Chatterton Square (British Library Women Writers)

by E. H. Young

  Flora, hoist with her own petard, carefully cast a piteous look at her mother and Mrs. Blackett, knowing that while she might serve herself she would not be serving her daughter by opposing this scheme, but must make some show of helping her, said quietly, “Hadn’t you better wait, Herbert, and take us all next year?”

  “So you are one of the faithless ones, too, are you, Bertha? I’m surprised—and disappointed. No,” he said, as Flora began to move the neglected plates, “as far as I am concerned don’t trouble about another course. I am far too much upset.”

  “Oh, that’s fortunate,” said Mrs. Blackett.

  “Fortunate!” he exclaimed.

  “I mean,” she said with smiling meekness, “because I know the pudding must be burnt.”

  Chapter XXXII

  

  While her father talked, Rhoda had plenty of time to trace the origin of Flora’s question and she was shrewd enough to know why it had been asked. With inherent distrust of her sister, she had meant to carry away the notebook in which her letter was concealed and in her haste she had taken the wrong one. Flora had read it and she was angry. That she might have sought for and found James’s letter was a villainy of which Rhoda did not suspect her. She was willing to believe that her offence had been at least partly accidental and though she had been very mean in using it, she was going to be well punished. Rhoda could not imagine a much worse prospect than a holiday with her father for sole companion and, shrewd here too, she guessed that her father’s decision was one of an irritable moment and his pride would compel him to abide by it. That was punishment enough and Rhoda decided to say nothing and this was not altogether out of generosity. She knew the kind of remarks Flora would make and, determined not to be troubled by them, she was pleasant and friendly while they washed the supper dishes together.

  “Nice for us,” she said, “but awful for you. You’ll be staring at churches all the time.”

  “Not awful at all,” Flora said. “It’s just what I should choose. I should hate to go trailing about with the whole family, everybody wanting to do different things.”

  “And nobody,” said Rhoda, “doing what they like. The best thing is not to go at all.”

  “I don’t agree with you,” Flora said. She could not allow Rhoda to pity her and, after all, it would be something to talk about next term, she would not have to admit to doing nothing and going nowhere when other people talked about their holidays and there was always the chance of the sort of adventure she wanted, but she realized that those chances would be lost without the exercise of tact, now and later, and Mrs. Blackett was surprised when, all smiles and eagerness, she brought the coffee into the study. This bright manner might be deplored as deceit or applauded as stoicism or unselfishness and it seemed to Mrs. Blackett that the virtues and vices had an extraordinary way of overlapping each other. It could hardly be called deceit in Flora to disguise her feelings for her father’s sake, yet Mrs. Blackett would have been better pleased by a less sudden enthusiasm. She never felt sure of Flora’s motives. But, from her own point of view, this enthusiasm was just what she wanted. It was infecting Mr. Blackett, loosening his pursed lips and adding a real desire to a petty impulse and, as she lifted her coffee cup she noticed that her hand was not quite steady. There had not been many occasions for excitement in her life, but this was one of them and she found herself saying childishly, “Oh God, don’t let anything stop them and, if there has to be a war, don’t let it be just yet.” She was not praying that humanity might be spared untold suffering and grief; she was begging for a little time for herself. There was so much of it. It went on and on, developing, too, a deplorable elasticity within itself, stretching until it seemed it would have to snap, but it never did and, surely, it was not much to ask for a little of it for her own. In nearly twenty years of marriage there had hardly been twenty nights passed by Mr. Blackett outside his home and now, with any good fortune, there might be at least twenty evenings when he did not turn his key in the front-door lock, twenty nights when she would not hear him coming upstairs to bed and as many mornings when she need not suffer the absurd indignity of clambering over his recumbent figure because he insisted on having the bed pushed against the wall and on occupying the outside place. She would send Connie for her holiday, the house would belong to her and Rhoda, with Mary as an almost negligible addition, and already there seemed to be more light and air in it, as though the door had been opened into a bigger, freer world.

  “But this is all very well,” she heard her husband saying, “all very well for you and me, Flora, but a little cruel to be making plans which don’t include your mother. And so, perhaps,” he said, for these plans were very different from the one in which he had seen himself wearing corduroy trousers and coloured shirts and with another companion, “perhaps we had better give them up.”

  Mrs. Blackett prayed again, this time for guidance. “Not on my account,” she said. “It gives me a great deal of pleasure to listen to them. I’m very glad that you should go but, if you have come to the conclusion—”

  He interrupted her. “I came to a conclusion a long time ago, Bertha, and I see no reason for changing it.”

  As far as he was concerned, she knew the affair was settled. More than a holiday and an educational experience for Flora, this was to be a declaration of faith and only some event beyond his control would turn him from his purpose. And as July slipped into August, a month when all the trees seem to be heavy with suspense, when one period is nearly ended and another must begin, there was a like feeling of suspense over the whole world, so heavy and yet so frail that Mrs. Blackett went her way very softly, lest a hasty movement or a loud noise should set up vibrations which would precipitate disaster and, try as she would to concentrate on great issues, it was her own little disaster she most dreaded, her own happy release towards which she looked with hope. But at last the day came when the suitcases were in the hall and the cab was at the door and Flora, for the benefit of anyone who might be watching, tried to look as though she were quite used to foreign travel, calmly entered the cab and was followed by her father who was quite sure he was being watched.

