Westwood

by Stella Gibbons

  Margaret sat before the fire and poured the coffee for her father and their guest. The house was hushed, and outside there was the dead quiet of the first black, damp, starless night of the New Year. She was silent, listening to the talk of the men, which, while not profound, was sufficiently different to the feminine conversations to which she most frequently listened to hold half of her attention: the other half was still turned dreamily towards the mansion on the hill.

  14

  At this hour its owner was still sitting by the fire in his study, with a drink and a cigar, at the end of an evening’s work on his play. Seraphina was seeing in the New Year with a gay party somewhere.

  He looked much as Margaret had imagined him. His profile was outlined against the radiance from the lamp, and in the shadows there were volumes bound in gilded calf-skin, and the velvet curtains, of the rich hue of a redcurrant, did hang down in sumptuous folds; there was even the bust of a Roman emperor of the Silver Age, with sensual lips and ox-like curls.

  The firelight played over the plaster mouldings on the ceiling and deepened the colour of the carpet, which was that worn red drugget, once of excellent quality, only to be found in old-fashioned hotels and the homes of the English upper classes. Tall green candles in massy silver sconces stood upon the marble mantelpiece, which was carved with the heads of pouting cupids, and coils of vine and sprays of curling feathers. At one side of the fireplace were stacked some large logs of solid beech, their silvery surface covered with a thin green lichen where for a hundred years the west wind had blown upon them with its burden of rain. A third rested upon the fire, with green and bluish flames just beginning to lick over its round dark sides. The time was nearly one o’clock in the morning.

  Mr Challis was thinking about the evening which he had spent with Hilda and trying to analyse what was her charm for him, but he could get no further than that she reminded him of the sharp fresh taste of a young apple, while her colouring had the apple-blossom’s pink and white, and her eyes the blue of the sky between the apple-blossom leaves; she even had the apple-blossom’s cool fragrance. He had enjoyed their evening together, but not as much as he had anticipated, for he had by now reached a stage in vanity and loneliness when another human being only served him as an audience, a mirror, or a thurifer, and Hilda was not fitted for any of these offices. True, she had been friendly and polite and cheerful, but this was not at all what Mr Challis wanted; he was a subtle, dissatisfied adult being (he told himself) and demanded a response for these qualities in the women he entertained. She had also, towards the close of the evening, displayed a puzzling interest in his welfare; asking him in the taxi if he felt a draught, making him promise to go straight to bed when he got home, and so on; and much as he would have liked to he could not attribute this solicitude to a passion for himself. He could not make up his mind quite what it was due to; unless she was intensely motherly and liked, so to speak, to tuck her admirers up? He hoped not. It was many years since he had been tucked up and he had never felt the want of it.

  The evening had not been a complete success, though she seemed to have enjoyed it all; even the dreadful film about two excitable young people, Judy somebody and a dwarfish boy-man all over freckles, who kept singing and dancing. Mr Challis had suffered considerably, but had passed the time by reflecting how far gone in degeneracy was Western culture. He would have preferred to take her to see a revival of Carnet de Bal, but feared that he might see someone he knew there, and so had deferred to her choice.

  And as that evening, in which sweetness and weariness were so strangely mingled, drew towards its end, he had begun to experience a division of personality which was disturbing; he had put it down to the noise and the excessive tedium of the film. It was as if he were at once two people; his own cultured, detached, fastidious self, and another man; a much simpler man who did not care where he was so long as he was with Hilda, and could drink in the sharp sweetness of her voice and laugh and catch the blue flash of her eyes as she glanced sideways. By the end of the evening this simple man had been completely in the ascendant, and Mr Challis, after one practised attempt in a taxi which Hilda had dealt with by forthright impatience, had pleaded as abjectly as any boy of eighteen for a good-night kiss.

  It made him hot to remember how he had pleaded, and he would not let himself think about what Hilda had said, and yet he could not forget it; it returned again and again to his thoughts, making him move restlessly as if under a stab of pain.

  At last he got up, and stood with his arms leaning upon the marble of the mantelpiece, staring down into the fire while the light played over his beautiful discontented face.

