“Alfred,” said Laura, after a long pause, “Alfred is inarticulate.”
“You don’t say so!”
“But that doesn’t mean that he isn’t, in his own way, absolutely devoted to me and to the children.”
“The only thing is,” Christine said, “wouldn’t it be more satisfactory, in a husband, if he was devoted in your own way, and not in his?”
The almost blinding intensity of Laura’s agreement prevented her from voicing it. Christine went on speaking:
“I’m certain husbands don’t realise what a lot they’d gain just by making a personal remark from time to time.” Laura winced inwardly. “Honestly, Laura, wouldn’t you like it if Alfred, once in a blue moon, said that you were looking pretty, or even asked if you had a headache—when you really have one, I mean, not when you’ve just put on your best clothes?”
“Of course—” said Laura. (“I’m not speaking personally, you understand, because nothing would induce me to criticise Alfred, even if there was anything to criticise, which there isn’t—”) “Of course, one likes a little notice, I suppose, though I daresay it’s very childish…but men aren’t like that.”
“You mean husbands aren’t. Because ordinary men, unmarried ones, I mean—always seem to notice things, and speak about them. Personal things.”
“Husbands notice things, too,” murmured Laura, with a certain gloom.
“But only unpleasant things. Anything wrong with the food, or anything one’s forgotten. Honestly, darling, has Alfred ever once, since you married, noticed when you’d been crying? Now don’t say you’ve never cried, because everyone does sometimes, if only for the sake of being asked why.”
“Fortunately, I’ve never cried for that reason,” said Laura rather drily. “I should have been disappointed if I had. But, of course, I knew when I married Alfred that he wasn’t wildly demonstrative. I shouldn’t have liked it if he had been.”
“Well,” said Christine kindly, “I can’t say that I believe you. And any decent analyst would tell you that you’re doing yourself a great deal of harm by this constant pretence. It’s bound to create the most frightful repressions. What sort of dreams do you have?”
But Laura, even though she did live in the country, knew all about Herr Freud and his theories, and declined to commit herself in any way upon the subject of dreams.
She abruptly wrenched the conversation back to March-land and Mrs. Crossthwaite.
“Did you notice that she spoke of ‘my son from Uganda’? I got the impression that he was on his way home.”
“So did I. With any luck he’ll have arrived by the time she’s returned your call, and then you can ask the lot of them, Girl Guides and all, for tennis. Though I suppose they’ll cram Baybay down his throat as soon as he sets foot in the place.”
The remainder of the drive was happily spent in dissecting, in strophe and antistrophe, the undesirable qualities of Miss Kingsley-Browne.
When they reached Applecourt, Laura, gazing round such portions of the garden as could be seen from the front entrance, without at the same time permitting herself to know for whom she was looking, followed her customary practice of going up to the nursery.
Nurse was sitting sewing by the open window, delightfully appropriate in her white uniform and clean apron.
“Where are the boys, nurse?” asked Laura, with the smile that she always instinctively assumed in the frail hope of propitiating the servants.
“Mr. Temple took them down to the orchard, madam.”
Laura was divided between gratification at so unusual a mark of attention to his sons from Alfred, and serious apprehensions as to its probable results, when the atmosphere was shattered into fragments around her by the sound of the fatal words:
“I was wishing to speak to you, madam.”
Knowing well that no amount of smiling would now avail anything, Laura gazed speechlessly at nurse.
“I shall be wanting to make a change at the end of the month,” remarked nurse, in a monotonous voice, and not looking at Laura. “I don’t wish to spend another winter in the country.”
“I thought you liked the country.”
“It’s very nice in the summer,” replied nurse temperately.
“And I did think, nurse, that you were fond of the children. But, of course, if you really feel like that, there’s no more to be said. But if there’s any other reason—any little thing that you’d like altered—”
“Thank you, madam. But I think it’s time I made a change.”
Laura, with a sensation of black despair, repeated that there was no more to be said. She then entered into a very earnest conversation, in which she sought to extract the real reason of her decision from nurse, but in this she succeeded quite as ill as she had expected.
The conversation ended as it had begun, with the formula: “At the end of the month, then.”
Laura, from sheer consternation, turned down the stairs instead of along the passage, and walked into the drawing-room as though walking in her sleep.
Christine was there, and Alfred stood at the window. The two little boys could be seen at the far end of the tennis-lawn.
“Nurse says she wants to leave.”
“I hear you found Mrs. Crossthwaite at home,” observed Alfred, evidently continuing the train of thought engendered by conversation with Christine. He never easily shifted from one train of thought to another.
Christine was quicker, but still not wholly adequate.
“What a bore for you!”
“I can’t think what I shall do,” said Laura tragically.
She felt herself to be absurd, but had to go on.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with her—she won’t say. And a change is so bad for Johnnie and he’ll be so difficult with a new one—and it unsettles the servants, too. It’s maddening—”
“But, Laura, there must be other nurses. Or why not let them have a governess ?”
