by Ursula Bloom
Surely this was the curtain rising on the big scene of his life, his marriage to the woman he loved?
‘Oh, Frances, my darling,’ he said emotionally, and groped for her hand.
‘It’s just that I’m tired, Aubrey,’ she told him when he commented on its chilliness.
‘It’s that journey. It was too much. Going back, we’ll break it at Milan.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and he knew somehow that she had missed the beauty of this lovely place, and lost the meaning of the serenata.
Ten
In the cottage little Kay grew to become a child. Alice’s marriage to George Herrick had run fairly smoothly. He was kind, and he had not referred to the child who was the reason for it, but had quietly accepted the situation.
Their marriage silenced the scandal, and when the boy was born, Alice knew that she had done the right thing. She had found a friend in the old woman of whom she had been so afraid. Old Mrs. Herrick loved the little boy as though he were her own grandson.
‘He’s beautiful,’ she had said. She had meant it even though she knew that the abundant fair hair and the lean little face had the hallmark of the real father on it.
Alice herself did not realize what had happened. She had done the correct thing in marrying, but she still loved Aubrey. There came the day when she saw him in the lane, and he had spoken to her. She had cried when she heard that he was marrying Miss Frances Cousens, even though Miss Frances was pretty, like one of the best pieces of Dresden china, the sort that took such a sight of dusting. She had seen him in the garden on the very day of his wedding, and had been quite frightened that she had done it. George would be very angry if he knew that she had opened that gate, for he had insisted that she must never go near Thornhill again, but she had gone because something inside her had made her do it.
She cried as she pushed the baby home, because she would have liked to be one of the crowd outside the church. She liked a good wedding to gape at, almost as much as a good funeral, but she couldn’t go to Mr. Aubrey’s wedding because of the baby.
When the happy couple came back from Italy, she kept out of the way, scared that young Mrs. Lester would catch her. Mrs. Lester was gentry, and gentry could be vindictive. Alice stayed in the cottage more and more, fretting for a lost girlhood, and the baby laughed at her with his eyes so like Aubrey’s, and stuck fat radishes of fingers into his dribbling mouth.
‘He’s a bonny boy,’ said his admiring grandmother.
The girl yearned to be out and about again. At eighteen the ties of home were harsh. She thought with longing of last year’s joys, when she had had Milly to talk to in the bedroom at Thornhill. Milly had always been gay, her own age, and far cleverer than Alice; she missed the scent of white-rose hair oil and the little messed-up bags of sweets.
At Michaelmas she and George went over to a fair for a break, whilst his mother minded the child for them. It was fun being at the fair after all the dullness, and they won three coco-nuts, for George had a strong arm. He swung round and caught the coco-nuts fair and square, then he bored a hole in one of them with his jackknife, showing her how to drain the milk out of it. It was lovely milk. She felt happy and excited, and pleased to be with him; they walked home from the fair laughing, with their arms round one another like lovers. In the gay good humour and the noise and the fun, they had forgotten the circumstances in which they had married, her need for a name, and suddenly it seemed they had recaptured their youth.
At Christmas she knew she would have another child.
She was angry that there would be a new child, for once again Fate had tricked her. Nature had deceived her in the mint bed at Thornhill; it had woven a magic moment with Aubrey, had staged it, and Alice had been the one who had paid for it. She didn’t love anybody any more; all she wanted was to escape from the routine of hard living and dull routine, but there was no escape, for Nature had seen to that.
Another child this year ‒ every year ‒ until there was a little tribe of them dragging round the house, and this was the way that her own youth and energy would be expended. She sat down and cried, she wanted foolishness; she wanted the silly chatter with which Milly had regaled her, the confidences and the fun. Instead of youth, she was reaping a harvest of carrying, and bearing, and suckling.
The old woman was standing by her bed, her hands with the protuberant glazed knuckles stroking her head.
‘I didn’t want another yet,’ said Alice, when she could lie calm after the distress of the earlier morning.
