E.M. DELAFIELD
THE WAY
THINGS ARE
“I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat.”
Grossmith, Diary of a Nobody.
Contents
Author’s Note
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter I
“Did I tell you what Johnnie said, after he’d had his reading-lesson to-day?”
“No.”
Laura embarked upon her anecdote.
She had not intended, nor even wished, to tell it. She knew well that her husband did not want to hear it.
Nevertheless, she told it. And her secret sense of her own futility and weakness took all conviction from the manner of her telling, so that even a much more amusing story than that of a five-year-old’s repartee would have been bereft of sense and all spirit.
When the recital of his son’s witticism had petered out, Alfred Temple said, “H’m,” compromising between a short, unamused laugh and a curt ejaculation, and then he and Laura were silent again.
They had been married seven years.
Every evening after dinner they sat in the drawing-room, or, on those rare summer evenings when it was hot, in the garden, and Alfred talked not at all, and Laura, in spite of almost frenzied resolutions to the contrary, found herself preparing to talk—and often, indeed, actually talking—about the children, the servants, or the question of expense.
Their elder son, Edward, was six years old, and Johnnie was five.
Between nine and ten o’clock, Alfred Temple, as usual, fell asleep behind The Times, and Laura, also as usual, told herself that it was only a question of concentration, and that an occasional snore could not annoy her unless she allowed it to do so. And at the seventh snore she cleared her throat loudly and suddenly, and Alfred woke with a start.
“I wish we could get the children in to the dancing-class at Quinnerton regularly,” said Laura.
“They’re a bit young, aren’t they?”
“Edward is just the right age. And it would be good for Johnnie. Besides, I like them to see something of other children.”
“They’re always going out to tea.”
“That’s another thing, we ought to ask the Allington children here, but nurse, for some reason or other, has taken a dislike to their nurse.”
“I shouldn’t let nurse regulate your invitations, I must say.”
Laura gave him a look, and compressed the corners of her mouth into an expression of controlled patience.
She was not really feeling impatient with Alfred, but it seemed necessary to let him know that she considered his opinion of no value whatever on the question of her relations with nurse.
Alfred had sometimes said, and frequently implied, that Laura was ruled by her servants.
Laura, in return, said and implied that Alfred did not know anything at all about the domestic problem from the inside.
She often felt that Alfred did not understand her, and that he still less understood what a difficult and fatiguing affair life was for her, and it also vexed her to know that their ideas differed widely on the important subject of Edward’s and Johnnie’s upbringing, but nevertheless, Laura knew that she and Alfred were what is called “happily married.”
Only, somehow, Laura was not happy, and she sometimes felt that perhaps Alfred was not happy, either, although he did not seem to think about it a great deal.
It might, perhaps, have something to do with the undoubted fact that their income was not quite adequate to their demands upon it. Laura, copybooks to the contrary notwithstanding, knew well that riches can do a great deal towards contentment, and that pleasure in life is not produced in an atmosphere of unpaid bills and economical dinners. Sometimes Laura visualised herself as the wife of a man much poorer than Alfred—obliged herself to cook a great part of every meal eaten in the house, and able to afford only one maid, to help her with the children, and to keep the house clean, and to do the sewing. Of course, they’d be living in a smaller house, two reception, five bedrooms, and one bath, h. and c., and usual offices, half an acre of garden, a job gardener, and rent and electric light bill to pay.
As it was, they lived at Applecourt, which had belonged to the Temples for three generations, and the house had nine bedrooms, two bath-rooms and three sitting-rooms, and two kitchens and a pantry, and a good deal of passage-way, and a staircase with two landings, and no lighting whatever.
And there were—or, very frequently, there were not—a cook-general, a house-parlourmaid, and a children’s nurse. A gardener received thirty-five shillings a week and a cottage and helped Alfred with the cleaning of the car, and worked in the garden and in the kitchen-garden.
Laura had been brought up in a house that entirely resembled Applecourt, except that it had been more comfortable, because everything had been much less expensive and difficult, in the time before the war.
Throughout the war she had lived and worked in London, boarding very comfortably with an aunt who had a house in Wilton Crescent.
Laura could speak French fluently, and play the piano not very well, and she had qualified as a masseuse in 1915. Ten years earlier she had supposed herself to be a good dancer, but the dancing of ten years earlier was not the sort of dancing to produce in a present-day ballroom—and Laura had learnt no other. Her tennis had also become inadequate, in much the same way. There were depressing times when she felt that her prettiness had shared the same fate as her accomplishments.
At twenty, it had been a universally acclaimed prettiness, of a slim, Grecian-nymph type, a matter of outline and features rather than colouring. It seemed to her that she had altered wonderfully little, even in fourteen years. She was still slim, upright, and without any grey at all in her brown hair. There were faint lines round her mouth and round the corners of her eyes, but her forehead was smooth, except for two little vertical marks between her dark eyebrows.
