Four-Part Setting

by Ann Bridge

  This was quite unexpected. She had supposed that her feeling for Antony had expunged all that, swept it away. It had not—marriage, the strange bond for which the monogamous Saxons coined the wise word “wedlock” is not so easily disposed of. In her cabin, when she had told Lady Harriet that she was getting smuts on her nose and should go below, Rose sat and faced this disconcerting fact. She lit a cigarette, and found that her hands were trembling. Oh, what was all this? She did not allow for the shock, she forgot how little of the strengthening solidities of love her feeling for Antony had so far had to support it, and for the moment this violent disturbance produced a chill of doubt in her. She loved Antony—then why this strange upheaval at the sight of Charles? Or did she not love Antony so much as she had supposed? Oh, she did, she did! Then why—

  There was a knock at the door. Her thoughts elsewhere—“Lai!” she called absent-mindedly; then, as the knock came again—“Come in!” She expected the stewardess or someone of that sort; she looked up casually, not bothering to turn her mind onto this slight interruption—and there stood Charles.

  “Oh!” she said, and for a moment sat staring at him stupidly.

  “May I come in?” he asked, rather formally.

  “Yes—yes, do.” She rose now, and as she rose, a sudden idea spread panic over her face.

  “You aren’t travelling home with him” she said, aghast.

  He smiled a little—that stranger’s smile of his that told no one anything, except her and Asta, who knew that it spelt self-consciousness and amusement. Charles Pelham was one of the very few people who can be self-conscious and amused at the same time.

  “With old Carshalton? No.”

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “Asta wrote to me—by air-mail from Singapore.”

  Rose sat down on the bunk, leaving the small chair free for her husband, who also seated himself, his long booted legs stretching right across the small space.

  “Oh—. Did she tell you to come and see me?”.

  “More or less. I should have come in any case, when I knew you were here.”

  She was silent for a moment or two. “Can I see her letter?” she asked then.

  “I haven’t got it with me.”

  She looked at him in silence, wondering if he was telling the truth. Charles didn’t always tell the truth, if it wasn’t convenient—it was one of his odd little foibles, which combined so curiously with his fearless statements of harsh and unpalatable truths to his superiors, when his job was at stake.

  “What did she say?” she asked—and knew, as she spoke, that it was a useless question; he wouldn’t tell her.

  “Does it matter what she said?” he asked. “She told me you would be here on board, and suggested that I should see you—that was the essential part of it.”

  “Oh yes—I see,” said Rose, and nothing more.

  He got up and fidgeted about the little cabin.

  “When are you coming back to Cairo?” he asked abruptly.

  “Am I coming back to Cairo?”

  “You should know,” he said, cold and sardonic immediately.

  “I don’t know,” she said, and again was silent.

  “You mean you are waiting to be asked to come back?” he said, after an uncomfortable pause.

  She gave a little cough, in her struggle to speak clearly and coolly.

  “I should want to know first what I was coming back to, certainly,” she managed to bring out.

  She saw the grim remote look come into his face that she knew so well—Charles always fixed his eyes on far horizons when he was going to be disingenuous because in fact he was ashamed of himself. And before he spoke she knew what his voice would be like—a little higher than usual, completely detached, icy cold.

  “You would be coming back to me, I presume,” he said.

  That angered her. He could keep the baby! She wouldn’t have it handed back to her.

  “I didn’t leave you—alone.”

  He brought his eyes down to look at her in some surprise. Then he tilted his head further back, and his eyes became more remote than ever.

  “If that remark alludes to Esther, she went back to England three months ago.”

  “Naturally it alludes to her—you know that quite well, Charles.”

  “I know that you made a great song and dance about her, and leapt to all sorts of conclusions. You were quite wrong—I was never seriously in love with her.”

  For some reason, the cold tone in which he said that made her almost hate him. She repelled a series of bitter angry suggestions which her mind made for a reply, but what came out in the end was as bad as any of them.

  “That doesn’t interest me very much, any more,” she said, as coldly as he. “But I might care to know whether she has been replaced.”

  At that he got really angry. “What do you mean?” he asked. Then he controlled himself. “The point,” he said very coldly, “is that you yourself have never been replaced. I have not the smallest wish to change wives. And as you are my wife, I think it is almost time to consider whether you should not return to my house.”

  A number of things in that speech depressed Rose unutterably—the cold anger, the careful legalistic expressions; and she was stung by some emphasis on the phrase “change wives”. Yes, she did want to change husbands! She could guess at a good deal of Asta’s letter. And no apology, no regret, no kindness! It was all perfectly hopeless. She sat silent and wretched.

  “Well?” he asked at last.

  “It’s all too horrible,” she said slowly—“I can’t think.” She pushed her hair up off her forehead with an almost exhausted gesture.

  He spoke a little less coldly then.

  “Yes—it is rather disagreeable. I hadn’t intended it to be.” He stood up. “I must go in a minute. But I ask you to come back to me. Will you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t decided.”

  He looked disconcerted.

  “What does your decision depend on?” he asked. “If it is”—he cleared his throat—“on me, I wish it, Rose.”

