by Ursula Bloom
Dinah’s Husband
Ursula Bloom
Copyright © The Estate of Ursula Bloom 2018
This edition first published 2019 by Wyndham Books
(Wyndham Media Ltd)
27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX
First published 1941
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The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.
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The Painted Lady
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Contents
PREFACE
THE FIRST WAY
ONE
TWO
THREE
THE SECOND WAY
ONE
TWO
THREE
THE THIRD WAY
ONE
TWO
THREE
FINALE
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PREFACE
1
Max knew about the whole romance.
All through dinner, Dinah had had an intuition that something was definitely wrong; she had sat there with her nerves on edge, yet not quite sure what was the matter. There was an undercurrent in the room, something which made her apprehensive. Not that she could ever conjure up fear of Max; he had always been the dearest man on earth, and in these four years of their married life they had never had a cross word. But lately she had realised that she was in love with Piers, and being in love was alarmingly different from caring for a man; one was a consuming fire, the other merely a warm glow.
Dinner will never end, thought Dinah helplessly.
One by one Lisa served the courses. They had been lucky when they had engaged her; she might be Austrian but she was a treasure in their house, and Max would have detested it if things had not run in an orderly fashion. They were almost through the meal, down to the green fruit plates, and the ruby red finger bowls that she had bought in the Caledonian Market that time when she and Max had visited it for fun. The bowls had been such bargains. It was queer now that she should be thinking of unimportant details like the ruby red finger bowls in the Caledonian Market; it was queer how her fingers went on tracing the little pattern on the drawn-thread-work mats, with the monogram that she had embroidered herself ‒ M.H., Max Hale. But everything was queer to-night.
Lisa brought the port from the sideboard, and handed round the cigarette box with the three small silver ash trays, one for each of them: Dinah, Piers, Max. Dinah knew that she could not bear the strain any longer; she could not stay here another moment! She looked across at Max.
Max was sixty-four. She thought that he had never looked so old before, perhaps because during these four years she had always thought of him as being a young man, somebody near her own age. He wasn’t young. To-night illusion suddenly drew back the veil and she saw him as he really was ‒ old, heavily built, yet handsome, with a florid face and broadly set shoulders. She had always admired the silver of that thick hair smoothed back from the high forehead, and the blandness of his blue eyes, which could look her through. She had liked the curve of his gracious mouth, and when he had married her, she had not seemed to notice the chins, the thickness of his neck, and the exaggerated heaviness of his shoulders. Then she had thought that age didn’t matter. It hadn’t mattered; until the moment when she had met Piers.
‘Port?’ Piers was asking her.
‘No, thank you.’
Dinah did not drink, because she had seen enough of that in the home of her childhood. She glanced at Piers as he handed the port to Max. She supposed that she would have known that Piers was a Naval officer, even if he had not told her. He was as tall as Max, but slight; there was no thickness at his throat, for it was firm and smooth with youth. His face was attractively weather-beaten, and out of it his young dark eyes glanced unafraid, with all the glad knowledge that life lay before him. His hands were smooth; time had not yet mottled them with the brown flecks that it had laid on Max’s hands.
Time had not set that finely pencilled map of lines at eye corners, nor had it sagged his mouth and jaw.
She ought not to be comparing the two men, yet she could not help it. Looking at Piers it seemed impossible that one day he too would grow old and heavy, and that his movements would become clumsy.
She got up. ‘I think I’ll go into the sitting-room and wait for you,’ she said.
Piers got up quickly and opened the door for her, smiling as she passed through. Surely it was not merely her imagination that something was wrong? An idiotic imagination which played tricks with her?
She went into the sitting-room of the cottage, which they had bought together only three years ago, in the first springtime of their marriage. Then it had been an empty ruin, with a thatched roof out of which the birds made their nests, with plaster dripping from the walls, and sightless windows. It had been fun rebuilding it together, and making it whole again. Seeing the thatch above the clean white walls, and the garden growing under experienced fingers. This room looked into the heart of an acacia tree, white with fragile blossom in latest May, but now a green loom, in and out of which the setting sun threaded a golden shuttle. The garden ran across a little lawn with a high yew hedge clipped round it, to the walled-in back garden, where Max had had a greenhouse set for her, in which she could grow her favourite flowers.
He had always been very thoughtful for her. Childishly she felt that it was wicked not to love him as she loved Piers. She sat down by the ingle, with the fireplace full of early autumn flowers, and she brought out her sewing, because she felt that she must concentrate on something to stem the fear which had been growing all day.
I’ve always been a frightened kind of person, she thought helplessly. She was so young.
