There were one or two country walks, and a quiet embrace or two on the downs, during his first leave; then a spate of letters, long and passionate letters from her, laconic and grubby notes from him, for it was difficult to compose love-letters in a roofless barn, shared with eight other mud-spattered men, when one yearned only for the oblivion of sleep from the cold and the dirt, and the lice, and the long-range shelling, that made up one's day-to-day existence.
They were formally engaged, of course, when he came on his final leave, in March, 1918. It was her nineteenth birthday, and he was one year older. There was a little party in the Caterham bungalow, a bottle of war-time champagne, a cake piped with their initialled hearts, and a good deal of reminiscent speech-making on the part of the Major and his cronies.
Then came the telegram, recalling Pip to the Line, where Ludendorff was punching huge holes round St. Quentin. That night, in the small hours, he had crept into her room, and when she started up, alarmed, he was standing there, mutely, already half a ghost, but a greedy one, greedy for that minute part of life that was left to him and demanding it, wordlessly, but with a pitiful urgency.
She was sure then that he would never return, that there would never be an arch of swords at Caterham Parish Church, a hill-station billet, or sons at public schools, but equally sure that these things were remote, and irrelevant when balanced against his need to be comforted, and the inevitability of the troop-train in the morning. He went off, sombrely enough, after breakfast, and they never heard of him again. He just disappeared into the welter of the German army's advance towards the Channel ports.
Pippa was born during the first Christmas of the Peace, and the shock killed her grandfather. He did not subscribe to the new morality, having been born and reared under a Victorian code. It seemed to him, already enfeebled by a war that had destroyed almost everything, yet denied him an opportunity to serve, that every convention had been violated, the sanctity of woman, the canons of hospitality, the very decencies for which, up to that time, he had supposed they were all fighting.
He took to his bed during the 'flu epidemic, and it was clear from the outset that he would neither recover, nor forgive her. There was a tiny income, and she could have that. She would need it, he supposed, for bread, when all decent doors were closed to her.
Pippa was born in the house of an aunt at Sevenoaks, and when Frances realised that she could not keep the child, and also earn a living, she agreed to her aunt's virtual adoption of Pippa. She herself moved closer to London, spending more than she could afford on week-end trips down to Sevenoaks, too tired, after a fifty-hour week in a bookshop, to compete with her aunt's living-in housekeeper for Pippa's affection.
She lived for a long time in a furnished room near her work, but shortly before answering Mr. Chaffery's advertisement she had made a great effort to pull herself together, and chase the drabness from her life. She began by mortgaging her income to buy a tumbledown cottage at Addington, and the cottage—or rather the absorbing work of restoring it—had given her a new interest in life. It was her search for suitable pieces of furniture that had led her into the junk shops, and stimulated her interest in the trade. She was now determined to become a dealer herself, and regarded her job with Chaffery as a form of apprenticeship.
Edgar listened to her story with close attention, but even as she talked his mind raced ahead, for Frances now filled his life, leaving no room for Esther, the children, his potted hyacinths, or his stamp-collection. Esther would have to divorce him, on any terms, and he would then make over to her and the children as much as he could afford. At some time in the future, he and Frances would move right away, and open their business, but in the meantime they would have to continue as employees of Mr. Chaffery, and their relationship, he decided at once, must remain a close secret from Chaffery, and the other dealers. Edgar had heard Chaffery discuss women, and flushed at the prospect of the sniggers and innuendoes he might expect as soon as Frances was out of earshot.
The important thing, he decided, was to do nothing precipitate, to think out each move well in advance, to sound out Esther, perhaps, to begin saving, to work and work towards the fulfilment of a dream that was delicious to contemplate, a dream of going back over the lost years, and starting all over again. At his time of life this might be difficult but with Frances it was not impossible. Nothing was impossible with a woman who cared, who welcomed his capacity to love, and cherish, and protect. This was the one important factor, and, in the ultimate reckoning, the only one that mattered.
“We ought to begin planning, Frances,” he began, “we ought to begin now.”
She took his hand, and laid it alongside her cheek.
