Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “I am an orphan.”

  Lydia, already a dignified and self-contained little girl, bore herself with a new, pale composure.

  It was for her that Aunt Evelyn, once more summoned from her shabby, untidy house at Wimbledon, was now hastily ordering mourning, and to whom the Wimbledon cousins had written brief, blotted letters of compassion and sympathy, and it was her future that Aunt Evelyn and Uncle George and Aunt Beryl had all been discussing under their breath whenever they thought she was not listening.

  This, at least, was Lydia’s complacent conviction, until she overheard a few chance words about Grandpapa, and how best they could break it to him, when he was old, and his heart was weak — and he had, besides, never really got over the shock of poor Peter’s death, three years ago.

  So it was Grandpapa they were thinking of now! Lydia really felt very angry. Grandpapa, however, did not exact an undue amount of attention, on the whole.

  “Grandpapa is old,” said Aunt Beryl, with a hint of apology in her voice. “Very old people don’t realize things quite in the same way — they’re more familiar with grief, perhaps.”

  “The real blow was poor Peter’s death,” said Aunt Evelyn, also determined that Grandpapa should be accredited with his due meed of afflictions.

  Aunt Beryl, who lived with Grandpapa, took Lydia to stay with them.

  They had a house at the seaside, only two hours by train from London, and Aunt Evelyn came with them, ostensibly to see how Grandpapa was, but in reality, Lydia felt certain, in order to help them to decide upon her own future.

  The two aunts talked to one another in anxious undertones all through the journey; their two, almost identical, black hats nodding so close together that Aunt Beryl’s hard straw brim kept on knocking against Aunt Evelyn’s stiff, upstanding bow of rigid crape.

  Although the younger one was still unmarried, Lydia’s two aunts had never lost a certain indefinable similarity of taste that always made them look as though they were dressed alike.

  Aunt Evelyn was Mrs. Senthoven.

  “You can remember it because of Beethoven,” she always said, with a nervous laugh. She had three children, and was several years older than her sister.

  Miss Raymond might have been handsome in a small, beaky way but for her extreme thinness and the permanent anxiety in her light-brown eyes. “Beryl is the youngest bird in the old home nest, and is always with dear Grandpapa,” Aunt Evelyn and Uncle George were apt to say.

  The youngest bird in the old home nest, growing yearly more pinched and vulture-like, invariably acquiesced eagerly in the pious formula, and thus enabled Aunt Evelyn to give her undivided attention to the straitened, clamorous household at Wimbledon, and L’ncle George to leave his room in Grandpapa’s house untenanted during his fortnightly holiday from the office.

  Now, however, he was at home, having gone straight back after the funeral. He met them at the station.

  Uncle George was small and fair, with a habit of asking thoughtful questions of the kind apt to provoke hasty and inaccurate replies, which he then had the satisfaction of correcting.

  He said, “Well, well, Lydia,” And gave her a little, awkward pat on the shoulder, that she quite understood to be expressive of his pity and sympathy.

  “What about the “bus?” said Aunt Beryl.

  “No, no,” Aunt Evelyn protested quickly. “The walk would do us good. No need to take the ‘bus.”

  This was one of the fundamental differences between the aunts and Lydia’s mother. Mrs. Raymond had always taken a cab from the station, whether she had brought any luggage or no, when she came down to see Grandpapa. She had never seemed to be aware, as Lydia had privately always been aware, that the household in Regency Terrace thought very much the worse of her for the extravagance.

  “The ‘bus could take your bag, Evelyn. I know the man,” said Uncle George. “It will be quite all right.”

  He put out his hand for the small, dirty, brown suitcase that was weighing his sister down on one side.

  “Well — I don’t know,” she hesitated. “I suppose it will be sixpence or more saved, if we carry it ourselves.” She laughed nervously.

  “Better let the ‘bus take it. I can say a word to the conductor,” persisted Uncle George, now burdened with the bag.

  “Oh, it isn’t far. I think I’d rather keep an eye on it.”

  “Just as you like.”

  Uncle George raised his eyebrows, and they trudged away down the dusty station road.

