A Long Time Ago

by Margaret Kennedy

  It was easy to get on terms with Maude. For the sake of a little confidential gossip she was ready to forget all her grudges. And she saw Louise’s point at once. Dick ought not to have allowed Ellen to come alone.

  “Supposing it had been a rough crossing!”

  “Lifting heavy things up on to racks!”

  “Gordon would never …”

  “Barny would never …”

  “She looked fagged out when she got here.”

  “I’m so glad I persuaded her to take breakfast in bed. Muffy’s looking after her.”

  “I know.”

  Ellen had her own allies. Muffy, who would not even allow Barny to have a chill, was now brushing Ellen’s hair. Muffy had been making a fuss about Ellen the very first night she was in the castle. She had planted her standard on the keep and sat inside it drinking tea and disapproving of Louise. Louise and Maude were both against Muffy, and that drew them together.

  They continued to abuse Dick. It was a conversation which could only have been held between two women, for no man would have understood that they were really blaming Ellen for allowing Dick to allow her to come alone. Everything which they said against Dick was really an arrow aimed at Ellen.

  “But this Dr. Thring,” repeated Louise, “if this Thring person has asked Dick to look after his cases I suppose Dick could equally well hand them on to somebody else. He’s not the only gynæcologist in London. Gordon’s just the same. They like to think they’re indispensable. You can’t ever get them away without manœuvring a bit.”

  “I know. And considering all this we’ve heard about how much he overworks, she ought to have played every card in her hand to get him away.”

  They had been strolling on the grass slope in front of the castle, and at this point Louise made a gesture which definitely turned these tentative openings into an alliance. She sat down on a stone bench, by the water’s edge, and signed to Maude to sit beside her.

  They settled to it.

  “I don’t think she manages him very well, do you?”

  “No. I do not. But then, I never …”

  Maude bit her lip. She had been about to say that no nice woman could hope to manage such a nasty man. But that would have broken up this pleasant atmosphere of sympathy. They were united over Ellen, who had failed to tame her wild hawk, but they were not really agreed over Dick.

  “She doesn’t understand her job, as his wife, in the very least,” said Louise. “She lets him overwork himself. All this unpaid hospital work, and lecturing, surely by now he ought to give up all that. She doesn’t seem to realise that people are beginning to talk about him as the man. Oh yes, I know they all do a certain amount of it, but she ought to discourage it as much as she can. She shouldn’t calmly submit to letting this Thring, or whoever he is, thrust his patients on to Dick, while he goes for a holiday. It isn’t as if they were making this sacrifice in order to get Dick on professionally. If it were anybody very important…. But then she’s no idea of pushing him. Socially, I mean. A wife can do so much. I’m not a snob … I hope …”

  “Of course not,” said Maude, genuinely forgetting great-aunt Harriet.

  “No, I don’t think I’m a snob. But one does realise, one has to realise, that there’s a snobbish element in all worldly success. One regrets it, but it’s so. It isn’t always the most brilliant men who get to the top of the tree, it’s the men who know how to climb, unfortunately. One doesn’t want Dick to push himself. One’s glad he isn’t that kind, it’s all part of his charm. But one wants him to be pushed. Ellen doesn’t realise … but she’ll have to realise.”

  Louise jerked her head in an angry way that she had when people would not realise and would have to be made to realise.

  “Or if they weren’t so comfortably off,” suggested Maude cautiously. “But then, they don’t have to worry about money.”

  This was a delicate subject, for the money was mostly Ellen’s. Dick was making a good income for himself, now, but he would never have been able to marry when he did if his bride had not been well dowered. And some of the Annesleys thought that he took it very coolly, that he had too many children, enjoyed his comfortable home too much and treated Ellen’s money as if it had fallen, like manna, from the skies. His arrogance annoyed them, and, though they all knew that no man could work harder, they would have preferred to see him show a little embarrassment at his position. Maude, especially, thought this, because she and Barny were poorer than the rest owing to Barny’s unfortunate habit of speculating. She was the only one of them who really believed that Dick had married for money.