She was thinking of home.
Her mind was going back at this crucial moment, when something warned her that she stood at a crossroads, a
nd would be forced to take a decision that was drastic. Her needle darted in and out of the tapestry, she hardly realised when and how, because she had gone back to being a child.
2
The first thing that Dinah could remember was the big rambling home set in a park, with Wrotham Hill rising behind. The courtyard was beneath the nursery window looking to the west, and there the jasmine twined about a broken wall which was imprinted on her mind. In spring the lilacs blossomed, and their scent came up and into the nursery itself.
There was the other southern window which looked on to the lawn, surrounded by quiet old trees, and the pool which was set between this lawn and the stiff flower beds opposite, round which Nurse often wheeled Dinah’s pram. Nurse was Guppy, thin, her shrivelled skin drawn tightly across the bones of her gaunt face; she always had considerable trouble with her false teeth, which showed acrobatic tendencies at meal times, most engaging to Dinah when very young.
There seemed to have been a hundred years spent in the nursery, years in the pram, relegated finally to walking, holding Guppy’s hand, and ultimately Guppy sinking away into the background of the house, and becoming less important, and the closer bond with father and mother coming into the foreground.
She had always wanted to love her mother, who was small and round, shaped rather like a robin, with a may blossom skin and pathetic brown eyes. Then she was too young to know that her mother had a little mind which worked extremely slowly. Mother had married her father in the heyday of her youth, which was both ignorant and innocent. She had admired his large house and the grounds, and his masterful ways, and his flirtatious manner, which thrilled her. She had never supposed that it might thrill other women too, and in her own small way had had a foolish belief that after marriage men did not flirt.
Dinah’s father was a man with an extravagant disposition. He had made money in a large firm, and, as he would have told anyone, wasn’t such a fool as to spend it only on bricks and mortar. He was a jovial spirit, with a roving eye for a pretty ankle, and a fondness for passion fruit, and the nectar of this world.
His wife had given up any idea of harnessing him to her apron strings when she had disappointed him over an heir by producing Dinah, but she had consoled herself with the maxim that there is safety in numbers and therefore did not complain. She had never been very clever, and could occupy herself with trivial occupations. She fussed over needlework, and patience, and friends in to tea, and grew more and more vague. Her husband came home less and less, and always gave as an excuse that it was the business of living; it was in reality the business of loving.
Dinah was nine years old when her father met the Bint.
The Bint was small and dark, with a cherry for a mouth and fine fiery eyes. Mr. Treeves, always susceptible, was attracted to her the moment they met, and the Bint felt that she really had found gold in him. He bought her an ideal little cottage in the neighbourhood, black and white with Tudor windows. It was not the Bint’s idea of bliss, and very quickly she sacrificed the Tudor for modern plumbing, and did away with the lattice work for a couple of ornate French windows, and a Canadian loggia. Upon this she would sprawl elegantly in a hammock. Mr. Treeves decided that he loved her devotedly, and came to the conclusion that he would give the affair the hallmark of respectability, so he brought her home.
Dinah remembered in her early life, seeing the Bint walking about the lawns, as though she owned them, and in truth she did own them, seeing that she had command of Dinah’s father.
From that time life at home was in the form of a triangle, with the Bint, her father and her mother. In her schoolroom days she drew pictures of triangles on her slates and her exercise books, and placed the three of them, one at each corner, wondering which was the way out. Circles were far more comfortable, but life did not run in circles; it was a series of triangles for her.
Later there were moments when her mother vaguely confided in her, which was dreadful. There was that evening when they walked down to the pool, with the evening primroses smelling so sweetly, and the owls just waking and calling to one another in the old trees. The Bint had dined with them, and her mother caught at Dinah’s arm.
She said, ‘I hate him for being such a fool, and letting that woman manage him in the way that she does! I’m nothing to him any more, and she’s everything. It isn’t fair.’
For a moment there was something fierce about the round little woman, something strong as the trees against the sky, and as the water which sped through the pool, to the runaway beyond. The girl was amazed by the sudden strength, and horrified by it too.
It was significant of there being more in life.
She had become used to truth changing into myth. Some of the stories the grown-ups told her with great care and suitable choice of words, were as swiftly destroyed by them, with a startling disillusion. In her extreme youth they had built up the legend of Father Christmas, only to destroy it ruthlessly when she was eight. Death had been another anxiety. From the time she realised that people disappeared and were carried away in boxes never to return, she had been very alarmed at death. Guppy had assured her that she needn’t be, as it could never happen to her; Judgement Day would come before that, or something equally convenient would prevent her experiencing it herself. Growing older, she mentioned this, to find that Guppy’s assurances had been lies. That was terrifying! There were fairies, for a long time cultivated at her mother’s knee, then as suddenly cast aside, to be made a joke of. The arrival of babies by a kindly stork, a pretty myth in which she had revelled, went the same way when a favourite maid was careless in the manner of village maids with virile ploughmen, who have nothing definite with which to occupy themselves on a Sunday afternoon.
