Alfred and Emily

by Doris Lessing

Mrs. Redway was tittering and gasping. She had watched her son descend through states and conditions of drunkenness but apparently decided not to notice it.

  ‘Oh, Betsy,’ she moaned. ‘Bert isn’t…he isn’t…’

  ‘Yes, he is,’ said Mr. Redway. ‘And she’s right, Bert, you have to stop.’

  ‘Or you’ll be like my Uncle George,’ said Betsy. ‘He drank himself to death a couple of Christmases ago.’

  ‘Betsy has an unlimited number of relatives who can be moral lessons to all of us,’ said Alfred.

  ‘Well, yes, I have,’ she said. ‘That’s one good thing about being a member of a large family. And I’m sorry for you, Alfred. Not being.’

  ‘Well, there’s my brother,’ said Alfred. ‘But I am sure he never drinks anything but champagne.’

  ‘Champers is no good,’ said Bert. ‘It gives you a headache.’

  ‘I wasn’t joking,’ said Betsy. She didn’t like Alfred’s snooty brother. ‘And there’s my brother, Percy. No one ever says he’s a drunk, but he is. On the way to the DTs,’ said Betsy.

  Now Alfred began laughing, and choked.

  ‘Oh, Betsy,’ he said.

  Bert, relieved at the laughter, laughed too, and Betsy said sharply, ‘It’s not funny. If you don’t stop, Bert, you’ll be dead before you know it.’

  Alfred laughed again and Betsy ran out of the room, crying.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ said Mr. Redway. ‘You mustn’t tease her, in her condition.’ Betsy came back, eyes red, and Mr. Redway got up and took her to the chair. ‘You are quite right, Betsy,’ he said.

  ‘And now I’m going to finish saying my piece,’ said Betsy. ‘When my Uncle George got so bad, he went to a man in London. He’s a famous doctor, and that’s where you must go too, Bert.’

  Bert, seeing that he was cornered, said, yes, he’d go one of these days.

  ‘No,’ said Betsy. ‘I’ll take you. I’ll get the address from my mother and I’ll write and make an appointment.’

  And she did.

  On the day of the appointment it was very hot, and she was flushed and uncomfortable, but she said to Alfred, ‘No, I’ll take him. If you go with him he’ll give you the slip and find a pub. He’s afraid of me, you see, but not of you.’

  ‘Afraid of you?’ said Alfred. ‘Who could be?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Betsy.

  Mr. Redway said she could ride to the station on the old white mare, but Betsy said she wouldn’t enjoy the motion of the horse. She would walk.

  They set off, Mr. Redway, Alfred, Bert and Betsy, along the dusty rutted lane to the station.

  Betsy was looking quite sick with the heat, but she said, ‘Don’t fuss. I’m all right. And this is important.’

  She bribed the guard to find a coupé and she and Bert got on.

  Alfred and Mr. Redway watched the train pull away.

  ‘Well, Alfred,’ said Mr. Redway, ‘you’ve got a prize girl there.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alfred. ‘I know.’

  In London Betsy put her arm through Bert’s and said, ‘And now, Bert, you’re not to go running off for a drink.’

  Bert, who had been planning just that, said, ‘I promise.’

  At the doctor’s in Wimpole Street, Betsy told the receptionist that this was Mr. Redway and she had made an appointment for him, and she took him by the arm into the waiting-room.

  ‘I say, Betsy, aren’t you riding me a bit too hard?’

  ‘No. This has to be done, Bert.’

  When the receptionist called them, Betsy took him to the doctor’s door, saw him in, and then sat down heavily in the waiting-room: she really was feeling knocked out.

  But she had her eye on the doctor’s door and ran to it when, after a good long time, more than an hour, it opened. She received Bert, smiled at the doctor, said, ‘I was the one who wrote to you.’

  ‘And a very good letter it was,’ said the great man.

  Down in the street, Bert saw that Betsy was scarlet and sweating, and he called a taxi and helped her into it.

  And still she held him tight by the arm, and all the way to the train, and again found the guard and gave him money for a coupé.

  The guard was more alarmed about Betsy than about Bert, who was sober today.

  At the station the other end were Mr. Redway and Alfred, and with them holding her arm on either side, they set off home through the lanes that smelled of may blossom.

  ‘Oh, that smell,’ said Betsy. ‘It makes me want to be sick.’

