Chatterton Square (British Library Women Writers)

by E. H. Young

  “There’s no hurry about it and as for not hurting your feelings—what a funny expression that is, by the way—I don’t think I could hurt them if I tried, or you mine. Ours is the best relationship in the world. We haven’t to be careful. We haven’t to think before we speak.”

  “You never did, did you?”

  “I’m learning,” Rosamund said. “You have to, with children and husbands.”

  “I don’t, not with mine,” Miss Spanner said triumphantly. “No, I wouldn’t change places with you, for all your happy youth. I’ve had an exciting life. Quite a lot of love affairs, too,” she said, squinting violently.

  “And I’ve only had one. It seems rather a pity.”

  “Now,” Miss Spanner said warningly, “you leave well alone.”

  “But I don’t call it well. I’m used to being made a fuss of and I miss it. I’m like an actress without an audience. There’s nobody to appreciate my technique.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” Miss Spanner muttered.

  “Are you referring to my innocent little dallyings with Mr. Blackett? You know I wouldn’t touch him with the tongs though, I admit, I should like to make him thoroughly miserable, not for ever, just for a little while.”

  “But what about making Mrs. Blackett miserable.”

  “I should think she’d be rather pleased, but I’m a civilized person, as much as any woman ever is, and I can control my primitive impulses.”

  “Then mind you do,” said Miss Spanner.

  “And you,” said Rosamund, “had better stick to the fiction you get in your books. I don’t think much of the home-made variety. If we knew the truth we should probably find that Mrs. Blackett adores her husband.”

  Miss Spanner had cocked her ear towards the window.

  “There’s a car coming now,” she said. “D’you hear it? That must be Chloe at last.”

  “Come away from those curtains,” Rosamund said sharply. “I won’t have you peeping. Suppose the young man saw you? And go to bed.”

  “Plenty of time,” said Miss Spanner as she heard the click of the brake, but almost at once the front door was opened and shut and Chloe’s quick feet were on the stairs.

  Chapter VI

  

  She stood in her mother’s doorway looking rueful but matter of fact. “I’m sorry I’m so late,” she said. “We had a puncture.”

  “One does,” Rosamund said.

  “Oh, this was a real accident. I mean he didn’t stick a nail into the tyre or anything. He wouldn’t think of that or, if he thought of it, he wouldn’t do it.”

  “Wouldn’t he?” Rosamund said and she wondered at the young man as she looked at Chloe, sitting now on the end of the bed, her head rising flower-like from the big upturned collar of her coat.

  “Much too conscientious,” Chloe said.

  “That sounds rather nice.”

  “Oh yes, plenty of niceness, nearly all niceness I should think. The kind of young man who has been a good son and so, I don’t know why, will be a good husband. That’s what your mother-in-law says when you get engaged to him and doesn’t think you’re half good enough. I don’t suppose I am.”

  “And are you engaged to him?”

  “No, but he asked me to marry him while he was changing the wheel. With hands like that! Suppose I’d said yes? But then if I’d had to, if I’d wanted to, I shouldn’t have cared if he’d been covered with grease, should I? How awkward things are! It would be so suitable. He’s quite well off, by our standards; he went into all that very thoroughly and I nearly laughed, and then, he’d be so safe. I’m always afraid of losing my head over some attractive cad. But that would be like marrying a policeman because you’re afraid of burglars.”

  “You might just as easily lose your head after you were married.”

  “I might,” Chloe agreed, “but I’d stick to my bargain. Anyhow, I don’t really want to marry anyone for ages.”

  “Then don’t,” Rosamund said.

  “But I want to have a lot of children.”

  “Then do,” said Rosamund.

  “But wouldn’t it be rather awful never to have been terribly in love?”

  “Yes, I think it would.”

  “Well, he may get me in the end. He’s very persistent.”

  “Then he didn’t take his dismissal meekly?”

