Chatterton Square (British Library Women Writers)

by E. H. Young

  “She is fortunate in having such a loyal friend in you,” he said, and he looked at her with that thoughtful air for another second or two before he said briskly, “Well, that’s the potatoes and the peas. Anything else?”

  “Nothing else,” Miss Spanner said. She felt strangely empty and exhausted and when she remembered that she had not paid him, she followed him with an effort, to get a friendly smile from Mrs. Blackett, now on the pavement, and a cheerful word from Mr. Lindsay as he accepted the money and fished the change from a pocket of his baggy trousers. This cheerfulness made a mockery of her little scheme. He had not needed the warning she had given him; she was perfectly safe from him and she had better, much better for her own comfort, have been silent. And after all, if it was not Mr. Lindsay it would be someone else, her security had gone and she had smirched herself for nothing, and she went back to the kitchen and turned off the light and sat on a hard chair in the dark. She was very unhappy and she was bound to be unhappy for the rest of her days. Sooner or later she would be turned out and she had done what Rosamund would call a dirty trick. If that trick had been necessary it would not have troubled her much except for the fear, and this was great, of having it found out, but it had not been necessary and she was pretty sure that Mr. Lindsay had suspected some personal motive in her confidences. To her own ears, they had sounded rather forced, as though rehearsed, and he had put a peculiar emphasis on his remark about her loyalty, or had her own conscience stressed it? And though he seemed too innocent and simple-minded a man for so much subtlety and too decent to tell tales, she decided that it was never wise to reckon on the inferior intelligence of other people. No, it was she who had been stupid and Rosamund, if she knew, would tell her she had been wrong as usual. And what was the use of struggling? She could not fight a whole battalion of suitors and that there would be a throng of them when Rosamund was free, she could not doubt. There was nothing abnormal or even jealous in her love for Rosamund. It was her own late won happiness she was protecting, the companionship, the talks at bedtime, her growing affection for these young people of whom she pretended to disapprove, their charming, half-teasing ways with her. All that, since last night, had become precarious. Her own simplicity lay in the belief that every free and reasonable man would want to secure Rosamund for himself. Since that day when she came bicycling down the Avenue, she had meant warmth and beauty and gaiety to Miss Spanner and even the inconvenience of five children, so carefully indicated to Piers Lindsay, would not be a powerful deterrent for anyone who saw her with Miss Spanner’s eyes. Rosamund with a husband, however loosely attached, meant security for her friend; Rosamund without a husband set Miss Spanner’s world rocking. And like Rosamund herself a few hours ago, but silently, she cried out in rebellion against forgoing what she wanted.

  “But perhaps it won’t happen,” she thought, as millions of people were thinking about a greater matter.

  Chapter XXI

  

  When the rattle of the car and its trailer had passed beyond earshot, Rosamund opened the gate and went into the field. There was a little border of bare earth between the oats and the hedge and she followed it, looking for a place where she could lie down and go to sleep. She had no thought of what had happened in the last hour or of what the future held for her; she merely felt exhausted. Sleep, at that moment, was the only thing she needed and when, in a corner of the field, she found the ground lifted into a bank, scooped out and pebbled like a tiny quarry, she accepted it without hesitation. This bed proved to be less hard and drier than she had expected and she had hardly put her handkerchief under her cheek and told herself she should have taken Sandra’s advice and brought a mackintosh, before she was asleep but still half conscious that the sun was warm on her. She waked when a shadow seemed to come between it and her.

  “Well, I’m blessed!” said the voice of James.

  She sat up. “What time is it!” She looked at her watch. “Why, it’s after four. I thought it was going to rain and it’s only you. I must have been asleep for hours and I’m frightfully hungry.”

  “Well, there’s going to be a very good supper. Salmon. The dear old Spanner has let herself go.”

  “H’m. Has she? I’m not surprised,” Rosamund said dryly, “but it’s a long time till then.”

