by Ursula Bloom
‘Kay dear, I’ll help.’
‘You can’t. I’ve got to do the work at home and Mum makes a fuss if I don’t.’
‘But I will help. Now this is a promise.’
But he still sobbed. ‘You can’t help me. Nobody’n help me.’
‘Nobody can help me,’ she corrected, ‘and that is where you are wrong.’
Until this actual moment she had never been able to see where her actual duty lay. To Edward, dying upstairs by inches? It seemed unfair to take advantage of his position when he could offer no resistance. Edward would never know what was happening if she succeeded in what she planned. Her life with him was over, she owed a duty to a new generation whose feet would blaze the fresh trail. They, she told herself, are the pioneers of the new world.
‘Kay, listen to me. Everything’s going to be different, I promise you that.’
He dried his eyes on a handkerchief that was the colour of an overworked duster. ‘I could learn, it isn’t that. It’s just that I don’t get a chance with all them kids and everything.’
‘Those kids and everything, Kay.’
‘Those kids and everything.’
‘You shall come here and work in this room. Would it upset you very much to leave the cottage for a time?’
‘Mum’d miss me.’
‘Yes, I know she would, but just for the moment your lessons are very important.’
‘Yes, yes, I know, and I like it here.’
They went out into the garden to the yew tree, riding on the branch again. As he sprang up and down, the traces of the tears vanished; he laughed. He pushed her on to it, and she rose and fell with the springy yew branch, and she laughed too, for the widening horizon became different for her. Suddenly she felt brave and strong, and capable of facing the whole world on his behalf. She loved him.
She walked away with him, and into the cottage to face the thing out whilst she had still got the courage within her. Alice had given up the uneven contest with life’s domestic difficulties, and was lolling back in a chair with a Sunday paper, whilst the kids played around her. She looked up, reddening, for she still knew enough to be ashamed at being caught this way.
‘Good evening, ma’am.’
‘I hear you’re moving next week, Alice?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘That’ll be nice. I’m afraid things have been dreadfully cramped for you here, and these old cottages are very difficult to keep clean. Old places make a lot of work, don’t they? A new one will be lots nicer.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Kay sat down unasked; she motioned to young Kay to take his brothers out into the garden, and started an amiable chatter, with the idea of winning Alice’s confidence.
‘Alice, life has been very difficult for you, hasn’t it? I know, because I’ve watched you and I’ve been so sorry for you. You’ve been very brave, you know.’
The girl’s underlip began to wobble. She felt very sorry for herself. ‘It’s been somethink chronic.’
‘I know it has, Alice, and I do wish to say how sorry I am. You’ve had far too many children and far too much to do.’
‘It ain’t fair,’ said Alice somewhat rebelliously, ‘if you’m a lady you don’t have kids. I don’t know what it is the ladies do, but they don’t have kids.’
‘I know. It has been much too bad. Now, I’ve got a proposal to make to you. I do want to help you; you know, you and I have always been friends, haven’t we?’
‘I’ve got no friends,’ said Alice beginning to cry loudly, ‘but you’m always been good to me. All the same I’ve got no friends.’
She remembered how kind Kay had been to her the day that she had married George. Kay had pinned a couple of white roses into her coat lapel, giving her quite a wedding-y feeling. ‘I mustn’t wear white,’ the girl had protested, her face blotched with crying, but Kay had insisted that all that was nonsense, and had smiled encouragingly, and had left the two white roses pinned to her coat.
‘I’ve always liked you, Alice, and I’ve been very sorry that life should have worked out the way it has done for you. Now it’s about young Kay.’
‘He’s a nuisance,’ said Alice, ‘always with his head in them silly books of his, never gives me a hand, has to be slapped into it, and that makes me mad.’
‘But you love him?’
‘Of course I love’m. He’m mine.’
‘I mean you love him more than Harold, or Victor, or Derek?’
‘Harold’s like his dad. He’m a one! The things that boy says, you’d die of laughing.’
