by Ursula Bloom
Mrs. Spinx had a bad attack. Lucy, her maid, got her out of her clothes with difficulty, because she was now a spreading woman, who had to be tightly laced to get into any sort of a figure at all. Once Mrs. Spinx was ‘let out’ of the grey coutille corsets which preserved her contours as though in armour, she knew that she would never manage to get herself back into shape again. The pain was dreadful, as though some evil hand clutched at her spine in a mailed fist studded with nails. As she lay there she listened to the sounds of preparation in the garden, the putting up of stalls for sideshows, outlining the house in pale blue fairy lights, and the hanging of Chinese lanterns under the trees where the local band would play for dancing on the lawn at night.
Mrs. Spinx felt that she could not bear it, she could certainly not hope to attend, but it was far too late to cancel it now.
The next morning she had to submit to the doctor’s visit, and he instructed that Lucy should iron her back with a hot flat-iron and a piece of brown paper. It was most humiliating.
It was one of those exquisite summer days when a light wind tossed the waxy syringa flowers, and the little rosettes of Banksia rose which grew on the wire arches and blossomed in soft frittering bunches. It was hot; if there had not been the wind it would have been unbearably so, but the breeze stopped that.
A crowd jangled through the gates and about the leisurely garden, which was well worth the money, so that many paid an entrance fee for the sake of seeing the place. The stalls were immediately surrounded. The raffles had their day. Tea was served under the trees, and all the time Mrs. Spinx lay in her room, indignant at the noise, furious with her pain, and shattered by the fact that she had had to be ironed by Lucy.
The first lull came about seven, when the day cooled slightly. The visiting band arrived in strange uniforms obviously bought second-hand, and they took up their stand under the tree admired by the girls. The gate fee went up in price, and the vicar sat at the receipt of custom on a kitchen chair with a regiment of pudding basins about him, in which the necessary change was arranged.
The earlier crowd had consisted of village women with children clinging to their skirts, or farmers’ wives, with capacious baskets, but all married, homely folk, who had come hoping to secure a good bargain. Now the younger ones flowed through the wide gate, entering the grounds where all Carolyn’s solitary youth had been wasted.
She watched them, standing a little apart; there were young men with their best suits, girls in flowered frocks and smart new sashes; they were an excitable, gay crowd who had come to buy amusement, good humour and happiness, and not seeking any special bargains.
The band in the miscellaneous uniform stood under the tree, galvanising their efforts into a tuneful barn dance, and couples tipputed forward with little running steps, one-two-three, Kick; One-two-three, Kick; then, suddenly turning to one another, clung and rotated in a schottische-like step, bounding round and round. Carolyn stood watching. She stood atop a moss bank with the heavy laurels behind her in a maze of shiny dark leaves. The crowd now seemed to emphasise her own solitariness, and she knew it. She was a small figure in a pale pink muslin frock with a darker sash to it, and a pink ribbon in her hair. She clasped her hands eagerly. Then she saw the young man beside her, a stranger to her, about four years her senior, she supposed. He was fair as she was, and not very tall either, but about him there was something that attracted her.
He said, ‘Would you like to dance?’
Although she knew how horrified Miss Bradshaw and her mother would be, she desired it so much that she could not stop herself from answering, ‘Yes, please.’
Within a moment they were on the lawn with the crowd, going forward with that gay running step, one-two-three, Kick, and again, then together, leaping round one another, with the blood coming to her cheeks and her breath in little gasps, whilst her heart made dizzy but exciting sounds. It was far more pleasant than anything she had ever known before, far sweeter.
Too soon the band stopped, and rather awkwardly they went back to the moss bank, and sat down on the grass there.
He said, ‘I’ve seen you often in the town, you know. I’m an architect in Mr. Fenwick’s office.’
Carolyn drove into the town on shopping expeditions with Miss Bradshaw or her mother. Although these outings were dull enough, the girl thought of them as a diversion. She knew Mr. Fenwick’s offices; it was the tall old house on the right hand side of Bridge Road, a Georgian house, hemmed in by houses that had been converted into shops. The tall house, now offices, was a reminder of what Bridge Road once had been, a residential street now drawn into the commercial business of the little town. Mr. Fenwick’s brass plate was on the door, in proximity to other plates.
‘Yes, I know the house. It looks very nice.’
‘I’ve been there three years. My name’s Hardy, Arthur Hardy.’
‘Yes.’ She sounded shy, but did not know what else to say.
‘This is a beautiful place; were you born here?’
‘Yes.’
‘I was born in River Street,’ he told her. She glanced at him. River Street ran down to the stream in the town, a narrow little road with some printing works at the end with an insistent noise like the June-time stag beetle. There was a tanning yard too, some hardware shops, and little places that sold sweets, and newspapers, and cigarettes. Carolyn knew the street because there was a Registry office in it, where sometimes Miss Bradshaw was sent to interview a maid for Mrs. Spinx.
‘Of course it’s nothing like this, but any time that you’d care for a cup of tea, my mother would be very pleased to give it you …’
‘Thank you.’
