“The first alternative,” said Laura gently, “is obviously impossible.”
“The second one is much more so, darling.”
To hear such things said in Ayland’s deep and agreeable voice, reduced Laura to an exquisite and breathtaking silence.
“Will you come away with me, Laura?”
“I could never do that. The children—”
A pang went through her as she said the words, and an unbearably vivid image came before her mind’s eye of Johnnie and Edward at home. She could feel Johnnie’s silky curls under her hand.
It was inconceivable that she should have got to a stage where such a suggestion as that of her leaving them could have been made.
If that suggestion were possible, what else might not become possible? In a confused and irrational way, she seemed to see herself deserting the children, less by an act of free-will than by the working of some mysterious and oppressive fate, for the existence of which she was nevertheless responsible.
“You don’t understand,” said Laura violently, “that Johnnie—the boys—are the most important things in the world to me.”
“I do understand.”
“There could never be any question of my doing anything that would hurt them.”
“Perhaps some day—a long time hence, when they’re both grown up—”
“Perhaps,” said Laura gently, avoiding any inward calculation as to the tale of her own years at that remote period.
She was, in fact, relieved to have softened the edges of her impassioned negation. It reassured her, that Duke should know how inexorable was her decision, and his knowledge seemed to leave her more freedom. She wanted to be made love to more than she had ever wanted anything in her life.
“We could have had the most wonderful marriage if we’d met years ago,” she murmured.
Ayland’s response was as ardent, as detailed, as she had wanted it to be.
Whatever happened, or did not happen, Laura’s dreams had for a little while come true, and she knew it.
Ayland told her all those things about herself that she had most wished to believe, but had been forced to doubt since for so many years no one had appeared to perceive them. Under the magic of his words she could feel herself actually verifying them.
He found her beautiful, and courageous, and lovable and gifted—and she became so.
“I have never been alive before,” thought Laura, her mouth trembling.
They talked for hours.
Nothing that they said was new, except to themselves.
At last Ayland returned to that aspect of the case which Laura, even in her own thoughts, preferred to shelve.
“You know what you said, just now, about telling your husband. You don’t still feel that’s necessary, do you?”
“I can’t deceive him.”
In the silence that followed, Duke’s carefully unspoken retort seemed to become almost audible.
“You may say, what else am I doing now?—and you would be right. But I don’t know what I shall do when I see Alfred again. I’m going home in two days now.”
“But you’ll come up again?”
“I don’t know.”
“Laura, darling! Don’t you want to see me again?”
“I want to more than anything else in the world. Couldn’t you come down to Quinnerton again?”
“It’s very difficult for me to meet your husband,” said Ayland slowly.
“He didn’t dislike you, you know,” Laura said, experiencing a strange moment of pride that this should have been so.
“I didn’t dislike him, either. But of course he doesn’t understand you—he isn’t fit to be your husband. He has never known how to make you happy.”
“He’s very fond of me.”
“That makes it worse, because, being what you are, it will prevent your ever having the courage to break away.”
Laura shook her head.
“The children—”
They were back at the children again.
As though knowing that, against that bulwark of Laura’s virtue, there could be no assault that would avail anything, Ayland changed the subject. They talked, inexhaustibly, about themselves.
Laura, obliged at last to go back to the flat in Bloomsbury, felt that Christine must inevitably ask her what had happened. It was impossible, that the whole of life should have become transformed for her, and that she should show no sign of it.
But Christine, if she did see what appeared to her sister to be so unmistakable, made no comment.
She met Laura at the door and said, low and rapidly, in the domestic French employed by everybody and supposed to be entirely incomprehensible to everybody else:
“Il y a une femme qui attend, dedans. Envoyée par le Registry Office. Une nurse. Assez gentille.”
“Oh,” said Laura, startled.
It was very difficult, to be thus suddenly thrust back into the atmosphere, so familiar and yet now so remote, of nursery necessities.
“I’ll go to my room. You’ll see her in the sitting-room, won’t you?”
“Very well.”
Laura instinctively took the little mirror out of her handbag, powdered her nose, felt a moment’s astonished wonder at the shining of her eyes, and went in to interview the nurse.
She seemed much nicer than any other nurse that Laura had interviewed.
Gentle and pleasant, with a ready smile.
The violent anxiety that, on previous similar occasions, had led Mrs. Temple to urge upon the applicant’s notice every possible deterrent to the situation, was absent. Indeed, a kind of spiritual haze seemed to have interposed itself between Laura and reality.
She asked questions, she smiled, as though in a dream. Unprecedently, she heard herself saying: “So long as the little boys are kept well and happy, I don’t really mind…I like them to be happy.”
Happiness, she felt as never before, was the only thing that mattered.
It ought to be attainable by everyone.
The little books about Education, about Diet, and about Sex-Enlightenment of Children by their Mothers had faded away—insignificant ghosts of the past—she did not seek to extract the nurse’s views on these so important points.
She said:
“Have you satisfactory references?”
“I have them here, madam.”