  “Of course not. Would you? If he’d done that,” Chloe said, “I shouldn’t even have bothered to tell you about him. Do you think Sandra’s asleep?”

  “No, I’m sure she wouldn’t go to sleep till she knew you were safely back.”

  “What a nuisance the child is! Now I shall feel I can’t stay out as late as I want to.”

  “But you mustn’t stay out late.”

  “I didn’t think you minded.”

  “I don’t, on Saturdays, when you can stay in bed the next morning.”

  “Is that all? I was afraid, for a minute, you were being a proper kind of mother.”

  “I know I’m not a very good one,” Rosamund said.

  “Don’t be so silly! I didn’t mean proper like that. I meant prim. You’re just the kind I like. I shouldn’t think Flora Blackett can talk to her mother as I do to you.”

  “Perhaps she has no need to,” Rosamund said, and when she saw Chloe steadying her eyes a little too carefully, she laughed and said, “All right. I’m like Agnes. I’m not curious.”

  “Poor old Spanner! No, you’re sweet,” Chloe said, and dropped a light kiss on her mother’s hand.

  “I’ve tried not to stick my claws into you,” Rosamund said, but when Chloe had gone she wished she had not seemed to be taking credit for what had come quite easily to her. She was not passionately maternal. Her children had followed each other quickly and without difficulty or pre-natal yearnings. They were the natural results of her marriage, not miracles, and she had been and remained too much occupied with Fergus to lavish over-anxious care on them—it was years before she thought of buying a thermometer—and she was too young and ignorant and happy to watch for worrying psychological developments. It was much later that she realized the accidental wisdom of this detachment. The children did not depend on her unduly. Chloe had been confidential with her this evening because her emotions had not been roused—when that happened, for happiness or sorrow, she doubted whether she would hear anything about them. All the children were frank on the surface; they kept their deeper feelings, if they had any, to themselves and even Sandra’s worries were indicated rather than expressed. And this, Rosamund thought, was as it should be. They were separate people, standing on their own feet, needing no parental props, and all their difficulties lay ahead when she would not be able to help them and, ultimately, every human being was alone. Yet, she wondered, were they all missing what she had withheld, first through light-heartedness and then by design? They had been brought up, too, as she had been herself, without any religion except what could be had at school. Had she wronged them there? She did not think so. If they felt the need of it, they could go and find it now, when nothing could be imposed on them by authority. Truthfulness and courtesy were what she had insisted on and these virtues included many others. Ought she to have marched them off to church on Sundays as Mr. Blackett marched his family? It might have been good discipline for the children but it would have been intolerably boring for herself and if they had asked her why she took them, she could not have given them a satisfactory answer. Whether she had been right or wrong, she could find little fault with the results. They were good children and they had, she decided, discipline enough in uncomplainingly doing without the indulgences most of their friends took as a matter of course.

  “If there’s a nice cheque inside this letter,” she thought, drawing it from beneath her pillow, “I shan’t spend a penny of it on necessities. I shall squander it all on the children. No, I shall give it to them
to squander any way they like.”

  Something of the same kind occurred to Miss Spanner when she returned to the bedroom Rhoda Blackett found so fascinating. It was a pleasant room with two low windows looking on to the garden. It would have graced fine old furniture or the productions of modern craftsmen in pale woods and Rosamund, enthusiastic about both schemes, was eager to help Miss Spanner with either. Nothing except her books, she said, ought to be brought from the dismal house on the Green. She must sell everything in it and shake the dust of it from her feet. But Miss Spanner, who had some sense of fitness, could not see herself moving elegantly amid eighteenth-century furniture and she said she was too dowdy to associate with the pale woods.

  “Then why be dowdy?” Rosamund said.

  “Too much bother to change,” said Miss Spanner, “and not likely to be successful.”