Then the band struck up again, with the Birth of Venus, and they danced once more. She had the feeling that she had been waiting all her life for this moment; the long stretch of wasted life, void until now, lay impotently behind her. That had changed. As she danced she knew that she could not say good-bye; they went back to the mossy bank again and sat there talking. Carolyn told him a little about her own dullness, he about his own life. Both were only children, and he had gone to the Grammar school for which he had won a scholarship, and had climbed thence to his present position. He was entering his plan in a competition held by a London newspaper for a model house. He glowed about it.
‘I’d like to see the plan,’ she said.
‘You would really? You mean you’re interested? Of course I’d love to show it to you.’
‘But how?’
‘When next you are in town, when will that be?’
She would be driving in to-morrow, she knew, and Miss Bradshaw being away and her mother being in bed, nothing could be easier. They could meet outside the confectioner’s, Arthur explained, have some coffee and then go across to the office. Carolyn had the deliciously quivering sense of danger that was intriguing. For the first time in her life she had quite deliberately attempted something that she knew was wrong, yet, knowing, was enchanted by it.
‘Eleven?’ she said.
The band was now bemusedly wandering through the Chorister’s Waltz, and if she had had any qualms about the foolishness of the assignation, she lost them as she danced.
‘Well,’ said Mrs. Spinx in bed as the sound of the National Anthem with a good deal too much big drum accompaniment was borne shatteringly up to her, ‘thank God that’s the end.’
For Carolyn it was the beginning.
The fine weather held.
Next morning it was hot again and Carolyn went into the town to shop, driven by old Hyman the gardener. She determined to scamper through the commissions so as to give herself more time with Arthur, and she practically ran from shop to shop, then met him outside the confectioner’s. He wore a greenish suit of the new fashionable shade, and he had a tip-tilted straw hat. Both had been alarmed that the other would fail to put in an appearance; both had been full of the exciting things they would say, and now on meeting were completely tongue-tied.
Blundering into the confectioner’s, they sat in
the far corner well away from the windows (both were apprehensive of being seen together). They drank coffee and ate pastries, then he said that he would take her across to the office to see the plans. Both had been disappointed in the conversation over the coffee, but were too young to put it right, and too afraid; with so much to say there seemed to be no time in which to give it words.
They went to Bridge Road, and into the tall red house. It was the first house that Carolyn had ever entered where the heart had died. The floors were bare boards stained with footmarks; the banisters were missing like lost teeth in some old woman’s skull, and their feet made echoing noises as they went up to the first floor and the small back room where Arthur worked.
As she went Carolyn knew that the doors on the landing went ajar, and that curious eyes peered out at her. Arthur had been so bursting with excitement that he had been unable to hide his affair from the other clerks in the building. Rather a joke, they thought.
Arthur shut the door on them and said to Carolyn, ‘I’m sorry. They behave very badly and it’s all wrong, but what could I do?’ Then he indicated the plan pinned to the table. The front elevation, the back elevation, the plan of the first floor, all extremely neatly done, so that even Carolyn was attracted to it. She had had no idea that a plan could be so interesting, and she asked all kinds of questions, which he answered eagerly. He was excited about its chances in the competition. Then, suddenly aware of time and what old Hyman would say if he were kept waiting, she turned, ‘I’ll have to go.’
‘This isn’t the last time?’ he asked.
‘No. It isn’t the last time.’
For a moment he hesitated as to whether he dared to kiss her, or not. She could feel the indecision, and although she had wanted it all the time leading up to this, now prayed that he would do nothing so foolish. In some way he understood this and contented himself with just seeing her down into the street. He hadn’t kissed her.
Arthur and Carolyn met on those lovely summer days; at first it was only when she went into the town, but later he took to cycling over in the summer evenings, leaving his bicycle at the public house, taking a short cut down the meadow and to the river which ran along the foot of the Lodge garden.
Carolyn grew more daring. The inherent loneliness that she had suffered so long drove her hard. She was infatuated with the thought of a youthful companion, she could not thrust him from her life.
One afternoon she met Arthur in River Street, having arranged to have tea at his mother’s, whilst Mrs. Spinx thought that Carolyn was with the dressmaker. Arthur met her by the Victorian drinking fountain with a leaden cup on a chain, which had been placed at the street corner to the memory of some defunct alderman. In the hot July sun there was nothing attractive about River Street, and the vicinity of the tanning yard made it nauseous. So far Arthur had scarcely mentioned his mother, and Carolyn knew nothing of his antecedents. Therefore when they stopped outside a small draper’s shop, she suffered her first doubt. It was a single-fronted shop, its window cluttered by knitting wools and traced linens of a cheap order. There was the strong smell of jute coming out of the door, and the interior appeared to be eerily dark in contrast to the bright sunlight of the street.
‘Mother?’ called Arthur.
When Carolyn’s eyes became accustomed to the dusk in the shop, she saw a homely little woman staring over the counter at her. The woman had a flattish, completely round face, crossed by steel-rimmed glasses looped over each ear. Her grey hair, alarmingly thin at the temples, was scraped back, but she had a kindly, pleasant face, and was tidily dressed with a black alpaca apron tied old-fashionedly over her frock.
‘Oh, there you are!’ she said. ‘The tea’s ready. I’m ever so pleased to see you.’
