by E. H. Young
“Piers?” Miss Spanner said sharply.
“That’s Mr. Lindsay’s name.”
“I didn’t know you used it.”
“Of course I do when I get the chance and that’s not often.”
“And how,” Miss Spanner inquired, “do you imagine he’s going to help?”
“Oh, just by existing, just by being himself and making you feel there’s still hope for mankind.”
Miss Spanner’s jaw dropped slowly. “So that’s what you call him, that’s what he does for you,” she said, and at the sight of her mournful face Rosamund said quickly, “For everybody, I should think.”
“Not for me,” said Miss Spanner firmly. “A bit of a nonentity, I call him. He hasn’t much to say for himself.”
Rosamund laughed. “You’re quite right, Agnes. That’s just it. There could hardly be a more selfless person.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because I’m a clever woman.”
“Bah!” said Miss Spanner and went to the window. “You’re not in love with him, are you?” she asked in a tremulous voice.
“What would be the good?”
“Good? It would be wicked!—You’re a married woman.”
“I do hate that expression,” Rosamund said. “I always think it sounds slightly indecent.”
“But are you?” Miss Spanner asked.
“Yes, yes, nothing’s happened.”
“I mean in love,” Miss Spanner said unwillingly.
“No,” Rosamund said with a sort of scorn. There was a difference between loving and being in love. She would not have smoothed her hair for Piers when she rose in the night. Then, she asked herself, was she in love with Fergus still? “No,” she said aloud, but she liked to remember the strangely enduring pleasure he found in looking at her. She hoped, she knew that Piers found pleasure in it too, but she had been scrupulous in trying not to provoke it and with him it was not the first consideration. He would be sorry, but he would not love her less, if she lost what beauty she had kept.
She had shut her eyes and now she opened them to see, with astonishment, that Miss Spanner’s eyes were full of tears. These overflowed and Rosamund, through her alarm and pity, could not help deploring the grotesqueness of her friend’s appearance, the unchecked tears falling towards the childishly drooping mouth.
“I was afraid, I’ve always been afraid since he started coming here,” Miss Spanner whimpered. “I even told lies to warn him off.”
“Lies?” Rosamund said, and Miss Spanner nodded her head several times. “What lies?”
“Oh, never mind,” Miss Spanner said miserably.
“And do you think they were successful?” Rosamund asked, hardening herself against this exhibition of emotion.
“How do I know? And it doesn’t matter so long as you don’t care yourself. Because,” Miss Spanner cried, “what was going to happen to me if you went and married someone else? I had a right, hadn’t I, to try to keep what I’d got at last?”
“Heaven knows you haven’t had much,” Rosamund said, touched as she always was by the thought of Agnes’s youth and forgiving the lies which had done no harm.
“And I’m not making a fool of myself now, because I’m unhappy,” Miss Spanner explained, “but because I’m so thankful to feel safe.”
“You’re lucky,” Rosamund said. Life could never be really safe, though it was true that there were fewer points of danger for Agnes than for her, and perhaps that was not so lucky, after all. “Don’t cry any more, my poor dear,” she said. “Whither I go thou shalt go—”
“And where’s that?” Miss Spanner asked in a new fright.
“Into the future,” Rosamund said. “And my people shall be thy people and all the rest of it.” She realized the rashness of this promise but she was not sorry she had made it. She had not rescued Agnes from that dark house on the Green to thrust her into a greater loneliness and she found herself remembering that Fergus had always liked her curious friend. It was one of the nice things about him, that capacity for recognizing her quality under an exterior which troubled his eye for beauty and a manner which suspiciously resisted his friendliness.
“My people are yours already, aren’t they?” she said. “They like you very much.”
“They put up with me,” Miss Spanner said. “It’s all I can expect.”
“Don’t be an affected idiot. I never so nearly dislike you as when you adopt a humble attitude. Go and put on your dress for the wedding and let me see what’s wrong with it.”
