“Yes.”
Laura got up. For the first time she really saw the picture of the wolves and the dogs, bespattering the snow with their blood, and found it singularly revolting.
“How hideous that is!” she murmured. “We’ll talk about it again. I must go now, but we’ll talk later on.”
But of what good was all this talking?
It was talking, indeed, that had brought them to their present pass.
Sometimes, reviewing the course of her acquaintance with Duke, Laura found it difficult to remember through what successive stages they had passed, in order to reach their present relationship, so unsatisfactory to at least one of them.
She had been herself far more happy than unhappy. The inward certainty that she stood to one man for the romantic ideal had comforted her in her matter-of-fact relations with another, and Ayland’s love-making had brought to her the reassurance craved by her waning youth.
She felt that it would be impossible to let him go. But it would be impossible—and far more so—to break up her married life and leave her children.
A week—one week with Duke Ayland? “One week, out of all my life,” thought Laura, as others, similarly circumstanced, have both thought and said before her. “After all, it wouldn’t hurt anybody, as things are, and Duke and I would have something to remember.”
In her mind was the vague conviction, still uncrystallised, that after that one week, she and Ayland would not again see one another very often. It seemed inevitable.
But it was quite illogical, as part of her consciousness well realised.
The frantic hooting of motor-horns and the yell of a passer-by roused Laura to a violent momentary activity, as she sprang back to the pavement that she had absently-mindedly endeavoured to leave.
“Dreamy-eyes!” said the taxi-driver who had nearly cut short Laura’s perplexities for her summarily, jocosely satirical.
Laura blushed.
“Fool!” she thought.
She deferred the consideration of her problem until she had reached the Knightsbridge Hotel.
“There’s a gentleman waiting in the lounge, madam,” the porter told her.
Laura, in the hot, plush-and-cane chair discomfort of the lounge, saw Christine’s friend, the medical student called Losh.
He looked, as before, unkempt, shabby, cheerful, enthusiastic.
“Mrs. Temple, do forgive me. I shan’t be able to come and see Christine tied up, and I had to come and tell her so, and give her my final blessing. Any hope?”
“She said she’d meet me here for tea at five. It’s nearly that now. Do sit down and wait till she comes.”
“Thanks most fearfully, I think I will. Sure I’m not barging in?”
“Of course you’re not. I’m sorry you can’t come to the wedding.”
“So’m I, but I’m taking Mids. Only just heard about it, as a matter of fact. Well, it’s the beginning of the end for me, thank God! I shall have qualified by this time next year if I get through my Finals.”
“What shall you do then?” Laura enquired, to humour him.
“Go to America, if I can wangle my passage money out of someone. They have the most topping Psychopathic Hospitals out there, and one can always get a job, once one’s actually on the spot. I want to study their methods of dealing with juvenile offenders frightfully. They put them under psychological observation, I believe, for weeks and weeks.”
“That’s what you’d like?”
“Rath-er!”
“I suppose there must be a certain attraction about it. People are always interesting.”
“Yes, aren’t they, by Jove! You see, Mrs. Temple,” earnestly said the young man, excitedly gesticulating with his bony hands, “everybody has a streak of abnormality in them somewhere. You’re abnormal—I’m abnormal. Only we have it under control—”
Laura, gazing at him not without fascination, felt inclined to wonder whether we had.
“You’d be astonished if I told you of the impulses that perfectly decent, respectable middle-aged women sometimes experience.”
“Should I?”
“You see, the Unconscious is so terribly Primordial, Of course, it’s all hedged round and covered up with acquired things—civilisation and the fear of punishment, and so on and so on. But don’t you yourself often find—”
“Let’s not talk personally, if you don’t mind.”
“I beg your Pardon. Of course I won’t if you don’t want to.”
He looked so much disappointed that Laura feared that she had hurt his feelings.
She said hastily:
“I daresay you could help me about the case of a—a woman I heard about. I don’t know her at all well, but I—I hear about her quite a lot. I’ve often wondered—”
Losh was gazing at her with even more than his usual intensity, and since it is always gratifying to feel that one is being interesting, Laura was encouraged to pursue the case of the hypothetical woman.
Perhaps Losh really might have some new and helpful light to throw on the question, she told herself, seeking an excuse for the relief of talking about her own complicated and distressing affairs.
“It’s really this. She’s married to a man—” Laura paused, and then said with violence, “to a man she’s really, thoroughly fond of—but with whom she isn’t exactly in love. In fact, not at all in love. They’ve got children. And she—the woman—has fallen in love with another man.”
Laura stopped again.
“Is the other man in love with her?”
“Oh yes. Yes, certainly.”
“I only asked because it’s quite usual for a middle-aged woman who’s had no satisfaction out of her marriage to go off the deep end about pretty nearly any sort of fellow, good, bad, or indifferent, whether he’s having any or not. It’s a mild form of hysteria, very often.”
“It’s nothing in the least like that,” Laura assured him, trying to keep a sense of profound indignation from quivering in her voice. “The man is quite as much in love as she is. More, if anything. In fact, he wants her to go away with him.”
