Love Comes Home

by Molly Clavering

  “Hardly. Not nowadays, whatever it may have been when the first epistle to the Corinthians was written,” said Jane, prodding the sausages to encourage them to burst, because George liked them that way. “No, Love was christened Magdalen Lovett, which was careless of the parents, when they’d already saddled the heir with the family name of Magnus. Of course he was always called Maggie at school, and as soon as Love could speak she threw away Magdalen, in case it dwindled to Maggie, too, and insisted on using Lovett, and it gradually shrank. She’s been called ‘Love’ since she was quite little.”

  “Pretty determined, is she?”

  “She is,” Jane said drily. “She inherits it from both sides, you see. Somehow all father’s and mother’s determination passed over Maggie and Stair and me and concentrated, after a long gap, in Love. It seems a bit unfair, but that’s heredity all over.”

  “But goodness me, Jenny, you’re no doormat yourself,” expostulated Kitty, as Jane dished up the sausages and poured clear, dark brown coffee into the green earthenware coffee-pot with a steady hand.

  “Not when I’m away from home,” Jane said, taking up a laden tray and starting for the dining-room. “. . . bring the toast, Kitty, there’s an angel! But at Craigrois with the parents I can feel all the self-confidence oozing out of me from the minute I walk into the hall. Maggie and Stair are the same, but Love—Love romps home and sets the whole place by the ears, gets her own way in everything, and father and mother don’t even notice they’re being crossed!”

  Kitty, the adored only child of elderly parents, the beloved daughter-in-law of George’s father and mother, who had no daughters of their own, could hardly understand this family of Jane’s. As she followed her with the toast-rack, dropping bits of toast all the way and picking them up again unconcerned, she murmured: “Extraordinary,” several times.

  Breakfast was a silent meal by the decree of George, who considered it grossly uncivilized to have to utter a single unnecessary word at eight-fifteen in the morning. His wife and Jane tried their best to bow to his wishes, since he seldom asserted himself, but they were both talkative, and their idea of unnecessary speech differed so greatly from George’s that there was occasionally friction; especially when they were sternly forbidden even to talk to each other. Then a host of remarks, witty, interesting, or of urgent domestic importance, crowded to their lips, and it seemed that they must explode if not allowed to give voice to them.

  George usually glanced over the top of the paper to catch them conversing in dumb show and to say resignedly: “Better just get it over, hadn’t you?”

  It amused him to hear the sudden rush of eager chatter in Kitty’s clear high voice and Jane’s rather low-pitched tones, which seemed to well up and bubble over ceaselessly and without effort. ‘God knows what they find to talk about when they’re together all day,’ he thought, but the flow never failed and, as far as he knew, never had since they had first become friends.

  It was a source of great satisfaction to Kitty and Jane that marriage had made no difference to their staunch and usually unquarrelsome friendship. If George had not liked Jane it would have been very awkward, but, fortunately, he not only liked her but in quite a short space of time had included her in the rather small circle of those for whom he felt real affection.

  This morning, in spite of the quite abnormal vivacity of his wife, who was plying Jane with eager questions about life at Craigrois—for one reason or another Kitty had never met her friend’s people—entirely forgetful of the embargo on conversation, he was sorry that Jane was going. Kitty would miss her and so would he; besides, apart from being fond of Jane, he always had a feeling that she kept Kitty out of mischief as far, that is, as Kitty could be kept. The feminine voices continued, and he growled, savagely spearing the last sausage on to his plate:

  “That infernal animation of yours ought to be made a criminal offence, Kit.”

  “Oh! I quite forgot, darling!” cried Kitty. “Have some more coffee? I do think it’s hard, when I always feel so gay in the mornings, that I should have to bottle it up because I married a morose man.”

  “Gay!” said her husband, and groaned.

  “It’s my fault too, George dear,” said Jane penitently. “I started to talk about the family, and I get quite eloquent on that subject.”

  George groaned again. “You do. All the same,” he added with an air of generosity, “you aren’t naturally so disgustingly cheerio at breakfast as Kitty. Frail but bright is the way I’d describe you.” He threw down his napkin, glanced at his watch, and exclaiming: “Good God! Is that the time? I shall be late!” dashed from the room, overturning his chair and leaving the door wide open.

