Ankle Deep

by Angela Thirkell

  “Oh, go on thinking that.”

  The taxi hooted outside. Valentine promptly opened the drawing room window and putting his head out, shouted to it to wait.

  “You are extravagant,” said Aurea, “throwing away twopences like this.”

  “That’s the dashing kind of character I am.”

  Aurea picked her cloak up. Valentine made a movement to help her, but she was rather nervous, and got behind a chair and put it on herself. The disadvantage of having gone behind a chair was that one was so hemmed in. Valentine was between Aurea and the door, and she wondered if she could get out without an exhausting wrangle.

  “Aurea,” exclaimed the enamored swain, “I must have something of yours to remind me of you.”

  “How very material you are,” said the adored one.

  “A glove, a handkerchief, anything,” and Valentine began to look distracted again. Aurea looked in her bag. “Here is a handkerchief,” she said meditatively, “but it doesn’t seem to be a very clean one. Oh, here you are — a perfectly new handkerchief.” She handed it, neatly folded, to Valentine, who took it with an expression of passionate imbecility and put it into his waistcoat pocket. At the same time Aurea slipped out toward the door, remarking, “It has no name on it, so when the other charmers see it, they won’t know whose it is.”

  “How dare you?” cried Valentine in a fit of indignant virtue. “I was perfectly right. You were cool and far off — the coolest and farthest off person I ever met.”

  Aurea, safely near the door, made one last attempt to return to sanity. “Oh, Valentine,” she said piteously, “you must think me a perfect half-wit, but I don’t know what to do. You see, I’ve never been in love with a gentleman before, except getting married, and I don’t know the rules. I know I’m a fool, but I do see that this is what is called playing with fire, and it is very foolish and wrong, and should be discouraged. Couldn’t you possibly help me?”

  What should a gentleman do in such a situation? Valentine was for once completely at a loss. If it had been one of the other charmers — but with them the situation would never have arisen. They liked you to put your arm around their waist, and if you did kiss them they didn’t much notice it, except in so far as it deranged hair or make-up. Never before had he been asked to lay down the lines on which a love affair should proceed, and he was completely baffled. What he wanted to say was, “To hell with everything,” and take Aurea straight off to Havana, or Sicily, or some equally practical and convenient place. But there seemed to be so many obstacles. It was late; the banks would be shut; one couldn’t get a berth or a passport at midnight; and, anyway, one hadn’t any money. One couldn’t pick her up and take her to one’s bed-sitting-room; equally, one couldn’t spend the night here. Mrs. Howard was expecting her daughter; the taxi was ticking up twopences; Fanny — blast Fanny — knew where one was and would be full of indiscreet questions. And all the time, there was the idol of one’s heart, looking distracted, and asking for guidance which one was incompetent and quite unworthy to offer.

  If those two foolish lovers had known it, there was such a simple way out. If Valentine, knocking down a chair and tripping up on the electric light wire, had taken Aurea in his arms, squashed the breath out of her body, and kissed her unmercifully, it is probable that much misery would have been prevented for everyone concerned. Aurea’s emotions worked largely in her head, the other kind being stiff with disuse. Her mind was terrified of a kiss or an embrace. Her heart — or whatever one chooses to call that part of one that isn’t mind — had told her quite unmistakably what it wanted. One doesn’t feel as if one were sitting under a millrace for nothing. But the poor half-wit, as she very properly called herself, didn’t understand what her heart was saying. And if she had, she would have told it to be quiet and hold its tongue, and remember she was a lady. If Valentine had taken no notice of her appeal and taken her in his arms, it would have done her all the good in the world. She would have been terrified, then furious, then forgotten to be a lady and smacked his face, then burst into floods of refreshing tears, then had hysterics, and then quite genuinely laughed at herself. Then she would have stopped being frightened, and made great friends with Valentine with much less sentiment involved. They would have danced together, and dined together, and come home in taxis late at night, and no harm done. And when Aurea went back to Canada, she would think of it all as a pleasant spring night’s dream.

