Company in the Evening

by Ursula Orange

  “Are you awake, darling?” said John, opening a sleepy eye.

  “Yes. Yes, definitely,” said Caroline, and, on a sudden impulse, she sprang out of bed and wandered over to the window. “Oh, John! It is lovely to see the canal at the bottom of the garden. Look! There are some ducks on it.”

  “Are there?” John lay down again and drew the blankets up to his neck.

  “I wish a barge would come up,” murmured Caroline.

  “They don’t any more. They don’t use Cumberland Market now. I told you.”

  “I know. But I wish it would.”

  “I bet that canal’s pretty foul at the bottom.”

  “‘Two men looked out of prison bars One saw mud, the other stars,’”

  mocked Caroline.

  “Do come back to bed, darling. You’ll catch your death leaning out like that.”

  “I’d much rather you said: ‘Come back to bed for God’s sake because I want to go to sleep again,’” said Caroline perversely, leaning farther out of the window.

  “Silly child,” said John fondly.

  “You never get aggravated with me, do you, John?”

  “I don’t find you at all aggravating, darling.”

  “Don’t you? You astound me. It’s almost inhuman. Really I am very aggravating, John, sometimes,” Caroline urged, “I even aggravate myself. So there!”

  “So there—what? Really, darling, you can’t expect me to quarrel with you at half-past five in the morning on the grounds that I don’t find you aggravating.”

  “No. . . . I don’t expect you to. All the same it’s rather awful the way we never quarrel.”

  “I’m too old to quarrel,” said John comfortably.

  “That’s selfish, because I’m not. Some day I shall throw a fish-cake at you, mark my words. Oh, John, I hope we have some fun in this house!”

  “What sort of fun?”

  Now why feel guilty at that? John could hardly be thinking of Vernon, could he?—He had only met him twice—and if she, Caroline, were thinking of him it was entirely an innocent guilt, so to speak.

  “Oh, just anything,” said Caroline quickly. “I wonder if I could throw a stone into the canal from this window. I say, John, I wonder if the boiler’s still alight. Shall I go and look?”

  “Isn’t that Florence’s job?”

  “You can’t expect her to get up as early as this.”

  “Well, she can’t expect you to, surely.”

  “Aren’t we grand now, with a nurse and a maid sleeping in.”

  “Very grand. Hope it’s not too expensive.”

  “Hope not,” said Caroline gaily. (Bother that bill from Debenham’s. Better not tell him about it just yet.) “I wonder if Florence can cook. Do you think she looks as if she could?”

  “God knows! Will she stay, do you think?”

  “Oh, yes. I shall charm her. She’ll tell all her friends, ‘Mrs. Cameron is ever such a nice lady. She knows what’s what.’”

  “What is what, darling, in this case?”

  “Oh, it’s quite easy. ‘What,’ in this case, is calling her a working cook-housekeeper instead of a cook-general.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “None.”

  “It seems a bit trivial then,” said John, digesting this distinction thoughtfully.

  “Don’t bother to turn your lawyer’s mind on to it. These things must be grasped intuitively, or not at all,” said Caroline, picking up a tip-tilted impudent-looking straw hat and adjusting the veil carefully before the mirror. “John! I must go on a tour of inspection.”

  “What of?”

  “The house, of course. Oh, not the sitting-room or dining-room. They’re all right. I’ve had them before. I want to go and gloat over the boiler and the tool-shed and the larder and that awful little patch behind the garage where they’ve left the broken deck-chair.”

  “Are you going to wake up at half-past five every morning and behave like this? You are an infant, darling.”

  “That’s because I’ve been spoilt,” said Caroline. “It’s not been very good for me. First Mummy, then you.”

  “Well, I like you all right,” said John affectionately.

  A shade crossed Caroline’s face.

  “I don’t, though,” she said disturbingly.

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “Nothing. I mean I know I’m pretty awful really.”

  “Nonsense. Or, at least, if you are so’s every one.”

  “Oh, no, they’re not. You’re not, for instance.”

  “My dear child!”

  “That’s just the trouble,” said Caroline seriously.

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “That you’re not pretty awful and I’m your dear child. Oh, well, I suppose . . .”

  “Suppose what?”

  “Oh, nothing.” (Suppose that’s the basis we got married on.) “John, do you remember moving into the flat after our honeymoon?”