  “Oh, I wasn’t thinking of that,” said Louise, in the tone of one who can afford to be above such things. “But she doesn’t understand him. She’s neither the one thing nor the other. She takes a narrow view of his career. She has no ambitions for him, and she takes no trouble from the worldly point of view. And on the other hand she isn’t the right companion for him … as a man. They’ve no interests in common, except their children. He’s intellectual and she isn’t. He is imaginative and sensitive and she is about as romantic as a leg of mutton.”

  “Then you think he’s not happy with her?”

  Louise pondered. This was a point which should not have been pressed in such a hurry. They were feeling their way towards it, but she was a little disconcerted at being asked such a question so soon.

  “He’s very loyal to her. No … I don’t think one can go as far as that. I think he’s been quite happy with her, up till now. I don’t think one can call it an unhappy marriage … quite …”

  But neither would she call it a happy marriage. How could it be when Ellen had not learnt to manage Dick, and did not even understand him? Louise and Maude were happily married. They lived on a nicely-balanced see-saw. They sacrificed themselves, consciously, and the security which they had achieved was worth the trouble. Maude held umbrellas over Barny’s head and Louise was obliged to live in North Oxford. Sometimes they complained of the demands which had been made on them, but more often they boasted of the rewards they had reaped. Their husbands were faithful and domesticated.

  But there was no see-saw in the Napier household, no sacrificial compromise. Dick gave Ellen children, spent her money, told her what to think, and made her, to all appearances, a happy woman. She was satisfied, not with herself, but in him. And to Louise, who had never known an instant’s satisfaction in the whole of her life, this primitive serenity was galling.

  “No,” agreed Maude, “they get on all right. But it’s a fluke.”

  “That’s just what I was thinking.”

  “If anything should happen …”

  “I know.”

  “Well, after all, supposing Dick were to be very much attracted by someone else? Has she ever thought of that?”

  “My dear Maude, Ellen doesn’t think. That’s the one thing one has to remember about Ellen. She doesn’t think.”

  “I suppose I’ve got a horrid mind.”

  “Not at all. It’s a possibility that no woman should ever forget. She’s a fool if she does.”

  Maude drew a long breath and risked it.

  “I mean … well, this stopping behind in London, for instance. It may be all quite true, I’m not saying it isn’t. But if I were Ellen I don’t think I should awfully much like the idea of leaving him to his own devices in London.”

  Louise sat up with a jerk. Her face grew very red.

  “What on earth are you suggesting?”

  “Oh dear! Oh dear! I said I’d got a horrid mind.”

  “You have, Maude. He isn’t that kind of man at all. I know him better than you do. He’s not the kind who’s kept late at the office on business. It wasn’t that sort of thing that I was thinking of.”

  “Then what …”

  “Not vulgar little infidelities. She needn’t ever be afraid of that. But how would she manage if he ever fell really in love? Because I don’t think, though I’d only say this to you, mind you, I don’t think he’s ever
been what I call romantically in love with Ellen. It began when they were too young. He told me once that he first made up his mind to marry her when she was fourteen, when she was only a child. Well, he couldn’t have felt about her then what a man feels about … about a mature woman. He must have idealised her in a transcendental sort of way … the way young men do. And then he married her and she turned into a nice prosaic wife. I don’t think he knows what it is to be passionately in love.”

  Maude shook her head solemnly.

  “I see what you mean. But for all that, and in spite of you saying that I’ve got a horrid mind, if I’d been Ellen I shouldn’t have left him behind in London. I’d have brought him with me or stayed to keep an eye on him.”

  This was really too much. The dinginess of Maude’s mind was more that Louise could bear. It was impossible to sustain any prolonged communication with it, even for the sake of mutual support.