  The girls loped after him to take their part in the daily uproar known as ‘getting George off.’

  “My gloves. My cap!” he shouted from the garage, above the angry burrings and whirrings which told of Kitty’s struggle with an unwilling self-starter.

  “Here they are.” Jane pressed the brown leather gloves and uniform cap into his hands.

  “My stick, my pipe. My pipe!” Anguish rang loud in the last word. “My tobacco!”

  “Here’s the stick and the pipe. I can’t find your pouch. I’ll look again,” promised the breathless Jane and fled indoors to search wildly through the bungalow. It did not seem possible that six rooms, including bath, could have so many hidey-holes; but, of course, the bedroom occupied by George and Kitty, which at present looked as if it had been recently wrecked by a tornado, might have harboured any amount of lost property. Pages of the Daily Mail, entwined in George’s pyjamas and yesterday’s shirt, lay about the floor, shoes and socks and ties were heaped on the tumbled bed, a bath-towel hung over the dressing-table mirror. ‘And they say sailors are tidy!’ muttered Jane disgustedly, stirring a pile of garments with her foot. ‘A dozen pouches might be adrift among this mess, but it’d take me all day to find them!’

  “Jane! Hi, Jenny!” called George, his voice echoing through the length and breadth of the house. “Aren’t you coming out to see me off? I’ve got my pouch.”

  With a shrug and a laugh, Jane went out to the gate as Kitty drove the car competently into the road, steering clear of the dustbins ranged for emptying at the edge of the kerb.

  “Oh, by the way, you’ll have to get my tin trousers down from the loft,” said George, as his wife climbed out and he took her place. “The C.-in-C.’s dining in Barracks this evening, and we’ve all got to be there, of course.”

  “This evening?” wailed Kitty. “Oh, George! My sherry party! Our last party for Jane!”

  “Can’t help it,” said George with masculine brutality.

  “Won’t they be able to come at all?” Jane asked. She and Kitty hugged each other in a fever of anxiety while they waited to hear the verdict.

  “Oh, yes, but they can’t stay long, and they’ll all feel damned fools, dressed to dine in Mess,” was George’s cheerful reply. He let in the clutch and roared above the roar of the engine something that sounded ominously like: “John Marsh can’t manage it, anyhow. Good-bye!”

  The car shot off down the long hill which led through Chatham to the Naval Barracks, leaving the two girls to stare sadly after it.

  “Well!” said Kitty at last on a long sigh. “If John isn’t coming, it really doesn’t matter much whether the party stays five minutes or all night!”

  Jane only shook her head, but a faint colour had risen to her pearl-pale cheeks, and she did not meet Kitty’s sympathetic and indignant look until she felt that the unusual flush had faded again.

  For an hour or two after they had gone back into the house the round of daily jobs proceeded rather quietly. It was impossible for Kitty not to sing to herself while she worked, she could as easily have stopped breathing; but this morning her songs were all in a minor key. Jane, battling against the curious blank feeling of hurt bewilderment which had attacked her on hearing that John Marsh was not coming to drink sherry at ‘George Backwards’ that evening, knew qui
te well why Kitty was so subdued. There was so little need of words between them, their thoughts ran along such similar lines, that both were sometimes frightened by this strange kinship of spirit. Over and over again, after a silence of an hour or longer, they would simultaneously voice the same idea in identical words and stop short, staring in amazement at one another. It had become a joke to George and all their friends, but to them it was more. Twins, perhaps, were like that, but what could account for this queer similarity between two unrelated persons? They were perfectly normal, healthy, fun-loving young women, who would have laughed to scorn any suggestion that they were psychic; and yet there was this affinity, sensitive as the needle of a barograph to any slightest change of mental atmosphere. . . .

  At eleven o’clock they came into a sitting-room so orderly and spotless that the cheap furniture and ugly wall-paper passed unnoticed in the general freshness, the smell of furniture polish and the scent from a late-flowering bowl of blue hyacinths on the window-ledge. Immediately they burst out in duet: “‘I wish we could throw this rotten sherry-party away!”

  Jane was the first to pull herself together after the usual rather startled pause, the small laugh. “Well, obviously we can’t,” she said, and added defiantly, “one man more or less won’t make much difference.”

