She stopped suddenly, realising what an awful disclosure she had made of her innermost thoughts. Her mother and Hugo both got up very slowly from the table, as if their movement was concerted, while Magda covered her face with her hands, broke into hysterical sobs and ran to her room.
[2]
Dorothy was standing in a queue of a dozen people, all waiting for a place at one of the tables in the Pâtisserie Mouton, just off Parkwell Road. Mouton’s light luncheons were famous for savoury omelettes, vol-au-vents, fancy cakes and coffee. The prices were on the high side, but Monsieur Mouton could have had twice the number of customers, if his premises and his staff had been twice the size, and it was a tribute to his cooking that so many regulars came day after day, knowing that they would have to stand a quarter of an hour, and sometimes longer, before they could sit down.
They were nearly all women, but immediately in front of Dorothy there were two young men with bright peach-coloured complexions and fair hair set in elaborate waves. Their voices were high-pitched and penetrating, and she couldn’t help overhearing their conversation—which, however, was not at all like the conversation she was apt to overhear at Garrows.
One of them said, ‘Oh, my dear, the corner-table’s on the move at last. Yes, the brown-tweed muffin is getting out her bag and scratching about in it for her money. Why do they have to take so long over it?’
The other one answered, ‘No, I’m afraid she’s only looking for her lipstick,—as if anyone could care what she looks like! There! She’s dropped her bag and knocked over all those cheap looking parcels the creature in pillar-box red put on that shelf. Aren’t they clumsy!’
His friend agreed readily. ‘Yes, I’ve noticed that on the top of a bus the slimmest woman is clumsier with her bottom than the fattest old man. They bang it against your shoulder or into your face and simply never, never apologise. Move up, Paul. Only three in front of us now. This really is a test of endurance.’
Paul moved up and hissed, ‘Beware of that harpy in the puce brocatelle! She’s pretending to look at the cakes on the counter, but she’s really trying to jump the queue. They’re not only clumsy, inconsiderate and selfish,—they’re so dishonest. And the awful thought is, they’ve nearly all got a husband or are going to get one. Imagine yourself coming home every night and finding a brown-tweed muffin or a pillar-box red or a puce brocatelle sitting waiting for you! We have a good many things to bear, my dear, but at least we’re spared that horror. . . . Come along. Those two little drabs at the side-table are getting up. . . . No, Madam, that is the end of the queue,—just by the door. You’ll find it rather draughty.’
They scuttled to their table with an arch avoidance of obstacles, and Dorothy was left at the head of the queue. Luckily another exodus soon gave her a seat.
What she had heard, instead of rousing her (as well it might have done) to a feminist fury, only increased her own forebodings. The two young men—why did they hate women so much?—had talked of husbands coming home every night to tedious and uncongenial wives. Of course, she had seen the subject discussed in evening newspapers, though it had always struck her as cheaply exaggerated. But now she wondered in all seriousness if that was how Robert really felt about her. Did he dread the moment when he opened the sitting-room door and found the same woman waiting night after night, with, more often than not, a grievance on her lips? ‘Why are you so late? . . . I’ve got another sore throat. . . . I shan’t go to Garrows’ fish-department any more. I told the man he’d given me haddock instead of halibut, and you wouldn’t believe how insolent he was.’ These little pinpricks, when a man has just got home, tired with his work and standing in the Tube, were quite enough to make him long for a change—even a change for the worse. There must come a moment when he’d break out and say, ‘This is the end.’
She still thought of her behaviour on Christmas Day with great contrition and doubted very much if Robert had forgiven her. It was true that the miserable evening had ended in a kind of reconciliation—for which she may have had her tears to thank—but she was sure Robert had by no means forgotten what had happened earlier on. It wasn’t that he had been any less attentive to her than usual. Indeed, he had gone out of his way to do one or two things which gave her pleasure.
