Company in the Evening

by Ursula Orange

  I strolled into the sitting-room, thoughts of bath and supper in bed uppermost in my mind. Rene was in there and greeted me cheerily.

  She was sitting knitting, looking young, untired, pretty. Not perhaps a bad person to come back to after a hard day’s work, I thought, with a sudden softening of the heart towards her—due perhaps to the fact that I was thoroughly ‘down’ myself that evening. Rene was, at least, no shrew or bully. The atmosphere of the home which she would have made for Philip might have been a bit sickly for my taste but would never have been hard or comfortless. She would not have been a stimulating companion, but her very softness might have been a pleasant refuge.

  In a burst of humility I suddenly conceded that Rene was probably far better fitted to be a wife and mother than myself.

  Just so (only with more affection—warm kisses, and so on) would she have greeted Philip on his return home from the office. Just so would she have instantly prattled to him about little Philip and what the man at the grocer’s had said to her. Just as I was doing now, would Philip have stood and smiled down at her, the burden of the day’s work easing a little’off his shoulders.

  It was not a design-for-living that I or Raymond had ever tried for, or even wanted, but it was a very solid, old-established matrimonial pattern, to which perhaps the majority of men and women instinctively conformed. Possibly they were the lucky ones.

  I did not go off instantly to my bath, as I had intended. I lingered, half-listening to Rene’s prattle, half-musing about the various lines men and women chose, or felt unconsciously impelled, to work out their marriages along. Presently I became aware that Rene was waiting for the answer to a question.

  “What? Oh yes—yes it is all right about my holiday,” I said, suddenly realizing that I had heard her query with my ears, if not with my mind.

  “Oh good! I’m so glad!” Rene looked genuinely, unselfishly pleased.

  “Yes, I must ring up the hotel this evening and confirm it.”

  I was not, of course, going to confide to Rene that Mrs. Hitchcock’s attitude had spoilt most of my pleasure in the whole plan.

  “Vicky—”

  “Yes?”

  “Have you come to any decision about Mrs. Dabchick yet?”

  I don’t know if I scowled outwardly, but mentally I scowled. Yes, I thought, with a change of mood, yes, just so might Philip have scowled had Rene forced unwelcome matters upon him too shortly after his return home. Not, I admitted instantly, that the analogy was quite fair. Rene would not have needed to appeal to Philip for decisions about Mrs. Dabchick and her like—they would have been purely her concern. For a fleeting instant I grasped once again the difficulty of Rene’s position in my household, and answered gently.

  “No, I’m afraid I haven’t, Rene. I just haven’t had time to think about it to-day. I will to-morrow, I promise you.”

  And now, I thought, for my bath, quick!

  Rene was quicker. Probably the gentleness of my tone had encouraged her.

  “It’s just that I’ve been thinking, Vicky, and—”

  “Yes? I know you want her, Rene. I’ll remember that.”

  “Yes, I know you know I do, and I wouldn’t dream of trying to over-persuade you, Vicky, I wasn’t meaning that at all. I wanted to say something else.”

  “Well?” (Get on, can’t you. Don’t fuss about ‘overpersuading’ me. You couldn’t, anyway, whether you, wanted to or not.)

  “It’s just that—if you do decide to try her and if you are going for your holiday on June the fifth, wouldn’t it be a good plan for her to come here just then and we could be all settled in by the time you come back? I know you hate changes. You said they worried you. So perhaps the change could happen while you’re away?”

  I stood thoughtful a moment. I had a strong impression that things were going a little too fast for me.

  “I don’t know if that’s a good suggestion, of course,” said Rene carefully, “because I don’t know exactly when Blakey’s going.”

  “Nor do I. That’s to be arranged between us. She’ll stay until I get someone, I know, But I don’t want any overlapping.”

  “If you did engage Mrs. Dabchick, did you mean her to come at once—before your holiday?”

  “I really don’t know, Rene. I haven’t thought it all out yet. I don’t want to throw Blakey out at too short notice, so perhaps not.”

  “The only thing is, it’s leaving it rather a long time to ask Mrs. Dabchick not to come until after you come home again, isn’t it?”