  “Even if it happens to be John?”

  “I’d rather it hadn’t happened to be John,” Jane admitted. “I wanted to—to say good-bye to him.”

  “What a curse men are,” said Kitty, clutching at her hair and damaging the very elegant wave and cluster of small curls which a patient hair-dresser had arranged only the afternoon before.

  “Oh, Kitty! Your lovely sausages! You’ve uncurled them all!” shrieked Jane.

  Kitty, rushing to her bedroom to view the ruin, raised her own voice in an answering shriek, and instantly added with immense satisfaction: “I had to damage something. I feel a whole lot better now. What a fright I look!”

  “H’m. I wonder what damage I can do to make myself feel better?” said Jane drily. She had followed Kitty and now stood scowling at her pale reflection in an exceedingly unflattering mirror which not only showed up every flaw but added several of its own. “Short of cutting off my nose, I can hardly make my face much plainer.”

  “Yes. It’s rather a pity about our noses,” Kitty answered, coming to stare earnestly at herself over Jane’s shoulder.

  The two faces, oddly alike in expression, had a certain resemblance of contour also, broad at the temples with eyes set under arching well-marked brows, with noses that certainly had an impudent tilt, with pointed chins. Kitty was as richly-coloured as a peach and with the same downy skin; Jane had the warm pallor of a pearl, and something of its milky transparency. Her eyes were set wider apart than Kitty’s, and darker, her mouth had a more symmetrical curve to its short upper lip. “In fact,” as Kitty said quite honestly, “your face is much better than mine; but then,” she always added, “I have such excellent legs.”

  “A better figure altogether,” said Jane, forestalling the usual remark about legs. “I always look so dumpy beside you.”

  “John doesn’t think so,” Kitty reminded her, the least hint of jealousy in her voice. “By the way, when did you last see John? The afternoon he took you to Canterbury?”

  “M’m.” Already Jane was deep in remembering that day, the first sight of the matchless towers rising beyond a foam of blossom, with the westering sun gilding them. Walking with John across the deep green peace of the Close, where rooks cawed gravely in the tops of the old trees, their nests like clumsy dark baskets among the young leaves, she had felt the beauty of the carved and traced stone sink into her heart, never to be forgotten, though she knew nothing of architectural detail. Inside, it was all an impression of soaring height, of jewel-bright glass, of Thomas à Becket’s shrine, which had not stirred her at all, since she had always disliked that great archbishop, Canterbury’s local saint and martyr though he was; of the Black Prince’s splendid tomb, with his embroidered gloves and surcoat hanging above it, which had moved her beyond words; of a sudden burst of music thundering from the organ . . . everything enriched by being there with John, seeing his keen, boldly-cut, handsome features dark against the sunlight streaming redly in through a window, hearing his murmured comments, feeling his occasional light touch on her arm. She had known then that he liked her as she liked him. She had known it again, later in that lovely evening, when he had suddenly stopped the car and told her to look, through a haze of young green foliage, at a glimpse of Leeds Castle. . . . And he wasn’t coming up to see her, not even with the sherry party as an excuse!

  In the glass her eyes met Kit’s, and she laughed. “Don’t worry, Kitty. What does it matter?”

  If the morning had been like three rolled into one, the afternoon made amends by passing, it seemed, in half an hour, so oddly does time behave. Kitty, wriggling into a tight-fitting red dress with expert speed, thought what a blessing it was that they had no maid, and a temperamental charwoman who only ‘obliged’ when she felt like it. She hadn’t had a spare minute to brood over the defection of John, and neither, of course, had Jane.

  “Come on, Jenny!” she called, rushing from her room to the kitchen for the very last preparations which had been left until after they had dressed. “Their van will be upon us before—Good Heavens! There’s a knock already!”

  “I’ll go.” Jane threw down the comb with which she had been putting the finishing touches to her curls, and hurried to the door, mustering a smile of welcome, trying to forget that the olives and cocktail biscuits had not yet been put out, hoping that this early arrival might be some rather junior lieutenant whom they could press into service as an assistant, and not the Commander, invited by Kitty “in one of those sunny gin-after-church moods,” as George had remarked.

