“Home at last, and thank you,” said Mary, when Joan followed her into the cottage after putting the car away in the thatched stable. “I thought we were doomed.”
“I never abandoned hope,” said Joan. And so the mother and daughter kept up this pretence of cheerfulness, giving themselves another respite and taking comfort from the physical pleasure of being indoors, warm, wrapped in familiar surroundings, where every object had its intimate whisper of memory, wistful perhaps but no less endeared.
Mary kindled the fire in the open hearth, and the flames from the paraffin sprinkled over the ashes lit up the Elizabethan brickwork, the door of the bread-oven, the gap of the salt-recess, the logs piled up and over the two seats in the chimney corners. As Mary went to draw the curtains, her cat appeared outside the casement, two eyes gleaming, and a coral-red mouth opening and shutting, the sound of the appeal cut off by the panes. She opened the window and he sprang in, his blue-grey fur bedewed, and his whiskers drooping. Shuddering as he walked, he made for the centre table, where he rubbed himself at an angle against a leg, purring and mewing together, protesting against the inclement weather and half-blaming his mistress. Joan stooped and roughly ran her hand along his coat, from head to tail, bringing it away wet and stuck with loose hairs.
The cottage was still lighted by oil-lamps, and the flat odour of them added to the rustic mood of the interior. With curtains drawn, the log fire now burning fiercely and hissing as it attacked the damp soot of the upper chimney, the two lamps casting pools of golden light and saturating the air with an almost visible texture of peacefulness, the two women forgot the outside world, and settled down before the fire, with tea and the opportunity for small-talk.
But the mother could wait no longer.
“Now, darling. What is it all about?” she asked, filling Joan’s cup again.
Joan hesitated, stared fixedly at the fire, clutched the cat on her lap and made it cry out in protest. She turned to her mother, who saw her breast rising and falling, shadowed and lit by fire-glow.
“Look, Mother,” she said at last. “John and I can’t go on as we have done. I can see that I made the mistake of urging him into marriage. But I begin to feel that I might just as well have snatched a boy out of the Fourth Form. I wonder somebody hasn’t informed the R.S.P.C.C.”
“Don’t be facetious, Joan. It sounds so bitter. I can’t imagine what …”
Joan suddenly changed her mood. Turning abruptly, she spilled the cat from her lap, and jumped up, to pace before the fire, marking the tiled spaces with her large shoes.
“Well, the truth is, that our marriage is no marriage at all. We’ve had four years of this boyish comradeship, and I can stand it no more. It’s turning me into a crank, a monomaniac.”
“My dear child …”
“I know. It sounds quite indecent. But when a man lives with you and treats you one moment like a fellow-soldier, and the next as though you were a dangerous Lilith or Delilah creeping towards him with a pair of shears to strip him of his manly strength, what are you to do, as a woman—as a woman, Mother; and that’s the blunt truth?”
Her voice broke, and Mary feared that she was about to burst into a flood of weeping; but indignation took charge again, and drove her to a further pacing of the floor. The logs on the fire collapsed, sending up a flight of sparks, and Mary got up, walked round her daughter and drew the logs together. The girl ignored this interruption, and spoke again.
“This university life is all very well. I enjoy that. But when it is cut off from reality—you know what I mean? Yes, that’s what it comes to. John is so concerned with his magnificent physical condition, when he’s not in the laboratory, that he begins to look upon me as a menace. Nothing must come between him and his fitness for climbing. You know he’s joined the Alpine Club, and goes up there to read for one night a week? That leaves me out at least for that part of his life. And for the rest—well, you see that I’m trying to tell you, Mother. I’m only human, and I can’t stand it any more. I’ve been a fool over him. He says so himself; accuses me of spoiling my career at Newnham because of what he calls my emotionalism. Emotionalism! It makes me want to say something beastly, something that smells of the stable and mother earth. But there it is. One can’t do it. All I know is, we’ve got no children, and are not likely to have any.”
Mary felt herself going colder and colder as she listened. She had no warmth of experience to draw upon. For the past fourteen years all her efforts of will had been directed to quelling the fires of nature. She believed that she must be direct and candid with the distracted girl.
“I don’t know what to say, Joan. I had no idea of this. You both appeared to be so happy together, with your work, and your expeditions. Didn’t you meet on the mountains? Life has drifted away from, from … It is so long now since I had your father. We were happy enough; without question. All was so natural. You were born at the end of our first year. Then your brother died. That frightened us a little, but it made no difference to our relationship. You know what I mean.”
She knelt before the fire still, gazing into the past.