  Louise got up abruptly, and said that she was going to take all the children for a bathe on the other side of the island.

  10

  ELLEN had gone with the three men over to the mainland to explore. She steered them to a place where a little stream ran down a narrow glen, its course marked by thickets of birch and mountain ash. It was the sort of stream which the wanderer is bound to track up to its source, simply for the sake of its many adventures, its hidden pools, waterfalls and mossy boulders, and the smaller streams which tinkle down the hill to join it.

  Once on land they all separated. Barny, with the light of the explorer in his eye set off up the glen at a great rate, followed more slowly by Gordon, who kept stopping and poking about in search of rare ferns. Ellen walked slowest of all, for the path was steep and slippery. She picked bog myrtle, and rubbed it between her fingers, and sniffed at it with a sigh of pleasure. When she got up about a hundred feet she sat down in a patch of heather to rest. High up above her she could see Barny, leaping like a wild goat over the mountain side. Gordon had disappeared round the turn of the glen, and Kerran, down below, was wandering along a rough cart track which ran beside the lake. He was anxious to see what lay hidden round the next little point.

  They had separated because each wished to enjoy the peace and leisure of the summer morning in his own way, and at his own pace. They were all half conscious of a sense of release and freedom. They had got away from the narrow confines of the island, and the even narrower constriction of the boat. They had got away from Louise. They were in a place where they could stretch their legs and think their own thoughts.

  Ellen thought:

  “This is nicer than the island. I like it better. I shall bring the children. We will have a lot of picnics here.”

  Barny had got right up on to the skyline. He could look down over the whole of the lake and he could see the blue ocean horizon beyond the sandhills and the rocky crags to the west of the Ardfillan mountains. His thoughts turned to rock-climbing, which he had long ago given up, because it made Maude anxious. He had been a very good climber once. He played with the idea of an expedition with Dick. They might go and climb those crags. And he saw himself climbing as an onlooker might see it, enjoying the ripple of muscles and limbs and the secret rhythm of balance, that was like music. Dick was a good climber too, intrepid, sensible and agile, but he had none of Barny’s instinctive poise. And at the top there would be pipes to smoke, and the knowledge of achievement, a moment complete in itself away from Maude. He would like very much to go. “Perhaps Maude will let me go,” he thought hopefully. But if the proposition upset her he would give it up, for he was always very careful not to flout her wishes when they were staying with Louise.

  Gordon had found a rare variety of sundew, which he wanted to take home, only he could not think where to put it. If he used his hat the sun would blister the bald crown of his head. He could not put a lump of wet moss in his pocket. Eventually he carried it in his handkerchief and started cautiously down the steep path again. It was rather tiresome, having to carry the sundew so carefully, and after a few stumbles, he wondered if it were worth while. But he wished very much to show it to someone and explain its carnivorous properties. He would take it, anyhow, as far as Ellen, who would certainly be interested.

  From time to time he stopped, in order to take in the view. It was remarkably fine. Very fine indeed, he thought. But not equal to the Lake District. The colouring did not please him so well. It was all too illusory, and there was something enervating in its softness. These were not Wordsworth’s “lonely hills,” and that lake could never have found a place in the prelude. There was something wanting, some element of grandeur. No noble thoughts occurred to Gordon.

  Kerran had got round the next little point and found there another glen and a stream exactly like the last. He looked about him aimlessly, for a little while, and then retraced his steps. For when he was quite alone he could think of nothing but his unhappy love, the sorrow which had become so constant a companion to him that he had grown quite used to it. Solitude could do nothing for him. It was a mistake to come to the mainland and walk about alone; he would have done better to remain at Inishbar, absorbed in the close little dramas of the castle.

  He quickened his pace and got back round the point again to Ellen, where she sat in the sun upon her boulder. She knew all about his affairs and he could say just a word or two now and then, to her, without feeling that he had been betrayed into a confidential scene. He could not trust himself to speak of his trouble save in the most commonplace way, and Ellen was comfortably incurious.

