Company in the Evening

by Ursula Orange

  “I can’t find the number or I’d ring up,” said Rene.

  “Don’t worry, there’s loads of time,” I said firmly. “I’ll just plonk Antonia into bed and then I’ll be entirely at your service.”

  “You said you’d tell me a story in bed,” said Antonia.

  “Oh darling, I’m so sorry. I’m afraid I can’t to-night. I’m playing at ‘Horrid Mummies’ in real life, aren’t I, darling? I’m so sorry.”

  “Where’s Auntie Rene going?”

  “To the nursing-home to have her baby,” I answered without hesitation.

  Rene, flinching from this bald statement, shot out of the bathroom, and I hurried Antonia into bed.

  When I came downstairs Rene was hovering anxiously by the telephone.

  I took off the receiver and waited for the usual dialling note. Greatly to my disgust I heard nothing but a few dead-sounding clicks.

  I did all the things that one always does on such occasions—shouted “Hello,” replaced the receiver and took it off again several times, dialled 0, and so on, but the wretched instrument refused to respond.

  “I’m sorry, Rene,” I said, “but the damn thing seems to be out of order. Now will you mind if I leave you here, alone while I just run along to the garage and bring the taxi back with me? It won’t take me more than ten minutes and is quicker than anything else I can think of.”

  “Oh dear,” said Rene, looking utterly aghast.

  It was irritating for her, but irritating was all it could possibly be. I refrained, however, from pointing this out to her again.

  “I really won’t be long,” I said, snatching at an old coat that hung in the hall. “Make yourself a cup of tea or something.”

  Without further ado, I plunged into the rather nasty November evening. It was not a very dark night, and I could see my way sufficiently to run. I was by this time myself infected by a slight sense of drama and urgency, and the mere fact of running enhanced this sensation.

  I arrived with my hair on end, my stockings splashed and my coat flying open.

  The first person I saw was Raymond. I rounded the corner of the road, where the garage stands, and practically fell into his arms.

  “Hello! Steady! Why, it’s Vicky! What an unexpected pleasure! Splendid!” said an oh! so well-remembered voice.

  Self-control in a difficult situation is a quality I admire enormously—and a mocking casualness is perhaps the best form self-control can take in circumstances where sentiment might be unbearable. I knew from the nervous tension in his fingers as he steadied me by the shoulders that his casualness was assumed, not real.

  One of the garage cars complete with driver, was standing beside Raymond at the kerbside. It was no moment for chitchat and enquiries.

  “Raymond! Are you just getting out of that taxi or just getting in?” I asked breathlessly.

  “Just getting in, I hoped. Why? Do you want it? Can I offer you a lift anywhere?”

  There was, in his light formal voice, a strong undercurrent of interest and—was it excitement?—but I do not think the chauffeur would have realized this. It was no new thing for Raymond and me to be communicating feelings to each other in public with no one the wiser.

  “Well . . .” I recognized the chauffeur, a man who had often driven me. “Oh Wilkins! I expect there’s another taxi I can have, isn’t there?”

  “Not just at the moment, there isn’t, I’m afraid, Mrs. Heron. Sunday evening, there’s some of us off-duty you know. If you care to wait a bit there should be one of the cars coming back soon.”

  “Oh well—I suppose I’ll have to do that then.”

  I spoke calmly. Raymond hates fluster.

  I did not fool him, of course.

  “Oh—please, Vicky! Take this taxi, by all means. I’m in no hurry, at all.”

  “Oh Raymond! Well, thank you enormously. But what will you do?”

  “Wait here till another comes back. I don’t mind at all.”

  “No, don’t do that. Come and wait at my house,” I said on impulse, “and they can send one round there when it comes. Will you, Wilkins?”

  “Certainly, Madam. I’ll just leave instructions.” He opened the door and Raymond and I climbed in. Wilkins disappeared into the office.

  “Vicky, this situation interests me strangely,” said Raymond. “I am not quite clear why I’ve got into this taxi with you, for instance. You’re going somewhere in a tremendous hurry, passing your house on the way, for me to be dropped to wait. Is that it?”

  I laughed.

