Ankle Deep

by Angela Thirkell

  “And that,” she remarked to Valentine, when they were alone for a moment, “will learn you not to desert your old friends for the first young woman you meet.”

  “I knew I could rely on you, Fanny,” was Valentine’s answer, and Fanny was left wondering exactly what he meant. She went back to the drawing room to pump Mrs. Howard about Aurea, but was met by such bland imperturbability that she fell back discouraged, and took to needlework. Another of her lovely quilts was excuse enough for staying by the drawing room fire peacefully. So she and Mrs. Howard sat happily sewing and reading till the walking expeditions returned.

  Mr. Howard, a good enough judge of men apart from their relations with women, had taken a liking to Valentine, who found that Mr. Howard by himself was very different from Mr. Howard rather fussed among his womenfolk. He was a scholar of wide learning and reading, with larger sympathies and a wider outlook than Valentine had realized. Ever since Valentine had, almost impertinently, spoken to him about excavations, he had treated him as a reasonable contemporary. This subtle flattery made Valentine show his best side; the side that was mostly trampled down under the dancing floor. He was not a scholar in Mr. Howard’s sense of the word, but he had lived much among men of the world, and had traveled in most of Europe. His mind was well trained and supple, though apart from his work he gave it little to do, and it was like a machine racing in the void. He was quite intelligent enough to know this and dispassionately to deplore it; but too lazy, too easily led into easier paths by the charmers, he let year after year slip by without any full use of his powers. To Mr. Howard’s tacit acceptance of him as an equal he responded at once, and talked clearly and cleverly about what he had seen in Rome.

  “I wish I could have gone there myself this spring,” said Mr. Howard, “but I will not leave England till my daughter has gone. We see so little of her.”

  “Has Mrs. Palgrave lived long in Canada?” asked Valentine.

  “Her husband was offered a post there just after the War, and they have been there ever since. She used to visit us regularly, but it has somehow been more difficult of late years.”

  Valentine longed to ask why, but felt that Mr. Howard would resent such an intrusion.

  “You must miss her, sir,” seemed a safe thing to say.

  “We do,” said Mr. Howard. “You won’t know what I am talking about, Ensor, but as we get older we feel through our children more and more. I suppose all parents except and claim from life a better and happier time for their children than they have had themselves; but it is a false hope. There is no continuity of progress in human lives. No experience that the parents can have will help the children. Every generation has to learn its own lesson, and the hardest lesson is the one that we have to learn towards the end of our lives: that we cannot help those whom we most love. Materially, yes. Spiritually, very little. It is all very well for the pelican to make a nest of its own feathers, but the young don’t want it. They prefer to hurt themselves in their own way. The nest is left empty.”

  Mr. Howard looked so haggard as he spoke that Valentine was touched.

  “At least, sir,” he said, “Mrs. Palgrave is lucky to have you and Mrs. Howard to come back to sometimes.”

  “Perhaps, Ensor, perhaps. But children don’t always want to talk to their parents, and then they keep away.”

  “Mrs. Palgrave was very young when she married, wasn’t she, sir?” said Valentine. “I remember Arthur saying something about it years ago, just after I had left Oxford.”

  “Yes, she was very young and very dear,” said her father. “Regrets, Ensor, are of little use, or I should allow myself bitter regrets that I ever permitted it. She was too young to know what she wanted — what she needed.”

  “She is so young now,” said Valentine.

  “That’s half the tragedy. She has seen too much and known too much in her youth. I don’t know exactly what, but some kind of cruel impression has been made on her. I blame no one, but there is some kind of incompatibility in her life which makes me afraid for her. She is very reserved, very loyal, and in some ways very childish. She won’t talk and she won’t complain. She accepts things just as a child does, and doesn’t try to protest. I know it is because she doesn’t want to make us unhappy, but we know her looks and voice too well. I sometimes wonder if when her mother and I are dead she will be happier. Then there will be no one to hide her secrets from. Ah, well, it is useless to regret and useless to look ahead. You say you were at Oxford, Ensor — which college?”

  Most agreeably Ensor had been at Mr. Howard’s old college, so that fellowship was established, and the conversation didn’t return to Aurea. Perhaps Mr. Howard felt he had said too much. But Valentine thought again, as they walked, of darkness under her eyes and a little hollow below each cheekbone, and wanted to be allowed to touch her face, once, very gently.