‘I know. But they come. That’s life, and we women have to love’m and care for’m. That’s living.’
‘You only had one.’
‘I lost three’m for the one,’ and she said it harshly, for she was thinking of the humps of coarse grass in the churchyard which represented no harvest.
Little Kay could not walk properly when his brother was born; he was a big child, and he rode on his grandmother’s hip, straddling the protruding bone with his chubby legs. He talked a lot, and was quick at it, which made Alice proud, though she was worried that he did not walk.
‘He’m walk when he wants to,’ said his grandmother.
Kay visited Alice on the second day, and saw the child, darker than the first one, with a round bullet head like a Christmas nut. ‘Glad it’s another boy, Alice?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘George must be very pleased. What are you calling this one?’
‘Harold, after my father-in-law.’
‘That’s a very good idea.’
‘My mother-in-law’s been very good to me, and it will please her,’ explained Alice.
By the next year Kay was a big boy who could sit on his grandmother’s lap, reciting long pieces of poetry that she taught him. Alice wondered where she had learnt them, but she knew lots of ‘pieces’, for once she had been in service with a poet, and he had, so she said, ‘talked funny’, so that she had learnt bits from him parrot-wise.
One day it was,
We hold our greyhound in our hand,
Our falcon in our glove;
But where should we find leash or band
For dame that loves to rove?
Let the wild falcon soar her swing,
She’ll stoop when she has tired her wing.
‘Whatever does it mean, Mum’ asked Alice.
The old woman had no idea what it meant, but the baby had got hold of scraps of it, and would repeat them to himself as he played with the dry pebbles in the garden that June.
‘She’ll ’toop when she has wi’d her ’ing,’ Alice heard him saying. Words meant something to him; just as notes in music were a pattern in space to gentry, though they meant nothing to Alice.
Harold was a year old, an early walker, and a knowing child, not clever like Kay, but domineering. Harold was keeping his birthday in July, and had a little cake that his grandmother had made for him. It was bad weather, and although the hay had been cut and tedded and stacked, they were waiting for a break to come before starting the harvest. George was in the bedroom. He had come in, having washed at the pump, and he was standing there, his braces dripping over his cord trousers, wearing only a vest beside, a heavy woollen one that his mother had bought at the Fincham rummage sale.
He looked at Alice as she came into the room, with an armful of clean clothes. The floor rose and fell, the boards had wide roadways between them where the dust came through, which was aggravating. She saw George standing at the window, but not looking out at the view, for he was looking at her. She was aware of the rainbow across the wet sky, and the light of a fickle sun on the trees making the leaves too yellow-green.
George said, ‘Hello, lass!’ and put out a hand. ‘Come here.’
She went across to him. ‘What d’you want? I can’t be long, as Mum’s got the kids.’
He said, ‘We’ve never seemed close to one another, you ’n’ me. I love you, you know,’ and he nuzzled her hair with his face. He was like a horse that, having tired of chewing c
lover and seed in his nosebag, suddenly pushes it aside and turns to the stack from which the full source comes.
‘Now don’t be silly, George.’
‘Silly, is it? I married you to get you out of a hole. Nice thanks I’m getting!’
‘I’m grateful.’
‘No, you ain’t. I scare you. You ’n’ me have missed sum’mat, couldn’t we come together a bit more? I’m not happy. I guess you ain’t happy neither.’
She wanted to deny it, but instead she began to cry, laying her wet face against the harsh woollen vest that had once been Edward Benson’s, and shaking with tears.
‘You mustn’t take on so,’ he said kindly, ‘we’ll leave the kids with Mum tonight, and go out somewhere, shall us?’
‘Oh George, that would be nice.’
‘Put on your things and come on out.’