Her colour had never been very bright—she was paler now, that was all. And her face and hands were thinner.
Nevertheless, Laura knew that, by some indefinable process, she had ceased to be very pretty. People no longer looked at her as though struck by her appearance.
She sometimes rather forlornly told herself that her particular type of beauty was no longer in vogue. Girls, nowadays, didn’t look like Grecian nymphs.
They had no particular features, but they had beautiful teeth—Laura’s teeth had always been too prominent—and good complexions, and they moved and held themselves well.
Shingled hair suited them.
It had not suited Laura, and she had compromised with a bob that always seemed to herself to be either just too long or just too short. She was still able to get most of her clothes ready-made—but she had to go to the better-class London shops for them. Never more could she hope to “carry off” a cheap, bright-coloured cotton frock, bought from the big draper’s shop in Quinnerton.
These considerations formed a kind of vague, unsatisfactory background to Laura’s life. In the foreground were Edward, Johnnie, Alfred, the servants, the management of their home, and the Nursing Association, the Women’s Institute and the Girl Guides, of Quinnerton. The relative importance of these things, to Laura, was measured in terms of her own emotional reacti
ons to them.
Johnnie came first.
Although Edward was her first-born, it was Johnnie that she loved best. Edward was a good little boy, not imaginative, mildly averse from any form of lessons, and finding his chief amusement in kicking at a ball, or in running rather aimlessly about the garden, making as loud and incoherent a noise as possible.
Johnnie also made a noise—and a much louder noise than Edward’s—but it was never an incoherent noise. He was articulate, sensitive, passionate and intelligent.
Alfred Temple said that Laura adored Johnnie, and in a sense it was true. But the term was only a relative one.
Laura herself felt that Johnnie was her chief preoccupation, and the source both of her deepest discomfort and her sharpest joys, but at the back of her consciousness was a profound conviction that her own emotional capabilities had never really yet been fully roused.
At thirty-four she had just begun to wonder if they were ever destined to be roused at all.
Perhaps if she had ever been in love.…Or had she ever been in love?
It was ridiculous to ask oneself such a question. No other woman in the world, Laura felt intimately convinced, could have experienced such a doubt. It was a problem peculiar to her own unique psychology.
Certainly she had thought herself in love with Alfred. But it had been an academic affair, rather than a passionate one. She had never lost her head, nor Alfred his.
They had been attracted by one another; they had found themselves to possess certain tastes in common. Alfred had admired Laura’s looks, and Laura had admired Alfred’s distinction.
Laura now admitted to herself—what she had not admitted to herself at the time—that she had been rather anxious to be married, just when she first met Alfred.
The war was over, and there had been a question of her returning home, which she did not want to do, and so many other people seemed to be getting married.…She wanted the experience of marriage, and she was just beginning to be rather afraid of missing it altogether, because so many of the men belonging to her own generation had gone.
It had been easy to fall in love with Alfred—in love, that is to say, as most people understand the words. If Laura had a lurking feeling, in those days, that a less deliberate process might better have suited her temperament, it had been stifled in the excitements of her engagement and marriage.
Alfred did not put his fondness into words—it was not his way. Laura, who was given to analysis, put it into words for him often enough—but only to herself, never to her husband. And although it reassured her to know that she did love her Alfred, and that he loved her, it failed to convince her that she had not missed romance altogether.
Laura, forlornly dissecting herself at thirty-four, was startled by the poignancy of her own regrets.
She studied a little psychology, obtained the loan of a volume of Havelock Ellis, and felt so little exhilarated by the life-stories there set out that she had a brief reaction in favour of Thomas à Kempis. But his consolations were too cloying, his wisdom too trite, and his explanations explained nothing.
Laura was rather relieved, for she would not have liked to think of herself as a religious woman, although her careful agnosticism in reality belonged to her date just as surely as the habit of orthodox belief did to that of an earlier generation.
She sometimes thought—in her less candid moments—“A woman can live for her children.”
Perhaps, indeed, some women could, but Laura, in reality, knew that she was not one of them. She could not possibly have lived for dear little Edward, with whom, in fact, she would probably have nothing whatever in common once his childhood’s dependence was over—and Johnnie, of an individuality quite as strong as her own, would certainly neither expect nor wish her to subordinate her existence to his.
She wanted a life—an emotional life—of her own.
Laura, for the sake of her self-esteem, strenuously ignored the fact that in all probability she was sharing this desire with a large number of middle-class, middle-aged Englishwomen all over the country.
“Mum-mie-e-e!”
That was Johnnie.
“Was that one of the children?” said Laura, disingenuously.
“Won’t nurse go?”
“She’s down at supper.”
“Mum-mie-e-e-e!”
“I’ll just see,” said Laura, halfway to the door.
