by Ursula Bloom
‘I’m mending some old clothes that I got.’
‘To sell at the rummage sale? Really, Kay, what will you think of next? What a waste of time, and it will only encourage the village women to shunt doing their own mending.’
‘I know.’
She could never explain things to Edward, because he did not understand. Once, earlier in her married life, she had tried to share secrets with him, but had been so continuously rebuffed and hurt by it, that she had lost heart, and now kept her own counsel. He went on with his reading.
Bit by bit, she scraped together the clothes, then one afternoon took them along to the cottage, when Edward was safely disposed of at a ruridecanal meeting. She felt very well pleased with what she had done.
Alice was shelling peas in the doorway, and might have been a corsetless thirty-five with her sprawling figure, as she lolled in a wheelback chair, the enamel bowl held between her knees. The children played in the garden. Kay, carrying her parcel, came proudly up the path, and going into the sitting-room set it down on the table. The old woman, who had been bending over the stove, turned to look at it.
‘You see,’ explained Kay, ‘it won’t do for the little fellow to be laughed at by his schoolmates, so I collected a few things for him.’
‘That was very good of you, ma’am,’ and she watched the parcel being opened, fingering the contents with approval, ‘he’m a very lucky boy, ma’am.’
‘I hope he’ll be all right.’
‘He’m be all right.’
‘You’re pleased about it, Alice?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ but she said it haltingly as though it gave her no real pleasure. When Kay left she walked down the untidy path with her, the garden ragged with vegetables on either side.
‘What’s the matter with you, Alice, isn’t life treating you too well?’
‘It’s a little difficult, ma’am. I keep on having babies, I think I’m in for another now, and I never get nothing back for all I do,’ she said grudgingly.
‘You’ve got the children; they’ll be the greatest blessing to you. I wish I’d had babies.’
‘Them as never hav’m wants them, them as is always having’m would give a lot to be shut of them,’ she said.
‘You’ve got George?’
‘He only married me to help me.’
‘I don’t suppose he would have done it if he had not loved you. Perhaps that was the greatest sign of how he felt for you, only you don’t see it that way.’
‘I’m just miserable,’ said the girl, half apologetically, half sulkily, ‘but it was good of you bringing those things for Kay.’
‘Well, I am his godmother.’ But that wasn’t the reason, and she knew it. She wanted to help Aubrey, he had always interested her, and he had made a bad mistake. She wanted to help him put it right. She knew as she walked up the lane, that she had blinded herself to the fact that she cared so much for him; she had cheated herself into believing that it was just sympathy for a young man who was occupied with spoiling his own life. It went far deeper than that.
She herself was lonely, she loved him, and it could never mean anything at all in her life. Love for a man like him could never bring any solid satisfaction with it, even if he did find his own self. There was his wife, and always behind them both that evil genius his mother. It was so cruel of fate that his father should have died, and his mother lived, but that is the way that the gods seem to decree things. Almost as if they did it on purpose. Kay had the feeling that whilst Maud Lester lived, Aubrey could never be really happy.
Young Kay did well at the grammar school, going to and fro in the suit the dentist’s son had worn. Sometimes Kay saw him, because she went to meet the bus that set him down at the corner of the lane, and took a joy in walking a little of the way back with him. He was not a shy child as his father had been, but made a friend of her, and would talk glowingly about the lessons that he had done during the day. He was proud of it all being so easy. It delighted her to hear him talking; once she had been enthusiastic about her own lessons, and he recalled much of that time as they walked along together. He would be a clever man, and in her there was a welling sense of pride.
Unfortunately one day Edward met them. He should at that particular time have been at the rectory sorting out the parish magazines, but had apparently unexpectedly changed his routine and had come out to take the air. When he met them, he expressed the most profound surprise to see them hand in hand.
‘Now, run along, my little man,’ said Edward, and when the boy had gone, ‘Really, Kay, why must you encourage this child? All that wretched scandal, and you will go on encouraging him. I know you had to be his godmother, and that was entirely against my better judgement too, I warned you at the time, if you remember, but I should have thought you might have left it at that.’
