Laura instinctively glanced round the table, wondering if her own inclination to comment flippantly upon so poor a recognition of hospitality was out of place.
She could not doubt that it was.
Bébée was looking soulfully at her host, but every other face wore an expression of concern for the difficulties that had momentarily overcome genius.
“It’s most curious, that inability to produce one’s best work except in the right surroundings,” said Onslow. “Personally, I can work almost anywhere, provided that I can get absolute quiet.”
“He really is wonderful,” his wife agreed. “I’ve known A.B. to sit down at Granada, and write in the hotel drawing-room or on the terrace of our tiny little villa at Capri. Surroundings make no difference to him.”
A lady in round, tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles spoke from the other side of the table.
“I prefer to write, or, rather, dictate, in bed. Many people, I know, find bed quite impossible. But I’m not strong, as you know”—Mrs. Onslow made a sympathetic sound of corroboration—”My wretched back won’t let me sit up for long. So I simply stay there until lunch time every day and dictate for two and a half hours, sometimes more.”
“Do you really?”
A. B. Onslow’s intonation expressed an almost incredulous admiration.
“Do you really? That’s extraordinary. And you don’t find that the ordinary sounds of the house are intolerable?”
“They are, of course,” said the spectacled lady quickly. “But I’ve trained myself to disregard them. It can be done, I assure you. There are double doors to my room, and no one is allowed to come near it until after twelve o’clock; I, of course, am invisible to everyone except my secretary, until I’ve finished the morning’s work.”
“To me, it’s so marvellous that you should be able to work like that to order,” Mr. Jenkins remarked. “Don’t you ever feel that you lack inspiration, and must put off work till the evening, say?”
“No. No. I never feel that. In the evenings I need people. The interchange of ideas—conversation—people. They stimulate me.”
“Wonderful!” said another lady, whom Laura had thought of as wealthy rather than talented, owing to her clothes and the fabulous size of her pearls. “I need complete silence and isolation. I often think of poor Carlyle, and his sound-proof room. And I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no such thing. I have a bungalow on the Sussex Downs, you know, to which I retire whenever I write. But even there, I’m sent nearly mad. A dog barks, or there’s a fly buzzing in the room. Never absolute silence.”
“Leave England,” advised her neighbour, a fair man with enormous and prominent eyes, and an enormous and prominent Adam’s apple, in whom Laura thought that she recognised a reasonably well known poet. “Leave England. It’s the only thing to do. I was six months in the Sahara last year.”
Laura’s head was reeling slightly.
Evidently, she thought, none of these talented people were bound by any domestic ties whatsoever. The lady who was sent nearly mad by the bark of a dog and the buzz of a fly could never have produced a Johnnie or an Edward, and subjected her reason to the far greater strain of existence in their neighbourhood. The tortoise-shell-glassed lady, who was invisible to everyone but her secretary all the morning, either possessed a supernaturally efficient housekeeper, or else no servants at all. The Sahara—Albania—Granada hotels—villas at Capri—Laura contemplated for one hysterical moment, announcing that whenever she wrote a short story, she found it essential to cross the Pacific Ocean in a balloon.
But when A. B. Onslow turned to her with his charming air of finding himself in suspense until her answer came, she only said:
“Devonshire is very delightful, I always find.”
“Ah, you get beautiful surroundings there, and quiet and solitude!” he replied in a tone of understanding. “How wise of you, Mrs. Temple! But you don’t give your whole time to your work, do you?”
“No,” said Laura with some feeling. “Not my whole time. No.”
“That’s wise, too. Every creative effort ought to be followed by a period of absolute rest. The mind ought to lie fallow for a time. You’ve found that out?”
“Yes,” said Laura, and was preparing to say more when she perceived that Miss Kingsley-Browne was listening to her, with something faintly cynical in her meditative gaze.
The course of the discussion, stemmed by Laura’s unnaturally curtailed contribution, turned into other channels.
It became incumbent upon Mrs. Temple either to remain silent, or to pretend that she was as much au fait with contemporary French poetry as was the circle of the A. B. Onslows. From prudence, rather than from conscientiousness, she chose the former course.
And the moment she became silent, she began to think about Duke Ayland.
It was better than thinking about her own inadequacy as a conversationalist which had always, on similar occasions in the past, obsessed her.
Duke had not found her at all inadequate.
Bébée Kingsley-Browne, so obviously enslaving her rather more than middle-aged host, had not attracted Duke as Laura had done.
For the first time in several years, Laura looked at her expensively-clad and elaborately-coloured young neighbour without resentment.
It seemed to her that Bébée was making a display of the flirtatious terms upon which she found herself with the celebrated A. B. Onslow. She addressed herself exclusively to him, and called him “A. B.” with marked assurance, and made many allusions to a past and a present equally shared.
Mrs. Onslow, at whom Laura glanced, seemed to wear a very faintly harassed expression—that of one who sees the approach of a tiresome, but familiar, recurrent phenomenon.
After lunch, she took a seat beside Laura, in the flagged garden, to which coffee was brought by the austere butler.
