by Alec Waugh
‘We cannot afford to entertain,’ she told him.
No Cinderella could have been more cut off from life.
It had gone on like that for fifteen years; fifteen years during which, while other families had depleted their resources with extravagance, he repaired his with industry and economy. On his twenty-sixth birthday he was as rich as his grandfather had been. On his twenty-ninth birthday his grandmother had summoned him to her presence.
‘The time has come for you to find a wife. You will take a flat in London. I will arrange suitable introductions.’
So much of his life was common gossip.…
It was easy now to unravel this mass of contradiction. What other result could have been produced by such a combination of training and heredity. He had inherited his looks, height and health, his dignity of feature: a high forehead, a long pointed nose, a full firm-lipped mouth. He had inherited, too, an ease of manner, a confidence that he would be obeyed, an air of authority that was increased by his exercise of that authority among a rustic and subservient peasantry. These he had inherited. By his training he had acquired an almost feminine curiosity about the world from which he had been excluded. It was easy to see how a girl like Julia would appeal to his imagination. He had led the life of a male Cinderella. Just as Cinderella, while she swept passages, washed pans, scrubbed floors, dreamed of the coloured-sounding world that lay beyond the narrow tether of her kitchen, so Martin, as he inspected leaking roofs, interrogated cottagers, supervised in their proper seasons the lambing, the picking of the hops, the ploughing of the wheatfields, had speculated on the nature of the world, glimpses of which periodically reached him through such books and magazines and newspapers as his grandmother and sisters tolerated in their drawing room.
Cinderellas focus their dreams of the world from which they are excluded upon one person who symbolizes that world for them: an athlete, a prince, a film-star. To Martin, the tenth Lord Bishopsbourne, London and all that London stood for in glamour, adventure, richness of experience, was symbolized by the garish personality of Julia Thirleigh.
I looked forward with the liveliest interest to their meeting. What happened in real life, I wondered, when Cinderellas met their dreams?
Very much what happened, I was to discover, in the simplest fairy tale. When Julia came into the room, a peroxidized mane of curls upon her neck, her face as smoothly white as a magnolia, decorated with a mouth that bore no relation to the actual contours of her lips, her finger-nails pinked to match the bright ribbon of her hat—‘Really,’ I thought, ‘she’s gone too far. This is not the way to dress for a small cocktail party in a one-room flat.’ But on Martin’s face, as he rose to greet her, there was the look of a man who has met his fate.
It was not, however, a moment of tongue-tied rapture.
‘You are the one person in London that I’ve really meant to meet.’ That was his first remark to her. The second: ‘You are even more beautiful than I’d thought you’d be.’ The third: ‘Let’s go over into that corner where we can really talk.’
He led her in his most authoritative manner to the far corner of a many-cushioned divan, and there proceeded to behave as though there were no party, as though there were no one else in the room beside themselves. He allowed me to fill his glass from time to time; but the attempts of one or two of Julia’s friends to disturb his monopoly of her company were frustrated by a frontier of passive resistance. They came up with their ‘Hullo, Julia!’s. They stood expectantly, waiting to be included in the conversation. But he behaved as though they were not there. The river of his talk flowed on. Once, over his shoulder, Julia caught my eye. She made a half-comical gesture of resignation, a ‘What-on-earth-am-I-to-do-about-this?’ look. But rescue was not possible. When at last, ninety minutes later, the colloquy was broken, it was at his side that she rose to her feet, at his side that she left the room. ‘We’ll dine at the Jardin,’ he was saying with that same odd mixture of masterfulness and boyish eagerness.
Early next morning she rang me up.
‘That’s an astonishing young man,’ she said.
‘You’re telling me!’
‘It’s like nothing that’s ever happened to me.’
‘Hasn’t anyone ever made love to you at first sight before?’
‘Oh, yes, of course. But—well, not like that. He seems to think—oh, I don’t know—that I’ve nothing else to do except spend my entire time with him. There’s no refusing him. Today I’m supposed to be lunching with the Gregsons, but I find I’m not; I’m motoring with him to Bray. I’d meant to play golf this afternoon. I’m not; I’m going on the river. I had thought I was going down to Pratings for the week-end; but I find I’m going to the first night of Canary Bird. And as far as I can see, he’s already made plans for tomorrow, and the next day and the day after that.’
She hesitated. She tried to explain. Yes, of course, she had been made love to before at a first meeting. But invariably by the kind of man who was too busy to delay attack. The kind of man who was continually consulting a little diary that was black with entries—’Yes, let me see now—Monday—Tuesday—Wednesday—what about Friday, then?’ The kind of man who had to make full use of his few unmortgaged moments. Julia had known that type. She had also known the type whose diary was a blank page for her to write on. ‘Now, what are you doing tomorrow—the next day—well, what about the day after, then?’ A technique which was, she had come to realize, less a proof of devotion than a need on their part to have their minds made up for them. Martin was not like that. He knew his mind, all right. His diary was a blank sheet. He placed it at her disposal. He assumed that she would reciprocate; that hers, too, was blank. That was what puzzled her; his naïve assumption that what he wanted, she must want as well.
