Sir!' She Said

by Alec Waugh

  For instance, was this pretty manicurist who had been so obviously bored at working on a woman’s hands, really so much better off? How much freedom had she actually, stuck underground, working by electric light from half-past nine to six with no real alternative for her future but a succession of intrigues with her male clients or a marriage with a man out of her own class whom she would compare contemptuously with the men whose confidences she had listened to across a barrier of orange sticks, the refusal of whose advances she would most certainly regret?

  She remembered the outbursts of the suffragettes before the Asquith government and the directorial terror in her husband’s office when the first woman clerk was taken into employment during the war. “For Heaven’s sake,” it had been urged,” let her be plain.” Now men were complaining that women were taking the bread out of their mouths. They talked of women meeting men on equal terms. But where did they, in point of fact? Not in commerce, not in finance, not in politics, not in sport; nor in the arts, except on the stage and in the novel, those two emotional forms of self-expression in which women had always been supreme. It was only really in the less remunerative spheres of life that women could enter into competition with men. How many women had bothered to stand for Parliament? How many women were capable of earning more than ten pounds a week? Women might be able to earn pocket money as mannequins and secretaries, but they were in the last analysis as dependent as ever their parents had been on masculine support. And were the clauses of that dependence any easier to-day? Had they been in her case? She had married at the age of twenty-two a man ten years older than herself. The right difference in age, she had been told. Which very possibly it had been then. No doubt women had aged faster than men in days when women had had babies every eighteen months, nursing them into the bargain; when women’s lives had been divided between the nursery and the kitchen. But to-day there was no real reason why a well-to-do woman should age any faster than a man. She had far less strain put upon her than a man. She did no work. She had her couple of babies which she did not nurse. Modern conditions had vastly simplified the running of a house. Much of her hospitality was staged in restaurants. Science had taught her how to keep young and healthy. There was nothing for the young woman in the middle thirties to do except enjoy herself. Her children were at schools. Her house ran itself. She looked twenty and she felt twenty.

  And she had had, there was no use pretending that she had not, a marvellous time in the middle thirties. She had had the looks of a girl and the knowledge and assurance of a woman. Marriage and motherhood had justified her of life. She had had her beauty and the means with which to decorate that beauty. She had lived in a day when a woman’s private life was considered her own concern: when discretion was all that was demanded of her: when there were too many glass-houses for much stone-throwing. They had been, those years, a succession of parties, dances, dinners, with herself invariably the most admired, the most sought for person in whatsoever gatherings she might find herself. It had been marvellous. She could never have had a time like that if she had been born in the eighteen fifties.

  She had had that. But there was nothing to be had both ways. There was the law of compensation. She had had that time, and now as a payment for that she found herself young still in looks, with a husband whom hard work had aged; engaged herself in the losing battle against age to retain her looks; living now in middle age the same life that she had lived in youth, a life in which she could no longer satisfactorily express herself: a life that was opposed to her interests and instincts, but that she lacked the resolution to abandon. She had had a better time, certainly, out of the thirties than her mother had. But she doubted if she would get as much out of the fifties and late forties.

  She did not care to look too closely into the future: to envisage the details stage by stage of that long and losing battle against nature that she would go on waging. As a child she had respected the boxers who had retired from the ring when the wave was at its crest: the generals who abandoned the power they themselves upheld; the women who closed the gate on love in the rich autumn of their beauty. Now it was to be her fate, apparently, to watch year by year, week by week, the slow ebbing of the tide.

  Not that it was any use complaining, she reflected. As long as her contemporaries chose to dress and look as though they were their own daughters, there was nothing for her but to go one better and beat them at their game, and anyhow, dining that evening with young Savile she would be able to be herself. It would be nice to look nice for him. “I think,” she said, “that I’ll take a bottle of that Chanel, after all.”

  Chapter IX

  The Sisters

  It was close on seven before Faith rose that evening from her siesta. In the road below her window was parked a familiar and mud-spattered Daimler. “So he’s still here,” she thought as she walked downstairs. “I wonder how they enjoyed themselves?”

  It was a question that quite clearly did not need answering as far at any rate as one of the protagonists was concerned. In the drawing-room, glum and silent, Arthur Paramount was sitting with her husband. In one glance, as he rose to greet her, her eyes took in and recognised the significance of the soiled collar, the creaseless trousers, the mud-caked shoes. “Again,” she thought.

  “Well,” she asked, “and have you brought back my daughter safely?”

  The lad nodded his head. “She’s upstairs changing.”

  “Have you had a good day?”

  “Melanie’s enjoyed herself, I think.”