  As they came in they met Arthur and Aurea. Aurea was windblown, untidy and wet. Arthur said she had sped along like a greyhound, landed him in a boggy meadow, and torn him to pieces by trying short cuts through barbed wire.

  “I am enjoying myself frightfully, Fanny,” said Aurea as they all came into the drawing room. “It was a heavenly walk, and tea to look forward to.”

  “What did you talk about?” said Fanny.

  “Mostly nothing,” said Aurea. “We just walked.”

  After tea Fanny’s energy abated. She summoned Valentine to play duets with her on the piano, which were much like other duets, with loud countings, pushings and shovings, fights for the pedals, and moments of more acute agony when they scratched each other’s fingers because their parts overlapped, or were written too close together. But all performances are more for the pleasure of the players than the audience.

  The rest of the party were allowed to lie stretched on sofas, or wallowing in large chairs. Mr. and Mrs. Howard went gently to sleep in spite of the duets, and Fanny, seeing this, obligingly trampled on the soft pedal and kept it down in spite of Valentine’s efforts to dislodge her. Apart from a belief that when once a note was more than two ledger lines above or below the stave it didn’t matter what you played, she was a good sight reader. Valentine didn’t read so well, but he had the unfair advantage of hands that could take ten notes easily with some black ones in between, and he kept accurate time. So that, on the whole, he and Fanny were pretty evenly matched.

  “I am so happy, Arthur,” said Aurea. “It’s all perfect here. Food, fires and friends.”

  Arthur said nothing, but one was used to that. Secretly he rejoiced that his house was giving Aurea pleasure. What she had just said must be meant a little for him. She was lying quietly back in her chair watching the fire. Looking at her he was conscious of heavenly rest, a pervading stillness that turned all his thoughts to a deep, brooding affection. Her sensitive face was a mirror to her wandering thoughts of laughter, of anxiety, of fear. At last her eyes brimmed with tears, and she began to dab them furtively with her handkerchief. Arthur was appalled and looked around anxiously, but the Howards were safely asleep, Fanny and Valentine dealing with a slow movement that had far too many demi-semiquavers, and the room too dimly lighted for anyone to see Aurea’s desolate face. She looked once at him and apparently reassured by his immobility, made no attempt to restrain the flow of her tears. He was afraid to move or say a word lest this strange unhappy confidence should be frightened away. He felt that Aurea had something to tell him, but what it was he could not guess. There must be some help for her silent grief, but one hardly dared to offer any. His long habit of silence could not be easily broken, and probably no words would be much good. He leaned forward with his pipe in his hands, screening Aurea from the piano. After what felt like eternity a thin voice said, “Thank you, Arthur. I am good now. It was about leaving mother and papa.”

  “I see,” he said. He was shaken by this rediscovery of Aurea. All his thoughts of her as a brilliant unattainable creature were shattered. It was only a frightened and desperately homesick child trying to behave.
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br />   “You don’t despise me, do you?” went on the tear-exhausted small voice.

  Arthur would have given a good deal to break through his barriers of reserve. All he could say was, “No, I don’t.”

  This seemed to reassure Aurea, who went on, “You see I simply can’t bear to think of leaving them again. Would you mind if I go on talking a little.”

  Arthur said nothing, but pulled his sheltering chair a little nearer, and busied himself with relighting his pipe.

  “You see, it’s worse every time,” said Aurea, who had stopped crying, “and I feel such a devil. Of course I know there are the children and I adore them, but one’s children don’t really need one, and one’s parents do. It is so awful to think of them missing me. I could put up with it if it were only I missing them, but when I have got into that horrible ship going in the wrong direction I begin to think of them alone at home, so wanting me, and it’s more than I can bear. I never ought to have left them, but what can one do? I married for love and what can a woman do more? It comes partly of being so respectably brought up. I always thought if you fell in love with a person you married them — just like that. It didn’t occur to me to weigh anything, or think things over. And of course we didn’t think Ned’s newspaper would keep him always in Canada. Our plan was to make a fortune and come back, but the fortune didn’t get made and Ned likes Canada. So there am I on one side of the sea, and mother and papa on the other. Arthur, every night of my life I dream that I am at home again, and when I wake up I’m not. It doesn’t need much psychoanalysis to analyze that. And every night when I am over here I dream that I am back in Canada, and can’t make out why, and I cry and cry, and then, thank goodness, I wake up and I am safely here. But soon I shall be back in Canada again with that other dream. Oh, dear!”

  “You are still very beautiful,” said Arthur.

