The Way Things Are

by E M Delafield

  Laura looked into the next room.

  Edward was alone, rather pale and heavy-eyed.

  “Where are Johnnie and nurse?”

  “He’s having to be washed in the bathroom. He got himself all black downstairs, while nurse was packing. Mummie, I think I’ve got a cold.”

  Laura’s heart sank a little lower.

  Edward’s colds were tempestuous affairs, necessitating bed, and an immense number of pocket-handkerchiefs, a supply of cold cream, and frequently a subsequent cough-mixture.

  It was Laura’s belief that no other child in the world had such severe and prolonged colds as had Edward.

  As she looked at him, the voice of Mrs. Bakewell seemed to ring in her mind’s ears:

  “We got through this winter without any colds at all Just the simple, healthy life they lead, and the right sort of clothing.…Let me see, it must be nearly two years since Cynthia had a cold. The cold habit is really so unnecessary.…”

  “Edward, are you sure?” said Laura.

  But she knew from his face that he was right, and presently he began to sniff—a recurrent, irritating sniff, that would increase in frequency and violence until a second, worse stage was reached.

  One could only hope that it would not be reached before the evening, and prophesy brightly:

  “Well, I daresay it won’t be very bad, and you can go to bed as soon as we get home.”

  “But I don’t want to go to bed,” said Edward, beginning to cry.

  “Oh, darling, don’t be silly!”

  “I hate bed!”

  Nurse and Johnnie came in.

  “Why, what’s the matter? Do I see a little boy crying? Who’s this little boy?” said nurse, affecting not to recognise the tearful Edward. “Whoever’s this? Our little boys don’t cry. It must be some strange little boy.”

  “Johnnie dear, don’t jump on the bed like that. Nurse, Edward tells me he has a cold.”

  “Yes. He has,” nurse said decisively. And she added to Laura aside, “Overtired, both of them. But he was quite all right when I left him—quite bright.”

  Laura knew that it was she who had quenched her son’s brightness, and she could see that nurse knew it, too.

  She did not attempt to defend the position. “Would you like a cup of tea before we start, nurse?”

  “Oh no, thank you, madam. I can never eat anything before a journey. I didn’t touch any breakfast this morning,” said nurse proudly. “But the boys have had some milk and biscuits.”

  “Here’s daddy,” said Johnnie.

  “Are you ready? The man’s here for the luggage.”

  “Quite ready,” said Laura, taking a last mechanical, unsatisfactory look at herself in the glass.

  The train was crowded.

  Laura took Johnnie on her knee, and nurse took Edward, and Alfred stood in the corridor. Strange women, hatless, and in thick, hot, crumpled clothes, made advances to the boys and offered them food.

  Johnnie became unendurably restless, and Edward sniffed, and occasionally sneezed.

  “You ought to have his adenoids seen to,” one woman remarked to Laura, gazing expertly at Edward. “He looks like adenoids.”

  “What do adenoids look like?” said Edward in a pessimistic tone.

  “They look like something perfectly hidgeous” Johnnie replied with the grave, perfectly unmalicious freedom of speech peculiar to the nursery.

  Laura was unable to forget her own preoccupations in keeping her children amused, because there was practically nothing that could be done to amuse them, and she was equally unable to remain still and face her own thoughts, because of the constant, unrelated demands of Edward and Johnnie upon her attention. Alfred, in the corridor outside, imperturbably read the paper. From time to time he looked round at them, and once he came to the door of the carriage and spoke. (Laura’s prestige went up when the hot and crumpled ladies opposite saw that she had a husband of so unmistakable a type as Alfred. They ceased to comment upon the probability of Edward’s adenoids, and only smiled at him instead.)

  Laura, in snatches of silence, wondered whether Alfred knew anything of the crisis through which their domestic life was passing. He behaved as though he knew nothing. And yet, even if he knew everything, she felt certain that he would behave in precisely the same way. Alfred was like that—imperturbable, unalterable, in many ways unobservant, and yet with peculiar qualities of solidity and kindness—qualities, as Laura well knew, eminently desirable in a husband.

