“Girls,” I can imagine Mrs. Kendal saying to them in her direct way, “I think two of you might very well walk down to Mrs. Fazackerly and find out something about this paying guest, who’s coming to stay with her. We must have some tennis later on. Ask her if she’d care to bring him up one afternoon.”
“Which afternoon, Mumma?”
“Whichever afternoon she likes. Find out when he’s coming. I think it’s next week. I was thinking of having a tennis party one day before the end of the month.”
I am sure that Dolly and Aileen forthwith put on their hats — on the backs of their heads — slung woollen sports coats of dingy grey and sickly green respectively across their shoulders, and walked to Loman Cottage, and that they did not talk to one another on the way. Unlike the Ambreys, the Kendals seldom have anything to talk to one another about. Abstract discussion does not interest them in the least, and they confine their remarks to small and obvious comments upon things that they can see.
“Two cart-horses,” Aileen might say, when they were exactly abreast with the gate over which the two cart-horses could plainly be seen. And quarter of a mile farther on Dolly might perhaps remark —
“The stream’s pretty full. That’s all the rain we had last week, I suppose.”
“I suppose it is.”
After a pause Dolly will say thoughtfully, “I suppose so,” and after that they will walk on in silence, both slightly swinging their arms as they go.
Their conversation with Mrs. Fazackerly was afterwards repeated to Claire by Aileen Kendal. They found her with her head tied up in a becoming purple and white check handkerchief, and wearing a purple and white check cotton frock with short sleeves, turning out her spare room.
She does a great deal of her own house-work, and always does it very well.
“You’ve got on a very smart frock,” said Aileen, whose tone is always disparaging, not from any ill-will, but because it is the Kendal habit to make personal remarks, and to give them a disparaging inflection.
Mrs. Fazackerly, who is used to this, said that she had made the frock herself, and it washed well, and wouldn’t they sit down.
“Thanks. Mumma wanted to know when your paying guest is coming and if you’d like to bring him up to play tennis one afternoon, and if so, when?”
Thus, untroubled by subtleties of diplomacy, did Miss Kendal accomplish her mission.
Mrs. Fazackerly, with equal straight forwardness, selected a date about a week after Captain Patch’s expected arrival, and at once wrote the engagement down in a little book.
“I am delighted with him, you know,” she said. “You’ll all like him — such a nice fellow.”
“What sort of age is he?” asked Dolly Kendal suddenly.
“Twenty-six,” said Mrs. Fazackerly with precision. The Kendal twins, on their way home again, dispassionately remarked one to another that they thought Captain Patch would have been older.
“It’s perfectly proper, of course, because of her old father.”
“Good gracious, yes. Besides, what is Nancy Fazackerly? At least as old as Amy.”
“That would make her thirty-three.”
“She looks younger than that, doesn’t she? It’s funny to think of her having been married, and gone out to India and lost her husband all inside five years, and come back again to this dead-alive place after all.”
“Oh, well,” said Aileen, with the philosophy due to other people’s troubles, “I daresay she’ll manage to struggle along somehow, like the rest of us.”
The Kendals, who seldom know cheerful anticipations, were more surprised than anybody when their own predictions as to the gain of an additional man to Cross Loman were realised.
Captain Patch was a tall, copper-headed young man, who gazed with a certain beaming friendliness at everybody, out of very short-sighted brown eyes from behind a powerful pair of thick lenses. He had something of the happiness, and the engaging ugliness, of a young Clumber spaniel.
As Mrs. Fazackerly had told us he would, he got on well with everybody.
It was at the Dheera Dhoon tennis party that he was first introduced to the neighbourhood. The Kendals were evidently rather glad of that, when they saw how very popular Mrs. Fazackerly’s paying guest seemed likely to become.
“I think you met him at our house, didn’t you?” they said firmly, when Sallie Ambrey, in her casual way, spoke as though she and Martyn had known the newcomer for years.
After a time, it became known that Captain Patch was writing a novel.
“He writes, I believe,” we told one another, with a tremendous and mysterious emphasis, quite as though nobody else in Cross Loman had ever got beyond pothooks and hangers.
“Of course, he’ll put us all into his book,” said Mrs. Kendal, with her large, tolerant smile. “We expect that. Novelists are always on the look-out for what they call copy, we know.”
Mrs. Fazackerly, closely interrogated, admitted that she knew Captain Patch was writing, but that he did not seem to require quiet, or solitude, or even a writing-table. Quite often, he sat under the pink may-tree on the circular bench in the garden, with a pencil and a small note-book. At intervals he wrote in the note-book, and at intervals he talked to Father. He did not seem to mind interruptions.
“Come, come,” said the Kendals, rather severely, at this. They knew better than that, even though authors had been hitherto unknown in Cross Loman. But then Mrs. Fazackerly’s statements were never to be relied upon.
“She likes to put herself forward,” was the trenchant verdict of the Kendals. “I don’t believe she knows anything at all about his writing. She only wants to sound as though she did.”
They did not say this at all unkindly. It is the natural instinct of them all, from Puppa and Mumma downwards, to adopt, and voice, a disparaging view of humanity.
They did not, however, disparage Captain Patch. They liked him.
Everyone liked him, even Mrs. Fazackerly’s father.
To those who do not employ the filial euphemisms always made use of by his daughter, Father appears as an aged, unreasonable bully, who is known to have driven his daughter into an improvident marriage. It is supposed that Mrs. Fazackerly elected to return to her parent’s house after her widowhood for reasons of finance, and quite a number of people that summer frequently informed other people that she would certainly marry again at the earliest opportunity. An impression gradually began to prevail that the opportunity might be at hand. The Kendals steadfastly reiterated: “He’s years younger than she is,” but they said it without very much conviction.
