A Man of Forty

by Gerald Bullet

  § 4

  Next morning, a morning of dazzling summer brilliance, David was the first down to breakfast. He came to the table feeling excited, hungry, anxious, and not quite real, having had perhaps three hours of rich, dream-haunted sleep. He was filled with a strange lightness, a lightness almost physical, as though he did not quite belong either to his body or to the world in which he found himself; and the sound of Mrs. Bayne in the adjoining kitchen, the bacon-frying and queer tuneless singing of Mrs. Bayne who came in every morning from over the way to start the Bromes’ day for them, somehow added to his wonder. Everything goes on the same, he thought : everything except me. I’m changed. I’m translated. I!m a new person. But gradually, as he looked round the room taking stock of the situation, the frozen zones of himself, with exquisite pain, began waking to life again.

  It was a narrow, low-ceiled room, one long side of which consisted largely of a series of tall windows, David’s pride and joy. These new windows entirely altered the original character of the room, but though he sometimes regretted the loss of that dark friendly intimacy he thought it no excessive price to pay for the better light, the sense of spaciousness, and the view of garden, fields, and Oxford-shire landscape beyond. The ceiling was interrupted by an age-blackened beam; the treadways of the brick floor had been worn into channels by the feet of vanished generations; and on the side of the room opposite the windows there was a large open hearth in a corner of which, if you chose, you could sit and bake yourself red on winter nights. Here, in the years when this house had been their week-end resort from town, David and Lydia had. spent many a quietly ambrosial evening, reading or talking, discussing the doings of their infant son asleep upstairs, planning improvements in the house, and savouring with contented grins the pleasures of escape from the metropolis. In those days Eleanor had been away at school for an aggregate of nine months out of twelve; and the having to look after the baby, without help either from Eleanor or from the maidservant left behind in town, was part of the novelty and charm of those week-ends.

  The room, though changed both in character and function, had never quite lost for David the quality of those warm domestic occasions; and at the moment, looking on it as though for the last time, he remembered too much. If Lydia today had been separate and distinguishable from the Lydia of so many yesterdays, he could have left her without a pang, so different was she in the mood she had now put on. But the very notion Lydia today was a fiction of the mind : Lydia contained and continued her past no less than he his. Moreover, and this was where the shoe pinched most, the notion of Lydia as quite separate even from himself was a fiction too. By cutting her off from his life he would cut off a part of himself : how great or small a part only time could show. After last night he could no longer doubt that it was a necessary, an inevitable piece of surgery; but he knew even now, being what he was, that its ultimate effect on him was beyond prediction.

  As he hovered near his chair, hesitating to sit down before the others arrived, a glance through the wide windows to his right showed him, in the distance, the very hill round which he had climbed last night, on the way to Bledlow : the sense of trees, and moon-spangled darkness, and wheatfield sloping down to the valley, this was still vivid in him, though their actual experience seemed a lifetime away. At his left, on the same side of the room as the big brick hearth, was a door opening on to a back stairway, down which, he supposed, Lydia would presently come. His nerves gave a twitch when he looked to that moment. A major operation without anæsthetic : that was his job, and there must be no fumbling this time.

  Mrs. Bayne put her head into the room to ask : “ Are you wanting your coffee, sir?”

  “Good morning, Mrs. Bayne. No, thanks. I’ll wait for the others.”

  Mrs. Bayne removed herself, shutting the door behind her. Sounds from above made David prick up his ears. His head began noisily pounding. Cravenly, eager for however short a reprieve, he prayed that Eleanor or the child would come down before Lydia, so that what must be said would have to be postponed till after breakfast. But slow steps began descending the hollow wooden stairway; not Eleanor’s, not Paul’s, and sufficiently unlike Lydia’s. Yet Lydia it was. The door from the stairs opened, and she stepped down into the room and went to her accustomed place at the far end of the table. She moved slowly, looking neither to left nor right; and David’s blood ran cold as he watched her. She sat down opposite him, the length of the table between them. She raised her eyes, giving him a cold level look. Her face was ghastly with an excess of powder, and she was dressed in deepest mourning.

  “Is this necessary, Lydia?”

