Ladies of Lyndon

by Margaret Kennedy

  She put the two letters into two envelopes and tucked them away into her handbag. She would post one when she got back from Hampstead. Then she said to her mother:

  ‘I’m just off to see Dolly and James.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Mrs Cocks doubtfully. ‘All the way to Hampstead? How will you go?’

  She had reason to suspect the influence of Dolly and James.

  ‘I can go by Tube.’

  ‘I don’t know that I quite like that. After all, child, you are, in the eyes of the world, a very recent widow. It isn’t quite the thing to go rushing round London in Tubes like this.’

  ‘It’s very unlikely I’ll meet anyone we know. I’ll keep down my veil. I’m afraid I must go.’

  ‘Very well,’ sighed Mrs Cocks, who was afraid to draw the rope too tight. ‘But I think you ought to be back for tea. It isn’t really decent that you should be going out at all, except for a little exercise in the gardens. Of course it’s dull, but one must observe some forms. Why don’t you occupy your mind with some solid reading? When your father died, I remember, I read all through Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico during the first few weeks of mourning. Of course it’s a little heavy. But why don’t you read Mdm de Sévigné? She’s very amusing. I’ll look her out for you.’

  ‘I’ll try to be back for tea,’ conceded Agatha, and escaped.

  An unpleasant wind, icy and dusty, blew in her face as she picked her way up the hill from the Tube station. It was an unbecoming day and she felt blue and pinched; she had a suspicion that she looked old. Hampstead, usually so pleasing a place, seemed to her dirty, noisy, and incredibly cold. She tried to sustain herself with memories of the warmth of Corsica; of long days by the sea, watching its blue glint through the arbutus trees. But then, the South could be squalid too. Remembering the smell in the inns and the flies on the ceilings, she thought that it could be worse. On the whole squalor in warm countries was more intolerable than squalor in cold. New York, so she understood, was given to extremes of climate; torrid in summer, frigid in winter, it was probably squalid all the time.

  Turning a corner by South Kensington Station she had caught a glimpse of herself in a long glass by a shop door. She had seen a pallid, disgusted-looking lady, well over thirty, whom she had scarcely recognized. She had never known that it was possible to look so commonplace, and the idea nauseated her. She tried to believe that Venus herself would appear insignificant in such unkind weather, and then remembered a young woman of about her own age who had passed her a moment later and whose beauty was preserved by a closed car and Russian sables.

  When she had entered upon the silent residential quarter in which Dolly and James were established she unfastened her handbag and drew forth the first letter that she had written to Gerald. She glanced through its honest, loving sentences, and then tore it up into very small fragments. These she scattered to the implacable wind to be blown for ever about the Heath from the grey ruffled pond to Parliament Hill.

  Then she mounted James’s doorstep and rang the bell. The girl admitted her and said that Lady Clewer had just run round to the grocer’s, but Sir James was in his studio. James at the same moment appeared at the end of the passage and greeted her joyfully.

  ‘Dolly’s out,’ he said, ‘but she’ll be in in a minute. Come into the studio where it’s warm. We have a fire there.’

  He led her down the hall where Clewer mackintoshes hung in symmetrical rows, through a covered passage, into the large comfortable studio which had been built out into the yard behind. She paused on the threshold with a cry of surprise, for against the wall, in a good light, there leaned that portrait of James’s mother which had once hung in Eaton Square.

  ‘How did that get here?’ she said.

  ‘Mamma made me bring it back after the … the funeral,’ he explained. ‘I’m very glad to have it. It’s good, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’ve always thought it good.’

  He looked at it attentively and then pronounced: ‘Too many of them altogether.’

  ‘What? Portraits?’

  ‘No. Lady Clewers. There’s this one, and there’s Mamma, and there’s you, and now there’s poor Dolly, who detests it. That’s too many.’

  ‘There certainly does seem to be rather a crowd of us.’

  ‘It’s a good thing you won’t be one for much longer. I suppose you will be getting married soon?’

  ‘Well … yes … sometime, I suppose.’