  Mrs. Blackett with Mary, excitedly, and Rhoda, dutifully, beside her, waited while the cab turned out of the Square into the road and disappeared. They had gone, and she followed them in imagination to the station, to London where they were to spend the night and across the Channel, and even though bad news might send them back, and there seemed no immediate likelihood of that, she reckoned that she had the rest of this day and all to-morrow and perhaps the whole of the day after for herself. That would be a pittance compared with what she had been promised, but it would be well worth having. She counted the hours, determined not to lose a moment of enjoyment, to make each one last as long as possible, but she knew that time would be less elastic now; it would refuse to stretch.

  She did not go in at once and Mary, seeing her standing still with her hands clasped, her face upturned and her eyes shut, thought she must be praying or, perhaps, trying not to cry.

  “But you’re not crying, are you?” she asked.

  “I could, easily,” said her mother, smiling with her eyes still shut.

  “Why? Are you anxious about them? Are you afraid the sea will be rough and they’ll be sick?”

  “I don’t care if they are,” Rhoda said.

  “Neither do I,” said Mrs. Blackett, opening her eyes. “Not a bit.”

  “Oh Mother!” Mary said reproachfully.

  “It wouldn’t last long and they’d soon get over it,” Mrs. Blackett said cheerfully.

  “Then,” said Mary, referring to her mother’s readiness to weep, “it must be because Father’s gone away.”

  “Yes, that’s it, exactly,” said Mrs. Blackett, and without looking at Rhoda, she went into the house.

  Mr. Blackett was right. His departure had been watched, but not by Rosamund. At the sound of the c
ab, Miss Spanner had stepped to the drawing-room window. Then, with some pale silk over her arm and a few pins between her lips, she went downstairs to report.

  “They’ve gone,” she said, first removing the pins and sticking them into her white overall. “Grey flannel suit and grey felt hat. New.”

  “I was hoping he’d get himself up in knickerbockers and strong boots.”

  “Very sensible, too,” said Miss Spanner.

  “Though, as a matter of fact,” Rosamund said, “the conceited ass dresses very well. But I should have liked him to look ridiculous.”

  “He’ll look ridiculous enough if he can’t get back. He’ll look very funny in a concentration camp.”

  “He’ll get back all right.”

  “H’m, I wonder,” said Miss Spanner. “And I wonder if Chloe is ever going to wear this,” and she shook out the garment she was making.

  With strongly expressed disapproval of the flimsy materials Chloe had chosen, she was putting exquisite work into the fashioning of them though she disapproved even more strongly of the patterns she had to follow and, arrayed in a specially purchased overall, she spent hours stitching in the seclusion of the drawing-room which happened, fortunately, to be handy for anything occurring in the Square.

  “Yes,” said Rosamund, “you and I do a lot of wondering but, for goodness sake, don’t wonder aloud when Chloe’s about.”

  “I’m not an idiot,” said Miss Spanner, “and, if it comes to that, neither is she,” and Rosamund remembered how Chloe, breaking into her own gaiety as she made plans for her wedding had said, “This is rather funny. It’s like planning a picnic for a day when you’re practically certain there’ll be a terrific thunderstorm.”

  It seemed worse than that to Rosamund. It was like living in the neighbourhood of an armed madman mistaken by the police, and nearly everybody else, for a well-meaning citizen, a little noisy and harsh in his own house, but doing nothing to cause real anxiety or to warrant more interference than common-sense persuasion.

  “It’s abominable that she should have things spoilt like this!” she cried.

  “Well, well, well,” said Miss Spanner, “they are not quite spoilt yet and if they have to be, it’s a small matter, after all.”

  “I know that, but life, for most of us, is made up of small matters, and if they were not important to us we’d be half dead and the big things wouldn’t affect us either, and what do we really know about measurements and comparative values? But I know I’d like to wring the dirty necks of those devils if I could do it without touching them.”

  “And I’d help you,” Miss Spanner said. “Now, how d’you think it would be to put some embroidery at the top of this? I thought,” she said somewhat shamefacedly and giving her nose a knock, “I might do some true lover’s knots, in blue, you know. She’s going to wear this set on her wedding day and there must be a bit of blue somewhere about.”

  “You’re an angel,” Rosamund said. “I’ve told you that before. You couldn’t take more trouble if you were doing it for yourself.”

  “I’d have taken much less,” Miss Spanner said. “There’s not much inspiration to be got from calico and that’s what my underclothes would have been made of, nightgowns up to the throat and down to the wrists. And quite right, too,” she added, and returned to the drawing-room with her light burden.

  Chloe was to be married at the end of September when the boys had had their holiday, but about that Felix had said nothing.

  “I suppose you’re going?” Rosamund asked him.

  He had passed his examination successfully and that look of strain which at times she had tried to attribute to a natural anxiety, had changed to a rather grim one. “Of course. Why not?” he said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. You never talk about it.”