  “Thank you,” she said vaguely, looking round her as if a reason for her decision was somewhere in the cabin. “No—it depends on me, now.”

  He had picked up his cap—he put it down again.

  “What do you mean by ‘now’?”

  “Oh, that all this is several months too late. I’m sorry, Charles,—but I must work it out by myself.”

  The coldness came up in his face again—and then died out of it. She did not see it—she was sitting looking straight in front of her, out of the porthole, in an attitude that had a certain desolation about it. He took a single step towards her and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, too,” he said.

  She looked up at him, then, in a sort of surprise. She saw all sorts of things beginning to dawn in his face—the brilliant intuition, the sympathy that in him was quite independent of love, the sort of interest that any spiritual struggle or genuine emotion always aroused in him. For a moment they were at least real to one another, as they had not so far been.

  “No,” she said then. “No, Charles. Leave me to settle it alone.”

  “Very well,” he said with a return of stiffness. “I shall write to you.” He stooped and gave her a quick formal kiss on the cheek.

  “Goodbye. Remember what I have said.” He picked up his cap and went.

  When he had gone Rose sat on in her cabin, thoughts and emotions chasing through her in a turbulent dance, interrupting for a few moments by their violence her prevailing depression and wretchedness. It had been a horrible encounter. The memory of the times when Antony had had to scold her shot into her head; that had been so utterly different—he had always been sincere, he had never been coldly disingenuous, however severe. Really Charles was impossible. And obviously he didn’t love her, as Antony did, or he would have been different.

  She had been horrible too. But how could one be anything else
, when he put on that face, that voice? Who could live with someone who made them be horrible?

  The idea of the evening was frightful. She sent a steward with a note to Lady Harriet’s cabin to say that she had a headache, had taken aspirin, and was lying down till dinner. Dinner would be quite bad enough! Then back to the whirling dance of her thoughts, the almost physical pain of feeling so violently, the genuine pain of her hot and aching head. Nothing of any practical use could emerge from such a thunderstorm, and yet her brain would not be still. She did go down to dinner, but escaped again the moment after coffee, took two Allonals, and slept.

  If Anastasia had hoped that this meeting between Charles Pelham and his wife would make her more inclined to go back to him, and loosen the link between her and Antony, she had miscalculated. Those two minutes of wordless watching, when he stood on the dock, had done more towards that than the twenty of wretched conversation face to face, which had indeed completely undone the first effect, and sent Rose’s mind and heart flying in the opposite direction. Standing alone at the rail next day, as the Polynesia forged through the brilliant chilly blue of the Mediterranean, Mrs. Pelham, quieter now, found that her momentary doubts about her love for Antony Lydiard had vanished, driven out by her resentment and depression at the way Charles had behaved. To make her miserable in private and humiliate her in public by his servile devotion to another woman was bad enough; but then calmly to ask her to come back, without apology, without regret—no, with the pretence that all this had been nothing, and she silly to mind—was too much. It was the sort of thing one could not be expected to put up with. Anyhow she would not put up with it. If Charles had to suffer, it was his own fault—not for falling in love with somebody else, which could happen to anyone, but for wilfully deceiving himself as to the nature of his behaviour, and even more wilfully being disingenuous about it to her. He was too fantastically self-deceived! No one could live with a man like that. She went down to the saloon and wrote a long letter to Antony about it. This relieved her feelings, though the letter could not be posted till Marseilles, and she went in to lunch with Lady Harriet quite able to say with apparent truthfulness that her headache was gone and she now felt quite all right.

  She had been disturbed on rejoining Lady Harriet to find her talking to General Carshalton. His mere presence on board was a source of embarrassment to Rose. Though he was “nothing to do with Charles” really—he had in fact merely been looking at the Sudan, on his way home from India—he had met him, he knew his name, and if he learned hers he might be moved to ask awkward questions. She had hoped that Lady Harriet’s normal reluctance to form fresh acquaintance might have kept him at a safe distance. But no—though he had not met Lady Harriet for years he had known her sister Lady Avonmouth well in Canada when Avonmouth was Governor-General; and he had, it seemed, relied on this friendship to approach her—successfully. But he asked no awkward questions. What Lady Harriet had said—indeed, what she might have felt herself in a position to say—Rose had no idea; but the General showed no signs of requiring any explanation of either her name or her presence on a ship bearing her home past a brilliant husband, and this, she felt sure, she owed to some manipulation of Lady Harriet’s. Pelham is not the commonest of names, and it had been clear, even in those few minutes when she watched them together on the quay, that the General was appreciating Charles. He must undoubtedly, therefore, have registered him.

