by E. H. Young
“An attention I didn’t expect to-day,” Miss Spanner said, drawing in the corners of her mouth.
“Why not? I should think you are more than usually in need of it. Did you get a dreadful shock, my poor dear?”
“Not as bad as he did, I’m glad to say,” Miss Spanner replied.
“Of course, he went straight to our old room. It’s queer that I never thought that might happen. I’d always imagined he’d come up by the balcony but, you see, he’d kept his latchkey.”
“You ought to have bolted the front door.”
“That wouldn’t have kept him out for long.” She smiled, with her lips, in what Miss Spanner considered an annoyingly complacent manner, but there was no amusement in her tired eyes. “A few nights ago,” she said in a dull voice, “I suddenly felt sure he was in the house. When he really came, I knew nothing about it until he was standing beside my bed.”
“Ah, he didn’t get as far as that with me,” said Miss Spanner. “But what a thing to do! Just like him! I thought, for a minute, it was Felix and what he thought I don’t know, except that you must have changed a lot since he saw you.”
“And he couldn’t laugh!” Rosamund said. “That was the awful part of it.” For a moment she hid her face in her hands. “He couldn’t laugh! But then,” she said, “that was why he came.”
She went to the window and looked out on a grey morning. It was very quiet here, at the back of the house, but she fancied she could still hear Fergus’s retreating footsteps. Often, in the past, she had listened eagerly for their approach and she had strained her ears for the last of them when he was going back to war, but never with so much sorrow as she felt now. Then, because he carried all her love with him, there was a sort of triumph in letting him go. It had been harder to send him away with no more than her pity and, yes, some kind of love, but not the kind he wanted or—anger stirred in her again—the kind he had expected. Yet she had been touched to the point of complete forgiveness when, looking down at her miserably, he had said, “I had to come to you. I got the last train down. I knew you would be all right about all this.”
“I wish,” she said, still looking at the garden but speaking to Miss Spanner, “I wish one could be sure where one’s responsibility ends or whether it ever ends at all.”
“I’m sure you’ve none for him,” Miss Spanner said. “I imagine that’s someone else’s business now,” and as Rosamund half turned her head, Miss Spanner saw that she smiled again. “Isn’t it?” she cried.
“No,” Rosamund said.
“And you’re pleased!”
“Not altogether. I wish I could feel anything altogether. How much easier it would be!”
“But you’re pleased,” Miss Spanner repeated. “Of course you would be. You’re that kind of woman and I can very well guess what he’s been saying.”
“No you can’t, Agnes,” Rosamund said quietly.
“I’ve read every love scene in English literature and that’s much more than you’ve done.”
“I know, but then—” and there Rosamund stopped. She could not tell poor Agnes that she had never heard a lover’s voice and Fergus’s voice, alas, had been a lover’s still. “I can’t get warm,” she said, gathering her dressing-gown round her.
“And no wonder, if you’ve spent the night in that garment. Come and have your tea. Well, I suppose this means I’ve got to pack. And I’ll go quietly. And I don’t mind as much as I thought I should because, since yesterday, I don’t care much about anything. I just want to get into a hole and hide. We didn’t know what a lot we thought of ourselves, did we, till this happened? I went to sleep and forgot it all and then that man had to come and wake me up. And what do you think the boys will say when they come home? Lucky they weren’t here. They’d have taken him for a burglar and there’d have been a fight. There’d have been a fight anyway, I expect, and quite right too.”
“Yes, that was lucky. And I don’t think Sandra or Paul can have heard anything. It was cold there. I lit a fire.”
She and Fergus had knelt in front of it and watched the wood catch and then the coal, his arm round her waist, her head against his shoulder, his left hand and her right one held out towards the flames as though, in this posture, they renewed their vows before some sacrificial altar.
“I’ve cleared away the ashes already,” Rosamund said, “because Sandra would be sure to see them. But I think I shall tell her. I think she would be happier if she knew her father had been here.”
Miss Spanner snatched at the past tense. “Been?” she cried.
“Yes, he’s gone,” Rosamund said, and she sank into a chair decorated with one of the great-uncle’s cats. “But,” she said, with an attempt at laughter, “I made him have a good breakfast first.”
“H’m,” said Miss Spanner with a return of pessimism, “and when do you expect him back again?”
“I don’t know, Agnes,” Rosamund said patiently.
Those few minutes in front of the fire had been very sweet. While they lasted, she and Fergus seemed to be young again and when she looked at him and saw all the characteristics she had loved, the set of his mouth, the lines round his eyes, the hair which had lost most of its bright colour but was still thick and strong, and he looked at her and found a like pleasure in her face, she could have yielded physically to his old charm, but he had laughed then, the old, delighted laughter of possession, and the temptation passed. He had no right to laugh like that. He had forfeited his possession, yet he still took it for granted. He had humbled himself by coming to her in his need and he either expected generosity from her or saw no cause for it.
“Does it depend,” Miss Spanner asked reluctantly, dreading the answer, “I mean has his coming back anything to do with me?”
