by Ursula Bloom
There was much here that was beautiful and fascinating, but unfortunately the spirit of the people was rebellious and they hated the English.
When she had left England Dinah had thought that she would loathe being away from home, and that, in her own language, it would all be ‘perfectly beastly’. Like so many girls she made impulsively momentous decisions of this kind, only to find that everything she had presupposed was quite wrong. It is true that she did not care for the German system of living; she disliked the poverty which was obvious everywhere, but the country had a loveliness that she could not deny, and it made a lasting impression upon her.
She was slow to make friends, and the girls were always changing. Some of them wrote home complainingly, for Germany was going through a bad time, and it reacted on the people who stayed there. Parents removed daughters in a hurry, and fresh girls came in their places. There seemed to be no permanence about any of it.
When Dinah was seventeen, the Fräuleins gave up the attempt to make a success of their finishing school, and it finally collapsed. They decided to go away to live with a married sister in Nuremberg, and take up some more lucrative form of living, for the mark had sunk beyond all hope.
Dinah came home. She had left it for barely two years, yet it had become nothing more than a memory. She had glorified that memory, thinking it was a mecca to be reached, through the purgatory of living in Germany. She had thought that all manner of exciting things would happen when she came home to Dukeleys. The other girls had spoken of love and marriage, and she believed that she was standing on the threshold of romantic event. There had been Daisy Stevens, the girl with roving blue eyes, who had attracted the attentions of a young German officer; he had come to admire her, standing under her bedroom window, and Daisy had leant out over the window box, murmuring encouragingly, although she always said to the others, ‘The silly idiot! Fancy his making all this ridiculous fuss over me!’
The young man received Daisy’s encouraging remarks with hope and redoubled his efforts to appear attractive; he came every evening, and sometimes in the late afternoons when the Fräuleins were about, which set Daisy tittering with apprehension. One night she leaned out too far, and the unobliging window box gave way with its full tide of petunias and begonias. Daisy was a large, full-busted girl, and the window box had been rotten for some time. Daisy only saved herself by clinging inelegantly to the shutters, whilst the gallant admirer below was covered with soil and broken petunias, and the Fräuleins came rushing up the stairs believing that one of their dear girls had fallen out of the window.
At the time Dinah had been considerably impressed by Daisy’s love affair, and had envied her capacity for such a romance.
There was also the other Daisy, who came from Switzerland, and was called Daisish, to make clear (or not so clear) the difference between her and the English Daisy. This was the Fräuleins’ idea, and some of their ideas were exceedingly mixed. Daisish was twenty, too old for a finishing school, but she had been the victim of an unfortunate affair with a gentleman who yodelled. He had come to their chalet to work in an agricultural capacity for her father, and he was, according to Daisish, the loveliest creature in the world. The affair had been discovered one afternoon when they had become ardent in the gathering of gentians, and her parents, appearing unheralded, were naturally scandalised. Daisish was a rich girl; she had money to spend, and could afford to buy large cups of hot chocolate when they went out in the morning, and Pfannkuchen to go with it. It was making her figure bulge unpleasantly, but she did not care, because she had no interest in beauty any more.
Daisish would tell the others between gulps and sobs, of the glories of the gentleman who yodelled, his fine dark eyes, his well-modelled legs and fascinating lederhosen, and, best of all, the emotional compliments that he had paid her.
This happiness would one day come to Dinah, though she hoped that she would not be wooed by a young man under a window box of petunias, which ultimately tipped over and on to his head, nor have the horror of being wooed by one of the gardeners at Dukeleys to the outrage of her parents.
She started for home one cold spring day in late March. Fräulein Hermon took her into Cologne, and put her into the train. There was a great crowd, and the porters were putting foot-warmers into the carriages, and all the windows were frosted with ice outside, and marked by stale breath on the inside.
The train was extremely full and the carriage very stuffy, because it was impossible to open any of the windows owing to the biting cold. Presently, when they were nearing the Dutch frontier, she went down to the dining-car to get a meal. Here matters were complicated. The meals had apparently been booked ahead, before the train had stopped at Cologne, and due to a complete lack of system, they had been overbooked. She was very hungry, yet she stood there helplessly; she looked young and rather silly (the waiters had excellent powers of perception when it came to assessing the people likely to tip well), so that she was pushed on one side.
An Englishman noticed her. He was tall, and bigly built, with thick silver hair. She liked the frankness of his eyes, and the way that he treated her in some phases as a child, yet with the pleasant respect that was due to a grown-up person.
‘You come along with me, and we’ll get something fixed up,’ he said.
‘Thank you so much, I really am most awfully hungry.’
‘We’ll soon remedy that.’
He pushed forward, and interrogated the waiter in his own language. He spoke excellent German and was obviously much travelled and cognisant of all the tricks. Within ten minutes he and Dinah were sitting opposite to one another across a small baize-covered table.
‘That’s better!’ he said brightly. ‘Now for a menu and then for some food. Going home from school?’
‘Yes.’
‘It must be fine starting with all your life before you, I’d give a lot to be in your shoes.’