‘He’s a very clever child, Edward!’
‘Yes, I daresay, but think of the example!’
‘His birth isn’t his fault, it makes it all the worse for him, inheriting better brains.’
‘I know, but you must realize how the village folk feel this sort of thing, and you should abide by their rules. I daresay it may be jungle law, but that’s how we live. Sometimes, Kay, you quite shock me with the things you do. I wish you’d be more careful.’
She said nothing.
Thirteen
The war ended.
Aubrey had had a difficult time, and sometimes wondered that he had ever been able to come through as he had done. Some years had been cleanly cut out of his life, and for that time he lived as he had never thought he could have lived.
He had loathed every minute of his training at that revolting camp in Norfolk, where he had been a private, one of hundreds, all of whom were boisterous, and completely uncongenial. He had been one of the half a dozen butts who inhabited the camp, and as butts they had been put through it. He had tried to laugh at it, to pretend that it was good fun and that he could do with a spot of teasing, but he ground his teeth secretly and resented it bitterly.
So much so that he had been almost glad when he was drafted overseas to India. The journey out was an appalling one, conjuring up every imaginable terror. Not only was there the constant fear of submarines, but the sea itself conspired against him. There was the misery of sea-sickness at close quarters with dozens of others who were noisily sick travellers. He was at close quarters with all and sundry, and he came to the conclusion that he had never cared very much for his fellows. One Elizabethan was worth forty present-day brothers, if only because he was dead!
He had nothing in common with the brothers from Kennington, and the Lambeth toughs who could pick a pretty pocket, and were proud of it. He searched desperately for someone to make a friend of, and found no one. If a man could have died of misery, he would have died, he felt sure. Eventually he was landed at Bombay. It was surprisingly alive and colourful after the grey-greenness of that sick journey; so bright that at first it actually alarmed him.
It was strange that he had never thought of going to India before. Now he was completely charmed by it. He settled down, and now he did not pray for the war to end quickly. He did not want to return to Thornhill, to the dark yews before the face of the house, his quietly hostile wife and remorseless mother. It was a pity they had no purdah in England. Purdah put women in their place and kept them there, it was an excellent arrangement, he considered, and the right way to overcome half the matrimonial tribulations. He liked the heat, he felt much better than he had ever done at home, and he liked lazing under the tulip trees, seeing the beauty of those transient dawns. He liked the strange people of India, fakirs, yogis, the occult.
He liked Kay’s letters, she wrote every little while, giving him the news that Francie and his mother never sent. Out in India he started to write a book on Elizabethan drama, and found that away from the disturbing influences of home he could create much more satisfactory work.
He was disappointed to find the war over; more disappointed when having expl
ained at length that he had no desire to be demobbed immediately (let those who were crying out for it, go first), he was drafted for England.
Aubrey arrived back in Mainwaring one September afternoon, and Francie met him in the car. Their weekly letters had told him nothing. He had sent her banal descriptions of his new environment, supplementing the correspondence with suitable pictures of the Taj Mahal, as sent by all visitors to India. He had brought her back some silk and hoped that she would be pleased with it, but knew that he himself was not pleased. He did not want to come back.
As the train passed through the cutting into the station beyond, he had a desperate sense of voidness. Like every other soldier, he had pinned his faith on a mirage, which was home-coming. It would indeed be dreadful if he were to return to the misery that he had left. Because he himself had changed. He was not prepared to tolerate Frances’s attitude towards him in the way he had once tolerated it. He went into the corridor of the train, and, opening the window, hung out of it. He could see a few people standing on the platform, the milk cans, the porters’ barrows, the mail bags, and there was Frances in the uniform of St. John’s Ambulance Brigade. He saw at once that she had grown thinner, and that with the new thinness she had got the rather hard look in her face that had labelled Lady Cousens. Her early softness had gone away, and he had thought of her during their parting with a certain wistful tenderness ‒ for memory always cheats ‒ and saw her now as an ordinary woman with rather hard eyes.