  She, however, wanted a lover.

  Ayland’s suggestion of a week to be spent together kept on recurring to her mind.

  “Perhaps a long time hence,” thought Laura, with a vague feeling that this procrastination made the project less immoral. But the real truth was that she was so much tired that the only kind of week she could bear to contemplate for the present would have been passed almost entirely in sleep.

  At the Junction it was raining hard.

  “We shall soon be home now,” said Laura, with fictitious cheerfulness.

  Eventually they were home—though not soon.

  This time there were no flowers in the drawing-room, and the pile of unforwarded letters was formidable.

  “Where is Fauntleroy?” said Edward, rushing out into the rain.

  “Oh, stop him!” cried Laura.

  Nurse and Johnnie also hurried out into the rain.

  “Johnnie, not you! Come back!”

  “Where on earth are the servants?” said Alfred, putting immoderate pressure upon the front door-bell.

  “They only didn’t hear us drive up. It’s all right, Alfred. Here she is. Good afternoon, Mary.”

  “Good afternoon,” said Mary, whose salient characteristic was that she never addressed either of her employers by any term of respect.

  “Is everything all right, Mary?”

  “Quite all right.”

  “We shall be glad of tea whenever it is ready,” said Laura, rather intimidated.

  “Take up those bags,” said Alfred, kicking the lighter of the suit-cases.

  Mary instantly obeyed, and was thus spared the sight of the boys’ re-entrance into the hall, hilariously followed by Fauntleroy, and their subsequent progress up the stairs, leaving wet and mould behind them.

  “Excited at getting home,” said nurse benevolently to Laura.

  “Edward had better go straight to bed after tea.”

  “I’ll get their things unpacked the soonest possible minute.”

  Laura, expert in detecting the finer shades of meaning in domestic formulas, deduced that nurse thought she was being slightly inconsiderate.

  “Send them down to me as soon as they’re—as soon as you’ve all had tea,” she said hurriedly, “and you can come for Edward when you’re ready for him.”

  “Very well, madam.”

  “What about tea?” said Alfred.

  “Dear, you’ve this moment sent Mary upstairs. She’ll ring the gong directly the tea is in the dining-room.”

  Alfred walked into the drawing-room. He appeared to have no curiosity about his unopened correspondence.

  Laura listlessly examined her own share. The letters all looked uninteresting, and yet as if every one of them would require an answer. Laura instantly felt that she never wanted to write another letter as long as she lived.

  Her correspondence with Duke Ayland had been the most interesting one that she had ever known, until they had fallen in love with one another. After that, it was impossible to deny that it had become perfunctory.

  She did not correspond regularly with anybody else, partly from lack of time, and partly because she had no very intimate friends. Although Laura could not be described as a man’s woman, she rather unfortunately possessed the distinction of not being a woman’s woman either, principally owing to her slender reputation as an author, which alarmed or alienated most of those who knew about it.

  “If I could only talk to somebody about it all,” she now thought unhappily. But there wa
s nobody to whom she could state the bald facts of her predicament, without the certainty of finding herself coupled, ethically and intellectually, with the scandalous Bébée Kingsley-Browne.

  Presently she stopped thinking about Duke, and about herself in relation to him. Dinner was rather an unsuccessful meal.

  “She’s not a good cook, is she?” Alfred observed truthfully, but, in this connection, tactlessly.

  “I daresay not,” Laura returned. “But all the same—”

  A bad cook, she meant, and Alfred undoubtedly would understand her to mean, was much better than a cook who had given notice. They fell into their usual silence, and Laura made her usual effort—excellent in intention, but poor in execution—to transform it into an interesting and intelligent conversation.

  “I think the drawing-room covers ought to go to the cleaner’s. Unless we can afford new ones this winter.”