She laughed because she was thinking how much she would give to be in his shoes, with the experiences of life behind him, with the capacity to handle difficult situations, to manage things, to settle arguments, and to use magic words which found both of them so quickly settled in the dining-car as though it had never been crammed full.
‘I expect you’ve got an attractive home to go to, and kind doting parents,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ but she was wondering what he would think if he knew about her father and the Bint, and her mother, whose mind was so vague and had grown so wandering. Recently Mrs. Treeves had not written much to her daughter, her mind moved in smaller and smaller circles. Dinah had realised that, and was struck with horror that here was the very opposite of the pool into which a stone is thrown; it was a mind into which a destroying bomb had been flung, and the circles had closed in on it. The bomb had been the Bint.
Dinah had gathered from these fragmentary letters, which were all that her mother could write, that the Bint had ceased to attract, and had been replaced by somebody else, equally distressing, whose name was Esther Johnstone, and who was thin as a lath.
Ultimately the train drew into Rotterdam, a great station that was surprisingly quiet, and her companion bought Dinah some Dutch chocolate. He told her about his own life, early days at Harrow, subsequent very jolly days at Oxford; then his aunt had died, leaving him money so that he had been able to follow life as he liked best.
‘Perhaps I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth?’ he said.
She asked if he had daughters of his own, and was surprised when he told her that he wasn’t married. He said that he had never met the girl whom he could care for sufficiently; one day, perhaps. She glanced at his thick silver hair, and he, noticing the glance, said, ‘You think I’m too old? Naturally I must seem to be a Methuselah to you.’
She was afraid that he thought she had been rude, and after that became shyly embarrassed. She had not meant to glance at his hair so meaningly, nor to infer that he was old, because he wasn’t old really.
When they got to the Hook,
he helped her with her luggage on to the little boat which rose and fell agitatedly alongside the quay. There was something more familiar about the Netherlands scenery, which was flat like Tilbury, and she liked the salty smell, and the marshes beyond.
She found her cabin, which was very cramped and dark, and had to be shared with another woman, old and fat, who grumbled a great deal because she could not get her corsets undone, and felt that she would be seasick if she kept them on. She spoke a patois which was difficult to follow, so Dinah went back on deck and sat there thinking of the talk in the train with the old man who wasn’t married. She watched the stars overhead, and heard the sound of the engines as the ship pushed her way down the Maas, and out to the open sea, rising more, falling, blown a little this way and that. It was beautiful to be aboard a ship, lovely to feel that sense of quiet rocking, rising gently, dropping again, it must have been the way that she had felt when she had lain as a baby in her cradle. Then she was standing on the threshold of living; now she was standing on the threshold of loving.
She had hoped again to see the man who had befriended her, but he did not come on deck, and finally, rather disappointedly, she went below, where the woman passenger had got out of her corsets, and was now calling raucously for the stewardess, and prophesying that she would never survive the night.
4
The car met Dinah at the station, with her mother sitting in it with a somewhat royal toque perched on her head, and fiddling with her innumerable watch chains which she always wore dangling round her neck. She kept saying, ‘Well, well, well,’ to herself, and shuffling her hands uneasily.
‘Hello, Mummy?’
‘Why, there you are! How you’ve grown!’
Dinah jumped into the car and kissed her mother violently. There was the remembered scent of naphtha balls and violets intermingled. Mrs. Treeves was always trying to outdo the naphtha with the violets, but the violets were never entirely successful.
‘You’ve got a lot of luggage? Well, well, well, it doesn’t signify really. Jackson will manage somehow.’
‘Mummy, how are you? How’s everybody?’
‘Quite all right. Your father is at business to-day, there is a board meeting or something. I never know quite what, but it’s very important.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Whilst Jackson and the porter tried to settle the trunks to their satisfaction on the luggage grid, she caught at her mother’s hand. ‘Glad to have me back?’
‘Yes, of course I’m glad. Only I get so worried. It’s funny these days, but I’m always worried.’
‘You mustn’t be; you’ve got me now. Isn’t it lovely and exciting? How are the hens? Has Busy had any more puppies? Have we got the same cat? You never wrote and told me these things.’
There was that anxious look in her mother’s eyes all the time. She had grown furtive. She looked apprehensively at Dinah, and it was disturbing, because she had not remembered her mother being like this.
They drove home.
They went up the drive curled between the trees, all thickly budded for the spring, but the branches looking coldly grey against the March sky. There was a wind blowing, a wind that had been born in the Arctic and persisted in the memory. In the grass stretches under the trees, the first primroses mingled with the crocuses which had been pecked wide by the birds. There was a drab appearance about the flowers which were trying so gallantly to herald the summer.
‘It all looks so lovely, Mummy,’ she said in a brave effort to convince herself that it did.
‘Yes, it does, doesn’t it?’
The car rounded the bend by the tall shrubberies which were so colourful in spring with the rhododendrons; then they bowled past the lilacs to the front door. The pool looked dreary with the first shooting of lilies upwards towards its face. Because of the thinness of the trees and the shrubs still naked with winter, she could see the village itself, and it looked much nearer than she had remembered it before. In summer she knew that she could not see a house from the garden, but to-day everything was disappointingly visible. The rockery needed weeding, although across its gnarled face aubretia struggled bright and mauve.