‘He’s the oddest creature I’ve ever met. I don’t know, precisely, what it is he’s driving at, but this I do know: he’s serious about it.’
She was not to be left in the dark long. On the sixth day of their acquaintance—and so concentrated had their acquaintance been that she felt she had known him all her life—he invited her to spend a week-end in Kent. ‘It’s all right,’ he explained. ‘My grandmother will be there.’
Then she knew.
It had been an odd courtship. It was an odd proposal. Strictly speaking, there was no proposal. Martin assumed that they were engaged. As the car turned from the main road through the lodge gates, he pointed to the wide, gabled house at the end of a long curving drive.
‘You’ll probably think it a little bare. But we could arrange some herbaceous borders.’ He took her into a large bow-windowed room, its long table littered with papers, its corners stacked with guns and riding-boots. ‘This is my study. It’s very untidy. But it’s light and airy. I expect you’d like to have this for your drawing room.’ On the first floor he led her into a room of pleasant proportions that would have appeared large had not the greater part of the floor and wall space been occupied by a vast, four-poster bed. ‘You’ll like this,’ he told her confidently; ‘it faces south.’ That was surprising to Julia; but he had an even greater surprise in store. There was a door across the end of the passage. It opened on to a separate wing. ‘This is immediately above the kitchens,’ he informed her. ‘It will make a pleasant nursery.’
For the first time since she had been very young, Julia found herself in a situation that was beyond her scope. In a long trailing telephone talk, she poured out to me the recital of the day’s adventures.
‘I’ve never met anybody like him in all my life. He’s the very last person that I could have imagined myself marrying. Still, if he can cajole that gorgon of a grandmother into accepting me as the daughter of the house, I suppose he does deserve me.’
Julia had no doubt of the reception that Martin’s announcement of his intention to marry her would have at his grandmother’s hands. Nor had I. But Martin, where his own wishes were concerned, never considered other people’s plans. He produced his news with a bland and cheerful c
onfidence.
’Well, Grannie, I’ve not taken long in following your advice.’
‘What do you mean, Martin?’
‘Julia, of course.’
‘Julia who, and Julia what?’
‘Julia Thirleigh. We’re going to be married.’
‘The young person who lunched here yesterday?’
‘Yes.’
There was a long pause.
‘I will discuss this matter with you one week from now,’ said Lady Bishopsbourne.
Within three days her grandson had been summoned to her presence.
‘I am afraid that I have painful news for you,’ she said.
‘Oh?’
‘Exceedingly painful news. It will be impossible for you to marry Miss Thirleigh.’ ‘Why?’
‘I have made inquiries about her. She is not the kind of girl you think she is.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘She has been extremely wild.’
‘I know.’
‘You misunderstand me. I don’t mean headstrong, wilful. I mean that there have been men, a great many men in her life.’
‘What else do you expect? She’s very pretty.’
‘Don’t be silly. I don’t mean in that way. I mean that she has had what the young people of your generation, euphemistically call “affairs”, but for which in my generation we had a very different word.’
‘That’s no news to me.’
‘What?’
‘Nobody worries about that now.’
‘What!’
‘It’s not what a girl’s done before she’s married, but what she does when she becomes a wife, that matters.’
‘Martin.…’
There was a pause; then with the authority of one who has not known opposition of any sort for fifty years, Martin’s grandmother spoke. It was a long harangue. She spoke of family and tradition, of the race and of the future, of woman as the guardian of the race, of woman as the sacred vessel of the race. It was a full quarter of an hour before she abandoned generalities and approached the personal implications of the problem.
‘I cannot imagine how a man with any delicacy of feeling can contemplate such a marriage. Do you expect your grandmother and your sisters to live in the same house as such a woman?’
‘Certainly not. I’m going to have the dower-house done up.’
That evening he wrote to Julia telling her that she would see the announcement of their engagement in the next morning’s issue of The Times.
Julia shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, if he feels that way about me—but I can’t think why he does. I suppose,’ she added, ‘that Freud would have an explanation.’
Which is the kind of explanation that would be sought in an age which believes that human nature has been recast in the mould of Austrian psychology.
The wedding-day was fixed.
London was frankly and unanimously sceptical. It regarded the whole business not only as the season’s best, but the century’s best joke. ‘Julia in orange-blossom!’ It refused to believe that it could last three years. ‘What else can happen?’ scoffing voices argued. ‘A girl like Julia. Think of the life she’s led! We’re not saying that a girl of her age shouldn’t have some experience. You’d expect her to on the whole. If a girl is not married by twenty-five, it’s probably because she’s been in love with someone that for some reason or other she couldn’t marry. Nowadays that usually means one thing. But Julia—well, you’ve only got to see what’s happened to other girls of that type who’ve married. Three years: that’s the limit. Still, at the end of it, there’ll be a nice comfortable wad of alimony. The girl’s on velvet.’
That was what London thought. But I was not certain. For the most part I sat silent when odds of eight to one against were laid.
In the main I was not certain, because in the last analysis I did not really know what manner of girl Julia was. Though I had known her for so long, she had never been quite real to me. She had remained a type: she typified innumerable things, but what she was herself I did not know. I could not even guess how her marriage would turn out, because I could not guess at the kind of person that marriage would reveal to Martin as his wife.
