by Ursula Bloom
‘What about money?’
‘What an idea! If you pay anything it merely shows that you admit a liability. George will see after her. I daresay George doesn’t even realize that he mightn’t be to blame, you know what that sort of young man is.’
‘Mother!’ He was profoundly shocked that she could think so hardly. ‘You can’t possibly believe that?’
‘I don’t wish to discuss it. You don’t realize how difficult it has all been for me. I think it would be very much wiser if you went away for Christmas, Switzerland or somewhere, instead of coming back here. Everybody may be talking for a bit, villagers are like that. Give it time, and the thing’ll die down. Yes, I do think you ought to go away.’
‘Look here, Mother, if you don’t mind my saying so, I’d much rather live my own life.’
‘That’s what you’ve been doing, I imagine, and with the most unfortunate consequence. Not only for yourself, but for us all. If your father knew, he’d be horrified. For the time being I think you would do far better to leave this to me.’
He said, ‘All right.’
When he thought about it he was so much in the wrong already that he was not in a position to argue.
‘That’s wise of you. You owe me a big debt, Aubrey. Few mothers would have done so much.’
‘I know, and I’m grateful.’
Facade again, for in his heart he wasn’t grateful; he resented her hardness of heart, her coldness, and the fact that she could handle the situation in this way. Yet what else could be done? She was right when she said that he couldn’t marry Alice.
He went off to his own room with the van Gogh sunflowers, and the mill at Leyden with the Old Rhine flowing past it. He felt despairing and so ashamed of himself that he could have wept. It was not that he was ashamed of the emotion that had induced this, but of the fact that he had no courage. He had not been able to defend the girl, he had not been able to silence his mother. He had not known what to do.
To comfort himself, he took down one of his favourite books of Sir Francis Bacon, but unhappily opened it upon the phrase:
What is more heavy than evil fame deserved? Or, likewise, who can see worse days than he that yet living doth follow at the funerals of his own reputation?
A new housemaid appeared at Thornhill. She was an intolerably plain girl with adenoids that prevented her from closing her mouth properly.
Milly could not bear her and referred to her as ‘that Ethel!’
The village enjoyed itself thoroughly over the scandal, all the more delectable in that until now the Herricks had been notoriously respectable. However, with the wedding over, and the girl established in the home of her queer-looking mother-in-law, the first sharpness of local tongues dulled.
Although he had not said so at the time, Aubrey had been thankful for the suggestion that he should spend Christmas away in Switzerland. As things were he hated going about the village, feeling that he was a traitor, and wondering how much, under all the surface chatter, was guessed. He had the feeling that Mr. Biddlecombe knew by the way that he looked at him. A guilty conscience makes cowards of all men. The young Jamesons openly jeered, and all the time he had to continue going about as if nothing were amiss, in case he should arouse suspicions the more.
He was desperately unhappy. He wished now that he had had the stamina to act differently, yet what could he have done? Obviously he could not marry Alice; he ought to have got her away, right out of the locality, that would have been the proper line to take; instead he had allowed his mother to manage it for him. He had become so accustomed to allowing his mother to manage things for him, that the thought of rebelling did not occur to him.
One late afternoon he met Frances driving her governess cart in the lane; as he saw her approaching he wondered how much she had heard. It would be all round the neighbourhood, of course, if people really did know the worst. He was rather surprised when she pulled the pony up abruptly, stopping to speak to him.
‘I’m going your way, Aubrey, can I give you a lift?’
‘Thanks.’ He got into the governess cart by the absurd little door at the back, and as he did so, he knew that Dick and Ernest Jameson were gaping at him over the crumbling wall of the rickyard. The governess cart rolled away, and Frances took the long route. Apparently she also had seen the Jamesons.
‘I sometimes wonder why you ever go near those beastly boys at the farm. They are really quite atrocious.’
‘You needn’t think that I was going there purposely. I happened to be walking that way.’
‘It’s dull here, isn’t it?’
‘I find it appallingly dull. I don’t know what’s the matter with me, but everything irks. I used to think the place was charming. Now I believe I hate it.’
‘I know. Life seems to be very much like a cage from which one cannot escape. It’s a nasty cage, and I suppose the real trouble is that both of us are over-mothered. I daresay that is a beastly thing to say, because our mothers are good to us, but in a way they are too good.’
‘How right!’ he said with feeling.
‘I wish I’d been born a boy. Then I should have had the chance to make my own way and get out into the world, but being a girl I’ve got to be a home bird, however distasteful home can be.’
‘And home can be a prison.’
‘It can. And Mother is head wardress. Oh, that’s a vile thing to say, an awful confession, but pathetically true. Poor thing, I don’t suppose she means it. I daresay she means particularly well.’
‘That should be written on every tombstone to a busybody. They meant well. It says a devil of a lot.’
There was the sound of the pony trotting, and the long vista of the reins stretching to Frances’s gloved hands; the road led on, the trees turning lightly autumnal, and patched in places with russet and amber. He had an idea that her eyes were moist, and knew then that they shared a common burden. Both were desperately unhappy at home.