On the Tuesday after Christmas he had turned up at the supper-party given by her friends, in spite of the loop-hole he had left himself for getting out of it, and a week later, on the third of January, when the undertakers had called to collect poor Mr Bray’s body, he had made the sad event an excuse to take her to a theatre and give her supper afterwards at a restaurant. Only the previous night, instead of going to his work-room after washing up, he had sat in the drawing-room with her and said he’d like to read one of Oscar Wilde’s plays. Yet there was a formality, almost an excessive politeness in his manner which made her uneasy. He behaved with her, as one might behave in the presence of someone whom one detested, but who, one knew, was very soon going to die. He had fits of abstraction, too, as if his mind was busy with a problem he hadn’t quite solved. She had asked him once if his work was worrying him, and he had simply said, ‘No,’ without asking her what could have put such an idea into her head. She had nearly gone on to say, ‘Well, then, what is it?’, but feared to irritate him. It was easy to see that he wasn’t happy, and still easier to blame herself for being the cause of it. Since her childhood she had been used to long periods of unhappiness and feeling out of sorts, but it seemed unnatural that Robert, on whose equanimity and vigour she so much relied, should suffer as she had suffered.
She finished her meal, and bearing in mind the strictures that the two unpleasant youths (who were still eating cake after cake), might pass on her, if she loitered too long at the table, she called for her bill, paid it and went out. The weather had changed again. It was now very cold—far colder than it had been at Christmas. The sun was shining, but between such menacing clouds that it only gave the sky an angrier look. Hail, thunder, snow—perhaps the end of the world—seemed to hang over her head.
This was no day for gazing into the windows of the shops in Parkwell Road. Besides, the sales were on, and the displays had sacrificed their usual elegance for a catch-penny utility. Even Garrows was full of alien goods, an alien staff and alien customers. For Dorothy, who liked shopping luxuriously, it had temporarily ceased to be a magnet. Still, she needed some new dusters and—if one had to spend money on such dreary things—perhaps this was the moment to buy them. And it would pass an unwanted half-hour.
She fought her way in, feeling very frail among the Amazonian bargain-hunters from the obscurer suburbs. How different they were from the smart and prosperous buyers of Christmas gifts. Those eager and acquisitive days seemed far away, but their memory was still precious. How happy she had been almost all November, and December too, right up to Christmas Day, when things went wrong. She had a feeling that the New Year, now six days old, was fated to bring her some calamity.
The counter at which the household linen was sold was one of the most popular in the sale, and it was nearly half-past three when she left the shop. As she was going out into the street, she saw Magda coming in by the same entrance. The girl was red-eyed and looked blue with cold. Or was she ill? With a mingling of concern and curiosity, Dorothy intercepted her and said, ‘Why, Magda, what a surprise seeing you here! I’ve just been buying some dusters, but I really don’t think the ones I chose were reduced at all. I might just as well have left it till next week, when these awful crowds will be gone.’
Magda seemed too listless to look at her, and with her eyes fixed on the mosaic of the threshold, she said weakly, ‘Miss Tredennick sent me in to buy some dusters—and a dozen tea-cloths—and——’ She broke off, as if it was a strain to finish the sentence. Making an attempt to rally her, Dorothy said, ‘If you take my advice, you won’t buy anything that’s much reduced. All those things you see marked down in the window, aren’t their regular lines, and I’m sure they wouldn’t be good enough for
Miss Tredennick. If it weren’t so cold, I’d show you the dusters I bought. Magda, are you quite well?’
Instead of answering, Magda gulped down a sob, went through the door and vanished in the crowd. For a moment, Dorothy thought of pursuing her, but feared to seem officious. Magda was neither a friend nor a servant of hers. If the girl was in trouble, it was Mrs Muller’s place, not Dorothy’s, to get her out of it. But it was all very odd.
She made her way along the bustling pavement, and wondered again if Magda were in love and wretched on that account. It was rumoured that the woman at Number Seven had killed herself in a fit of jealousy,—which is presumably a form of Liebestod. What tragedies seemed to have centred themselves round Pollitt Place,—Miss Varioli, Mr Bray and now Magda. The thought of these three persons’ unhappiness—though it might be a mistake to think of Mr Bray as unhappy—relieved her own, by distracting her from herself.
