Ten Pollitt Place

by C. H. B. Kitchin

  Her thoughts, as always now, when she was unhappy, swung back to Robert hungrily. While he was with her, she could forget her worries and her sins. Oh that Thursday would come!

  [2]

  On Thursday, at half-past twelve, Dorothy came down­stairs with a suitcase. Another suitcase, which Robert had carried down earlier, was waiting for her in the hall. Magda, coming up from the basement at that moment, said, ‘Oh, Mrs Fawley, can I get you a taxi?’ Dorothy said, ‘That would be kind, if you’re sure you’re not too busy,’ admired herself in a Chinese Chippendale mirror, that had come from the drawing­-room at Polvannion, and sat down. She had never taken greatly to Magda, whom she thought too shy or too sullen to make a congenial servant, though no doubt the girl was an excellent worker. She couldn’t be having very much of a life, spending her days upstairs with Miss Tredennick (who, though a charming old lady, could no doubt be a tyrant when the mood took her), or on the ground-floor, cleaning Mr Bray’s beautiful things, and tied, in such free time as she had, to that stick of a mother. No wonder she went about with a look of glum resignation. Still, just lately, perhaps, she had been looking a little more alive, though one couldn’t say she looked happy. Again Dorothy wondered idly (as she had done on the morning of Miss Tredennick’s birthday), if Magda had a young man. She might be quite attractive if she had proper clothes and knew how to wear them.

  Dorothy surveyed her own outfit with pride. It was one of Garrows’ new season’s models. She wanted to make a good impression on Susan, and she’d always heard that Hove, if not Brighton, was a smart resort. After all, she might just as well wear her best things there as hoard them for London. Robert never noticed what she was wearing, and they so rarely went out to places where clothes mattered.

  It promised to be a most exciting fortnight—putting finish­ing touches to Susan’s new flat and dressing the window of her little shop—and when she came back, there’d be only one more week of November to get through before December and Christmas. During that time, she’d have her own shopping to do, and Miss Tredennick’s to finish. About Christmas itself, she was still undecided. Louise might ask her and Robert to join the house-party in Cambridgeshire, but Dorothy doubted if Robert would accept. It hardly seemed right for her to go there and leave him alone in London, though he probably wouldn’t be at all unhappy. He’d find something to tinker at in his workshop, and no doubt some colleague of his or one of his Hackfield friends would ask him out for dinner on Christmas Day.

  Then a more thrilling possibility occurred to her. She might persuade Susan to come to London over the holidays. Susan could sleep on the sofa in the sitting-room,—or could they turn Robert’s study into a bedroom, just for those few days? (Her enterprising mind had already transformed Robert’s workshop into a study.) At all events, there were two or three ways of escape from what in her heart she most dreaded,—being forced to spend dark day after dark day cooped up with Robert in the flat, with no shops to look at, no little parties to go to, and probably no friends to come and see her. That was more or less what had happened the previous year, and she was resolved to do all she could not to let it happen again.

  The taxi arrived. Magda helped her in with her luggage and stood watching while the taxi turned into the Crescent. Then she sighed with relief and thought, ‘If only something could happen to stop her from ever coming back here.’

  In the area, Hugo was talking to Bert, and caught Magda’s eye as she glanced down at him from the steps. The dustman said, ‘Do you know, you’ve got a very pretty sister?’ Hugo scowled as he answered, ‘She’s dull and often bad-tempered. And she’s horrid to me, whenever she gets the chance. I wish she would go away and work somewhere else.’

  [3]

  When Robert came home from his office that evening, his first thought was to make sure that his wife had really left the house. Yes, her two suitcases had gone, and so had her toilet-things, dressing-gown, bedroom slippers and night-dress—though he noticed with amusement that Swinburne’s Atalanta still lay on the bedside table. Then he went to the sitting-room, turned out the lights, and in unconscious imitation of Miss Tredennick, sat in a chair by the window, keeping watch. But unlike her gaze, which moved up and down between the front door and top window of Number Seven, his was directed only to the area gate of Number Ten and the iron stairway leading up to it.

