Birthday Party

by C. H. B. Kitchin

  It’s so chilly, I ought to have a fire. April’s always a cold month. I wish we had gas, or the main electricity supply, so that I could just turn on the stove. It seems rather a waste having a fire here before lunch when there’s one in the morning-room. But I can’t write in the morning-room. Who could at a silly secretaire desk, even if it is Sheraton? And the Dutch marquetry desk is far too high for me. Besides, I can think better in my own room.

  I ought to have written all these letters yesterday. I did mean to, but—of course I found I only had one envelope and two or three dirty sheets of paper. Then something happened to put me off. I’d better ring now. I must get these done to-day.

  “Oh, Eames—I’ve run out of stationery. Could you bring me some? Yes, notepaper, envelopes and cards.”

  Why don’t I order my own notepaper, something a bit brighter than this plain cream with the black address? It’s too silly leaving it to the butler. I would order my own if I were beginning here all over again. I intended to, I remember, but Joan put me off by saying, “Why do you want a change? Don’t you think ours very nice?” And I had to say, “Yes, dear, of course I like your notepaper very much.”

  “Thank you, Eames. Yes, it’s wonderful how one uses it up, isn’t it?”

  If he’d suggested lighting the fire I’d have let him. I suppose he thinks the central heating ought to be enough in April. Besides, Isabel never feels the cold. Or pretends she doesn’t. She doesn’t understand comfort. None of these people do. She’d rather spend her money on lime for the irises, or soup for some silly old woman with arthritis.

  I think I’d better write to Stephen first. What is his address? King Stephen Hotel, Thurlow-on-Sea. It doesn’t say what county, but it must be Kent. Anyhow, that’s the envelope done. It’s such a bore, when you’ve written a letter, to find you’ve got the envelope still to do.

  Carlice Abbey,

  Wiltshire.

  Thursday.

  My dear Stephen,

  I was very sorry to hear what you say in your letter. You say you’ve got enough to carry you on till the end of August. Well, that is something.

  He said “scrape along.” I suppose I must send him something. Five pounds will do. After all, that will keep him nearly a fortnight. And I might spare something in July, after I get my next money. But I can’t keep him altogether. I can’t afford to do that.

  I have heard from Don Rusper, and I think it’s almost hopeless to try to make him change his mind. As you request, I am writing to him to-day, but I know him better than you do.

  Oh dear! I won’t say that. I’ll cross out those five words.

  But I know he takes a very strict view of his duties as your trustee. We’ve had this out before, and I dare say it’s hardly worth while my saying it again. But you know perfectly well that Daddy would have left you your money outright, if he hadn’t thought it necessary for you to be looked after. So far as that goes, he left four-fifty for you against my two-fifty, because he thought you needed it more than I did.

  Perhaps it doesn’t sound very nice reminding him of that, but it’s quite true, and I’m going to leave it in. After all, if I’d made any kind of fuss, Daddy would have left the money differently, or even left it all to me. But I was set upon Stephen having most of it. That awful afternoon when Daddy was nearly dying, I told him so and stopped him sending for his solicitor to alter his will. “You see,” he said, “I used to think you’d made this good marriage, and that it didn’t matter to you any longer what you had from me.” It was as if he knew Claude was only going to leave me five hundred a year. Perhaps dying people do somehow know these things. But I quietened him and let the money go to Stephen. I don’t grudge it now, at all, but he should be a little grateful and not keep on at me about Don. Don must know best about a case like this.

  So I feel it was Daddy’s real wish that you should be guided by Don, and I can’t go against it. Don tells me that the cure you had with Dr. Duparc was hardly any good. He’s got to know this Dr. Ebermann, and has sent two or three patients to him, with excellent results. He says six months in his institute would make you a different man, in fact as well as you were before you were wounded.

  And I wonder very much exactly what that means. The war’s a very easy thing to blame. Other people were wounded and shell-shocked and are perfectly all right. Stephen never was quite normal, even before the war. I could see that. I don’t know where he gets his weakness from. Certainly not from Daddy. Perhaps his mother had a poor strain in her. My mother used to say she had. But Daddy wouldn’t let us talk about his first wife.

  You’ve told Don that you won’t go to Dr. Ebermann, and he thinks it’s only kindness to you to make you go. The only way he can make you go is by stopping your allowance, which by Daddy’s will he has every right to do. In fact, you and I know that Daddy would thoroughly have approved of what Don is doing.

  Still, I am sorry for him.

  Still, I am sorry for you, and send you the enclosed five pounds, which may be useful. It’s all I can spare now. If, as you say, you are perfectly well, and have conquered your weakness, why not go to Don and let him examine you? If he finds you quite fit, I’m sure he’ll only be too glad to continue your allowance as before.

  Oh dear! Is that quite true? Anyway, I’ve got to end up by saying it, even if I think they’re both deceiving themselves. Stephen hasn’t really conquered his weakness, and Don is perhaps a little fond of interfering.

  To-day it is pouring with rain, and this is a draughty cold house. I hope you are having better weather where you are.

  Your affectionate sister,

  Dora.

  2

  Now my letter to Don.

