“Do stop crying, Annie. It’s quite all right. It’s bad for you to cry.” She shook her, repeating sharply “Stop crying”—frightened of her own pain—of the slipping of sanity.
The kitten vibrated, swelled over its saucer at their feet.
“I’ve felt so sadly. … I haven’t been able to take any pleasure in my cooking. The sickness is something shocking.”
“I know.”
It was all she could remember of child-bearing.
“Still, that’s gone off now.” She wiped her eyes on her apron. “I’m quite fit for my work, madam.”
“You’re not—thinking of getting married?” Grace asked shyly.
“No, madam.” Her sobs burst out afresh. “To tell you the truth, madam, he’s a married man. I knew it all along. He didn’t deceive me.”
“I see.”
But she felt quite startled, she told herself. Annie’s code was more lax than she had imagined.
“He’s a traveller, madam, with a van. His home’s in London. Somehow it didn’t seem like he was a married man—being always on the move. … I shall never see him again.”
“Does he know?”
“No. I never told him. I didn’t want to put him to any inconvenience, or cause any trouble, not if I could manage by myself. I’d rather not give you his name.” She looked anxious and obstinate for a moment, so that Grace realized she was expected to insist on this revelation. “He’s only young. And got two children to keep. … Last time he came, I went straight to the door, and ‘Hullo, it’s you,’ I said, like that. ‘Don’t you come bothering me any more. I’m fed up.’ He was that upset … wanted to know what he’d done. Poor Arthur.” She cried a little, but not bitterly. The situation, though painful, had obviously not been without a saving dramatic grace.
“I suppose you loved him.” (Another improper remark, she thought. Annie would consider her thoroughly immoral.)
“Well, he was very nice, madam. If he hadn’t been I shouldn’t have let it happen.” She added delicately: “Of course, it was an oversight that caused this. Somehow, not being as young as I was, I never thought it would occur.”
Annie, with her fund of physical wisdom, was not the one, of course, to let her own ripeness wither un-plucked: to deny the needs of her body in the pagan amplitude of its middle years. Love was a term foreign to her vocabulary—an emotion not exploited in her world. He was young, he was nice. They had suited each other. Rather than harm him, she had let him go—did not miss him much. It seemed so simple and right: right, too, that this symbol of matronly qualities should be in truth with child. Annie was a triumph for unchastity.
“We must think about a hospital for you later, Annie. I’ll find out—”
“Oh, thank you, madam. I haven’t slept for weeks thinking whatever should I do. It’s the baby that worries me. Who ever would take it for me? …” She repeated: “I must earn. I haven’t a home.”
She hid her face in her apron—straining her ear for the words that would not—might—must come.
“Well, you can have the baby here. … As long as it never cries.”
“Yes, madam.” Annie saw the joke. She beamed, though faintly. “Oh, madam, you shall never regret this—never. You’ll never notice there’s anything funny in the house. I swear I’ll give you every satisfaction. …”
She had planned it all—where he’d sleep, how she’d fit in his feeds and all. Many a time since the final loss of hope in the last pill and dose, she had rehearsed the scheme, when thoughts of the river, the gas-oven, the workhouse had stared at her so uncompromisingly that she must cheat herself with an improbable happy ending. Now it had come.
But Mrs. Fairfax was not one who liked a lot of talk. Deeds, not words, should prove her gratitude. All the same, she would just like to say …
“All the same, madam,” she said, “I’ve often thought I’d like a nice chubby little boy.”
“Yes, Annie.” She felt that, whatever the sex, the chubbiness was certain.
“People are very narrow-minded, aren’t they?” she ventured, with a deprecating sigh.
“Yes, very.”
Annie, free now to think of other people’s troubles, looked with her usual solicitude at Mrs. Fairfax. That tear-stained face, pale, apathetic, worn, those sunken eyes. … Ah, poor soul! … She guessed, well enough, what ailed poor Mrs. Fairfax; how salt, how barren were the tears of her life. Yes, it was for herself she wept. Mr. Fairfax was a good-hearted gentleman, he meant well; but no use to her, not as a man, as you might say. What she needed was the same as what every woman needed. She’d seen it coming on bad of late. She had put two and two together. … But he’d gone away now, left the town for good. Listening—only for a very few minutes—at the keyhole, she’d heard him say so.
