Chatterton Square (British Library Women Writers)

by E. H. Young

  “Get into the car and I’ll take you for a drive,” Mary called to him, acting the baby for his benefit.

  Smiling, he shook his head at her, removed his hat and acknowledged his neighbours gravely, but he looked longer at Mrs. Fraser than was necessary, longer, indeed, than was quite courteous, and then he turned to Lindsay.

  “Trade seems to be good,” he said.

  “Not at all bad,” he replied. “Relatives and friends all rallying round. No, I’ll carry this for you, Bertha,” he said, and she and Rhoda followed him down the area steps while Mr. Blackett let himself through the front door.

  “Most unfortunate,” said Miss Spanner. “One late and the other early.”

  Mr. Blackett in his bedroom, changing his business suit for easier garments, took a discreet peep into the road. Miss Spanner, clasping a lettuce, was going towards the house; Lindsay and Mrs. Fraser were talking somewhat earnestly, it seemed to Mr. Blackett; then they appeared to settle something between them; Lindsay fastened up the end of the trailer, hustled Mary out of the driver’s seat and took it himself, but instead of driving away he manoeuvred the car into position opposite the Frasers’ door and then, with Mrs. Fraser, entered the house.

  “Just so,” Mr. Blackett said to himself, “just so,” jerkily tightening the knot of his necktie and, contrary to Rhoda’s expectations, he was in a very good humour at the supper table. Meanwhile, the cousin’s car stood outside the other door and it seemed to her very hard and all wrong that he should be there instead of here, though, she admitted, it would not have been very nice. What she would have really liked would have been to cross the road herself and spend the evening with him and Miss Spanner. The other members of the family did not interest her. It was not comfortable to meet Sandra Fraser outside the school for, within it, she was a member of the sixth form, a prefect, a person of importance who had had occasion to reprove Rhoda who vaguely blundered through her work, broke rules through inattention and was only noticeable for her lapses. She envied Sandra for all the qualities she did not possess herself and thought it unfair that she should have Cousin Piers as well.

  Mary, too, seemed to begrudge him to the Frasers. “He’s still there,” she said, turning in her chair. “He must be staying to supper.”

  “No doubt he sings for it,” Mr. Blackett said pleasantly.

  “Sings for it?”

  “Yes, in his own way,” Mr. Blackett said.

  “But how?”

  “Ah, I’ve never been privileged to hear him, but it’s a sort of reversal, I imagine, of the sirens’ song.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” Mary said.

  “But without the wax,” Mr. Blackett continued with a smile.

  “I don’t understand,” Mary complained.

  “Never mind. Just my nonsense.”

  Here was an opportunity for instruction missed. Rhoda, looking at him with her considering stare, as she might have looked in a shop window and wondered whether she liked what was displayed there, noticed this omission and determined to trace the allusion which had some hidden place in her memory. Flora, who would have been sure to remember it, was fulfilling one of her increasing number of engagements.

  Mr. Blackett himself was not satisfied with his analogy. He liked to be accurate and this one was confused, for the singer, in this case, was not the siren, who was assuredly making for the rocks and Mr. Blackett was not going to warn him of them:

  “Nice people, I believe,” Mr. Doubleday had said of the Frasers. “Mrs. Fraser’s father was much respected in Upper Radstowe. Not a churchgoer,” he said and added quickly, “unfortunately. And old Mr. Spanner,” here he looked grave without difficulty, “was a nonconformist, but a very good firm of solicitors—Spanner and Brookes.”

  Mr. Blackett had now learnt the connection between the two women next door, the one offending by her unattractiveness almost as much as Mrs. Fraser did by the consciousness of her ability to charm, one neglecting the obvious mission of a woman, the other making it a kind of sport, worth while for its own sake even if she brought nothing home. But he had discovered more than that. His instinctive distrust of her was justified.