‘Yes, I’m sure I should. He is like his father, and Kay is like his father. That’s why he likes books, and why he ought to have books. Alice, I’m going to ask you to do something for me. I want to take Kay back to Fincham rectory with me for a bit; only for a little while, mind you, but I want to help him with those lessons of his.’
Alice looked at Kay, not understanding what it was all about. Then she said, ‘Them silly lessons aren’t no good. He’ll go to plough like every other lad!’
(What in me is dark, Illumine, what is low, raise and support;)
Kay’s heart beat a shade faster as she remembered the exquisite simplicity of the lines.
‘Alice, I wondered if you would loan me Kay for a short while?’
‘You want to adopt him?’ Instantly her small heart became shrewd. There might be money in this.
‘I just want to help him with his exam.’
‘How much’d you pay?’ For Alice’s little mind had raced off to a cheap bedroom suite that she had seen displayed in a shop window in the High Street of Mainwaring. It would be a wonderful thing if she could get hold of the fifteen pounds required to buy that suite, and it would start her off in a regular grand way in that new cottage.
Kay looked at her in surprise. ‘I wasn’t offering you money, Alice. Surely your own son is worth more than a price to you?’
The corners of her mouth dropped. For Alice did not see it in quite that light. Until this moment she had discarded all ideas of ever being able to get possession of that suite; now cunningly, she saw a chance and grabbed at it. She wanted it very much indeed. It had handles that were made of some green shiny stuff, ever such lovely handles, and a highly veneered polished wood. There was a dressing-table and a wardrobe, a little one of course, but nice with it, and a washstand with holes where you put the basins in. She explained it glowingly to Kay, who thought that it sounded shocking.
‘I’d do anything to get hold of it,’ said Alice, ‘but fifteen poun’s’n a sight of money.’
‘If I made some arrangement ‒’ Kay hated herself for suggesting this, but something had to be done, ‘if I made some proper arrangement for it, could I have Kay with me for a short while? Just long enough to get him coached up for his exam?’
‘I don’t know what his dad’d say.’
‘You know what his real dad would say, Alice?’
That brought a silence, with Alice gone copper-coloured and sitting staring at her work-worn little hands. ‘I’d have to ask George, wouldn’t I?’
‘Yes, of course. That’s better. You talk it over with George, and then let me know what you decide. We’ve always been friends, and you need a real friend, you know.’ She put out her hand and took Alice’s. That opened the flood gates. For a few moments the girl howled like a child that has fallen down and hurt itself; she ran the full gamut of noisy tears, and then she said,
‘If I could only have that there suite! If only I could have that there suite!’
‘You shall have it, Alice, if everything works out as I want, you shall have it.’ And all the time Kay’s heart was quite sick at the thought of trading the child for the horrible-sounding suite.
Alice came to a tremendous conclusion. Quite suddenly. The child had been nothing but a nuisance to her, he had caused all the trouble; if he had never been coming, she wouldn’t have married George and be living in this squalor with all these kids.
‘Take
Kay back with you now. George wouldn’t say so much if he’d gone. Only you mustn’t do me about that suite. I do want that suite.’
‘I wouldn’t do you, you know, Alice. You shall have it. Fifteen pounds, did you say?’
The great moments of life are mud-spattered. Across the field Kay went with the boy’s hand in hers, and she dramatized that dreadful little bedroom suite with the shiny green handles as the price of this. From the post office she rang Aubrey up at his office. She had not even got the time to be discreet about it. She had no money with which to buy the suite even at fifteen pounds, she hadn’t even got the money to feed young Kay, but she would do it somehow, she’d go without anything to help the child. She’d manage.
‘I’m taking the boy with me,’ she said, ‘but Alice wants the suite, and she’s got to have it. It’s the one in Brangsome’s window, fifteen pounds, with shiny green handles and holes in the wash-stand to fit basins into.’
‘What do I do about it?’
