Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  We were in our own house, that he’d bought, when he died rather suddenly.

  After Dad’s death, I wrote to Cecil at that American address, but I didn’t have much hope of his getting the letter, because I’d written there before, many times, and never had any answer.

  The other children were very good to me, and Rose wanted me to go and live with her and her husband in their nice place that had three spare bedrooms. But I didn’t go.

  I just stayed on, in the house Dad had bought. I’ve been there a long while now, and the grandchildren come and stay.

  There was one more letter came from Cecil, ten years ago now, saying that he was quite settled out in America, and doing fairly well, working in a Bank. He didn’t say anything about coming back to England, and he didn’t ask about his brothers and sisters, or anyone.

  It’s strange to think that if I saw Cecil now I shouldn’t know him again. He must be a middle-aged man by this time, only I can’t realize it, because the last time I saw him he was only fifteen.

  His letter never said if he was happy, and I often wonder. It does seem as if life was too much for some people, and they just can’t fit in anywhere. But perhaps it isn’t like that for him any more, out in America.

  I don’t suppose I shall ever know, now.

  CONVERSATION-PIECE

  “My dear, was it marvellous?”

  “My dear, it was absolutely marvellous!”

  They sat on Betty’s bed and looked at one another and laughed, feeling — and indeed looking — extraordinarily happy and young and beautiful.

  Betty’s half-filled cigarette-case and Rosemary Ann’s half-emptied box of chocolates lay on the bed between them, and as they smoked they ate chocolates and as they ate and smoked they talked, and Rosemary Ann also drank cold water out of the tooth-glass, long and frequently.

  “Go on — tell me the whole thing,” urged Betty.

  She was twenty-one, and more earnest than Rosemary Ann, who was only just nineteen. Nevertheless it was the love-affair of Rosemary Ann that was engaging the attention of both at the moment. (The love-affair of Betty was, so to speak, in rather a stage of transition between Kenya and something very, very modern and artistic in Bloomsbury, and there was nothing much to discuss about either.)

  “Well,” said Rosemary Ann, looking quite amazingly pretty, with her blue eyes shining in her soft face, and her lovely mouth curving every now and then into perfectly involuntary smiles.

  “Well, my dear, it was too marvellous. You know how absolutely miserable I’ve been for the last year?”

  “I know,” said Betty. “It’s been frightful, hasn’t it?”

  “Too frightful. Honestly—” said Rosemary Ann (“Darling, eat this one for me, will you? I hoped it was a hard one, but I’m sure by the feel it isn’t). Honestly, I don’t know how I’ve kept myself from going mad. It’s been so awful, having to meet him everywhere, and always with that woman — because she did run him absolutely to death, everyone says so — and I believe that’s what sickened him in the end. But you can imagine what hell it’s been for me, all this time.”

  “Rather. Something like that time when I thought Nick was keen on Patricia Godden — I simply couldn’t bear it.”

  “Darling! That really wasn’t a bit the same thing. You only thought you were in love with Nick — you know you say so yourself. It didn’t last any time at all.”

  “No, I know, but still it does matter frightfully while it’s on, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh, of course. But the awful thing for me was that mine went on and on — absolutely. I think it’s the way I’m made or something. There simply never has been anyone but Robin.”

  “I know, darling. You’ve been too marvellous.”

  “It’s not as if I hadn’t tried to fall in love with other people. I did my absolute best, with Gilbert, and the Somers man — Heaven knows he’s attractive enough — and it simply wasn’t the slightest use. I never thought of anyone at all except Robin. I used to think I was getting over it — though I always knew I wasn’t really — and the moment I heard that thing we used to dance to— ‘Colorado Baby’ — on the gramophone or anywhere, it was just as bad as ever. And, my dear, this is the really marvellous thing — you won’t believe it. On Wednesday, at this extraordinary place in Leicestershire, where Robin was the absolutely first person I saw when we got into the ballroom — and Heaven only knows why I didn’t faint or something from sheer astonishment — well, you won’t believe me, but the band played that very tune. You know how frightfully old it is — I remember dancing to it at my first dance — and of course one never hears it now in London. But that heavenly band started ‘Colorado Baby’ ten minutes after we arrived.”