He had got to put a good face on it. He bounced out of the train with an exaggerated joy. ‘Here I am, Francie, after all this time.’
‘Well, Aubrey?’
Yet both knew that the world still lay between them. They were not here at all. One was in India, the other at Thornhill. They were that much apart.
‘The car’s outside, Aubrey; lots of luggage?’
‘Just this and my haversack. Thank God that travelling light is now done with. The haversack interlude has lasted too damned long, and like everyone else, I’m sick of it.’
‘Of course.’
They went into the well-remembered yard. There was the scent of the tarmac, of the green trees, and the petrol, to the chugging accompaniment of shunting trains. He had thought of it sometimes, when far away, as the background of warmth and sympathy and understanding, and was dismayed to realize now that none of those three essentials were here.
He got into the car beside his wife, eyed her as she drove off. Frances had been an indifferent driver when he left for the war, she was good now, but different. He supposed that everything was different. Even the trees in the lane were a shade taller and shaggier, and the hedges had grown unkempt. He could not have believed that orderly hawthorns could have become so untidy. The farmer was growing barley in the big field, and the men were at work there. The last time that he had seen the field, he had wondered if he would ever return again. Death had seemed to be very close.
He saw the Hayworth Arms standing on the green just as it had always stood, with the stunted elm for sentinel, and the familiar little crowd of yokels round the bar. But the garden was overgrown, there were tall nettles against the wall. Everything seemed to be so much more neglected, lack of labour, he supposed.
‘How’s Mr. Biddlecombe?’
‘Didn’t I tell you? He died last winter in that awful plague of pneumo-influenza.’
‘Do you mean to tell me that after the way he would keep talking about it, his stomach didn’t kill him after all?’
‘No, it actually got better.’
‘How very disappointing for him! I can’t help feeling it spoilt his grand entrance into the other world.’
She glanced at him dubiously, almost as though he had told her a doubtful story. ‘His wife is behaving queerly. I think when it came to it, she was glad to be rid of him. She’s an extraordinary woman, not nice.’
‘I’m not surprised that she was glad to be rid of him. He went on talking for ever, like a rather poor gramophone. You could never escape him.’
Frances turned the car to the side of the green, and went round behind the inn, where the chestnuts stood. Under them the grass was very ragged, it badly needed cutting, and Aubrey wondered what on earth the gardener had been doing to let it get into this state.
‘Labour has been so scarce. And now they take advantage knowing you cannot replace them. Oh, it’s a sickening world,’ said Frances coldly.
They left the car and walked up the garden side by side. The box hedges were tall, they grew in spurts like little trees here and there, and had made too much wood. The cucumber frame was now full of sow thistles, and the japonica an untidy mass. Decay had set in. It seemed to Aubrey that a mildew had spread itself fungus-fashion on the pleasure of living.
‘Francie, it’s all looking very shabby.’
‘I know. It’s super-tax. You’ve been at the back of the beyond in Simla, and you don’t realize what we’ve been through here. We’re hard up. We can’t keep the place as it used to be kept; even if we could get the labour we couldn’t pay for it, and the labour isn’t there to be got.’
‘What about maids?’
‘You may well say “what about maids?” That beastly little Milly …’
He was just going to ask what Milly had done, when he saw his mother coming down to meet him. Surely she had not stooped so much when he left, nor had she walked so slowly? Her face was calm, her eyes sunken, and her body had aged only to reveal a harder look, as it had done with Frances.
‘You look much older, Aubrey,’ were her first words.
So he had changed too!
The three of them walked up the garden that had grown so weedy and untidy, and turned in at the hall door. The funny thing was that he could not imagine the place without Milly. He had never liked her, but somehow always associated Thornhill with her, and her decayed front teeth, and the smell of rancid white rose.