  “But what,” James persisted, “are you doing here?”

  “I went to sleep.”

  “I know that. But what a place to choose!”

  “The best I could find. I was nearly asleep on my feet, a queer feeling, I’ve never had it before, but I had just enough sense not to lie on the grass.”

  “Did you have a bad night?”

  “Yes, rather. What are you doing here yourself?”

  He told her. “But Lindsay isn’t there.”

  “No, it’s one of his Upper Radstowe days.”

  “I’d have thought Miss Spanner would have remembered. Still, I’ve had a look round, his man’s there, and then as I came along the lane I saw a blue something and I thought I’d better investigate.” He sat down beside her. “You do do funny things, you know. Suppose somebody else had found you.”

  “It wouldn’t have been nearly so nice. James, do you think we could go and ask that George to give us some tea?”

  “No, hardly, could we? But there’s the pub on the main road. Let’s go there.”

  “All right, we’ll go there.”

  “Wait till I dust you down. You’re a bit earthy. And if you’re crippled with rheumatism it will be your own fault.”

  “Wouldn’t that be horrid? I couldn’t like myself any more. I never feel really kind about people who don’t move well. It’s a shockingly savage instinct.”

  “What about Lindsay’s limp?”

  “Oh, that’s quite different. That’s something to be proud of.”

  “Like our parent’s bad temper,” James said. “Same cause but more inconvenient.”

  “Oh James,” she breathed. It was almost the first time any of the children had spoken of their father since he went away and she did not know whether the words were merely a comment on the irony of things or whether they held a reproach for her; it was as a reproach she heard them. She felt cold and miserable and mentally confused and as James saw the colour go from her cheeks and even her eyes seem paler, he put his arm through hers.

  “Never mind, old dear,” he said. “Come on. It’s not your fault.”

  “But I’m not so sure,” she told him and, finding it hard work not to weep, she laughed instead when he stopped and kissed her gently and quickly on each eye.

  “To bring the colour back,” he said.

  It was a pretty, surprising thing for him to do and while, in the softening pleasure of it, she was tempted to confide in him, it was perhaps the fear of more emotion which led him, still with his arm in hers, to talk uninterruptedly until they reached the inn. The young did not want to know the troubles of their elders, to be bored with what could not be so very important. They could not believe that older people knew anything like their own intensity of feeling. And, actually, after the little shock James had given her, Rosamund, for the time, was incapable of more emotion. Whether it was that sharp reminder of Fergus, though she seldom needed one, or the sleep separating the present from the immediate past, something had left her high and dry on the prosaic shore of common sense. It was the natural reaction of a woman of her age and in this reaction she was bound to see something rather absurd and quite impracticable in the future Lindsay planned. A love affair between two middle-aged people was one thing and could be beautiful and satisfying: marriage between them when one of them had a large family and neither of them had much money, was quite another thing, unfair to the children and a muddle that might even become squalid. What, she asked herself, as she and James walked silently down the long road from the inn, did she and Piers imagine they were going to do? Did he intend to leave his holding and set
tle down to doing nothing in the Square, or was the family to be scattered? It was true that it was bound to scatter itself before long. Chloe seemed likely to marry the conscientious accountant and Felix and James would have to go to war or wherever their work might take them, but still there were Paul and Sandra. Were they to be sent to boarding-school while she went to live with Piers and George? Paul would like that, but she could not afford boarding-schools and she would be very dull among the cabbages and potatoes. At this moment she could not recover the happy excitement of knowing she was loved again, of living vividly under appreciative eyes and of being able to love, not with all the ecstasy of youth but with confidence and content. All that had fallen away. It seemed unreal, as though it were only part of her dreams when she was sleeping in the field and now the sun began to dip and the clouds it had kept at bay began to harry it, covering and uncovering it and chasing it again, as her own happiness was darkened and pursued by doubts.

  “It’s cold, isn’t it?” she said.

  “I expect you’ve caught cold,” James said severely.