He patted her shoulders and pulled her ears, turning her face up to him and kissing it spontaneously, roughly, so that his beard bruised her, but at the same time she felt elated by it. They changed and went across to the Hayworth Arms for a drink. The evening had come out fine, fulfilling the promise of the rainbow. It was quite warm, but with too flashy a sunset, and a dark cloud in the east. They sat out in the garden where there were green tin tables, and chairs, and the bedraggled flowers broke with past rain. They drank beer. Beer always made Alice’s head ache, but it gave her a certain sense of exhilaration. She disliked the sour taste that lingered in her mouth, but liked the faint dizziness as though life had somehow become lovely, instead of being just one darned bit of hard work after another.
‘Have some more?’ said George, well pleased with it, and proud that he had his hay money to draw on.
All the men were here and many of them had their wives with them. They accepted her as being part of their crowd, and the sense of frustration and isolation dispersed in Alice; she felt at home, almost as though everything was forgotten and she had crossed into another world. It might be the beer ‒ she wasn’t at all sure that it was not the beer ‒ but she felt better and chattered with the crowd.
She took George’s arm quite possessively as they walked home across the field.
‘Not feeling that way?’ he asked.
‘Feeling a bit gay,’ she admitted.
She sang a little snatch of a song, it was months since she had sung, and now it amused her. It was nice to be walking across the field with him, and singing, and feeling his body close to hers, knowing he was amused and not angry.
He kissed her again in the garden, and this time it didn’t hurt, for she liked the feel of his unshaven cheek, and the way that he held her. She collapsed laughing into his arms and knew that she had enjoyed the evening very much. It wasn’t finished yet. Of course it wasn’t finished.
In September she knew that she would have another child next year.
Eleven
When Frances Lester returned from her honeymoon she brought with her a strange feeling of loss, the experience of having climbed to a heady height, and looked down on what should have been the most beautiful view in the world, and yet had turned out to be nothing.
Her life at home with old Lady Cousens had been unhappy, she had never ventured to entertain the thought that her married life could turn out the same way, and the only difficulty she had anticipated had been that of an interfering mother-in-law. But she had no trouble in that quarter. It was Aubrey.
It had begun the night before they left Venice, lying in a gondola, with the water lapping the side, and the distant calls of the gondoliers like music. Aubrey, longing for the confessional, had insisted on talking about Alice.
Realizing that this was a rubicon they would have to cross (since Alice lived so near to them), Frances said that she thought it would have been much better if Aubrey had shipped George over to Canada to start life afresh there. Better for them, and very, very much better for the Lesters at Thornhill.
‘But how could I have done that? There was his old mother who had been born in that cottage. She would have loathed it.’
‘Instead, I can loathe it.’
‘Frances dear, it isn’t that …’
‘It’s looking very much like that. You must admit it is awkward. The girl and the baby within half a mile, and all the village talking. They ought to go. Right out of the place. They really ought to go.’
‘Frances, do try to be reasonable.’
‘I think I am being very reasonable. I’m sure most girls would have insisted that you did something about it before they got married to you. I didn’t. I’m awfully weak in some things. As it is, the only possible way out is for you never to speak to the girl again.’
‘I don’t see how I can promise that,’ he hedged, nervously.
‘I think you ought to.’
‘I don’t see how I can promise to keep it.’
‘But of course you can, Aubrey, unless, well unless you put her first.’
‘It isn’t a case of putting her first. It is just that it is so damned awkward.’
‘I realize that, but you can’t have both ways. You’ve got to go silent to one of us.’
‘But I might ‒’
‘You don’t really love her still?’
‘Good God, no, you’ve got hold of absolutely the wrong idea. It wasn’t that sort of thing. I ‒ well, it’s a bit difficult to find out what sort of thing it was. This is just that I hate making a promise that I am not sure that I can fulfil.’
‘I thought that affair was over?’
‘And it is.’
‘Yet you still intend carrying on with her?’
‘No, of course not. It is highly probable that I shall never set eyes on her again.’
‘I should think it much more probable that you will.’
‘Yes, well, that’s what’s worrying me. I might be tricked into speaking to her again, couldn’t help myself sort of thing, and then I’d feel awful. It’s quite easy when I’m sitting miles away here in Venice, not so easy at home.’
‘I’m very hurt, Aubrey.’
‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘It’s either got to be her or myself, and which is it to be?’
‘You, of course.’
Although Frances had won that battle, it did not make her happy. She would have liked to cling to him, to show him how dreadfully she felt all this, and not be dictatorial and rather grand about it. But she had this unfortunate mannerism. She sounded school-marmish, and knew it. That night she could not get back the old tenderness, and both of them were unhappy. She ought to have made some move to help him, but she couldn’t.
They settled down to life at Thornhill, and Frances was delighted with the place. She behaved in an exemplary fashion, as she would behave in all things, for she was the sort of highly-finished young woman who makes no mistakes. Yet sometimes she wished she had not been taught to hide all the warm emotions, which made it intensely difficult to meet Aubrey half-way, and to share with him some of the inconsistencies of his own life.
Thornhill possessed her.
If Mrs. Parkin resented a new mistress, she gave no outward sign of it, but carried out her duties in the same methodical manner, lips pursed, and figure never decreasing with the years. The younger maids discussed Frances, and were for ever being brought to book for it by Mrs. Parkin.
‘I won’t have the mistress discussed in my kitchen,’ said she; ‘as to you, Milly, you ought to be ashamed of yourself encouraging Ethel the way you do.’
‘Well, it’s a free country.’
‘Not in my kitchen it isn’t. I will have manners,’ snapped Mrs. Parkin as she lifted a tray of cakes from the oven. ‘Keep your mouth shut if you can’t open it properly.’
Frances was intrigued with the strings of callers, and though she hourly expected a quarrel with Mrs. Lester, it never drew one whit nearer. Kay Benson called.
‘I don’t think I care for her,’ Frances told Aubrey afterwards, ‘she’s what you’d call a little extraordinary. She reminds me of a boy.’<
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‘Yes, she is rather boyish.’
‘She’s clever, I suppose, but I think she knows it, and it spoils her. I can’t think why Mr. Benson married her.’
‘It’s always puzzled me, too.’
‘You? I wouldn’t have thought you’d think about such things.’
‘She was out in Switzerland at the time my father died, and I came home in that hurry. She was very good to me there. She adores poetry.’
‘I rather thought she looked as if she did. She’d do better darning her husband’s socks, I should have thought.’
Aubrey was hurt that Frances should feel that way, so he said nothing.
Frances had an appendix operation that autumn, which brought Mrs. Lester back into command. Frances made a marvellous recovery, throwing it off easily, and she enjoyed her convalescence. She had happy memories of it, for Aubrey was kind and attentive, womanish in his care for her. There was that pleasant day in the orchard, sitting in the late September sunshine, with the smell of grasses. They folded little paper darts and threw them at the Apollo, poised on his pedestal.
‘He looks so grim,’ said Frances.
‘He’s made that way.’
‘Why didn’t you have an interesting statue, if you had to have a statue at all?’
‘I should have thought he was interesting.’
‘You’re an old silly!’ she said.
There was the afternoon when they went blackberrying together, and sat down to rest in a dry ditch, and Aubrey tickled her throat with a grass, pushing it through the eyelet holes of her broderie Anglaise yoke. At none of those moments did he seem to be real to her. She knew that, but she felt that soon reality must come. He told her little about the office, she gathered that he did not care for it, and that the others teased him at times. He was always a man seen through a screen.
One day I’ll break it down, she told herself.
One lovely November day, drawn out of an amethyst mist, she went up the lane to meet him as a surprise. She felt particularly happy at the moment. She saw his car coming out of the distance and stood back behind a russet hawthorn to pop out at him. She knew that he had not expected her. She waited behind the bush but the car was a long time approaching, so that ultimately she peered out from her hiding place to see what had happened. Aubrey had stopped. A girl with a pram was standing talking to him. Seeing her, Frances had no illusions as to who it was, and knew instantly that Aubrey must have broken his promise to her. Presently she heard the car starting up again, and coming slowly towards her. She stepped out as it came nearer, and walking into the centre of the road stopped him.