“Bébée’s mother is a neighbour of yours, I think? We met at her house, I know.”
“Yes. They’re our nearest neighbours.”
“The girl is a pretty creature,” said Mrs. Onslow, with, however, only a tempered admiration in her eyes.
“Very pretty. We always think her a little bit spoilt, though. I daresay it’s natural.”
“Oh, most natural. She’s attractive, and certainly pretty, though personally—so much make-up—but then, they all do it, nowadays. I often wonder why. I don’t think,” said Mrs. Onslow artlessly, “that really nice men admire it, you know.”
It seemed a little bit difficult to agree, and tacitly brand her host as something less than really nice, or to disagree, and emphasise his already evident infatuation.
Laura murmured.
Without making any definite statement, she found herself obscurely hinting at the existence of the eligible Vulliamy, and at Lady Kingsley-Browne’s high hopes that a safe anchorage would shortly receive the volatile barque of her daughter’s affections.
Mrs. Onslow brightened, and said that she believed in marriages, especially for girls, and when Mrs. Temple rose to go away, she was cordially invited to come again.
“No one can say that I’ve been an absolute failure there,” was the singular form of congratulation tendered to Laura by her own inner monitor, as she left the house.
She rehearsed to herself the witty and trenchant phrases in which she would presently, for Christine’s amusement, delineate her fellow-guests.
(Alfred was very seldom amused by accounts of festivities at which he had not been present—and still less by those at which he had, since in these he found inaccuracy, which he disliked.)
Christine was as appreciative as her sister had expected her to be, and as unmaliciously satirical on the inexhaustible topic of Miss Kingsley-Browne’s latest lapses from decent behaviour. Then she remarked:
“You’ll hardly believe it, Laura—I always say I have the devil’s own luck—but I have got an invitation for the theatre for us both. Do you remember Vulliamy?”
“Bay-Bay’s young man? His nose is well
out of joint, now.”
“I do not personally believe that it was ever in joint,” replied Christine imperturbably. “I was walking across the Park, and I met Losh—you remember that medical student who was here the other night—the one who’s keen about sexual aberrations, you know—so we sat down under the trees, and he began to tell me about some unfortunate creature with Habits, and how perfectly splendid it was to think what a lot of cases there were simply waiting to be investigated, and presumably cured—when he said, ‘There’s a man I haven’t seen for years! May I go and speak to him?’
“Naturally, I thought anybody in whom Losh took an interest would be a freak and a degenerate—and then I saw Vulliamy and remembered him perfectly.”
“Let me see, was he good-looking?”
“Quite.”
“Did he remember you?”
“He at least had the decency to pretend that he did. And we’re going to do a theatre—you and I and Losh and him—he. It’s his party, of course. Shall you mind, Laura? Losh is really quite amusing, in his own way.”
“I’m glad you said ‘in his own way,’” Laura remarked, remembering the conversation of Losh.
She was inwardly amazed at the purely fortuitous fashion in which Christine so frequently collected the invitations of young men.
At Quinnerton there were not, and never had been, any young men, and Laura supposed—without realising that the supposition was now out of date—that since the war there had been no young men in London either.
“He’s going to ring me up, about where we’ll dine and what he can get tickets for. Tuesday—that’s two nights before you go home. Though if you can stay longer, darling, I should simply love it.”
“I can’t—possibly,” said Laura. “The children. And besides—”
“I see,” said Christine.
Laura hoped, and believed, that Christine did not see, in any very extensive sense.
The days were passing, she was meeting Duke Ayland daily, and still she failed to achieve that dispassionate facing of the situation that she so frequently promised herself.
Duke Ayland’s society had an effect upon Laura that she considered strange and unusual. His companionship stimulated her, she was happy and at her ease with him, prompted to an unreserve the depth of which constituted a spiritual luxury, and fully conscious that her own effect upon him was exactly similar.
His admiration gave her a sense of expansion. He thought her wonderful, and it was so long since anyone had thought such a thing, that any latent possibilities of wonderfulness in Laura had almost died, from sheer inanition. Duke had revived them.
She had been told the story of his life, in which actual events had apparently counted for little, and psychological reactions for much.
In return, she had unrolled for him the history of her days up to the year of her marriage, emphasising the two rather bloodless love affairs that alone could be mustered from the past—for Laura had been a person of romantic imaginings rather than actual contacts.
She wanted to speak of her marriage, she passionately wanted to be honest about it, but she had a sense of obligation to Alfred, and a Victorian conviction that Duke Ayland would think the better of her for conforming to its conventions.
One evening, dining with him alone, she fell.
“You’ve never told me about your marriage, Laura?” said Duke Ayland.
“No.”
“I wish you would.”
“It’s so difficult,” murmured Laura, her heart throbbing violently. “I’ve often thought of it—”
“Surely you can say anything to me?”
“Yes. It’s only—I’m very fond of Alfred,” said Laura, taking the plunge, and temporarily unaware that almost all wives begin conversations about almost all husbands in precisely the same way.