  He hadn’t long to wait before he saw, first Hugo, and then Mrs Muller climbing up the steps and emerging on to the pavement. As soon as their backs disappeared at the street-corner, Robert drew the curtains, careful to leave no chinks through which an inquisitive neighbour opposite could spy. Then he went to the bedroom, stripped and had a bath. While he was drying himself, he noticed a bottle of eau-de-Cologne on a shelf in the bathroom, and like a young schoolgirl who tries the effect of her mother’s lipstick for the first time, he took it down and dabbed the scent all over his chest and under his arms. Then he walked naked into the bedroom and was about to dress himself, when he felt a sudden distaste for his travel-stained clothes and wondered if they smelt. He bundled them impulsively into a drawer and took out a pair of clean pyjamas and a thin silk dressing-gown (a gift from Dorothy the previous Christmas, though he had never yet worn it), and put them on. Then he went back to the sitting-room and without switching on the light he opened the door a couple of inches and listened for Magda’s footsteps on the stairs.

  She came up from the basement soon before seven. When she reached the first landing, he saw her pause just outside the door, looking uneasy and puzzled because it was ajar. He flung it wide open, and seizing her in his arms, carried her over the threshold into the dark room and kissed her passionately. She made no effort to struggle from his embrace, but whispered to him, ‘I’ve got to get her dinner ready first. She’s only having a little soup—which is ready—and an omelette. I’ll come to you on my way down, but I shan’t be able to stay more than twenty minutes, as I shall have to go upstairs again and wash up and settle her for the night.’

  He said, ‘And after that, darling? What is the earliest your mother and Hugo will be back?’

  ‘They can’t be back before a quarter to eleven, if they stay for the whole film. Of course, if Hugo says he’s feeling ill or bored—and he might easily—they might be back any time.’

  ‘We shall have to risk that,’ he murmured. ‘I’m so excited to-night, I’m prepared to risk anything—and to make you risk it. I should like to walk hand in hand with you down the street and let those prying people at the windows see us together and point at us and hiss their silly disapproval. It’s all your doing. I’ve never been like this before.’

  She said, ‘I must go now,’ drew herself gently away, smoothed her hair and her dress and went upstairs.

  When she came down again, she found that he’d made some coffee and laid a tray with potted shrimps and brown bread-and-butter.

  He said, ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t have your dinner while she’s having hers.’ Magda smiled happily and answered, ‘But what will Mother say when she comes home and finds I haven’t eaten my supper in our kitchen?’

  ‘Is she bound to know?’

  ‘Well, I think I can make it look as if I have. But, Robert, how long shall we have to go on pretending like this?’ The moment she had asked the question she regretted it, but he answered readily, ‘We’re not even going to consider that question to-night—or any other question. There’s a whole lovely fortnight ahead of us. Now, tell me honestly—can you cut bread-and-butter quite as thin as I can?’

  She laughed outright. ‘Yes, much thinner. When Miss Tredennick has it for tea, it’s almost as thin as tissue-paper.’

  They chatted gaily, but with a nervous eagerness, as if both of them, knowing that this interlude must be short, longed for it to be over. When it was time for Magda to go upstairs again, Robert said, ‘I don’t know how I shall bear waiting for you. You must hurry and skimp your work, or I shall go mad!’

  When she had gone, he cleared up the remains of their l
ittle meal and paced up and down the room, with his eye on the clock. The strain of his inaction was so great that every nerve in his body began to quiver in an agony of frustration, and he had a feeling of panic. What was the matter with him? Was he losing his grip on himself? Was this the way that nervous breakdowns started? Would he soon find himself shouting or sobbing or tearing his hair, or, worse, ringing up for a doctor?

