Ladies of Lyndon

by Margaret Kennedy

  ‘Look here! I don’t really see why I should go. They don’t particularly expect me. It won’t be in the least rude if I don’t turn up. They don’t want me. They are your friends, you know; and if you don’t go, I don’t see why I should. And it’s the kind of thing that bores me stiff.’

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t come,’ she pleaded, ‘but I really oughtn’t to, you know. It wouldn’t be a suitable party for a young woman in my interesting condition.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t use such vulgar expressions,’ he complained. ‘I can’t think where you pick them up. “Interesting condition” is very low.’

  ‘I got it out of Dickens: it’s mid-Victorian. But I could say much worse. I could say “in the family way.” “A party in the family way.” …’

  Hubert drew himself up into a mid-Victorian husband, and thundered:

  ‘Be silent, ma’am, and don’t pollute my house with such coarse expressions….’

  He was interrupted by the parlourmaid who came to carry out the tea. Hastily he left off being Mr Caudle and picked up the London Mercury. Lois crossed to the window and drew the blue linen curtains, shutting out the chilly twilight. She could afford to make jokes about her condition since it scarcely troubled her at all. Though she was nearly seven months gone, her cheeks still bloomed and she moved buoyantly.

  The clock struck, and Hubert remarked with relief:

  ‘It’s only six. I needn’t dress yet.’

  ‘The car is ordered for a quarter to seven, and you’ll take all of three-quarters of an hour.’

  ‘But that will get me up to town at seven-thirty, and I don’t need to be there before nine, surely?’

  ‘You’ll want dinner first. Aren’t you dining at Eaton Square? I told Mother you would be, when I rang her up this morning.’

  ‘Uncommonly officious of you, Lois! I never authorized you to say such a thing. I’d meant to dine here and go up afterwards, if I felt inclined, and if it wasn’t too cold. But this absolutely pledges me. I suppose your mother is expecting me now?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, dear.’

  ‘All the same, I don’t see why I should have to go to the Martins’ if I don’t want to. What, exactly, do you expect me to do when I get there?’

  ‘Oh, my dear Hubert! We’ve been into all this before.’

  ‘Yes, you’ve told me what I ought to do, but not how I’m to do it. I’m to lead the fellow round, I suppose, and introduce him to all the people you and your mother think he ought to know.’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘And what earthly good do you think that’s going to do him or them? Haven’t you learnt by this time that it’s quite impossible for the family to run him?’

  ‘But, Hubert, this is the whole object of getting him and Dolly to come and live at Hampstead.’

  ‘I never could see any object in their living at Hampstead.’

  ‘Of course, Chelsea would have been better, but Dolly had all these ideas about the children getting good air. And there are artists at Hampstead. But the point of the whole thing is to get him into congenial society; to get him to meet more people and get known a little. I’ve been so pleased about his getting this invitation to the Martins’. It’s just the sort of thing we want. He will meet exactly the right people.’

  ‘All right, let him meet them! What good do you think that will do? What sort of impression is James likely to make on the right people, or they on him? Can’t you see that he would much sooner stay at home with his Dolly?’

  ‘Dolly is invited too, tonight.’

  ‘Is she? Then I don’t really think I need go. She’ll look after him quite capably. I shan’t go. I’ll run up and dine with your mother and come back.’

  ‘Oh, Hubert, please! Remember James is my stepbrother….’

  ‘Whom you’ve always understood. I know.’

  ‘Don’t interrupt! Yes, I do understand him. I discovered him long before anyone else, now didn’t I? Ages before you did….’

  ‘It’s a pity you didn’t discover him a little sooner over that Braxhall affair….’

  She put her hand over his mouth and stopped him. The smouldering bitterness in his heart was instantly quenched: he caught her fingers and kissed them.

  ‘All right!’ He sighed. ‘I’ll do my best; I promise I will. I’ll go. Only you see, I don’t think it will do any good. I’m coming to the conclusion that our cue is to leave him absolutely alone. He’s of age, and a married man, and what not, and I shouldn’t wonder if he knows what he wants better than we do. Honestly, my dear, I think your mother is making a mistake in trying to turn him into a tame family genius at this time of day. But I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘It’s just that he needs to know a few more people and go about rather more,’ repeated Lois with conviction. ‘He’s never been among really congenial people … creative artists….’