“A decent governess is expensive and she wouldn’t sleep in the night nursery—and what about carrying up her meals? Maids will never wait upon a governess. And dusting the nurseries—well, she might do that, perhaps, but the turning-out—”
Laura’s incoherency was degenerating rapidly towards the hysterical.
“Has nurse given notice?” said Alfred, in the tone of one determined to get to the bottom of things.
“Yes, and she won’t say why, exactly.”
“I daresay you can easily find a better one. Or, as Christine says, a governess.”
Laura with great difficulty restrained herself from rehearsing all over again the reasons why she could not agree to this suggestion.
“Come up and stay with me, Laura, and interview nurses in London. It’ll save you any amount of writing.”
“It might be cheaper in the long run—one has to see them, of course. Well, I’ve got a month, and I suppose I could advertise.…”
“Of course you could.”
Christine began to talk about Marchland, while Laura, in her own mind, weighed the comparative merits of “Excellent references essential” and “Must be excellent needlewoman.” “Young, bright, and genuine child lover,” she discarded at once since young must always be relative, bright may very well mean bumptious, and all nurses, of necessity, are obliged to call themselves genuine child lovers, at any rate when speaking or writing to parents.
“But I must put ‘Very quiet country place,’” was her final decision, as the air was suddenly rent by brassy yells from Edward and Johnnie, in violent dispute.
Laura sprang to her feet.
“Better leave them alone,” said her husband.
Laura remained uneasily hovering between the open window and the inside of the room.
“Boys! It’s time for tea!” called out Christine, and Edward immediately trotted towards her. Then he caught sight of Laura.
“Mummie’s come home!” he shouted joyfully, breaking into a run.
Laura received him kindly into her arms,
but her eyes were fixed upon Johnnie, crawling morosely across the lawn.
He was annoyed because she had not come rushing out to see what was the matter when he had been screaming.
How could any new nurse, Laura resentfully wondered, expect to understand so complex and intelligent a child as Johnnie?
Quite impossible.
The boys went up to their nursery tea, Edward apparently quite satisfied by his mother’s conscientious but absent-minded pattings, and Johnnie still unmollified by her ardent caress to the top of his curls and her whispered promise of a story after tea.
In the dining-room tea was a failure.
Alfred was in that frame of mind in which nothing would serve him but to ring the bell—an act of despotism disliked at least as much by his wife as by the servants whom it was designed to summon.
“Dear, what do you want?”
“Haven’t we any jam in the house?”
“Has she forgotten the jam?” said Laura coldly. “I suppose that as none of us ever eat it, she didn’t think it worth while.”
“Ring for it.”
“Please do ring, if you really want jam,” Laura replied icily.
“How is she to learn, if we don’t tell her?” was the indirect retort of her husband.
The house-parlourmaid appeared, looked quite as sulky as Laura had expected her to look at being disturbed in the middle of her tea, and replied impeccably that, if you please, sir, the jam was finished, and there was no more put out.
“Then there’s nothing more to be said.”
Laura sketched a movement of rising from her chair.
“I can get the key and go to the store cupboard,” she said, with a perfectly genuine sense of martyrdom, to which she allowed full vent in her voice and expression.
“It doesn’t matter,” replied Alfred, with slightly raised eyebrows.
How trivial, and yet how infuriating, was life, with recalcitrant nurses and husbands and children, and nothing to look forward to ever, and at the back of everything an eternal sense of one’s own inadequacy.
“I thought it would be rather fun to go to Brussels for a week this autumn,” Christine was saying. “An exhibition I want to see.…Some of us may make up a party. I think Duke is going.”
With an inward start of mingled astonishment and gratification, Laura realised that she had forgotten all about Duke Ayland and his very existence.
Perhaps after all it didn’t matter about Alfred, the nurse, and the jam.
There might be something to look forward to, although Laura didn’t quite know what.
“Duke is coming up on the chance of some tennis, after tea,” observed Christine.
“I daresay you can give him a game if you don’t mind singles. I must do a little weeding, and Laura will want to be with the children.”
Alfred’s agricultural proclivities led him to derive actual enjoyment from the process of weeding, to Laura’s ever-recurring amazement.
“You’d better play tennis, Alfred,” said Christine. “Four is much more fun than a single. The children can pick up the balls. And Duke gets so very few chances of playing tennis. He’s always in London and always at work. He’s got to be, to make a living.”
“Is he very badly off?” Laura asked.
“Oh, very. But he’s only got himself to think of—no wife or anything like that, so it’s not so bad really. Duke hasn’t even got a mother or a sister to support.”
Laura, obscurely, was glad to hear it.
She was glad, too, that Duke Ayland was coming.
And after that, when he did, they played no tennis. Alfred continued intent upon selecting what appeared to Laura to be small green plants growing in the midst of other small green plants that exactly resembled them, and then throwing them away, and Christine took the two little boys away into the paddock.
Ayland sat down by Laura under the apple-trees.
“Don’t let’s play tennis. You look tired,” he said in a voice of concern.
Laura turned to find his eyes as full of concern as had been his voice.
“Why are you tired?”