“No. You weren’t mentioned.”
Miss Spanner grunted again. “And I suppose the rest of it isn’t my business.”
“No,” Rosamund said.
“And I’m not curious.”
“Oh no, never,” Rosamund agreed heartily.
Miss Spanner leant back against her pillows. “I only want to feel safe,” she said.
“Safe!” Rosamund exclaimed. “Why bother about your little bit of safety here when we’re all in mortal danger? A lot of us think there isn’t any, but there is, and that was Fergus’s only consolation.”
“So he’s on the right side, is he?”
“Don’t be silly,” Rosamund said.
That was what had made it so hard not to drift again and take the temporarily easy course, but she had seen the consequences of drift. He would not have gone away but for the results of that tendency in her nature; he would not have come back if the country had not drifted into its perilous, false safety; she had allowed herself to drift into love for Piers but, except for his sake, she did not blame herself for that. That was the fault of everything she liked in him. But what was she to do about him now? she asked herself, while Fergus strode up and down the room, raging at one moment against the Government and, at the next, telling her he had never really ceased to love her, shrugging away her reminder of his request, showing himself bitterly hurt when she remained unresponsive and apparently unforgiving. Was it not still drifting to leave her attitude unexplained and drifting in a direction which would take her treacherously far from Piers? Yet she offered no explanation. She could not be fair to Piers without being cruel to Fergus and, not sure whether justice or kindness were the greater virtue, she tipped the scales a little in favour of kindness because, in this way, she gained nothing for herself and sacrificed, as women like to do, the person she loved best, and she remembered how Sandra had complained that gain for one always involved loss for another. Fergus’s gain was not very great but, as she watched him who had been ready to fight, had come home to fight and might have to do it yet and was almost in tears because he could not do it now, she knew it was impossible to cast him ou
t altogether, to tell him she wanted to be free, now, when he was in trouble, when the future was so uncertain, when there was misery enough in the world and would be more. And once again, as she had done so often years ago, she pictured him lying dead or wounded, with no one, this time, to call his own.
But how childish he was to suppose that all would be well here, in future, because the past was submerged in the present trouble! The tide would inevitably ebb and his grievances would be revealed, like a bit of wreckage on the shore. And there would be other grievances. What part did he imagine he could play in the home he had left two years ago? Felix and James were men; they would never accept his authority and he would never resign it. He had forfeited their allegiance too and while they lived in the house he would have to remain outside it.
She had made that clear and, surprisingly, he had acquiesced. Perhaps he had been unable to fit himself with dignity into the picture; perhaps he was acting with the generosity which lay at the roots of his character. She did not know, but with Piers she would have known.
“I suppose,” she said to Miss Spanner, “life is quite clear to some fortunate—or are they stupid?—people. I simply grope. I have to find my way by feeling and probably the way is wrong.”
“So long as you are doing your best,” Miss Spanner said with unwonted gentleness. She was in the dark and Rosamund’s sad face—and how seldom she had seen it sad—warned her that she must remain there.
“Yes, my best!” Rosamund said scornfully. “That’s what people always say they’re doing when they’ve made a mess of things and want to clear it up, and though part of me feels that nothing much matters now, I know it does and more than ever. But I know, too, that my best is a very poor thing at that.”
Ought she to have fought for Piers? she asked herself. Had she been taking the easiest way again? All she was sure of was that it was the way her groping took her and Piers, with that strength which is not afraid to look like weakness, would tell her that what was right for her must be right for him. He would not say a word in his own cause or try to argue with instincts which were not susceptible to reason, and she said, “I’m going for a walk this morning, Agnes, into the country,” and the cast in Miss Spanner’s eye wavered and became fixed.
She might meet him in the lane and they would lean over the gate again as they had done when he first told her he loved her. There would be no oats now to listen and whisper; they must have been gathered long ago. The field would be bare, but she had never yet looked at a bare field without wondering what the next crop would be and feeling sure it would be a good one.
Afterword
At first glance Chatterton Square seems to be a simple story of two neighbouring families – one happy and one unhappy – and, as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina famously opens, ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ While that sentiment proves to be untrue in Young’s novel, it can also be seen not just as showing the reader a happy family and an unhappy family, but showing three of the marital options open to the mid-century woman: unmarried, separated, miserably married – Miss Spanner, Mrs Fraser, Mrs Blackett.
The families living perpendicular to each other are the Frasers and the Blacketts, and it is notable that the matriarchs of these families are respectively known as Rosamund and Mrs Blackett in the narrative. While Mrs Blackett has a first name (Bertha), she is referred to throughout in her role as wife. And it is certainly an unhappy role. We get a sly, early hint of this in the first couple of pages:
She [Mrs Blackett] was, or ought to be, as well content with her room as he [Mr Blackett] was with his and she was the least curious of women. […] She lived in a little world of her own with a home and a husband and three children to care for, and a peaceful, well-ordered world it was
Though this is the third-person narrator, it is evidently taking Mr Blackett’s perspective of his family life as gospel for the moment – and only those suggestive words ‘or ought to be’ give us the first clue to what is going on under the surface; that Mrs Blackett hates her husband.