  Hubert was silent, since he disagreed with her. He sat by her side and absorbed regretfully the beauty and comfort of his home, still but half resigned to his enforced departure. They were in the living-room. There was nothing so Victorian as a drawing-room in Hubert’s house; only a library, a hall dining-room, a music room, and a living-room, besides a billiard-room in the garden, and quite enough too, as Dolly had observed when she heard of it. The house, which was called Killigrew’s Croft, suited Hubert and Lois very well. It was in Buckinghamshire, near Amersham, within easy reach of town, yet sufficiently out of it to pass as country. Outside it was rather ordinary, and suggested the placid comfort of a retired stockbroker. But the interior was very Georgian. The carpetless floors, the severe whitewashed walls, the Russian linen, the black divans with their brilliant cushions, the John drawings and the peat fires were all there. Hubert liked it immensely, and felt that it was exactly right. So, had he been born a generation earlier, would he have regarded a Morris paper and Willow Pattern china. But he did not suppose that his house was at all individual, having spent his life in homes exactly like it. Lois, born in Manchester, and reared at Lyndon, was still inclined to regard it as unique. She thought it a great deal more tasteful than the home of her girlhood, and often argued with Hubert about it. She could not grasp his admiration for a house so unlike his own.

  ‘Looking at this, one would never think you admired Lyndon,’ she would say, comparing the yellow washed walls of her living-room with the Chinese paper in Agatha’s drawing-room, all strange birds and exotic vegetation. ‘It’s so crowded! Every sort of style, all mixed up. Think of those lacquered cabinets and the Queen Anne Talbois cheek by jowl in Agatha’s bedroom.’

  ‘I never was in Agatha’s bedroom,’ said Hubert wistfully. ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Like nothing on earth. A wonderful Elizabethan bed, all hung with old Italian tapestries. And, I think, an Aubusson carpet. And a Louis Quinze dressing-table, and a crystal jug and basin from somewhere in Hungary. And, by way of pictures, a Gainsborough portrait, and a landscape, Cotman, I think, and “The Rake’s Progress” in funny little black frames all along the chimneypiece. And a good deal of carved jade and ivory lying around. It was just like all the other rooms in the house, only she had seized on the very best things.’

  ‘I can’t imagine it.’

  ‘Just a muddle! Not any clear expression of one kind of culture. If all the things had been English, or all French, or all Chinese!’

  ‘But that’s England, you know, Lois. Just that! There’s nothing in England so English as a house like Lyndon. A medley of races and civilizations and ideas, all chucked together anyhow, and yet … not chaos … but a whole … a living, individual whole.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were so patriotic.’

  ‘No more did I. I’ve always considered myself rather cosmopolitan. But, when I think of Lyndon I feel sorry. Sorry all that should go. It’s so absolutely ours, you know, and it’s melting like snow in the sun. Now a room like this,’ he waved a hand round his living-room, ‘you might find in any capital in Europe at the present moment.’
<
br />   ‘Well, if you are so discontented with it, change it! It’s yours. You say you admire Lyndon, but you don’t copy it, I notice.’

  ‘Copy Lyndon? Oh, Lord! Copy Lyndon! My dear girl, I couldn’t! It can’t be copied, that’s just it. One man didn’t make it; it’s been the work of generations. The smell of it! That smell of stone passages and beer! No one can build a new house and put a smell like that into it. Think of all the storms it has weathered! It’s survived the landscape gardening of the eighteenth century, and the flagrant bad taste of the Regency, and Victoria’s upholstered mahogany, and the aesthetic monsoon of my childhood, Walter Crane and all that, yes, and the recent deluge of peasant handicrafts and chromatic barbarism. These impermanent things go over it in waves. Our house, for instance, is just part of a wave, and quite a nice wave too. But Lyndon is a rock. The whole effect remains essentially the same, though it emerges from each wave with a few more things scattered over it as relics of the epoch. Lovely things … the best that each particular tide has produced…. Pity it should go!’

  ‘Why do you talk of it going? Nobody wants to burn it down.’