She had added to her complications. She had accepted responsibility for Agnes, but was she fit for it? In the past she had not properly accepted her responsibility for Fergus and she might fail Agnes too. She had drifted past all the mistakes she knew Fergus was making: she had allowed herself to drift into love for Piers and allowed him to love her in a highly involved situation through which she could not see her way. She had never looked far enough ahead and her only right to criticize those who had made the same mistake in larger matters was her readiness to admit her faults and, until she was roused by the return of Miss Spanner in a garment needing immediate action, she felt too much of a failure to dare to face another day. But she was sure of herself in the matter of clothes and, on her knees, in spite of Miss Spanner’s protests, her reminder that there were more important problems to be faced than the length of a skirt and that this preoccupation with it was an unworthy frivolity at such a time, she tackled it with zest.
“I can’t make a war or stop one,” she said, “but I can make you look less of a fright. There! Now undo the hem and turn it up again. Did you happen to try on this dress before you bought it?”
“No,” said Miss Spanner. “Couldn’t be bothered. The girl in the shop said it was my size and I knew she’d sneer at my underclothes. And, talking of girls in shops—”
“Why should we?”
“Oh, all right. I was only going to say that Felix is oftener at home in the evenings than he used to be.”
“Yes, bad for him, with a pack of women.”
“Better a pack than one,” said Miss Spanner. “And just when the shops are shut, too, so perhaps we needn’t worry.”
“Have you been worrying?” Rosamund asked as though surprised. “And those sleeves must come out too. The shoulders are all wrong, and in future, Agnes, take me with you when you go shopping.”
“I’ll take you to-morrow if you like and you can have a look at her.”
“A nice pair of old cats we should be. Looking for the wrong mouse, too, very likely.”
“Then you admit there’s a mouse,” Miss Spanner said quickly.
“Sure to be,” Rosamund said. “You’re a queer mixture, Agnes. You reverse the usual order of things. You’ll be furious if the Government plays any dirty tricks but you’ll play them yourself out of mere curiosity.”
“Curiosity!” Miss Spanner exclaimed. “I should call it the kind of maternal care you’ve never given your children.”
“The kind your mother gave you, peeping and prying! There’s something a bit Spannerish about you, after all.”
“You’re the only person I ever talk to and I’ll never tell you another thing,” Miss Spanner declared. “All the same—”
“What? Turn round slowly. Yes, that will do, but don’t lose all the pins when you take the dress off.”
“All the same,” said Miss Spanner, “I shouldn’t be surprised—but no, I won’t tell you.” She would not speak, she tried not to think of the admirable plan she had made for Rhoda. Rhoda was still loyal. It was no longer an adventure to reach Miss Spanner’s room, but she still found pleasure in it, still stared and listened in spite of the other attractions in the house and no tricks, clean or dirty, even privately, must be played with her simple candour. “But if it happens,” Miss Spanner said, “perhaps you’ll remember that
I foresaw it.”
“I will. That gives you unlimited scope as a prophet. And I suppose it’s time I got dressed.”
“High time,” said Miss Spanner ungratefully. She stepped on to the balcony and returned. “Blacketts, just starting for church,” she reported.
“And I know what he’ll be praying for,” Rosamund said.
Mr. Blackett, as a matter of fact, did not feel inclined to pray at all. This was nothing new. He did not find it a necessary exercise. Church going was discipline for his family, a sign of his belief in law and order, a personal protest against the careless tendencies of the times and he had his reward in listening to beautiful, familiar words. This morning all he heard was his wife’s voice as she joined in the hymns and the responses and he heard it with irritation. He liked this acquiescence in the woman he had married, yet he had an admittedly unreasonable feeling, on this occasion, that she was declaring her independence of his silence. He was very uneasy; he was as much aggrieved as Flora when she could not get what she wanted, and though his expression was that of a man who accepts injury with dignity, he raged inwardly to think that his comfort, his business, his security and his own prophecies were imperilled by the obstinacy of a country no one would be the worse without. And at breakfast there had been an argument he had not been able to quell, a new experience. Flora, who seldom failed him, had expressed views which were his own, but Rhoda—he glared along the pew and saw her as glum and silent as he was himself—had dared to have very different ones and had still more daringly suggested that he hated anyone to disagree with him, and declared that she had a right to her own opinion. He would have forbidden her to come to church but for his conviction that she would have been delighted to stay away. She would have slipped across the road where, he had no doubt, she had been injected with these false notions.
