Chatterton Square (British Library Women Writers)

by E. H. Young

  “I was hoping to see you soon,” he said, “but not here, and this is better.”

  “This is very good,” she agreed. She slipped from the gate and turned to rest her arms on the top rail as he did. “Why, of course, this is one of your Upper Radstowe days. I’d forgotten that,” she said, and she was pleased with herself for having forgotten, she felt charmingly innocent as she had felt long ago when she looked frankly into the face of a passing policeman, assuring him that she, at least, had done no harm. She wondered if Lindsay were pleased too. He was looking at the oats, no doubt reckoning what sort of crop they would make.

  “There are more beautiful places than this, all round about,” she said, “but it’s one of my favourites. I haven’t been here for a long time though, and never alone before. There was always someone with me when I was young, my father or a friend or—or someone and to-day I was having a happy time, discovering how nice it was to be all by myself.”

  “And then I came and spoilt it.”

  “It doesn’t seem to have made much difference,” she said contentedly.

  “No, I suppose it wouldn’t,” he replied, humbly taking her in the wrong sense. The uninjured profile was next to her and when she looked at it she saw a twitch of amusement at the corner of his mouth. “So I can’t hope you were on your way to see me.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” and again she felt clean and innocent. “I just came here from a sort of homing instinct, I think.”

  “Well,” he said, “my cottage isn’t far from here. Past the Monks’ Pool, the first turning on the left.”

  “I knew it was somewhere near the Monks’ Pool, but there’s no turning there.”

  “There wasn’t until I made one.”

  “I suppose you had to do it,” she said after a pause. “It’s foolish to resent changes, and quite useless. Look at that!” she said as an aeroplane roared overhead. “There were no such things when we were young. We did still have the sky to ourselves. It looks lovely in the sunshine, but why do all the new things have to make a noise?”

  “I think they might seem more sinister if they were silent and at this moment,” he said gravely, “I wish there were enough of them to blot out the whole sky. But nobody seems to be in a hurry about it.”

  “And they ought to be?”

  “I haven’t much faith in inactive good intentions and their power to influence a people gone mad. I don’t know whether kind words have ever been really effective with a maniac and I’d rather put him in a strait jacket. An unpleasant thing to have to do, but I wouldn’t take the risk of simply hoping his better nature will prevail.”

  The aeroplane had gone with a last twinkle as the sun caught it and except for the low flight of birds which seemed almost earthbound in comparison, the sky was empty again.

  “But let us be happy to-day,” Rosamund said in a low voice.

  “That’s all too easy,” he said.

  “Yes and it’s the way I’ve always lived, thinking it’s not worthwhile to make a fuss to-day because everything may be all right to-morrow, but it isn’t. And it won’t be, will it?”

  “Not possibly.”

  “How comforting you are!” she said.

  “But what else can I say?”

  “Nothing. That’s why you’re comforting. I’m frightened by all these people who have bandaged their eyes and pretend they’re having a nice game of Blindman’s Buff. And I’ve no one to talk to about it. No man. Only Agnes. The boys are so discreet and considerate, I might be half-witted or an invalid who mustn’t be worried. As though I don’t know far more about it than they do! They were born in one war and it looks,” she said, beating the bar of the gate with both hands, “it looks as though they’ll have to die in the next. All right, I won’t,” she said as he made a little gesture of pity and appeal, “but wouldn’t it be wonderful—and what a hackneyed remark—to wake up and find it isn’t true?”

  “Yes, but not just yet. I don’t want to find I’m not here after all.”

  “Neither do I,” she said, and the frank smile she gave him changed to an uncertain one, retreating before the eagerness she could discern, as she had learnt to discern most of his expressions, through the fixed, comic mournfulness of his face. Moreover, his injury had not touched his eyes and with astonishment she recognized in them the look she had told herself she would never see. The retreat had been an instinctively conscientious withdrawal, and then, in a spasm of rebellion against caution and fairness and common sense, she let him take his chance while she took her happiness. She dropped the defences she might have raised against the sweetness of the unexpected moment, the tenderness she felt for him and her trust in him. Yet, with her hands in his, she was critical and watchful. Behind her was the experience of a love-making in which neither she nor Fergus had seemed, to each other, to make a false movement or utter a jarring word. They had been inspired in their first raptures to an artistic perfection which was considered, if that were possible, while it was spontaneous, deliberate even in ecstasy. Nothing like that could ever come again and she wondered if Piers, too, had a past which could not be recovered and feared, as she did, an awkward ardour and self-­consciousness. These thoughts came too quickly to be framed in words and went as fast. She, at least, had nothing to fear. Whether through practice or instinct, she did not care which, his technique was good, too good to be accepted under false pretences, and she said reluctantly, “But then, you see, there’s Fergus,” and mercifully he did not drop, he tightened his hold of her hands. She nodded in confirmation of her words. “I ought to have told you before, but that would have been conceited.”

