Facade (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  But the room didn’t make Alice laugh. It was square, with windows that reached to the ground, and looked out reposefully into the heart of a cluster of elm trees which grew but a few feet from the house itself. There was a blue carpet and the bed was draped to match, so that it reminded Alice of the lady chapel in Fincham church. The bulky washstand bulged out from the wall with a preponderance of marble slab and over-patterned blue china. The dressing-table was like a bow-legged old woman who has run to fat and sits with a capacious lap. On it lay ivory brushes. But it was the pictures that Milly had referred to. They were good copies of van Gogh, of Franz Hals in rich dark colours, and of Rembrandt. They were very beautiful. There was a view of the Old Rhine flowing peacefully before the mill at Leyden, with a stumpy little tree in the foreground, that even Alice could see was alluring.

  ‘Oh, but they’re ever so nice,’ she said.

  Milly expressed indifference; she always thought that Mr. Aubrey was a bit soft. ‘A lot of tommy-rot, it makes me scream,’ she said, and tossed her over-curled head.

  Milly had to answer the drawing-room bell, and making a little grimace to herself that showed all the decayed teeth, tipputed down the stairs. Alice was left to drape the hot-water can in the small monogrammed towel, and go on to the landing again, closing the door behind her.

  It was a circular landing, round a central stairway which climbed upwards in leisurely gracious steps, with an iron balustrade beautifully patterned, and, as Milly had confided in Alice, ‘a beast to dust’. The whole place was lit by a glass dome roof ‒ through which the evening light fell pleasantly. There was a surround of doors, and now Alice could not remember which was the one that would lead her to the back stairway. Naturally the front was forbidden to the domestic staff, and she had been warned of it. In perplexed horror she stood there staring about her. To add to the trouble, she saw a young man slowly mounting the stairs, tall and slight, almost angular, with fair hair that lay flatly against his head. His skin was darker than is usual for a fair man, which only emphasized the vigorous blue of his eyes, and he walked with a lope, swinging forward. Ignoring the iron balustrade, both hands were thrust into his trousers pockets and the trousers gave the impression of looseness, and too-bigness, yet were not long enough to hide the largeness of his feet. As he looked up, he saw little Alice standing there in her alpaca frock with the new cap and the patched apron.

  He smiled. ‘You’re fresh here?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Aubrey Lester was an understanding man; shy himself, he was very kind and solicitous for others who might suffer from the same trouble. He gathered that something was amiss.

  ‘What’s happened? Have you lost something?’

  ‘Yes, sir. My way, sir. I was looking for the back stairs.’

  She knew, even as he laughed, that he did not resent her telling him, and he opened one of the doors, the one that did not lead to an Aladdin’s cave. Beyond lay the poorer landing, with its marked difference of stamped-out linoleum, and general inferiority, and the faint scent of curry rising from the kitchen to mingle with that of Milly’s white-rose hair oil. And with the scent came the tinkle of pot and pan as handled far below by Mrs. Parkin now fully occupied with the dinner.

  ‘Oh, thank you very much, sir,’ said Alice, and feeling ashamed at her stupidity, she passed through the door and shut out the glimpse of Aubrey on his own landing.

  Two

  Maud Lester had married when she was thirty. In the ’eighties, girls married to make sure of it, in their teens, but Maud, having always desired to make a brilliant match, wasted her time on a philandering young baronet who proved not to be matrimonially intentioned when it came to the long run.

  The long run was too long, so that later on Maud had had to grab at Henry Lester because he represented her last chance, and she knew it. Henry was rich though not well bred, and in ordinary circumstances Maud’s family would have looked askance at his farming, even though it was in the past tense, and since he had come into a big legacy he had given it up to take on Thornhill and the entourage of the landed gentry.

  Henry was astute; he knew that he was Maud’s last chance, because he could price anything and he appreciated his own value. He wanted social stability, she wanted marriage; it was a fair exchange, even though love did not come into it. It surprised them both when the boy Aubrey was born.