‘Oh, Milly could buy us all up,’ said Frances ungraciously, ‘she went off into munitions and was getting eight pounds a week, so they said. Then she married a captain in the R.A.S.C., quite a rich man, and I understand that Milly is a lady today.’
‘She’s done well for herself.’
‘If you call that doing well. Any outsider can get a commission today, it isn’t like it used to be,’ and for a moment she glanced at Aubrey’s uniform. He had stayed a corporal. Out there it hadn’t seemed to matter very much. Now he knew that he had done wrong. Frances would set great store by pips, and think nothing of stripes.
Mrs. Parkin came out of the kitchen.
Mrs. Parkin had changed least of all, because to Aubrey she had always been old. She had that wonderful little moustache of wrinkles on her upper lip, and a queer pattern of them at the corners of her mouth; her fat bosom had slumped down to meet the uprising of a fat stomach. Mrs. Parkin was just the same. She was perhaps a shade more florid, her hair more sparse, but she was still Mrs. Parkin. Ethel had stayed on with them, because she was a nit-wit, well able to scrub and clean and serve meals, but weak in the top storey when it came to anything more.
‘Of course we can always keep an imbecile,’ said Frances, screwing her mouth awry.
He glanced at her nervously. She had got into the habit of making grudging remarks, and he did not care about it. For a moment he wondered what their life was going to be. Was he here as husband, or friend, to be loved, or only tolerated?
Ethel brought the tea into the drawing-room, still mauve and gold, with a profusion of ornaments; a travesty of a Regency room. He could not think how he had ever lived in it.
‘Hello, Ethel!’
‘Good afternoon, sir.’
They all sat down to tea.
Everything was just as he had remembered it, only shabbier, untidier, and smaller. As though the house and garden had shrunk. It is queer how life narrows the perspective; the remembered room has fewer feet when you actually see it; the garden of recollection was more spacious, the recalled face lovelier.
‘Well, here
we are!’ He was making a desperate attempt to be bright. They looked at him apprehensively.
‘Yes,’ said Frances.
He had the feeling that he must be as disappointing to them as they were to him, and none of it could be helped. It happened that way because life is made up of disappointments.
The Crown Derby cups were running out; there were only a couple left; although his mother tried to shuffle her inferior brand behind the tea-pot, he had caught sight of it. They talked of village life, the little scandals that had accrued, the little changes. The young men who had been killed, the young men who had come back. He found his mind wandering from the inane conversation, he was wondering ‒ not without some trepidation ‒ where he was to sleep.
He did not want to be catapulted into a new relationship with Frances. He had none of the bridegroom emotions, only a sick fear of repeated failure. He did not know how he would broach the matter. They were a couple of complete strangers, and evening was falling fast. Something had got to be said.
When he went upstairs he realized that he need have had no illusions as to his proper position in the house. Frances was not the kind of woman who forgives easily. He was back in his bachelor bedroom, with the blue carpet and hangings, with van Gogh’s sunflowers and the mill at Leyden on the Old Rhine. His things were arranged for him, his civilian clothes looking curiously old-fashioned laid out on the bed.
He thought mournfully that everything had aged save beauty, and the mill on the Old Rhine and van Gogh’s sunflowers were still perfect.
He went across the room and looked out into the heart of the trees, darkening green with expended summer. For the first time the ecstasy of peace touched him. All the familiar sights and sounds and joys were real. But the familiar pain was real too; he could feel the pain, the frustration and the urge to strip himself of a facade and stare out at the world with unveiled eyes.
The pain was familiar.
There was a certain warmth of enthusiasm about exploring the village again, and experiencing old emotional thrills. Simla was receding, the whole scene was a colourful tapestry, but it was now hung in another room of his life. The snake charmers and the chattering chuprassis were of no importance. The beauty of moghra and tulip tree was forgotten in the quivering ecstasy of silver birch and English oak and elm. He made a royal tour of Hayworth, delighting in it, for he had always been a favourite with the old people.