  “What, is her husband dead?” Mr. Doubleday had cried when Mr. Blackett sympathetically remarked on her widowhood and family cares. “No, no, that can’t be. I should have heard of it. One hears everything, you know. Can’t avoid it,” he said, sighing, and smiling together. “Some little trouble, I believe. So my wife tells me. What a pity! What a pity! But it will blow over,” he promised, beaming again. “These little matrimonial troubles often do, I find,” and he picked up his shears. Mrs. Doubleday’s drawing-room faced the garden too and he had been idle long enough.

  This was what had caused Mr. Blackett to walk home slowly and to be cheerful at supper, in spite of that scene in the street. He was a thoughtful man: he wrestled with problems over which Mr. Doubleday, for instance, found no difficulty, the existence of pain and evil, of God himself, and if he did not discuss these matters with his children, it was because he had no solutions to offer and he confined himself to subjects on which he could speak with personal certainty. But, curious as he was about many matters, there were regions of his own mind which he did not care to explore with thoroughness. He knew he might find things there which, as a conscientious person, he ought to remove, but their effects were pleasurable and he preferred to leave them undisturbed. He liked to believe that, in any case of an absent husband, the woman must be to blame. If he strayed, it was her fault for not being agreeable or clever enough to hold him; if she were guilty as, with Mrs. Fraser, seemed most likely, because this was how he wished to find her, then no excuse was possible, and he had the right to look at her a little longer, with a shade less respect than he would have wished anyone to look at Bertha. But—he watched her as she made the coffee, her pretty, plump hands moving slowly and deftly—Bertha, he was thankful to know, would never attract errant glances and she would, very properly, have resented them if she had recognized them. She was quite definitely his and everything she did and said acknowledged a settled contentment in her situation and the impossibility of imagining any other, and he felt a moment’s irritation at her implied assumption that he was as well satisfied as she was. He was, of course, completely satisfied; no other kind of wife would have suited him; she was perfect, yet it would have enlivened existence to have her less sure of him while he remained sure of her, to see her taking a little trouble to keep a lover as well as a husband. But she had never played any feminine tricks, she was too profoundly innocent. And how silent she was, another valuable quality; yet, again, now that he was silent himself because he was afraid of saying what he would regret, he wished she would introduce some topic interesting in itself or capable of being made so. And he was sorely tempted to startle her out of her calm by Mr. Doubleday’s shocking news, but then, in her gentle way, she would pass it on to Lindsay for his good and that was what Mr. Blackett did not desire. He did not tell himself why. Here was another of the regions he would not explore too far. He could not, however, resist the pleasure of hovering at the edge of both. They had been entirely separate, they were now intermingled, and they made a fascinatingly complicated country.

  “He seems to make friends easily, your cousin,” he remarked. “Gets bored with his own company, perhaps. One can understand that.”

  “One of Mrs. Fraser’s sons wants to be a farmer,” Mrs. Blackett said.

  “Interesting,” Mr. Blackett said blandly, “and I hope the young man will be successful, but I don’t quite see the relevance.”

  “Piers may be able to advise him.”

  “Oh, I see. Yes.” Asking advice of a man was the surest way of flattering him. “But the greengrocery trade is rather a far cry from farming, isn’t it? And you know, Bertha, I’m not narrow-minded and I don’t consider myself conventional, but is it really necessary to cluster round the vegetables as I found you a
ll doing this afternoon? It was rather a vulgar spectacle and how the ghosts haunting this old square must have shuddered! Why not get your vegetables sent to you decently from a shop?”

  “These are freshly gathered and I want to help him,” Mrs. Blackett said.

  “He ought to have avoided giving you the opportunity.”

  “Why?” Mrs. Blackett asked.

  He lifted his shoulders. “That’s a question impossible to answer. It’s a matter of feeling, it can’t be put into words, and as for helping him, you know very well he has a pension and no responsibilities and the pension must be adequate or he would have found himself a real job long ago, or,” Mr. Blackett said slowly, “have induced someone to give him one.”