  “We cannot afford new anything,” Alfred said calmly. “This visit to London has just about dished our budget for the year.”

  “We couldn’t not have gone!” exclaimed Laura. “And Christine paid every single thing for the boys.”

  “I know she did. And I know we had to go. I’m glad we did. But we shall have to be a bit economical, that’s all.”

  “Shall we be able to have any painting done in the spring? The nursery passage is terrible—just where the little lamp always smokes.”

  “I’ll see if I can give it a coat of whitewash myself one of these days. But the difficulty is to find the time. This is just the time when things want doing in the garden.”

  “I haven’t planted my indoor hyacinths yet!” exclaimed Laura, in allusion to her solitary annual horticultural effort.

  Alfred smiled kindly. There was little to be said about Laura’s hyacinths save that she did not possess what is called la main heureuse.

  Then Laura said “What’s that?” with a start of apprehension.

  “What is what?”

  “It sounded exactly like—”

  She half rose out of her chair.

  “If it’s Johnnie, you can tell him that I shall come up and settle him if I hear another sound. I thought he’d given up that nonsense.”

  “But it wasn’t. It sounded,” said Laura in stricken tones, “exactly like the noise they made during the whooping-cough.”

  “I think it was your fancy. I didn’t hear a sound. Sit down again, dear.”

  Without a word Laura rose and rushed from the room.

  She had heard the sound again, and as she went upstairs and along the passage she recognised it beyond any possibility of doubt.

  The cough that belonged to Edward’s whooping-cough.

  Outside the door of the night-nursery, beside the bracket on which the little lamp that smoked stood smoking, was nurse, listening attentively.

  “It’s Edward,” she mouthed. “I don’t think it’s woken him—not from the sound, it hasn’t. But I really thought he was going to be sick.”

  “But he can’t have whooping-cough again!”

  Nurse shook her head.

  “It’s like that, whooping-cough is. They get quite well, and then suddenly they catch a cold, and it’s all to do again. Even after weeks.”

  “But it seems too bad to be true—the doctor never warned me. I wouldn’t have taken him to London if I’d had the least idea. There, hark at him!”

  Nurse shook her head.

  “That’s what it is.”

  Then she relented a little.

  “It won’t last, very likely. Just a sort of relapse, and then they pick up again. It’s catching a cold that does it.”

  “What about Johnnie?”

  “He may be quite all right. He had it very lightly, didn’t he? And he doesn’t get colds the way Edward does.”

  Laura, with a sensation that approached despair, told nurse to come and fetch her if Edward was worse in the night, and went down to her husband again.

  Alfred did not reproach her for agitatedly dashing away from him, although she knew that he profoundly disliked and disapproved of both agitation, and of what he looked upon as undue anxiety about the children.

  He read The Field, and presently he fell asleep.

  Laura opened her letters, and found the usual proportion of bills, of advertisements, of business on behalf of the Nursing Association, the Women’s Institute, and the Girl Guides, and a note from Mrs. Bakewell, who wanted to come and hear all about the wedding. To this last there was a postscript:

  “Are your little ones attending the dancing-class this term? C. and Th. just longing to begin again.”

  Would Edward and Johnnie go to the dancing classes? There would be the same difficulty that there had been before about getting them to Quinnerton. It was too expensive to hire a car every week, and Alfred would not always have time to drive them.

  Perhaps it was better for them to go occasionally, than never at all.

  Laura looked at the clock.

  It was half-past nine.

  One of Laura’s convictions was that people living in the country, who went to bed regularly at ten o’clock every night, put themselves thereby in danger of turning—spiritually—into vegetables. Therefore some three-quarters of an hour must elapse before she could go upstairs. She thought of Duke Ayland, and of their passionate, and at the same time unsatisfactory, parting, and of the hope that she had not forbidden him.