  Henry was satisfied with a son. You could, he averred, always rely on a well-bred mare to do the right thing, and he laid plans for his boy’s future. He himself was a big coarse man, believing in the rod, and vexed when early on his son showed signs of inherent delicacy and had to be wet-nursed through a difficult infancy and finally launched into a prep for delicate boys. Aubrey made up mentally for that which he lacked physically. Henry Lester had never been a book-worm, and did not understand a scholar, though he was proud that the child should be head of his form, but annoyed that he got on badly with his fellows, not having the stamina to stand up for himself.

  Maud and her husband drifted apart, it was only to be expected. He was a bully, she a snob, and she had the additional vice of nagging. Both were masterful, and although she could never manage Henry she did not give up the idea. Their married life was fretted with discord, frayed with argument, and although Henry got his own way he despised the female bickering that prevailed.

  Aubrey was twelve years old when he learnt the first big lesson of his life. Afraid of other people, and in particular his own parents, he was a shy, aesthetic child, at heart half faun and sensitive to the ill-feeling that went on in his home. Beauty satisfied a crude hunger in his heart. The written word could exalt him, even at that age, whilst lovely music enchanted him, but he lived in an era when the aesthetic mood was unfashionable. The blustering qualities were demanded, and the languorous mode of the ‘naughty ’nineties’ had given way to the ‘jolly good chaps’ of the early part of the twentieth century.

  He had to find an excuse for his shrinking from games, jeered at by his fellows, and he began to play a part. He found that the world could not tell the difference between reality and mummery, for the world sees only the facade. He said that it was his lack of robustness that debarred him from the games he would have loved to join, and it was believed. Now he found that he had but to put a new frontage before his easily-wounded tenderer emotions, curtain the windows and close the door. In this way he was able to develop more and more his scholarly instincts, living unhurt in a world of his own, a world of the sixteenth century, where Sir Francis Bacon, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson and Will Shakespeare were his companions.

  Dreaming on naught but idle poetry,

  That fruitless but unprofitable art,

  Good unto none; but least to the professors.

  But to Aubrey Lester there was intoxication in poetry, the opiate for his senses which only found reality in dreams.

  In this wise he missed the warm joys of spring which should come so gladly to all young men; his salad days were not dewy, only to himself did he ever dare to admit that they alarmed him. He was afraid of himself. An awkward gaucherie held him back from women (unless they were in his mother’s category); he had a stupid head that turned giddy in drink, cutting him off from the more usual adventures. Because of these disadvantages he was for ever analytically displeased with his companions, censoring and despising them because he himself could not do as Leacock had it,

  By conscientious smoking and drinking

  They had kept themselves from the horror of thinking.

  Aubrey’s fault was that he thought too much and was secretly afraid of the searching nature of those thoughts. He was always trying to conceal the fact that he was not the man that he would have liked to be. The facade was thin.

  It was a surprise to see Alice on the landing; usually his mother employed only charmless maids, having a suspicion that the other type might entertain her husband too well; in fact the family had been astonished how she had ever come to engage even Milly. With Mrs. Parkin
in charge of the kitchen ‒ a veritable dragon whom even St. George would have done well to avoid ‒ the other two maids could only be selected from supervised homes, and never for their looks. What Aubrey did not know was that Alice had looked very plain when she had been engaged. She had come over for the interview in her best clothes, and the borrowings from other members of her family, her hair had been scraped up, and her face washed until it glazed like calendered chintz. In her uniform she looked quite different.

  Aubrey stared at the door through which she had disappeared, wondering how anything so inviting had ever got inside the place. As he tidied himself, he thought with pleasure of her youthful helplessness as she had stood there searching for the right door to take her back the way she had come. This was the first time that allure had really penetrated, and perhaps charm combined with contemporary youth was what he had missed most. The girl was quite unaware of her appeal, of her warm, round little throat and the tendrils of hair above her shy eyes, and he had melted towards her.

  He went downstairs.