  Lydia was tired and hot in her new, fussy black clothes, and the contrast between her present discomfort and those condemned, self-indulgent ways of her mother, in the advantages of which she had always shared, brought a genuine realization of loss to her mind with a dull pang.

  “What made your train late?” Uncle George inquired, patiently shifting the suit-case into his other hand.

  “Was it late?”

  “Surely. Wasn’t it, Beryl?”

  “I think it was. About five or ten minutes.”

  Her brother immediately looked astonished. “Five or ten? The railway company would tell you that there is a very great difference. As a matter of fact, your train came in exactly seven-and-a-half minutes behind time.”

  “Perhaps we started late,” wearily suggested Mrs.

  Senthoven. She was beginning to limp a little in her tight, black boots.

  “Not very likely to do that. Probably you lost time at the Junction. The two-fifteen always has to wait about there. I’ve noticed it.”

  “Probably that was it,” said Aunt Beryl, with tired acquiescence in the masculine infallibility on the subject of time-tables.

  “I expect it was that. Let me see — you would have stopped only once before the Junction” The discussion, if it could be called one, when the only wish of the aunts was obviously to agree with Uncle George, lasted all the way to Regency Terrace.

  Then Aunt Evelyn and Aunt Beryl both said, “Here we are!” And Uncle George put the suit-case down upon the lowest step of the stone flight that led to the front door as though by no possible feat of endurance could he have sustained its weight further.

  “There’s Grandpapa,” said Mrs. Senthoven, looking up at a first-floor window, and nodding vigorously.

  “George!” exclaimed Aunt Beryl reproachfully, “why is Grandpapa in the drawing-room? You know he always sits in the dining-room on week-days. With the parrot to keep him company and all.”

  Her brother was spared the necessity of providing any explanation as to Grandpapa’s disregard of his privileges by the opening of the front door.

  “Welcome, my dear child,” said Aunt Beryl very kindly to Lydia, and she kissed her.

  Then she looked round sharply at the servant who had opened the door. Her face relaxed at the immaculate cap and apron that met her gaze, and she said graciously: “Good afternoon, Gertrude.”

  As they went into the dining-room, of which the door already stood open, Lydia heard Aunt Beryl say in tones of satisfaction: “The girl really is improving at last. I’ve had such a time with her!”

  “I wish I could get our girl at home to look half so smart,” said Aunt Evelyn, shaking her head. “But she’s got more than she can manage, with the house in the morning, and then the waiting at meals — Robert absolutely insists on that — and half her time she doesn’t dress in the afternoons at all, and I really can’t blame her. Just goes to the door with her arms all turned up, anyhow. Not that we have many callers,” sighed Aunt Evelyn. “I’ve had to give over social life altogether, practically; the children take such a lot of seeing to. Don’t ever marry a poor man, Beryl.”

  The fiction still prevailed between the sisters that a choice of matrimonial projects lay ever before Miss Raymond.

  “If you ladies have finished talking secrets “said Uncle George, in reproachful reference to the rapid undertones employed by Lydia’s aunts.

  “Yes, now what about Grandpapa?”

  “He’ll want to see our little Lydia.�
��

  “Poor child! Get her a little wine and a biscuit first, George.”

  Lydia sat complacently at the square dining-room table, whilst Uncle George slowly unlocked the lower half of the sideboard and brought out a decanter with a very little red liquid in it, and Aunt Beryl produced, also from a locked receptacle, a small glass barrel containing three or four Albert biscuits.

  “You sit here quietly, dear. Aunt Evelyn and I will go up to Grandpapa first.”

  The aunts left the room together, and Lydia and Uncle George remained solemnly facing one another across the dining-room table. Lydia was much too self-possessed a little girl ever to feel any necessity for making conversation, and as her uncle remained silent, she occupied herself in gazing round the diningroom, familiar though it was to her already. The table was still covered with rather worn red baize; Grandpapa’s arm-chair, in which Grandpapa should by rights have been sitting now, still stood in the bay window, flanked by the small, round table which supported the parrot’s cage. The cage was covered with an old piece of green stuff now, and Lydia was glad of it. She was not at all fond of the parrot. Over the mantelpiece hung “The Monarch of the Glen,” and over the writing-table, at which no one ever wrote, but where Aunt Beryl did a good deal of sewing, was “Derby Day.” Lydia had heard Aunt Evelyn say that the detail in that picture always struck her as being quite wonderful.

