Britannia Mews

by Margery Sharp

  “I must,” said Lauderdale, white-faced as herself—“it’s the only thing she understands”; and he struck again, again with his open hand. The Sow snapped with her toothless gums, and that was all; only the table prevented her from falling. “If you ever speak to Mrs. Lambert again,” said Lauderdale, “I’ll break every bone in your body. Now get out.”

  Very slowly, the Sow moved. Helping herself by the table, by a chair, she crossed the short space to the door; pulled it open and dragged herself through; and there on the threshold paused and gave Adelaide a last backward look.

  It was, strangely enough, a look of reproach; and in the strangest manner Adelaide felt that somehow she had deserved it. The misery and squalor of all her relations with the Sow infected them to the very end.

  Lauderdale shut the door and went to the sink and washed his hands. It was an action Adelaide understood; it did away with the repugnance she had momentarily felt for him. Over his shoulder he said:—

  “Go and lie down a little. I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  2

  It was much later in the day, when Adelaide had sufficiently recovered to prepare a meal which they ate together, and when they were drinking coffee afterwards, that Mr. Lauderdale broached the question of the future.

  “And now,” he said casually, “I suppose you’ll go home.”

  Adelaide did not immediately answer. Like so many people to whom a long-desired wish has been granted, she did not know quite what to do with it. She was free; she could go home; and two years before would have gone home, at once, without considering an alternative. Now she hesitated. Lying on her bed, thinking steadily, she had perceived that for two years, within one great limitation, she had enjoyed the completest independence, filling each hour of the day exactly as she pleased. To return to Farnham meant readapting herself to a daughter’s docility, putting her time at other people’s disposal, conforming to other people’s tastes and opinions instead of following her own. Adelaide had no illusions about this, she saw the Culver point of view too clearly: a daughter come to grief through self-will could return to the bosom of her family only on the condition of surrendering all self-will for the future; having flung one’s cap over the windmill, one went bareheaded all one’s life. Two years ago, battered and shocked by disaster, such a condition would have been acceptable; but now …

  “I don’t know that I can,” said Adelaide slowly.

  Mr. Lauderdale, who had been watching her with great attention, nodded.

  “Would it mean such a deal of humble-pie?” he asked sympathetically.

  “Not exactly. But I’ve got out of the way of … listening to Mamma.” Adelaide smiled. “Perhaps I was never very good at it. I shall have to consider.”

  “You know what that means.”

  “That I don’t really want to go? And yet I have wanted to so badly! I used to picture myself doing the flowers, going calling with Mamma, simply waking up in a pretty room.… Now I wonder what we should talk about.”

  Mr. Lauderdale rose and began in an absent-minded way to examine the objects on the mantelpiece. He picked up the Indian shell and turned it in his hand, running a finger over the blunt spines.

  “You would certainly find conversation more restricted.”

  “It could hardly be that, for here I’ve talked to no one. But I’ve a suspicion I should be bored.”

  “When I was a boy,” said Mr. Lauderdale reflectively, “I travelled abroad a great deal with my parents. Then they sent me home to school. I found all the boys there great fools. But it was undoubtedly a healthier life.”

  Adelaide sighed.

  “You’ll think me sentimental; but I had planned to go home … rejoicing. I don’t want to go because I have no alternative.”

  “Is there no alternative?”

  “On an income of two pounds a week? I might get work, I suppose, but I doubt it. I don’t imagine anyone would employ me as a governess.”

  “No, you don’t look like a governess. You look like a gentlewoman, of course, but insufficiently distressed. Any really nice family would be afraid of you.”

  “In fact the only place where I can live, on my income, is Britannia Mews.”

  At once he said, as he had said the night before:—

  “You can’t live here alone.”

  Adelaide reflected.

  “I think I could. It’s not exactly a pleasant way of life; but I’m used to it. Perhaps that’s what I’ve brought on myself: that I’m no longer fit for ordinary pleasant living.”

  “There is nothing ordinary about you.” Mr. Lauderdale replaced the shell and stood frowning down on her; he added abruptly, “The curse of it is, I’m married already.”