The Blacketts’ marriage is one of the great mis-matchings of literature. What makes Young’s drawing of the pairing so brilliant is that Mr Blackett is never malicious. He does not wish to harm his wife, nor realise that he does. Rather, he is monstrously selfish. He can see no perspective beyond his own, and expects others to agree. As Rhoda, one of his daughters, reflects: ‘[he] was not an ogre. He expected people to be happy in his own way, not in theirs, that was all’. That may be all, but it is enough. Young creates an image that sums him up perfectly: he insists that the marital bed be pushed against the wall, as he prefers that, but also insists on sleeping on the outside. Each morning she must face the indignity of clambering over him.
There are echoes of Henry Wilcox in E.M. Forster’s Howards End, or even Mr Collins from Pride and Prejudice. But where Austen allows us to laugh at Mr Collins, and perhaps avoid thinking too hard about what life must be like for Charlotte Lucas, it’s impossible to read about the Blacketts’ marriage and not empathise intensely with Bertha.
If the reader watches the marriage with some pain, then Mrs Blackett finds refuge in humour – albeit a fairly damaging, distorted humour. When Rhoda intercepts a glance that Mrs Blackett gives to her unseeing husband, she sees ‘a concentration of emotions which she could not analyse and which half frightened her. There was a cold anger in it, but she thought there was a kind of pleasure in it too’. Ever perceptive, Rhoda has accurately understood Mrs Blackett’s position. She is playing a role of quiet subservience, all the while mocking her husband in her mind. Her pleasure comes from the successful duping, over decades, of a stupid, unwittingly cruel man. It is a startling, extraordinary portrait.
Across the road is Rosamund Fraser – whom Mr Blackett erroneously believes to be a widow: ‘He pitied widows but he distrusted them. They knew too much. As free as unmarried women, they were fully armed; this was an unfair advantage’. As we quickly learn she is, in fact, not widowed; rather, her husband has abandoned his wife and children. They remain in contact (when he wants money), and ‘truly, she did not want him back. She did not see how she or the children could readjust themselves to his presence’.
It is left to the reader to wonder about how true that statement is, but certainly Rosamund is not a miserable character. She is lively and witty, and has a benevolently laissez-faire approach to parenting. Nor does she consider herself to be acting wrongly in being separated, even if she doesn’t broadcast it: ‘it seemed to her that there was a monstrous moral tyranny in social and religious conditions which could penalise two mature people who chose to part.’
Miss Spanner lives in the house as a constant contrast – the woman who has never married, and is not likely to. Like Mrs Blackett, the narrative always calls her by the title that emphasises her status. Rosamund calls her Agnes, but even her first name underlines her condition: it derives from the Greek for ‘pure’ or ‘chaste’. She is not related by blood, but plays the part of the maiden aunt who was present in many interwar homes. As early as 1927, the novelist and essayist Winifred Holtby wrote that ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Aunts’ needed to be written, since their lives and wants were overlooked in favour of the rest of the household. The family is affectionate towards Miss Spanner, but she represents many women of the period who would never be considered central to the household they lived in, but could not afford to live independently. And she is resigned to her fate: “I never was a girl – not what you’d call one. I was born a plain spinster, somewhere around thirty years of age”.
The happy marriage doesn’t feature in Chatterton Square, but nor, other than by suggestion, does the divorced couple. The typical twenty-first-century reader’s response to either Mrs Blackett or Mrs Fraser might well be ‘get a divorce’. Mrs Fraser hasn’t seen her husband and the father of her children for years and she does not expect his return. Mrs Blackett
has despised her husband ever since their honeymoon and compensates herself for this disastrously unhappy marriage by duping him into believing in her admiration. To the reader, it seems like cold comfort.
But even had she chosen to, Mrs Blackett would not have been able to secure a divorce in the late 1930s. Mr Blackett does not do any of the things for which she would have been granted a divorce, even though the criteria had recently changed. Until 1923, a man would have had to have committed adultery and an additional fault (such as cruelty, rape or incest), while a man could petition for divorce if his wife had committed adultery, without any additional faults. The obscure reasoning for this, according to 1935’s Divorce and its Problems by E.S.P. Haynes and Derek Walker-Smith, was because ‘a wife, it was felt, only committed adultery when she was seized with a feeling for the adulterer so strong as to be incompatible with the continued existence of marriage or family life’, while ‘a husband might be swept along in a gust of passion to commit an act of adultery, which, however regrettable, was transient in duration and should be in effect’.
The call for divorce law reform had been heavily influenced by A.P. Herbert’s bestselling 1934 novel Holy Deadlock. The novel’s plot demonstrated how absurd it was that people often had to pretend to commit adultery (most commonly setting up a ruse to be caught by a chambermaid in a hotel room with another man or woman) in order to be permitted to divorce; that is, that divorce frequently demanded perjury. Collusion officially meant a divorce would be refused, but it was usually overlooked.