  But she held out, got home, and went to lie down.

  It was suppertime.

  Mrs. Redway, in her most suffering, gasping voice, at once demanded to know what the doctor had said. It seemed she imagined she would hear, ‘Nothing much.’ But Bert said, ‘He told me if I didn’t stop drinking I would be dead in ten years.’

  Mrs. Redway dabbed her eyes, moaned, ‘Oh, no,’ and seemed as if she would faint.

  ‘And so, Bert,’ said his father, ‘that’s it. You’ve got to do it.’

  The supper ended. Bert went out to the side of the house where there was a bench. Alfred followed him, at Mr. Redway’s look. He was afraid he would have sneaked off to the pub, but Bert sat on the bench in the late sunlight. Alfred sat by him and Bert said in a low voice, ‘It’s made me think, Alf. I really didn’t believe it was as bad as that.’

  ‘You’ve been pretty bad,’ said Alfred.

  Bert slumped there, shifted his feet about, sighed, coughed, and sent glances at Alfred.

  ‘No,’ said Alfred. He was finding this gaoler role hard: an easy-going chap, he was, and now he faced months – years – of saying, ‘No, Bert. No.’

  After a while Bert said, ‘I’ll turn in.’ Alfred did not watch him to see if he did go in: it would be easy for Bert to escape. But he was thinking that if he were Betsy, he would watch, and intervene, if he had to.

  It was very warm and a breath left dust on the tongue. The scent of the may was like a clammy touch.

  Shadows from a long line of elms that stood along a stream stretched to his feet. A cart that had sacks of barley on it went past in the lane. The smell of the barley, sweet and insidious, made Alfred think of a tankard of ale, with a big head on it.

  ‘Oh, Lord,’ said Alfred. ‘I’m catching Bert’s condition.’

  He had had a bad afternoon. First, he hated seeing his Betsy swollen and reddened, her hair matted on her cheeks. He was thinking all afternoon, trying to come to terms with it, that two years ago he had seen little Betsy, a delicately plump pretty girl, at the hospital dance, and he had swept her away from her partner in the Excuse Me, then danced with her all evening. And that had led to this, with him sitting here, perplexed and disbelieving, with one ear open for Bert – in the room at the corner of the house – his wife lying down because she felt bad, and him…

  As he was coming away from the station, having left Betsy there with Bert in the train, two girls had called out to him, ‘Alf, Alf, will we see you tonight at the Dawley dance?’

  Mr. Redway had looked sharply at Alfred, who was about to call back, ‘Yes, of course you will,’ but then he remembered and said, ‘I’m a married man, you’ve forgotten.’ The girls were Ruby and Ethel and he had danced with both at many dances. His mother would have said they were common, but he didn’t mind that. After all, he wasn’t marrying them! They were good fun and, above all, they danced well.

  ‘So,’ called Ruby, ‘your dancing days are over, Alf.’

  And Ethel, ‘What a shame, Alfred.’

  A knife in his heart could not have hurt more. Yes, his dancing days were over, and he did so love to dance. He had won prizes for it. Often when he was dancing the floor cleared so that he and his partner – Ruby perhaps? Ethel? – could show off what they did. But his dancing days were over. If he had not had a wife lying there behind drawn curtains he would be off walking to Dawley. To walk on this summer evening, the shadows deepening, the birds sending to him their goodnight messages. Oh, no, he could not
bear it. Never again. And so Alfred sat on the bench as the elm shadows engulfed his feet, and then his legs. He had understood that, with a wife, he could no longer enjoy the freedoms of a bachelor but he had not taken it in as he had that afternoon with ‘Your dancing days are over.’

  He had made himself go up to see how the workmen were getting on with the house, so soon to be needed; he had walked from one end of the farm to the other and then back and around. His walking days were with him still but his dancing days…

  Not long before it was time to set out for the station with his father-in-law, it occurred to him: And how is she feeling? I hadn’t thought of that.

  At the wedding in Kent he had seen how many of the young men were regretful – they had courted Betsy, or thought they might. He felt like a thief snatching away the favourite of the girls. He could see she was that. He had danced at the wedding, proud as could be, with this girl, a beautiful little dancer, light as a feather. They whirled in the waltz, they were clapped by the wedding guests for their quickstep, he heard the women saying, ‘What a dancer!’