  Dr. Donald Rusper,

  95, Meridian Avenue,

  South Mersley,

  London, S.W.

  I’m glad I can write to him quite easily now. I remember when writing to him was a marvellous treat, and how I planned the letters hours before I sat down at my desk. Because I wanted so much to write to him, I had the feeling that I mustn’t do it. Or perhaps it was the other way round. The days when I decided to let myself write were the bright days in the week. I would slip down the lane to the pillar-box by Noakes’ cottage, and as I heard my letter drop down inside it seemed as if a part of me had gone with it, and as if I wasn’t complete when I walked home again. Whatever happened afterwards, and in spite of all the other things that were happening at the time, those were very lovely days ten years ago. I was a different person then, and he was different. Five amazing months, in spite of everything—June, July, August, September and part of October.

  I hadn’t been to Elmcroft for nearly two years, I think. Daddy used to write to me about every six weeks, and I wrote to him about once a fortnight. He only came here twice, and then none of us enjoyed it, not even Daddy. I could see he blamed me because he wasn’t more of a success. I was terrified he’d suddenly say to Claude, “Young man, this isn’t the way to behave to your father-in-law.” Not that Claude was ever anything but polite. Still he couldn’t ever bring himself to like Daddy slapping him on the back and calling him “old boy.” He wasn’t hearty enough. And there was the awful moment when Joan said, “Auntie Dora, who is that funny man?” and Daddy heard. He became huffy, as he always did when his dignity was attacked, and couldn’t play up. “You ought to have sent the child upstairs to her room,” he told me. “You’ll fail in your duty if you don’t give both children a taste of discipline.” Fail in your duty. It was one of his favourite phrases. Don must have caught it from him, though it’s come out more lately.

  The telegram about Daddy’s illness came when the General Strike had been over for three weeks—about the beginning of June, 1926, it must have been. Don had been Daddy’s partner for eighteen months. He was living round the corner from Elmcroft, at 18, Portugal Road. But when I arrived I remember seei
ng his brass plate under Daddy’s on the brick gate-post at Elmcroft. I’d almost forgotten that Daddy had taken a partner, and I don’t think I’d seen Don since my marriage.

  Don was out, visiting an urgent case, and Mrs. Greeg showed me in. She had grown quite plump, and I thought her dress rather flighty for a housekeeper. I thought, too, that she ought to have said “Dr. Payne,” not “your poor father.” “Your poor father’s getting some sleep now,” she said, “and Sister says he mustn’t be disturbed. Would you like to go to your room?” “But what is the matter with him?” I asked. The telegram and the letter I had had the week before had told me nothing definite. She didn’t answer, but sniffed and led the way upstairs to the room I used to have before my marriage. It was just the same as when I lived in it, and still looked pretty, though very small after the big rooms at Carlice. “Dr. Rusper should be in any time now,” Mrs. Greeg said. “You know, we now use the drawing-room as the patients’ waiting-room. Your poor father used the dining-room as a living-room when he wasn’t in his consulting-room.” In my day the patients had waited in the dining-room. It was awkward for meals, sometimes, but it was nice to have the drawing-room free. The drawing-room used to be such an attractive room. I went down to it, when I had washed and unpacked some of my things, but found it spoilt with a big round table in the middle, covered with all the illustrated papers, and the chairs arranged against the walls. The door leading to the verandah was open, and I went out into the garden and walked round it. After the grounds at Carlice it seemed no size at all. I couldn’t think how Stephen and I played our game of being “lost in the desert” there. But when you’re a child you can imagine anything. The garden wasn’t tidy, either, and there were weeds in the paths. It was seeing the weeds that made me realise that something serious must have happened to Daddy. He was always so particular that the garden should be kept neat.

  I was still in the garden when Don came out to fetch me. Beyond having grown a little stouter in the four years since my marriage, he seemed hardly to have altered at all. If anything, he was handsomer. Seeing him again brought back all the past to me—not, of course, that I had ever known him at all well. But his family had been friends of ours for a long time and it all goes so far back that I can’t remember when I met them for the first time. I suddenly felt I wanted to cry, partly about Daddy, and partly because everything had become so different during the four years I had been away. He shook hands with me and gave me a look that he had never given me before—that searching “doctor’s look” which always frightens me. He called me Mrs. Carlice and I called him Dr. Rusper. That shows how little we knew one another then. He didn’t say anything about Daddy till we had gone indoors to the drawing-room. I suppose he was afraid of one of our neighbours hearing, or the maid might have been listening at a window upstairs. Then he told me the name of the disease Daddy was suffering from. They were going to operate the next day, to relieve the pain, though it was a disease they couldn’t yet cure. I broke down, and he put his arm round me and put me in a big chair. Then he held my hand, while he told me the details about what had been done and the doctors who had been called in, and asked me whether I should like any further opinions taken. I said I should prefer to leave everything to him, and it came to me suddenly that I was going to rely on him tremendously, in a way I’d never thought of relying on Daddy or Stephen or Claude.

