He omitted the formality of a stereotyped beginning, wrote mostly about books, his own work, and Laura’s writing, and ended with: “I am saving up such hundreds of things to talk to you about. Please don’t be even one minute late on the 27th.—Yours, M.A.”
As soon as she had skimmed the four pages, and re-read the last sentence five times, Laura found herself emerging from a kind of trance to the sound of hilarious shriekings and splashings that caused her to rush upstairs and into the bathroom again.
At last Edward and Johnnie were dried, clad in their striped Viyella pajamas, and tucked up into their respective beds.
Edward said his prayers with conventional gravity, Johnnie was discouraged by his mother in an attempt at melodramatic intercession on behalf of various improbable trespasses, and Laura shut the door of the night-nursery behind her.
There was barely time to change for dinner before the gong rang, and Alfred, coming in from the garden, said: “I must just go upstairs and wash. I shan’t change.”
“There isn’t time,” returned Laura frigidly. “The gong has just sounded.”
It annoyed her that Alfred should be unpunctual, it annoyed her that he should not change for dinner, and it annoyed her to realise that his not doing so implied an intention of returning to his gardening again as soon as dinner was over.
“I never used to mind little things,” she thought, remembering the light-hearted indifference of the days when she had not known responsibility.
The soup was not hot by the time they sat down at the dining-room table, but Laura could tell that it wouldn’t have been hot even if they had come in punctually.
“No one to change the plates?” enquired Alfred, raising his eyebrows.
“You know it’s her afternoon out.”
“Why do all the servants go out on the same day?”
Laura explained curtly.
“Must you ask people to tea on days when we have no servants?”
“Alfred, naturally I didn’t ask them to tea. Is it likely, with Hilda out and the boys on my hands? Mrs. Crossthwaite aggravatingly chose to-day for returning my call, and I suppose that absurd woman is staying with her. Of course, at Marchland it doesn’t make the slightest difference if two extra people turn up for a meal, but here it does, that’s all.”
“It doesn’t make any difference to the amount of milk we’re allowed, apparently.”
Laura received her husband’s small jibe with a joyless smile.
“I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it, dear, but whenever nurse goes out for the day, and you have those two boys to look after, by the time evening comes,” said Alfred impressively, “you’re fagged out. That’s what you are—absolutely fagged out.”
Laura, who had so often regretted and resented the fact that her husband never commented upon her looks, received this exception to the rule in an embittered silence.
“Well,” said Alfred as they rose from the table, “I shall do a little gardening.”
Laura went to the night-nursery, gazed at the sleeping Johnnie, forgot Edward, and ascertained by the presence of nurse’s hat upon the lid of the clothes-basket, that nurse had come back.
In the day-nursery she found her.
The information that nurse had accepted the situation offered by the lady at Bristol renewed Laura’s anxiety-complex on the subject of finding a substitute.
Someone who would be able to manage Johnnie. A good needle-woman, because Laura wasn’t. Fond of animals, because of Fauntleroy, and besides, the boys might have a pony one day. Young enough to run about and play.
Old enough to have a sense of responsibility.
Willing to do her own nurseries.
Laura snatched up The Times, and tore feverishly through the advertisement columns.
“Town preferred.”
“Baby from the month preferred.”
“Would travel.”
“Wages £70 to £80.”
At the last item, Mrs. Temple remembered what a very long while it was since any story of hers had brought in a cheque.
If she wrote more stories, and could sell them for better prices; she might be able to afford the wages asked by highly trained nurses and governesses.
By the time that her husband came in, Laura had not thought of a short story, but she had answered Duke Ayland’s letter, and two of the advertisements in The Times.
“I wish you’d look at what I’ve written in answer to two ‘Situations Wanted,’ Alfred,” she said.
“That seems all right.”
“Do you think I’ve said enough?”
“Too much, if anything.”
“Oh Alfred! I’d so much rather tell them the drawbacks beforehand, and then they can’t say anything afterwards. What do you think I ought to leave out?”
“I don’t say you ought to leave out anything exactly,” replied Arthur carefully. “I only meant that the whole tone of your letter was rather calculated to put them off, that’s all.”
“Oh, is that all?” said Laura satirically, and then they both laughed.
It was always a relief to her when they laughed at the same things, because it engendered a sense of companionship.
Laura was passionately anxious to believe that companionship played a large and important part in the married life of Alfred and herself. She put aside the facts that they differed upon the question of the children, that Alfred’s main preoccupations lay in the vegetable kingdom, and her own in the realm of the emotions, and dwelt firmly on the interests they held in common.
Sometimes—but not often—these were reduced to Fauntleroy and lawn-tennis.
Duke Ayland had in a fortnight shattered her carefully-cultivated attitude of mind.
His society had forced upon Laura that which she had resolutely made herself forget, for fear of missing it unbearably: the meaning of mental and spiritual affinity.
She wanted to see him again with an intensity that secretly frightened her.
“Am I in any danger of falling in love with him?” Laura asked herself solemnly, from time to time.
She never asked herself whether Duke Ayland was in any danger of falling in love with her. Whatever the answer to this, Laura instinctively knew that it would dismay her.