“The best thing she could do.”
“But the children—”
“Oh, I see. Did you mean go off for good, or just take a week-end together?”
“He has asked her to go away for good, I believe, but she won’t. So it would be a—a—just a temporary experience.”
Laura looked at Losh, and he looked intelligently back at her.
“She can’t make up her mind.”
“Is she religious? That sort of thing? I mean, would that stand in her way?”
“She isn’t a conventionally religious woman.”
“Not a Roman Catholic, or anything like that? We have great difficulty with Roman Catholics, of course, because of their priests. They’re dead against honest analysis every time.”
“There isn’t anything of that sort,” Laura repeated.
“Then I don’t see where the difficulty comes in.”
“The husband. She hates the idea of deceiving him.”
“Then she’ll have to tell him.”
“How can she?”
“Well,” said the young man reasonably, “she must do one or the other, you know, mustn’t she? What sort of fellow is he?”
Laura hesitated. In what terms could she make Alfred’s personality apparent to Losh? At last she said:
“The kind of man who thinks that psycho-analysts are all humbugs, and that the people who go to them are always hysterical women.”
Losh nodded.
“I get you. I know the type. Quite a lot of them about still. Believe in Church and State, and one law for the man and another for the woman, and to hell with all this new-fangled jargon of the day, if you tell them anything they didn’t hear in Queen Victoria’s reign. I see.”
“But he’s very nice,” said Laura weakly.
“Oh, quite.”
The niceness, or otherwise, of the subject under discussion, was evidently a matter
of the utmost indifference in the psychological scale of values.
“Then I take it that there’s no hope of your friend’s being able to go to her husband quite simply and naturally, as you or I might do, and saying: ‘Look here, old thing’—or whatever she calls him—’as you and I don’t seem to click quite as well as we should like, what about giving the other lad a week at Weymouth’—or wherever they want to go—’and getting a little fun out of life, and then coming back a better and a brighter girl, so to speak?’”
“I don’t think you understand,” said Laura. “For her—it’s most horribly serious.”
“But, my dear, it can’t be. Otherwise she’d do a bunk with the other fellow,” said the medical student simply.
“The children. I told you she had children.”
“I know. That’s all right. If she puts the children first, well and good. Then obviously she must either chuck the blighter she’s in love with, or start an intrigue—week-ends, and so on, like I said at the beginning. But you say, it’s most horribly serious. And I say, it can’t be. Because if it was, the kids simply wouldn’t be in it. She’d leave ’em, and go to her man.”
Laura stared at her adviser in the stricken silence of utter spiritual devastation.
“Would she?” she said at last.
“Obviously. But most Englishwomen have the maternal instinct much more strongly developed than the mating instinct.”
“For the sake of the argument,” said Laura in a slightly tremulous voice, “you can take it absolutely for granted that the woman I’m speaking of won’t ever leave her children.”
“Right,” said Losh cheerfully. ‘Then it’s not what the Russians call a Grawnde Passiong. Is the husband the kind of bloke who’d divorce her?”
“I don’t know. I—somehow I don’t believe he would.”
“Good. What about the other johnnie? Is he married, too?”
“No.”
“Well, honestly, the best thing she could do would be to go off with him for a bit. She must use her own judgment about putting the husband wise. From what you tell me, I shouldn’t think it would be any use. No object in making the poor chap wretched.”
“It’s she who’ll be wretched if she has to tell lies and deceive him.”
Losh shrugged his shoulders.
“She sounds to me pretty spineless altogether. Not that I blame her. Women have a rotten time all along the line. But she’s lucky, really, your pal is, to have a chance at all. Hundreds and thousands of women in this country would give the eyes out of their head for what you might call one illicit thrill, and there simply isn’t anybody to provide it. I say, are you sure I’m not boring you?”
“Perfectly certain. I—I’m really interested in this particular question. I think my friend is rather—she isn’t absolutely an average woman, in some ways.”
“No? Well, of course you know more about it than I do. Only one gets a bit fed up with the woman who’ll let a fellow go all out after her, and tell him that he’s the love of her life and so on, and then, when he very naturally asks, Well, what about it?’ throws a fit and says she couldn’t ever wrong her husband and won’t he just go on being friends?”
“When it’s put like that, I agree—in a way.”
“Well, of course. Any sensible person would. The fact is, of course, that such a lot of women live in their imaginations. They’ve no other outlet. A woman like yourself”—Laura hoped that she did not start—”can let herself go a bit in her writing. But these wretched, inarticulate souls, who can’t do anything but yearn in silence—half of them are neurotic before they’re forty. It’s all rot, that about women not getting neurotic if they’ve plenty to do. Very often the more neurotic they are, the more they try and do, and then they get nervous breakdowns, and are worse than ever.”
“And if they didn’t do things?”
“They’d still be neurotic,” said Losh.
“Oh!”
“It’s a vicious circle, I know. But I don’t believe in all this blinking optimism. Better face things as they are. I say d’you suppose Christine’s got run over or anything? She’s frightfully late, isn’t she?”
“I expect she’ll be here in a minute. Are you in a hurry?”