  Adelaide did not pretend to misunderstand him. Their common history of the last few hours had begun to seem the inevitable conclusion to their separate but oddly similar histories in the past; the end, for both, of one period, the beginning, for both, of another.

  “I’m sorry,” said Adelaide, simply. She didn’t ask whether he were living with his wife; she knew that he was not.

  “That would have been one solution,” said Lauderdale seriously. “However, owing to the peculiar circumstances in which we have both somehow landed ourselves, there’s another. We can simply join forces. I’ve the greatest respect and admiration for you. I can’t ask you to marry me, but I do ask you to let me live with you, in every sense of the term except the technical one.”

  There was a considerable silence. Adelaide sat perfectly still, looking not at her suitor but at her hands folded in her lap. The proposition was one which appealed to her strongly, it seemed to offer exactly what she needed—a man’s company and protection, without any emotional demand. She liked Mr. Lauderdale, his unspoken desire to protect her from annoyance was matched by her own impulse to mend his clothes for him; each had benefits to confer on the other, the greatest being simply understanding; but for all that, if there had been anything lover-like in his attitude, if she had glimpsed any of the amorousness of which Henry had so thoroughly sickened her, she would have refused. But there was nothing to alarm. Even his suggestion of marriage—and Adelaide really believed that Lauderdale would have married her if he could—sprang, she felt sure, from a wish to regularize their position. For they had one rather curious trait in common: neither, though forced to inhabit Bohemia, and indeed appreciating certain of its advantages, was a natural Bohemian.

  “Why not?” said Adelaide.

  Mr. Lauderdale smiled.

  “You’re more than remarkable, you’re unique.”

  “There’s nothing unique, in this neighbourhood,” said Adelaide rather dampingly, “about taking a lodger. You can sleep in the coach-house. It’s a nuisance that Mrs. Mounsey took the bed, but I’ll get another. At any rate, we can try the experiment.”

  Mr. Lauderdale reflected.

  “Speaking as a lodger—I believe I told you that my source of income was addressing envelopes. If I make ten shillings a week I do well.”

  “Then you can give me five, and I shan’t be out of pocket for your food.”

  “Or I might even find more remunerative employment. Especially if I stop drinking.”

  Adelaide surveyed him with a perfectly friendly cynicism.

  “That I shan’t expect. If you drink … badly, I shall of course turn you out; but I don’t expect you to stop. I’ve seen too much of it.”

  “You aren’t going to try and reform me?”

  “Indeed I’m not. I do think, as I believe you do, that we may get on very well, and be—and be—”

  “A comfort to each other.”

  “A comfort to each other, if you like; but I don’t expect miracles.”

  Adelaide rose and began clearing the table. Lauderdale watched her a moment (standing out of the way, for he was already at home in the small room) with an expression of great thoughtfulness. He said slowly:—

  “At the same time, there is something slightly miraculous about it. If I hadn’t be
en thrown out of the Cock—”

  Adelaide turned and looked back at him and made a completely incomprehensible remark.

  “If Alice hadn’t had a cold!” she said bitterly. “How I hate that word ‘if’!”

  With the tact that was always to be so valuable to them both, Mr. Lauderdale replied that he would be back about six, if that suited her, and went out.

  He was so deep in thought that he passed not only the Cock, but five other public-houses as well, without even observing them; and arrived at his place of employment, for the first time that quarter, in a state of complete sobriety.