  She wasn’t exactly badgering me. Nevertheless, I felt a movement of irritation—the more so in that there was some sense in what she was saying.

  “Well Rene, honestly, I think I’ve got to decide whether I want Mrs. Dabchick before I decide when,” I said.

  “Oh, of course, Vicky. This is all—all—”

  “Hypothetical,” I suggested impatiently.

  “Is that the word? Yes, I suppose it is. It was only that I was just wondering about your holiday and how it would fit in and everything.”

  “Probably it won’t fit in at all well—these things never do. There’s one thing I’m not going to do and that is tell Blakey to go to-morrow, so to speak. Especially not as she’s been so nice over Antonia recently.”

  “But it’s three weeks to your holiday, isn’t it, Vicky?” said Rene.

  I had never realized before quite how persistent Rene could be. Evidently she had spent the whole day thinking things out. It was partly her business, of course—and, even if I would have preferred personally to discuss it another time, how was she to know this? I had said nothing about having had a hard day at the office, and, and, anyway, why should I always dictate my own times?

  I looked at her and suddenly realized what might well be at the back of her mind.

  “I expect you’re not particularly keen on being left here tête-à-tête with Blakey while I’m away?” I suggested.

  Rene shifted and looked uncomfortable. “I—I shouldn’t like it much,” she admitted. “Oh, I know it’s silly of me, Vicky, but I can’t help feeling awfully uncomfortable with her somehow.”

  “I know. I don’t blame you. She can be perfectly awful, that I freely admit.”

  “Of course if it was necessary, I’d just have to put up with it and that’s that,” said Rene bravely. “But if I could—if it could be arranged that it was Mrs. Dabchick instead with me—and really the dates do seem to fit rather well, don’t they, Vicky?—well, that would be just lovely.”

  It was extraordinary how, at the mere mention of Mrs. Dabchick, Rene’s whole face shone.

  “You mean, what you’d really like would be Mrs. Dabchick to come just as, or immediately after, I’d gone away? Frankly, Rene, now I come to think of it, I just don’t want her here before. I don’t want to have to cope until I’ve had my holiday and feel I’ve got the energy.”

  “Oh yes, Vicky, I do see that. I wasn’t thinking only of myself and not wanting to be alone here with Blakey. I was thinking of you too. Wouldn’t it save you a lot of the sort of bother you hate if, when you came back from your holiday, you found Mrs. Dabchick already settled in and knowing her way about?”

  Just for a moment this prospect, as put by Rene, certainly sounded enticing. Without considering it further, I said:

  “Yes, it’s not a bad idea.”

  The effect of this casual statement on Rene was electric. She jumped up, clapped her hands—I had thought people only did such things in books—and exclaimed enthusiastically, “Oh! I’m so glad you agree with me.”

  A wave of horrid misgiving suddenly engulfed me. I had a sudden vision of coming back home to find Mrs. Dabchick only too well ensconced in my house. I would come in and she and Rene would be having tea together, their heads close together prattling as hard as they could go. They would jump up and welcome me charmingly, and at first I would feel like an honoured guest in my own house. Later, as their prattle died down, it would become apparent that I was indeed the outsider, t
he stranger, the discordant element. Mrs. Dabchick would slink off to the kitchen, and I would be left remembering that she was a vicar’s daughter in reduced circumstances and feeling generally awful about her.

  It was an exaggerated and nightmare-ish vision, no doubt. Nevertheless, there was more than an element of good sound foresight in it.

  “Don’t go too fast, Rene,” I said. “I really haven’t decided to engage her yet.”

  “No, no. But if you do . . .”

  “I can’t promise even that, Rene. When I said it was a good idea just now to have her come while I was away, I wasn’t really thinking.”

  Rene stared at me blankly, like a disappointed child.

  “I only thought it would save you such a lot of bother,” she hazarded timidly.

  “Well, so it doubtless would. Only the point is—I don’t really want that sort of bother lifted off my shoulders.”

  “You mean you’d rather I didn’t sort of help you? Oh Vicky, I would so like to. All along I’ve felt I didn’t do enough in the house.”

