CHAPTER TWO
IT was just a week since Rosie had told Matilda. ‘I say, Tilda, I wanted to ask you something. I’m afraid I’ve got myself into a most frightful muddle. In fact I think I may be going to have a baby.’
Tilda sat staring at her, struck motionless, one hand grasping the tail of Emma’s nightdress. Emma, straining against white Dayella like a dog on a leash, postured with great silliness before Adorabella, the copy-cat baby in the glass who obligingly postured back; such sycophancy suddenly palling, gave up and stuck out her tongue. This strictly forbidden gesture brought Tilda back to life. She hauled her child on to her knee and, automatically beating its round, pink mushroom of a behind, said with a sort of despairing resignation: ‘Oh, Rosie!’
‘Well, there’s no use being horrified,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s done now, and that’s all there is to it.’
‘It’s not all there is to it, I assure you,’ said Matilda, restoring the blithely uncaring Emma to an upright position and undoing her own good work by responding to craven caresses. ‘Having an illegitimate child’s no joke, my dear, especially at the ripe age of eighteen years.’
‘Good gracious, you don’t think I’m going to have it, do you?’
‘What else do you propose to do about it?’
‘Oh, well, my dear, there are thousands of ways. I mean, dreary old women in back streets with hot water bottles, though what they do with them one never can imagine. But still I needn’t worry; I can always go to Tedward.’
Tedward was Thomas Evans’ partner in medical practice. ‘Tedward wouldn’t touch a thing like that.’
‘He might not for other people, but he would for me. I mean, he’s frightfully soppy about me, isn’t he?’
‘I think he is, rather, God help him!—but all the more reason why he shouldn’t help you under these circumstances. And what on earth,’ said Tilda, miserably, ‘what on earth is Thomas going to say?’
‘I thought perhaps we needn’t tell Thomas,’ said Rosie, quickly.
‘Oh, don’t be silly, child; living here in the house with him—and being a doctor.…’
Rosie was Thomas’s sister, thought she was less than half his age. She had been left a burden on him, while he still fought his way through the years of his medical training and he, since the burden was rounded of face and limb with warm, amber eyes and foolish curly yellow hair, and had, moreover, grown up gay and easy tempered and not more incredibly silly than the next pretty girl, had conceived an idealistic passion for it, had exalted the burden in his otherwise eminently cool and sensible mind, into a treasure of infinite virtue and charm. Matilda, in the twelve years of their marriage, had tried diffidently to suggest to him now and then that so much physical allurement allied to so much careless generosity and a skull of purest ivory through and through, might be pregnant of future danger—and pregnant, it now seemed, had been just the word. But Thomas, in all other matters quite aridly rational, was a damn fool about Rosie and that was all there was to it. He had reiterated indulgently that she was a perfect bloody idiot, of course, like all girls of her age; but, unlike the rest, as good as gold. And he had completed his folly by packing her off, all on her own, to a finishing school in Switzerland, still with a beautiful faith in the armour of a round felt hat with a crested school hatband, and a uniform overcoat. Rosie had, of course, pitched the hat out on to the line, the moment her train steamed out of Victoria station, and sought a compartment not reserved like her own, ‘for ladies only’; and even an old school hat might have some virtue in it, it seemed, if virtue was quite the word for it: for its flight past the window had provided an opening for conversation with her first pick-up, a young dog who had subsequently proved to be up to some very old tricks. So that now, despite the kind help and chaperonage in Geneva of Matilda’s own one-time flame, Raoul Vernet, here she was back on the family’s hands, not to say in the family way.
Raoul Vernet! Tucking up the sleepy baby into its white blankets, putting out the nursery gas fire, feeling her way across the darkened room, Tilda smiled reminiscently and was back again with Raoul under the trees outside the little pub in Carouge, a tram ride from Geneva; with a carafe of red wine between them on the white tablecloth and Raoul murmuring that to-night, now really to-night, at last they would go to some place and be alone together.… ‘Eh, Mathilde? Ah, Mathildc—dites oui; dites oui!’ A fine one I am, she thought, to be preaching morality to poor, fallen Rosie.