  “Conceited?”

  “As if it would matter to you one way or the other. But it was partly because I thought you might be too discreet to come and see me if you knew. And I wanted you to come.”

  “Are you telling me,” he did drop her hands now, “you are still married?”

  “Yes. I’d better tell you everything and try to be fair to him,” and they turned again to lean against the gate and the oats seemed to listen greedily and nudge each other as they heard the story.

  “And now,” she said, when she had finished, “I don’t think I shall like this place any more.”

  “I won’t have you saying that. I’d like to put a fence round it and keep everyone else out,” and she thought that was a strange thing for him to say for she remembered with a pang how Fergus, in one of his mad moods, had chalked a circle round the place on the pavement where she had been standing when he first saw her and said it was sacred ground.

  She glanced over her shoulder at the little car. “I don’t know why it always looks like an old cab horse but it does,” she said. “I feel rather like one myself. And your customers will be wondering where you are.”

  “They can go on wondering.”

  “Yes,” she said. “We can give each other a few more minutes.”

  “Years, surely. Thirty or forty of them, perhaps.”

  She shook her head. “No, no. This is all my fault. I drifted with Fergus and I’ve drifted with you. I ought to have limited our acquaintance to cabbages. But how did I know what would happen? And yet,” she cried with anger, “why should I deny myself something good?”

  “And why should I have to do without it?”

  “Because it’s entangled with so many other people.”

  “We can straighten the tangle.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps it will be straightened for us. Last night Agnes told me she thought the happy people were those who had missed what they thought they wanted. It would be better to miss this than to spoil it.”

  “Much, but it won’t be spoilt.” He started the engine. “Go and ask George to give you some tea,” he said, and drove off in an abrupt departure. But it was the right one for the moment and she told herself again with a curious detachment that his technique was certainly good.

&nb
sp; Chapter XX

  

  Miss Spanner had not forgotten that this was one of Lindsay’s Upper Radstowe days. She was surprised and pleased that Rosamund should have chosen it for her solitary expedition and she was able to tell herself that a person in doubt about a line of conduct could rely on Providence either to reserve judgment, in which case the doubt must remain unresolved, or to point the way and the way had been clearly pointed. Her own mind was in a careful state of confusion. She had collected enough conscientious motives to smother the one which was insistent and irresistible, the one which induced her to go shopping in a recklessly placatory spirit and return with a large piece of salmon, several pounds of raspberries and a jar of cream.

  “Good Lord!” said James. “Will the housekeeping money stretch to it?” He was at home, for the University term was over.

  “It won’t have to stretch,” said Miss Spanner. “It’s my own little treat for to-night. Your mother will be tired and hungry.”

  “I’m glad I haven’t missed it.”

  “Why should you?”

  “Because I’m going away, farming, to earn an honest penny till it’s time for the other little treat you’ve given us. Plenty to do on a farm at this time of year and I can’t stay here doing nothing for months, can I?”

  “How do I know what you can or can’t do?” Miss Spanner said, finding, as usual, a difficulty in expressing approval. “But I hope there’ll be a good harvest. We’ll need it. And you’d better get into training. If I were you I’d go for a nice long walk this afternoon.”

  “No you wouldn’t, Miss Spanner. If you were me you’d go to the pictures. Let’s go together and my treat this time.”

  Miss Spanner gave her nose a knock to hide her pleasure. “Anything good on?”

  “I don’t know, but you can always shut your eyes when there’s anything unsuitable.”

  “Then I might as well go prepared for a long nap,” she said. “It would be a good deal cheaper and much more comfortable to have it here. Besides, I’m in charge of the house. No, you go and tell me about it afterwards. Or take someone else,” she suggested brightly. “One of the Blackett girls.”

  “Which?” James inquired, eyeing her cautiously.

  “Rhoda,” Miss Spanner said promptly.

  “The one who stares?”

  “Does she? Well, she’s the best of them. I don’t care for that Flora. Self-conscious and conceited, like her father. But Rhoda’s different. She’s getting the right ideas about things too. From me,” she added. “But no, you can’t take her. She’ll be at school. Take the other one. I don’t suppose she knows what to do with herself any more than you do. I see her sitting at her window for hours on end.”

  “You don’t miss much, do you?” James said with a grin.

  “No, I’m a great student of human nature,” she said with modest pride.

  “And what this house chiefly needs,” he went on with apparent irrelevance, “is a way into it and out of it at the back, through the garden.”

  “Yes, I daresay that would suit you very well,” said Miss Spanner acidly, “and I’m glad your mother’s spared that anxiety.”