Suddenly she was realising that her father was behaving horribly, which made her dislike him, and visualise herself as her mother’s champion.
The house was a house divided against itself, but Mr. Treeves was determined that it should stand. The Bint came to tea, and came to lunch, but unfortunately, with time, her Spanish ancestry asserted itself, and she ran to fat; Mr. Treeves, too, was growing plumper, and had to be restricted as to the ordering of potatoes. His roving eye began to wander; there were others in the world, and some more pleasing.
There was the shocking day when the Bint realised that her Tudor home was going to be taken from her, and screamed with rage. She came to visit Dinah’s mother, who goggled at her with amazement. She was dazed with her husband’s infidelities and now hardly understood. Dinah happened to be coming home from the village, and was taking a short cut through the shrubberies, making believe that she was an Indian brave on the trail. She heard the quarrel, and plunged out on to the lawn. The Bint was doing well, having the better chance because her brain was twice as quick as Dinah’s mother’s. Dinah gathered what was happening and saw red; she hit out and she caught the Bint in the face. It was a glorious moment of revenge. There was something satisfying about the feel of the Bint’s pulpy face crumpling against her own sharp little hand. It was an ecstasy and it thrilled her.
At fifteen Dinah was too young to realise that her loyalty to her mother might not be rewarded. The Bint had a story to tell Mr. Treeves that evening, and it lost little in the telling. Her father disliked scenes and was indignant.
That was the period of her life when Dinah was sent away to a finishing school in a foreign country, to learn manners, so Mr. Treeves said, but really to grow away from the house with the lawn before it, and the scent of jasmine and lilacs coming in at the windows, and the view of Wrotham Hill beyond. It would never be the same to her again.
3
The finishing school was within sight of Cologne, and yet not quite as far from that city as Bonn-am-Rhein. It was set snugly in a large square of similar houses, where the lindens grew, and whispered like suspicious neighbours all the summer. It was very cold in winter, and very hot in June, when there were expeditions up and down the Rhine in festive little steamers, which were very pleasant. In the garden there
were stocks, and banksia roses grew round the tall white house, and almost met the balconies where petunias and godetias blew in the window boxes to make the place gaily colourful.
In summer, too, the girls were taken down to the biergarten, where they sat and listened to the music, smiling into space, or perhaps in the direction of the German officers who swaggered about in their oversmart uniforms, expecting to be admired.
At first, when Dinah arrived at the school, she hated it. She despised the Fräuleins with their prim faces in which large mouths curled lasciviously. They obviously disliked the English. It was but a few years since the war had been lost, and there was bitter resentment in the hearts of most of the German people. Few English families sent their daughters to finishing schools here, but Dinah came because it had been recommended by a friend of her mother’s, who had influence with Mrs. Treeves and whose advice she always took.
It was a passage of time, between epochs, because life is always divided into epochs. It has its swiftly moving moments, when times change suddenly with devastating abruptness, and leave those who are living through them, dazed and bewildered. Then there comes a slackening of event; life being less fluid, almost congeals, but it is only the passing of time, the space between the chapter ending and the chapter heading for the new epoch.
In Germany Dinah changed from child to girl, and from girl to budding young woman. She was taller than her mother, and of a much slighter build. Her limbs were loosely made, so that she walked with a swinging gait; she had clear grey eyes and brownish hair which refused to lie flat, and gave her that rumpled, babyish appearance of the very young. She was never beautiful, but she had about her an arresting charm; she had the unawakened look, the wistful expression, of one who seeks some treasure of knowledge that she cannot find. She did not know what she sought till she grew older, then she realised that she wanted to be loved.
In Germany she developed a love of good music. She adored the twin spires of Cologne cathedral with their miracle of carving, silhouetted against the skies. Later came the days when the Fräuleins took the girls into Cologne to the gay market, with the flags fluttering and the gay music of the biergarten. She liked the trips up the Rhine in the small crowded steamers when she ate sausage and bread, and drank light beer; she liked the dark majesty of the Lorelei and the gaiety of Coblenz, close to the water; and once, when they spent all day in Wiesbaden, and stayed the night there to listen to an exquisite concert, she thought that she had never been so happy before.