  Fear tightened about his heart, but he spoke with studied normality.

  She answered, with frigid politeness : “ Is what necessary?”

  “This… garb of yours.”

  “Yes, David,” she said, enunciating with careful distinctness. “ I am in mourning. I have lost my husband.”

  He stood staring at her, divided between anxiety and anger. If this was madness, this carefully contrived melodrama, he would never forgive himself ; and if it was not madness, he would never, he thought, forgive Lydia. Yet even in his anger he remembered that she was not a stranger, nor he her judge : she was Lydia. She was Lydia his wife, and only intolerable misery could have driven her to this.

  While he waited for words he could speak, Paul burst into the room, with Eleanor following close at his heels.

  “Hullo, Dad! Do you know——”

  Paul got no further. Sitting at a table, in place of the mother he knew, was a grey-faced silent woman dressed in a garment of lacy blackness such as might have been made by a beady-eyed, crab-clawed spinner perched snugly in its captive’s lap. He gave one look at his mother, and with a loud scream turned to hide himself in Eleanor’s skirts.

  The woman in black started up out of her chair and made for the door. David, holding it open for her, and passionately wishing her away, saw that her dreadful composure was shaken. She’s at least, he thought, sane enough for that, thank God. But how, he asked himself despairingly, how can I leave a seven-year-old child in the care of such a woman?

  § 5

  Now there’s Mrs. Parzloe to see about. Katie Parzloe who lives at Bell Green. Come along, Mrs. Parzloe, you’ve waited long enough. There she is, a smallish plump person, and leaning over her scullery sink, just as I first saw her. She hears a knock at the door, and, dropping the dishcloth, hurriedly wipes her hands on her apron. There’s something very good in her face, something very good and common. She’s an ordinary, drab, tired, unthinkingly heroic woman ; and the way her face lights up when she hears the knock, or the ring, that’s characteristic of her. She’s at once interested, inquiring, alert, ready to believe that this summons to the door is a portent of something wonderful, some sudden unlooked-for happiness. And even if it’s not that (and caution tells her that of course it isn’t) it’s almost certain to be amusing. Perhaps, though she’s not fool enough to hope this, perhaps it’s Arthur come to pay a call on his wife after five years’ unexplained absence. That would be funny, wouldn’t it? Fun, in the most inclusive sense, is the spice that makes everything worth while for her, in spite of loneliness and the struggle to make ends meet; and she manages to find it in the most unlikely constellations. It wasn’t funny when her husband’s postcard came from America, to say he had left her for good. And yet in a way it was. “ For his good, not mine,” she says, and evidently enjoys her little joke, for she repeats it every time she tells the story.

  She has lived at Bell Green since the day, thirty years ago, when Arthur brought her home as his bride. Seven minutes from her door is a main road with tramlines ; but here in the Green, as they call it among themselves, there is all the warmth, cosiness, and inconvenience of close community. Most of her neighbours still prefer gas to electricity, or they thought so when they heard what the installation was to cost; many of them grow their own vegetables in small back gardens and hang out their week’s washing to catch soots from n
eighbouring chimneys ; and it is inconceivable, unless you’re gentry, that you should get groceries from anyone but Mr. Fletching, or firelighters from any shop but Bunce’s.

  There she is, listening, wondering, wiping her hands on her apron. With a dawning eagerness in her tired eyes she runs off to answer the door. A smallish brownish homely woman, with thin greying hair.

  She opened the door six inches, and there it stuck.

  “Just a minute, miss! The lino’s rucked up!” She fell on her knees, dealt with the lino, and gingerly eased the door past the obstruction. “ It wants a few tacks, the silly thing!”

  On the doorstep stood a nicely got-up young woman, with the beginnings of a polite smile on her face. Was it Mrs. Parzloe? the young woman asked.

  “Yes, that’s me, miss. Ever so sorry to keep you waiting. Won’t you come in?”

  “Thank you. My friend Mrs. Bates said I might call.”

  “That’s right, dear.” Mrs. Parzloe put a hand on the visitor’s arm. “ It isn’t a room, is it?”

  “A room?”