  He began now:

  “When you’re writing to mother next, you might just let her know that it’s all off, absolutely off, between Nathalie and me.”

  “Yes,” said Ellen, “I will.”

  “I saw her, a week before I came away, and she’s quite firm, so there’s nothing to be done.”

  “She won’t marry a Protestant?”

  “And I can’t become a Catholic. So it does seem quite hopeless. We’ve decided not to see one another again.”

  He picked a stalk of heath and began pulling off its pink bells and pouring them from one hand to the other.

  “She’s going abroad. I rather think … I’m pretty sure … that she’ll end by becoming a nun. I believe it’s that, more than my being a Protestant. But as mother knows of my … my … attachment … you’d better let her know it’s all over.”

  “I’ll tell her,” said Ellen again.

  She knew that Mrs. Annesley had probably been told already, for poor Kerran’s plight was fairly common property. Nathalie Power’s sister had confided in a friend who had passed it all on to Louise. Nothing of the last interview had been kept a secret. But Louise had fortunately made up her mind that the affair was unimportant, a mere sentimental aberration on Kerran’s part. She had never liked Nathalie, and she discouraged comment or discussion. Ellen’s baby and Kerran’s romance were forbidden topics at Inishbar.

  “I’m glad I didn’t have to change my religion to marry Dick,” said Ellen. “I don’t think I ever could have believed in the Virgin Mary.”

  “Believed in …” Kerran sat up with a jerk. “My dear girl, what do you mean? Do you doubt that such a person ever existed? Or don’t you accept the Virgin Birth? Or are you talking about the Immaculate Conception?”

  “Oh, don’t flurry me,” said Ellen. “You’re as bad as Dick. Isn’t the Immaculate Conception the same as the Virgin Birth?”

  “Indeed it’s not,” said Kerran.

  He began to explain at some length, for he had a purely academic interest in theology and was an authority upon the career of Pius IX. Ellen saw that she was in for a history lecture, and very soon she left off listening.

  “All this has nothing to do with religion,” she thought. “Religion is about God.”

  But even as she thought it she was aware of an oppression, a menace hovering somewhere in her thoughts. For she was a religious woman, a communicant, and she believed in four Gods, or rather, four Persons who bore the same n
ame. She believed in the God of the Old Testament, and had a very distinct idea of His character. He was definitely anthropomorphic, grossly unfair, a materialist in the matter of rewards and punishments, callous of suffering, but noble, uncompromising and full of majesty. He had nothing to do with the Presence lurking in the background of the Gospel story, an impersonal and unsatisfying divinity, who was said to be loving and merciful but who had sat safely up in Heaven while His Son died on the Cross. Ellen did not know it, but she had never liked that second God. “He gave his only Son …” There was a kind of sentimental unfairness about the idea of which the God of Israel would never have been capable. Nor could she identify either of Them with Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, a pitiful, defeated figure of goodness and pain—a victim. And fourthly, there was the Holy Ghost, a mere name, without personality or shape at all.

  She had been taught that all these four people were really one and it was only lately, since she had come to be so much worried about Dick, that she had found this difficult to believe. In her trouble she had prayed more fervently and more intimately than ever before, and she could not escape from the feeling that her prayers were being heard by a committee, by four people who would, so she had been assured, take a kindly interest in herself and her affairs. But did they? Or rather, since she must remember that there was only One, did He? Somewhere at the back of her mind she had a feeling that she would think more of Him if He did not, and that He would think more of her if she held her tongue. Only that was not what she had been taught, and what she had placidly accepted through the tranquil years of her girlhood and her marriage. She could pray to four Gods in whom she did not really believe, or she could believe in one to whom she could not pray. It was all very wrong, in a religious woman, and a communicant. It was doubt. She had heard of people losing their faith, but she had never thought that such a thing would happen to herself and it frightened her.