She wanted to tell him that it was wonderful of him to have noticed her tiredness, but the sheer unexpectedness of his sympathy held her silent with surprise and gratitude.
“I think you do far too much for other people, you know.”
“I’m not tired now,” said Laura suddenly, smiling at him—and indeed she felt miraculously rejuvenated and entirely unfatigued.
“The things that tire me are the things that bore me.”
“Of course. Like all artists, you’re most terribly sensitive, aren’t you? One felt that directly.”
Laura yielded to the insidious rapture of talking about herself exactly as she wished herself to be talked about.
“If I’m sensitive,” she said slowly—”and I suppose you’re right—I can’t afford to own it to myself, far less to anybody else. I used to think that I could kill it altogether, by never giving in to it, and to a certain extent I’ve succeeded.”
“Instinctive self-protection. Don’t you see that if you, of all people, let yourself feel things as you could feel them, you’d go mad?”
Laura did see. But her seeing was as nothing compared to the blinding, ecstatic satisfaction of knowing that Duke Ayland saw.
“You’re putting into words things that I haven’t dared to let myself think, for years—” she faltered.
It was true. One didn’t dare let oneself think about emotions that one never had the chance of experiencing. But now, all of a sudden, Laura not only dared to think and speak about them, but she wished ardently to speak and to think of nothing else.
It appeared that her desires were shared by her companion.
When a conversation of this description is embarked upon for the first time between two people, there is no reason, perceptible to themselves, why it should ever stop. Any interruption from without comes as a complete and unwelcome surprise. Laura had just said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, quite—I’ve never told anybody else—” when the two little boys came running up to say good night.
Laura felt herself violently jerked back into the atmosphere that she had for years thought of as “real life.”
Duke Ayland roused in her a fresh, silent access of appreciation by standing up to receive the good night handshakes of Edward and Johnnie.
His manners were wonderful.…
At the sight of nurse, in her grey-and-white, competently escorting the boys into the house, Laura’s latest anxiety took possession of her again. But even that remembrance held possibilities of alleviation.
“Christine wants me to go to London at the end of the month, to see about a new nurse, as this one is unfortunately leaving.”
“Oh,” said Ayland, “I was going to ask you if you ever came to London. I’m so awfully glad. Would you—if you haven’t got every minute booked up—is there a chance that you’d let me take you out to dinner one night?”
“I’d love it,” said Laura, trying to sound kind, rather than enchanted.
“If there’s anything you specially want to see, perhaps you’d come to a show afterwards?”
“I’d like to very much indeed. I hardly ever see anything nowadays.”
“If you’ll let me know what you most want to see, I’ll book seats directly I get back. I wish to goodness I wasn’t going on Monday, but I’m afraid I must.”
“I wish you weren’t going. But you make me talk about myself a great deal too much. I haven’t done it for years,” Laura declared with truth.
“Next time,” said Duke Ayland smiling, “I’m going to talk about myself, if you’ll let me.”
It was curious, the extraordinary sense of intimacy the words conveyed.
Or perhaps it was his tone.
He stayed to dinner again, that evening, and afterwards they played paper games—tolerated, rather than enjoyed, by Alfred, who served, indeed, merely as a foil for the skill of the other th
ree players.
Playing at paper games was Laura’s only genuine accomplishment, and the environments of Applecourt had never offered any scope for it. She went up to bed feeling clever, and successful, and when she gazed earnestly at herself in the glass she felt, as well, that she was still pretty.
“What is thirty-four, after all, nowadays?” Laura found herself recklessly enquiring.
She would go to London.
To look for a nurse, certainly, but also to enjoy herself.
She would go and see the A. B. Onslows. After all, they’d asked her to. It would be good for her writing.
Laura began to take off her clothes—it distressed her to know that she usually wore at least three more garments than any other modern woman, but her circulation was poor, and it was a choice between that and a faint violet tinge to the tip of her nose—and as she did so, unconsciously fell under the obsession of a complex medley of thought, wherein improbable sartorial triumphs mingled strangely with encounters between intellectual affinities gathered together at the house of the A. B. Onslows.
“A crinoline hat of very palest yellow, and yellow organdie and lace—a slim silhouette—the long amber necklace. ‘Mrs. Temple, I’ve always loved your work so much—’ Duke Ayland standing by the door, watching her.” “She looks so absurdly young!” Would it be out of the question to go to a decent place, and get a really lovely hat? After all, it’d come in for weddings, afterwards. And for yellow organdie and lace—Bond Street—Duke Ayland and the theatre. No one wore any sleeves at all nowadays, but no one—except Laura—had vaccination marks that showed. She looked her best by artificial light, provided that her hair had been properly cut, shampoo’d and waved. “Don’t you see that if you, of all people, let yourself feel things as you could feel them—”
Laura snatched up her hand-glass, and examined her own reflection with passionate intentness. Whatever she might have looked earlier in the evening, she didn’t look tired now.
Neither tired nor sleepy.
Always, she was both at the end of the day. A strange, quivering excitement made her feel as though she might lie awake, to-night.
The Way Things Are Page 9