Rosie, fallen perhaps but not noticeably crestfallen, was curled up in the firelight on the shabby sofa-bed in Thomas’s ‘office’. ‘Well, now, Rosie—you had better tell me all about it.…’
And, damn it!—there she was, back in Carouge again; sitting under the trees with the fairy lights, seeing again the table before her as bold and clear as a Van Gogh painting, white rolls broken on a white cloth and a bottle of rough red wine.… ‘Of course you wouldn’t know about it, Tilda, it’s a little place outside Geneva, “our pub” we used to call it, and it was most terribly romantic and I suppose we were young and idiotic, of course I’d be more experienced now.… But we used to go out there evening after evening and have dinner and sit under the trees and hold hands. I think we were quite dotty for a little while; you wouldn’t understand, but one gets into a sort of a state where one just doesn’t think that anything else exists or matters in the whole world. And he—he had a little flat that somebody had lent him, because of course he was only a student, he hadn’t a sou, right up on top of the hill, you went up a heavenly crooked little street to it, and it was too heavenly there and—well, in the end I just sort of gave up even trying to be good and we used to go up there for days and days together and nights too of course, and we were so madly in love it wasn’t true!’
‘What on earth was the school doing, Rosie, all this time, to let you behave like this?’
‘Oh, well of course I told them a whole lot of lies and then I finally pretended that you’d come to Geneva to find out what I was up to, and I used to put on a funny voice and pretend to be you on the telephone talking to Madame, and we used to nearly die with laughter because of course she got frightfully confidential about how awful I was and of course I used to agree like mad.…’
‘Why on earth couldn’t the damn woman write to me?’ said Matilda angrily.
‘Well, I’m telling you—she thought she was practically in daily communication with you over the ’phone, only you had la grippe or something or other madly infectious, so you couldn’t actually meet her because of course she was petrified of getting it. And then of course you were most frightfully considerate and were afraid I might carry the infection back to the school so I had to stay away for more and more days and nights, and in the end I think she just gave us all up; but anyway by that time he’d gone home so it didn’t matter anyway.’
‘Well, where was home—I mean who is this man?’
‘Oh, don’t get excited, Tilda and think I can marry him or anything of that sort, because I can’t. His people were farmers or something, miles away in the mountains—you can’t see me spending my life on an alp for the sake of my Littel One, can you?—yodelling away at goats or whatever they do.’
‘I gather that you have recovered from your grande passion?’ said Matilda dryly.
‘I meant it at the time,’ said Rosie, a little shame-faced. ‘It was—I don’t know, it was simply tremendous.’ She added with an air of experience that it had been too tremendous to last, that was the trouble; and it just hadn’t. These things simply couldn’t last for ever.
‘Not even three months, in fact.’
‘Oh, well, if you’re going to be stuffy about it, I wish I hadn’t told you. I mean, I did think you’d be a bit more broadminded, Tilda. You usually are.’
Matilda’s heart smote her; beneath the airy confidence, she knew there must shelter a sick anxiety, she saw that there was an added whiteness, a paper whiteness, under the pink and white skin, a hint of desperation in the indignant amber-coloured eyes. If only the yo
ung could make their demands upon one’s pity and affection without feeling compelled to assume an air of such contemptuous superiority. However.… ‘I don’t think you can accuse me of a Victorian scene, exactly, Rosie,’ she said. ‘I’ll help you in every possible, conceivable way I can; only I can’t help you to get rid of it, because first of all I think it’s horrible in itself; secondly if anything goes wrong it’s too dangerous to everyone concerned, including you, and incredibly sordid to boot; and thirdly, I’m married to a doctor, and you’re the sister of a doctor, and it would be ghastly for Thomas if either of us got involved in a thing like that. Anything else.…’
‘Well, I shall have to go to Tedward, that’s all,’ said Rosie.
So Rosie told Tedward. He sat at his desk in the surgery at his house on the canal bank, ceaselessly tapping with the point of a dark green Venus pencil. ‘Do you mean, Rosie, that the man got you drunk?’