Springing out of the car she flung herself eagerly through the door and across a turkey rug, its brightness dimmed by long service, and she saw Guppy in the hall, definitely older, her face more shrivelled, her skin like parchment, stained dust colour with time.
‘Glad to be back, dear?’ asked her mother, still fiddling with the chains.
‘Yes, of course, frightfully glad. And, Mummy, I met such a nice man in the train, he was so kind to me on the journey and bought me chocolate at Rotterdam.’
‘Yes, of course, we must ask him to tea or something or other,’ as though that settled the question completely.
Her father did not come home until the mid-afternoon; although he always pretended that his business kept him, he was lunching with Esther Johnstone at an expensive restaurant. Esther was thin, which made her seem taller than she really was. She had interests in the ‘rag’ trade and had started a shop in South Moulton Street, which had cost Mr. Treeves a considerable sum of money. But then, why shouldn’t he? she asked herself. Far better parade his affluence that way instead of spending it on ridiculous lunches with wines and camellias (which always made her look anaemic); so why not let him spend something on this venture?
He must send her customers, she suggested, because there had been a lamentable deficiency in these. There was his wife and now the daughter just back from school, who would probably need a complete outfit. Girls usually returned from school looking frightful. Esther considered that when you looked down one of the female crocodiles marching through the streets of educationally-minded provincial towns, each girl looked plainer than the others; lumpy; sticking out where they should stick in; straight hair or fuzz; pimples; bland greasy faces with the fearlessly uninteresting eyes of youth; yet somehow they would emerge into the world as luscious and desirable young debs! Esther Johnstone was always looking at crocodiles and wondering about them. It was the everlasting miracle of girlhood.
She imagined that the Treeves girl would be either one of those firm puddings of seventeen, too big in the bust and with legs like rick stones, or the attenuated kind, with horn-rimmed spectacles, obliged to take liver extract twice daily for anaemia.
‘She used to be very pretty,’ said he.
Esther made allowances for the dottiness of the doting father, who always thought his spawn pretty because it complimented himself. The belief in the beauty of one’s own children is merely a form of satisfying personal vanity, as she very well knew. She said, ‘Yes, and she’ll be wanting some pretty clothes.’
Mr. Treeves had been hard hit lately. His women cost him too much. He had done as little as he could to Dukeleys, and the gardener was always appealing to him about the state of the back garden wall where nasty little boys climbed in and stole the apricots.
‘Why the hell don’t you put broken glass along that blasted wall?’ he demanded irritably.
The head gardener, who was a Methodist and consequently objected to strong language, said complainingly that the wall had fallen down, which would mean putting broken glass on the ground.
‘Rubbish!’ said Mr. Treeves.
It was ridiculous to waste good money on absurdities like back garden walls, when there were exquisite luxuries like wine, and women, and exotic restaurants with the chance of a little surreptitious knee-patting under cover of the table-cloth.
He did not want to fall out with Esther, so he said that he would get his wife to take Dinah along to the shop.
‘Dinah is an attractive name,’ said she, eyeing the red carnations which were placed indolently against the coffee trolley, with the idea of tempting licentious old gentlemen into buying them for their sweeties. He saw the look.
‘Three dozen,’ he told the girl, ‘Madam will take them with her. Yes, Dinah is a nice name.’
‘Though a bit Scott-Gatti,’ commented Esther.
Two days later Mrs. Treeves appeared at the shop with Dinah walking beside her. ‘Your father wishes it, and after all we’ve got to have the what-do-you-call-its for you somehow or other, as I always say.’
‘But, Mummy, isn’t this the Esther Johnstone? The one you wrote to me about?’
‘Oh, yes, I dare say, but it doesn’t signify. He always has to have somebody to get away from me,’ she said plaintively.
‘Why must we go to her?’
‘We must do as your father wishes. I always do.’
She had grown into a door mat. His infidelities had turned her into a piece of oakum on which people only wiped their boots. She and Dinah appeared in the doorway of Esther’s over-smart shop in South Moulton Street. It was very small, somewhat overdone, and what servants would undoubtedly have called elegant. Esther had not expected a girl who was so attractive for her years, and had nothing of the big bust, or the liver-extract bluestocking look. This was going to be an easy job.
Dinah knew that she hated Esther, and that her mother was obviously very nervous. When she got frightened she had a disconcerting way of forgetting her nouns, and of talking helplessly of ‘thingummys’ and ‘what’s-its-names’, trusting to the perspicacity of others to fill in the missing words.
She stumbled blindly to a small gold chair, and perched herself upon it, looking more than ever like a robin on a precarious twig. She sat there thrumming the patent leather bag that she held, fidgeting with her gold chains, and watching all that was going on in a dazed fashion.
Dinah would always remember that, because it was then that she knew with such grim finality that there was more than a little gap between them; there was a world.