“Don't let's go into all that, Edgar, not now, not yet ... it isn't important, really. What is important is that we've found one another. I want you to meet Pippa, and I want you to see the cottage. It isn't very far from you. You could walk there, one evening.”
His heart began to beat violently. “Any time, this Saturday ... it's easy now, while ...”
He was going to say “while Esther is in hospital” but checked himself just in time. She rescued him, with another of her swift smiles.
“You needn't worry about neighbours,” she said. “I haven't any, and I'll cook you a supper. What do you like? What do you like especially?”
He abandoned planning in favour of the novel and delightful experience of having his appetite explored. He told her he liked sweetbreads, and kidneys and all manner of savouries, that he preferred potatoes baked in their jackets, and rarebits, and pasties, and apple-and-blackberry tart. For the moment they discussed only the immediate future. It was enough that they would eat supper together—her supper, in her cottage, and that this was no longer a wildly improbable day-dream, but a glorious, established fact, as real and reliable as a railway time-table!
When it was dusk they locked up, and he escorted her to the 'bus stop, standing to watch the receding vehicle until its tail-light winked out in the autumn dusk.
Then he set out to walk home, swinging the neatly-furled umbrella he carried as a boy swings a stick at thistles in a country lane.
It was not until he was passing the “Rec” gates in Lucknow Road, that his step began to lose its spring, and his mood the boyish ebullience with which he had set out. For here he was passing into the orbit of the Avenue, and Esther, and without being conscious of it his stride began to shorten, until he found himself hardly moving.
Then he remembered that Esther was not there, but still in the ether-smelling ward of the hospital. Illogically, this did not encourage him, and he began to wonder how long it would be before she came home—how long before he must confront her with the demand for a divorce?
And as he thought this a chill struck him, and he admitted to himself that he did not know Esther, that he had never known her, that she might well be capable of anything, of withholding a divorce, of finding some way to destroy both him and his dream.
The rush of fear stopped him dead. Alone, and without the soft pressure of Frances against his knee, it was not so easy to dismiss Esther, even an Esther tucked away in hospital. He felt a desperate need to confide in someone, someone who was neutral, who had experience of these matters, who could explain what to do, what to say, and what not to say.
He had reached the corner of the Avenue, and was loitering in the shadow of the laburnum that dwarfed the front garden of Number One-Hundred-and-Eight, when a man of about his own age passed, moving briskly down the Avenue towards the shorter even numbers. As the passer-by walked into the shadow of the street lamp, Edgar recognised the neat pin-striped trousers, and level-set Homburg of Mr. Harold Godbeer, of Number Twenty-Two. Harold gave him a sidelong glance, and automatically touched his hat. He was one of the very few people in the Avenue who knew Edgar to speak to, for occasionally, when Edgar had business in town, the two had walked down Shirley Rise together, on their way to catch the 8.40. On one occasion they had even travelled up to London Bridge in the
same compartment, so that Harold wondered briefly what Mr. Frith could be doing, standing alone, and uncertainly, beneath the laburnum of Number One-Hundred-and-Eight, on a chill, autumn evening.
He was within a few yards of his own gate, when he heard trotting steps behind him. Mr. Frith caught him up, and laid a nervous hand on his sleeve.
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Godbeer,” he said, a little breathlessly, “but ... but I understand you are a practising solicitor!”
Harold regarded the little man with surprise that was not far from alarm.
“Well, I'm ... er ... I'm managing clerk to a firm of solicitors,” he said, “Messrs.——”
Before he could announce the name of his firm, Frith interrupted, even more breathlessly.
“I have ... I have a matter of some urgency ... I should be extremely grateful if you could advise me,” he said.
Ordinarily Harold would have protested that matters of urgency, once brought to the attention of solicitors' clerks, were not discussed in the light of street-lamps, but something in Frith's anxious eyes, and the tremor in his voice, touched his warm heart and he smiled politely.
“Will you come inside, and drink a cup of tea with me?” he asked. “My wife ...” Harold could never manage to keep the pride out of his voice when he referred to Eunice as his wife—“my wife will have it ready now—but perhaps you're expected home?”