“But after I lost him. Yes, that was the end of things. I had to put all that behind me. I was afraid, Joan. I am afraid still, though I begin to grow old. An old woman, changing into something poor and strange. I don’t recognise myself. But I want to help you. I don’t believe in violence. You must not be …”
“Don’t imagine I’m being headstrong, Mother. This thing has been growing for the past two years, though I’ve tried to hide it, dismiss it. The fact is, he’s not made for marriage. I love him, and he thinks he loves me. But all this fasting, and remorse; all this self-dedication as though he were a Greek athlete or a medieval monk. The two ways of life are utterly incompatible. I’ve done with it all, Mother, done with it. And nothing in the world will make me carry on with it. We had it all out before he went off for his rock-climbing. I accused him finally of being abnormal, and he was terribly hurt. But it’s true, it’s true. Either that or we are physically incompatible, and he does not really want me. Sometimes I’ve thought that he was either a child, or a man belonging to a generation older than mine. It was as though, as though he were more in love with you, Mother, than with me!”
Mary, still kneeling before the fire, looked up almost slyly at her daughter, though she spoke as one shocked.
“Joan, how can you say such things?”
“Well, sometimes it has looked like that. He worships you; he hovers over you—yes, hovers. Perhaps it is because you are smaller than I—and still so lovely, with that silver hair framing a face that you and I both take for granted, but must have driven men mad in the past—and could do so to-day, too, if men were still capable of that sort of thing. But I sometimes think the biology of the human male has been altered. It’s turned away from … Oh, I’m talking rot, Mother. I can only speak from my own experience. And I know this. My own marriage is a failure, and I’ve done with men for good. That’s final, and it’s no use crying over it.”
She finished this speech with an emphasis that left the air confused with a hundred broken questions. Mary could say nothing. She got up, returned to the tea-tray, and poured herself another cup, which she sipped thoughtfully.
“Well, darling,” she said at last, after Joan had subsided into a sulky silence, “the only thing is to take some active steps. We cannot leave the matter thus. Do you mean that you have agreed to part? And if so, on what terms? I am not prepared to believe this is the last word. I had a letter from John too for my birthday—by the way, thank you both for the present, which I’ve not yet opened, owing to our preoccupation. He says nothing about so serious a decision.”
“Of course not. He never will. He has a genius for skating round reality—unless it’s made of limestone and is stuck fifteen thousand feet above sea-level.”
“Oh well, love, we are all made in different moulds. What you need now is a complete change. So do I. Dr. Batten has written from Paris, as usual on
my birthday, asking me to go over. I’ve never done so, since that first year after your father was killed, or rather when the war ended; though for me the war did end when he was killed in 1915. I know it sounds weak and selfish. But I’ve tried to make up for it since, and to cancel out my own feelings.”
“That’s the trouble, Mother. All this abnegation and arid self-control! But it looks as though I am in for a course of it now. How else am I to carry on?”
So the talk went on, between mother and daughter, neither of them able to express herself fully, or to bring under control the flood of emotions and disconnected memories released under the clash of words and events. The evening drew toward bed-time, and after Mary had inspected the gift sent that day from The Stores, and both she and Joan had had baths and sipped cups of cocoa and nibbled at biscuits, they parted for the night, having agreed to accept Dr. Batten’s invitation, concluding that nobody would be more surprised than he. Mary added, as they parted for the night, that she could barely remember what the doctor looked like. She faintly recollected a thin man in uniform, with a face heavily lined each side of a wide mouth, the eyes sunken under a lined brow, and lank hair. “He stooped,” she said, pausing with her hand on the door-knob, as though it were a handle to the past. “It looked so odd with a man in uniform.”
“Well, you will see what time has done to him, Mother. But I must first finish off my last job for the Professor, before he goes off to America. That will take a few days. But we need a little time, surely, to pack our things?”
They agreed, and parted. Mary noticed that the cat had followed Joan into her room, and was not turned out again.
Chapter Three
A Long-Standing Invitation
Joan’s work for her Professor took a week, but during that time her mother got busy, arranging for the departure and an indefinite stay abroad. This activity was deliberately maintained to prevent her from worrying about Joan’s marriage and the threat to it. Mary thought John Boys rather an adorable person, with his childlike enthusiasms, his utter lack of self-consciousness, and his old-fashioned attitude toward women. He always made her feel frail and helpless, and she found that a relief from the part which she had forced herself to play in the lonely drama of her widowhood. For she never succeeded in disguising the fact that her life was lonely, in spite of her devotion to Joan, and her activities and good works locally and in London. It was as though she were conducting herself through a glass screen, or over the telephone. Everything, and everyone, stood at a slight remove from flesh and blood contact. She did not care to examine that matter more intimately.
The cottage in the wood was left to the care of Milly, who would keep the place aired and clean, and could be depended upon. Nothing to worry about there. Mother and daughter found themselves in the boat-train at ten o’clock one calm morning in mid-December, rushing through Kent, too excited by travel-fever to be able to see what they were looking at through the windows of the compartment. Winter sunshine touched the coloured landscape, flashing on oast-caps, ponds, and the wires in the hop gardens. Flights of rooks rose from the fields as the train disturbed them. The travellers looked furtively at the surface of the sea as the train ran alongside it through Folkestone Warren. But all was calm, even glassy, with the sun burnishing the water to blue steel, under the tempering of a slight mist.
Both of them were quiet during the crossing. They walked the deck, their heads protected in silk handkerchiefs against the breeze. Gulls skated on air round the boat, darting down from time to time into the great blocks of glassy water thrown aside by the vessel. The Channel appeared to be empty, and both shores were soon lost behind the mist.