  “My dear, it must have been fate or something.”

  “I know. And Robin came absolutely straight across the room to me and said ‘Our tune, Rosemary Ann,’ and looked at me, and I simply went straight into his arms and we danced, and we made them give three encores of ‘Colorado Baby’. It was absolute heaven, my dear.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “About the hag? Only that it was all over and he’d been utterly mad or something, and he’d been dying to ring me up but simply hadn’t dared. But he said the moment he heard that tune, that we’d always danced to together, he somehow knew everything would be all right.”

  “And it was?”

  “Absolutely. We spent the whole, entire evening together. It was the most wonderful dance I’ve ever been to, which just shows you, because really it was absolutely lousy, in itself — all county and huntin’ and shootin’ people, and the men either terribly ancient or frightfully young, and not a frock in the room except one’s own.”

  “I know the kind of thing. Devastating. Did they have a polka, and all the grandpapas and grandmamas simply leap into the middle of the room and perform the most shame-making antics?”

  “Practically. At least, it was a waltz, and a most fearfully good tune as a matter of fact, but one just retired gracefully and let them have the floor.”

  “I cannot imagine why they do it,” said Betty pensively. “Do you mind if I drink, darling? — which side didn’t you use? Chocolates make one so frightfully thirsty, I always think. Well, go on.”

  “There was one woman there, wearing the most utterly mouldy clothes, with grey hair and collar-bones and things. And, my dear, when this waltz-affair began, she said to the man standing next her — he wasn’t bad-looking, but absolutely bald — she said: ‘Do you remember, Tony?’ all sentimental, and he answered: ‘Those were the days, Elisabeth!’ And they started dancing together. My dear, I ask you!”

  “My dear, what do they get out of it?”

  “God knows,” said Rosemary Ann, eating chocolate. “I don’t.”

  MEN HAVE NO IMAGINATION

  Taking it bye and large, I suppose you might say that I’ve not been a good woman. It depends on the way you look at it, of course, but I’m bound to say that I shouldn’t like Evelina to inherit my temperament. Ever since I was about fifteen. Now I’m fifty-six and, of course, it’s all over. Has been, for years.

  No one, as far as I know, ever loved me as much as Maurice did, although I was over thirty when I met him. We were both crazy, and even now, when I think of the risks we ran, my blood runs cold, as people say.

  He was the only person who ever really loved me as much as I wanted to be loved, the only trouble being that he didn’t go on long enough.

  His love-making was what I call intelligent. I didn’t have to think of everything myself, and at the same time make it look as though it all came from him, which is what really takes it out of the woman in most love-affairs. He’d say all the right things, at the right moment. He’d notice when I looked tired, and be terribly sorry, without ever making me feel that looking tired is mostly the same thing as looking plain.

  When he gave me violets, he told me that it was because he remembered I’d once said I liked them.

  Things like that.
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br />   Well, of course I went off the deep end. As I say, we were perfectly mad.

  I met him wherever, and whenever, he wanted me to, and I sent him the kind of love-letters that every woman wants to send, if she can only find the man who wants to get them. And he wrote me the same kind of letter — every day.

  Looking back, I suppose George knew. He never said anything. Some husbands don’t. Not that I should have cared if he had. I’d have left him, and Evelina too, for Maurice, if Maurice had ever asked me to go.

  He never did. For my sake, he said — and I believed it when he said it, which just shows what a genius he was in his way. We had two marvellous years. It’s a relief to me, even now, to remember that it ended quickly. Maurice’s technique, as you might say, was too good to spoil the thing by an inartistic finish. We said good-bye (in a garden, under a harvest moon, and with someone or other playing the “Valse Triste” by an open window) while we both of us cared enough to make it worth while.