“No, no,” said Edgar gratefully. “I'm often late, and my wife is away in hospital ... I should be extremely obliged, extremely so, Mr. Godbeer.”
Harold pushed open the primrose gate. It was the only primrose gate in the Avenue. All the others were painted chocolate-brown, slate-grey, or at best, a dull, hedgerow-green. Eunice liked unconventional colours. Under her direction Harold had last winter repainted all the interior woodwork of Number Twenty-Two in lilac, cerise, and what she always called “pastel shades of sweet-pea”. It was certainly the most original scheme in the crescent, and one of which Harold was just the tiniest bit ashamed.
He selected a key from a ring heavy with keys, yale keys, watch keys, safe-keys, cash-box keys, and padlock keys of deed-boxes.
“Eunice, my dear,” he announced from the narrow hall, “we have a visitor!”
He coughed twice, and tried not to notice Edgar's blink of surprise at the rainbow colours of the banister supports.
CHAPTER XVI
Lady In A Tower
1
ELAINE was the first to win liberation.
The bond between her and her father was undeclared, but it had existed for some years, beginning as a wary, defensive alliance, when Sydney began to grow old enough to influence his mother. It was not a very strong alliance, for Elaine was contemptuous of her father, but on his side there was a measure of sympathy for a young girl, whom he saw as someone cut off from all the normal enjoyments of youth, and driven in upon herself to feed, not on dreams, but on a hatred for Esther that she made little attempt to conceal.
As he watched the girl pass from childhood into her teens, Edgar could not help contrasting her with the daughters of other families in the Avenue, girls who now flaunted their post-war emancipation from the pillions of motor-cycles, who, in their shapeless, tube-like clothes, were beginning to look more and more like the youths who hung about their back gates, who came home with their boys in the small hours, and sometimes kept him awake, exchanging interminable and uninhibited good-night embraces, to the accompaniment of giggles, and scuffles, and, on several occasions, the throb of a ukelele.
Like most of his generation, Edgar was genuinely shocked by the new freedom, but it still seemed to him grossly unfair that Elaine should be the only young girl in the neighbourhood to whom it was not extended. He was not unaware of her contempt for him and, although it sometimes saddened him, he did not actively resent it, for he knew that his surrender to Esther had been abject, and that his hasty retreats into the greenhouse, when edicts were issued by his wife, was the act of a craven. He knew that he could have, and should have, asserted himself sometimes, particularly on the occasions when Esther reached for the cane that had hung, for so long, behind “The Tempting Bait”, in the living-room; but the fact was that he never had interfered, not once, and he therefore deserved his daughter's opinion of him.
It did not take Elaine very long to realise that something stupendous had happened to her father. At first she attributed the new Edgar to the mere absence of her mother, but when his customary mood towards her changed from mild gentleness to one of clumsy jocularity, when he went so far as to tax her with “not getting out and about enough”, and “not meeting more people her own age”, she realised that life at Number Seventeen would never be the same again, not even when Esther came home. This realisation determined her to advance her own plans, plans that had now been maturing for more than two years.
Elaine Frith had not the smallest desire to become a flapper. Had she yearned to wear thigh-revealing skirts, to dash about on a pillion, to use make-up, and consort with the wide-trousered youths who flapped here and there as the suburb's corps of beaux, there is little doubt but that she would have long since extended her physical rebellion against Esther to the point of open mutiny, for she was no longer afraid of her mother.
She was taller and stronger than Esther, or Sydney, besides being, in her own smouldering way, a good deal more ruthless than either of them. Faced with defiance, Esther would have been obliged to take refuge in nagging, and choose between giving her daughter the freedom of the suburb, or advertising her impotence to the Avenue every evening. Neither Edgar, nor Esther, nor Sydney really understood the reasons for Elaine's unexpected passivity in this direction. How should they, when they had no inkling of how Elaine passed the time when she was out of the house, or was closeted for all those hours in her little room, over the porch?