  “Why,” asked Mrs. Blackett as she collected the coffee cups, “do you dislike him so much? But perhaps,” she added quietly, picking up the tray, “that’s another question it’s impossible for you to answer.”

  Mr. Blackett stared at the door she had shut behind her. It certainly was a question impossible for him to answer truthfully without acute discomfort and he blinked it away. What he did face was his surprise, his slight uneasiness, that it had come from Bertha. She had laid—was it accidentally?—some emphasis on the personal pronoun. “Still waters run deep,” he found himself saying and then in annoyance, first for his own triteness and then for applying it to Bertha, he left his chair and went to the window.

  The shabby car and trailer were still there and the car, he thought, looked like some patient old cab horse drowsing between the shafts, taking what rest he could get, and this was all part and parcel of Lindsay’s make-up, the old car, the humble occupation pursued with such cheerful simplicity, the limp, the whimsically distorted face, and Mr. Blackett was obliged to acknowledge the artistic perfection of the performance. He turned away impatiently but he could not settle down to a book. He missed Flora. What with amenities connected with the University, and there seemed to be a lot of them, and the new friends she had made, there were a good many evenings when she was not at home. And Bertha had not returned with her sewing. It always soothed him to see her at it and he went to the drawing-room in search of her, but she was not in the pale, sparsely furnished room with everything in its place and nothing without a certain impersonal elegance. The room was not like her, he thought, pausing to look about him, and he had had no hand nor had he paid for anything in it. She had brought some things from her old home, the water-colours in their narrow gilt frames, the old-fashioned work table with its silk bag, a small walnut bureau and a few stiff chairs: the rest she had bought with her small legacy from her father. It was not like her, he thought again, wondering that he had not noticed this before. Bertha was essentially a wife and mother and it was strange that she had not impressed her characteristics on a room of her own choosing.

  “Almost uninhabited,” he muttered and went to the door at the top of the steps down which she had been careless enough to fall last year.

  She was in the garden with Rhoda and they were both working on the borders. It was so small a place that Mr. Blackett would not have bestowed more care on it than was necessary to keep it neat, but they were going to make it very gay. That was all very well, but had Rhoda done her homework? Something in the happy absorption of these two who had their backs towards him, stopped him from calling to her. Rhoda was a clumsy mover, thunderous on the stairs and apt to collide with the furniture, but he noticed that her hands were as deft as her mother’s, and she touched the plants with surprising gentleness. Bertha, of course, had inherited her love of gardening from her father and she seemed to have passed it on to Rhoda and, as clearly as though they had told him, he knew their happiness in the work was doubled by doing it together. He felt lonely and isolated and unwontedly dissatisfied with himself as he stood at the top of the little staircase and he stepped back into the drawing-room before they could turn round and see him.

  Chapter VIII

  

  The young man who wished to be a farmer was not present to hear any advice Piers Lindsay might have to give and there was not much of it.

  “I’m buying some more land myself,” he said. “There’ll be a lot of food wanted if things go as I think they will. It won’t be what you could call farming, though. Chiefly potatoes. Still, I shall need more help and if he’s on the land already there’s just the chance that he might not be taken off it.”

  “What did Mr. Blackett do in the Great War?” was Rosamund’s reply.

  They were upstairs, in the drawing-room, and she had just lighted the fire, for it was hardly summer yet and the room felt chilly, and, tending it from her knees, she turned and looked at him as she asked this question. A stranger would not have known whether he was amused or grieved, but he was not a stranger now and she was learning to read expressions through the fixed, half-humorous mask.

  “He was doing work of national importance,” Lindsay said gravely.

  “Exactly! And that’s my reply to your kind offer. I’m surprised you made it.”

  “But I knew, pretty well, what you’d say,” he assured her.

