strangely, I fancied, but he went away then, only sayin
g that he would come back next day.
I told Frederica that evening, in our room. We still slept together, as we had done ever since we could remember.
“He thinks you need a change. I suppose Bognor would hardly do.” We went there for a month, every summer. “He even suggested Switzerland. Would you like that?”
“I think perhaps I should,” said Frederica’s voice out of the darkness.
“But he said London, or anywhere that you’d like. So you will have to choose, Frederica, because I don’t really mind. I’m quite as ready to go to Switzerland as to London.”
She said something, but I could not hear what it was.
I knew, however, instantly, that it was something that it distressed her infinitely to say.
“What?”
Then suddenly I understood.
“The doctor — meant me — to go by myself.”
My first impulse was one of anger — almost of fury. But for Frederica’s sake I stifled it Anything emotionally violent always upset her.
I answered in a very quiet voice.
“I suppose he doesn’t realize that we haven’t ever been separated. Did you tell him that we’d both of us hate it — that it would be out of the question?”
“No,” said Frederica in a strangled tone.
“Then I’ll tell him, to-morrow.”
I did tell him. I checked him, when he tried to argue, and even to persuade me that he knew better than I did what Frederica wished, what would be best for her. I told him that no professional care would ever be like mine, for I had studied Frederica until I knew every thing that passed through her mind, whether she spoke of it to me or not. I said that I should never allow anybody else to take care of her.
“Not if I told you that the very best thing for her — and for you too — would be to separate?” he asked me.
I was very angry then.
I said things that I had never meant to say — that I could never have imagined myself saying. But I had the strangest feeling — that could not be called memory — that my grandmother could, and would, have spoken so, had her supremacy ever been questioned.
She would have been angry because she could not bear to be opposed or contradicted. She wanted all the time to dominate.
But I was only angry because a stranger, who knew nothing of the isolation that had thrown us together, dared to suggest that Frederica should attempt an existence independent of mine.
If she had been away from me, I should have gone mad with anxiety.
But she never went.
The doctor was not angry, as I was. His face was white, but his eyes were full of an extraordinary compassion.
“Ask her — at least ask her — if she doesn’t really think I’m right and that she had better go away by herself,” he said.
I called Frederica then and there, and asked her in front of him. I knew that I was safe. Even if it had been true — and it was not true — she wouldn’t have said, to a stranger, what she knew I didn’t want her to say.
I looked at her and saw the familiar little white dints come round her mouth and nostrils. I hated her to suffer, but it was necessary.
“The doctor doesn’t understand, Frederica. He thinks that you could go away without me — that you’d leave me here — let me be anxious about you—”
“That isn’t fair,” the doctor interrupted.
“You don’t want to go anywhere without me, do you, Frederica?”
Her eyes went from one to the other of us with a hunted, agonized look that tore at my heart.
I loved her so.
The doctor, who talked of sending her away from me, was not capable of realizing how much I loved her. What did he know of our thwarted, distorted childhood, of the morbid atmosphere of introspection that had surrounded us always, of the isolation that had flung us back upon one another until neither had any real existence apart from the other?
Frederica, her eyes on me, said:
“No. We can’t be separated.”
We have never seen that doctor any more. A much older, more old-fashioned man comes, when a doctor has to be called in at Scorpe.
But we are never ill, Frederica and I.
Every day, almost, we walk on the Mungar road, and every night we sleep in the large bedroom together, so that I can hear every breath she draws, and almost every thought as it passes through her mind.
THE LADY FROM THE PROVINCES
ADAIRE was bored. It was months since any woman had interested him seriously, and in order to find himself in vital contact with life, he needed the stimulus of an overwhelming personal interest. It was always a woman who had supplied that element, ever since his eighteenth year, and he was now eight-and-forty.
Dining out, going to first nights, and attending public dinners, evening after evening in London, he met the same women. It seemed to him that they all conformed more or less closely to a type that failed to retain such interest as it might arouse. Girls, he left alone. The breezy animalism of the sporting English girl revolted him only slightly less than the academic frigidity of the literary spinster.