  “Of course I do!”

  “It was a bit different, wasn’t it? Everything new, I mean. . . .”

  Caroline woke in a strange room, but a room not long to be strange, for it was her first night in her own home. Even after a month’s honeymoon it was still odd to hear John breathing beside her in the new double bed. Darling John, so solid, so masculine, so competent with hotel managers and porters, so good at giving her that novel delicious “married woman” feeling. Married! It was an amusing, a piquant thought. Caroline, aged just twenty-two, excessively pretty, excessively indulged, giggled like a schoolgirl at the idea. Should she wake John up and tell him she was laughing at the idea of being married? Yes, she would! He would think it a charming whim (and so it was). Wake him with a kiss. There!

  “Hello,” he said sleepily.

  “Darling, I woke myself up laughing at the idea of being married. It’s four o’clock.”

  “Grand,” said John. “Four more hours in bed with you. Good idea.”

  “Does it make you laugh to think of being married, darling?”

  The minute she had said it Caroline could have bitten her tongue out for her tactlessness.

  “Not so much.” (A careful voice.) “You see I’m eight years older than you.”

  And married before, AND married before, screamed the silence.

  Caroline put her arms round John to console him. Only a month married—the obvious consolation.

  “Darling,” she whispered, “we’re going to be so happy.”

  “Of course we are. I’ll make you happy. I know I can,” murmured John, into the curls about her ear. His voice was almost grim. Poor darling! How he must have suffered in that dreadful first marriage, about which she must never, never talk. (“My dear, we never speak of it,” John’s mother, Lady Cameron, had told her. “It was all the most terrible mistake.” Her voice had sunk to a shocked whisper. She was doing her duty and telling John’s future bride all that she need be told, but the task was obviously abhorrent to her. Half-fascinated, half-repelled, Caroline afterwards found Lady Cameron’s words, her phrases, even her intonations, indelibly printed on her memory. “Only a boy—nineteen—at the time. Can you imagine it? . . . Oh, well, she’s dead now. A terrible thing that motor crash, but perhaps . . . Never would have been happy. . . . Years older than he was, and I don’t doubt—er—experienced. If my husband and I could have stopped it . . . ‘But, dear, who is this Edna girl?’ I said to him, the first time I met her. ‘What’s her family?’ No time to interfere. . . . She rushed him off to a registrar’s office. . . . Only saw her two or three times after they were married. . . . No children, of course. . . . Edna always rushing off somewhere . . . other men, I believe, and so on, poor boy. . . .Yes, four years of it. . . . Thankful it wasn’t longer—What, tea-time already? Splendid! And crumpets, too! Delightful! Have a crumpet, Caroline dear, and tell me all about the lovely furniture I hear your mother’s giving you. Switch on the light, will you please, Smithers?” Snap! went the light, switching on the present,
switching off the past, as if to say, Henceforward let us never speak of this again.)

  They never had. Neither Lady Cameron and she, nor even John and she during the six months of their engagement. But surely now that she was really married to him, now that at last they were in their own bedroom in their own darling little flat, she might whisper something to him that would indicate—oh, very delicately, of course—that she knew and sympathized and—no, not forgave. There was nothing to forgive, of course—well, just understood.

  “Darling,” she murmured, holding him closer, “I’ll make it up to you, really I will. The—the past I mean and—” (John was stirring restlessly) “—everything.”

  “Please don’t, Caroline. I—I don’t want you ever to think about the past—my past. Never. Promise.”

  “Oh, of course, I won’t talk about it, but I just wanted you to know—”

  “No, please, Caroline.” (He was really distressed.) “Don’t think about me at all. It’s my job to make you happy. That’s all.”

  “Darling, you’ll spoil me,” said Caroline, cozily, rapturously, luxuriating in the idea like a kitten in a fur-lined basket.

  A Furrowed Middlebrow Book

  FM12

  Published by Dean Street Press 2017

  Copyright © 1944 Ursula Orange

  Introduction copyright © 2017 Stacy Marking

  All Rights Reserved

  The right of Ursula Orange to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her estate in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 1944 by Michael Joseph

  Cover by DSP

  Cover illustration shows detail from Searchlights (1916) by Christopher R.W. Nevinson

  ISBN 978 1 911579 30 4

  www.deanstreetpress.co.uk