She thought of the difference between herself and Christine.
Love affairs came naturally to Christine. She had had one, Laura knew, with a married man. But it had not been tragic.
“It’s utterly out-of-date to take things seriously,” Laura told herself, more seriously than ever.
Although less than ten years separated her from Christine she felt that she belonged to the generation that accepted, if it did not positively manufacture, tragedy, renunciation, and sublimity.
It was impossible to her to be genuinely flippant and detached where personal relations were concerned.
Laura, as usual obsessed by two conflicting emotions, despised and resented this peculiarity in herself, and at the same time admired and exulted in it.
In a frame of mind that entirely defied analysis she prepared to go to London. Nothing, to her surprise, happened to prevent it.
“Mind you enjoy yourself. Go to some plays, or something,” said Alfred at the station. Laura, touched and strangely self-reproachful, hovered for an incredible instant on the verge of an insane offer to remain at home and not go at all—but fortunately remembered in time that there was nothing more justly disliked by Alfred than a change of plans at the eleventh hour.
Chapter IX
The train sped onwards, and Laura held her library book open upon her knee, and supposed herself to be reading it, whilst a merry phantasy careered round and round her mind, in which she sustained a rôle not unworthy of an American film-heroine featuring the brilliant night life of Broadway. But of this she remained fortunately unconscious, with that part of herself that would most strongly have objected to it.
At the junction, Lady Kingsley-Browne was also awaiting the London train.
“How
delightful, my dear—look, you’re dropping your book—are you actually going all the way to town? We can travel together.”
A discrepancy in the class of ticket purchased respectively by Lady Kingsley-Browne and by Mrs. Temple would, Laura well knew, defeat this amiable project, but she received it nevertheless with an assenting smile, which seemed simpler to accomplish than an explanatory refusal.
“My dear, I’m glad—positively glad—that you’re going to have a change. You sometimes look to me quite worn out,” said Laura’s neighbour solicitously. “A rag! Neither more nor less than a rag!”
“Oh, I hope not!”
Lady Kingsley-Browne shook her expensively-turbaned head.
“A change is what we all need, from time to time, though I know how hard it is to tear oneself from the garden. How is yours doing now?”
“If we could only get a little really hot sun—” said Laura, who had learnt by long experience that this observation can almost always be made with perfect safety in an English summer.
Lady Kingsley-Browne met it with almost passionate sympathy, and rushed into horticultural details whilst Laura allowed her mind to turn once more to the anticipations that had held her imagination for the past fortnight.
Suddenly she realised that her interlocutor was no longer straying amongst begonias and petunias.
“I know you’re really interested, or I shouldn’t say one word, but after all, you’ve known Bébée ever since she was so high, haven’t you?” Lady Kingsley-Browne’s white kid glove appealed to an imaginary line somewhere about the level of Laura’s knees. “And I always think it’s such a joy to hear of a girl being settled”
“Yes,” said Laura, thoughtfully rather than assentingly. “Married, you mean?”
“Engaged, and then married, naturally.”
“It’s wonderful how much they enjoy themselves nowadays, it seems to me, without any of the responsibility that marriage brings,” murmured Laura. “Look at my sister!”
But Lady Kingsley-Browne had no desire to look at Laura’s sister, although she paid her the passing tribute of an indistinct murmur from which the words “charming” and “tennis” disconnectedly emerged.
“One likes Jeremy so much on his own account,” she mysteriously assured Laura. “The very best type of young Englishman, is what one always feels.”
“She brought him to Applecourt—I remember. He’s very—quite young, isn’t he ?”
“To us he may be, but of course he’s exactly the right age, really. About twenty-nine. And I’ve always been so fond of Felicia Vulliamy.”
“His mother?” hazarded Laura.
“His mother. They have such a lovely place in Norfolk. I’ve never seen anything like their azaleas—and the rhododendrons in June—they had the new variety before anyone else in England.”
She was off again, Laura rather unsympathetically told herself, and waited for a pause in which to interject:
“Is he the only son?”
“The only child at all. As a matter of fact, he will be one of the richest commoners in England. Poor Felicia idolises him. One felt she could only endure to surrender him to a girl of Bébée’s type.”
Laura’s astonished inward conjecture as to the discernment thus ascribed to Mrs. Vulliamy’s maternity was cut short by the approach of the London train.
“We must meet in town, dear!” cried Lady Kingsley-Browne. “I suppose you’ll be at the Chelsea Flower Show?”
Laura, who did not at the moment ever wish to see a flower again, except within the confines of a restaurant dining-room, waved enthusiastic agreement, and sought the far end of the train.
Her excitement was growing steadily, and, in a blind instinct of self-protection, she sought to mitigate it by seriously analysing, with the help of a pocket-mirror, the justice of Lady Kingsley-Browne’s description of her as a rag. On the whole, Laura decided, it was unmerited, especially with a hat on.
She took out a new and unused lip-stick, and applied it to her upper lip, but in such a manner that she could not really be sure if it had or had not altered the colour of her mouth.
In the luncheon-car she had one more glimpse of Lady Kingsley-Browne, emerging from First Luncheon as Laura approached Second Luncheon.