“You’d much better leave him to nurse.”
“Yes, but—”
“Well, tell him that if he’s simply playing the fool, I shall—”
She went out of the room, closing the door with an effect of gentle deliberation, and then flying up the shallow staircase two steps at a time, and along the passage.…
“Coming, darling. Don’t scream—”
She opened the door of the night-nursery and slipped inside very quietly.
“Never let the child see that he has been the centre of unusual excitement,” said the little book read by Laura during her children’s infancy.
“What is it, Johnnie?”
“I heard you rush upstairs, and all along the passage,” said Johnnie in tones of interest. He was sitting up in bed, in his blue striped pyjamas, with his curls all on end.
Those curls, to which Johnnie owed so much more in the way of leniency, and treats, and petting, and notice, than he would probably ever know!
Good little Edward’s hair was quite straight, and cut rather short.
“Johnnie, what did you call me for?”
“Please can I have a drink?”
“Couldn’t you have thought of that earlier?” said Laura indulgently, pouring water into the glass on the wash-stand as she spoke.
“Yes,” said Johnnie candidly. “But I just thought I’d like to see you. I feel rather lonely.”
Edward was in the other little bed, but Edward was asleep. He always went to sleep early. Johnnie never did.
“Well, but don’t call me for nothing, like that. It vexes daddy.”
Laura bent to kiss him, and, as usual, Johnnie’s curls and his smile, and the way in which his arms went round her neck, charmed her utterly.
“Darling!”
She kissed him half a dozen times, rejoicing in the warm, fragrant touch of his little soft face against hers.
“Now go to sleep, and let there be no more of you to-night.”
“Yes, some more of me to-night,” Johnnie answered, in the formula of his babyhood that had always made her laugh. She left him.
Outside the night-nursery door, she remembered remorsefully that she had forgotten to look at Edward, just as she always did forget to look at Edward when Johnnie was there.
The little lamp on the bracket against the passage wall was flaring, and Laura turned it down, noticing for perhaps the thousandth time that there was a black patch of grime on the ceiling above the bracket.
The house needed painting, and cleaning, and repapering. Some day they’d have to afford it.
Laura returned to the drawing-room, and to her armchair, and the half of The Times that Alfred had finished reading before dinner.
“Well?” said Alfred.
“Oh, it wasn’t anything serious.”
“I never imagined it was. He simply wanted to see if you’d come, I suppose?”
“He wanted a drink.”
“Couldn’t he fetch that for himself?”
“Of course not. For one thing, they’re not allowed to get out of bed like that.”
“Johnnie, of course, never does anything he’s not allowed to do.”
They both laughed.
“All the same, Laura, you’re spoiling that child. Why not let nurse go to him, if he wants anybody?”
“She couldn’t hear, from the kitchen.”
“You could ring and tell her to go to the night-nursery, I suppose?”
“No, Alfred, I couldn’t!” said Laura, speaking no less than the literal truth.
“I must have a go at the car to-morrow.”
&
nbsp; “Oh—”
Alfred interpreted the sound of her ejaculation correctly, as he could hardly, indeed, have failed to do.
“You didn’t want to go anywhere, did you?”
“I did rather want to go into Quinnerton, but of course I can manage—”
“Wouldn’t Wednesday do?”
“It’s early closing. And Thursday is nurse’s day out, and Friday the Stevensons are coming to tea.”
“Well, all this taxi-work is playing the dickens with the car,” said Alfred mildly.
“I don’t see the sense of having a car if it isn’t to be used,” said Laura, also mildly.
“I wonder how many times in a month I drive to Quinnerton and back, or to the station, or half across the country,” Alfred enquired into space.
“Mum-mie-ee-e!”
Laura tried to think that she had only imagined this familiar, distant sound.
It recurred, with increased volume.
“That naughty little boy,” said Laura in an unconvincing way.
“Don’t go. He doesn’t really want anything.”
Laura knew that this was true.
She hesitated.
The summons became an imperative shriek.
“Tell him that I shall come up and spank him if he isn’t quiet.”
Laura took advantage of the implied sanction and sped upstairs.
“Johnnie, be quiet. Daddy isn’t at all pleased with you—”
“I want a hanky, please.”
“Aren’t you at all sleepy to-night, darling?”
“No,” said Johnnie pathetically.
She found him a handkerchief, tucked in the bedclothes, kissed him, told him to be a good little boy and go to sleep, and went out, forgetting to look at the placidly-sleeping Edward.
Outside the door of the night-nursery she remembered about Edward.
She turned down the little lamp on the bracket, that was flaring, and noticed the patch on the ceiling above it.
Then she went downstairs, and into the drawing-room again.
“Nothing, of course?” remarked, rather than enquired, her husband.
“Nurse will be up there directly,” was Laura’s evasive reply.
She looked at the clock.
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