  Mrs. Parzloe smiled : gaily, reassuringly. “ No, that’s all right, dear. I thought it might be a room. So glad it isn’t, because I never take ladies.”

  “Oh, do you mean paying guests, Mrs. Parzloe?”

  Why so nervous? wondered Mrs. Parzloe. And why so refined? You don’t have to pretend with me, my dear. You and me were as like as two straws when I was your age.

  “Come into the parlour and have a sit-down,” she said. “ Lodgers I call them. Paying guests if you like, but what about when they don’t pay?” She laughed joyously, “ Doesn’t do to be too sure, does it, eh?”

  “That’s right enough,” agreed the young woman, taking the seat offered her. “ I do hope I’m not putting you out at all, Mrs. Parzloe?”

  “Never in the world. Enjoy yourself when you’ve got the chance is my motto. So you’re Bertha’s friend. That is nice. What’s your name, dear, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Lily Elver,” said the young woman. “ Do you know Mrs. Bates well then?”

  “Pretty well,” said Mrs. Parzloe, with a smile that was half a wink. “ Twenty-eight years come the sixth of August, not to mention the nine months.”

  “Do you mean… you don’t mean you’re her mother? She never said…”

  “ Ah, there! That’s my tongue again! I know I’m not a credit to her—quite the lady she is,” said Mrs. Parzloe with fond pride.

  “Oh, but——” said Lily in embarrassment, “ I didn’t mean… I mean I’m sure…”

  “Are you, dear?” said Mrs. Parzloe, with genial irony. “ Then you don’t know my Berth. Bless you, I don’t mind. She’s had education, she has, and her husband’s a clurk. Clerk. There I go again—a’n’t I awful! I’m only too pleased she does speak better-off than me. Of course she’s a silly little thing to be so silly. But it’s funny too when you come to think of it. Ashamed of Her Mother—like the penny novelties.”

  “Like what, Mrs. Parzloe?” For the moment Lily was quite at ease, having forgotten her difficult errand.

  “Like the story-books, dear. The penny novelties.”

  “Do you mean penny novelettes?” Lily asked.

  “Perhaps I do, dear. Just like me to get it wrong. You mustn’t take any notice.”

  She laughed with unaffected pleasure, and Lily, joining in the laughter, cried impulsively : “ Oh, you are a scream, Mrs. Parzloe! You are really!”

  “That’s what Arthur used to say,” said Mrs. Parzloe. “ Katie the cure, he used to call me. But that didn’t stop him leaving me on the beach. Soon as Bertha was safe and married, away he goes and you couldn’t see his heels for dust, as the saying is. Now she’s off your hands you can fend for yourself, he said. Well, he didn’t exactly say it, but that’s what he must have been thinking, in that funny old head of his.”

  “Didn’t you mind, Mrs. Parzloe?”

  “No use minding, dearie. Live and let live’s my motto. It wasn’t so warm on winter nights.” She sat quiet for a moment, contemplating her memories. “ But hark at me!” she said, throwing up her hands. “ You haven’t come to listen to my nonsense. This your first sight of the Green, dear?”

  Thus reminded that her visit had a motive, which was as yet undisclosed, Lily Elver felt her newfound confidence begin to ebb.

  She began falteringly : “ Mrs. Bates said——”

  “Just a minute, dear, while I run and pop the kettle on.”

  “It’s ever so kind of you, I’m sure,” said Lily, glad of the respite. And by the time Mrs. Parzloe had returned, her speech was ready. “ Mrs. Bates said——”

  “Call her Bertha, dearie. She’ll never know.”

  “… said why didn’t I come to see you, she said. Said you were a sort of relation of hers, and ...”

  “What did I tell you?” said Mrs. Parzloe, with another peal of laughter. “ She’s a caution, that girl! She’ll be the death of me, laughing. Go on, dear.”

  “An old friend, she said, and ever so kind. And she said to ask your advice.”

  “Do remind me to show you the tortoise before you go,” said Mrs. Parzloe. “ Such a little ducky he is. What about, dearie? Advice, I mean.”

  “Well, you see, Mrs. Parzloe, I’m in a bit of trouble.”