  Then suddenly it occurred to him to wonder what he would do if Magda didn’t come to see him again that night. Suppose, for example, Miss Tredennick felt ill and wanted Magda to sit up with her? If that happened, he thought he would really go mad. He’d rush upstairs, seize the selfish old bitch by the shoulders and fling her out of the window, like Jezebel. Or he’d strangle her quietly or smother her with a pillow. Any­thing to rid the world of such an incubus. As it was, he’d half a mind to storm into her bedroom and let her know what would come to her, if she showed any sign of interfering between him and Magda.

  Again, he wondered what was the matter with him. Was this the normal result of being in love? He’d never felt like that about Dorothy, with whom—evidently—he’d never been in love at all. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that theologians and sociologists disapproved of passionate love, the former declaring that it came between man and his Maker, and the latter discouraging it as apt to impair the smooth working of the social organism. Well, let the theologians and sociologists rant as they would, he was in love with Magda, and that was enough.

  When she came down and tapped softly on the door, these and other perplexities troubled neither of them for two splendid hours.

  On the floor above, Miss Tredennick was lying awake. She had tried to sleep, but for some reason her mind was restless. She switched on the light and picked up the book by her bed,—some nineteenth-century memoirs—but they failed to hold her attention and she turned the pages mechanically, hardly taking in a word of what she was reading. The whole time, she was waiting for something to happen in the street or in Number Seven, and she interpreted every faint noise that reached her ears as signal that some drama was about to begin. But nothing rewarded her wakefulness that night.

  Justin too was in bed and sleepless. He had dined early with his publisher, who lived at some distance from London, and had been told, rather brutally, that Seven Silent Sinners had been a failure from the financial point of view and that there had been no gain of prestige to justify the expense. As for Justin’s new book, his publisher didn’t even ask what its title was to be.

  But this was only one of Justin’s worries. The rather odd sensation near his heart—not exactly a pain, though no doubt it would soon become one—was troubling him again, although he’d come home in a taxi. On the way, he had also noticed a dryness at the back of his throat and nose which meant that another cold was in store for him. One of his two remaining teeth was aching a little, and if that had to come out, there would be no escape from a new and much more cumbersome sort of denture. The political news was poor and the Govern­ment was every day losing its popularity, while prices were dwindling on the Stock Exchange. Suppose Labour got in and really put their new programme into force? How would he live? Twenty years before, he might have subsisted on his royalties, but now they would hardly pay for his sherry. He was getting too old and tired to struggle on much longer. How right Lord Hervey was when he said to his friend Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The last stages of an infirm life are filthy roads.

  And more than once, when Justin heard a slight noise over­head, he looked up at the ceiling and thought of the Fawleys, and envied them for their good health and comparative youth, their adaptability to a changing world and, above all, for the companionship which they had with one another.

  [4]

  The fortnight that followed was for Robert and Magda a period of rapture such as neither of them had conceived to be possible. Their appetite grew on what fed it. Magda’s scruples and doubts were banished for a while by the ecstasy of her first emotional awakening, and even for Robert the experience was almost as rich. Dorothy’s response to his love-making, though genuine in its way, had always a kind of archness about it, as if something impelled her to transform her passion into a pretty bedroom-ornament, and he now found in Magda’s love a single-mindedness and an intensity of which he hadn’t guessed women were capable.

  Love may indeed ennoble a character, but it may also play havoc with old moral values and make a stubborn sense of duty appear in the guise of a neurotic inhibition. For the first time in his life, Robert took to excusing himself for leaving his office early on the score of a chill or a headache, and for the first time in hers, Magda made it clear to her mother that her long hours of work must be shortened and that, above all, her free time must really be her own to use as she liked. In vain, Mrs Muller kept saying interrogatively, ‘Well, Magda, I know I can trust you and I don’t want to spoil your life, but I think you might trust me,’ but Magda replied, ‘I really don’t know what you mean. All that work, all that staying indoors, was getting me down. You noticed it yourself.’ So her mother spent more of her time looking after Miss Tredennick (who asked a sly question or two, but didn’t press too hard for an answer), and got in a charwoman to do the rough work down­stairs.