  “But what do I mean to do?” Laura asked herself, utterly bewildered. For whatever course of action she might contemplate, it always seemed to her that she was determined not to follow it.

  “I hope to goodness the bath-water is hot,” said Alfred, waking suddenly.

  “You always have your bath in the morning.”

  “Not always. I want one to-night. But in any case, the water ought to be hot. I shall find out.”

  “Don’t ring!” exclaimed Laura instinctively.

  But he had already done so.

  Moments elapsed.

  “Oh, Alfred, don’t ring again! They’re probably gone to bed.”

  “Then they won’t hear me.”

  But after an interval sufficiently long to suggest that Mary had been at least on her way to bed, at the end of a day’s work, she came in.

  “Is the water hot?”

  “The bath-water?”

  “Yes.”

  “The bath-water isn’t hot. Not to say hot. We were going to ask you to have a look at the range, or something, in the morning. It’s been giving Ethel and I the most awful trouble.”

  Mary went away again, looking more aggrieved than ever.

  The fact that Alfred, also, was aggrieved because the water was not hot, evidently did not matter to her.

  “Do you know,” said Laura, a train of thought presented to her, “that Christine once said to me that she thought servants were rather like God—they live so close to one, and know so much about one. Only, unfortunately, they don’t love one.”

  “Like God?” said Alfred gloomily. “Ours are a good deal more like the devil, if you ask me.”

  Laura could not but agree with him.

  She took this exhilarating simile to bed with her, and although of the two subjects she would have preferred to think—however unsatisfactorily—about her unhappy and discreditable love-affair, she found that the atmosphere of the house was too strong for her.

  She fell asleep to the accompaniment of a quiet, reasonable, conviction-carrying rebuke that should convey once and for all to Mary and Ethel Laura’s standard of domestic requirements.

  She woke to the realisation—one become just too habitual, in the course of years, to be called a pang—that there was nothing to look forward to, and that it would be necessary very shortly to go to the kitchen and to order dinner.

  In the distance, the servants were moving—but it was a quarter-past seven, so they well might be—and farther away still, she thought she heard Edward cough—the raucous, open-mouthed, unrestrained coughing of a small, bored child wishful to attract not
ice.

  A single shriek, only faint because it was so far off, told her accustomed ears that Johnnie, as usual, had interposed his own infallible methods of wresting nurse’s attention from his brother to himself.

  “I must see about another daily governess for them, if Miss Lamb isn’t coming back this term,” thought Laura.

  Alfred had left her side long ago, without disturbing her.

  If Duke had been her husband?

  Laura neither pursued the question nor attempted to find any answer to it. Nothing was more certain than that to do so would be entirely futile.

  She was in love with Duke, undoubtedly, but she could not, at a distance of two hundred miles, remain in love with him indefinitely—nor he with her.

  Alas, for the brief-lived romanticism of an attachment between a man and a woman, unsupported by even occasional proximity! Laura at last admitted to herself that she and Duke Ayland, in common with the vast majority of their fellow-beings, were incapable of the ideal, imperishable, love for which the world was said to be well lost.

  She would never give herself to Duke, but hers was not the Great Refusal that ennobles the refuser and remains a beautiful memory for ever.

  The children, her marriage vows, the house, the ordering of the meals, the servants, the making of a laundry list every Monday—in a word, the things of respectability—kept one respectable. In a flash of unavoidable dear-sightedness, that Laura would never repeat if she could avoid it, she admitted to herself that the average attributes only, of the average woman, were hers.

  Imagination, emotionalism, sentimentalism…what woman is not the victim of these insidious and fatally unpractical qualities?

  But how difficult, Laura reflected, to see oneself as an average woman and not, rather, as one entirely unique, in unique circumstances.…

  It dawned upon her dimly that only by envisaging and accepting her own limitations, could she endure the limitations of her surroundings.

  THE END

  A good many of the characters in this novel have been drawn, as usual, from persons now living; but the author hopes very much that they will only recognise one another.