At last, but sooner than they anticipated, the coast of France grew from a smudge to a solid, and took shape in cliff, downside, beaches, and the approach to Calais Harbour.
“I’ve not seen it for over eleven years,” said Mary sadly. She was realising that she was about to step ashore on the ground where her husband lay. Was something missing in her, she asked herself, that she had not been again to visit his grave in the well-tended cemetery? But the regularity of the tiny graves, the sameness of them, had filled her heart with a dreadful sense of futility that had almost made her cry out against God. She had not dared to go again.
Joan took her arm, as they stood waiting at the gangway, amid the cries of porters, and the excitement of a party of skiers on their way to the Alps, young folk perilously encumbered with the tools of their pastime.
“This is your suggestion, darling,” said Joan. “So we’ve got to enjoy ourselves, or all the effort and money will be wasted.”
Mary looked swiftly at her daughter, surprised by this touch of perceptiveness. It cheered her, and it also made her feel guilty at having given way to so gloomy a reminiscence, when the girl must surely be needing all her attention. She obeyed Joan’s gesture, which sent her first down the gangway. They found their reservations on the train, and sat down to luncheon, which began as soon as the train moved.
The winter afternoon gradually faded over northern France, but a wind had sprung up, whistling round the carriages and clearing away the mist. Darkness beyond the windows was pinned by diamonds of light from farmhouses, and Amiens and Chantilly glittered in the night. Joan fell asleep, but Mary could not lose herself. She watched her daughter’s face, the handsome oval of her chin, touched with a petulance by sleep; the fair hair disordered by travel. “I wonder if she is too strong-minded for him?” she asked herself suddenly; and her thoughts turned to the husband, somewhere in the Pennines, his climbing-boots ringing on the rocks, his rucksack light with a mass of papers concerned with problems in physics, the by-product of Lord Rutherford’s research work at Cambridge.
But Paris was approaching, and Joan was wakened by that apprehensiveness latent in all travellers’ minds. The two women tidied themselves, collected their luggage, and stood in the corridor watching the lights of the city. At the barrier of the platform in the Gare du Nord, they were instantly approached by two men, one in advance of the other.
“I recognised you, Mrs. Winterbourne,” said a quiet voice, “we don’t need to re-introduce ourselves.” Mary shook hands with Dr. Batten, and presented her daughter, who towered above the stooping figure whom she could not see distinctly under the gloomy station lights. She was aware of a surprisingly small hand that gripped hers firmly; and of a pair of sharp eyes that could not be dimmed even in that dismal setting.
He said nothing to her, merely stood for a moment with her hand in his. Then he turned, and his companion, who had been lingering in the background, came forward. “My brother, Colonel Tom Batten,” said the doctor. Mary greeted the stranger, looking at him vaguely, for it was useless to try to register any impression in this gloom. Nor did she detect a trace of irony in the doctor’s voice. She noticed only that he out-topped his brother, being a head taller than the Amazonian Joan, who was struggling with him about the luggage.
The doctor did the talking as he led the way to the car. The other three were shy, and the women tired.
“We’ve put you into an hotel only a stone’s-throw from home, Mrs. Winterbourne. Our flat is almost wholly a professional headquarters, and no place to invite you to stay in, as you will see. But you are dining with us to-night, if that is agreeable. You did meet my wife? There are two children now, a boy and a girl, both bilingual monsters, aged nine and seven. They would not add to the comfort of visitors. I fear we are negligent parents. But their uncle, who has been here for some time, is licking them into shape with army discipline.”
The colonel chuckled, and took the suitcase from Mary, to stow it into the boot of the car. She saw his face clearly as he laughed, the scar down one cheek, the slightly drawn lip that side, the grey eyes and slight expression of bewilderment. Joan saw him too, but she diagnosed the expression as shiftiness.
The colonel drove, timing himself expertly with the Paris traffic, so that the passengers’ terror was gradually lulled, as he tore down the Boulevard de S�
�bastopol, past the front of the Palais de Justice, up the Boulevard St. Michel, to draw up at a small hotel close to the Raspail Métro station.
“While you get yourselves installed,” said the doctor, “we will put the car away and my brother will come back for you. Take your time. We dine at all hours, but to-night the meal is planned for eight o’clock. That gives you an hour.”
Mother and daughter found themselves in two small, communicating rooms at the side, overlooking the large Cimetière du Sud. They could hear the traffic rumbling along the Boulevard Raspail past the front of the hotel, the noise rushing up the side road, the Rue Edgar Quinet, in momentary bursts of activity.
“This will do, won’t it?” said Joan, who liked being high up, and in a new building where everything was clean. “The colonel’s not very communicative, is he?”
They began to unpack and hang up their clothes, coming and going between the two rooms as they changed into dinner dresses and coats. A maid interrupted, and offered her services most pleasantly. They purred with a sense of comfort in the super-heated atmosphere.
The Dangerous Years Page 2