“Rhoda,” he said to Mrs. Blackett as he watched his daughters walking homewards, “is quite insufferable.” On the way to church, the children walked behind their parents, on the way back they went ahead. “Look at her now. In the road instead of on the pavement. Still too bad tempered to walk beside Flora, I suppose. I don’t like the way she is developing. She is going to be an arrogant, unattractive young woman, I’m afraid, the very type I most dislike. I don’t know how I came to have such a daughter.”
“I worked very hard on her,” said Mrs. Blackett, with unusual candour, “before she was born, though I don’t believe that sort of thing is really effectual.”
“Evidently not,” said Mr. Blackett. “You had better start working all over again. And in the first place, this constant communication with our neighbours must be stopped. You know I distrust them. Tell her so.”
“I think you must do that.”
“After her behaviour this morning I refuse to speak to her.”
“Very well,” said Mrs. Blackett, smiling a little. People who never fought were never beaten. They had reached the entrance to the Square. “Dinner will be a quarter of an hour later than usual,” she said. “I’m going into the Frasers’ house to hear the news.”
Chapter XLVIII
“The funeral baked meats,” said Felix, looking at the simple preparations for the wedding, “did coldly furnish forth the marriage table, only it’s the other way round. Wedding first, funeral after. A pity,” he said to his mother with a wry grin, “we couldn’t have had a double wedding while we were about it.”
“It’s the bride’s mother who gives the entertainment,” Rosamund said.
“Clever!” he said, grinning again but, his grin said, he was not to be caught like that.
She thought he seemed a little drunk but she was sure this manner, unusual with him, though she had often seen it in his father, was a mixture of desperation and exhilaration. The conditions that doomed might also save him. Twenty-four years ago a gay recklessness, this kind of flippancy, had been the resource of young men who knew their lives were not worth many days’ purchase, and here it was, all over again, yet the prospect had not dimmed Chloe’s radiance and Rosamund saw Felix looking at her with an envious curiosity as she came calmly downstairs in her soft blue dress and little hat, half smiling and, as it were, illumined by an inner glow.
“I don’t want to give you away,” he said. “I’d like to keep you.”
Flora, disdaining to go to the church with her mother as a mere spectator, watched the proceedings from the dining-room window. She saw Miss Spanner, Sandra and Paul set off on foot, they had not far to go; then a car came for Mrs. Fraser and James, another for Felix and Chloe, and she thought it was a very shabby affair. It was like a servant’s wedding, she decided, when she saw the boys in ordinary suits and the charwoman, left in charge of the house, standing on the doorstep to see them go, and if she had been familiar with an author she could not appreciate, she would have said, changing the words a little, “No white satin, no lace veils, a most pitiful business.” But when the cars had gone and the heads had disappeared from many of the windows in the Square, it was her own situation that became pitiful. She felt as though she were alone in an empty world and it seemed a long time before Chloe and her husband returned, then Mrs. Fraser with a little lady in flowing garments and a large lace hat and a tall, vague gentleman who fumbled in his pockets for the car fare and suddenly remembered that he was a guest. These, she supposed, were the bridegroom’s parents and then, in little groups, the other guests arrived, many of them young, and why was she not there? Why was she not talking merrily to Felix or even to James? Then she saw her mother walking with Miss Spanner and Cousin Piers and with them entering the house and she ran upstairs and hastily changed her frock. Somebody would wonder why she was not there too, perhaps Felix, she thought excitedly, would come and fetch her, but the minutes passed and nothing happened except the arrival of Rhoda and Mary who, back from school, flung their books into the area and joined the party. She was certainly not going to follow them and as she was the only member of the family who had not been invited, she would not go now if she were asked. She heard the hum of voices through the window of the long room, she saw changing figures on the drawing-room balcony and at last the doorway, the shallow steps and the pavement were full of people watching the bride and bridegroom drive away under a shower of flower petals. And still the young ones lingered, finding plenty to say to each other, plenty to laugh about, Felix and James, but not Rhoda, among them, and Flora cautiously, enviously, peered at them until she saw her mother and Mary leave the house and she retreated to the drawing-room, whence there was no view of the Square, and she was found there, deep in a book.