‘You order it. Get them to send her the receipted bill, and enquire from her where she wants the wretched thing to be delivered. You must do exactly what I say, Aubrey.’
‘I will, but I fail to grasp what has happened.’
‘I know. You’ve got to trust me.’
She took the child home with her. Perhaps she herself did not grasp exactly what had happened, as she made up the bed in the little room next to her own. There were his books on the shelf, a clock on the mantelpiece, a school cap hung on the peg behind the door. Lo, her world was great, she told herself.
The whole thing might be very unfair to Edward, but then he would never know. He was slipping slowly out of the world with long periods of semi-consciousness, and it was unlikely that he would ever know. The village might chatter, but their chatter would never affect her if she managed to do something for this boy. She looked at him with pride as she went in to kiss him good night. The earth was hers for the asking, for now it almost seemed that he was her son. Hers and Aubrey’s.
I wonder, she thought, how I really feel about Aubrey. She did not know. He sat behind the facade of himself, and she could so seldom visualize the real man.
She came down the stairs with the reflection of the stars in her eyes. In the back hall, old Emily was standing blinking up at her.
‘He’s an angel,’ she said sentimentally to old Emily.
‘Is he?’ Old Emily scratched her twiny hair. ‘He eats a lot for one of them, I’m thinking.’
Aubrey hung up on the strange conversation that had come into his office. Now he knew that he could not do any more work. He went out into the street, along to Brangsome’s, the cheap little furnishing shop, just closing for the night. They seemed to be surprised that he should choose so shoddy a suite.
The officious young man with the toothbrush moustache took down the instructions, and if he thought a lot, he didn’t say so. Aubrey loped out of the shop again, rather pink about the ears, he hated to imagine what people were thinking of him.
So Kay was taking his son into Fincham rectory with her. It had happened over-suddenly. He saw now her extraordinary generosity of purpose. She would brave public opinion, for which she cared little, for the good of the child. She would let him share her small store, go hungry herself for the boy to have his chance. Kay would make something of him because she was unafraid, whereas Aubrey stood back, shrinking behind a facade, because he had always been terrified of what people would say.
He kept delving back into the past; arguing with himself that he could have done nothing else, otherwise he would have hurt his mother and Frances. Yet he knew that he had hemmed himself in by his own mistakes.
He thought of Kay affectionately. He thought of her as she had been out in Switzerland, in those slim blue trousers, with that unbrushed head and those brilliant eyes of hers. He had loved her then. Now he knew that he had always loved her, but was utterly unworthy. He had an insane longing to take her and the boy right away; to shut the sagging maroon gate on Fincham rectory, to close his own gate on the winding garden at Thornhill, and go away to those white points in Switzerland again, to that strong sweet air that brought such clarity of mind.
That was what he had always lacked. He shrank from comment, and confused his own reason that way.
When he got back home, Frances had not yet returned.
Recently she had been having a lot of trouble with her little car, which was suffering for the war years, and he suspected that she might have had a break-down somewhere on the road from the home; so he went to meet her.
As he turned the corners he expected to see her car stranded at the roadside, instead of which he accomplished the full distance, arriving at the side door of the home with as yet no sign of her. She was not there, but her car was still standing against the shrubbery in its customary place. He saw it with some surprise. An orderly came to the door in answer to his ring.
‘Mrs. Lester?’ asked Aubrey.
‘Oh, her? She’s somewhere in the garden along of Captain Carey,’ and there was something in the way the man said it that appalled Aubrey. He didn’t care for the significant grin.
‘Right. I’ll go and find her.’
The orderly went back into the kitchen, where the staff were sitting over the fire and eating faggots, brought back from Mainwaring as a special treat.
‘There ain’t ’arf going to be a row, the very deuce of a row,’ said he brightly, ‘’er ’usband’s come along for ’er. You could have knocked me down with a fevver. Serve ’er right too.’
‘Manners, manners, now then, who d’you think you’re a’talking to?’ chirped up the cook, but for all that she laughed. She thought that it was very funny.