  “Are you, dear?” There was genuine concern in her voice. “ What sort of trouble?” She gazed in question for an instant; then comprehension dawned. “ Oh, you mean a bit of trouble. That is a pity, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not very… convenient,” said Lily.

  “I should never have known,” said Mrs. Parzloe, with an appraising glance. “ And I’ve done a bit of maternity in my day. When’s your time, dear?”

  “P’raps there won’t be a time,” said Lily evasively. “ It’d be the ruin of me, Mrs. Parzloe,” she continued, with sudden vehemence. “ I just shan’t care what happens if that happens, I tell you straight. There’s my job and everything, let alone character. Ever such a nice post I’ve got. What chance has a girl like me, with a baby to trail round. It isn’t fair.”

  “Won’t he marry you, dear?” In the silence that followed this question, Mrs. Parzloe gave her guest a shrewd look. “ But perhaps he can’t manage with two wives?”

  “There’s nothing of that about it, Mrs. Parzloe,” said Lily, primly.

  “No, dear. You’re not that sort of girl. Don’t think I’m a Mrs. Nosey Parker, but there’s no denying the best way with a bit of trouble is to marry its dad and have done. Don’t you think so, dear? But of course,” she conceded, “ only if the marriage would answer.”

  “It won’t answer, Mrs. Parzloe, because it won’t happen.” Lily, red with nervous defiance of no one in particular, was on the point of tears. “ It’s no good,” she said. “ I’ve got to get someone to help me. I suppose ... I suppose you couldn’t help me, could you, Mrs. Parzloe? I’d be ever so grateful.”

  “Me, dear?”

  “Seeing you’ve been a nurse, like you said. I get quite good money, you know. I’d expect to pay, same as if you were a doctor?”

  “ Me?” cried Mrs. Parzloe again. “ I wouldn’t do it for a thousand pounds! Nor wouldn’t a doctor either, except he was a rascal. But that’s not saying,” she gently added, with a hand on the girl’s arm, “ that I wouldn’t do it for nothing, dearie, once I felt it was the right thing.”

  “Would you really?” Lily uttered a deep sigh and suddenly burst into tears. Crying quietly in Mrs. Parzloe’s embrace she said with a squeak : “ I’ve been ever so frightened, Mrs. Parzloe.”

  “I know. It takes you that way sometimes,” said Mrs. Parzloe. “ Let’s go into the garden and see if we can find the tortoise. Then we’ll have a nice cup of tea and you shall tell me all about it, see? Found your hanky, dear? That’s right.”

  Smiling now, though with an occasional sniff, Lily followed her hostess through the kitchen, and stood with her in the back doorway, peering out at the small patch of garden. There was no tortoise in s
ight.

  “Hiding somewhere, you may depend,” said Mrs. Parzloe fondly. “ He’s up to any amount of mischief, you know—well, for a tortoise, I mean,” she said, laughing at herself, and giving Lily a humorous nudge. “ Yes, he can be ever so naughty. The other day, what do you think? He came walking up the garden path to me with a little blue flower in his mouth.” In a lowered voice, almost a whisper, she added quickly, confidentially : “ But I didn’t say anything.”

  § 6

  Mrs. Parzloe’S Bertha, now the property of an earnest honest middle-aged warehouse clerk named Bates, lived at no great distance from Lily Elver’s lodging; within a stone’s throw of the Paragon Dance Hall, where she and Lily had first made each other’s acquaintance ; and in the same postal district as Vines, the newsagent and stationer. She had seen Bert Vines several times across the counter of his father’s shop, but had never expected to see him on her own doorstep. She greeted the sight with a stare of inquiry.

  “Mrs. Bates?” said Bert.

  “Yes,” she admitted, “ it is Mrs. Bates.”

  By speaking of herself as an impersonal object she felt that she kept the young man at his proper distance. You couldn’t be too careful, Harold said.

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Bates, but might I have a word with Mr. Bates? Vines, the name is.”

  “ Not Saturday afternoon,” said Bertha.

  “Mr. Bates is out?”

  “That’s what I said. He goes out with his Rambling Club every first Saturday.”