  Milly was beating the gong as his mother came out of the morning-room, shutting the door on the green walls and gazebo window that looked out to the lawns and the dark wallflowers that smelt so sweet. The family went into the dining-room, fed by a serving hatch. Milly stood primly at the serving hatch, a little behind her the new girl hesitated, confused and inclined to go rather pink. Mrs. Lester had already begun her running commentary, believing that much could make up for poorness of matter.

  She dabbled in matters parochial, which was all the vivid entertainment that life could offer her. Occupying herself in good works, she talked about them gaily with a pleased eye on the boredom that they afforded her husband. Maud had an active mind that she had to occupy, and she was glad when her husband chafed against her chatter, but irritated that he always waited, hoping for the chance to probe between the cracks in her armour of virtue. This had always been.

  Aubrey watched them furtively. The constant bickering was inescapable at Thornhill, and although they never actually quarrelled before the servants, which would undoubtedly have been bad form, they fenced dexterously for position.

  Aubrey wondered if the new girl would notice what was going on, and looked at her as she stood behind Milly, a smug little beast who was always showing off. Alice had fairish hair curling in a leisurely way, and her grey-blue eyes were framed by pale yellow lashes like flower stamens. Later, when her colour hardened, and her contours thickened, she would not even be pretty, but today she looked like a country flower, pink and white in a garden setting. She was clumsy and Milly was over-quick to correct her, bustling her about and enjoying every moment of her confusion. Aubrey could sense that the new girl already admired Milly, probably thinking her an admirable person to copy, which, thought he, God forbid! He disliked Milly with her decayed teeth and that dreadful rancid hair oil against her foxy little face, but he dare not show it. His mother had short shrift with other people’s likes and dislikes.

  His parents were distressingly polite to veil their nastier innuendoes, and Aubrey felt his hand going clammy with shame for them. All the time he looked at Alice, and knew that he liked looking at her, for she gave him the most comfortable feeling of satisfaction. He was so used to drawing a curtain across his heart, and patterning it with the design most likely to suit the people on the other side, that he was practically a stranger to himself. But not so with Alice. He could be natural with Alice.

  He ate the bread and cheese that finished the meal and was always alluded to with disgust by his mother, who considered it to be vulgar and was annoyed that his father insisted on it. Then he watched Milly being condescending, and sending Alice on innumerable small journeys. Later when he and his mother were alone in the drawing-room, Alice brought in the sugar and cream on a silver salver, following Milly, who bore the big silver coffee tray which was spread with the Worcester cups and the big coffee-pot.

  He could not stop thinking about Alice, even though his mother was talking to him. He had never felt quite like this before.

  ‘It’s no use, because your father and I will never see the same way. Thank God I was not born plebeian, and his world is not my world. A big cup for him, why, it’s almost ludicrous! I sometimes wonder what outsiders think of all this bourgeois business.’

  ‘If he likes it …’

  ‘Oh, if he likes it, I suppose you’ll maintain that there is no accounting for taste, but the difficulty is what will other people think?’

  Maud’s life was influenced by what people would think, not of herself but of her entourage. The private opinion of Mr. Everyman and his wife influenced Maud in every way; the plaudits or censures of the unseen were the prim lines hedging her life, ordering her personality and governing her actions.

  ‘I know,’ said Aubrey, and all the time he was looking at Alice.

  ‘It’s so trying.’ Maud helped herself liberally to cream, never looking at the new maid and dismissing both girls peremptorily. Then she sat stirring the cup, and said, ‘What coarse hands that girl has! It comes of being in poor service, I suppose. That farm and then with the Bensons at Fincham rectory. I do think that farming is so lowering. Odious!’ She would never miss the chance to let fly a barb at her husband and always found her mark, never aware that it revealed her own Achilles heel.

  ‘Has she coarse hands? I hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘Like raw steak. I’d give a lot to see the good old-fashioned maid again, but nowadays something has happened to the lower classes, they’re all alike and dreadful.’

  ‘I thought she was doing rather well.’