  “I don’t talk much about my own affairs,” he answered with an irritatingly superior manner.

  “No, I’ve noticed that,” she said dryly, and then, quickly, knowing this was not the way to deal with him, she said in what she hoped was the right tone, “I often wish you would.”

  But he changed the subject. “I hope,” he said, “you’re not going to make a great fuss over Chloe’s wedding.”

  “Do you? Why?”

  “I think it would be most unsuitable.”

  “Fortunately so does she.”

  “That’s all right then.”

  “So long as you are pleased—” she said, dryly again. Really, she thought angrily, he treated her as though she had deeply offended him and he could not forgive her. She wanted to shake him. But how childish he was under the severity that made him seem a prig. For some reason, he was offended with himself and, like a small boy, he wreaked his anger on his mother. Nevertheless, she saw this treatment as part of her general failure. She could not gain the confidence of her son, Fergus had left her and Piers was altogether too true to his word, too cheerful under the determination to keep it. She would have despised him for a love-lorn look yet she felt it was her due and asked herself why, since he was getting on so well without her, though she began to be increasingly less happy without him, they should trouble to think about the future. This was her mood of the moment. Even Mr. Blackett’s departure was a grievance: she was robbed of one of her amusements.

  “But the air does feel a little purer,” she thought when she stepped into the Square.

  Chapter XXXIII

  

  “What a difference it makes when there are no men about the place,” Rosamund said on the first of September. Felix had gone off with the experienced Smithers, to meet James on the way; Paul was camping with some friends and a young schoolmaster. “Not nearly so much cooking to do, a reasonably tidy house and the certainty that there won’t be any trouble. Just you and me and Sandra and Chloe. Very nice. Peace, perfect peace.”

  “Not,” said Miss Spanner, looking up from her newspaper, “what I should call a timely remark. But you’re quite right, There’d always be peace without them. You can’t imagine getting a gang of women together who’d carry on like this pretty lot.”

  “And yet,” said Rosamund, “though men do the worst things they do most of the best things too. There’s no getting away from that.”

  “You wait till women have had a proper chance.”

  “They’ll never, in general, have the kind of chance you mean, and quite right too, as you would say. They’ve got something else to do. If you’d been a boy, Agnes,—Oh well, I suppose you’d only have turned into a deacon and you’re much better as you are.”

  “Cumbering the earth,” Miss Spanner said with melancholy, and paused to consider the fruitlessness of her life before she said, “And this best of yours doesn’t do as much good as the worst does harm. How d’you account for that?”

  “I never try to account for anything,” Rosamund said, “not even my petty cash.”

  She could account without trouble, however, for certain signs across the road, the front door, hitherto rigorously shut, often left open; a light burning late in Flora’s bedroom, though Flora had gone away, and no light from the big bedroom on the other side of the door; an indefinable change in Mrs. Blackett’s appearance, as though she had decided to discard her bustle and moved more freely without it; a definite change in a new morning frock with a shorter and less ample skirt. The masquerade, thought Rosamund, was in abeyance. Mrs. Blackett moved more freely but not more quickly. There was about her an air of leisure, of having all time at her disposal, but she could have told the acute observer who was her neighbour that this was something in the nature of sympathetic magic. By thus assuming that there was no hurry she might persuade time to linger. It seemed to her like an eager horse with a hard mouth and, pull as she might on the reins, she could not control it. Already it had galloped into September and, though she went to bed late and rose early, the days were still too short and they were in danger of being spoil
t by the thought of the endless future. This was foolish wastefulness and she tried to be more thrifty; it would have been much easier if the future had not threatened her nearly every day with a letter from her husband who, considerately ignoring her assurance that she would be quite satisfied with a postcard now and then, gave her detailed accounts of all he and Flora did and descriptions of what they saw. These were garnished with historical and literary allusions and marked as passages to be read to the children. Thus warned, she had only to skim the rest of the letters, to note changes of address and learn that he thought of her constantly. She did not believe that. The only person of whom he thought constantly was himself and, after years of intensive study, she knew just how he was thinking of that person now and how he pictured himself as other people saw him, as a distinguished-looking man, probably a painter or a writer, probably, too, a widower, devoting himself to a pretty daughter whose delight in his company equalled his for hers. Her preoccupation for so many years could not be suddenly forgotten altogether; she could not cherish her happiness without dwelling on its cause and in the careful changing of her routine there was a sense of triumph not unflavoured with spite; the very neglect of the letters which lay where they had been dropped, until one of the children picked them up, was an acknowledgment of an effort to forget.

  But all this was the undertow to the calmness of those days in the Square. She and Rhoda busied themselves or idled in the garden and Mary had the run of the kitchen and, showing a surprising efficiency as a cook, prepared the meals they ate there or out of doors and served them at any uncertain hour she chose.

  “I wish we could go on like this for ever,” Rhoda said. “I can’t see why people aren’t allowed to live just with the ones they like.”

  “But you see,” Mrs. Blackett said, “the people you don’t want to be with may want to be with you.”