  “My hurry, if you can believe it, Raymond, is entirely for another. Rene is starting her baby and the telephone was suddenly out of order. The taxi is to take her to the maternity home. Yes, Wilkins, to the Lodge first to pick up someone.”

  “I hope nothing untoward will happen to Rene in the taxi with which you won’t be able to cope, Vicky,” said Raymond.

  “Oh—I shan’t go with her.”

  “My dear girl! In common humanity . . .” (Sub-mocking, of course.)

  “I can’t help it, Raymond. Blakey’s out and I can’t leave Antonia alone in the house. Besides, there isn’t really any hurry at all.”

  I felt, rather than saw, Raymond’s grin at this cool admission, but all he said was, “Vicky, I need a little help with the dramatis persona of this scene. Who, for instance, are Rene and Blakey? Antonia”—he paused and the amusement died out of his voice—“Antonia’s name I know.”

  “Rene is Philip’s widow. You heard about his death, perhaps?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry—very sorry. I didn’t know he was married.”

  “No, it was all very sudden. Well, Rene’s living with me now. Blakey was Grandmother’s maid, who’s been with me some time now. She’s the only other member of our household, but, as I say, she’s out to-night. And this is the house. Wait just a minute, Wilkins.”

  Rene was still hovering in the hall. Her face, on seeing me accompanied by a strange man, was a study.

  “Rene, this is a friend of mine whom I met by chance and who’s kindly giving up his taxi to you,” I said hastily.

  I did not think that, in her present state of mind, Rene would recognize Raymond from the photograph she had once seen, and I guessed right. She glanced at him in a slightly scandalized way, but with no trace of recognition. I do not know quite why I did not want Rene to realize who Raymond was, but certainly I did not.

  “Let me help you with your suitcases,” said Raymond, tactfully taking to action.

  “I’m sorry I can’t come with you, Rene, as Blakey’s out,” I said, “but you’ll be there in no time at all and you’ll be perfectly all right. I’ll ring up later to hear how you’re getting on. Now good-bye”—(I kissed her, I think for the first time)—“and the very best of luck. To-morrow morning you’ll be feeling marvellous. . . . To Harrington Maternity Home, Wilkins.”

  “She looks rather forlorn and agitated,” said Raymond, as the taxi, with Wilkins at the wheel registering polite imperturbability, disappeared.

  “I’m afraid she thought it execrable taste on my part to reappear with a strange man,” I said. “Strange men are rather Strange Men with capital letters to Rene.”

  “Do you two get on well together?” asked Raymond.

  “I’m not quite sure yet,” I said cautiously.

  “I wondered if I ought to offer to guard the house while you accompanied her,” said Raymond.

  “Oh really, darling!” (The ‘darling’ slipped out before I noticed it.) “Surely pinching your taxi is enough for one, evening without making use of you as a watchdog as well.”

  “What does a watchdog do? Prevent the house going on fire? Or rush to the cot-side if there are screams from upstairs?”

  “Both. Neither ever happens, of course. But both undoubtedly would repeatedly if one went out.”

  “Of course, I quite understand. Probably I’d have been better qualified as a fire-fighter than as a cot-watcher.”

  “A piquant situation,” I agreed.
“‘Don’t be frightened, darling, I’m your Daddy.’ Redoubled screams.”

  “Yes . . . yes,” said Raymond, taking out his cigarette-case. (So familiar the tone, the gesture. That way of saying ‘Yes . . . yes,’ half-pondering, half-agreeing. That flat gold case, a twenty-first birthday present.)

  “Have a drink, Raymond? Gin? Whisky?”

  “Thank you, Vicky. Would you have any objection to my seeing Antonia—asleep, I mean?” He snapped his case shut and replaced it in his pocket.

  All Raymond’s gestures, all his words, are precise without being finicky. It makes him a curiously easy and at the same time satisfying companion. I had almost forgotten that restful feeling of the situation being under control—under his control—which one always gets in Raymond’s company.

  “No objection at all, Raymond. I’d rather wait half an hour or so, though, until she’s really sound asleep, if you don’t mind. Can you wait?”