  It can’t have been that afternoon—no, it was next afternoon, when Daddy had been taken to the nursing-home and the operation was over, and I felt as if the day had lasted a month and anything could happen to me, I was so routed out—when I found myself leaning against Don by the round table in the middle of the drawing-room. It was one of those quick moments which seem to last for ever, because it was so vivid afterwards. It was a moment which I kept picturing and calling to mind at all times and places during the next few months. I was leaning against Don by the round table in the middle of the drawing-room when he suddenly caught both my wrists and drove me against the hard curve of the table, till it dug into my back, and made me face him. He drew away from me slowly, holding me there and stretching his arms out, and I could see the black hairs a long way up his arms under his wide stiff cuffs. Unconsciously I thought of how Dolly and I used to talk at school about hairy men, and the things we used to imagine together about them.

  “You must pull yourself together and face this,” he said. I remember well that the word this didn’t only convey to me Daddy’s illness and operation, but something very different. For me, and for him too, there was a double meaning in everything he said.

  “We have to grow up,” he went on, while I blushed, but didn’t speak. “When we’re young we imagine that these things only happen in books, or only happen to strangers and people we don’t know very well. But they do happen. They happen to us. I want to see you happy again. I’m going to make you happy.”

  He let go of my left wrist and put his hand on my arm, slid it down to the elbow and then put it inside my arm, under my left breast. I felt something I’d never felt before, and we stood like that, looking at one another, till there was a step in the passage—Mrs. Greeg going into the dining-room. Then he came closer to me, and took me to the settee and sat down by me.

  “Your father told me he wanted to get back home as soon as possible,” he said. “I don’t see why he shouldn’t be moved here next week, in an ambulance. As soon as he comes, I shall come and sleep here. It’ll be useful to have a doctor in the house. I’ve only got my rooms at Portugal Road by the week. As I shall have to do all your father’s work, it’ll be handier my being here—if you approve.”

  I nodded. Already, it seemed absurd to think that I might not approve.

  Then perhaps because we heard Mrs. Greeg’s step again, conversation became more discreet. Don talked of Stephen, who had thrown up his job as a solicitor the autumn before, and was at the time acting as tutor to a rich Japanese boy, whom he was escorting to Tokyo. Even if we wired for Stephen to hurry back he couldn’t reach England before mid-July. And Don said it would be silly to wire. He’d seen a good deal of Daddy’s relations with Stephen and felt there was no point having Stephen hanging around. “I think it’s really better that Stephen is away,” he said. “He might upset your father. And there’s little danger that he won’t be back in time. This is not going to be a short illness.”

  I shuddered and he put his left arm right round me. “And what about you?” he asked. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to stay here the whole time, will you?” I told him that I ought to get back to Carlice for the week-end, when we were expecting visitors. He agreed that I should have to go backwards and forwards a good deal.

  “If you had married me,” he said, “you would have been here the whole time.”

  “You never asked me,” I replied. “You can’t have asked me.”

  “I did, at the Boswell’s fancy-dress party.”

  “That was a joke. Three people asked me that night. Besides, you were practising in Luton then, and everyone said you were engaged to a Luton girl.”

  “I was half engaged, but when I saw you that night I knew I had made a mistake. I broke off the engagement the next week.”

  “For my sake?” I asked.

  “You were partly the cause.”

  “But you didn’t write to me, you didn’t try to see me. You did nothing, till you turned up at my wedding with your mother and sisters.”

  He laughed.

  “You wouldn’t have married me then. Your father wouldn’t have let you marry me. I was tied to my practice in Luton and you were a tennis star, meeting all sorts of suitable husbands. You soon found one. But he shan’t have the last word.”

  3

  I went back to Carlice for the week-end, and we had a large party. I felt as if I was acting, and only pretending to be mistress of the place and Claude’s wife. I was on edge, but the shocks I’d had during the week seemed
to have stirred up something in me and given me a new force. I was quicker in the uptake and brighter, as you are when you’re in love. I noticed then, and still more later, that some of Claude’s men friends, who had never bothered about me before, began to notice me. I was glad they did, as it showed me that there was something for Don to notice in me.

  Meanwhile, Daddy was going on as well as one can with that kind of illness, and he’d been back at Elmcroft a few days when I next went there. There were two nurses in the house. They shared the big spare room next to Daddy’s bedroom. Don had a little room on the next floor, just across the passage from mine. At supper, the first night, one of the nurses was with us and afterwards Don had some work to do in the consulting-room. I went to bed before he had finished. I lay awake for a long time listening for his footsteps. It was midnight before he came upstairs. Then from time to time I heard the floor-boards creak as he moved about in his room. There were moments when I felt I couldn’t bear it if he didn’t come to my room. I got very hot and threw the bedclothes on the floor, and imagined every little sound was his footstep. It didn’t seem to matter to me at all that the house was full of people. But there was only the maid sleeping on our floor, and she was right at the end of the passage round a corner. Mrs. Greeg had a small room on the floor below, which used to belong to Stephen. I was glad she was so far away, though I thought it rather funny that she wasn’t in Don’s room and Don in hers. I mentioned it to Don later, and he said that she’d had the room done up and had filled it with her own things and Daddy had refused to let her be disturbed.