  *

  I got over it, of course, as one does. And some years later, when Maurice was engaged to a girl straight out of the schoolroom, he wrote and told me that he was going to be married. I’d always guessed that he would marry some day.

  George and I sent him a wedding present. I never met the girl.

  A very stupid woman, who knew her, once told me that she’d spoken about me — she thought that Maurice and I had been friends — and that the girl said: “Oh! But Maurice doesn’t want me to meet her. He told me she was a wrong ‘un.”

  Well, of course, it was true in a way. But it does make one feel that men — even men like Maurice — have no imagination.

  THE NIGHT SISTER

  Rosewarne is a Cornish name, of course, and it was seeing the little boy’s name — Dickie Rosewarne — on the case-sheet that made me think of Constantine Bay all of a sudden.

  Just for a minute it was like a breath of wind from the north Cornish shore blowing through the long polished wards and the scrubbed corridors, all smelling of carbolic, and the cement-white stairs.

  It’s over twenty years since we went to Constantine for the summer holidays. I was only ten years old and Roland was fourteen. I used to call him “Brother”.

  We used to swim in a place known as The Gully, that was like a long creek of ice-green water stretching away between two great towering walls of rock; and at the end of it was a cave that we called Smuggler’s Cave, and a high rock like a giant. Once another boy dared Roland to dive off that rock, and he did it. Nobody else was there except me, and Roland told me afterwards that he hadn’t been a bit frightened until he was actually in the air, and knew it was too late to go back.

  Those were the best holidays we ever spent.

  Later on, it got more and more difficult to afford things, especially after Father died.

  Mother said: “It doesn’t matter, Cicely, about us, but Roland must have his chance. If only he makes the most of it!”

  She didn’t understand Roland, although she loved him better than anybody else in the world, poor Mother. He was very clever — but he didn’t work, and he didn’t seem able not to spend money. It all went — everything we were able to give him, and more. Sometimes, when he came down from Oxford, he used to bring us presents, though he’d left all sorts of bills still unpaid, and Mother used to cry and say it was dishonest. But I don’t think it seemed like that to him. He was very generous, and he just wasn’t able to understand about money, ever. When he was at home, Mother had everything as nice as she could, always, and from the time he was a very little boy she’d give him everything he wanted. Afterwards, she used to say it was her own fault, and that she’d spoilt him.

  I don’t know.

  To me there was never anybody quite like Roland. He could make everything amusing, and happy, and lovely just by being there.

  When he was at home, I used to feel that it made up for all the things Mother and I had to do without, even for my not going to College, though I’d wanted to very much.

  *

  The terrible thing, that made life quite different ever afterwards, happened after he’d left Oxford and we were living in London.

  Some people got hold of him — a man and his wife. He owed them money, and I think he’d made love to the wife.

  Roland shot himself.

  Mother said he hadn’t trusted us enough. He didn’t understand that we’d have forgiven him everything, and done anything to help him.

  But I don’t think it was like that.

  I think Roland killed himself, like he’d dived off the Giant Rock at Constantine — on a mad impulse, not realizing until it was too late to go back.

  It was years and years before Roland’s debts were all paid off, but we did it before Mother died. But then, of course, it was far too late for me to go to College. But I got plenty of hospital experience during the war, and a job after it was over.

  *

  Time goes very quickly. When I get my holiday I usually go to the East Coast somewhere with another nurse. That time that Roland and I were at Constantine Bay, years ago, seems like another life altogether, and “Cicely” seems quite a different person to “Sister”, which is what almost everybody calls me now.

  It was the name of the little boy — Rosewarne — in Ward II. that brought it all back to me, and Roland and me swimming in the Gully together, in the days when I always called him “Brother”, and we didn’t know what life was going to be like.

  FAUNTLEROY

  (To A. P. D.)