  “Thank you, Vicky. Yes, I can wait.”

  “What about some food? I can easily produce some sort of a meal.”

  “How one thing does lead to another, doesn’t it, Vicky?” said Raymond easily. “Once again—thank you. Can I help?”

  “No. Your rôle in this highly domestic little scene is to mend the telephone. It’s in the hall.”

  Raymond went out into the hall and lifted the receiver.

  “I’ve mended it,” he said instantly. “Listen.”

  Sure enough, the dialling tone appeared to be functioning normally.

  “Nevertheless, I think we’ll test it,” said Raymond, dialling rapidly. “This is a number I happen to know. Hello? Whiteway’s Garage? . . . I’m speaking for Mrs. Heron. When she does want a taxi this evening she will ring you. You need not trouble to send one round . . . Thank you.”

  He came back into the sitting-room with perfect composure.

  “I see you know this district,” I said.

  “Yes. Yes, well. How long have you been here, Vicky? It’s very nice, your house.” Raymond cast a quick appraising glance round the room. Some of the ornaments and cushions must, of course, have been entirely familiar to him. One would not have guessed so from his manner.

  “About a year. Since the beginning of the war. And you?”

  “About the same time.”

  “It’s funny we never bumped into each other before, Raymond.”

  “The first six months I wasn’t often let out.”

  “From the Army, you mean?” He was not in uniform, and, for the first time that evening I had time to wonder what he was doing in Harminster.

  “No. From the sanatorium.”

  “Sanatorium . . . Raymond! How . . .”

  “. . . How I startle you?” finished Raymond dryly. “Yes. I startled myself at the time. T.B. is one of those many things that only really happen to other people, isn’t it?”

  “Are you—all right—now?”

  As I spoke I looked at him anxiously. I had already found time that evening to wonder if Raymond was noticing much of a change in my appearance. I did, I knew, look older than when he had last seen me. But, curiously enough, I had hardly studied his face closely at all. From the first moment of our meeting he had seemed so utterly himself, the same Raymond in every particular, that it had never crossed my mind that his life might have altered too as radically as mine had done.

  As a matter of fact I could, now I really looked at him, see little trace of what one would be careful not to refer to as ‘the ravages of the disease.’ He was thin, of course, but then he had always had that whip cord greyhound look. He was pale, but so he had always been.

  “Don’t look so aghast, Vicky. I assure you I’m not infectious.”

  “Oh, Raymond!” I cried, too hurt to hide the fact. “As if I was thinking of that! I’m just so—so sorry.”

  “That’s sweet of you, Vicky, and I beg your pardon. One gets a bit on the defensive, you know. The ordinary reaction to T.B., as I have had every chance of finding out, is a horrified shudder.”

  “I’m not horrified, Raymond,” I said quickly. “At least, I am—shocked—on your account, but I’m interested too. Tell me all about it. Only do sit down and look comfortable.”

  Raymond grinned. “It’s not necessary for me to put my feet up on every occasion, you know. I can, thank God, lead a moderately normal man’s life.”

  “You are—all right—then now, Raymond?”

  “One’s never precisely cured, Vicky. The disease is—one hopes—‘completely arrested.’ A nice phrase, that!”

  “Are you?”

  “I hope so. Actually that remains to be seen. I went to the sanatorium to-day to be X-rayed. The doctors have hopes that the plates will show a completely healed lung. I think they will, because when I was ‘screened,’ everything looked all right. This final X-raying is just to make absolutely sure.”

  “So then you will be cured, Raymond?”

  “In so far as one is cured, yes. There’s always a scar left on the lung, of course—it was only one lung affected in my case. One is supposed to take a certain amount of care—no violent exercise or sudden exertion and that sort of proviso. Otherwise, lead a healthy happy life, my dear, and never brood on your condition.”

  “Sounds like advice to an expectant mother,” I said.

  “Very like. By the way, Vicky, in common decency, I should now ask you about your operation.”

  “My operation? Oh, you mean Antonia being born? No, Raymond, I’ll spare you all details. Everything was most uninterestingly normal. But anyway, Raymond, you haven’t finished about your operation yet. I’ve heard the end of the story, not the beginning.”