  ‘It will be nice for you to be an honest woman again,’ said James kindly.

  Agatha agreed that it would be nice, recognizing some conjecture of Dolly’s in this artless repetition.

  ‘You’ll find you are much happier altogether when you have got out of the family,’ he assured her. ‘Did Dolly tell you how worried we are?’

  ‘No. She only said something….’

  ‘There she is back! I heard someone at the back door. I’ll just call to her that you are here.’

  He leant out of a window which gave him a view of the tradesmen’s entrance and shouted:

  ‘Dolly! Dollee! Agatha’s here! Oh, it isn’t Dolly, it’s a man. What is it? Oh, the Gas! Oh, yes, can’t you come again when my wife is in? I don’t know where it is, do you? Very well, then, I’ll let you in. Can you show me how to do it or do you do it yourself? You’d much better wait till my wife comes in. Yes, I’m Sir James Clewer all right. Oh, Dolly! There you are! Agatha and the Gas are here.’

  Dolly dealt with the Gas and came up into the studio. She wore a new black dress of far more lugubrious appearance than Agatha’s grey furs and looked unexpectedly bereaved. She kissed Agatha with a perplexed mournfulness and dragged a chair up to the fire for her.

  ‘How nice of you to come so quick,’ she said. ‘Has James been telling you? What do you think?’

  ‘I haven’t told her yet,’ said James, fetching chairs for himself and Dolly. ‘It’s Mamma’s newest idea, Agatha.’

  ‘It isn’t as if it wasn’t bad enough us coming into a title we never wanted,’ began Dolly wearily. ‘We don’t like being Sir James and Lady Clewer all of a sudden. It isn’t what I expected when I married James. It doesn’t suit our style of living. But what must be, must, and since it’s the will of God I suppose we oughtn’t to complain.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it’s the will of God at all,’ interposed James. ‘Why should it be? Why should He want to make me a baronet, I should like to know?’

  ‘If He hadn’t, He wouldn’t of let your poor brother die,’ explained Dolly severely. ‘But what I mean to say is this. We don’t want to let it upset us more than we can help, do we?’

  ‘You see,’ continued James, ‘Mamma came up here yesterday and wanted to know when we were going to move into Lyndon.’

  ‘You could have knocked me down with a feather,’ said Dolly. ‘Just when I’d got that range put into the back parlour and the whole house papered. I didn’t want overmuch to come here: I didn’t think it near so healthy for the children. But since we are here I’d sooner stay. There’s no question but it’s better for James and his painting.’

  ‘Yes, this house suits us,’ said James. ‘We’ve got everything here how we like it. Do you think it’s fair to make us live at Lyndon, Agatha? She says that it’s my duty now to keep up my position.’

  ‘And the worst of it is, there’s a lot in it,’ said Dolly sadly. ‘I sometimes think that he ought to go. There ought to be some of the family live at the House. I quite see that.’

  ‘What I feel,’ said the hopeful James, ‘is that it’s so much more your house than ours, Agatha. It’s just the place for you, and you and Blair would do much better there than we would. Now you are going to be married, couldn’t you go and live there and be the family for us? You like Lyndon, don’t you? Better than any other place? I know you do. Then do please go!’

  ‘Oh, dear James, it’s quite impossible….’

  ‘Wouldn’t Blair like it?’

  ‘He’s going to America in a fortnight,’ she s
aid quickly. ‘What? For ever and ever?’

  ‘For some time, I’m afraid.’

  ‘But aren’t you going too?’

  ‘N—not yet….’

  ‘But you will eventually, I suppose. Oh, dear! Then that puts an end to my best plan,’ said James dolefully.

  Dolly was almost tearful.

  ‘Oh, Agatha, I am sorry! We shall miss you ever so! I don’t really know however we’ll get on without you, so kind as you’ve been. But you must write to us a lot.’