  As for Valentine he would have got what he wanted and, as far as the hysterics were concerned, what he deserved. If a gentleman who has great experience in affairs chooses to set his wits against a lady who has no experience at all, and is handicapped by good principles, the odds are all in his favor. But if to his experience she opposes quite infuriating and dense stupidity and innocence, all his arts are discounted, and serve him right. There was plenty of good in Valentine to respond to any lead in the right direction. His worst fault was that he frittered all his time and energies and emotions away when he wasn’t at work. A frightened and hysterical Aurea would have made him pull himself together faster than anything else. And he would have felt a little ashamed and quite unrepentant, and they would have had such fun together. But poor, silly Aurea didn’t know this any more than he did, and without meaning to she was leading him on far more than the most expert charmer could have done. Courage was needed, and unfortunately though she had plenty of it, it was of a negative kind. She would refuse to let Valentine touch her or take her hand, though she died a thousand deaths in refusing. But she could not tell him to go. Valentine had too much good feeling to attempt what she so obviously feared, but it was asking too much to expect him to renounce Aurea on the spot.

  “My dear,” he said, very kindly, “there are only two ways out. One is impossible, and doesn’t come into this story at all. The other is that I should put you into your taxi and say goodbye to you now — and forever.”

  Aurea again disconcerted her admirer by blushing apparently from head to foot. “Oh, I suppose I know what you mean,” she said doubtfully, as though her recognition of his meaning might be taken as a proof of innate viciousness. Then the horrible thought of never seeing him again wiped out everything else.

  “Oh, but I couldn’t say goodbye to you now,” she cried. “I haven’t the strength of mind. It will be quite bad enough when we have to say goodbye.”

  “It will be far, far worse then, my dear,” said Valentine.

  “It couldn’t be worse than it is now,” said Aurea, so drowned in grief that she had forgotten her fears, and laid both her hands on Valentine’s arm. He very gently took them off and didn’t hold them.

  “Ten thousand times worse,” he repeated. “But you shall do whatever you like. And now I have spent my twopence, and we must go.”

  “A lady and gentleman going to a party,” said she without moving.

  “Is that what you want?”

  “I suppose so. Yes, please.”

  So the lady and gentleman went downstairs and got into the taxi, and Valentine behaved like a perfect gentleman and Aurea like a perfect lady. An outsider would have noticed that they both talked in highly unnatural voices and were quite incoherent, neither knowing what they said themselves, nor what the other said. But no outsider was there to applaud their behavior. Valentine left Aurea at the Sinclairs’, and went to his club, and wrote letters to Aurea and tore them up till he was turned out.

  Aurea went through the party in a dream. Fanny was, as usual, to the fore, with a group of cavaliers to whom she talked with great ignorance and effrontery about music. Aurea discovered Arthur morosely smoking on the landing. The string quartet had far exceeded his worst fears. Not only were there four foreigners playing stringed instruments, but there was another fellow with an oboe, and worst of all, a woman singing. People might call it Bach, said Arthur bitterly, but he didn’t think it was the kind of thing to ask people to hear. Aurea was incapable of hearing anything intelligently, so she agreed with Arthur and suggested that they should go d
own to supper before the rest of the party got loose. So they went downstairs and found a little table in a corner, and Aurea drank quantities of champagne, which to her great astonishment, had no effect upon her at all.

  “I usually get drunk on practically nothing,” she explained quite unnecessarily to Arthur, “but tonight I seem to have a three-bottle head.”

  “Drunk,” said Arthur scornfully. “You don’t know what the word means. If ever you had drunk so hard that you had to pull up at once or go under, you could talk. I drank far too much once for a few months, and I had to stop myself short because it wasn’t doing me any good; and that was no fun at all.”

  “You weren’t really a confirmed drunkard, were you?” said Aurea, looking so alarmed that Arthur began to laugh.

  “No, goose,” he said. “But when the girl you love goes and marries someone else, you must work, or walk, or drink. I had just enough work then to keep me in London, so I couldn’t get away and walk. But there wasn’t enough to keep me occupied all the time. So I drank.”

  “But you don’t now,” said she anxiously.

  “Oh, no — it’s too expensive for a married man with a family.”

  “I hope it wasn’t at all my fault,” said Aurea hesitatingly. “I couldn’t bear to think that I had ever made you unhappy.”

  “That’s all right,” said Arthur, “you didn’t.” Aurea felt secretly rather disappointed. “But,” he added, relapsing into his usual somber mood, “I think you would make anyone very unhappy that you didn’t care for.”