‘He was so much older than me, Tedward,’ insisted Rosie, gabbling it all out again as she had earnestly gabbled it to him three times already. ‘And he—he took me to this wonderful restaurant, I mean the most frightfully grand place right on the Jardin des Anglais, and—well, I don’t know, the lime trees were in flower, you know, and it all smelt too heavenly and he was so terrifically sort of sophisticated and all that and I suppose I tried to be sophisticated too.…’ She looked up at him piteously, poor little wronged, broken-hearted, disillusioned flower who didn’t seem, somehow, to have caught what the gentleman said.… ‘And we had a terrific dinner and simply thousands of wines.…’
‘I’ll bet,’ said Tedward, dryly.
‘I know it was silly of me, Tedward, but he was so much older than me, I mean really quite old, but really very handsome and terrifically well-dressed and of course terribly experienced and all that. Actually, I suppose he was what you might call a roué.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’
‘And then he asked me if I’d like to go back to his appartement and have a cup of real English tea.…’
‘What, no etchings?’
‘No, English tea seems to have been his line,’ said Rosie, simply. ‘I suppose it’s more original in Switzerland. And he had a wonderful flat, looking out over the bay, because he’s quite rich and all that; and then he—he sort of began to make love to me and I felt so stupid and sleepy and I suppose I was sort of flattered.…’ She burst into tears again.
He looked at her wretchedly. His kind, round, friendly face seemed quite altered all of a sudden, she thought, covertly watching him through her highly becoming tears; with sagging white cheeks and jaw. She scrubbed her nose to an endearing pink shininess with her silly little handkerchief and went and perched herself on the arm of his chair. ‘Don’t take on so, pet. It isn’t the end of the world, I suppose.’
‘I just can’t believe it, Rosie,’ he said. ‘Not about you.’
‘That’s because you still persist in looking on me as a little girl.’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ he said, ruefully. He took up her plump white hand and held it for a moment against his cheek; but immediately released it, rose, and went and stood staring out of the window. He said at last: ‘Rosie—I suppose it wouldn’t do if …?’ But he broke off. ‘No, never mind. I’m a fool.’
‘Yes, but what were you going to say?’
‘I had a vague idea that I might help you out by making an honest woman of you,’ he said. He waited for not more than half a second. ‘But never mind, skip it.’ He came back to her and took her chin in his hand, looking down, smiling, into her tear-bright eyes. ‘I don’t think we need resort to such desperate measures as that! We’ll get round it somehow; I’ll stand by you, I’ll do everything in the world I can to help.’
But there was one thing, it seemed, that Tedward would by no means consider doing after all; the one thing, said Rosie, when at last it dawned on her that he was adamant, that she had come to see him about. ‘I don’t see why, Tedward. Because of the risk?’
‘Because of the ethics. But that’s something you just wouldn’t understand, my little mutton-head, would you?’
‘But Tedward—as it’s me?’
‘Put it out of your mind, Rosie. Anything else in the wide world I’ll do for you—but not that. After all, we can find a place for you to go to, the baby can be adopted afterwards.’
‘I won’t have any damn baby,’ said Rosie, ‘and that’s flat.’
‘Rosie, I can’t help you in that way; you least of everybody in the world.’
‘But, Tedward …’
‘Once and for all, darling—no.’
‘All right, then,’ said Rosie. ‘I’ll find someone else. There are thousands of people.’
‘Not available to young ladies with medical backgrounds, my pet.’
‘Anything’s available to anyone if they’ve got enough money,’ said Rosie, tossing her head.
So Rosie told Gran. ‘I say, Gran—if I tell you something you won’t be shocked, will you?’