  He walked on the horse track; she kept to the road. Its hard surface and the sound of her feet on it suited her mood and neither of them spoke again until he exclaimed, “Oh, here he’s coming now.”

  His masculine eye had recognized, far off, the bonnet of Lindsay’s car and she thought, “That settles it. I didn’t hope I might see him when I started this morning and I never thought I might meet him now. I’m not having the right sensations. I want him to love me, of course, but it’s too much bother; it’s all too complicated; I must be too old to love him as I should.” Yet when he stopped the car and she saw his odd face again and heard his voice and knew he would always act exactly as she would wish, giving her now no special look of understanding, but frankly glad to see them both and anxious to drive them home again, her doubts vanished and she remembered how Sandra, who was so often right, had said he was a man who ought to have a family of his own. He would have to be content with hers and she believed he would be. Somehow, all the difficulties would be solved, not by her but by his sensible, quiet selflessness.

  “Mother’s cold. We’d better walk,” James said.

  “No, I’m quite warm again,” she said, and she heard the warmth in her own voice, “but I’d rather walk. I want to be tired and hungry for my supper. James says it’s going to be a good one.”

  “I know you’re going to have a lot of my green peas.”

  “So you saw Agnes?”

  “Oh yes, I saw her,” he said, and he gave the involuntary little blink of one eye which she had learnt to know as a sign that something puzzled, amused or troubled him.

  “That’s cheered you up,” James remarked blandly as they walked on again.

  “Yes,” she admitted. They knew more about her than she had thought, these boys of hers; more than she knew of them, but James seemed to be amused where Felix was anxious. “And why shouldn’t it cheer me?” she asked.

  “I’d be surprised if it didn’t. He’s a nice person and it’s nice to see you enjoying yourself. On the whole, you have a pretty dull time of it.”

  “Dull! I call that an insult. I shan’t be dull until I’m dead and I even have hopes that I shall enjoy things then. Nobody is dull who hasn’t a dull mind. I don’t mean that I’m clever.”

  “I think you are, rather.”

  “Do you? How?” Rosamund asked with animation.

  “Not intellectual—”

  “No.”

  “But, well, on the spot.”

  “And yet, d’you know, I can never remember how much milk is a pint and sugar a pound.”

  “That doesn’t matter. We’ve got to have the stuff anyhow. But you understand people.”

  “Oh no, James, I don’t. I should have to be God to do that,” she said, and she thought of Agnes, so broad-minded about what she read, incapable of being shocked by the written word if it reached her standard of literary merit, turning tail at the prospect of continuing to live with what was called the innocent party to a divorce and thinking she could make up for this desertion with salmon and green peas. And why had Piers blinked at the mention of her?

  “No, I don’t understand people,” she said.

  “What I mean is that you don’t fuss.”

  “Too lazy.”

  “You work like a navvy.”

  “Lots of dust in the corners, but who cares?”

  “Not me,” said James.

  They had come to the end of the long road and crossed another to take the curving way above the woods. The leaves were too thick now to allow more than an occasional glimpse of the cliffs across the river; the river itself was hidden, but it was good to know it was there, that not far away it reached the Channel and the Channel merged into the sea.

  “In every other place I’ve lived in,” Rosamund said, “I’ve felt a little trapped. Yes, even in that great bare field where we tried to have the chicken farm.” She laughed. She always laughed when she thought of the farm, the bungalow with its corrugated roof, the wind that had a chill in it on the hottest day, the wire enclosures for the hen runs and the determined mortality of the hens.

  “Here,” she said as they reached the bridge, “I feel I can get out. And so I don’t want to.”

  “How many did you start with?” James asked.

  “Start with?”

  “For the chicken farm.”

  “Oh, I forget. I know how many we ended with.”

  “Mad idea,” James said. “I don’t think that will happen again, whatever else does. People won’t squander their gratuity money on jobs they don’t understand.”