  After this he became speechless, and Aurea was not sorry when a round of decent applause proclaimed the end of the music, and the audience began pouring into the supper-room. She was glad to see her mother safely escorted by their host. Then Fanny with three gentlemen in tow appeared at the next table.

  “Hello, Aurea,” she shouted across the tumult, “Why didn’t you bring Val?”

  “He wasn’t invited,” shouted Aurea, “and I’m not a gate-crasher.”

  “You took long enough getting here, anyway,” said the unabashed Fanny. “What were you doing?”

  “Making love, of course,” said Aurea desperately. The remark was a complete success, and from that moment Fanny’s suspicious mind was entirely at rest. She insisted on having her table pushed up close to Arthur’s so that they made one party. Her companions, belying Valentine’s prophecy, did not despise Arthur for being in a black tie, and Arthur took occasion to point out to his wife that their host was also in a dinner jacket. When the quartet came in, they all turned out to be friends of Fanny’s, and kissed her hand and added themselves to the party. Fanny was enjoying herself frightfully with seven admirers around her, and managed to flirt outrageously with every one of them. Aurea was delighted and amused by Fanny’s brilliance, and entirely unenvious of what she couldn’t hope to emulate. Arthur, she thought, looked suddenly tired. It must sometimes be difficult to work hard all day and keep up with Fanny at night. Arthur had absented himself, as he so often did, from the noisy surroundings, and was leaning back, wrapped in his own thoughts. Now and again his eye fell tolerantly and admiringly on his wayward wife. He knew that she would not notice that he was tired, but if he could force himself to be so far articulate as to hint to her that he was, she was capable of getting up in such a whirlwind of repentant haste as to upset the table, and taking him straight home. Therefore, he said nothing. Aurea, he thought, looked very lovely, and he rejoiced to see her looking so happy. The memory of her silent tears had been with him, uncomfortably, ever since Sunday.

  Then people began to go, and Aurea said goodbye and went off to find her mother. As they drove back, mother and daughter were silent. Mrs. Howard was wondering whether she had better tell Aurea about her conversation with Mr. Ensor. On the whole, better not, she thought. One could trust Mr. Ensor to say nothing about it and it might, not unnaturally, annoy Aurea. When they were home Mrs. Howard did summon up courage to say, “Is it quite all right about Mr. Ensor, darling?” and Aurea answered, “Absolutely all right, darling. We are terribly in love and it is going to be a tremendous affair.” Then she kissed her mother and ran upstairs and, overcome with excitement, emotion and champagne, went to sleep at once. As it is the last good night she will have for many weeks to come, it is just as well that she should sleep soundly now.

  Mrs. Howard looked softly in at her husband’s door, and found him peacefully asleep. She went to her own room, wondering about Aurea’s last words which had partly alarmed and partly reassured her. If by any conceivable chance Aurea were speaking the exact truth, how appalling and hopeless. But that was impossible. She knew Aurea too well. From a child she had had an ostrich way of hiding her emotions which made them but all too visible. She had never been able to pretend that she didn’t care for people well enough to deceive anyone. If she really cared for Mr. Ensor, she wouldn’t be able to talk of it so lightly. In fact, her whole attitude to him from the beginning had been so open that there couldn’t be much in it. What had probably happened was that Mr. Ensor had made some kind of declaration and Aurea, who was really good at keeping people off, had laughed him out of it. And what Aurea had said was just her customary exaggeration, to make it sound important. Probably she would be a little beside herself for the next few weeks, and rather in a whirl of lunches and dinners and taxis, but that would keep her from thinking of her departure, and Mrs. Howard could not bear the moments when her child forgot to forget and her face suddenly became haggard and lined. Mrs. Howard was a kind woman, but she sometimes wished to herself, as her daughter had wished, that Ned Palgrave were just comfortably dead. But he wasn’t, nor was he likely to be, so one must make the best of things, and be glad that Mr. Ensor had taken one’s perhaps quite unnecessary interference so nicely. She sighed, took up a book, and read herself to sleep.