Martin, who had puzzled me first when I met him at Lord’s, had become a comparatively simple problem; but Julia, about whom I had then scarcely bothered, had become, now that I had really started to consider her, an inscrutable enigma.
Her behaviour during their engagement was altogether different from what I had expected. In view of her reputation, I had anticipated a flaunting and defiant manner, a head held high in self-vindication, lips curled with an unspoken, ‘Didn’t I tell you so? I’ve got the thing both ways: have had my cake and have it still to eat; have played the town and am marrying a peer.’
That’s what you would have expected. But not at all. She grew quieter, dressed less stridently, arranged her make-up in approximate conformity with the contours of her face. At times she would sit quite silent at a party, an abstracted look upon her face. As the marriage day drew close, her moments of abstraction grew so frequent that her manner became almost trance-like. One would have said, had she been anyone but Julia Thirleigh, ‘A young girl in love for the first time!’
So marked indeed was her manner that when I met her two days before her wedding at a cocktail party given in her honour, I could not help exclaiming: ‘Julia, you look like a bride!’
Her answer came back pat.‘I feel like one.’ It was the obvious answer, but the tone of voice and the look that went with it made me feel that there was a meaning behind her words. I looked at her quickly, interrogatively. ‘I’ve every right to feel like one,’ she added. Then I knew there was a second meaning. I took her by elbow. ‘Now, what’s all this about?’
It was the kind of cocktail party where there is so much noise, so much crowding of people into a confined space that no serious
conversation is considered possible, or is, indeed, intended by its organizers, but which provides in actual fact the best of shelters for two people who really want to talk intimately to one another.
Julia chuckled as I led her toward a window-seat.
‘Come along,’ I said. ‘What is it?’
Her chuckle became a laugh.
‘I’ve always wanted you to know. I’d wanted to tell you when you wrote that novel. But I thought: No, I’d better wait. I’ve waited so long that I can afford to wait a little longer.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘No, you wouldn’t. It was what you said about my looking like a bride. I feel like one. I’ve every right to feel like one. I’ve as much right to wear orange-blossom as any Victorian damsel that walked up an aisle.’
‘I still don’t follow you.’
‘Of course you don’t. You got me wrong. Everybody got me wrong. I let them. I encouraged them. All those things you wrote about me—it’s not true, any of it. I’m not like that at all.’
‘But—’
‘I’ve been wild. I know that. But not in that way.’
I stared at her uncomprehendingly.
‘But those men, those love-affairs?’
She shook her head.
‘No, not one.’
I stared blankly. Had I been offered proof of Queen Victoria’s frailty, I should not have been more astonished.
‘But how, when, why, where, what—’ I stammered.
She laughed: the kind of laugh that comes from the depths of a great happiness.
‘It was shyness to begin with,’ she explained. ‘All the girls I knew were talking about their affairs, I felt ashamed of not having any. So I pretended that I had, just so as not to seem out of things. I expect that a great many more girls than one would ever suspect are like that too. There’s more talking about things than doing things. Perhaps if I’d ever been attracted by anyone, really attracted, I’d have had a real affair; but I wasn’t, so I just pretended. And when one starts pretending, one can’t stop—even when one real
izes that it’s gone too far; as I knew it had, of course. But I couldn’t have told anyone then. I should have looked so silly. Besides, it was fun, too, in a way, deceiving everyone. I used to chuckle when people warned me, when they told me that I’d never find anyone who’d want to marry me. I knew that some day someone would come along who would be so much in love with me that he wouldn’t mind what I’d been, who’d want me for what I was. I knew that would happen. But what I never had suspected, was how completely I was going to fall head-over-heels in love with him myself.’
The smile on her lips and in her eyes was touching.
I had listened to her in silence; stupefied at the start, but with a dawning sense of comprehension. It was rather like the sensation one gets from a good detective story, when the least suspected person is revealed to be the murderer. You say: ‘Oh, but that’s impossible.’ You feel fooled and cheated; then gradually, as clue after clue is stated, you recognize that you have not been fooled, that the clues were there if you had had the sense to spot them; that subconsciously, indeed, you had spotted them; that no other conclusion would have fitted all the facts. Astonishing though Julia’s confession was, it did explain all that had puzzled me before. I could understand now why she had never seemed quite real: why she was someone who had done things rather than somebody who was something. She had been acting a part. No wonder she had seemed a type.
Her confession explained a lot. It did not, however, appreciably determine the outcome of her marriage.
‘Are you going to tell Martin this?’
‘Naturally. I’ve been keeping it as a surprise for him for the wedding-night.’
‘You think he’ll be pleased?’
‘What man wouldn’t be?’
I answered her obliquely.
‘Have you ever read a book called Tess of the D’ Urbervilles?’
‘No. What about it?’
‘It was much discussed in my parents’ day. It’s about a dairy-maid who had an illegitimate child that died. Several years later, she married. On her wedding-night, her husband discovered the secret of her past. He was so shocked that he left her there and then.’