  Oh dear, I thought.

  “I’d be very grateful for your help, Rene,” I said, slightly emphasizing the last word. “But—well, help’s one thing, and very welcome too, but—but training someone into my ways is rather a different thing, isn’t it? I expect you and Mrs. Dabchick would settle in splendidly and then I should come back and upset everything, and it would all be a muddle.”

  I thought this was putting it as delicately as possible. I thought, nevertheless, that Rene would grasp and appreciate the point that I had, after all, a right to ‘upset everything’ if things were not my way.

  She did not. The word ‘training’ seemed to be the one chiefly to catch her attention.

  “I don’t think Mrs. Dabchick is the sort of person one ‘trains’ exactly, is she, Vicky? I wouldn’t have suggested it if she had been.”

  It was, I think, about the most annoying thing Rene could say in the circumstances.

  “Exactly,” I snapped. “That’s just my objection to her. That’s just my objection to the whole situation. It’s all a splendid idea and we’re all going to get on like a house on fire and share all the work so nicely together, and it’s all lovely—except that it isn’t what I personally happen to want. And it is, after all, my house.”

  I knew, as soon as this last fatal sentence had left my lips, that I had in my own eyes at least at last committed the worst social crime against Rene I could possibly commit. Even if I had had a particularly awful day at the office, even if Rene had, in some measure, driven me to it, I felt that it was a shocking thing to say. The fact that all over England owners of houses were saying or implying precisely the same thing to the evacuees, refugees or paying-guests they had probably at first welcomed, did not comfort me in the slightest. I had gone into this business with my eyes open, only about nine months had passed, and at the end of this short time I was ending discussions with the one remark that should never in any circumstances have been made.

  The fact that Rene did not seem particularly insulted, only made me feel more of a cur than ever. Had she flared up, had she reminded me, as she might very well have done, that she had never behaved as if the house was not mine, I might have felt better.

  As it was, the discussion tailed off inconclusively; and a sense of penitence, which I could not express for fear of making matters worse, caused me to punish myself by having supper downstairs with Rene after all.

  * * * * *

  I have, as a minor luxury I greatly prize, a telephone extension by my bedside. I was almost asleep that night when Raymond rang up.

  He had never rung me before at home—always at the office. It was an odd sensation to lie in bed, talking to him, so strangely like old times and yet so very different.

  “I just wondered whether you knew yet whether you were winning or not,” explained Raymond.

  “Winning?” I said, stupidly.

  “Yes. Your game. Snakes and ladders.”

  “Oh, that! I’m very sorry to tell you, Raymond, things are so bad I haven’t the heart to play it any more.”

  I expected him to laugh and tease me. I had spoken half-humorously, although God knows it was the truth. Instead, he enquired very sympathetically what the trouble was.

  I pulled myself together. Luxurious in a way as it would have been to drip tears of self-pity down the telephone receiver,

  I was not yet quite so far reduced as to wail at Raymond. Not once, in our whole life together, had I ever wailed at him. Not even when things were at their worst.

  “Oh, just a terrific conglomeration of snakes—office snakes and domestic snakes and private snakes,” I said. “Positive boa-constrictors, some of them.”

  “Poor Vicky! Just one of those patches, is it?”

  “It is indeed!”

  “Shall I send you a poker-work calendar with ‘It’s not life that matters, but the courage you bring to it’ inscribed on it in Gothic letters?”

  In spite of myself, I giggled. Raymond and I, both agreeing that poker-work mottoes and illustrated rhyme-sheets were about as horrible as they could possibly be, had once ‘collected’ them (mentally only and by report to each other) as atrocities. Many were the moments I had spent in front of arty-crafty shops, my lips moving, silently memorizing some new perpetration for Raymond’s benefit.

  “It would be a rather subtle insult to one’s paying guests if one suddenly caused the house to break out into a rash of texts and mottoes preaching forbearance and courage, wouldn’t it?” I said.

  “Yes. On the day they entered the house you could ostentatiously remove ‘Don’t worry—it may never happen’ from the hall, put up ‘If’ in the sitting-room, and in their bedroom hang out ‘Oh wad some power the giftie gie us, To see ourselves as others see us’,” suggested Raymond.