“No. So long as I’m not boring you.”
Laura shook her head.
“You’re interested in psychology, aren’t you?”
“Anyone who writes fiction has to be.”
“I suppose so. Well, do tell your pal that all this confession to the husband stuff is out of date. All she’s got to do is to break away from her own repressions for a bit, and keep her own counsel about it.”
“You don’t think that lies and cheating matter?” said Laura bitterly.
“Of course they matter. But we live under such damned artificial conditions that we can’t do without ’em. And anyway, other things matter more. Do you know what Freud says: ‘It is better to murder an infant in its cradle than to nurse an unacted desire?’”
“Does he?” said Laura, considerably startled at this echo of her own recent self-communings.
“Not, mind you, that I’m prepared to go with Freud the whole way, for—Hullo!”
Christine, composed and smart, unhurried in spite of her lateness, walked into the hall of the hotel.
She and Losh greeted one another with exclamations and tea was ordered.
They were noisy and merry, all three of them.
Laura perceived, without any very great surprise, that Losh assumed a considerable degree of intimacy to have been established between her and himself in their half-hour’s tàte-á-tête.
Presently she left him with Christine.
She went up to her bedroom—filled, after the manner of all hotel bedrooms, with crumpled tissue paper and chilly squares of white crochet-cotton—and sat down on the edge of the comfortless bed. She felt extraordinarily tired.
Losh had been interesting and sincere—if immoral. No, a-moral was the word that everybody used now.
Laura wanted to remember what he had said, and to think it over quite dispassionately, but she found that she was so very tired she could remember very little, and was quite incapable of any thinking over at all.
When Christine came upstairs and knocked at her sister’s door, Laura was still sitting on the edge of the bed.
“You look tired, darling. Losh is so terribly in earnest, even when he’s playing the fool, that he wears one out. You must have been a great success, by the way, while you were waiting for me to come in. He said you were a most frightfully interesting person.”
Laura felt uneasy, rather than gratified, at this tribute.
“What sort of way did he mean?”
“You may well ask, knowing what his tastes are!” Christine returned, looking at herself in Laura’s handglass. “(What shall I do, Laura, if I get a really plain fit on my wedding-day—such as I have now, for instance ? I suppose I really ought to say, what will Jeremy do?) Losh didn’t say, exacdy, why you were so interesting, but I gathered that you’d been telling him the story of your life, rather. Losh is terribly discreet, really, although he does talk so much, and you’re perfectly safe with him.”
Laura felt that at the moment she did not care whether Losh had penetrated the feeble disguise of her fable or not.
“What are we doing to-night, Laura? I know Jeremy is taking us to another relation, but I’ve forgotten which one. That’s the only part of being married that’s rather a bore—all this digging up of relations that one’s never been to see for years, and will probably never go and see again.”
“You’re lucky not to have old cousin Louisa and poor Selina to go and see. At least, Jeremy’s relations live in get-at-able places, or if they don’t, you can go to them in a car comfortably.”
“Well, who is it to-night?” Christine took out her engagement book from a brand-new crocodile bag, with her monogram in gold. “Eaton Square. That’s his aunt, I think—Mrs. Arthur Hobbs. A widow with dogs, and plays Brid
ge. It’s a pity all his relations are such Philistines, but it’ll give the children a better chance. The children of parents who are both brainy generally turn out awful—either so precocious that they die young, or so nervy that one can’t do anything with them. Our children ought to have decent physiques, and quite good brains. Like your Johnnie, in fact.”
“You do want to have children?”
“Oh yes. Not immediately, of course, and not more than about three, at decent intervals. But we both want a family, fortunately.”
“You’re quite right. Children,” said Laura thoughtfully, “keep married people together.”
“Darling, what absolute nonsense!” exclaimed Christine ruthlessly. “What can you be thinking about, to say things like that? Married people who haven’t anything else to keep them together except their children, would surely be better apart. So terribly hard on the wretched children, too, just to serve as links for chaining an unwilling couple together.”
“I suppose I’m old-fashioned,” gloomily said Laura, who would have repudiated such an accusation almost with frenzy at a more normal moment.
Christine did not hesitate to take advantage of her sister’s mood of fatigue.
“Not old-fashioned, exactly, but conventional. Yes, darling, you are, in some ways. Your ideas of right and wrong, for instance, seem to me stereotyped. As though you didn’t really feel that every single case in the world has got to be judged on its own merits, and not by some outside, arbitrary standard.”
“If you lived at Quinnerton—” began Laura.
“I know. I dare say I should. But I hope one of these days you’ll make up your mind that you aren’t actually rooted to the earth at Applecourt, and that—”
The elder sister, long dormant in Mrs. Temple, had nevertheless existed in Laura Fairfield, and now woke again.
“I go away from home quite as much as I want to—we both do—and I’m quite satisfied with such standards as I have got, thank you, Christine.”
“Well, well,” said Christine thoughtfully. “I dare say my little head is rather turned by all this sort of thing,” she waved her left hand, with its enormous glowing square of green fire. “I’m sorry if I was tiresome.” She went away.
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