  “No,” she agreed and, seeing him vexed with himself for having introduced this subject, she went on with it. “But Felix will have a profession to come back to and you’ll know a good deal about yours. I wish I could buy you a really nice farm.”

  “Of course you can’t. I’ll have to start with a little place like Lindsay’s. P’raps he’ll sell me his.”

  “Why should he?” She was a little suspicious of James’s acuteness.

  “He’ll be wanting to retire soon, I should think. It’s hard work for a man of his age.”

  “But he’s quite young!” Rosamund exclaimed. “He can’t be much older than I am. Yes, that amuses you, doesn’t it? And when I was your age I thought everybody over thirty was practically dead. But we don’t feel like that. We find ourselves just as interesting as we ever did and what happens to us seems just as important. But it isn’t really. We’ve opened our oysters and eaten most of them, too. It’s the ones you are going to open that matter now.”

  James gave a satiric grunt, thus expressing his view of what his particular oyster was likely to be.

  Chapter XXII

  

  From her bedroom window and well aware that Flora—supposed to be deep in study, was looking out of hers—Mrs. Blackett saw Mrs. Fraser and James at the far end of the Square. They were walking slowly but not with the slowness of fatigue. There was an easy swing about their movements which gave her the impression that they were in no hurry to get home and that their unstrained companionship was pleasant to them both. It must be very nice, she thought with moderation, to have a tall son like that and nice for him to have a mother who could fit her pace and probably her mind to his. And then an ironical little smile disturbed the placid curve of Mrs. Blackett’s lips. Piers had stayed with her longer than usual this afternoon and she realized that this attention must have been due to the absence of Mrs. Fraser who was now entering her house, while her son stood aside but, Mrs. Blackett noted, did not linger to give an upward glance at Flora’s window and with a little pity for her daughter, because she was young, there was mixed a little cruel satisfaction because the pity was for that particular daughter. Trying to do the right thing by her and to think the right thoughts, she could not accompany these efforts
with properly sympathetic feelings. By the time Rhoda and Mary were born she was comparatively inured to the process of their begetting; she could forget it in the happiness they gave her, but Flora was stamped with the surprise and disgust and despair she had known as she trailed through the picture galleries of Florence on her honeymoon and did not know how to face the future. Flora was stamped too with much of her father’s character and appearance and for Mrs. Blackett she was rather like a child who had been taken into the family because there was nowhere else for her to go. That did not lessen, it increased her mother’s sense of duty towards her. With Rhoda there was no such sense because there was love and understanding to transcend it.

  Mrs. Blackett smoothed the hair which was never untidy and changed her morning frock for another, a flowered silk instead of a flowered cotton, and realized, as usual, that whatever she wore was always, though she did not know why, a little wrong, and as she moved quietly about her room the thought of Flora, on the other side of the wall fancying herself in love with a boy who was certainly not in love with her, led her to the consideration of the other threads linking her family to the one across the road. There was Rhoda’s odd affection for Miss Spanner, there was Piers who, naturally enough, preferred that house to this one and there was her husband’s secret interest in everything that happened there and she smiled again as she thought how astonished and humiliated he would be if he knew that she was not only aware of it but amused and sustained and pleased by it. And she understood it too. Mrs. Fraser had beauty, but for Mrs. Blackett, and probably for others, that was not the chief part of her charm; it was the sense of undiminished life in her. She must, Mrs. Blackett reckoned, be somewhere about her own age but she had not settled down into being the mother of a family with no more adventures ahead of her; she never would. She was ready for the next good thing that came her way and though it was a readiness that could easily be misunderstood, that possibility would not trouble or control her. For—and this was why Mrs. Blackett envied her—she seemed to have the right kind of freedom, one involving no defiance or any need to assert itself, a heritage taken for granted like the right to her share of the sunshine. But then, Mrs. Blackett thought, she had no husband, and she went down to the drawing-room where Mr. Blackett always expected to find her on his return.