  3

  Mr. Lauderdale’s place of employment was situated in a large basement, the area of which had been roofed in to form a private office for the proprietor, an elderly and lizard-like Welshman who had seen better days. He thus resembled his helots: they had all seen better days, for all had to be literate; and indeed a mouldering flavour of gentility characterized the whole establishment. On the damp and peeling walls ceremoniously worded notices requested gentlemen not to smoke; gentlemen were also requested not to spit, lay bets, or bring in spirits. No one paid any attention to these injunctions, but if one fell off Mr. Evans punctiliously replaced it. The temperature, even in summer, was cellar-like; gas burned all day, one naked jet above each long table, and gave a special quality to the atmosphere. The tables themselves were rather interesting: each habitué knew his place by a familiar pattern of ink-stains, and some of these stains had been minutely elaborated into likenesses of women, domestic animals, and maps; over all lay the rich patina produced by years of contact between greasy cloth and greasy wood. At one end of the apartment gaped a doorless cupboard containing on its upper shelves a supply of envelopes and wrappers, and in its lower half great jorums of ink—or rather of the inky fluid which Mr. Evans prepared himself every Monday morning: it was compounded of a black powder and water, in very unequal proportions. Directories, reference-books, and special lists were housed in the office and dealt out as occasion required. Gentlemen supplied their own nibs.

  Such was Evans’s, familiarly known as “the Club”; and in spite of its melancholy appearance, it was a going concern. There was always work on hand for the big shops, whose circular wrappers provided the backbone of the trade; charitable organizations did not disdain Evans’s, nor political candidates. Sometimes the lists came complete with addresses, sometimes a blanket order was given to cover a whole district, and the addresses had to be looked up. A tricky but profitable customer was a large firm of second-hand booksellers, who required envelopes of superior quality, and no abbreviations; it was the general opinion that they supplied erotica to the gentry.

  Lauderdale ran down the area steps, nodded to Mr. Evans through the office door, and passed into the workroom. Monday was always, from the employees’ point of view, a slack day, for they had the upper-class habit of taking a long week end, and to-day only two tables had occupants. Lauderdale nodded again, to Mr. Bly and Mr. Samson, and sat down opposite the inky likeness of a flying pig. He sat some moments, regarding it attentively, until Mr. Bly turned round and thrust over a tattered portion of a directory. At this sign that they were on a Belgravia “blanket” Lauderdale pulled himself together, fetched a stack of wrappers, fitted his nib into the holder, and sat down again. As a rule he was quick and accurate; not to-day. He wrote four addresses, blotted the fifth, laid down his pen, took it up again to add a twist to the pig’s tail; he could not re-immerse himself in the familiar atmosphere. Something important had happened to him. Adelaide Lambert had happened to him. It was enough to disturb any man. And strangely enough, what disturbed Mr. Lauderdale most, as he sat there reflecting on their whole encounter, was not the fact that Mrs. Lambert had (though inadvertently) killed her husband, but the fact that she could still flash such bitterness at the thought of an unknown female named Alice, who had once had a cold.…

  For it was a cardinal point of Mr. Lauderdale’s philosophy never to cry over spilt milk; that they inevitably did so, one of the things he most disliked in women; and he had seen, or thought he had seen, in Adelaide such a capacity for cutting her losses as set her apart from her whole sex. Only … who the deuce was Alice? Part of that other life, no doubt, which Adelaide had seemed so admirably ready to jettison; Mr. Lauderdale had felt confident that she would jettison it; but if she continued to yearn after it, and particularly if yearning embittered her tongue, he foresaw that the new arrangement wouldn’t last long.

  Mr. Lauderdale seriously considered not returning to Britannia Mews at all.

  It also occurred to him that if he did return, he might not find any one there. That phrase might have marked the beginning of a reaction: the recollection of Alice, bringing no doubt a flood of other memories, might set Adelaide Lambert’s thoughts so strongly towards her home that neither the desire for independence, nor the fear of humiliation—nor the prospect of his own companionship—could turn them. Perhaps she was already packing; perhaps already gone. “And yet I’ll swear she’d have married me,” thought Lauderdale, “as I’d have married her. We both felt the … fatality. But she may be subject to other fatalities as well—and then where the deuce am I?”

  At this point Mr. Bly, sensing his colleague’s idleness, turned again. He was a man about fifty, but so shrivelled as to look much older: nature had provisioned him with a bit of skin and bone, just enough, a dab of hair on top of his head, and two more dabs growing out of his ears. With a monkey-nut and a little wool it was possible to make not so much a caricature of Mr. Bly, as a miniature likeness.