Knowing that, Aubrey felt himself drawn towards her in the common bond; her aloofness, that cold calm critical manner of hers, was a pose, just as his manner was a facade. When she said that her home was a cage, she had laid her finger on the pulse of their lives.
‘It was nice of you to give me the lift,’ he said when he got out of the cart at his own gate.
‘It was very nice having you with me,’ and she looked yearningly up the garden. ‘I always admire the way your path slopes up to the yews. It’s an old-fashioned garden, ours at home is so prim and far too orderly. I like yours better,’ and from the way she said it it might have been I-like-you-better.
‘You must come and spend some time in it.’
‘I’d like to one day.’
‘Please do,’ he said.
He thought about her as he went up the garden alone, past the stone Apollo with moss on his winged heels. Frances was a nice girl; she was a very nice girl indeed.
Six
Aubrey spent that Christmas in Switzerland as his mother had suggested, and he was glad to escape. It had been dull at Cambridge, and he was glad that his time there was over. He knew that to be unusual; he knew that he ought to have regretted going down for good, but he was very different from his fellows in every way. He did not understand the team spirit; herds frightened him. They were so amazingly young and so high-spirited, and although he tried hard to join in with their escapades, in his heart he knew that he failed.
He would be pleased to start in the new year with Mr. Clement’s in Mainwaring. Architecture had always intrigued Aubrey; he appreciated lines. It was impossible to attach his career to the Elizabethan poetry that fascinated him, and he accepted architecture as the career, and poetry as his hobby. He considered that there would be some consolation in the thought of Sir Christopher Wren:
Architecture has its political uses. Public buildings being the ornament of a country, it establishes a nation, draws people and commerce, makes the people love their native country.
Aubrey loved his native country; he l
oved Thornhill, he loved the agricultural pasture land that flowed so urbanely about it. But at the present moment in his life, everything was overshadowed by the thought that in some way he had betrayed himself, and had made an irretrievable mistake.
He had been agitated all the term, and his mother with her masterfulness had not allayed the feeling that guilt lay upon him like a dark shroud. He was very anxious about Alice’s monetary outlook, because whatever anybody might say, she had been put to expenses for the coming child which should have been Aubrey’s burden. To satisfy his own conscience, he took part of a cheque from home, and putting ten golden sovereigns into a small jeweller’s box, registered them and sent them to Mrs. George Herrick. Afterwards he felt that they might have been thirty pieces of silver, and was even more ashamed than before.
He travelled out to Switzerland, a dreary crossing in a fog, moving slowly, and taking much longer than it should have done in the over-crowded boat. France looked murky; it was a joy when he saw the first snow points through the windows of the train. He had had a luxurious though somewhat fuggy journey as far as Basle, where, in the darkness of the early winter morning in company with other complaining travellers, he was turned out on to the platform.
‘Almost inhuman,’ they said.
He stood there in the biting cold, drinking hot chocolate from a cup capped by a pyramid of whipped cream almost like the Jungfrau herself. He was irritated to have been pushed out of the overheated compartment just when he was comfortable, and yet exhilarated by the air. Common discomforts make fellow travellers strangely friendly. He talked to the stockbroker and his wife, who, in England, would never have exchanged so much as a good morning. He made friends with the small girl who had put all her savings into this one holiday; and the fat man who had always wanted to ski, but never believed he’d have the nerve when it came to it.
Two hours later Aubrey was left at a wayside station which appeared absurdly small after Basle, together with five other travellers all set for the same destination. Now the sun was brilliant upon the snow, and the fir forests swept down to the very gateway to the ticket office. They were packed into waiting sledges, stowed in with fur rugs, and started to the jangle of bells in true musical comedy fashion. He felt that the tediousness of the journey was forgotten. Suddenly he was elated, feeling that he had never been really alive before. He might have lived just for a moment with Alice ‒ even then it had been hurriedly drugged by the confusion of subsequent emotions ‒ but now he was vigorously and alertly alive. He had come out from behind that facade, and dared to be himself.
He thought that he was a man emerged from a dungeon, though he must be crazy to think of Thornhill that way, but now he was free of sentimental fetters. He wanted to laugh for joy.
He had booked a room at a small Gasthof for the big hotel, the Excelsior, situated round the corner, was very expensive. There they gave nightly dances and ice carnivals, with a resident Viennese band, whose leader always conducted with a live macaw clawing on to his shoulder. It was quite easy to live at the Gasthof at a reasonable cost, and spend money on sharing the entertainment of the Excelsior. And now he knew he wanted to share; Switzerland could do that much for him. He could find himself, a gay creature instead of the gauche, quiet man who, having saturated his youth in poetry and pictures and study, had found it insufficient.
He met her at mittagessen the next morning.
He had got in early, sitting down at the one crowded table which had to be shared by the sixteen members of the Gasthof. The door opening again, he saw Kay Benson coming in. But here she looked different too, almost like a boy in her dark trousers and white bunched sweater, high at the throat. Her pointed face was tanned almost out of recognition, her hair bundled in the same careless manner, but her eyes were even more brilliant.
‘Good gracious,’ said she, ‘what on earth are you doing here, and don’t tell me you’ve brought your parents?’
‘Of course I haven’t.’