  Agatha felt too jaded and dejected to tell them that she had practically decided not to go. It would have needed so much explanation. They had supported and encouraged her in every vicissitude, so far, believing that she was bound to Gerald as they were bound to each other. This deliberate desertion they would never understand. She could picture quite clearly Dolly’s look of startled disapprobation and James’s compassionate gravity. She wondered why she knew so well how James would look. Hadn’t he, once before, looked on her with pity and proffered advice which she had not taken? Her mind swung back to her wedding day and she remembered that he had said:

  ‘Don’t go if you don’t want to…. They are very silly, you know, but you shouldn’t pay any attention to them. I don’t….’

  Bending her head towards the fire, so that they might not see her twisting face, she said to James and his wife:

  ‘No, I’m afraid you must count me out as far as a tenant for Lyndon goes. But really, I don’t see why you should worry. I shouldn’t let them make you go if you don’t want to. You’ve always been the most sensible person I know, James, about refusing to let other people interfere with you. You’ve never allowed them, so far, to distract you from anything you want to do, or confuse your ideas as to the essential things for your own happiness. Why should you allow it now? I certainly wouldn’t go and live at Lyndon if I were you. It would upset your life horribly. Oh, you’ve done so well up till now! Don’t let them persuade you against your will! You mustn’t go.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ he said. ‘But Dolly thinks …’

  ‘Goodness knows I don’t want to neither,’ broke in Dolly. ‘But there ought to be the family living in a place like that. James has got a duty towards it. He’s a rich man now and, of course, he’ll find it much harder to know how to act right. It says in the Bible that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle …’

  ‘That isn’t as bad as it sounds,’ interrupted James in an instructive voice. ‘Miss Barrington explained it to Cynthia and me once. And she said that the eye of a needle was really a gate in the walls of Jerusalem….’

  ‘If the Lord had meant that He’d of said so,’ replied Dolly with conviction. ‘Anyhow the meaning’s plain. It’s much more difficult for James to go to heaven now than it used to be, so we’ve got to be more careful how we behave. We are the Family now. We don’t want to be, but we are. And we’ve got this house; we don’t want it but we’ve got it. It’s the state of life to which we have been called.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going,’ announced James, who had evidently made up his mind. ‘Nobody can be called to two states at once and I shall stay here and paint. You can go if you’d like, Dolly; I won’t interfere with what you think is right.’

  ‘James Clewer! What a shocking thing to say! We can’t be parted, and you didn’t ought to speak of it, not even in fun.’

  ‘I’m not in fun.’

  He rose and crossed to the wall where his mother’s picture stood. After looking at it for a few seconds he said again:

  ‘I’m not in fun. You ought to know that. You know, you both know, how I hated that place! Even after you came, Agatha, it was never the sort of place I like, though it was better. Things were quite different for me when once I got away from it. It may be very beautiful, and so on, but it isn’t my sort of house and never will be, not if I’m the Family fifty times over. I won’t have my children living there. I’ve got away and got my own place for them, and if we went back they’d never have a free moment. We’ve got a duty to them. I’m sorry, Dolly; I know I generally do what you want, but this time I’m not going to.’

  Dolly, after the shortest of pauses, signified a tranquil acquiescence in a decision which she saw to be irrevocable. She turned to Agatha and asked:

  ‘And what do you think we should do with the house, then?’

  ‘What about your stepmother, James?’ asked Agatha. ‘She’s the person who has always run it really. Would she like to go on there?’

  ‘We hadn’t thought of her,’ said James.

  ‘After all,’ pursued Agatha, ‘she’s lived there a great number of years. And done it very well. Couldn’t you ask her to stay on for a bit? Later you might feel differently about going back yourselves.’

  ‘That would be almost as bad as letting it,’ objected Dolly. ‘I mean, I’m sure she’s a kind woman and very good to the poor and all, but I don’t like her way of doing things. She doesn’t do them quite like the lady of such a house ought to do. She isn’t like you, Agatha, for instance.’