  The sideboard was the largest piece of furniture in the room, and it occupied almost the whole of one end of it. Lydia had often been told the story of the sideboard’s arrival at Regency Terrace — the impossibility of getting it in at the front door — Uncle George’s humorous suggestion that the roof of the house should be taken off — and finally its lengthy and strenuous entrance through a window, assisted by a large crane.

  It was a matter of everlasting regret to Lydia that this sensational progress should have taken place some twenty years before her own arrival into the world.

  In front of the empty grate stood a faded worked screen, its spiral legs embedded in the fluffy black hearth-rug.

  “Oh,” said Lydia, suddenly reminded, “where is Shamrock?”

  “Out, I suppose,” said Uncle George simply. Shamrock was Grandpapa’s dog, and Uncle George had good reason to disclaim all responsibility for Shamrock’s in-comings and out-goings.

  “A seaside town, or, in fact, any town, is no place for a dog, in my opinion,” said Uncle George.

  “Of course they have more fun in the country,” glibly returned his niece, who had never spent more than three consecutive days in the country anywhere, nor owned a dog in her life. “They can run after chickens and lambs, I suppose,” she added innocently.

  “They can indeed!” ejaculated Uncle George.

  “But why lambs, Lydia?”

  “I thought I’d seen pictures of dogs running after sheep, and barking at them to make them go the right way.”

  “Sheep-dog! That’s another matter. Sheep are not lambs, child — nor is this the season for lambs.”

  Uncle George looked happier, having found an opportunity for the bestowal of information.

  Lydia secretly thought him very like Mr. Barlow in “Sandford and Merton,” And had no idea that her comparison was anything but complimentary.

  “Have you ever read ‘Sandford and Merton,’ Uncle George?” she inquired conversationally. She had no idea of simulating a conventional grief for her mother with Uncle George, knowing instinctively that any such display would merely embarrass him. Uncle George liked one to be intelligent and very attentive to everything he said. Lydia had often asked him questions, the answers to which left her profoundly indifferent, merely for the sake of pleasing him. Her unconsciously cynical acknowledgment to herself of her own motives at least saved her from the charge of insincerity.

  Lydia had seen so little of her grandfather during the last three years that she could not remember what he liked from little girls, although she retained a vivid impression, mostly gathered from her mother, that Aunt Evelyn’s noisy, slangy, hockey-playing Beatrice and Olive were not approved of by him.

  Lydia, the precocious little only child of a mother half-enviously and half-contemptuously acknowledged to be “rather a fine lady” by the Raymonds and the Senthovens, was not likely to transgress in the same directions as Beatrice and Olive.

  When Aunt Evelyn appeared at the dining-room door with her summons, Lydia followed her demurely upstairs. She remembered the steep, rather narrow staircase, with a blue carpet that gave place abruptly on the second flight to yellow oilcloth, and the ugly blue paper on the walls, quite well.

  The drawing-room seemed altogether strange to her, but she was given no time to examine it.

  “Here is little Lydia, Grandpapa,” said Aunt Beryl, who stood as though on guard behind the arm-chair in the bow window, that looked out on to a distant strip of grey sea.

  How tiny Grandpapa was! It quite shocked Lydia to see the minute proportions of the stiff little figure that sat back rigidly in the depths of the arm-chair.

  Grandpapa’s hand was like a claw, and his eyes looked out of a network of wrinkles such as Lydia had never seen or imagined on a human countenance.

  She half expected his voice to be in proportion, but it was in very sharp, incisive tones that he addressed her: “How d’y do, my dear? You are very young to know grief.”

  “Lydia has been very good and brave, and given us no trouble at all, Grandpapa,” said Aunt Beryl.