What was the use of Mrs. Fairfax being so broad-minded?
“Well, then the apple pudding, Annie.”
“Very good, madam. I’ll put the rind of a lemon in: it takes off the tartness and makes a lovely flavour.”
And as Grace left the kitchen she heard her addressing the kitten:
“Here’s another drop, then. Have a nice blowout and a good sleep afterwards. I knew you was lucky, you little black love.”
“Good afternoon, then,” said Norah at the door of the cottage, smiling cheerfully and telling herself it was no good pretending this was an agreeable old woman. “Now let’s see who’s next on my list.” She consulted a notebook. “Number 15. Miss Roberts. That’s your next-door neighbour, isn’t it?”
A sudden stiffness shot into the hitherto unresponsive, collapsed face of the old woman. A spark animated her eye.
“If you take my advice, you won’t go there.”
The smile faded from Norah’s lips.
“Why not?” she said, quite coldly, she thought, for her.
“I’m saying nothing.” Arms folded, head shaking with senile emotion, she looked at Norah. Her eye was stony, lidless, unwinking as a reptile’s. “We’re all respectable people in this street. We don’t have no dealings with Pansy Roberts. Good afternoon.”
She banged her door.
“You’re a nice one,” murmured Norah.
She stood still a moment, discouraged. Should she give up and go home? … and write to the bishop’s wife to-morrow, resigning once for all from the committee? Social work was no use at all. Yet, instead of giving it up, one let oneself be flattered and bullied into doing more and more of it every year. And all the time there was a part of her that hated and disapproved of every committee and board and institution, social or religious, ever founded. Gerald would not believe her; but it was so. It was the people, she told herself, that made one go on: the fascinating human contact, the discovery here and there of a revivifying drop in the unpalatable ocean. But her reception in this new district, whose housing and health conditions she had undertaken to help investigate, had not encouraged her to believe in her success as an apostle of social welfare. And she thought of the last house, where a woman had shouted to her from an upper window that she was behindhand with her washing and could not see her; and the one before where the mistress of the house, in gaping petticoat and bodice, and a filthy shawl wrapped round her head, had informed her with tipsy tears that she was far from well and must be permitted to return unvisited to the sofa; and the first house of all, where, besides a woman and some children, several men, in rags, long workless, sat all together by one relic of a fire, stared at her dumbly out of starved eyes in animal faces; and her set speech of a Visitor had died on her lips; and she had given them money to buy food (which was against the rules and precepts of the society) and gone quickly away.
Yes, she thought, she could report want and sickness, drink and defective sanitation, bad manners, ignorance, malice, and uncharitableness … the way of the world, in fact. And now for another sinner, to season the slice of life; and if she fail
ed here to make herself acceptable, not as a Worker but as a person, she would resign to-morrow and leave this inquisition to spirits more combative for good, to skins made tougher by missionary fervour.
She went up to the door of Number 15 and knocked, reluctantly. After a time she observed a familiar agitation in the thick lace curtains of the front room. Somebody was taking a good look at her. A long pause; then the door was grudgingly opened, and the face of a girl peered out at her; a face unreal in its delicacy, its glow, its look of wasting.
“Good afternoon. Are you Miss Roberts?”
The face did not return her smile. It gazed; then as if assailed by a dreadful conjecture, it froze. A voice said:
“Did you want anything?”
“Only to—to pay you a little call—if you’re not busy.”
“I’m not very busy, but I’m not at all well—I wasn’t expecting callers. …” Her pale blue gaze, bright with fever and suspicion, explored Norah minutely.
“I’m so sorry. I’ll go away.”
The mask confronting her made her feel guilty, helpless.