  ‘Dolly, I think you are much too feudal. You want to put the clock back. You want to revive a state of things which is past and gone for ever. What did I do for Lyndon when I had it? I enjoyed it very much; it suited me to live in it, but I did nothing for it and in the end I disgraced it. I know I belong by race to the “Bless the Squire and His Relations” galley, but it’s out of date, all that sort of thing. I never made the smallest attempt to uphold it. It’s she, with all her modern activities, and her dairies, and her laundries, and village institutes, who is ready to shoulder responsibility. I know she domineers, but think how she works! Think of all the dull hard work she’s done since she came to Lyndon! She’s what is called middle class, but she’s ready to take on all the unpaid public work, she and her like. Lyndon’s hers. I belong to a class which is of no account now.’

  ‘They do say that these people, what made their money in trade, are getting into all the old houses nowadays,’ agreed Dolly.

  ‘If we went to live there ourselves, you know, Dolly, we couldn’t push her out of it. She’s dug herself in all right,’ said James, ‘and how should we like that?’

  ‘Well, we needn’t decide all in a minute,’ concluded Dolly. ‘Let’s think it over. I daresay you are right, Agatha. I wish you didn’t have to go to America all of a sudden. I’d been counting on you to set us right in quite a lot of things. We’ll often need someone to advise us now. Oh, dear!’

  She sighed lengthily. Agatha had never seen her so unsure of herself.

  ‘What date are you sailing?’ asked James suddenly. ‘Couldn’t we all come and see you off?’

  ‘I don’t quite know,’ replied Agatha. ‘It’s such very short notice.’

  ‘Why aren’t you going when he is?’

  ‘Well, my passage isn’t booked for one thing….’

  ‘Oh, I see!’ he exclaimed enlightened. ‘You wouldn’t have gone if John hadn’t died.’

  ‘Hush, James!’ admonished Dolly.

  ‘But I don’t see why,’ he complained. ‘If she could go to Corsica, why not to America?’

  ‘There are plenty of reasons,’ said Dolly tactfully, ‘which might not occur to a gentleman. But I do wish you could go same time he does, Agatha. It will be a job for you to go alone. I should hate it if James was to go and leave me to get there by myself.’

  Agatha had a vision of the courageous Dolly and her children, harassed but indomitable, loaded with strange luggage and armed with third-class tickets, setting forth to the ends of the earth in pursuit of James. She jumped up and began to pull her furs round her.

  ‘You’ll stay to tea, won’t you?’ exclaimed Dolly. ‘If you’ll excuse me while I get it. I sent the girl out with the children when I came in.’

  ‘No, do you know I don’t think I can. I said to my mother that I’d be in for tea.’

  Agatha’s heart was as bleak as the skies outside and she wanted to escape from Dolly and James, and their insuffera
ble security in each other. Some of her misery was written in her face, for James said quickly:

  ‘I’ll walk with you down to the station.’

  Dolly stood on the doorstep and watched them to the corner of the street. The wind, swirling in bitter gusts, blew her bright hair round her face and fluttered her black skirts, revealing the serviceable green petticoat beneath. When the strange couple, James broad and shambling, Agatha slim and elegant, had disappeared, she sighed and turned into the house to get James his tea.

  ‘Aren’t your feet very cold?’ asked James, seizing Agatha’s arm and piloting her down the hill. ‘You ought to wear woollen stockings like Dolly does.’

  Agatha did not reply: she was much embarrassed by the long veil which hung from her little hat. It blew all ways at once, and wound itself round James’s neck, and round every lamp-post that they passed. They came to a pillar-box and she reflected that, with the fountain pen in her bag, she could have addressed her letter. She would have posted it if she had been alone: but such a deed could scarcely be perpetrated on the arm of the upright James.

  At the station he took her ticket while she tucked her loosened hair under her hat and redraped her veil becomingly. He put her into the lift and stepped back, waiting to see the last of her. He gave her a painstaking, reassuring smile; a mute kindness spoke in it, and she had a sudden desire to run back to him and lay all her case before him.

  The impulse came too late. She had barely sketched a movement forward when the iron gates clanged between them and she was plunged into the abyss.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.