  She found this remark very warming and she was in need of warmth; she was in need of recovering some sense of her own value, for it was a sound instinct that had bade her postpone the opening of Fergus’s letter. He had made it clear that he did not intend to come back, that he did not wish to do so and was getting on very happily where he was. It was wonderful, he said—the whole letter was cheerfully friendly and this she found very daunting—it was wonderful how much more and how much better work could be done in sympathetic surroundings, and that remark, more than his suggestion that they should be legally parted as the present situation was senseless, had really hurt her because it touched her where she had a weakness. She had adopted his own light attitude towards his writing and he must have wanted encouragement, wanted to be taken seriously, to have a higher standard raised for him than he had dared to raise himself, and she had failed him while she thought all was well between them because they had never ceased to be lovers or to find pleasure in each other’s company. That had been a great deal, it was more than most people had and it had seemed to satisfy him but, when she had seriously angered him—so she had worked things out in many wakeful hours—then he remembered faults in her she had never suspected and he had never mentioned. But, she excused herself, whatever they may have been there had not been much time, in her life with him, for more than she managed to do. It had been hard work with five children to rear and very little money to stretch for their needs. She had had a Victorian family in post-war circumstances; he ought to have thought of that and she suspected him of exaggerating her omissions in justification of himself. And, if that was necessary, there was no more to be said, though much to be thought of and she found she was able to think of his sympathetic surroundings with more fear for him than any other emotion; yet it was quite possible that his present surroundings were what he had always needed. She had loved him too simply, she supposed, taking everything for granted, never wondering whether he wanted anything he did not ask for. Why should she? She had not wanted more than he had given her. That was where she had been stupid and unimaginative, she decided, and it was humiliating, more humiliating than the loss of her physical hold on him, to look back and see him bearing patiently with her mental deficiencies. But, if that were true, she thought with amusement, it was the only provocation under which he had exercised that virtue. And he might find—here she was a little spiteful—that being loved simply was better than being loved with cunning. In the meantime—and she had always insisted with Agnes on his decency—he was worried about the money. He had not sent a cheque for fear it might prejudice her case but when he had heard from her lawyer—how absurdly distant that sounded—he would see what could be done. He seemed very sure of her acquiescence. She supposed she would have to oblige him and, truly, she did not want him back. She did not see how she or the children could readjust themselv
es to his presence. This break in the chain they had forged together could not be properly mended, not, at least, without clumsy signs of welding, yet it was sad that all the links should fall apart and what had been a solid entity should be disintegrated so easily. And, naturally, she suffered in her pride. That was why Piers Lindsay’s words were grateful to her and she gave him a big, honest smile of pleasure, without self-consciousness, without realizing the charm of her attitude and her smile until she detected, for she was practised in such matters, his unmistakable appreciation.

  This was warming, too, warming enough to make her turn to the fire again and say, “And I suppose the war and all that is why Mr. Blackett dislikes you?”

  “Does he?” Lindsay said mildly. “I don’t see why he should. It’s all a very long time ago and he knew his own business best.”

  “Yes, I know that’s the correct thing for a man to say, a man who fought himself, but it’s not what women think, not those of us who remember. And I remember. It’s all discredited now and the people who avoided fighting are better off than those who didn’t and the whole world flopped and everything seemed to have been wasted and you were all fools for your pains. That’s what the younger generation believes, though I’ve tried to teach mine better, but when they look around them what else can you expect? It was a great time to have lived in, all the same, though not a very nice one for Mr. Blackett to remember,” she said, getting easily to her feet.

  “You’re hard on him, aren’t you? He’s not the only one.”

  “He’s the only one who lives next door to me and I don’t like him. Do you? Oh, you needn’t answer! And here’s Chloe with the coffee.”

  “But I ought to be going.”

  “Just when I’ve lighted the fire?”

  “I shall get into trouble with George, you know. He’ll be very reproachful. A good supper spoilt.”

  “Well, tell George—does he bully you?—not to cook it in future, on your Upper Radstowe days, until you get home. Then you can stay when you want to without upsetting him.”