‘Good!’
She sat on the chair beside him, looking like a small child in the way that she squirmed her trousered legs round the chair supports.
‘What are you doing here? I thought you were at Fincham? Don’t tell me Mr. Benson is with you?’
‘He is not,’ and she grinned at him over the pottery bowl of soup. ‘I happened to be ill.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Years ago I came to school near here and made friends with a girl called Margot. She’s with me now. Margot is a darling, she married well, I married badly. Poor parsons, you know.’
‘They’re never very rich.’
‘Margot does not forget pauper friends.’ She pushed away the empty bowl and helped herself to chicken and rice. As she sat there eating there was very little about her to remind Aubrey of the clergyman’s wife at Fincham who had seemed to be so many years his senior. She had the rare quality of youth.
‘You’re here for long?’ she asked.
‘Just for the vacation.’
‘Good! You’ll adore it. Of course you skate?’
‘Very badly. I’m one of those gauche people who are very feeble at all sport. I wish I liked it. Frankly, I don’t.’
‘You’ll have to like it here. I’ll make you. Tobogganing is easy, and you’ll learn to ski.’
‘It terrifies me.’
‘Oh, what nonsense! It’s the most wonderful feeling in the whole world. It is the whole world. You’ve got to learn, and you’ve got to love it.’
She pushed the smeary plate from her, propping her face between her hands. That same pearly sheen was on it, the sheen that he had noticed on the day of the fête.
‘It’s all very well for you; you’re good at these things, I’m not.’
‘I shall teach you.’
‘And be shockingly disappointed in your pupil.’
‘Not at all. My pupil is going to be very pleasantly surprised in himself.’
‘You’re a very persistent young woman.’
‘I’m extremely persistent. More so than you know. I’m determined to make you ski, and skate.’
‘I should think it’ll kill me.’
‘Not at all. Go and get changed and we’ll start right now.’
As he went up to change he wondered how much she knew of the truth behind the affair that had brought him here. He hoped nothing. Yet Edward Benson had married Alice to George Herrick, and must have known something. If Edward knew, so did Kay.
They spent the afternoon on the nursery slopes, where Kay persuaded him on to skis, completely spoiling the rest of his day for him. Although she was encouraging, he felt terrible. Too tall and lanky, and falling in absurd attitudes like a crucified spider.
‘I shall never do this. Never.’
‘Yes, you will. Everybody does that at first. The young man in the red jumper over there has just come his twentieth unholy cropper. I’ve counted.’
‘Very unkind of you.’
‘And this is only your twelfth. I think you’re doing very well indeed.’
‘I don’t.’
He was very thankful when they took off the skis and went to a patisserie for tea. It was a pleasant place, with the old-fashioned kachel offen to make the place warm. They sat in their corner eating Berliner Pfanner Küchen, and rhum babas.
Kay looked young, and elfish; she laughed a lot and he found himself laughing too. It was surprising that there should be so much to laugh at.
‘All the funny people who come out here because it is the proper thing to do,’ said Kay, ‘you must own that they are a bit ridiculous. All the very earnest people who want to win trophies.’
‘In which category do you come?’
‘I can’t guess. Neither probably. I was at school here, and we always thought ourselves of the people themselves. We joined in their derision over the English misses in their fancy skiing suits. Always too beautiful; the suits, not the English misses, naturally. I wouldn’t have missed the experience of being here at school for anything els
e in the world.’
‘I bet it’s made Fincham seem rather dull.’
‘Dull?’ She raised her eyebrows slightly.
‘Don’t you pine there?’
‘I loathe it,’ she said, ‘but half the people in this world hate the places where they live. That’s life. And if you had to change, where would you go? Choosing where to live is horribly hard. I’d rather have it chosen for me ‒ and hate it.’
‘Perhaps you’re right.’
He did not meet Margot until the evening, and found her rather ponderous. A large young woman, disappointingly scholastic, with a passion for examinations which apparently she always passed with honours. On only one point did she and Aubrey see eye to eye, and she confided it in him when they sat in a corner drinking hot coffee.
‘One thing about Kay I can’t understand. I don’t know if you’ve ever met Edward Benson, but he’s impossible. So narrow-minded, and so preachy. I can never think what Kay saw in him.’
‘I do know him and he doesn’t impress me much.’
‘So pedantic, so meticulous. And Kay so glad and gay and so clever. I just wouldn’t know why she did it.’
Until Margot had mentioned it, it had not occurred to Aubrey to wonder why Kay had married her husband. But having it brought to his attention he could not lose sight of it again. He wanted to find out. He mentioned it one morning when he and Kay were skiing, he awkwardly and always in his heart a little fearful, whilst she moved in sweeps like a bird. They were above the village, looking down on what appeared to be a toy church, with a grouped surround of toy houses, the fir trees dripping snow, and a fir forest rising behind, almost to the heights themselves. There were violet shadows on the sharp whiteness, and in places they caught the brilliance of the pure gold. It was a lovely sight. He never knew why he asked it. It came quite suddenly. As they were standing on the top of a slope, looking down, and she beside him, so small, so elfish, like a child.
‘Why did you marry Edward?’ he asked.