  Aurea managed a rather doleful smile. “Thank you, Arthur,” she said. “Coming from a gentleman of your well-known insusceptibility, of course one values it. But I feel terribly humble in front of you.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because of you being so happy with Fanny.”

  “But why should that make you feel humble?”

  “Perhaps it sounds mad, but when one sees people being very happy and having successful marriages, one feels very out of it, and one respects something in them that one can’t do oneself.”

  “Aren’t you happy then?” said Arthur, looking at the fire.

  “Oh, no.”

  “Could I do anything?”

  “Nothing, thank you. There’s nothing wrong that you could lay your finger on. Only if Ned were just comfortably dead it would not be very regrettable. Now I suppose you despise me.”

  “I don’t change my opinion of you.”

  “Oh, thank you. I really am grateful for people being kind. Don’t think I’m a heartless beast. It isn’t Ned’s fault altogether. I’m a poor kind of wife in some ways. We are just — different.”

  “How?”

  Aurea looked as if she were going to speak, and then thought better of it.

  “You can’t shock me,” said Arthur placidly.

  “I wouldn’t try. It’s just nothing,” she added, looking somberly away. “Only things. Things I hate. Things I can’t bear. At least, that’s not true, because whatever you have to bear, you can bear. And if you can bear one thing, they, whoever they are, say, ‘Ha-ha, she can stand that, can she? Very well, let’s give her some more.’”

  Enthralled by this philosophical flight, Aurea looked almost cheerful again.

  “It is such a help to talk about myself,” she explained, “and so very bad for me. I didn’t mean to.”

  “I like it,” said Arthur. “You see I know quite a lot about life — professionally — and you can say anything you like to me. It’s safe.”

  “Do you mean not even tell Fanny?” said Aurea.

  “Certainly not Fanny.”

  At this moment the duet came to a long-drawn end of interminable tonic and dominant chords. The Howards woke up. Fanny remarked in a loud voice that Beethoven never knew when to stop, adding kindly that it was doubtless because he was deaf. Then she took Mrs. Howard and Aurea to the kitchen to make amusing things for Sunday supper, and for the rest of the evening conversation was general. Aurea went quite happily to bed, but after an hour’s sleep she woke suddenly and could not sleep again. There was a storm in her mind that she couldn’t understand. The night felt like a century’s delirium, where all thoughts, all remembrances fled faster than the wind, and returned in maddening recurrence. Reading was no good, for she couldn’t understand what she read. It was useless to have drinks of water, or look out of the window. Nothing would stop the riot in her mind. It was not till long after that first rowdy and ill-timed chorus of birds, who have nothing better to do than to yell before dawn and then go happily to sleep themselves, leaving a wrecked and exasperated world hopelessly awake, that she closed her eyes. When Fanny called her next morning, she felt battered and spent. Fanny could have diagnosed it, but Fanny for once was blind.

  Chapter 3

  Mr. and Mrs. Howard and Arthur went off by the early train as arranged. Fanny, Aurea and Valentine idled away an hour or two pleasantly enough before driving up to town. Aurea and Valentine sat in the back seat, and Valentine regrettably took Aurea’s hand.

  “Do you know,” she said gravely, “that this is a very common kind of behavior.”

  “What is?”

  “Holding people’s hands in cars.”

  “Then let’s be common,” said Valentine cheerfully.

  So they were common till they got to London, where Fanny dropped Valentine at a tube station and drove Aurea home.

  “Goodbye, and a thousand thanks for a heavenly time,” said Aurea. “I expect we shall meet you at the Sinclairs’ on Tuesday.”

  “No, I don’t think we shall go. Val has chucked us to dine with you, and I don’t like to go to a party with nothing but a husband.” And having planted this barbed shaft, Fanny drove off, leaving Aurea rather uncomfortable. Had she perhaps been poaching on Fanny’s preserves? Would Fanny really mind because Valentine had thrown her over? It would be horrid if she did, because one wanted Arthur’s wife to like one, and one thought on the whole she did, in spite of her brusque ways. Would it perhaps be better to ring Valentine up and tell him to come another evening? But even as this foolish thought passed through her mind, she knew that whatever happened Valentine must dine with her on Tuesday. It was already one whole hour since she had seen him, and there were, roughly, thirty more hours to be got through before she could see him again. Anything might happen in that time. Valentine had broken one engagement to dine with her: mightn’t he break his word to her for someone else? He has deceived his hostess and may thee, she remarked sardonically to herself. This made her laugh, but almost at once her laughter was swallowed up in anxiety. Even if Valentine did mean to keep his word, he might be unavoidably detained, or be ill. Or she might be ill herself, or her father and mother might be ill, or even worse the cook, in which case Mrs. Howard would certainly want to put Valentine off. Or it might be a mistake about the night. Ought she to ring him up and make perfectly sure that it was Tuesday? She ran downstairs and got as far as the telephone, when she had to stop for breath. Her heart was thumping so hard that she knew she couldn’t speak naturally, and she had the horribly empty feeling which is experienced in a rapidly descending lift. She went slowly upstairs again to her room and knew at last, fatally, what had happened. This, she reflected, is being in love.