“One of these church-workers, are you?” remarked the voice from an infinitely remote watch-tower.
(For she’d heard of them coming poking, prying—rescuing, they called it. You had to be careful, with Enemies everywhere.)
“No, no!” cried Norah. “Nothing to do with any church.”
“Oh, I see. I thought I’d just inquire … not being a church-goer myself—not regular, that is … on account of my health.”
She drew a black velvet jacket closer over her small chest. She was charmingly dressed, Norah noticed, in an unsuitable little frock of black crêpe-de-chine with white lace collar and cuffs, stockings of finest silk and high-heeled patent leather slippers: the costume of a hostess at an urban “At Home.” How could one address such a creature on the subject of drains?
“I only wanted to ask if—if there’s anything I can do for you. You know, we visit, some of us … try to help … But—”
Faced with her last, her worst failure, she turned to go. One might as well offer to help a bird, explain one’s object to a squirrel. She had the desperate recoiling dignity of an animal; the hauntingly lonely look of a being irreconcilably divided from oneself by difference of species.
“I see,” said the voice again. “Well, I don’t think there’s anything I want, thank you. I can manage for myself. If you’ll excuse me … this draught … I’m quite an invalid.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Norah, opening her umbrella, “Please take care of yourself. Nobody so young and pretty has any business to be an invalid.”
The face thawed all at once, a mournful smile lifted the lips.
“It’s my lungs,” she said. “Dear me, the rain! Won’t you come in till it stops?”
She ushered Norah into the front parlour. A smell of room, thick, unventilated, filled the nostrils; green plush, antimacassars, photographs, an aspidistra, made suitable display in the meagre space; a fan of pleated white paper concealed and adorned the empty grate.
“Please take a chair,” she said. “You’ll excuse the fire not being lit. It’s a trifle chilly. … As a matter of fact,” she conceded lightly—for we ladies, said the smile, all have our whims—“I was sitting in the kitchen this afternoon.”
“Oh, let’s sit in the kitchen. I always think it’s far the cosiest room,” said Norah, corroborating, suggesting comfortably that all ladies have this whim in common.
She opened another door and called out gently, but authoritatively:
“Will, put your coat and scarf on, dear, and take a turn. Sister has a visitor.”
It sounded as if she were speaking to a child. But a man, indistinct in the obscurity of the tiny room, rose from an armchair and shambled out silently by a back entrance.
“It’s my brother,” remarked Pansy, setting another chair by the stove. “He’s just a trifle backward, but he means well. He’s very good to me. He looks after me when I have a bad turn. But it upsets him, poor fellow, to see the blood. Of course, he remembers mother. She died of it, you know.”
“The blood?” inquired Norah, aghast.
“Oh, yes,” said the voice, primly. “I’ve been spitting blood off and on this autumn. I’ve been obliged to give up my work, of course. I’m a coiffoose and manicurist.” She tossed her fly-away top-heavy cloud of ash-blond hair, glanced at her polished nails. She said:
“The doctor thinks I’ll never get well again.” And she continued to describe the variations in her temperature, her night sweats, her cough; mentioning each fatal symptom with decorous restraint, with a little shrug; with that delicate, precise degree of under-emphasis that is the difficult, the supreme achievement of the professional actress.
They parted an hour later.