  But his dancing days were over.

  And Betsy, with her great stomach that seemed to swell as you looked at it, what did she feel? He hated that stomach. He felt the great protuberance had swallowed up his Betsy, his dancing girl. But how did she feel? Perhaps she felt as he did. With the shadows heavy on the garden Alfred turned and stood looking at Bert’s window. It would have been easy for Bert to go out the back way and no one would have known. As he looked, he saw Bert was lighting the lamp. The glow of lamplight fell into the evening shadows. Bert had seen him, Alfred, looking, and had lit the lamp to say he was there. Spied on, watched, suspected…that was Bert’s life now and must be – for how long? And Betsy, how did she feel about that? She had married handsome Alfred Tayler, and found she had a brother-in-law who was drinking himself to death, and there was the whiny, complaining mother-in-law. Very strange if Betsy was not making comparisons.

  Alfred went in, and into the bedroom, hoping that Betsy was asleep. He brushed his teeth as quietly as he could but as he lowered himself down beside her, careful of that great stomach, her arms went around him and he felt the hot, sweaty, distressed bundle that was his lovely Betsy.

  ‘Oh, Alfred,’ she said, ‘I was waiting for you.’ Waiting, he knew, for reassurance. Did he not need it just as she did? Two people, their dancing years behind them. He could not stop the sour words crowding his tongue.

  ‘I was lying here thinking,’ said Betsy. ‘It is only two years since we first met. Do you remember, Alfred?’

  Did he remember!

  ‘And look at us now, Betsy,’ he murmured, stroking her shoulders under the bundle of damp fair hair.

  ‘Are you sorry you married me, Alfred?’ came the sad little cry in his ear.

  ‘No, how could I be? But you could be sorry, it seems to me. You’re landed with quite a load.’ And he was thinking of Bert, the heaviness of him, the weight of him, the threat – and now it was falling to Betsy to keep that load steady.

  ‘Don’t be sorry, Alfred. Oh, don’t be sorry,’ she pleaded into his ear.

  ‘It seems to me that there are two of us who could be sorry,’ said Alfred, trying to avoid that hot, treacherous stomach, which he knew could seethe and heave as you looked at it.

  And then, in a little dry humorous voice that matched his own ironies, she said, ‘But it’s no use either of us regretting it now.’ And she took his hand and put it just there, on what he feared, that mound – his child. Oh, and how could anyone expect him to make sense of that?

  ‘We’re stuck with each other, Alf,’ said Betsy, putting her hand over his where it lay on what seemed to him must be a hand or foot or a knee thrusting out – as you could see on the side of a cow, near her time.

  ‘Yes, so we are,’ said Alfred, and swallowing his regrets, reluctance, reservations, he laughed quietly and said, ‘Betsy, I was going to say, “But we’ve got each other,” but it seems to me we’ve got a good bit more than that.’

  And laughing, near to tears, they drifted off to sleep.

  Emily suddenly understood that she had not thought about anything but her house, or rather William’s house, for months – years? Curtains, wallpapers, the cover for a chair, a new dining-table, carpets, rugs had filled her mind, day and night. All her concentration, her energy, had gone into it, as if for an examination. This realization had come to her when she was visiting Daisy, where she had not been for some time, being too busy with soft furnishing. She laid in front of Daisy swatches of silks, velvets, velveteen, and saw Daisy’s face, which was saying, ‘Well, then, what has got into you, Emily?’ What had? Sitting in the little sitting-room at Daisy’s, with Daisy and the woman who had taken her place in the house, one Dido, once her own staff nurse, now sister in the ward Sister McVeagh had ruled, it seemed as if she had been under a spell. The swatches of fabric now seemed like a comment on the absurdity of her, Sister McVeagh. This was not what she was.

  Here, where she had lived with Daisy, gossiping about hospital matters, she felt she had never left the Royal Free. Her life since her splendid marriage was as if someone else had lived it.

  Daisy shrewdly contemplated her friend, and remarked, ‘Well, Emily, I would never have believed you could care about all this.’ Daisy was still a little thing and, beside the well-fleshed Emily, seemed she might blow away or disappear if you stamped your foot.

  Emily was thinking wildly that she would not leave here, it was where she belonged. Even Mrs. Bruce, seeing her go up the stairs, seemed pleased. ‘Welcome home,’ she said as a joke, but it chimed with Emily’s feeling.

