by Ursula Bloom
At the Hayworth Arms he met Mrs. Biddlecombe, grown very smart; piercing her ears had made an agonizing difference to her appearance, and now she wore long dangling ornaments on either side of her pendulous face. She was obviously putting most of Mr. Biddlecombe’s legacy on her back.
‘Well, you’re only young once,’ said the gay Mrs. Biddlecombe, who was perhaps of that uncertain age which is most certain of all. She meant to have some fun.
‘Of course,’ said Aubrey. He thought that Mrs. Biddlecombe was awful.
‘And you’re looking filled out,’ said Mrs. Biddlecombe, ‘the war’s made a man of you.’
‘It’s made a change in all of us,’ and he glanced at the prodigious ear-rings.
‘That it has!’ she agreed.
He went past the Jamesons’, and now with his yearning for the old times would almost have welcomed the shot-gun that the boys had fired to scare him. And it had scared him! There was no gainsaying that! Dick Jameson had died on Hill 60, but not before he had won a medal for gallantry. As Aubrey walked past the silent rickyard he thought how dreadful it was that so much that was young and brave should have faded out with this tragic war. It should never have been.
He recalled the Herricks. It was queer to find that he was walking towards the cottage quite deliberately. And now he did not care how Frances felt about it. If she insisted on being so cold and grand towards him, then she must take the consequences. She treated him as being of no importance in her life; she would never have children, their marriage wasn’t a marriage at all.
He became aware of the fact that he was now going to see his son, and recognized glowing within himself the urge to see his own flesh and blood. It is the yearning in all men for immortality, the reaching out to the carrying on of their own lives.
He saw the cottage standing in the field, sagged into itself. The shaggy thatch had not been patched in the war years, because there had been nobody to do the job. The tattered garden was overrun with large spreading cabbages and the first of the button chrysanthemums. He saw the children playing on the path, heaping up small stones into little pyramids, and he looked amongst them for the sight of his own child.
Then he saw Alice. She wore a wooden yoke across her shoulders, and from it hung two full buckets she was bringing from the well. She steadied the chains with her hands. He supposed that he would not have recognized her as being Alice had he not looked more closely. She was flaccid, her figure flowed into her waist line, and her neck was squat. The yoke framing her made her look wider than she would have done otherwise.
He said, ‘Well, Alice, I’m back, and I wondered how you all were.’
‘We’m all right.’
‘How many children have you got now?’
‘Five,’ she said sulkily, ‘and never a girl.’
‘All boys?’
‘All boys, sir.’
‘And Kay?’
She looked at him. ‘Mrs. Benson’s making a gentleman of Kay, sir. We’m all starve for that Kay. He’s clever, you know, and he goes to Mainwaring grammar school.’
‘Really?’ Kay had said something about it in one letter, but somehow Aubrey had thought it was a plan and not anything more.
‘He be coming back in the ’bus,’ she told him.
‘I see. Well, remember me to George and your mother-in-law, won’t you?’
‘Yes, sir.’ She stood there, a girl framed in a wooden yoke, with the chains and the dripping buckets on either side. None of her first beauty was left. It was sad to see how she had changed. Aubrey retraced his steps, walking down the lane to where the Mainwaring ’bus would stop and put down its passengers, the boy amongst them. He only wanted to catch a glimpse of the lad, and stood waiting at the roadside.
He saw the ’bus coming out of the distance, an out-of-date, tired old ’bus, stopping at the corner and setting down an old woman and a schoolboy, who went their different directions. Aubrey knew that the boy with the school satchel must be Kay. The child walked as he did, he had the same long lean head, and yellow-gold hair flat to the skull. Yet he wore the sort of suit that Aubrey would not have expected to see on Alice’s son, it was neat and tidy, and he had good shoes and stockings. His satchel was a new one.
Looking was not enough. Aubrey caught up with him. He said, ‘And what’s your name, my lad?’’
‘I’m Kay Herrick, sir.’
‘You go to the grammar school?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Do you like your lessons?’
‘Oh yes, sir,’ and suddenly the boy became confidential, he had news today, news that interested him. ‘The master says that I shall be able to sit for the Haileybury scholarship. Where is Haileybury, and what is it?’
‘It’s a large public school.’
‘Is it, sir?’
‘What lessons do you like best?’
The boy said thoughtfully. ‘Poetry. I like poetry. Shakespeare. That sort of thing.’
It seemed that in Aubrey’s heart a fire was kindling, it was pride. ‘I love poetry too,’ he said, and to himself,
‘But oh, he was my son! ‒ my only son.
My child!’
‘It makes you feel so comfortable inside,’ said the boy, walking beside Aubrey and kicking along a stone. He had all the boyish tricks, he was simple, and young, on his hands were little warts, but his eyes were Aubrey’s own eyes, and his affections were as his father’s.
They parted at the gate, and he watched the boy go to the sagging cottage, still kicking the stone along with him. And watching, Aubrey felt an infinite satisfaction, an infinite hope. He felt courage rising in him, and rising full and strong, as though he could face any man for this child, and not be afraid.