Laura, still in a dream, read a letter on stamped blue paper, another one on expensive white with red lettering.
They seemed to be nice, enthusiastic letters.
Charlotte Emery was evidently a treasure.
She looked a treasure. Her kind, middle-aged face gazed at Laura as an older woman’s face does sometimes gaze at a younger one’s—with a touch of wistfulness, of un-envious admiration.
It was a very long while since Laura had met that look—but she recognised it unerringly. It was her own rejuvenation, her secret rapture, that had drawn it forth.
She engaged Charlotte Emery to come to Applecourt in a week’s time.
The anxious quest of so many days had been brought to a successful conclusion in half an hour.
“Well?” said Christine, when the nurse had gone.
“I’ve engaged her. I like her very much.”
“How splendid! You think she’ll be able to manage Johnnie?”
“Oh yes, I think so.”
Christine looked rather surprised at this unprecedented optimism.
“I never really think Johnnie is as difficult as you make out, you know. Of course, he’s terribly precocious, but he can be a perfect darling when he likes, and any nurse is sure to get fond of him.”
“They get fond of him more easily than he does of them. Johnnie has been so very much with me.”
“How excited the boys will be to get you home again!” said Christine.
Laura said with sudden passion: “Not half so excited as I shall be,” and went to her room. She wrote a letter to Alfred, telling him the things that she thought would interest him—there were
not many of them—briefly announcing the satisfactory acquisition of Charlotte Emery, and giving the time of her own arrival at Quinnerton.
In three days more she would be home again. She would wake up in the morning without the thrill of knowing that the day was to bring a meeting with Ayland.
But she felt that never again would her first waking thought be of the servants, the stores, the ordering of a pudding. Her horizon could never again, surely, be bounded by such considerations day after day.
Her mood of exaltation dropping abruptly, Laura wondered whether perhaps instead she would open her eyes to problems less material, indeed, but also infinitely more painful. Would it be possible to see Alfred beside her and not to ask herself what justification she had for deceiving him?
“But then,” reflected Laura, “if it comes to that, what justification have I for enlightening him? As Duke says, it would only make him unhappy or angry, or both.”
She could not imagine how Alfred would receive the information that his wife loved another man. She had never seen Alfred confronted with any emotional situation. Emotional situations were things that Alfred did not attract. They died still-born in his very presence.
It was inconceivable that Alfred should, like a husband in an old-fashioned novel, wish to shoot Duke Ayland, or even to horsewhip him. It was equally inconceivable that he should, like a husband in a modern play, agree to discuss the whole problem dispassionately with his wife and the man who was in love with her.
What, Laura wondered, were the remaining alternatives?
She could find only two.
Either she must continue to see Duke Ayland and tacitly deceive her husband, or she must give up seeing Duke Ayland altogether.
Confronted by these two courses, each one of which appeared to her to be entirely incompatible with her own self-respect or peace of mind, Laura instinctively floundered her way into a morass of compromise.
She represented to herself that it might be possible for her to see Duke as often as they could arrange to meet, but that he should not make love to her.
Friendship.
Laura, like Mr. Twemlow, might be represented as saying to herself all that evening: “Hold on to friendship”
She was obliged to say it during the night as well, for she slept badly.
It is impossible to ignore the fact that Laura, at this juncture, was profoundly agitated by the unescapable consideration so deftly implied in a more reticent age, by the euphemistic reference: “The Woman Who Did.”
Never, since she had outgrown the sentimental and supremely ignorant eroticism of early adolescence, had Laura identified herself with the type of Woman who Did. Marriage, indeed, had served to inculcate in her the chastity—than which there is none more rigid—of a romantic woman, married to a man with whom she had never been in love.
Duke Ayland had revolutionised many things.
Laura, refusing absolutely to be anything but truly modern, had the greatest difficulty in persuading herself that any decision she might come to on the subject, must be based upon the individual merits of the case alone.
Tradition, and the force of early upbringing—so much more powerful, always, at night than in the day-time—thronged in upon her. Quotations, every one of them in favour of renunciation, continued to distress her.
“The only thing,” said Laura to herself, sternly, “the only thing is, what is least likely to hurt the children, and Alfred, and Duke. And myself.”
But it still continued impossible to find any formula that should combine an absence of hurt for the children, Alfred, Duke and Laura.
“And in any case,” said Laura wildly, “‘thou shalt not commit—’”
She had been trying not to remember it, to think that it had no power over her.
But it had.
She got up, washed her face in cold water, fetched pen and paper, and wrote an immensely long and exhaustive letter to Duke Ayland, in which, like the compiler of the Athanasian Creed, she sought to define the indefinable.
The performance left her far from satisfied.
She put the letter into an envelope, sealed it, and placed it underneath her pillow—as a measure of precaution.
More wholly wakeful than ever in her life before, Laura told herself excitedly that she must get some sleep.
Lying down in the not very profound obscurity of the early summer morning, she closed her eyes.