“I know you are.”
“I don’t think we were ever desperately in love with one another, but I know he’s devoted to me, in his own way—and so am I to him. And there are the children, of course.”
“Yes,” said Ayland, with a different intonation. “There are the children, I know.”
“I admit that if we hadn’t had children, I might have felt rather—lonely, sometimes.”
“You see,” Ayland said, without looking at her, “you and he haven’t really got very much in common, have you?”
“I suppose not.”
Laura felt this simple statement of simple fact to be the crossing of the Rubicon.
“I can’t possibly discuss Alfred, or my relation to Alfred, with you or anybody,” she exclaimed unhappily.
“I think I know exactly how you feel about it. But do you think that so much repression is really good for you or for your writing—and after all, your work does matter.”
“But does it?”
“It’s your form of self-expression, besides being a thing that’s valuable—because it’s sincere—in itself. I should say it mattered very much indeed.”
“It is really quite a new idea to me,” said Laura, without any affectation, “that my writing matters anything at all.”
Duke Ayland smiled.
“You’re the only writer I’ve ever met who thought that about their own work. If it was anyone in the world but you, I should say it was a pose.”
“It isn’t.”
“I know that. You’re incapable of posing.”
Laura experienced the double gratification of receiving a tribute, and of knowing it to be one that she did not always entirely deserve.
“It isn’t even as though I’d married when I was very young,” she irrelevantly observed.
“In some ways, my dear, you’re very young now—and always will be. I don’t know what it is, exactly—I can’t find the word I want—not exactly ‘unawakened’—” He paused, and Laura felt herself blushing.
Partly because she detested so démodée and unsuitable a manifestation of her feelings, and partly from pure nervousness, she dashed into speech.
She spoke very low and rapidly, and with astonishing vehemence.
In something under seven minuutes, she had released what Duke Ayland called the repressions of more than seven years. She had put into words resentments, regrets, despairs, and madly romantic ideals that she had never yet had the courage to acknowledge even to herself. She had cast loyalty to the winds. She had, indeed, forgotten Alfred as a man altogether. He was one with her immense, her unique, grievance against life itself.
Ever since she had awakened to conscious values, Laura had wanted, and expected to find, such things as happiness, companionship, and perfect love. Her grievance was that she had not found them.
When, in the course of years, it had been borne in upon her that she was not destined to succeed in her quest, she had found it impossible to accept defeat. She had cast from her mind any recollections that could evoke the thought of happiness, companionship and perfect love.
She had immersed herself in domestic problems of which the solution brought her neither joy nor triumph.
Instead of suffering, she had developed an irritable temper, and the habit of waking daily to a mild depression. Instead of happiness, she had experienced a timorous relief on discovering new servants to take the place of departing ones, and a trivial satisfaction when her accounts showed a balance on the credit side.
Spiritually and mentally, she had remained static for years. Emotionally, she had ceased to exist.
Laura, in effect, told Duke Ayland everything of which he had himself made her aware.
There was silence when she had finished. A revulsion of feeling overwhelmed her.
“Whatever he says, I shall hate it,” she thought, in despair.
Ayland, without saying anything at all, put his hand gently over her clenched ones, and looked at her.
He did not speak a word, and Laura translated his silence into the response for which any words must have been inadequate. It stood to her for the complete sympathy and understanding that her whole being craved. Rapture a
nd gratitude flooded her soul, and in that illuminated moment, she acknowledged to herself, without shame or dismay, that she was in love.
It neither frightened nor surprised her when Duke Ayland that evening told her that he loved her.
It had become inevitable.
He took her back to Bloomsbury and Christine was out.
“May I come in and wait till she gets in?”
“Yes,” said Laura, almost inaudibly.
Christine’s small sitting-room was very quiet, high above such traffic as passed through the square, and lit only by the small, scarlet-shaded electric lamp on the writing-table. Laura, intolerably conscious of the emotional tension in the atmosphere, murmured something about another light, and broke the spell.
“Wait,” said Duke. “Darling, you know I love you, and I’m going to tell you so.”
She stood stock still on the instant, and faced him.
“Laura, Laura—say you love me.”
The knowledge that romance had found her, after all, affected Laura so extraordinarily that she nearly fainted. Actually, she swayed slightly towards Ayland, and he caught her in his arms and held her to him.
Blindness and ecstasy descended upon Laura as they kissed.
Chapter XI
“What Are We going to do?” said Ayland, next day.
(He had previously been saying other things, far more agreeable to Laura than this inevitable, but difficult, enquiry.)
They were sitting in Kensington Gardens, within sight of the Albert Memorial, and Laura gazed earnestly at it before replying, as though seeking counsel of Albert the Good, so straightforwardly domestic.
At last she said:
“I’ve been trying to think. It’s so difficult to be honest. I used to say that if ever I fell in love with anybody else, the first person I should tell would be Alfred.”
“I used to say that if ever I fell in love with another man’s wife I should either persuade her to come right away with me, or else go right away myself and never see her again.”
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