  Robert and Magda found the flat in Twickenham an irresistible attraction, and slipped off there whenever they could, even though the journey might take much longer than the time they could spend there together. Robert had a spare latch-key cut and gave it to Magda so that she should have access to the flat whenever she wished. Sometimes she arrived half an hour before he did—they made a point of travelling separately, for part of the way, at least—and her keenest delight was to sit waiting for him, as if by some miracle she had the privilege (shared by a million suburban housewives, and shared too by Dorothy,—though Magda preferred not to think of this), of expecting the punctual return of her husband, the bread-winner, as soon as his day’s work was over. To heighten the illusion, she bought a few knicknacks, a vase, an earthenware dog, a cheap colour-print, and put them about the flat, which henceforward became symbolically her home.

  Meanwhile, the day fixed for Dorothy’s return approached, and almost at the last minute was deferred for another week. She had caught a touch of ’flu and Susan insisted on her staying in Brighton till she was really well enough to face the fogs of London. Both Robert and Magda were now living in such a world of fantasy, that this reprieve seemed hardly remarkable. It is true that Robert, less fatalistic than Magda, did sometimes in his more cool-blooded moments consider what he would do when Dorothy came back. The evening when he had almost promised Magda in Thurloe Square that he would have things out with his wife, as soon as he got home, and then had been thwarted by her fit of hysterics, made him distrust his power to launch his thunderbolt out of the blue. He was confident that if she gave him the slightest opening, he would be able to make it into an effective breach between them, but the opening itself must be made by her. If ever she reproached him for being uncompanionable, for neglecting her, for being restless or moody, he would speak out at once. It seemed unlikely that she would ever suspect him of being unfaithful to her, but if she did, either intuitively—though he’d never believed in woman’s intuition—or because some accident had put her on her guard,—if ever he caught her playing the detective, asking artless but awkward questions or spying on him, he would hide nothing from her except Magda’s name. Far the best solution would be that Dorothy should find herself so much happier with Susan or some other friend of hers, than she was with him, that she would take the initiative herself, and ask him for her freedom. He knew that as it was, he often bored her. Very well, in future he would be ten times more of a bore, exasperate her by asking ignorant questions almost on the crude level of ‘What are Keats?’, and not listening to her replies. This was the nearest he could bring himself to actual cruelty. It wasn’t in his nature to shirk his share of the house­work, cooking or washing-up, however politic it might have been to do so.

  Perhaps the
weakness and the cowardice inherent in such a compromise might have come home to him, if Magda had even once thrown out a hint that it was time for him to ‘make an honest woman’ of her. But she still believed that more than marriage was needed to make a woman honest.

  [5]

  It was the night before Dorothy was to come back from Brighton, and Robert and Magda were spending it in Twicken­ham. Robert seemed even brighter and more self-assured than usual, and Magda, who, for the first time since the three weeks’ idyll had begun, found her happiness invaded by sad appre­hensions, was a little alarmed to see him so gay. Was it possible that in some curious way he was looking forward to Dorothy’s return? Had he felt lonely while she was away?

  When they had finished their little supper, Magda said wistfully, ‘Well, I suppose we ought to begin packing up, just in case we can’t come out here again before your friend gets back from America. I wonder what he’d think of those things of ours, if he found them here.’

  She looked round the flat, letting her eyes rest on her treasures—the colour-print, the earthenware dog and the vase which she had filled with some fresh anemones that evening. Robert got up very quietly and, standing behind her, put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her hair.

  ‘Darling, don’t look so sad. I’ve some splendid news and it was naughty of me not to tell you at once. But I wanted to keep it as a lovely surprise. Guess what it is!’

  It was on the tip of her tongue to say, ‘You’ve heard from Dorothy and she wants to divorce you,’ but she was prudent enough to leave those words unspoken, and shook her head in bewilderment.

  ‘Come on, guess. I’ll give you three guesses.’

  ‘Mrs Fawley’s staying in Brighton another week?’

  ‘No. She’ll be back to-morrow, so far as I know. It’s some­thing much better,—more far-reaching than that.’