Pansy stood at the door watching her walk away. “Yes,” she told herself, “I like your style.” Good tweeds but shabby, good low-heeled shoes but old. Powder but no lipstick; just the gold band upon the wedding finger—no other jewellery. Nice teeth, pleasant smile, the right sort of voice. His sort of voice. … Funny thing, to have got it into one’s head all of a sudden as she sat there that she knew him. Like telepathy, something had seemed to say: “She’s got him in her mind.”… More like sick fancies. … But you could almost see her entertaining him to dinner, calling him Hugh, telling him to come again soon. …
Anyway, it would be quite a pleasure to have somebody like her coming to pay a visit now and then. The interest she’d taken! … but not a prying sort of interest. And to think how nearly she’d had the door shut in her face! It couldn’t be helped. One had to think of one’s self-respect. “You’re much too pretty to be ill,” she said. She was quite upset to find how bad it was—wanted to make inquiries from the doctor. She must be prevented somehow from doing that. … It wasn’t quite true, of course, not strictly, about the doctor. “Not serious yet,” he’d said, “but it’s the first warning.” He’d told her to report herself at the clinic. A few months in the sanatorium would cure her, so he said. She knew better. Why, she’d got ever so much worse in the last week. She was dying. She’d die like Mother in a fit of coughing—blood everywhere. Then whatever would Will do? …
No; of course, she’d be all right for years yet. She must look after herself. She’d soon be back at work … get a new hat and coat…go down to the Palace one evening … see him coming in to look for her, to take her out to dinner.
No, he would never come. Something told her she would never set eyes on him again.
So die. … But not alone, oh, God, not alone! … She’d be there now to look after her at the last. I’ve just come from the death-bed of my dear little friend Pansy. … Good God, not little Pansy?… Yes; her last words were a message for you. … Then he’d remember; then he’d be sorry … come and kneel beside her, lay flowers in her cold hands, where she lay dead. …
“Pansy!”
There was Will, back from his walk.
“Pansy!”
He was shouting up the stairs … so hoarse and silly-sounding—panicky.
“Here’s sister, Will.”
She took a last look up the dim and squally street.
Out of sight.
Come again soon, as you promised. Come again.
She shut the door.
Norah hurried through the streets.
Another storm was piling in the tormented west, spreading across the sky. The gale was growing wilder. It would howl now all night through. She told herself it would mean a midnight visit from David, creeping from his bed to stand beside hers and whisper that he thought he had a little pain. He was frightened of the sound of a storm: expected, in spite of Robin’s scorn, and all she could do to reassure him, earthquakes, tidal waves, the end of the world. She must leave a night-light burning for him.
Well, the afternoon had not been altoget
her wasted after all. That little creature rose before her eyes, standing at the door of her cottage looking after her attentively from its mournful animal remoteness. What was the clue to such unreality? “I cough blood,” she’d said, as one might say one felt rheumatic in wet weather. “I wasn’t at all surprised to see the blood,” she’d said. “I was expecting it, really.”
Was it that artifice—dramatization—was the essence of her existence … her way of escape from reality, as the psycho-analysts would say? Did she practise an absolute self-deception—seeing herself, in one perpetual day-dream, as the heroine of a series of interesting and pathetic situations?
Or was it the pathological hopefulness of the consumptive which made it so impossible to rouse her to a sense of her own danger? … Or what?
Never did anybody so disguise herself, so reveal herself in a variety of obvious but impenetrable shams.
But, what about her profession? thought Norah, waiting for her tram at the street-corner. Would one have guessed, without the evil hint? Was it in her eyes, with their fanatical stare and lightness?—in something dreadfully discreet, avid and secret about her whole expression? Or was that simply imagination?
Would any man recognize her at once for what she was?—take her—describe her afterwards to his friends? For they did tell each other (so Jimmy had said) about their casual experiences, though never about their wives. … She felt a kind of pressure in the brain, sweeping her away on a tide of images and conjectures: the old abscess of sex throbbed again, still festering, never properly healed. It was hard still to take the physical importance, the emotional unimportance, for granted. A nice boy like Hugh, for instance—how would he treat a prostitute? He had such charm, such good manners; answered in every particular to the prescription for a clean type of young Englishman. Candour and kindness shone out of his blue eye; no sensuality was apparent in his features. But would he also … without a qualm of conscience before or afterwards? Surely, such serenity as his, such healthy roundedness of character, must come partly from having got his sex-life regulated to his thorough satisfaction. She wished she could have asked him about ideals, and sowing wild oats; what point of view he’d recommend for the boys. Really, it was the first, the most important and interesting thing to know about any one; though Gerald would not agree. He thought, or pretended to think, one wanted to know what sort of books people read.
A Note in Music Page 19