  “But you’d hear us, wouldn’t you, from your bedroom? You’d be able to let us in and help us upstairs when we came reeling home.”

  “I don’t like that kind of talk,” said Miss Spanner. “I don’t think it’s at all funny.”

  “But you started it, by implication. I’m sure I can’t be fit to take any girl to the pictures and I’m not going myself. After all I think I’ll go for your nice long walk.”

  “Much better,” said Miss Spanner.

  “And see if I can find Lindsay’s place.”

  “Yes, that’s a very good idea,” she said with enthusiasm. “And, oh dear, I forgot to bring a cucumber! If you’ve really nothing to do at the moment, would you mind running out and getting one?”

  “I’ll go with pleasure but I won’t run.”

  “Well, well, it’s only a way of speaking.”

  “I know. It makes the request sound less exacting, doesn’t it? A smooth or a knobbly one?”

  “Knobbly, if possible.”

  He hesitated in the hall. He was acutely conscious of Flora at her window and it was infuriating that he could not leave or enter the house without the likelihood of being watched. But she was somewhat on his mind. Should he look up, as though hopefully, and wave, or turn his back on her as quickly as possible? He felt he owed her a little attention, but that sort of debt had the peculiarity of increasing with every payment. He had been a fool to kiss her. It had been as natural and unimportant as biting an apple, but he had not wanted the whole of the apple and her father’s formal permission to visit her had spoilt his taste for any of it. Perhaps that was what the old stickler wanted. Well, there were only a few more days before he would be on the farm and then there would be the mountains and then, who knew what? With chivalry towards her and comfort for himself he tried not to remember that she had cried and stubbornly he did not look up either going or returning.

  It was while he was out that Miss Spanner’s jaw gave a sudden drop. She wondered whether she had been a little hasty in believing Providence was guiding her. James was almost certain to meet that unmistakable little car and he would return with Mr. Lindsay. It would not surprise her if Rosamund returned with him too. That would account for this lonely picnic of hers. She might have known there was something behind this desire for solitude and it looked as though her plan, which now seemed more than ever urgent, was to be frustrated. But she refused to believe it must be a bad one just because it might meet with difficulties. Indeed, difficulty was inherent in any good cause, it was its guarantee of value; history showed that clearly. “And anyhow, I don’t care,” she said to herself. Nevertheless, this excellent argument did not prevent her from rejoicing when things were made easy for her: Piers Lindsay arrived unaccompanied and she was alone in the house. Sandra and Paul had gone back to school, Felix to his office, and James had started in search of the man who was busily uncovering his trailer and setting up his scales and, as she watched him, Miss Spanner was swept by an extraordinary confusion of feeling. She felt both hard and pitiful; for the first time in her life she had a sense of sin and welcomed this new experience while it daunted her. She was in a web of her own making and completely isolated in it. She knew that by her own act she must remain mentally isolated from the one person she wished to be near, yet the force of her night’s thinking and her morning’s scheming drove her on.

  “Four pounds of peas,” she said. “No, I’d better have six. By the time I’ve shelled them there won’t be too many for such a family. Five of them, not counting Rosamund and me. Far too many in my opinion, and not one of them independent yet. A heavy burden.”

  “Mrs. Fraser seems to carry it lightly.”

  “Ah well, she’s used to it, you see. That makes all the difference. And a lot of potatoes.”

  He carried the potatoes into the kitchen and she shut the door.

  “Rosamund’s out,” she said, “and I’m glad. I wanted to ask you what you think of things. I don’t like the news this morning.”

  “No. They’re another step farther on. They’re consolidating.”

  “While we’re asleep.”

  “No, not asleep. Drunk with optimism and noble aspirations.”

  “Yes. You see,” she said hurriedly, “I don’t like to talk about it much to Rosamund. It’s not a nice prospect for her, with those boys. And there’s Fergus too.” She caught her breath and waited in vain for a question. “Her husband, you know,” she said. “He’s in France at present. I expect she’s told you and he’ll be back soon if I know him. And, oh dear, I never saw two people more in love. And then there’s Paul. Four years last time—how long this? I can’t help wishing it would start soon and finish before he’s old enough to fight and then she’d
have one of them left. Still, I haven’t a doubt Fergus will come through as he did before. He’s that kind of man. Reckless, but lucky. She’s very proud of him.” Miss Spanner sighed heavily. She was doing her best but she did not seem to be getting any response. From Lindsay not so much as a sympathetic murmur had reached her. It was dark in the kitchen, too dark to see him properly and when she turned on the light she did not catch the quickly controlled stricken expression she had expected. That might be because his expression was odd already, but there was a thoughtful kindness in his eyes. He seemed to be thinking more of her than of Rosamund and himself.