He turned back again towards Thornhill with the early mist rising, and that faint touch of autumn against his face. Homecoming had been a mirage, and he had staked too much on it. Thornhill and Frances and his mother had all changed, only the boy had made it worth while.
He walked slowly, because he was trying to form some sort of a plan and decide upon some way out. He could not continue like this. His wife and mother had sided against him; he knew now that there would never be any warmth from either of them, and was appalled at the thought, yet he knew that he owed them a duty and could not bring himself to shirk it.
Already his family were half way towards negotiating for an architectural practice in Mainwaring. Old Mr. Clements had died in the influenza plague, and whilst he was away, his mother had decided that he would wish to buy the practice. Now he knew that he did not want to tie himself closer to the place. He chafed for freedom. Maybe the war had opened doors for him, maybe it had shown him the way in his own heart, but he knew that he could not stand very much of this.
He went up the garden and into the house. He was half way up the stairs, when the door of his mother’s morning-room opened, and she came into the hall and called him.
‘Aubrey, I want to speak to you.’
He did not like the sound of her voice, it was too commanding and too forbidding, yet he went. Her room was as it had always been, at least that did not change, and he was thankful for it. She sat there by the empty fire, wearing her deep black frock out of respect for a man she had never loved and now detested. She looked at her son.
‘I’m worried about things for you, Aubrey. I do hope that now you’ve come back, you and Francie are going to get on better, it is such a horrid example to the village.’
‘I hope so too, Mother.’
‘It’s hard on me to be at the end of my life and realize that the marriage I hoped so much for, should fail. I do think a lot of it is your fault, for Francie is a sweet girl, she has always been kind to me, and she has had a lot to put up with. You know what I mean.’
‘I know, and I’m sorry.’
‘It’s got to stop, Aubrey.’
‘What do you mean exactly?’
‘It was very wrong of you letting Alice stay on in the village, right under poor Francie’s eyes. Of
course, I ought to have done something originally about it, but then I’ve always been weak! I was wondering if ‒’
‘If what?’
‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea if we started the family abroad? Moved them all, got rid of them? I know it would be expensive, but I can’t help thinking that it would be a very sound investment.’
‘Francie says that we’re hard-up. Super-tax seems to have hit us very desperately. Besides, what about the Herricks’ personal feelings in the matter.’
‘That sort of man is not paid to have personal feelings. If it comes to it, what about my feelings? What about Francie’s feelings, too? Nobody seems to be thinking a thing about them. Nobody really thinks of me. I suppose I ought to be used to it by now, but the sad thing is that I never get used to the fact that I’m not really wanted.’
‘Now, Mother …’ Desperately he wondered how he had coped with her in the old days when she got into one of her martyrish moods. A man was at a definite disadvantage when this happened.
‘I suppose you’ve seen Alice already?’
‘Yes, I have. And the boy too. He’s at the grammar school and doing well.’
This was no fresh news to her, and he realized that by her eyes. She was quiet for a moment, then she said, ‘The whole thing was that wretched little Mrs. Benson’s doing. I really don’t know who she thinks she is. She’s a bad influence in the neighbourhood, and no mistake about that. She put that stupid little Mr. Binns up to getting the child entered for the scholarship, and then she got him a lot of clothes, so that he looks almost like a gentleman, which, of course, he can never be. These parsons’ wives can never keep their fingers out of other people’s pies, and it makes me sick.’
‘All the same, I think that it was very good of her, and I’m grateful to her.’ He lit a cigarette and looked his mother squarely in the eyes.
‘You seem to have no decent feelings, Aubrey. I’m glad that I shan’t be living very long. I wouldn’t want to live, after all the bitter disappointments of my life,’ and she fished in a capacious bag for a handkerchief.
‘Please, Mother, don’t start being a martyr.’
‘So that’s what you call it! A martyr! After the abominable way your father treated me, and the way you have carried on here in your very home, disgracing everybody and then being obstinate about it. Now not living with Francie. Not having children …’
‘Francie cannot have children.’
‘She could have had if she had wanted them. The trouble is that you’re not truly sorry, and you don’t care one halfpenny for the way that we all suffer for your selfishness. That’s what it is, just selfishness.’
He got up.
In Simla he would have laughed at the absurd situation, and he would have wondered how he could set about changing her. But here, in close contact with her, he knew that was impossible. ‘I’m going to my room, Mother.’
She hadn’t finished. ‘I suppose my fault is that I spoilt you. I never thought you could behave like this. I never thought that I’d live to see you so difficult.’
‘Perhaps I have thought the same thing about you.’
Yet, as he closed the door, he knew that he shouldn’t have said that, it had done no good. It would have been wiser to hold his peace.
In the hall Frances was putting flowers into a delft bowl on the dresser; she had not seen him. Her back was towards him, but he could see her face in the gilt mirror, and on it there was a girlish joy, a radiation, something that he had never expected to see there, which surprised him enormously.
He wondered if he crept up behind her, and buried his face in her shoulder, kissing her, whether he could recapture some of the lost emotion that once had flowed between them? That day with the mossy Apollo when he had asked her to marry him. Their honeymoon in Venice, the voices of the serenata, and the dazzling mosaic of San Marco. Then he thought better of it.