  In due course, and with all the imperceptible speed of such transitions, they passed from middle age into elderliness. From being Daddy and Mummie, they became Father and Mother, and then Grandpapa and Grandmama.

  Soon, as it seemed to them, scarcely anybody was left to address them by their Christian names. They had passed into that region of which the inhabitants have no real existence in the eyes of outsiders.

  Their daughters wrote them nice letters every Sunday, one from Vancouver and the other one from Lancashire, and told them things about the children, and — in the case of the Lancashire one — the garden.

  Their son was married, to a suitable wife, and lived with her and their two little boys, in a house that was only two miles away from the family home. It was understood, in a polite and unspoken way, that whenever either of the old people should die, George and Doris and the boys would come and live with the survivor at the Hall.

  Meanwhile, George managed the estate, and Doris came over to tea two or three times a week, and the little boys came up even more frequently throughout their holidays.

  Grandpapa and Grandmama had their own routine, and were satisfied with it. They disagreed with one another rather frequently, but to that they were accustomed, and it did not distress either of them in the least.

  There was, for instance, the long-standing feud about the cat Fauntleroy. He was a large, square, black stable-cat and had transformed himself, by means of that indomitable friendliness that had earned him his name, into a drawing-room pet. He sat in armchairs, and jumped on Grandmama’s knee, and was given milk at tea-time.

  The unfortunate thing was that Grandpapa did not like cats.

  Grandmama, on the other hand, did, and had allowed herself to become deeply attached to Fauntleroy.

  She was unreasonable about him, and would get up and open the bedroom door at half-past six in the morning and let him in, and eventually give him bread-and-butter from the early-morning tea-tray.

  “I will not have that dam’ cat in the bedroom,” said Grandpapa, who never could wake up in time to say this at the moment of Fauntleroy’s admission, but always opened his eyes to the unwelcome sight of the black monster purring on the quilt, replete with bread-and-butter.

  In reality, Grandpapa did not particularly dislike Fauntleroy, who had a good deal of character, but he disapproved of Grandmama’s excessive fondness, and had a strange conviction that he could cure her of it by showing an exaggerated bias the other way. (This after being married t
o Grandmama for forty-eight years, in the course of which she had not been known to change her views more than half a dozen times all told.)

  “I shall send the cat out of the house altogether if this goes on,” said Grandpapa with tremendous firmness, and ignoring the fact that the cat had been in the house for nearly nine years already.

  George and Doris — particularly Doris — supported Grandpapa, although quite amiably, and without attaching any very great importance to the point, in the matter of Fauntleroy. Cats, they said, were all very well, but give them dogs every time. And in any case — this was Doris — not up-stairs.

  But the two little boys, Billy and Dan, loved Fauntleroy, and encouraged his assumptions.

  When the old lady, after rather a long illness, died, George and Doris were very kind to Grandpapa, although unable to feel that the grief of any very old person could be quite as real an affair as it would have been in the case of a contemporary of their own.

  When it was all over, and the funeral accomplished, and the move to the Hall made, and the new régime in full swing, they murmured to one another that the old man would probably be really happier, now that he’d got over the first shock, than he’d been for years.

  “Grandmama, poor dear, did rule the roost completely. Poor Grandpapa couldn’t call his soul his own.”

  “Well — perhaps not. But I don’t think she ever let him find it out,” said George.

  “Oh, I’m not so sure. Look at the Fauntleroy business.”

  “Oh, that. Yes, that was ridiculous,” said George. “What are we going to do about that cat? It’s all over the place.”

  “Naturally. It’s always been encouraged. Of course, it wouldn’t do at all to make an end of it, as it was such a pet of hers, but after a time I should think it would naturally reach the stage when it was kindest to put it out of the way.”

  Fauntleroy, however, did not look at all like having reached that stage. He continued to stalk in and out of rooms, his tail waving gently, his body every now and then curving into a half-moon round the legs of the furniture and the children.