  Moreover, she prized much in her old home that Rosamund despised. There was the tiger-skin rug, for instance. Her great-uncle had shot the tiger. It was something to have an uncle who had done that and when the boys asked her whether she was sure he had not bought the trophy in a London shop, she could show them a faded photograph of him seated on the tiger. Two smaller felines, more victims of his prowess, had always hung limply, as though disgraced, over the backs of armchairs in the drawing-room and Miss Spanner took all three skins to the Square. And she was thrifty. She was not going to sell good solid stuff for a mere song and she had only been restrained from laying down a good Turkey carpet, not long enough for the room and much too broad, by the certainty of providing a happy home for moths in the bulky fold which would be necessary. The tables, the top of the chest of drawers, the mantelshelf and the walls were all covered with ornaments and pictures she could not bear to part with and her only new possession was the electric reading lamp beside her bed. There had been no electric light in the house on the Green. The gas jet had hissed at some distance from her bed and, for reading there, she had been compelled to the use of candles and had always been in fear of gentle chiding if discovered. She had not yet lost her pride and pleasure in switching that light on and off and she was completely satisfied with her room.

  “You’ll have to dust it all yourself,” was Rosamund’s comment as she eyed this collection with amusement and dismay.

  Miss Spanner did more than that. She behaved, Rosamund complained, as though she were the paid help instead of the paying boarder. The only paid help was a lethargic charwoman who lived in one of the basements in the Square and, leaning on her broom, gave Miss Spanner all the news of the neighbours, thus enabling her to create exciting dramas round people of whom Rosamund had never heard. Sandra need have had no qualms about Miss Spanner’s personal happiness. Nothing within this house was wanting to it and that conviction, coming over her as she turned on the light and saw it flooding her little Paradise, seemed to demand expression, not in words, for agreeable ones from her would have been out of character, but in some kind of unexpected treat for people who had made the place a home for her, accepting her as part of theirs. “Why should they?” she asked, catching a glimpse of herself in the glass. She had been sure of Rosamund but what could she seem to the others except a rather peculiar and sour old maid? Yet Chloe, meeting her just now at her mother’s door, had said “Good night, Miss Spanner,” in a voice that was almost tender. “Perhaps she’s sorry for me,” Miss Spanner thought. “And no wonder,” she added, getting another glimpse of the drab dressing-gown and the thin plaits. But Chloe was wrong, she decided, sitting down and resting her head against the flattened head of one of her great-uncle’s cats. She had nothing to lose except her present happiness and already she had enjoyed it for a year and more. “Manna from Heaven,” she said to herself. It was more than that for she had passed out of the desert too. She took her good fortune gratefully while it was vouchsafed, she would not grumble if it were withdrawn and that was possible, it was even likely. She could not share the complacency of her countrymen, their comfortable belief that those who yelled and threatened must be playing a big game of bluff, that foul ideas could not actually develop into fouler action. To respond with soft words and reasonable suggestions seemed to her like trying to divert a mad dog by whistling to him cheerfully but because men in high places did whistle optimistically, the rest of the country seemed to be content. Or was it merely that it was indifferent, morally and mentally weakened by the inertia that had fallen on it since the last war? And what could she do about it? she asked herself, feeling cold with anxiety and huddling closer into her chair. She was not suffering from physical fear though she had imagination enough to foresee that there might be bitter cause for it. Secretly and very deeply, she loved her country, its virtues and its faults. She was proud of it and, looking back, she saw its history studded with great names and great deeds and round these the force that created them, the character of its people. Had the strength gone from it, leaving only the tolerance and good humour which could be a weakness? The people were allowing themselves to be led by amiable old gentlemen who apparently thought their own pacific leanings were a safety in themselves. Meek sheep, that’s what we are, Miss Spanner thought, trotting after the shepherd into wild country with nothing but his pleasant smiles for protection against wolves. It was not war Miss Spanner feared, except for these young ones whose hopes would be shattered, their bodies too, their children unborn and their work never accomplished. War was horrible, but there were worse things. Indeed, in conditions of her own choosing, Miss Spanner would not have shrunk from it. The age for combatants, if she had the making of the conventions of war, would start at about forty-five and there would be no limit at the other end. All but the halt and the blind would be in it and she saw this army of her creation, with grey hairs and wrinkles under the helmets, floundering through the mud, swimming rivers, trying to run, gasping for breath, falling out exhausted or deciding it was time for a truce and a nice cup of tea. She felt quite equal to dealing with an enemy of her own age. She would last out better than most of them, she was very wiry, a bullet would go through her as though she were tissue paper and there was a strong strain of pugnacity in her character. “I shouldn’t be at all surprised if I got a commission, on the field,” she thought and, for a few minutes, she lost her consciousness of present time and place as she saw herself, cool and resourceful, the insignificant Miss Spanner a distinguished figure amid the rabble. Meanwhile, the young and the strong would be getting on with the real business of life and war would surely end for ever in tears and laughter. “Once make it ridiculous and that would finish it,” she said. But there was no chance of that and there seemed to be nothing for her to do.