When she reached Number Ten, and saw the uncurtained windows of Mr Bray’s sitting-room, she realised for the first time that there was now a flat in the house to let, and began to speculate about the new tenants. On the whole, she favoured two middle-aged spinsters, who would be available for tea or gossip when she was at a loose end. Failing them, she would choose an elderly married couple. The husband might be keen on photography, and although few things were more tedious than having to look through other people’s albums of snapshots, the hobby might provide an interest for Robert, who could help the old man to do his developing in the bathroom, while she sat and talked with the wife about plays and books and what they had seen in the shops. They might even be fond of a game of three-handed bridge—Robert hated cards—which would help to pass the time when he was kept late at his work or went to one of his scientific films. At all events, she hoped very much that if they were ‘nice people’, they would be neighbourly—without, of course, that intrusive suburban matiness which she had found so distasteful at Hackfield—and unlike Mr Bray, who, for all his gentility, had made it clear that he regarded himself as belonging to a different world and didn’t want any truck with his fellow-lodgers.
Upstairs, in the sitting-room, she switched on the fire, tapped the barometer, which showed a sensational fall since the morning, tapped the glass of the aquarium and threw a pinch of ants’ eggs on to the water, watching the fish flash upwards with mouths agape to devour the titbits. Then she went across to the budgerigars, said, ‘Tweet, tweet,’ to which they obligingly replied, and poked her finger through the bars of the cage to be pecked,—and they obliged again. It was a pity that they couldn’t talk, but she had been told that if you had two of them, they talked to one another in their own language and wouldn’t bother to learn yours. But to keep one poor little bird shut up all alone seemed too cruel, and she had decided that if she lost one of her pair, she would at once buy a mate for the survivor. Lucky creatures indeed, for whom a devoted companionship could be provided so easily!
It was twenty to four. In less than two hours and a half, she should be hearing Robert at the front door, and his quick, springy step on the stairs. There might have been times—though it shamed her now to think of them—when his presence had bored her, but it had never failed to give her a feeling of safety, such as she craved for more than ever that afternoon. At all costs, she must keep herself from imagining catastrophes,—street accidents, railway accidents, or even an accident in the laboratory at the works. (There had been one, two years before, and a colleague of Robert’s had been blinded and nearly killed.) She knew from experience that her bouts of panic—however silly they might seem afterwards—could be agonisingly painful at the time. One of them seemed to be taking shape within her at that very moment, and she longed to be set some strenuous manual task which should keep it at bay.
What was there she could do? Three years before, she had learnt petit-point, but had given it up with the excuse that it strained her eyes. However, she had had new spectacles since then, and it might please Robert to find her, just for once, doing something with her hands.
She went to the cupboard in which she thought she had put the tapestry and the silks, but they weren’t there, and it was some time before she came across them. (Four o’clock. Only another two hours to go.) The silks were in a tangle and the shades all mixed up. She sorted them and arranged them in the compartments of her work-bag, methodically, like Robert replacing his tools in the tool-box. The half-hour struck before she was ready to make a stitch. Should she have some tea first? But at that moment, there was a knock on the door.
[3]
‘Come in. Oh, it’s Hugo! What is it?’
She felt confused and full of apprehensions. He seemed to have changed from a pathetic under-sized child into a tragic and dignified young man. She went on, ‘Do you want to speak to me? Mr Fawley isn’t back yet.’
‘No, Madam. It’s you I should like to speak to, if you’re not too busy.’
‘Of course I’m not. Do shut that door and come in. There’s a bitter draught. I was just going to make myself some tea. Can I give you a cup?’
Three minutes before, it would have seemed impossible that she should ever offer Hugo—the house-keeper’s son—a cup of tea in her drawing-room, but now the invitation came out quite naturally. He shut the door gently, but stood by it, while he said, ‘No thank you, Madam. I couldn’t say what I’ve got to say to you, over the tea-table.’
His slow delivery of this ominous sentence filled Dorothy with alarm. ‘Don’t say——’ she gasped, ‘don’t say they’ve sent you to break some bad news to me!’
He looked at her gravely, as if he were choosing words with which to soften the blow. Reading a hint of compassion in his expression, she could bear the suspense no longer and cried, ‘Is it bad news of my husband? Has there been some message from the place where he works? Tell me outright, and don’t try to disguise it.’