  She sat on a chair, suspended in a whirling void, empty of all thoughts, all emotions; hurled skywards by great whirlwinds; dropping like a plummet to the depths of the earth; consumed in hidden fires; overwhelmed beneath roaring mountainous billows; deafened, blinded, deprived of all power to speak or feel. From her looking glass a strange woman stared at her. All values were lost and time had ceased to exist. Eternity passed in a few moments. After millions of years
the winds and waves and flames subsided. Time was restored. Her own face looked at her from the glass.

  The day passed in a trance. Night had no sleep; only waking dreams, where all her thoughts were of Waterside, reliving every moment again and again, listening to what Valentine said, reading fresh meanings into his words, tormenting herself with fears that they might never meet again, feeling sure that Valentine cared for her, but not knowing how much, longing to see him, fearing to see him, shaken and wasted as she had never been.

  The next day passed as they always do. The world did not come to an end, nor had Valentine forgotten his engagement. He turned up at eight o’clock punctually, looking clean and distinguished. At the sight of him, Aurea thought perhaps it was all a dream from which she would awake heartwhole.

  Mrs. Howard was inwardly almost as much perturbed as her daughter. Sitting at dinner between Aurea and Valentine, she observed them both anxiously. Aurea was quite obviously a little drunk with excitement, but then the child had a way of sparkling when gentlemen were about. Not, Mrs. Howard reflected fondly, that she had ever run after men, but she had a charming feminine reaction to their company. Mrs. Howard was all in favor of her daughter amusing herself, but this was something more alarming than Aurea’s usual amusements. She would trust Aurea herself under any circumstances. The child had what used to be called good principles, and these would serve her well. But what about Mr. Ensor? She had taken a liking to him and had a vaguely protective feeling about him. If he were going to fall in love with Aurea it would do him no good. Aurea would always control her feelings, and Mr. Ensor was probably used to charmers who didn’t. He would very likely be hurt, and it would make Aurea miserable. She didn’t feel at all capable of handling either of them. It was particularly unlucky that he should have turned up near the end of Aurea’s stay, when she was unhappy and needing distraction. She stole a glance at the unhappy daughter, who was looking extremely pretty and being very impertinently funny, but betraying nothing except what a mother’s morbidly watchful eye might detect. Mr. Ensor, on the other hand, was in a quite alarming state. His excellent appetite was indeed in no way affected, but his eyes were nearly starting out of his head; he was talking quite incoherently, and had a general look of straining at a leash which might snap at any moment. Mrs. Howard sighed to herself at the difficulty of it all. It was hard work being a mother, she thought. One had a daughter, and she married and left one. Then she wasn’t happy. It might be partly her own fault or not, but she was your own child whatever happened, and you could kill anyone who hurt her. Aurea had written less and less about her life with Ned of late years, and wouldn’t talk about him. Mrs. Howard, as ignorant as only a happily married woman of her generation can be, had vague fears and suspicions from which she resolutely averted her mind. Aurea, she felt sure, did not care for any other man. She had loved Ned Palgrave as a girl, and was too honest to seek refuge from disillusionment in having affairs. Mrs. Howard knew her daughter had been dead for years as far as affection for her husband was concerned. Friends and children filled her life, and she had told herself they must be enough. There were worse fates, Mrs. Howard tried to persuade herself, than having a husband one didn’t love. He might be a brute, or a drug-fiend, or an unlucky gambler, or unfaithful: though this last word was one which Mrs. Howard would hardly have said aloud. But Mrs. Howard was not going to sit by and see Aurea made more unhappy than necessary, and if Mr. Ensor was going to complicate her life she felt she would have to interfere, even at the risk of rousing Aurea’s resentment. Perhaps Mr. Ensor, who was too nice to be hurt, would see reason on the subject. Vain faith of a mother and courage vain!