Mrs. Evans, like her grand-daughter-in-law, Matilda, was incapable of being shocked by anything other than cruelty or vulgarity. She had been a Victorian beauty, successful and gay, and now was heartily bored with her quiet life in the big, first-floor room in her grandson’s home in Maida Vale, looking out over the charming gardens that meet the gardens of Hamilton Terrace and stretch away on either side, concealing the houses in front and to right and left of them. ‘Almost like being in the country,’ Matilda would say, advancing the virtues of the quiet room. ‘Well, but who wants to be in the country, anyway?’ Mrs. Evans would reply. ‘Not you, for one, my dear; and not me either. Nasty grass and mud and leaves and nothing else—it’s just like that awful American song says, “God can only make a tree”.’ And she would suddenly go gaily off her head, and, rushing to the window, hurl out whatever came first to hand, crying loudly, ‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’ ‘Throw them further out, beyond the greenhouse,’ Matilda would say mildly, knowing it useless to resist and concerned only to save the conservatory roof. ‘Throw them across on to the lawn. The flames are coming up through the greenhouse, can’t you see?’ Mrs. Evans, who often saw a great deal more than she let on, would obediently fling cushions and tea cosy and combs and brushes out on to the grass and even the smaller bits of furniture. It was remarkable that she never threw books, which she loved; and that a certain rather valuable china tea service was also, apparently, invulnerable to the flames.
Rosie, without a tenth of her grandmother’s essential beauty, had yet inherited much of her one-time charm: a freshness, a radiance, a look of health and vitality, of generous good-nature, that saved her soft, round face and big round eyes and little round mouth and rounded button of a nose, from insipidity. She settled herself comfortably down on the hearthrug, one arm hung confidingly across the old woman’s bony, bird-like knee. ‘It’s the most awful thing, Gran, but I know you’ll help me. Nobody could possibly understand except you, but even if you are old, you’re broadminded Gran, aren’t you?’
‘It’s because I’m old,’ said Mrs. Evans. ‘Not in spite of it. What’s the matter—you’ve met some man, eh?’
‘Yes, pet.’
‘When you say a man—do you mean a man? Or a gentleman? Or merely a gent.?’
It had obviously better not be merely a gent, but Rosie was at a loss to know which of the other two would best please Granny in her present mood; Mrs. Evans was an ardent reader of romance and vacillated a good deal between Gentlemen and Rough Diamonds—not to say Black Diamonds, for at the moment she was in the throes of a rediscovery of the works of Robert Hichens. Rosie cast her mind back among her admirers in Geneva; the best of having been really a bit of a basket there, was that one didn’t have to make up, one could just choose. With the unerring cunning of the intensely stupid, she selected the one best calculated to appeal, even right down to the little dash of colour.… ‘He was so sort of—well, sort of strong, Gran, and of course people in the East have a different idea of how to treat women, that’s
all, and he just—well, he didn’t bother about whether I wanted to be made love to or not, he just swept me off my feet, he didn’t give me time to think, I couldn’t have resisted even if I’d wanted to and I must say, when people are so sort of strong and sweeping, one doesn’t seem to want to very much. He had a boat there and he just took me by the hand and said, “Come with me,” or something like that, because of not speaking English very well, and I was sort of compelled like a rabbit, or a bird with a snake or whatever it is and I just went with him and he carried me down to the water’s edge and lifted me into the boat and we sailed out on to the lake in the moonlight.… And the thing is, it’s too frightening, but I think I may be going to have His Child.’
‘Then he must marry you,’ said Mrs. Evans at once.
‘How can he, darling? He’s—well, I mean, he’s only a fisherman,’ said Rosie, hurriedly improvising.
‘There’s as many good fishermen in the sea as ever came out of it,’ said Mrs. Evans vaguely. ‘And he must marry you.’
‘Yes, but he can’t, Gran, you see, he’s—well, he’s gone back to the East with his fish by now.’
‘Then he must be brought back from the East. Your father must seek him out and drag him back here; by the scruff of the neck, if need be.’
‘But Granny, darling, don’t be silly—how can he? He’s dead.’
‘Dead?’ said Mrs. Evans. ‘Nonsense! Why should a man die all of a sudden like that? It’s a ruse to get himself out of this mess, depend upon it.’
‘I don’t mean him, Granny. I mean my father.’
‘Who’s talking about your father? I know he’s dead—bother it all, he was my own son, wasn’t he?’
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