  ‘A house dies with its family. Lyndon has come to an end. It’s nothing better than a museum now. And a museum isn’t a living thing; it’s a mausoleum for bygone cultures.’

  ‘John may go back there in the spring, Mother says. So it won’t have been empty for so very long. Six months can’t turn it into a museum, surely?’ she asked, with some derision.

  ‘N—no,’ he replied uncertainly.

  He had always thought of Lyndon as Agatha’s house, rather than John’s, and, to him, its history was ended upon the day when she fled to Corsica with her accursed cousin. But he knew better than to air this idea, especially when Lois was already a little irritated. It was, in truth, hard upon her to have to listen to these glorifications of Lyndon when she had spent so much of her rebellious youth in trying to escape from it.

  Pondering upon these conversations, he sat beside her, holding her hand in somnolent content until the clock struck a quarter past six. Pressure was again exerted by his wife. ‘You positively must dress,’ she urged, and he capitulated.

  Upon his way to town, however, his indignation boiled up again. It was bad enough that he should be forced to spend the evening with the Martins. He had begun to grow out of the atmosphere of guarded Bohemianism in which they moved, and expected to be bored. But it was monstrous that he should have to dine with his mother-in-law as well. He raged dimly against the conspiracy of women which netted him in. He had always hated Eaton Square, and just now he knew that there would be long, unsparing inquiries about Lois and her health. Besides, he might see John, and he hated meeting John. He knew that he ought to be sorry for the fellow; that his was the gesture of the Levite who passed by on the other side; but he could not help it. John was too unfortunate; it was impossible to forget that his wife had deserted him in a particularly heartless manner, and that he was dying by inches. It was really tactless of him, all things considered, to hang about London in this way. He should have buried himself and his sorrows in some decently distant place. He was not, it seemed, too ill to shoot in the country at weekends. Hubert thought that he should stay there altogether.

  He supposed that John was right, on the whole, not to plunge into the scandals of a divorce. It was decent of him, anyhow. But it made the affair so unofficial: so preposterously delicate. One never knew where one was. It was impossible to talk to anyone of the Clewer connection for five minutes without getting on dangerous ground. The thing had become a question of clan loyalty, and everybody in the family was expected to lie fluently in the cause. It was a silly fiction, this upholding of Agatha’s respectability in the public eye, for the whole story was bound to come out sooner or later. She was showing no disposition to leave her cavalier, and her reputation could only be held together as long as she was content to lie concealed in Corsica. Hubert racked his brains to remember the details of the official explanation. Supposing Stella Martin were to ask him tonight how long Agatha would be abroad! Should he say he didn’t know? Or was he supposed to know? He ought to have asked Lois.

  But he did not, willingly, discuss Agatha with his wife. Within the tribal group there was, of course, no charity for the lost mistress of Lyndon. It seemed to him sometimes that they were almost too hard on her. He knew that she had behaved badly; she could scarcely have behaved worse; but he could never listen to the abuse which the other women poured out upon her without a pang, the stirrings of an emotion which was not condemnatory. He remembered how lovely, how unlucky, and how kind she had been. Yes, and still so young. He would much rather not think of her at all.

  Instead he thought of James, aggrievedly. Why should he be burdened with James? He did not mind having him as a brother-in-law, at a convenient distance. Sometimes he was rather proud of the connection. But taking him about was another matter. It made one so horribly conspicuous. Wrapped in these gloomy reflections he arrived in Eaton Square, and, as the car drew up, resolved that his boy should marry an orphan. He would do for his son what no one had done for him; he would see to it that the lad never met any young woman encumbered with surviving relations.

  He was relieved not to find John among the chesterfields in the drawing-room. When last he had dined there he had sat for a quarter of an hour with John. Three times he had asked nervously whether there was anything in the evening paper. John had told him thrice, with a kind of abstracted patience, that rubber was still going down. That had been the whole of the conversation between them. Tonight, however, Marian trailed in alone. She wore the kind of informal dinner gown which suggests a solitary meal. She had aged conspicuously during the past months; her elaborate brown hair was now flecked with grey and a settled melancholy made her face look heavier. But she was still a fine woman, with every appearance of vigour and health. Trouble had not bowed her white shoulders or dimmed her little blue eyes. She said that John had gone for a week to Sussex to stay with friends.