  “What’s your opinion of women?” asked Lauderdale suddenly.

  “Pah!” said Mr. Bly.

  This however was more an immediate reaction than a considered answer; he thrust his chair back, crossed one leg over the other, and mused. Mr. Samson too turned; there was a Mondayish mood about the place which inclined them all to conversation. One sometimes heard very good talk at the Club, each member having a wide experience, mostly unfortunate, to draw upon.

  “In general, or in particular?” enquired Mr. Bly, who was fond of chopping logic.

  “Either.”

  “In general, a soft and charming sex, designed for the pleasure of mankind and consequently the propagation of the race. In particular, hellcats.”

  “I take issue,” said Mr. Samson formally.

  “What has chiefly struck me,” said Lauderdale, “is their persistence in following their own ends. It’s a very remarkable woman who can suddenly, so to speak, change direction.”

  “If you’ve met a remarkable woman,” said Mr. Samson shrewdly, “steer clear of her. But all women are remarkable in some way, and that is where I take issue with the Chairman. To say ‘charmers’ or ‘hellcats’ is over-simplification.”

  “Then I’ll say hellcats,” offered Mr. Bly.

  “You miss the point. I fear we are not giving our young friend much assistance.”

  Lauderdale tilted back his chair and considered them. They were both fairly intelligent; both (if their general conversation were any guide) frequenters of women; he himself was fairly intelligent, and a married man; and there they all three sat, discussing women as though women were some unknown fauna of the Antipodes.

  “It’s their damned conventionality,” he said abruptly. “How deep does it go? Can they ever really get rid of it?”

  “No,” said Mr. Bly.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Samson, at the same moment. “Conventionality has been bred into ’em, by man, for man’s protection; but they can get rid of it, with a man’s help—and then God help man.”

  Mr. Bly spat neatly into the empty grate.

  “If I may illustrate from my own experience—I was once a puppet-master. I am probably still the best manipulator of puppets in the three kingdoms. In the summer I travelled with fairs, in the Christmas-party season entertained the coroneted brats of the nobility. I was equally at home in the caravan and the servants’ hall. There I observed the two extremes of the basic
female character: the pampered female servant, untouched by education, engaged in purely feminine activities; the toil-worn gipsy, equally uneducated, equally restricted to female avocations, a great breeder, but exposed to all the hazards of an inimical world. And what had they in common? A rooted, an intense conventionality. The conventions differed, of course, but that was all. Mrs. Lee as conventionally poisoned a pig as Mary Ann went to church. In dealing with any women whatsoever the mind, as such, may be written off.” Having delivered which judgment Mr. Bly added tolerantly, “Just go for a dark ’un with a small waist and a big bust.”

  Mr. Samson, for once in agreement, nodded.

  “And don’t be put off by a mole or two on the face, a blemish of that kind, in the big-built sort. It’s a good sign.” He looked at Lauderdale inquisitively. “Dark or light?” he prompted. “You being so black yourself, I’ll wager she’s light.…”

  But Lauderdale let his chair drop forward with a clatter. The conversation had not exactly cleared his mind, but it had produced a sensation which he recognized as important. He felt, in fact, that he shouldn’t be discussing Adelaide, even anonymously, with Mr. Samson and Mr. Bly. It was such a feeling as a husband might have about his wife; and Lauderdale knew that whatever the upshot, he would at least go back to Britannia Mews.

  “Light as a fairy,” he said flippantly, reaching again to his wrappers.

  Mr. Samson and Mr. Bly, however, continued the conversation behind his back; and became so engrossed by it that Mr. Evans, emerging from the office in one of his Welsh humours, cursed them as roundly as if they were being paid by time. Mr. Samson cursed back; Mr. Bly quietly extracted from his tail-pocket a pair of bloaters, and set about grilling them at a gas-jet; the Club was itself again.

  About six o’clock Mr. Lauderdale returned to Britannia Mews. Adelaide was still there, she had bought a truckle-bed for him, and prepared him a meal.

  CHAPTER V

  1