  “Yes. I think the crowning subtlety would be that one would put up more and more mottoes, more and more to the point, hoping passionately that they would take the hint and go, and it would only be years afterwards that one would learn casually from a friend that the one thing that had helped them to put up with everything else was the fact that they liked the house so much—so cosy, so furnished, so home-like, with not a bare space on the walls!”

  “Are things too desperate for a two-runged ladder to be any good, Vicky? Saturday isn’t one of Your Days, I know, but what about lunching with me one Saturday soon and topping it up with a matinée or a visit to Kew or something of the sort?”

  “Lovely, Raymond,” I said gratefully. “Things are not so desperate yet that I’m forced to reserve my free Saturday afternoons to have a good cry in, for want of finding any other possible boo-hoo time.”

  “But there is plenty to boo-hoo about?”

  “Well, roughly speaking, the position is ‘Don’t worry. It has happened and is just as nasty, or possibly even a little nastier, than you thought it would be.’ However . . .”

  “May I hear the details when we meet?”

  “My dear Raymond. Of course I shall talk of absolutely nothing else! What do you take me for?”

  “Splendid! You shall cry on my shoulder. It will be a new experience for both of us.”

  “I’m looking forward to it enormously, Raymond.”

  “I’ll let you know the date of the gala performance as soon as I can. It won’t be quite immediately, I’m afraid. I must just make sure which day I’m absolutely free. I’d hate anything to interrupt us.”

  “So would I. I should be deeply insulted. Who wouldn’t be? Good night, Raymond.”

  “Good night, Vicky.”

  A click from the receiver. A click from my bedside light as I turned it off again. The day, the extraordinarily long, the extraordinarily harassing day, was finally over. I was alone in the dark, with only my worries as companions.

  I was not, however, as, miserable as I had been before Raymond’s call.

  * * * * *

  I think if Rene and I had never had our ‘this-is-my-house’ discussion ov
er Mrs. Dabchick I would not have engaged the woman at all. It was chiefly the fact that I was left with a bad conscience about Rene after this argument that led me to decide to give her a trial. I still, however, stuck to my decision about not having her arrive while I was away, partly out of genuine prevision of calamity, partly out of obstinacy and partly out of a feeling that it would be sheer waste to have made myself so unpleasant and then not stick to my point.

  Rene, being of a truly humble and forgiving nature, appeared delighted when I told her, a day or two later, that I had written to Mrs. Dabchick to offer her the post, and even more delighted when Mrs. Dabchick wrote a four-page letter by return, accepting with joy and saying that it really suited her splendidly not to come until the middle of June. It would give her time, she said, to stay in the neighbourhood she was in a little longer, and “help to settle” her new tenants into her “wee bungalow.”

  She had, I had already gathered, a bungalow of her own in a London suburb, which she had already arranged to let—partly for the money, partly to escape the loneliness of living perpetually by herself.

  I pitied her new tenants profoundly. I could just imagine her popping in and out all day asking them if they felt cosy yet.

  Matters had arranged themselves so quickly that there was still more than a fortnight to run before I went for my holiday. It occurred to me that if Blakey was to go anyway as soon as I came back, she might as well go, if she preferred to, when I went away. I sounded her, and she expressed a definite preference for doing so. I do not think she liked the prospect of being left alone with Rene, any more than Rene did. She had, I am sure, a bad conscience about Rene underneath.

  It honestly never occurred to me that I ought to have asked Rene first before sounding Blakey on this point. Rene had told me that she was afraid she would feel uncomfortable alone with Blakey, and I therefore jumped to the conclusion that she would prefer to be quite alone. Rene had, I knew, been longing for some time to stop being waited on and do things for herself. She was, I also knew, domestically inclined and liked cooking, and had once told me that she had planned never to have a maid when she was in a home of her own with Philip, but to do everything herself. I thought this very admirable of her (all the more admirable in that it was my idea of Hell), and never dreamt but that she would be delighted at the prospect of a fortnight’s undiluted domesticity with Philip.