His boredom caused him to feel middle-aged, and he noticed in himself a tendency to hum the music-hall refrains of twenty years earlier, recalling the elaborately coiffed beauties who had strummed “Under the Deodar” at the piano after dinner, under silk and fringed lamp-shades, and the woman to whom he had said good-bye on the eve of his departure for South Africa, to the strains of “Good-bye, Dolly, I must leave you,” ground on a barrel-organ in the Square outside. And then Lady Lucassin rang him up at the office.
“Desmond, is that you? Are you going to Dormer’s new play to-night? Oh, I hoped perhaps you were. Well, do come to our box after the first act, will you? I want you to meet Pamela Carew — she doesn’t know anybody at all, poor little thing, and one wants her to enjoy herself, just for once—”
It was so like his dear friend Margaret Lucassin, to ignore all preliminary explanations, and take it for granted that one would know what she was talking about.
“I’d love to come, of course. Who is Pamela Carew?”
“Oh, not anybody at all,” Lady Lucassin assured him cheerfully. “She’s up from Devonshire, or Cornwall, or somewhere, and the husband is in a nursing home, poor wretch. She’s a most terribly distant cousin of Charlie’s, and we’ve asked her to stay because they’re so badly off.”
That was like Margaret, too — to be kind, and brazenly proclaim it, with a candour that was too simple to be offensive.
Adaire purposely allowed a tinge of dismay to sound in his voice.
“Of course I’ll come to your box — to see you. But shall I have to talk to Mrs. — er — Carew about the bulbs? Because I’d so much rather talk to you—”
“About Universal Franchise?” she interrupted him, good-humouredly derisive. “Only come, and you shall talk about anything you like to anyone you like. And Pamela’s a little dear, really — such a dull husband, too — breeds Cairn terriers or something.”
Her voice trailed off, and Adaire was left, rather gloomily forecasting the kind of “little dear” whom Margaret Lucassin would want to have amused, because she had a dull time at home. But he liked Margaret Lucassin, and prepared himself, although without enthusiasm, for the disconnected question-and-answer conversation of the lady from the provinces.
“Mr. Adaire — Mrs. Carew.”
She was pretty. More, she was his type of prettiness. Tall, and yet so slim as to appear almost small, with a long neck and a beautifully set little head. And her eyes were exactly the eyes that, to Adaire, had always promised most — brilliant, rather mocking, with alluringly long lashes — and hazel, the colour of intelligence. She had brown hair, and straight black brows. Her mouth — a very pretty one — intriguingly failed to carry out the promise of her eyes. It was the mouth of an unawakened girl. He guessed that she looked younger than she was. Her real age might be thirty. It was nothing to him that her frock was, quite obviously, a “best” evening d
ress of two years ago, brought up to date by a village dressmaker, and that her hair was an un-smart bob.
He was attracted by her, and it was with a recognizable throb of satisfaction that he realized that her speaking voice was not going to be a disappointment to him.
He took the chair next to hers.
“Please don’t criticize the play,” she begged, “I’m simply living in it, and two people have already pointed out faults in the construction, and faults in the acting, and it’s so destructive to one’s enjoyment.”
“I won’t,” he promised. “Besides, I like the play. I want them to marry and live happily ever afterwards.”
“You must be a bachelor,” she declared calmly.
“I am.”
“Some day when I write a play, the curtain will go up on the lovers, just where it usually goes down — you know, when he says Joan! and she answers David! Quick curtain. And the play will be about what happened afterwards.”
“May I come to the author’s box, on the first night?”
“Yes, I think you may.”
Her smile was enchanting.
By the end of the evening he knew he was definitely attracted. And he was excitingly in doubt as to whether he had made her aware of it or not.
“Well, have you talked about bulbs?” Margaret Lucassin inquired, her eyes twinkling in her plain, good-natured face, as Adaire helped her on with her cloak. (Mrs. Carew had slipped into a rather naif furry cloak-of-all-work without giving him a chance.)
“Certainly,” said Adaire coolly. “I’m interested in bulbs — very!”
“Come and lunch to-morrow.”
“Thanks so much.”
“Two o’clock. Mrs. Carew goes to Highgate and spends the morning with her husband, and she can’t get back to Eaton Square before a quarter to two. But he has treatment or something in the afternoons, and she doesn’t go back there.”
Adaire was not in the least interested in Mrs. Carew’s husband, except that he hoped that he might remain ill for a long time.
“Can’t I give her a lift, to-morrow morning?”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 547