  “Oh, that too was uninterestingly normal, Vicky. The only quaint detail is that it was an Army doctor who discovered it at a medical examination, thus shattering one of my oldest illusions.”

  “So you were in the Army for a bit?”

  “For one glorious month, during which time the fighting was in Poland and absolutely nowhere else.”

  “You must have had the disease when you joined up then?”

  “Yes. Undoubtedly. Would it surprise you to hear, Vicky, as we barristers so unfairly say, that most people contract T.B. at some time or other in their lives and recover again without knowing?”

  “Well, since you put it to me, Raymond, yes, it would.”

  “Nevertheless, it’s true. I don’t know at all when I actually picked up the germ, but not, I think, very long before it was discovered.”

  “You didn’t have it when we were—were together—then?”

  The question was prompted by a belated quiver of maternal instinct towards Raymond. I do not blame him for misunderstanding its import. He had, after all, never known me in the rôle of solicitous wife.

  “No. Certainly not, I should say. You need not worry at all about Antonia, Vicky. There’s absolutely no reason why she should even have the slightest tendency towards it.”

  “Actually I wasn’t even thinking of Antonia, Raymond.”

  “I’m sorry—I answered something you didn’t ask. I thought—you are, I suppose, very fond of Antonia, aren’t you, Vicky?”

  Well! This was a new thing! Raymond and I at cross-purposes, actually groping for each other’s meanings! We must both have changed more fundamentally than I had realized.

  “Fond of her! Good heavens!” I laughed. “You need not worry on that account, Raymond. I never understood how mothers do love their children, until I was a mother with a child. It’s quite extraordinary, I assure you. Nobody was more surprised than myself.”

  “Once again I beg your pardon, Vicky. It’s quite monotonous how I keep on doing it this evening. My only explanation for my stupidity is that there are some things about which I am still—in the dark, so to speak.”

  I did not know whether I wanted to follow this up or not, and I had the feeling that Raymond was tacitly offering me the choice and that he would accept whatever course I followed. On the one hand I passionately wanted this odd conversation
between, us to be carried through with grace and dignity, and laughter, and all my deep-rooted love for style and gesture and control in human relationships urged me to pass lightly over the past that lay between us. On the other hand I thought that if, perhaps, a few things were said, quickly and briefly, now, some vaguely-visualized pattern would be finally completed, and could then be allowed to drop from our fingers with all its interwoven strands of suffering and happiness neatly blending into a completed—and dead—whole.

  “Raymond, I don’t want to talk about the past any more than you do,” I said finally, “but—like you, again—I hate loose ends. If there’s anything that you’re in the dark about, I’ll give you quick, brief answers, and then get the supper.”

  “Fortunately, I’m practised in putting what are really personal observations into question form, Vicky. I put it to you, then, that you did not know that you were going to have a baby when you instituted divorce proceedings against me?”

  “No. Yes. I mean, you’re right.”

  “Quite. (You’re not the first witness, Vicky, to find that form a confusing One.) I suggest to you that, when you did become aware of this fact, a sense of chivalry deterred you from communicating the knowledge to me?”

  “Right again. You might prefer to call it obstinacy.”

  “I prefer chivalry, myself,” said Raymond gravely. “There’s only one more question, but it’s a nasty one. Would you say that, generally speaking, a man had a right to know that his wife was going to bear him a child?”

  “Generally speaking, yes. In the circumstances—I mean, I didn’t think—it was ages before I even realized Antonia was going to be a real person—you see . . .”

  “—In the circumstances that point of view, rather naturally perhaps, escaped your consideration,” finished Raymond suavely, and then—with a complete change of tone—“Vicky, it’s sweet to see you behaving and talking like, every witness under cross-examination always behaves and talks. And, incidentally, I do apologize for cross-examining you at all. I won’t ever again, I promise you. There is this to be said for legal language—it helps one over an awkward patch, don’t you think?”

  “It makes everything sound less miserable and awful and more dignified,” I agreed. “But Raymond, there’s one question you haven’t asked me, which I shouldn’t exactly blame you for asking in the circumstances.”