  Maud looked up at the tone that he had used. ‘Aubrey, you’re not being silly about her?’

  ‘Silly about her? Good heavens, no, Mother! Lord, I’ve something better to do than make sheep’s eyes at the servants.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. Lots of young men of your age have silly fits with the maids.’

  ‘Then they must be different from me,’ he said, and got up with the feeling that he had been sitting on prickles. ‘It’s a lovely evening, and I’m going out.’

  ‘Into the village?’

  ‘Yes, into the village.’

  At all times a lonely young man, tonight Aubrey felt that it was intensified. In the lanes the elms were stirring together with the cow parsley rising in a froth of cream lace under them. He saw a young ploughman coming striding across the churchyard, which served as a short cut for the living through avenues of the dead. Aubrey recognized George Herrick. George could not be much more than twenty-one, born of the soil, sturdily built, his mouth pursed into a whistle.

  ‘Good night, George.’

  ‘Good night, sir.’

  Aubrey skirted the green and as he did so he saw Mr. Biddlecombe, the landlord of the Hayworth Arms, standing in the doorway, arms akimbo, his enormous stomach protruding and emphasized by a white calico apron.

  ‘How are you this evening, Mr. Biddlecombe?’ he asked. That was a mistake.

  Until last autumn Mr. Biddlecombe had always replied ‘I’m fine! I’m in the pink!’ and winking knowingly had slapped his fat paunch. But last autumn Mr. Biddlecombe had come over poorly, so poorly in fact that ultimately he had been sent to the hospital where, after exciting X-rays, the powers-that-be had operated on Mr. Biddlecombe’s stomach and had removed this and that out of it. Mr. Biddlecombe was then overcome with fearful pride in the complexity of the operation, and the added grandeur of having been unable to keep anything down for ten whole days. Also, when he returned to the Hayworth Arms, he did not feel to be the new man that the doctor had prophesied; he felt a very old man indeed, and increasingly so as time went on. Adhesions distressed him. He was for ever fretted by trivial pains which the doctor ignored but which now absorbed the patient’s little world, so that it was impossible to recognize the old jolly Mr. Biddlecombe from the new morbid Mr. Biddlecombe, who could never disengage himself from his stomach trouble.

  Off he started on a long story
about what the changeable weather did to his inside. It mattered not that the bar was brimming with noisy people, and that his overworked wife was cursing under her breath at the way in which her husband would go on talking about his infernal illness. Nothing would stop him.

  The beauty of the late spring evening was full and flowering and much too sweet to be wasted on a conversation against which Aubrey’s sensitive nature rebelled. ‘I’ve got to get away,’ he said almost rudely, and hurried on before Mr. Biddlecombe could expostulate.

  He knew that the landlord looked after him with injured disapproval, but Aubrey couldn’t help that. He went down the lane, past the bend where it curled round the rickyard of Jameson’s farm, and there he saw the two sons of the house with an old gun prowling about the ricks looking for rats. Both the Jamesons were ordinary, healthy young men, liking the usual pleasures of ordinary, healthy young men, those same pleasures that worried Aubrey. He hated shooting rats because, although he disliked rats, he disliked death much more, and could see no reason to bring it about so messily. It repelled him. If the Jamesons were not shooting they were usually swilling at the Hayworth Arms, or out with one of the village wenches in some fecund ditch. Aubrey tried to escape them but they had already seen him, and Ernest, the younger of the two, let off the shotgun, aiming high over Aubrey’s head but alarming him more than he cared to admit.

  ‘Hi there, ’arf a mo’,’ called Ernest, busily reloading that damnable gun of his. Aubrey wished that he did not feel so sick.

  ‘You’ve got a new maid, and she’s a looker,’ challenged Dick.

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘We tracked her to Fincham rectory six months back, but the old parson was too fly for us. But of course you never look at girls.’

  The trouble was that he had looked at Alice and was ashamed of it. ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘Supposing you take us home with you?’

  ‘Whatever for?’