Hugo shook his head and said, ‘No, Madam, there’s been no message. So far as I know, Mr Fawley is quite well. Though what I have to tell you, does concern him.’
Dorothy’s relief took the form of indignation. ‘You have to tell me something that concerns my husband? What can you mean?’
Hugo ignored her outburst and went on, ‘It’s about Magda too. Oh, Madam, if you could guess, it would help me so much. It’s about your husband and Magda. Think, for a moment!’
He watched her while she thought, and saw her face contorted by a suspicion of the truth. Her first impulse was to break out into defensive abuse and order him out of the room, but remembering her chance meeting with Magda at Garrows’ main entrance that very afternoon, and how ill and woe-begone Magda had looked, she said, with all the calmness she could muster, ‘Hugo, before you speak, be very sure you’re speaking the truth. You’re old enough to know what slander means. It’s a serious thing and you can be sued for it in a court of law. If you’ve heard some silly gossip from one of the local tradesmen or errand boys’,—at this point her voice became more conciliatory—‘I shall be glad to hear it, of course, so that Mr Fawley and I can take steps to deal with it. If on the other hand’—her voice hardened—‘if it’s something you’ve imagined or invented, or something you’ve been put up to by your sister——’
She paused in the middle of whatever threat she was going to make. Could it be that Magda was expecting a baby and was accusing Robert of being the father? Had she sent Hugo to blackmail them? How did one deal with such a situation? That little flaxen-haired boy with his angel-face, on which the bitter experience of a thousand years seemed suddenly to have left an imprint—what an envoy to choose!
Hugo read her thoughts as easily as if she had uttered them; for he said, ‘It isn’t Magda who asked me to tell you this. She doesn’t blame your husband. She’s in love with him. I think she’d really like you to divorce him, so that they could marry. But she’s very religious in her way, and I don’t think even if Mr Fawley did marry her, her conscience would ever be easy. She’ll be unhappy all right—you needn’t worry about that—b
ut you can’t stop your husband from going out with her. All you can do is to threaten to divorce him.’
As he ended his speech, he put his head on one side and looked at her interrogatively, as if he expected her to collaborate with him. But the full implications of what he had been telling her, hadn’t come home to her yet. Playing for time in which to collect her wits, she said coldly, ‘I can only think you’re suffering from delusions, or that you’re an evil-minded little boy and have invented all this to upset us—and perhaps your sister as well. What evidence have you got? What do you know?’
He answered calmly, ‘I’ve only got one piece of real evidence, but that’s strong enough. Do you know a block of flats in Twickenham called Underbourne Mansions?’
‘No. Wait a minute,—yes, I do. A colleague of my husband’s lives there. What about it?’
‘About ten days before Christmas I followed Magda there. She went by bus and walked the last bit of the way. I took a taxi. I saw her going in—so did the taxi-driver. I’ve got his number.’
‘What was the number of the flat she went to?’
‘I don’t know that; we stayed outside near the entrance.’
‘Then what makes you think your sister’s visit there has any connexion with my husband—or his colleague? It’s a large block, so far as I remember.’
‘Just as we were driving away, your husband went in. I saw him clearly by the light of a lamp in the road.’ He paused for a second, and then, as if her incredulity annoyed him, went on more ruthlessly, ‘Of course, it might only be a coincidence. Magda may not have gone there to meet Mr Fawley and Mr Fawley may not have gone there to meet Magda. He may have been going to see a gentleman-friend—that colleague of his you spoke of.’ He looked at her closely, saw her shake her head slightly, and continued, ‘All the same, I think Mr Fawley and Magda did go there to be with one another. You see, when you were away in November, she used to go and sit with him up here. At least, I think so. I’ve no proof of it, but unless she spent a very long time indeed with Miss Tredennick, or by herself in the box-room, I don’t know anywhere else she could have been. She wasn’t downstairs; and I should have heard her if she’d been in Mr Bray’s rooms. But why not ask her? She won’t lie to you. If she says she’s not in love with Mr Fawley and has never been with him up here or in Twickenham, I shall believe her. But she won’t say that.’
Ten Pollitt Place Page 23