Next morning I felt rather ashamed of myself and the state I’d got into during the night. I was almost glad not to see Don at breakfast. And at lunch I only saw him for ten minutes, and one of the nurses was there. But as the afternoon wore on I began to get worked up again and to wonder how I was going to get through the next night—my last night that visit; for I had only come to Elmcroft for two days. I thought about Don the whole time, even when I went up to sit with Daddy.
After supper the nurse who’d had her meal with us went out for a little walk, and Don and I had coffee together in the drawing-room. It was funny to see the coffee things dumped down among the illustrated papers on the big round table. I sat on the settee and he came and sat beside me. It was the first time we’d been properly alone together since I had arrived.
“You’re tired,” he said, and the way he said it made me know that everything was all right between us. “It is a strain,” he went on, “being in a house where somebody is so ill.” He took my hand, and I said, “You know, I’m going back to-morrow morning.” “Then,” he said, “we must make the most of to-night,” and he put his arms round me and kissed me. Then he got up and walked round the room and said, “It’s too dangerous in here. Can I come and talk to you later, in your bedroom?” I nodded, and he went on, “We shall be quite safe there. But I shall be very late. Go to sleep first, and I’ll come in and wake you and we’ll watch the moon together, through your window.” That was almost the only time he said anything romantic to me. In the ordinary way, that kind of thing—I mean the conversational side of love-making and the kind of talks lovers have together in novels—never entered his life at all. But I didn’t mind. I didn’t want pretty speeches from him.
He went to the consulting-room, and I went upstairs to say good-night to Daddy, and came down again and went into the garden, and then, when it was dark, sat in the drawing-room with a book, trying to pass the time. Then I went to bed and lay awake. I had pulled up the blind and the moonlight streamed on to my bed. And I remember being glad to think that it was in the room which I’d had as a child and a schoolgirl and young woman—the room where I’d imagined so many wonderful things happening to me—that I was going to meet my real lover. The night was so hot that I lay with only the sheet on top of me.
It seemed an age before I heard his step on the stairs. He trod rather heavily, as if the whole world might hear, and he was simply a tired doctor going ordinarily to bed. Daddy had been given something to make him sleep. Then a long time passed by, but I didn’t mind it. I felt quite different from what I had been the night before—quite different from what I had ever been. It was as if I was asleep, or in a trance, and yet very wide awake. My body seemed to disappear and become part of the sheets and the mattress, even of the bedstead and the whole fabric of the house. I was so utterly at peace and so happily bewildered by the strange thing that had happened in my life. I forgot to think of time. I might have been lying there, flat on my back without moving, for a whole week or a few minutes. Minutes and weeks had become the same.
From time to time I heard little noises coming from his room—the click of an electric switch as he turned it on, the creak of the wardrobe door, the water running into his wash-basin—we had them in all the bedrooms—and running out again. Then another click of the electric switch. “He’s turned out the centre light,” I thought, “or turned on the lamp by his bed.” Then silence. An owl hooted in the garden and a big moth flapped against the window. A motor-car went down the road. An engine whistled in the distance. The house was absolutely still. My room was over the bathroom and a piece of the lower landing, and I couldn’t in any case have heard anything happening in Daddy’s room.
Then, very slowly, and almost without sound, my door opened and Don came in. I lay just as I was, without moving or speaking, while he shut the door and sat down at the foot of my bed, with his thigh touching my toes. He was wearing one of those thin silk dressing-gowns with a Paisley pattern. Then he stretched forward and took my hand, which was outside the sheet, and kissed it, brushing his moustache against the back of it and right up my arm to my shoulder. There was no need for either of us to say anything.
4
I thought then, of course, that it was love, and I still think it was. Love, they say, can take many forms. It must have been love, or I should have felt guilty next morning when I went into Daddy’s room to see how he was—and guiltier still when I went back to Carlice for the week-end. This time, Claude and I were alone, without visitors. Joan and Ronnie were both away at school. The weather was very fine and warm, and before lunch on Sunday I went for a walk—the big circle we used to call it—with Claude, through the park and some of the fields. The green of the trees was still quite fresh, and the fields were covered with long waving grass. I felt uplifted and excited and very happy, stronger and more important, more attractive than I had been before. Claude seemed pleased to have me alone with him. When I was getting over the stile into Herbert’s meadow he gave me a kiss on the forehead as he helped me down, and I gave him a kiss back. It was just a kind of high spirits, and had nothing to do with what was between me and Don—nothing to do with love. And it didn’t enter my head that I was “deceiving” Claude. Everything had seemed so natural that I couldn’t believe Claude would mind even if he knew. Claude had become an elder brother, another Stephen. He never had been much more than that to me.