He went up to his room, locking the door on himself, and suddenly supremely glad to be alone. He went over to the window, looking into the clustering branches of the comforting tree. There were bronze rims curling the leaves with the first fingerprints of autumn ‒ scarcely discernible ‒ and he had the feeling that autumn was touching his own heart also.
He had had so little from life, and had paid such a price for it. It did not seem to be fair.
Fourteen
Although she had never told a soul, Frances had dreaded Aubrey’s return home. She had been running Thornhill in undisputed right, and had enjoyed it. She liked authority. It was pleasant to have the bedroom entirely to herself, to lie there with the evening paper, or a book; to have breakfast in bed, getting up when and as she would, and with no interloping disturber of her personal peace.
She knew that she did not love Aubrey; now, looking back, she wondered if she ever had done. She had been so desperately unhappy at home and had believed implicitly that the fellow feeling which makes us wondrous kind would cement their marriage, and give them full understanding of one another. She had been wrong.
The war ending, she had been beset about her own future. She was not anxious on her husband’s behalf, but she was concerned as to where her duty lay. She had been living the life of a girl at home, and she had enjoyed every moment of it. She had become occupied with the small societies for which she worked zealously; the hospital, the Girl Guides, the Y.M.C.A. hut. She would resent any of this being interrupted, and the fact that Aubrey was coming back would interrupt it.
She wondered if it would be better to have a clean break, even to go away ‒ but she did not want to go away and whilst she was in this state of indecision, her mind was made up for her, and quite finally. Frances was sure of herself; it never occurred to her that she might change; she thought she understood everything about the living of her individual life, and could command it. She found that she couldn’t.
Near Mainwaring was a large old-fashioned mansion which had, for the latter part of the war, been used as a wounded officers’ convalescent home. It was a spreading and commodious house, of the kind rapidly falling into disfavour. It would probably fulfil no further useful purpose, but would drift into some sort of an institution, because the needs of England had changed. The big house was going. The little house was coming into its own right. Frances had heard of the convalescent home, but had disregarded it. Then one day Lady Epsom spoke to her, when she was working in the almoner’s office at Mainwaring hospital.
Lady Epsom was a member of the committee, and one of those people with whom Frances was only on a nodding acquaintance. She had made several sterile advances in the direction of Lady Epsom, with inconspicuous success, and had rather given up the quest, when she was surprised to find Lady Epsom coming into the almoner’s office, with an exaggerated expression of benignity almost as if they were the oldest friends.
‘Nice to see you,’ said Lady Epsom, wearing a lot of fur and feathers, and lorgnettes, ‘very nice to see you. I did so want a cosy little chat with you.’
And down she sat.
She had come to cadge, and was well versed in the art. A war cannot last four years without someone getting proficient in this career. There had been trouble with the committee of the convalescent home recently. A Sister-in-charge ran it with a V.A.D. staff to support her, but unfortunately the 1914 ecstasy of dressing up in blue print and white linen aprons had palled. People had had more than their fill and said so. Hostilities had ended. In 1919 the local girls had gone home, they had tired of being ordered about by Sisters-in-charge, who were not always too tactful. The more eligible V.A.D. had married, and the less eligible were sick of it, with the result that, patriotism being on the wane, the home was having trouble in acquiring new staff.
Racking her brains for fresh blood, Lady Epsom had suddenly thought of Frances Lester as a likely proposition. She’s got nothing to do, and is just the person to do it, she told herself, and had come along to the almoner’s office, determined to land her fish.
When she heard of the plan, Frances demurred
; she did not see why she should give up her time to that sort of thing, for after all, the war was over! Finally she consented to do two afternoons a week for a couple of months only. Lady Epsom suggested kitchen-maid’s work, which was something of a shock; finally Frances stipulated for parlour-maiding, and eventually this was decided upon. She was not enthusiastic, but she had wanted so much to get to know Lady Epsom better (Lady Epsom was a definite power in the neighbourhood), so she decided that she would agree if only to allow her social ambitions to mature.
On a spring afternoon she reported for duty with the two o’clock shift. The local doctor’s daughter, a fat lump of a girl called Hilda Stevens, was with her. Hilda took a depressed view of the fact that they were expected to wash up the lunch things after the retiring morning shift, who might at least have done their own dirty work.
‘It’s all very badly arranged,’ she told Frances.
‘But surely each shift clears up after itself?’
‘Not the lunch shift. Lunch is hardly over by two, you see, they just cart it all out and dump it in the sink, then off they go. Their argument is that we’ve got nothing to do till teatime, so may just as well do this for them. Sickening, isn’t it?’ She was undoing pieces of elastic with which she kept her skirts secured to her ankles whilst cycling. ‘These cotton dresses fly about all over the place and do look so awful,’ she explained.
Frances had come over in the car. She could look down her nose at skirts that had to be tethered with elastic. They walked in at the side door, which in itself rather went against the grain. A professional cook was talking to one of the orderlies, whilst in the butler’s pantry a couple of V.A.D.s crammed the crocks into the sink, then pulled down coats from the roller towel fitment (the only place they had to hang anything) preparatory to making off.