  It’s no use, Marcus, I don’t like you enough yet. I don’t mean to be rude, but I just can’t.

  It was the first time that his kisses had ever been refused, and his vanity writhed and writhed again. He had the usual theories about amorous experts, and when Hilda had admitted with a laugh that she often kissed her boys good night (‘and good morning and good afternoon too, if they’re good’), the thought of her exchanging hearty hugs with amateurs in the Services was to him as inexplicable as it was humiliating.

  He would have salved his vanity by thinking that she suffered from all sorts of peculiar complexes, but his intelligence rejected the solution: apple-blossom and complexes do not go together.

  No, thought Mr Challis, standing upright with a sigh, I confess it; I cannot understand her, and as he sighed, the clock silverily struck one.

  * * *

  At breakfast at the Steggleses the next morning there was only the usual conversation about how the members of the party had slept and comment upon the war news, and Dick Fletcher did not join in it much, but he looked rested. As was usual when she had dispensed hospitality and found the experience less disagreeable than she had anticipated, Mrs Steggles was in a gracious mood and addressed most of her remarks to him, telling him among other things that now he had found the way there he must come out and see them again.

  ‘Yes, you can give me a hand in the garden, Dick,’ said Mr Steggles, winking at Margaret.

  ‘Oh, Dad’s no gardener,’ said Mrs Steggles instantly, laughing, ‘and Margaret’s busy at school all day and I’ve got my hands full, queueing and cooking and cleaning, I’m sure I’m ashamed of that wilderness out there.’

  ‘Are you a keen gardener, Mr Fletcher?’ asked Margaret.

  He shook his head. ‘I haven’t even got a window-box.’

  ‘Hasn’t your flat got a garden?’ asked Mrs Steggles.

  ‘Only about two square feet, and that belongs to the people downstairs.’

  ‘Oh, a garden’s a great joy, I always think, but it does bring the dirt into the house. I used to say to Mr Steggles when we were in Lukeborough – garden as much as you please, I’m sure no one likes to see flowers about the place better than I do, but you leave your boots outside the scullery door before you come into the house, I said, if you please,’ and she laughed.

  ‘Yes, it does tread the dirt in,’ said Dick Fletcher, after a pause. Margaret had the impression that he would rather not have spoken and only did so because she and her father kept silent, and for an instant his face wore the impatient, gloomy look which she had brought to it by her own sneering remark on the previous evening. That thin face showed all changes of expression very plainly.

  ‘You ought to come up one Sunday and help Dad dig up our wilderness; stay to lunch and go for a walk on the Heath in the afternoon,’ said Mrs Steggles, while Margaret listened in surprise. Had her mother taken one of her sudden likings to Mr Fletcher? ‘Get some of our Highgate air into your lungs.’

  ‘It’s awfully kind of you, but I’m afraid my Sundays are always booked up,’ he smiled.

  ‘Every Sunday?’ cried Mrs Steggles archly.

  He nodded, still smiling.

  ‘Well, Dick, I suppose we ought to be moving,’ said Mr Steggles, getting up from the table, and shortly afterwards they went off, and Margaret and her mother began upon their
morning’s work.

  ‘Poor man!’ exclaimed Mrs Steggles, after a silence, running more hot water into the basin, ‘I expect it’s a change for him to come into a real home.’

  ‘Why? Is his flat so uncomfortable?’

  ‘Oh, I expect so. He does everything for himself.’

  ‘Can’t he afford a housekeeper?’

  ‘I don’t know, Margaret,’ said her mother mysteriously, ‘that’s just what puzzles me. He gets the same as your dad, I believe, yet he looks – doesn’t he?’

  Margaret nodded, bored.

  ‘Shabby,’ said Mrs Steggles. ‘Did you notice?’

  This was the type of conversation which Margaret disliked more than any other, and she was silent. Mrs Steggles went on: ‘Poor fellow! No wife to look after him – no wonder he’s let himself go. I’d whip such women, that’s what I’d do – have them publicly whipped.’ She scrubbed a saucepan vigorously.