  “Except to fill up that form,” she remembered, and as the church clock on the Green struck twelve and a siren hooted on the river, twelve solemn notes and one defiant one, she pledged herself to the service of her native city. “But I shan’t tell anyone,” she thought. “They’d laugh. And perhaps I shan’t be needed.”

  Then she said her prayers, hoping that more than she dreamed of might be wrought by them.

  Chapter VII

  

  Mr. Blackett, coming home rather earlier than usual one evening, found the vicar clipping the privet hedge in his front garden. This, near the church, faced the Green, so did Mr. Doubleday’s study and he kept the hedge at a height that did not impede his view from the window and made it easy, when busy with his shears, to see the passers-by and have a chat with those he knew and smile at anyone, known or unknown, who gave him the opportunity. At the sight of Mr. Blackett, regular in his church attendance though, enviably, only once on Sunday, Mr. Doubleday laid his shears on the flat top of the hedge and Mr. Blackett, who despised the old gentleman’s sermons and would have been surprised to learn that Mr. Doubleday thought nothing of them himself, was held to the ransom of a little talk by the vicar’s beaming smile.

  After glancing at a passing aeroplane, Mr. Doubleday straightened his face and referred to the European situation, a top
ic he seemed to think suitable to Mr. Blackett’s air of gravity, and he relinquished the subject gladly when he received a somewhat curt reply. He had not really wanted to talk about it and he was much happier when Mr. Blackett spoke of the beauties of Upper Radstowe, then of the houses in the Square and so of some of the people in them. It was the first time in his life that Mr. Blackett had conversed, though he listened more than he spoke, across a garden hedge, but he was rewarded in thus breaking his code of manners and excused by the respectability of Mr. Doubleday’s clerical hat and he walked home at much less than his usual sharp pace. It was only a short distance to the Square and he had a good deal to think about, with a good deal of pleasure, before he reached it. When he did reach it and, following the curve of the Oval, could see the Frasers’ house and his own, he was startled to see too a muddled group of people clustered round a motor car and he hastened towards the scene of what he feared, for a short minute, must be an accident. Then the group resolved itself into Piers Lindsay with his car and trailer surrounded of course, Mr. Blackett had time to reflect, by a collection of women among whom, to his astonishment and what, on another day, would have been disgust, he saw his wife. Mrs. Fraser, taller by an inch or two, was there, and Miss Spanner, like a draped stick. This might have been a gathering in some mean street, where the front doors were all open, the women gossiping and chaffing the huckster while the children, all eyes and ears, joined in the fun, for Rhoda was watching Lindsay as he weighed something in the scales at the back of the trailer and Mary was sitting at the wheel of the car. It only needed a barrel organ, thought Mr. Blackett, and the little red-haired Fraser dancing to it, to complete the picture, but it was his own children, not the Fraser girls who were present.