  “That’s right. That’s quite right. How old are you, Lyddie?” Lydia suddenly remembered that her grandfather had always called her “Lyddie,” although no one else ever did so.

  “Twelve and a half, Grandpapa,”

  “Can you read?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Lydia, astonished.

  “There is reading and reading,” said the old man rather grimly. “If yours is very good you can read to me in the mornings, and save your Aunt Beryl.”

  “We shall have to see about some lessons for her in the mornings,” said Aunt Beryl rather repressively.

  “Eh, what’s that? You don’t want to go to school, do you, my dear?” Lydia wanted to go to school very much, and had always resented her mother’s refusal to send her there, and the irregular, desultory lessons at home, from which she knew that she learnt nothing useful.

  But already she felt certain that to say so would not advance her cause with Grandpapa.

  “I have never been to school,” she said at last “A very good thing too. I don’t like all this business of girls trying to be like boys, and learning all sorts of rough ways.”

  Old Raymond cast a malicious glance at his daughter Evelyn, whose two girls attended a high school.

  “You’re tired, Grandpapa,” she said gently and unresentfully, although she coloured.

  “What made you sit in the drawing-room to-day?” asked Aunt Beryl. “You know you always stay in the dining-room until six o’clock.”

  Grandpapa’s perfectly alert old face suddenly assumed a blank expression.

  “Eh, my’-dear?” he said vacantly.

  Aunt Beryl repeated the observation in a higher key.

  “I can’t hear you,” said Grandpapa obstinately.

  Aunt Evelyn and Aunt Beryl exchanged glances.

  “Don’t do that, my dears, it’s very ill-bred. Even little Lyddie here can tell you that. Very bad manners to exchange glances. I suppose you thought I couldn’t see you, but I’ve got very good eyes yet.”

  The old man chuckled gaily at the discomfiture on the faces of the two women.

  “You must come downstairs now, Grandpapa. It’s tea-time,” said ‘Aunt Beryl firmly.

  Lydia wondered how anyone so very old and frail could ever be taken downstairs. Did Uncle George carry him? She saw with horror that neither of her aunts made any move to assist him as he leant forward and gripped a stout stick that stood against the arm-chair.

  Then he began to slide down the seat of the deep chair, his old frame quite rigid, one hand clutchi
ng the arm of the chair, the other the stick.

  “Oh!” cried Lydia involuntarily.

  Grandpapa, his face tense and his breathing very loud, never looked at her, but both the aunts said, “Hush!” So she stood quite silent, very -much interested and rather frightened, while the tiny, taut old frame twisted itself to the perpendicular, and at last stood erect. Then, and then only, Grandpapa accepted the support of Aunt Beryl’s arm to supplement that of the stick as he went very, very slowly downstairs, one step at a time.

  Aunt Evelyn, following behind with Lydia, explained to her that Grandpapa never allowed anyone to help him out of his chair.

  “You will learn all the little ways of the house in time,” said Aunt Evelyn kindly. “You know we hope that this is to be your home.”

  “Yes, auntie,” said Lydia submissively.

  A dim, resentful consciousness was slowly creeping over her that “to learn all the little ways of the house” is the endless and often uncongenial concomitant to that orphaned state to which she had proudly laid claim.

  II

  IT was not difficult to learn the routine of life at Regency Terrace. By the end of the autumn Lydia felt as though she had always lived there.

  It was very monotonous.

  Breakfast was at eight o’clock, and Lydia found herself expected to partake of bread-and-milk, to which she was not accustomed, and which rather annoyed her because she knew they only gave it to her in order to satisfy Grandpapa’s old-fashioned sense of the appropriate.

  Immediately after breakfast she went out, so as to give Aunt Beryl time to see to the housekeeping before her lessons.

  “A good brisk walk up and down the Front,” her aunt said encouragingly. “There are never many people there early.”

  After September, indeed, there were hardly ever any people there at all.

  Lydia did not dislike her solitary promenades from one end of the Esplanade to the other, except on the days when there was an east wind, when she hated it.