  Faith Terance ignored the implied distinction. She was in no mood for a lover’s complaints and confidences. But neither was the lad in any mood for withholding them. He was too unhappy. And there was a curiously soothing, curiously receptive quality about this woman that was his loved one’s mother. She gave you the impression that she understood you.

  “It’s all wrong,” he said, “though I don’t know what is wrong, quite.”

  And he rambled off into a long, incoherent explanation of the troubles of that day, and of other days.

  “I seem to do everything wrong,” he said, “I don’t know why. There’s nothing I’ld not do for her, nothing I’ld not give to her.”

  Faith Terance smiled. She half pitied, half despised the lad. Men ought to realise when a thing was helpless.

  “It’s not by giving, but by getting given things,” she said, “that we make people fond of us.”

  “Then what. . .?”

  But before the lad could finish, Julia had arrived, and by the time that the first greetings had been ended, Melanie had burst into the room. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks glowing. The bronze glint in her hair was intensified as she tossed back her head, by the metallic shimmer of the silver tissue dress that fell in a straight, swaying line from arm to ankle. Every joint and muscle of her body was eloquent of excitement.

  “Mother, darlingest,” she cried, “if you knew how much I’d made to-day. But it’s no good your guessing. You’d never guess. I backed an outsider. Practically an outsider, that’s to say. Mauritius. Only for a place. But even so I made more than a hundred out of it. Think of the fun I’ll have. And Julia, I believe I’ll actually be able to give your absurd shop something on account of that bill of mine. Enough, anyhow, to get some new ones from them. I’ve nothing to wear. You can’t think just how nothing. I spent so long deciding over the little I have got, that I didn’t see how I was going to get changed in time.”

  She talked quickly, breathlessly, the sentences tumbling over one another.

  “Darling child,” her mother laughed. “What is the hurry? I’ve not begun to change yet.”

  “But I’m being called for at quarter to eight.”

  “Quarter to eight? But young Savile rang up this morning. . . .”

  “Young Savile?”

  “Melanie, I believe that you’ve forgotten.”

  Her daughter laughed: a care free, ringing laugh.

  “Mother dear, I believe that I’ve forgotten everythi
ng that’s ever happened. Young Savile, though. Oh, heavens!”

  She raised her hands above her head in a mock gesture of despair, crossed over to her mother, laid her cheek low on hers, and “Mother dearest” she whispered, “you’ll forgive me, it’s naughty of me, I know. But I was so excited. It’s not the kind of thing that’s likely to happen twice. And when Druce Mander suggested that we ought to celebrate.. . . Mother, I can’t, you do understand, don’t you?”

  Her mother tapped her cheek. “Of course, you go and enjoy yourself.”

  Julia had started, however, at Mander’s name. “So you’re all going out together?” she asked sharply.

  The sharpness in her tone made Melanie meet her sister’s glance defiantly. “No, not all of us,” she said.

  “A partie carrée?”

  “No, not even that.”

  “Yourself and Mander, then?”

  “Myself and Mander; and if,” Melanie added, “you’ve anything to complain about in that. . .”

  But Julia was not going to discuss the matter with her sister. “Father,” she said, “it’s ridiculous. Druce Mander isn’t a person with whom Melanie ought to be going about alone.”

  Melanie was resolved, however, that it was with her sister that the problem should be discussed.

  “Why shouldn’t I go about with him? What have you got against him? You know him yourself, he told me that you did. If you know him, why shouldn’t I?”

  “I don’t go about alone with him.”

  “That’s quibbling. You’ve met him in the company of men with whom you have gone about alone. And anyhow, that’s not the point. What have you got against him? I’ve never met him till to-day. He seemed nice. And if he hadn’t been, Arthur wouldn’t have taken me to his party, would you, Arthur?”

  The lad was too embarrassed to reply otherwise than inaudibly. But Melanie went on as though his support had been distinctly vocalised.

  “What have you got against him? Is he crooked in business? I’ve never heard he was. I don’t know what his private reputation is.”

  “He’s not a marrying man.”

  Melanie laughed scornfully.

  “Not a marrying man! And what’s that got to do with it? One doesn’t only go about with people that one thinks one might marry. What would happen to one’s married friends if one were to? What about yourself and Leon Carstairs, for example?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Leon Carstairs’s married. You go about with him.”

  “Leon hasn’t got Mander’s reputation.”

  “And what is Druce Mander’s reputation? He’s forty. A man who’s unmarried and has got charm doesn’t reach that age without having had something happen to him. If one delved into the secrets of one’s friends, one wouldn’t have a friend left, probably.”

  She spoke truculently, unbalanced by the day’s excitement, exasperated by the cool watchfulness of her sister’s stare. “Don’t you think,” she went on, “that I’m capable of looking after myself?”