“It was a pity you didn’t come,” Mrs. Blackett said. “It was a very happy party. Mrs. Fraser saw me in the church and asked me to the reception.”
“Reception! How grand!” Flora said.
“She didn’t call it that.”
“Well,” said Flora, “I suppose she had to ask you. You’d bought the invitation, hadn’t you?”
“Bought it?”
“With that present,” and when her mother did not answer, she said, “Where’s Rhoda?”
“I think she is still there. I expect she will come back with your Cousin Piers.”
“Did they ask their other tradesmen too?”
“I didn’t notice any of them,” Mrs. Blackett replied patiently, and then, very gently, she asked, “Why are you so unhappy?”
“Why shouldn’t I be?” Flora replied sullenly before she let herself go and cried, “I haven’t any friends here. I don’t fit in with these humdrum people. It’s the wrong kind of life for me. And nobody wants me at home. Rhoda hates me and Mary doesn’t count and you just try to be kind and Father likes me because he thinks I’m like him.”
“And so you are,” Mrs. Blackett said.
“Then,” said Flora accusingly and with enjoyment, “I suppose you just try to be kind to him, too.”
“No, I don’t try,” Mrs.
Blackett said, and left Flora to make what she would of that.
“And,” Flora went on, “I hope there’ll be a war, not because I think it would be right; I don’t. Though Father’s stupid about some things, he’s quite right about that, but I might be able to get away from home and meet some really interesting people, the kind I like.”
“It would be the best thing for you,” Mrs. Blackett said.
“Wouldn’t you mind?” asked Flora, ready for another grievance.
“I should be very anxious about you.”
“You’d be more anxious if it was Rhoda.”
“No. I shouldn’t be at all anxious about Rhoda.”
“Well, no,” Flora said after a little thought, and with a smile, “you wouldn’t need to be, would you?”
Mrs. Blackett gave a sad little shake of her head. She knew it would be misinterpreted: she knew anything she could say to Flora would either be taken as an affront or slide off the polished surface of her self-esteem.
“And it’s a pity Rhoda doesn’t realize that herself,” Flora said, and added with apparent irrelevance, “I very soon got bored with James Fraser and had to let him know it.”
Mrs. Blackett heard this remark with concealed amusement not unmixed with pity, but she was startled when Flora said, “And now it will be James who will soon get bored with Rhoda. Haven’t you noticed? All this friendship with Sandra? It’s so obvious. But it began ages ago with pretending to like Miss Spanner. As if anybody could!”
“I can and do,” Mrs. Blackett said with an unmaternal desire to slap Flora’s face.
“Oh, that’s quite different,” Flora said. “I meant anybody young.” Mr. Blackett had wondered how he came to have a daughter like Rhoda: Mrs. Blackett knew all too well how she came to have one like Flora. She was not worried about Rhoda. The time for that would be when the child began to take an active interest in her appearance. There was no sign of it at present and between then and now many things were going to happen. There might be no James for whom she would wish to brush her hair and make sure her blouse had some firm connection with her skirt; there might even, she realized, as Piers Lindsay prowled about the basement, be no Rhoda herself.