Instantly, the letter, assuming gigantic proportions, began to torment her, suggesting to her mind terrible possibilities.
Letters read aloud in the divorce court—indiscreet letters in blackmail cases—letters, even, figuring sensationally in certain well known murder trials.
Laura’s imagination, leaping every intermediate stage, placed her momentarily upon the scaffold. She jerked herself miserably back into the realms of comparative common sense.
Her letter, after all, was a work of supererogation.
She was going to see Duke, and she could urge her point of view upon him—especially if she were only able to formulate it clearly in her own mind first. She would not be unfaithful to Alfred.
She put her children before every other consideration in the world. She could never leave them.
But she could not relinquish Duke.
A more than distasteful analogy rushed unbidden to Laura’s memory.
“Hunt with the hounds and run with the hare,” she muttered distractedly.
And, after that, she slept.
In the light of morning things—as is their custom—looked less desperate.
She was able to consider the value of her letter dispassionately and to apply a lighted match to it without compunction.
“And I shall see him to-day,” thought Laura, and felt that little else mattered.
She was to see Duke in the evening at a small literary and artistic soirée, for which he had given her and Christine tickets.
“A totally insignificant kind of club,” he had apologetically explained to her, “to which I’ve belonged ever since it started, over a mews near Southampton Row. It’s quite prosperous, nowadays, and meets at quite expensive restaurants. Consequently I go there very seldom. Sometimes they get A. B. Onslow there.”
Christine, on the morning following Laura’s nuit blanche, reminded her of this festivity.
“Are you going to do anything special to-day? You’ll be going home, worse luck, in such a short time,” Christine superfluously added.
“I know. This afternoon I’m afraid there’s nothing for it but to go and see old cousin Louisa Temple at Queen’s Park. I’ve been meaning to do it ever since I got here, and putting it off—and if I don’t do it now, I never shall.”
“And must you?”
“Yes.”
A pilgrimage to Queen’s Park was indeed something that no member of the Temple family, even though only a member of it by marriage, could omit. Almost all families are subjected to similar oppressions.
Cousin Louisa, strangely, lived at Queen’s Park from choice, with a niece who would have been an old lady herself, if cousin Louisa had not been so much older. The extravagant senility of Cousin Louisa consigned her niece to a dim, perpetual middle-age. She was called by almost everybody Poor Selina, and sometimes, by those who knew her less well, Poor Miss Thingamy.
Laura had been aware ever since she married, that an expedition to see Cousin Louisa at Queen’s Park was a moral obligation attached to every stay in London. It might be—and almost always was—inconvenient, but it could not be shirked. A tradition had been established, and only death could break it. She must, of her own free will, deliberately immerse herself in the atmosphere of pills, and Halma, and little grey shawls, diffused by cousin Louisa and Poor Selina.
Before she started, Duke Ayland rang her up on the telephone.
He wanted to take her out to lunch.
“But we shall meet this evening. You’re coming to fetch us, aren’t you?” said Laura, entirely for the sake of hearing his reply. When he h
ad protested, she suggested going out to tea with him instead, for she knew from experience that a visit to old Cousin Louisa could not possibly take place within the confines of a morning.
“I ought to see a man about some songs, this afternoon,” she heard Ayland’s voice.
“Oh, then, please—”
“But that’ll be all right. I’ll settle him somehow. Can I call for you anywhere?”
“But, Duke, the man sounds important. You’d better see him.”
“He’s not half as important as having you to myself for a little while. Of course I shall chuck him. What time, Laura?”
It thrilled her exquisitely, that he should think it worth while to cancel his appointment for the sake of being with her. Amongst her friends and acquaintances, she knew of none who would not resign cheerfully, and as a matter of course, any personal engagement that should clash with a business one.
After arranging a rendezvous with Duke, it was easy to undertake the Queen’s Park expedition, although Laura disliked the atmosphere of the Underground and almost always lost herself in the Tube at Oxford Circus.
She had made up her mind to tell Duke Ayland that he must not make love to her, that they would remain friends, and that she would see him whenever she possibly could, and write to him very often. This course would combine loyalty to Alfred with fairness to themselves, and to the claims of creative art, that surely demanded some emotional outlet for its depositaries.
Only too well aware that if she thought any more about this resolution, she would gradually be overwhelmed by its disadvantages and general impracticality, Laura in the train read the Daily Mirror from end to end, and did its cross-word puzzle.
Her visit to Queen’s Park was exactly like all her visits to Queen’s Park. Cousin Louisa was as old, as wonderful—from the point of view of what are called faculties—and as inquisitive as Laura had always known her, and Poor Selina as effusive, inconsequent, and tiresomely unselfish. Lunch, as usual, was an affair of pale boiled mutton and glutinous white sauce, unsuited to a hot summer’s day, pink corn-flour mould, and tapioca pudding, followed by cups of strong tea. Laura, also as usual, inwardly criticised Poor Selina’s housekeeping, and felt ashamed of herself for doing so.
The Way Things Are Page 14