  ‘I like him to get the change and the interest,’ she said, ‘though I feel he’s hardly fit for it. He should really be nearer to good doctors. It would be very awkward if … if he was taken ill or anything when he was staying with people. But he won’t give in, poor boy, or be treated like an invalid. It’s pitiful! Now tell me how Lois is.’

  Hubert immediately regretted John, whose presence would have protected him. He said:

  ‘Lois is very well.’

  ‘Is she getting about a certain amount?’ asked Marian tenderly.

  ‘Oh, yes. She seems to be very energetic and active. We go quite longish walks.’

  ‘She must be careful not to overdo it.’

  Marian sounded disapproving, but he rejoined brightly:

  ‘She’s taking every care of herself, I’m sure.’

  ‘It must be a very anxious time for you.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ he protested, ‘I’m not anxious. She seems so well.’

  But she was quite determined that he should be anxious, anxiety being, in her opinion, the only proper state of mind for him.

  ‘If it wasn’t for John,’ she said, ‘I could be with you a great deal more.’

  ‘Thank God for John,’ thought Hubert,’ he has his uses.’

  ‘It would be a great relief to me if I could be with Lois and make quite sure …’

  ‘Dinner is served, my lady.’

  ‘She’ll begin again in the dining-room,’ thought Hubert as he armed her downstairs.

  But he had forgotten the servants. She could not begin again while they were present. Indeed she ate most of her meal in silence, for she was so preoccupied with John’s misfortunes, James’s misdoings, and Lois’s condition as to be really unable to talk of anything else. Hubert was permitted to enjoy the very good food in peace, and when, at length, they were left alone together, he short-circuited a return to Lois by plunging into the question of James.

  ‘I understand,’ he said, ‘that I am, as it were, to chaperon him at th
is party?’

  ‘Oh, Hubert, if you would! And if you’d give him a hint, just a little hint, now and then, how to behave, it would be so kind. I’m so glad he’s been asked; this sort of thing is so good for him. I’m rather disappointed, you know, in the results of the Hampstead move. I had hoped for better things. It was such a piece of work to get them to move at all. He was so stubborn; I don’t think he’d have given in if their landlord at Bramfield hadn’t given them notice. Then I talked to Dorothy, and got her to see all the educational advantages of having the children near London. Just imagine, she and James had contemplated sending them to the little village school near by! I was horrified. I didn’t like to say what I thought to Dorothy, for of course she was at a National School herself, but I spoke to James and asked him how he could think of it. And he said she had been to the school one day to have a look at it herself, and was quite satisfied with it. It was a very small school, and he said’—Marian blushed at such coarseness—‘he said that she only saw one child that she was at all doubtful about, and she caught it coming out and had a look at its head, and was quite reassured.’

  ‘Not really?’ said Hubert with a grin.

  ‘I don’t see anything funny in it,’ said Marian. ‘I feel it’s all rather sad. What is to become of those poor little children? Still, I persuaded Dorothy in the end. I pointed out what a much better studio James could have, which she appreciated. She admitted that it was always rather difficult getting models, and so on, when they lived so far out in the country. And, of course, when she saw reason the battle was won. He always does what she wishes.’

  ‘But you aren’t satisfied with the result?’

  ‘Well, you see, I wanted him to know more people. You’ve no idea, Hubert, how curious people are about him. People who’ve seen his pictures. I’ve been asked about him so often by people who are anxious to meet him. But I don’t know. It seems hopeless! Living at Hampstead hasn’t done him a bit of good; it hasn’t altered him in the very least. As I say to people … that unfortunate marriage! It will be a drag on him all his life. It makes his house quite impossible. I took Mrs Downsmith there the other day to call, and really that girl has absolutely no idea how to do things. Tea! You should have seen it! Shrimp paste in a pot, and we were offered eggs. And after tea they played us tunes upon that awful gramophone. I really didn’t know which way to look, and I could see that Mrs Downsmith thought it all most extraordinary. Coming home I said what I could about artists’ households being always rather Bohemian, and she said: “Bohemian isn’t the word I’d have used somehow.”’