There wasn’t a row.
Aubrey went across the garden dying down for the long sleep of winter. The dahlias were hanging their heads heavily, white cobwebs sprawled across the chrysanthemums in lacy indolence. The grass was dewy and lush, so overgrown with time. He looked into the thinning trees, and it was a long while before he saw the two of them, because of the accruing dimness of the evening.
Frances was standing by the edge of the lake, with the white spikes of bleached grasses at her feet and the darkness of the rhododendrons behind her. She was in Michael Carey’s arms. The strange thing was that Aubrey was not surprised; he walked towards them under the cover of the bushes ‒ he had wit enough to know that he must stay unseen ‒ and he knew that they were kissing one another. He would not have thought it of Frances, but then one never suspects one’s own, but goes on in a fool’s paradise, believing them to be immune from temptation. Now there was a sudden griping pain within him; he could hardly have believed that he cared so much, but nothing he could do now would stop it.
He said, ‘Frances?’
They broke apart, and she went very white with the deadly pallor of faintness. Michael Carey wasn’t white, nor red. He looked at Aubrey, recognizing him at once from the description, and he said, ‘Thank Heaven you’ve come’, which seemed a very peculiar remark to make.
‘It looks to me as if it were about time.’
‘Yes, it is. Frances and I are in love.’
‘I rather got that idea.’ Aubrey didn’t reproach them. He did not know what to do or say. He saw an open door, a vista in the distance, and knew that now he was standing on alien ground. It might be a quicksand under his feet, it might be firm soil.
‘We’ve got to talk this out,’ said Michael.
‘Yes. I ‒ I suppose you want to marry my wife?’ and as he said it, he thought how strange it sounded.
‘I do.’
‘Well, it’s been a bit of a shock, as you must admit. I hadn’t any idea that this was going on, she never told me anything about it. Where can we talk?’
‘Not here.’
‘No, certainly not here.’ The mist from the lake seemed to be enfolding them in a blanket of wet cotton wool; he could feel its fingers at his throat, and he spluttered a little. ‘You had better come to my office tomorrow, we sha
n’t be interrupted there. Could you manage to get to me at eleven?’
‘In Mainwaring?’
‘Yes, the office is in the High Street, over the decorator’s, number 117.’
Then Frances recovered herself and she had to flash into the conversation. ‘You can’t do this, because I won’t have it. I don’t believe in divorce, I haven’t done anything to be divorced for, and anyway it would be wicked. This is merely a passing interlude in my life. I couldn’t face the consequences of all that dreadful publicity and it shan’t happen.’
Aubrey stood looking at her.
It was funny, but he was going right back to that first day in Switzerland, years ago, at mittagessen, with Kay coming into the room in her dark trousers and bunched sweater. The way she had sat in the chair beside him, squirming her trousered legs round the supports. Her voice, the brightness of her eyes, and the feeling that he was given the God-sent opportunity. He was back at the beginning again, and if he let his chance go, then all chances would go. He tore down the facade with a tremendous effort. He looked at Frances and knew that he didn’t even like her very much.
‘It’s going to happen, however you may feel about it, Francie. You are one of those women who want to have their cake and eat it too. You want me, this other fellow as well, and public opinion all for yourself. You can’t do it. You are having him.’
‘But your mother ‒’
‘You can leave my mother out of this. Anyway, it is nothing to do with her, nothing at all. I shall act entirely as I think fit.’
‘I thought you said that he was weak?’ murmured Michael, and Aubrey turned round.
‘She thought I was weak, and perhaps I was. Only I think now I’ve found my real self. It’s taken me a long time. A very long time. But I’ve done it at last. Now I know what I want, which means that I’m going to get it.’
He drove her back in complete silence, and Frances had her meal sent up to her in her own room. Aubrey guessed that she was crying, but he sat on in his study and he knew that he didn’t care. He had already stripped down the outer covering, and was seeing himself as he really was. He had an idea that he was very pleased with himself now.