They had to go down a step into the back room, which looked out on to a yard where the crates were stacked. About the place there clung the dreadful smell of cooking, of fish, and vegetables, and human bodies, not definitely unwashed but warmly odorous.
‘This is the best bit of River Street,’ said Arthur, suddenly aware of Carolyn’s silence. ‘Some of it isn’t much, but this house was built in Tudor days. It has got some lovely beams in it.’
‘Yes.’
She hadn’t thought that it could be like this. Now, sitting in this terrible room, she realised that she must have loved Arthur because he was the first young thing in her life, but that the emotion was not big enough to surmount the horrors of class distinction.
The shop bell rang and his mother slipped out to attend to it, full of apologies.
Arthur turned to Carolyn, his mouth full of pie.
‘You like it here? It’s homely, and it’s real, which is something. Your home isn’t like that.’
‘Yes, it’s very homely,’ she said.
‘You’ve gone a bit quiet?’
‘I’ve got rather a headache, I think that it must be the heat.’
‘Yes, it’s very hot.’ Then his mother came back, chattering hard with a strong accent and errors of mispronunciation that jarred on the girl. She got up as soon as she could.
‘I must get back. If I keep Hyman waiting there may be trouble.’
‘Yes, of course. We all know what your ma is,’ said old Mrs. Hardy. It was strange that suddenly this disloyalty stabbed Carolyn, and the colour slowly drained from her face as she went out through the shop into the street.
She was glad of the air, and even the smell of the tanning yard was preferable to the frowst of that little back room. Arthur was so excited that he did not notice how she was feeling. He was telling her of his father who had died when he was quite young, a hard man with a T.B. lung, inclined to drink on the sly and meeting all sorts of queer friends in the local pubs who led him the wrong way.
At the end of the street Carolyn said, ‘I’d rather go on alone. If Hyman saw us together he might make mischief.’
‘Yes, of course. When shall we meet again? Tuesday at the confectioner’s as usual?’
‘Yes, yes, Tuesday,’ she said miserably. Her head ached and she did not know what to do. She wanted to speed this difficult moment of parting, and yet the side of her that had thought she loved him clung tenaciously to all that had been. She held his hand for a moment. ‘Good-bye,’ she said.
She did not look back.
Hyman found her very quiet as they drove along the main road, and when they got home she went straight up to her room, a large airy room, in contrast to that dreadful little back shop parlour where she had had her tea. She felt sick and old, oh, so very old!
She looked at her reflection in the cheval glass, and it seemed that her face had become blotchy. She looked closer at that reflection, and suddenly opening the collar of her blouse, saw on her chest little yellow spots, as though somebody had spattered her with lemon jelly.
She had got chicken pox.
Youth takes its first blow badly, and Carolyn had been entirely unprepared for its harshness. She had never thought that Arthur’s people could keep a shop, and if it had to be a shop, nothing of this small type. She knew that she could not go on with the affair and was ashamed that such a snobbish reason should part them.
She did not realise that really it was not snobbery at all; she had awakened to the fact that the difference was too great, and that in trying to love Arthur she was attempting the impossible. He was satisfied with River Street, and the smell of jute, the tan yard and the hum of printing presses. He could not see beyond them, and privately thought her home unhomely, and her mother awful.
Ten days later, when she was still in quarantine, he wrote to her. Arthur had waited for an hour one miserable morning outside the confectioner’s, and one of his fellow clerks, naturally the one he particularly disliked, had come out and had made fun of him. Receiving no letter from Carolyn, he had become suspicious and had suspected the truth. In his letter to her, Arthur showed only too plainly the antecedents from which he had sprung. He was no longer the Galahad of her acquisition. In her eager quest for youthful love, sh
e had been dreadfully mistaken in him, as well as in herself.
The girl took it to heart, for the kicking power of the feet of clay is under-rated.
Mrs. Spinx was getting about again after her lumbago, and Carolyn, freed from quarantine, was palely lethargic and making a very slow recovery. She seemed to have lost her old elasticity of spirits. The doctor suggested that a holiday would help them both.
Mrs. Spinx knew of an excellent hotel at Ross-on-Wye, and she thought that the Wye Valley might do them both good, so they went there in the August.
Carolyn had not travelled much, for her mother did not encourage holidays for her, so that this was indeed a change. On the first evening she stood in the garden of the little hotel looking out across the horseshoe bend, with the lush meadows spreading on either side of the river, and behind it all the dim outline of the Back Mountains of Wales.
There was an iron seat in the corner, and here she sat, staring out at the beauty of the Wye coiling between the verdure in its double bend, with the trees beyond that, and the sky flecked with the salmon and topaz of sunset. She was miserable. She knew how Arthur must think of her, and the worst part was that she felt the same of herself. She had not realised that birth and breeding held her in such fast bonds, which were so inescapable. They could not be easily thrust aside, and she could only think of this as being the acme of snobbishness. His letter had hurt her badly, and she would never forget the bitter things that he had said. Never. Not even here with the Wye beyond her, and the Black Mountains, and the topaz-flecked sky over it all.
Then she met James Hinde.