  Her husband, the eminent doctor, was going to a professional dinner tonight so Emily could stay…and she stayed. She pushed the pretty fabric away into her purse and talked about events at the Royal Free as if she had never left.

  When she got home her William was getting ready for bed.

  He had drunk a little too much – but God forbid this could be compared with Bert’s excesses. He was in a good mood, and kissed Emily more warmly than usual. Feeling he appreciated her, even actually saw her, made her expand into recklessness, and as he put his arms around her, she said, ‘Oh, what would you say if I went back to the Royal Free?’ This shows she was not a tactful wife: surely the wrong time and place for such an impetuous announcement. He dropped his arms, stood staring at her while disapproval took him over. He said, ‘That wouldn’t be very nice for me, would it, Sister McVeagh?’

  But when they were slowly coming to an understanding, Dr. Martin-White and Sister McVeagh, hadn’t it been very nice indeed? He turned away and got into his own bed: they had separate beds.

  So that was that! No question of it.

  And the way he had said Sister McVeagh told her that he had not entirely admired her, or did not now.

  Well, he could hardly stop her, could he? Yes, he had, with one cold remark.

  Emily, who had seen very little of Daisy, went there as much as she could. She felt so excluded, left out, shut out.

  If the Emily who had thought, bought, shopped for, ordered, even dreamed of wallpapers and paints for so long – she was going to have to admit it was a good deal more than a year – if this Emily suddenly seemed alien to her, then Mrs. Martin-White, the doctor’s wife, seemed even more so. She was desperately unhappy, though at first she thought she was ill. What could account for her heavy heart, her anxiety, her feelings of wild panic that took her over for no reason, without warning? In those days people did not automatically search in their memories of childhood to explain current wrongs. Yes, she had felt like this before, she knew she had, but could not remember why or when. She reminded herself that she had lost her mother, aged three, and presumably she had been unhappy then. But this, what she was feeling now, pain her element, unhappiness the air she breathed? And whom could she tell? She did remark to Daisy, when Dido was not there, that she felt low and bad and unhappy, and did not know why.

  Daisy had no
experience of being married or even thinking much about marriage. Emily, it seemed to her, had walked away from her, and her experience of her, when she had taken off into a state of – it seemed to Daisy – unnatural and wild exultation, planning that amazing wedding. That had not been the Emily she knew or had ever known.

  Daisy was working for final examinations, which would make her an examiner of nurses. Her concentration on a goal was as fine as Emily’s, but not so near an edge of instability. Daisy and her old colleagues had remarked that Emily did not seem herself these days, and so had Mrs. Lane, Daisy’s mother.

  Emily wept a good deal in private, concealed red eyes and a need to sigh deeply and long…but she could not conceal her state from the servants, all four of them, the housekeeper (‘who has been with me since my mother died’), the housemaid, the maid-of-all-work, the cook. Emily was irritable and often unreasonable, and they left.

  ‘You are not the only woman who cannot deal with her servants,’ was what her loving husband said to her. ‘Well, get some more.’

  But Emily, like her husband’s colleagues’ wives, complained about the servant problem, which was fast becoming a major crisis for the middle and upper classes.

  The plenitude and wealth of Edwardian England had not ended. This was a time of great prosperity – well, it was for the said classes. And the servants were deciding that to work in private houses with their restrictions and rules was not for them. Within a mile or so of Clarges Street there were a new glove factory (‘French’ gloves), a French milliner, an upholsterer whose other shop was in Paris, a luxurious chocolate shop, a department store whose five floors were crammed with fashion and frivolity. And the craze for everything Russian, Mir. That was where Emily’s servants had gone. She advertised in newspapers, applied to agencies, but she had a single housemaid and a maid-of-all-work and no one to wait at table. She wrote to Mrs. Lane asking if the country girls might like to come and work for her. There was accommodation – well, of a sort – but Mrs. Lane wrote back to say that the girls these days didn’t want to do housework.

  Meanwhile Emily remained so low, so sad, that her husband, noticing it, prescribed a tonic. He remarked, too, that Emily seemed to be spending a lot of time with nurses at Chestnut Street. And he suggested that this wife or that wife of his colleagues would surely be more suitable company.