  “I don’t think that any girl of your age is a match for a man of Druce Mander’s experience and position.”

  “A girl of my age! And what about yourself four years ago, when you were my age? When you said that a girl was as capable as any boy of looking after herself; that you were not going to be kept in cotton wool. That’s the way you talked then, wasn’t it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And you went out with all sorts of people. You went out with young men, and you went out with middle-aged men, and you went out with married men. Do you remember the arguments there were when you started going out with Leon Carstairs, when father said that a married man like Carstairs wasn’t in a position to be taking a young girl out alone, and how scornful you were, and said that nowadays, with women educated and emancipated, a man and woman could be friends just as easily as two men and two women could be. Do you remember that?”

  “I remember.”

  “And have you ceased believing all that now?”

  “I don’t know, no. . . of course I haven’t really. . . but. . . oh, well, that’s four years ago. . . one’s attitude alters in four years.”

  “Not in essentials. If it had, you wouldn’t be going about with Leon Carstairs still. He’s a married man, with wife and daughters. And he’s your best friend, surely? He’s your proof, isn’t he, that a man and a woman can be as good friends as two men and two women can?”

  Julia hesitated. “Yes, I suppose so.”

  The anger had gone out of Melanie’s tone as she had argued. As Julia hesitated the fresh, friendly smile came back into her eyes.

  “Silly one, of course he is,” she said. “And if you have your Leon Carstairs why shouldn’t I have my Druce Mander?”

  “Because. . .”

  “Darlingest, because nothing. You’re just being the fractious elder sister. And you mustn’t be, because I love you so, and I won’t be made angry with you. I should be so unhappy if I were, and I won’t let anyone make me that, so don’t be silly, dearest.”

  Her voice was soft again and wooing: she had moved over from her mother to her sister, and her arm, her cool, soft arm, was about her neck.

  Helplessly Julia shook her head.

  “It isn’t as simple as all that,” she said.

  Melanie would not let her continue the discussion.

  “Oh, but it is, my dear, much simpler. I’m only doing now what you were starting to do four years ago, and I don’t see that you’ve come to any particular harm by it. You’re not going back now on what you were saying then. You’re not regretting that you were allowed to have things the way you chose, are you now?”

  “Of course not, only. . .”

  “Only what?”

  “Only that. . . well, there are dangers, there are complications I hadn’t realised then.”

  “But you avoided them, why shouldn’t I? No, darling, you can’t think of one real reason why I shouldn’t go out with Mander, and I’m sure I can think of ever so many why I should. He’s so amusing. He knows so much. And he’s been everywhere, and he knows every one. And he is so rich. There’s Watkins coming up the stairs, and I’m sure that it’s to tell me I’m being called for. Good-bye, darlings, all of you.”

  Neither father nor mother had taken any part in the sisters’ argument.

  More than once, however, John Terance looked thoughtfully at Julia during the quiet dinner that they shared after her mother had gone out. What had prompted that sudden outburst, he asked himself: that unexpected denial of everything that she and her generation had seemed to stand for. Why should Julia be seeking to protect her sister unless she had felt in her own life the need for some such protection? Had she in some way unknown to him, paid the penalty of that freedom? He did not know. There was no way of knowing. He knew so little of her life after all, whom she saw, where she went; what her ideas and her ambitions were. She would drop in once or twice a week at cocktail time, and once a fo$$$tnight she would come to dinner: and they would discuss mutual acquaintances; and books and theatres and the chance topics of the hour. But he saw nothing of the real Julia, could only guess at what filled her life and heart. She was as strange and secret to him as her mother was.

  His perplexity was by no means soothed by Julia’s sudden asking of him if he knew anything about the people that Leon Carstairs worked for. The question surprised him so much that he did not at first know what kind of answer was required to it.

  “Smart and Alderston,” he said. “I don’t know much about them. I believe they’re sound.”

  “I know that. But they themselves? Leon says they’re stodgy. Do you know them personally?”

  “Not enough to know that.”

  “Leon says they’ve got very Victorian ideas. He thinks they’ll take him into partnership one day. Do you think they will?”

  “My dear, how can I tell?”

  “You can tell how likely it would be. If you were in their place would you be wanting a younge
r partner? And if you were, would Leon be the kind of man you’ld be taking in?”

  John Terance pursed his lips.

  “Smart and Alderston looking for a partner? Well, they may be. They’re both oldish. Smart’s not married; Alderston’s two sons are in the Army. And I daresay that if they are looking for a partner, Carstairs is the kind of man they’ld choose. He’s irresolute in some ways, but he’s straight. People would trust him. He’ld bring business. His wife’s very well connected: she’s no money herself, but she was born into a world that has. Yes, Leon Carstairs has got quite a chance, I’ld say.”