  Chapter 4

  The next few weeks were to be the happiest and the unhappiest that Aurea had ever known, or was ever to know again. As she explained to Valentine, “The trouble is, Valentine, that I loved you before I had time to know if I liked you. I quite thought I was going to like you very much at Waterside, and then suddenly this love business had to get in the way and I loved you so much that I simply couldn’t see straight, and I haven’t the faintest idea whether we could be friends or not. I think possibly not, but now I shall never know.” It didn’t matter in the least, Valentine assured her; but Aurea didn’t take much notice of what he said, because she knew he was wrong. She had made him into an idea, and ideas are quite fatal to women. If they get abstract ideas they become magistrates, or run the local branch of the League of Nations Union, or found a new Women’s Institute if they live in the country, and they take their object very seriously, and do their work far too conscientiously, and without any of that necessary sense of the ultimate worthlessness of everything one does. Still, it keeps them happy and out of mischief, and at least does no very serious harm. Mrs. Howard had for years had an amiable idea about the poor, and had tired herself very much by committees and visiting, putting so much personal interest into it that she would usually finish the day on the sofa. Then she had overheard a chance remark by one of her poor women about a lady who was visiting the poor, and entrapping mothers to bring their babies to a clinic to be weighed weekly. Waste of time, and worrying to the mothers, thought Mrs. Howard privately. In my time if a baby slept all night and didn’t cry, all was well. Now, if it doesn’t put on the Board of Health standard number of ounces in the week, the mother is wildly anxious for the next seven days, and that doesn’t do the baby any good. “Poor thing,” the woman had said of the visitor, with the large and tolerant philosophy of the poor, “she likes it and I let her.” That was about the ultimate value of ideas.

  But there was a far more dangerous idea for women and that was a personal one. Body and mind appeared to be far more mixed up in women than in men, so that one didn’t quite know the difference between a mental attraction and a physical one. But if once your mind was possessed by an idea it
might drag your body into anything. Aurea knew, fatally and dispassionately, that Valentine was not suitable for her, not quite worthy of her. It might sound conceited to think that, but it was true nevertheless. She knew that if Heaven had suddenly seen fit to remove Ned and make her a widow, incidentally providing either her or Valentine with a large income, things would have been little better than they were. She and Valentine could never live in peace together. Even making allowances for the fierce jangling of nerves which their present inharmonious relations involved, they were too different ever to mix. Putting aside all talk of intellectual interests, or tastes in common, physical passion was, if one looked straight at things, the only way they could at all understand each other. And in that Aurea had little faith, having already experienced its transitory qualities. Already she was aware, though she didn’t like to think of it, that she cared for Valentine, fatally, more than he could care for her, and that this would always be the case. Not that she questioned the real sincerity of his love, but she knew, as well as if she had seen it in a magic mirror, that Valentine was, luckily for himself, incapable of living on the passions of the mind. When they parted, he would be wretched beyond speech, and suffer deeply. But the end of it would be a scar that had healed, and quite possibly oblivion when another woman had crossed his path, who had a right to give all that Aurea could not and dared not offer. Her own case would be different. Love, she concluded, was like red hair, or a deformity of some sort. You had it; and that was that. Nothing but death could part you; as for after death, useless to discuss that. Eternal rest would be enough, if one could only be sure of getting it. Her love would not be a scar that had healed. It would be something that was always with her. There would be days, later, perhaps, weeks and months, when it would lie quiet in her breast. Then for no reason, called up by one of the thousand chances that stir the chords of the heart, it would blaze again and be the torture one so well knew it to be. Then for weeks, days, perhaps months, one would be so consumed, so shaken by the mere thought of a man whom one had never even kissed, that the world would become distant and veiled. No one ever to talk to about it. And in a few years one would be too old for him to care for one, even if he had remembered. A man of forty would have his life before him. A woman of forty would have done her work, which was, after all, having children, Aurea supposed, and trying to bring them up. After that your children took you in hand and brought you up, and you were lucky if they were even interested enough to do that. But as for love, it would only be silly — the kind of thing one laughed at in other people. No, there was nothing for it but to grin and bear it, and to be extraordinarily glad that one hadn’t gone through life without this experience, even if it brought no kind of happiness with it. And what in the name of heaven was happiness? Certainly being in love wasn’t happiness; it meant every kind of torture, only inexplicably, one wouldn’t have it otherwise. Perhaps it was only another idea. One made an idea of a person in one’s head, and then decided that everything to do with this idea must be happiness. Then one accepted gratefully all the pains that it involved. So that the only way to get through life comfortably would be to have no ideas at all, in fact, to be an idiot. And that’s what I am, thought Aurea, only the wrong sort, without any of the advantages.