Elaine had, in fact, travelled a long way since that far-off day when she had rescued The Art of Marriage from the trunk in the cistern loft. It might be said that the study of the little volume had changed her life, for since then she had perfected a complicated network of defensive deceit around her, and the smoke-screen that she added to her defences would have done credit to a depraved bishop, bent on leading a worldly life whilst remaining a spiritual example to his flock.
Outwardly, she spent much time studying text-books, relative to her commercial course. Her mother never even bothered to look into these text-books. Had she done so she might have been surprised to discover that every one of them belied its innocuous title. Gregg's Shortened Course of Double-Entry Book-Keeping, for instance, camouflaged Miss Elinor Glyn's This Passion Called Love. Shorthand for Beginners provided covers for Miss Dorothy Dix's advice to the lovelorn, and even Doctor Marie Stopes' Married Love had strayed into Elaine's commercial course, and was now carefully rebound between the blue covers of The Secretarial Questionnaire.
No fiction was represented, beyond the inevitable one on the outside covers, but under the loose board, beside her washstand, Elaine had accumulated a sizeable fiction library, and in the hours supposedly spent in study she sometimes switched her mind from the technical to the romanticised aspects of love, beginning with Ethel M. Dell's Way of an Eagle, and graduating to Lady Chatterley's Lover, purchased tenth-hand from a student who had been on Easter Holiday in France. She had all manner of other books down there between the floor-joists, books on female costume throughout the ages, books on etiquette, books on cosmetics. They were all part of the master plan.
She spent a good deal of her time at the public library, but she never took out a book, passing the hours instead in the reference section, where she had long been accepted by the assistants as a fanatical medical student, too poor, it seemed, to attend university. To get here in the daylight she had to falsify her time-table, but this was accomplished easily enough by a bland announcement that she stayed on at College one hour after other, and less conscientious, students had left, in order to “practise” on one of the establishment's typewriters.
S
he enjoyed lying to her mother. It gave her a sense of power, and of superiority over Edgar and Sydney. Every successful deceit was a personal triumph, and when she had accomplished something new in this sphere, she always went upstairs to her room, smiling like a cat, to savour her triumph alone.
But Elaine Frith did not spend all her hours of seclusion in reading.
Every night, as soon as the others had retired, she went through her ritual in front of the long mirror of her wardrobe.
The moment her mother's light had flicked out, she scrambled from bed, slipped out of her flannel night-dress, and shed her old personality like a snake sloughing its skin.
She began by re-dressing her hair, looping it in heavy coils over her wide brow, and wetting her fingers to fashion the kiss-curl in the centre. She had got the idea of the kiss-curl from a film poster outside the Granada, advertising Barbed Wire, starring Pola Negri. She discovered that kiss-curls suited her, and she bought a small bottle of fixing lotion, so as to be ready for the occasion that she knew would come, sooner or later, when she could emerge from Number Seventeen, and devastate all mankind.
When her hair was arranged to her satisfaction, she would stand before the mirror, carefully examining her body. She looked with satisfaction at her firm breasts, her flat stomach, her long, straight legs, and small feet. She admired the pale shine of her skin, the steep smoothness of the curves above her hips, the firm roundness of her behind, and the way it emphasised her surprisingly small waist.
Standing there, turning this way and that, glancing over her shoulder, posing hand on hip, and studying the reflection of her hundred and one expressions, from the demure to the sultry, from the arch to the downright provocative, she looked like a young, pagan priestess performing some mystic, solitary ceremony. She had the serenity and confidence of a priestess. She did not envy the Avenue flappers their freedom, for she was aware that, in contradiction to the stridency of the decade, men did not really want flat-chested, comradely women, but the kind of woman she would be when her moment arrived. The books had taught her that the art of love was that of sustaining mystery, of promising so much and giving so little, until the time came when one could stupefy with generosity, and enslave the man who would pluck her from the tower, and instal her in a mansion or palace, where she could be done with subterfuge, and spend the livelong day radiating beauty, reigning over a whole troop of lesser men, each of whom would consider it a high privilege to die for her.
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