  On the doorstep stood nothing more alarming than a small and breathless maid, her cap held on by one hand, who gasped without pause: “Please miss Lootenant-Commander Jenkins’s compliments to Lootenant-Commander Mariner an’ is it tin trousies this evenin’?”

  “Lieutenant Commander Mariner is out,” said Jane with a certain grimness, for George had been hustled into plain clothes immediately after tea and sent out to fetch more sherry which he had forgotten to bring on his way from the barracks. As he had not yet returned it seemed only too probable that he had met someone, and that they were having what he euphemistically called a ‘quick one’ to nerve him for his part of host. “But you can tell Lieutenant-Commander Jenkins that it is tin trousers.”

  “What was that? Not the man selling vacuum cleaners again, poor wretch? I really can’t buy another, we’ve still six instalments to pay on the one we’ve got,” said Kitty as Jane joined her in the kitchen.

  “The Jenkins’ maid to ask if it’s tin trousers to-night.”

  “Isn’t it just like Jenkins not to know? He’s quite mad,” said Kitty, eating a stuffed olive. “Oh, God! Jenny, all the gold lace is dropping off George’s tin trousers, and I meant to sew it on and didn’t—”

  “I’ll do it. Can you finish putting out those things?”

  “Angel, of course I can. Anything as long as it isn’t sewing!” cried Kitty. “I’ve hidden the work-basket on top of my wardrobe.”

  Time rushed on. Jane, in the sitting-room, which, owing to the peculiar construction of the bungalow, acted as fairway between the kitchen and the narrow strip of hall, sat, stitching with trembling lingers at the stiff solid line of gold braid up and down the length of two long navy-blue legs. Kitty, passing to and fro with glasses, decanters, laden plates of salted nuts, olives and cheese biscuits, talked the whole time.

  “Where on earth is that devil George? We should never have let him loose. . . . I’m going to hang the ‘Walk Right In’ notice on the door and leave it open, Jenny. . . . We won’t get George dressed for this vile dinner once he starts drinking and smoking. Jenny, did you see the cigarettes anywhere? Where can George be? Jenny, I think we’ll have the party
in the garden, there’s more room, and it’s such fun for the neighbours!”

  At that remark Jane raised her head from her labours. “You’ve just carried everything in here,” she pointed out.

  “Well, I’m just going to carry the whole lot out into the garden. Oh, I wish the balloon would go up! Don’t you hate waiting for the brutes to come? Jenny, have a glass of sherry now to hearten you. I will if you will—”

  Half of the party’s effects had been taken to the garden and the sitting-room was in a state of chaos owing to the removal of a table by Kitty, who had dumped its load of photographs, vase of tulips and silver cigarette-box on the floor, when there were footsteps on the path outside, and a man’s voice could be heard reading aloud: “‘Walk right In.’ Do you suppose that means us, Bobby?”, followed by embarrassed mutterings in the hall of “Which room?” “Damned if I know!”

  Before Jane, putting the finishing stitches to George’s trousers, could call: “In here!” she heard them open the door of Kitty’s bedroom. There was a horrified pause, then it was hurriedly but gently closed and further conference took place. Jane, smothering her laughter, jumped up and flung the sitting-room door wide in the flushed faces of two totally strange and very young officers, who looked at her with nervous smiles.

  “Er—Mrs. Mariner?” stammered the braver of the two. “We’re Barnet and Wood, from the Carp.”

  “I know. The submariners George invited. How nice.” said Jane. “But I’m not Mrs. Mariner. She’s just decided to shift the party into the garden. Half of it’s out there now. Will you give us a hand with the rest? My name’s Jane Cranstoun.”

  Everything had been pleasantly disposed on the lawn, most of the chairs and all the cushions had been carried out by the two young lieutenants, much too dazzled by Kitty’s smiles to realize that they were doing what practically amounted to furniture removing in their best suits, when George came romping home, laden with sherry, cigarettes, and two bottles of Plymouth gin. Hard on his heels the guests began to arrive, and immediately the men, several of whom had already changed to mess dress, and were in consequence acutely conscious of their splendour, utterly refused to drink sherry or anything else under the watchful eyes of the Mariners’ neighbours. “Dressed up as if we were going to act The Flag Lieutenant, in broad daylight,” said one reproachfully to his hostess. “I must say, Kitty, I thought better of you than this.”