  General Carshalton was one of the nicest sort of Generals. He was small and dark, with rather a Warwickshire voice, lazy and inexact in the syllables, which contrasted amusingly with the clearness of his views and the crispness of his pronouncements; he had a vast acquaintance everywhere, and liked them all; he was interested in a great variety of subjects, of which ethnology was his favourite—and he was extraordinarily tolerant. He never boomed or imposed his views; he asked, listened, laughed, differed, and said something amusing or informative at the end. He at once saw a lot of Lady Harriet and Rose. With Lady Harriet he spent much of his time exchanging accounts and views of people they both knew, and their two short deep laughs, so curiously alike, resounded frequently from their deck-chairs. But he appeared to like Rose too, and constantly annexed her as his companion for walks round the deck, with the pleasant easy assurance of a man who has been popular all his life, and important for a great part of it. He and Mrs. Pelham had not such a large acquaintance in common about which to talk, and Rose anyhow didn’t want to talk about the Army; but he asked her about China, and told her about odd remnants of races in India, and the customs of certain Red Indian tribes in Canada, and made comments on politics and politicians which showed a good deal of inside knowledge, and altogether caused the time to pass very pleasantly. It was impossible not to like him, and as her fears were allayed, Rose began to find herself quite at ease in his company. He knew so much about almost everything that she eventually stopped being surprised at fresh instances of his abundant information. At Malta he took Rose about, and insisted on her seeing the Museum—“the fellow there is one of the few people who really knows somethin’ about archaeology.” At Marseilles he gave Rose and Lady Harriet an excellent lunch at quite a small restaurant, where the proprietor really knew somethin’ about bouillabaisse, and afterwards took Rose driving about that rather sinister town. “Mos’ corrupt city in Europe—I don’t mean the quayside life, I mean the municipal administration. Shockin’ lot of crooks.”

  He pleased Mrs. Pelham by his instant admiration for Lady Harriet. “A mos’ remarkable woman. All those sisters are witty, but she beats the lot. Amazin’ vitality, too—an’ so just. I like a just woman, and there aren’t a lot of them about. An’ what she’s bin through would have turned most women as bitter as lye.”

  There it was again. And this time Rose, having the General to herself, rather trotting beside her round the deck, asked the question she had not had a chance to ask of Sir James Boggit.

  “What has she been through?” she asked bluntly. “You see I only met her out in China—I never knew her before.”

  He turned his bright intelligent robin’s eye onto her.

  “No?—Well, I haven’t seen her for donkey’s years, either, as a matter of fact, but I know all the others, an’ Lady Avonmouth’s a great friend of mine. Anyhow everyone knew in London—only you’re so dashed young, you wouldn’t.”

  “Sorry,” said Rose, smiling.

  “Don’ be sorry—thank God you are! I do! Well, to put it a bit plainly, old George Downham was a selfish old brute. He was mad on travellin’, and every time, as soon as she got up from childbed, she had to go buzzin’ off with him again, somewhere or other. She had to leave her children to servants more than half the time, an’ she loathed it. Well, she had a nice little boy, who came right at the end of the string—only boy, and of course she worshipped him. Light of her eyes. Funny business, that about women and their sons, but there it is—just like the sun or the moon; can’t alter it. My mother was jus’ the same.”

  “And what happened?” Rose asked—the nephew was very much in her mind at that moment.

  “Oh, it was all Sir George’s doin’, silly old fool. He bought the boy a pony, and it was damned hot—far too hot for a child. She knew quite as much about horses as he did, an’ she said it was a bit fresh for him. But no, he would put him up, and for a wonder the youngster managed it—he was a plucky little chip, and for a time he rode it. But she was always in torture when he was doin’ it, though Lady A. said she used to make the groom cut his oats down, as long as she was there. Then old George dragged her off somewhere, and she begged again to have the pony put out to grass while she was away, but of course he wouldn’t hear of it. And in the end it threw the boy and dragged him, while she was away, and she came back to find him lyin’ in a long chair, crippled for life. Spine.”

  “How awful!” Rose said, her heart wrung.

  “It was awful—a most shockin’ thing. Luckily he only lasted about four years; he died when he was thirteen or thereabouts. Much the
best thing, of course. But I doubt if she saw that.”

  Rose doubted it too.

  “Pretty hard thing, that, to forgive one’s husband,” the General went on meditatively—“or anyone else, for that matter. But the boy’s own Father! She did, though—that’s to say, she was always damned good to him, right to the last. They’ve a quite shockin’ sense of duty, all that family. Get it from their Mother, I s’pose—nothin’ of that sort about the old Duke! They’re philosophers, too, you know—‘men are like that’, an’ all that. I s’pose we are, to women.” And again he cocked his bright bird’s eye at Rose.

  Rose made some indistinguishable murmur in reply. Her mind was full of pictures of Lady Harriet in the past—watching the child set out on the pony that was too much for him, and returning safely; leaving him to go abroad; getting the telegram, seeing him, on her return, lying flat in the spinal chair. It was one of the most cruel things.

  “He was a boor to her all round, poor old George Downham,” the General went on dispassionately. “He played the fool with his money and hers—when she married, you know, women didn’t stick so to their own property; ’twasn’t done—and when he did die it turned out that pretty well everything was gone. The girls had their jointures, of course, but she was left damned badly off. Rotten luck. But she never made the least fuss—she’s one of the women you can’t put down. Some horses are like that—pull at the bit when they’re practically droppin’. It’s the sort I like—women or horses.”