  ‘Who was his wife?’ asked Margaret, at last, knowing that her mother would become irritable if she did not make some comment.

  ‘Oh, some girl up in Birmingham. She was mixed up with the Repertory Company there somehow. I don’t know the rights of it; I don’t think she was exactly an actress. She was very pretty, by all accounts.

  ‘Didn’t they get on?’ said Margaret, hanging up the damp tea-towel.

  ‘He spoilt her,’ said Mrs Steggles. ‘Gave her anything she wanted and then she wasn’t satisfied. She went off with some rich chap, so the story goes. I don’t know. It was Mrs Miller told me. She knew some people who knew them in Birmingham.’

  ‘Were there any children?’ asked Margaret.

  ‘Oh, no, I don’t think so; Dad’s never mentioned any.’

  ‘Mother, shall I shop, or will you?’ said Margaret, pausing at the door.

  ‘I hope he will come here often, if he wants to,’ burst out Mrs Steggles, giving a last polish to the gleaming sink. Her face was flushed and her eyes wet. ‘Poor fellow! I can sympathize.’

  Margaret hesitated. She had never before taken any outward notice of her parents’ unhappy relationship, feeling that to do so would only have increased her mother’s sufferings. But her mother had never before indulged in such an outburst, and Margaret felt that it must be because she felt a need, which had become unbearable, for comfort. Perhaps it was the renewal of old torments in a new place, where she had hoped to find respite, that had broken down her control.

  Father must have got hold of some new creature, thought Margaret in disgust, and just as I thought things were getting better. It was now clear that her mother’s championship of Mr Fletcher was due to her feeling that both he and she were victims of Bad Women.

  At least Margaret’s sympathy could flow from her heart. She did feel her mother’s sorrow; she did feel anger at the way her father behaved, and she went over to her and put an arm about her shoulders.

  ‘Mother, I’m so sorry,’ she murmured, kissing her. ‘It’s such a shame –’

  ‘Why, my dear – that’s all right,’ said Mrs Steggles, looking up in surprise but returning the kiss. ‘It’s all all right, really, Margaret,’ she added in some embarrassment.

  ‘You mean – there isn’t anything new to upset you?’

  ‘Something did happen last week to upset me, but it wasn’t anything new and there’s no need for you to worry about it, anyway. Your turn will come soon enough,’ said her mother, with some return of her usual manner. ‘Now, let’s hurry up and get the beds done and you can get out early, or all the best greens’ll be gone – what there is of them.’

  How sordid it all is! thought Margaret. If it weren’t for Westwood, and thinking how happy he and she are together, I’d have nothing beautiful in my life – nothing.

  She was still thinking of Mr and Mrs Challis when she went out an hour later. Her nature was jealous, as was to be expected when a capacity for romantic passion is allied to strong feelings and both are denied expression, and her feeling for Gerard Challis was not so spiritual as to exclude jealousy. That first sight of Seraphina had filled her with a painful mingling of admiration and despair; it was not that she had hoped to attract his affection towards herself; she not only felt him too far above her, but also had a distaste for marital infidelity and intrigue which amounted to horror, but the knowledge that so lovely a creature shared his life, and was woven throughout his intimate being, emphasized the gulf between him and herself: Margaret Steggles, unlovely and heavy in manner, and craving for beauty both earthly and divine that could never be hers.

  But even in the short time that Mrs Challis had spent with the two girls, Margaret’s heart had been won and her jealousy lost in admiration, and now she could think of their mutual happiness almost without pain. One doesn’t envy the angels in Heaven, she thought, as she went into the greengrocer’s.

  She was at once wished a Happy New Year by Zita, who was out buying potatoes, and in the next breath was invited to go to Westwood that evening to listen to a broadcast concert of Chopin’s music, arranged under the auspices of the Free French and the Polish Governments in London. She accepted with delight, and the winter day instantly seemed to glow with colour and the anticipation of pleasure. She arranged with Zita to go in by the back entrance to Westwood at ten minutes to eight that night.