I was so sure of myself that I didn’t even wonder if people mightn’t be a little surprised that I had come back from my father’s illness in such good form. I ought, I suppose, to have been pale and exhausted and worried. I simply couldn’t pretend to be that, at least when only Claude was there. If Isabel had been staying with us, I might have been more careful, or felt that I ought to be more careful. But it didn’t occur to me then, in those early days, that Claude would notice anything that mattered. He noticed so few things. He always seemed somehow shortsighted. You had to point everything out to him in the garden before he saw it. Isabel used to say that if the big cedar in the main lawn were struck by lightning to the ground Claude would only notice it when he tripped over the fallen trunk. I used to think she said things like that because he didn’t appreciate all she’d done for the place. And why should he? Nobody asked her to do anything for the place. But she was quite right. He was detached from everything—even the people round him. And his not noticing things made him seem less real. But I did feel that, being so happy myself, I ought to be specially kind to him. I wanted to be kind to everyone.
Thinking of myself as I was then, I seem now, these ten years afterwards, to have slipped down into a rut, to have become something less alive, just a fidgeting rather lazy person who finds it a bore to run a big house, and wants her little comforts and the thrill of a new dress or a new chintz, a day at the races or a party every now and then. It must have been love that made me so different then. Not a very “spiritual” love, as they say, but still, love. And that is not the same as affection or devotion. I wasn’t devoted to Don. I didn’t worship him. I don’t know that I ever really liked him. But I did love him. He gave me something that did me an enormous amount of good.
Daddy was asking to see me next week, and I went back to South Mersley on the Thursday, for two days. Daddy was better, and Don said that for a time he would get much better. “After a week or two you won’t have the excuse for coming here so much,” Don said. “We must make the most of the time we have together.” At first I didn’t think of the future at all, and just lived for the hours I could be with Don. But he was quite right. By the middle of July there was really no reason for me to keep slipping away from Carlice, where we were busy with visitors, and I realised that there was a difficult time ahead. Those were the weeks when I had to content myself with writing to Don, and would walk down the lane to the pillar-box by Noakes’ cottage and post my letters secretly. It was a new stage in my love-affair—a less happy stage. If people had been watching me
, they would have seen that I was less happy than when Daddy was really ill. Someone did suggest to Claude that I was in low spirits and he said, “Oh, it’s only the reaction from what she went through earlier in the summer. She’ll be all right again soon.” My friend Dolly Headford was staying with us, and heard the conversation and told me about it.
I spent the first fortnight of August with Claude in Deauville. It wasn’t Claude’s kind of place, but he thought the gaiety would do me good. When we got back I had a letter from Don telling me that Daddy wasn’t so well. My visits to South Mersley began again—the third stage in my love-affair, like the first in some ways, but with a new background. I felt myself just as much in love with Don, but it wasn’t the light-hearted love I’d known before. There was something more desperate about it, as if I was having a love-affair during a war or a revolution. Daddy soon became really ill again, and Don told me that the end would come sooner than the doctors had expected when they operated. He said it would be a merciful release. I suffered a good deal. I found myself fonder of Daddy than I thought I was. Besides, one would have been miserable seeing anybody going through so much. But Daddy was drugged most of the time, and there was no use in my sitting by the bedside all day. When he was conscious, I used to think he was more pleased to see Mrs. Greeg than to see me. Don used to take me for motor-drives in the evening, if he could spare the time. During the day he was very busy with Daddy’s practice. At night we thought it safer for me to go to his room than for him to come to mine. Although Daddy had another doctor, there was no knowing that Don wouldn’t be needed to do something in an emergency. If the nurse came up to fetch him it wouldn’t matter if he was in his own room. That did happen once. I was terrified, though Don went and talked to the nurse by the door, and she didn’t attempt to come in. And yet I got a kind of thrill out of the risk.
Don was different. Though he seemed to be just as fond of me physically, as time went on he became more cautious, and I think there were moments when he would rather have had me out of the house. I see now that he was already thinking of the future. The moment our love-making was over, he’d turn to some practical subject, such as what would become of Elmcroft. I said it would be nice if he could take it on with the practice. It had been my home for sixteen years, and despite Daddy’s illness we had had such happy times there. It seemed a pity to sell it. But Don said it was much too expensive a house for him to buy and too big for him to keep up. He had his eye on a nice little house in Lillah Gardens. I didn’t like talking about these things, but he said that the future had to be faced. One night I got angry with him—I had had two painful hours in Daddy’s room, and my nerves were all on edge—and I said I thought he’d begun to prefer the pretty nurse to me. It was very silly of me. He told me not to be a little fool and didn’t come near me the next day. The day after that I had to go back to Carlice. Ronnie had caught a chill bathing in the lake and had to be looked after. I wrote Don a long letter begging him to forgive me, but tore it up, and sent him quite a short one in which I said nothing very much. I hardly knew if I loved or hated him.
When I next went to Elmcroft Don was very kind, but not quite in the same way. He treated me a little as if I was a rich patient of his. The pretty nurse had gone, and we had a very ugly one instead, but something in Don seemed to have disappeared, and I couldn’t recover it again.