“Now be sure and look up the A. B. Onslows,” cried Lady Kingsley-Browne kindly and earnestly. “I know they really want you to, and he thinks your poems so delightfully clever. We must meet there.”
“Does she really suppose,” Laura rhetorically demanded of herself, “that one goes all the way to London for the sake of looking at flowers and meeting country neighbours?”
At Paddington Christine met her.
Unlike Laura, she had not been in the least half-hearted in the use of her lip-stick. She looked very pretty and very well dressed, and seemed enthusiastically glad to see her sister.
“Duke rang up, to ask what time you were arriving. I think he wanted me to ask him round to the flat to-night, but I didn’t in case you wanted to get your hair waved first, or anything.”
“I’m dining with him to-morrow night, anyway,” said Laura, who had wondered for days how she was to explain this engagement to Christine and now found it as easy as though she had been eighteen years old again.
Easiness was in the atmosphere of Christine’s flat, and was prevalent in everything that she and Laura said and did.
Domestic mishaps, if they occurred, did not matter. There were no servants, and the absence of them was not a calamity.
There were no children and—
At that, Laura’s mind jibbed suddenly and irrecoverably. She was incapable of allowing the thought to reach to its logical conclusion.
The next morning she went to the famous Mrs. Laid-law’s Registry Office, and was conducted to a small cubicle like a bathing-machine, where a chair with arms received her, in contradistinction to the upright and uncomfortable stool that awaited the candidates for her situation.
To each one of these, Laura, after a brief, dismayed inspection, made a short and faltering speech, describing the disadvantages of life at Applecourt, and the excessive quiet of the surrounding country. The candidates, for the most part, were scornful-eyed, middle-aged women, who asked curt and business-like questions.
Laura never got as far as, “My second boy, I ought to tell you, is a particularly highly-strung child—” which was the preface that she had designed for the elucidation of her theories on education.
She said: “Well, nurse, I’ll write to you one way or the other, before the end of the week,” and one by one the candidates withdrew.
“I don’t think it’s going to be at all easy to find the right person for the boys,” Laura said to Christine at luncheon.
“How are the boys?” said Christine. “I’m afraid I forgot to ask yesterday.”
But Christine’s forgetfulness, Laura felt, was as nothing to her own, in having neither noticed nor resented the omission.
Whilst she dressed for dinner that evening, Laura dwelt with passionate earnestness on the thought of her own maternity.
It seemed a kind of safeguard.
For the first time in several years, she found her frock, her hair and her general appearance, adequate, and when Duke Ayland came to fetch her in a taxi, she was immediately aware that he, also, found her so.
“It’s simply splendid to see you again,” he said earnestly. “I’ve been so absurdly terrified that something would happen to prevent it.”
“So have I,” said Laura, quite involuntarily. “Where are we going?”
“I thought of the Roumanian Restaurant, unless you’d rather go anywhere else. It’s generally quiet there, and we can talk.”
A sudden panic seized upon Laura, and caused her to say:
“I haven’t talked to anybody about books since you were at Applecourt.”
“But it isn’t only about books that we’re going to talk,” said Duke Ayland gently.
He looked at Laura, and Laura looked at the motor-bus tha
t was towering against the side of the taxi, and a breathless and significant silence descended upon them.
She heard Ayland catch his breath before he spoke again.
“You know, you don’t talk about yourself nearly enough. It would be much better for you if you talked about yourself a great deal more. Of course, to most people one would—or, at least, could—give diametrically opposite advice. But what I feel about you is that you suppress such a tremendous part of yourself, always and every day. Please stop me if you think I’m being too personal—I don’t mean to be.”
Laura took no advantage of the opportunity thus offered her for checking a conversation that was causing her genuine and serious alarm, considerable excitement, and a variety of disconcerting physical emotions.
Instead, she replied in a slightly choked voice:
“It’s true, of course. But don’t you see that I can’t let myself think about it? One goes on from day to day, and life is perfectly bearable, just as long as you don’t stop to think about—about the part that’s suppressed. I suppose my life is the same as that of thousands of other women.”
“That’s what’s so wrong,” Duke Ayland exclaimed. “It might be all right for those thousands of other women—but not for you. For a woman of your temperament, and your talents, and your sensitiveness, it’s all so absolutely wrong.”
“Don’t tell me that,” said Laura in a low tone. “My life is what I’ve made it, I suppose, and even if what you say is partly true—and perhaps it is—I can’t—I don’t—and in any case—But the only possible way is for me not to think about things, far less talk about them.”
All the evening, in the intimacy of a corner table, Duke Ayland and Laura Temple talked upon the topics designated by Laura as “things.” There were not very many people in the restaurant—but of such as there were, Laura was entirely unconscious.
She knew only that she had come to life again. Duke Ayland looked at her across the small table, and as often as her eyes met his, Laura felt the blood racing through her body.
She ceased to analyse, to examine her motives, and the strange discrepancy between them and her actions, and she ceased entirely and unprecedentedly to view the whole of life in the rather austere light of her own wifehood and motherhood.
The Way Things Are Page 11