  Mrs Steggles vaguely realized that her daughter had some new foreign friend who had a job in the big house up on the hill, but she was not particularly interested and made little comment when Margaret said that she would get supper early for herself as she was going out for the evening to Westwood.

  She went; she opened a narrow door in a wall and saw, high above her head, in the faint moonlight, the bust of the goddess gazing towards the little garden beyond the iron gate. Frost on the grass, every laurel leaf masked with frost! Oh, beautiful, she thought, and went down the pathway leading to the house.

  15

  It was the first of many journeys along that path, for throughout January and February she was invited by Zita to attend their ‘private concerts’ in the Little Room, two or three times a week. Her work at school began to suffer, and so did her health, for after she returned home, bemused by the splendid sounds still ringing in her ears, perhaps exalted and stirred by a distant glimpse of Gerard Challis, she would sit until one or two in the morning correcting the exercise-books which she should have dealt with earlier in the evening, and in the morning she never awoke in time to take her dressing and breakfast in comfort, but had to be aroused by her mother, who scolded her while she was hastily swallowing the meal. In time, however, she grew used to being slightly poisoned by lack of sleep and even found that her senses responded more acutely to sounds and colours, and that her brain was stimulated by the privation.

  She decided that if she chose to do without sleep it was no one’s business but her own.

  She found Zita’s company less trying on these evenings than at any other time, for she never talked, or even moved, while music was in progress, and when it was ended she appeared at her best, soothed and calm and almost like a rational being. Sometimes when the concert was over they would have a modest supper together on a tray in front of the fire; some sandwiches and coffee coaxed from Grantey, or sausage-rolls brought by Margaret and washed down with little bottles of beer provided by Zita, but usually Margaret went straight home through the cold dark night with themes from some Beethoven sonata or Brahms symphony singing in her head, relieved that the echo of the lovely sounds had not been dispelled by an hour of gossip.

  The Little Room was reached by three downward steps at the end of the corridor, and had for generations (so Zita told Margaret) been used as a sewing-room. It had a faded but still gay wallpaper of bright little leaves and berries on a white ground, which had been designed and made by William Morris, and was sunny and quiet. It was pleasant to think of women sewing here in the sunlight throughout the last two hundred years; the shadow which the seated, peaceful figure threw upon the wall changing in the course of time from a profile crowned with a mo
bcap to a profile with short hair crowned by a ribbon bow; the needles and cotton gradually becoming finer, the material upon which the seated figure worked changing from the lustrous stiff satin, the cotton printed with tiny sprigs of flowers, of the eighteenth century, to the thin rayons and brilliant patterns of the twentieth. In the world outside the Little Room great events occurred, and continents were conquered, and empires were built or destroyed, and the backwash of these happenings came into the sewing-room in the shape of materials, stuffs from America or Bradford or Japan; and women sat tranquilly sewing at them, while the sunlight shone into the Little Room and the shadows of young trees, that gradually grew massive and tall, danced upon its walls.

  Margaret had been disappointed to learn that the Challises had been living at Westwood for only ten years, for she had hoped that the family had lived there for generations. However, Mrs Challis did carry on the tradition of this room, for there were two sewing-machines standing on a large firm table in a corner, and in one cupboard there was an Ellen Maria, or dummy, upon which dresses could be modelled, with the slender waist, rounded hips and full bosom which were evidently the measurements of some Victorian lady, and Margaret wondered very much how Ellen Maria came to be there, for she was sure that the dresses worn by Mrs Challis were never planned upon such a creature. Another sign of the room’s traditional use was a little work-table made of polished mahogany, with a ‘well’ covered in striped yellow and blue silk for holding heavier materials, and when Margaret once ventured to open its drawer she found a nest of boxes and containers covered in faded cherry-red moiré, for sewing implements, and many reels of brilliant cotton and silk. This was the room where Grantey came to ‘run-up’ little frocks and undergarments for Emma, and Zita came to mend the linen, and she confessed to Margaret that it was here that she had found the materials for Margaret’s Christmas present, having asked Mrs Challis if she might take something pretty from the rag-bag.