Daddy died very suddenly. It must have been while I was in the train on my way to Carlice. The doctors had thought he would certainly live another week. Claude brought me the telegram when I was just starting to dress for dinner. It said: “Your dear father died peacefully this afternoon. Funeral Tuesday. Am making all arrangements. Writing. Rusper.” The letter came by the afternoon post next day. It was full of the various legal things which had to be done.
Claude of course came with me to the funeral. He was pale and nervy, and said very little. We spent the Monday night in London with Isabel, and motored to South Mersley the next morning. Stephen was still abroad. He’d caught some kind of fever in Marseilles and was in hospital there. We hadn’t wanted him at Elmcroft during Daddy’s illness, but it would have been a comfort to have him at the funeral. It was a very beautiful day in mid-October, sunny but cold. The trees in the cemetery were coloured with autumn tints, and some brown leaves fluttered down into the open grave. When the coffin was lowered, I felt as if something in my own life were being buried. Don was very black and official and kept away from Claude and me. When we were looking at the wreaths arranged at the grave-side I broke down. Claude stood beside me, but didn’t try to comfort me at all. He had forgotten to bring his thick overcoat and was shivering. It may have been then that he caught the cold which led to his influenza. As for me, I went on crying into my crumpled handkerchief, and nobody seemed to care.
5
Dr. Donald Rusper,
95, Meridian Avenue,
South Mersley,
London, S.W.
Bother! That’s the second envelope I’ve addressed to him. That’s what comes of mooning over the past. But it was such a wonderful past. Even in spite of everything, I would not have had it.
Carlice Abbey,
Wiltshire.
Thursday.
Dear Don,
I’ve had a letter from Stephen, who’s very upset at the idea that you may be stopping his allowance. I told him that I’m sure you know best, and that Daddy would have wished him to follow your advice. Still, I think we ought to look at things from his point of view. He seems to be getting on fairly well now, and says there is no fear of his exceeding again. “Exceeding” was his word. He naturally feels it hard that he hasn’t control of his money, and it makes him obstinate and specially suspicious of you. I think you ought to make allowances for this. Could you suggest that he puts himself in the hands of some other person for observation?
How do they observe you, I wonder? Do they surround you with bottles and watch through a skylight to see how much you drink?
I’m so afraid that if you insist on your plan, something frightful may happen. He’s so set upon not going to the home, he might try to kill himself. Or he might turn up here and make a scene. He says he has enough money to carry on till the end of August. Don’t you think you might let him know that if he goes on all right till then, you might alter your views? Surely you could get the local doctor to keep an eye on him. At present he’s staying at Thurlow-on-Sea, and seems to like the place very much.
I really can’t say any more than that. I’m not going to beg Don to let him off on bended knees. Don’s probably quite right. Stephen might be better in every way for going to the home. He’d probably come out quite cured and get some work that would interest him. He might marry and settle down. What a pity that it should have been Don, of all people, who married the one girl who ever seemed to interest him. But Catherine could never have cared for Stephen. If she had, she could never have married Don.
Still, it’s not too late for him to find someone else. Suppose he could make three hundred a year, with his four-fifty he’d be as well off as I shall be—when I leave here.
I hope Catherine and the children are well. It is pouring with rain here, and this is a draughty cold house. I hope you are having better weather where you are.
Yours very sincerely,
Dora Carlice.
6
Still too wet to go out. At this rate the grass won’t be fit to walk on for days. I can’t bring myself to wear those thick rubber things Isabel wears. She’s always dressed so suitably for the country, and I never am, although I live in it. But I’m better dressed for London than she is. She always looks dowdy there. I suppose it’s county to look like that.
What shall I do this afternoon, if it goes on raining? Oh, there are plenty of things I ought to do. I ought to have the car out and see how Mrs. Grainger is getting on. Or I might take those things round to the Vicarage for their sale. No, I
can send Flora round with them. Or I could drive in to Risely and go to a cinema. Joan might like to come. No, she wouldn’t. And I always think it’s a bit funny the lady of Carlice Abbey going to a little local cinema alone. Oh, the afternoon will pass somehow. With all these visitors coming, I shan’t have many more to myself for a while. That reminds me, I ought to write to Dolly too.
Mrs. Headford,
25, Occident Court,
Paddington, W.
I wonder what her flat really is like. It’ll be very modern and labour-saving with all sorts of gadgets we’ve never heard of here. But I suppose there would be no room for one’s things. It would be a change after living here. I suppose one would get used to it quickly, though it wouldn’t seem like home. If it comes to that, Carlice doesn’t seem like home to me—after fourteen years of it. Elmcroft was my real home. And God knows who’s living at Elmcroft now. When we were at school, Dolly and I were quite sure we should marry Londoners with houses in London. She chose Carlton House Terrace and I chose Belgrave Square. And she married 80, Royal Avenue, South Mersley, and I married Carlice Abbey, and now we’re both widows. It’s funny how things move round in circles.
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