Only Sallie Ambrey declared that Captain Patch was not, and never could be, attracted by Mrs. Fazackerly.
“But why not, Sallie? Do you know anything about it, or is it just that you like putting yourself forward?”
“It’s a case of using my powers of observation,” said Sallie, perfectly indifferent to the uncomplimentary form of the Kendals’ characteristic inquiry. “He is nice to everyone, but he’s a hopeless and temperamental romantic, and I believe he’s one of the few men I’ve ever met who is capable of a grande passion.”
“What can you know about it?” murmured Dolly, almost automatically.
“As for Mrs. Fazackerly, I don’t believe she’d inspire anyone with a grande passion, and I’m certain she’d have no use for one herself. She’s essentially practical, and he is essentially an idealist.”
“I agree with you about her, of course,” Martyn said to his sister, “but I admit that you’ve gone further than I should be prepared to go about him. You may be right, of course. To me, he’s simply a curiously straightforward, rather primitive, person, with limited powers of self-expression. Take his writing, for instance—”
“Oh, if you’re going to talk about books, we’ll be off,” said Aileen Kendal hastily.
The disappearance of the Kendals, however, was scarcely noticed by Sallie and Martyn, who are always perfectly content to talk vigorously to one another.
Ear
ly in June, Christopher Ambrey, Claire’s brother, came home from China. Mary, Sallie, Martyn and I all endeavoured by various means, direct in my own case, and indirect in that of the others, to persuade Claire not to go to the docks to meet his ship.
“Why not?” said Christopher’s only sister, her voice trembling.
She knew very well why not, and so did we, but nobody had the courage to say brutally that it was because she could not be trusted not to make, a minor scene.
In the end she remained at home, excited and restless, while the car was sent to the station. Before it returned, one felt fairly certain that Claire, walking aimlessly all over the house, had mentally received and opened several telegrams respectively announcing Christopher’s death, a fatal accident to the train, his arrest and imprisonment in London, and the immediate cancellation of his leave. Also that she had held several imaginary conversations with her brother of so dramatic a character that she found herself bewildered and trembling when Christopher actually arrived, and said nothing more sensational than —
“Well, Claire — this is splendid—” one of the non-committal cliches of which he so frequently makes use, and which always fall like cold water upon poor Claire’s emotionalism.
She herself has a keen, if exaggerated, feeling for le mot juste in any situation, but this is shared by none of her family, except Mary, and Mary’s words, at any time at all, are very few, and Claire naturally does not attach to them the importance that she does to her brother’s.
Christopher and Claire, the only children of their parents, are both of them victims of Christopher’s reaction from Claire’s temperamental excessiveness. He once told me that even as a little boy, he had known himself unable to live up to his worshipping sister’s demands upon a degree of sensitiveness and intelligence that he did not possess. She had tried passionately to shield him from spiritual hurts that he would never have felt, and to exercise nursery influence over him long after he had outgrown the nursery. Her vicarious sufferings when Christopher first went to school must have been of dimensions that never came within the range either of Christopher’s limited imagination, or of his experience.
He is uneasily, gratefully, and resentfully fond of his sister when he is away from her, and it is, I think, always on his conscience that he never quite manages to read the whole of the immensely long and rather illegible letters that she writes him — but when they are together Claire makes Christopher feel self-conscious and inadequate.
I am sorry for Claire. She spends her life and her strength in making the wrong demands on the wrong people. In middle life she still retains all the passionate desire of youth to be wholly understood. It has never yet occurred to her that, in the majority of human relationships, it is still more desirable not to be wholly understood.
When Christopher comes home on leave, she is as wildly and pathetically excited as though he were not one of the most real and poignant disappointments of her life.
And yet her bitter resentment of Christopher’s emotional inadequacy occupies her mind for hours and hours and days and nights, and fills pages of her diaries and reams of her notepaper, besides forming a sort of standing item in the list of miseries with which it is her nightly habit to keep herself awake.
(Like all neurasthenics, Claire is always complaining of sleepless nights.)
Christopher, having spent part of each of his previous furloughs with us, is always looked upon as belonging to Cross Loman, and the welcome accorded to Captain Patch was of course extended also to him by the whole neighbourhood.
It was I who suggested, tactlessly enough, that Mary and her children should come up to dinner on the evening after Christopher’s arrival.
Claire’s enormous dark eyes were turned upon me with tragic reproachfulness.
“His second evening with me? They can come next week, if they like.”
Unfortunately, before the close of his first evening with her, Christopher said: “Why didn’t you have Mary and the two kids here? Let’s walk down and see them after dinner.”
“Certainly,” said Claire, her lips compressed, her spirit descended into fathomless depths of depression. But Christopher, the sturdy and, to be honest, rather stupid Christopher, has no clue to Claire’s mercurial sensitiveness. When she is most profoundly wounded by his matter-of-factness, Christopher regards her pregnant silence and her tragic eyes as an all-too-common phenomenon which he describes as “Old Claire being a bit put-out about something or other.”
“Mary’s children have grown up, you know,” I said to Christopher. “Martyn’s twenty-one, and Sallie is now a medical student. She wants to specialise, eventually, as a psycho-analyst.”
“Is she clever?” said Christopher, astounded.
“Very.”
Claire did not look delighted.
“I’m not so sure, Miles, that Sallie is really very clever. She’s sharp, in a way, and of course she thinks herself tremendously clever, but all that talk, and the opinionative way in which she lays down the law doesn’t impress me very much. Sallie and Martyn are both crude in many ways.”
“But is Sallie really going to be a lady-doctor?”
“So she thinks at present,” replied Claire, with a tolerant smile that I think relieved her feelings. “Girls have these wonderful opportunities, now-a-days. I’ve sometimes thought that if it had been possible, I ought to have gone in for that kind of career myself. I believe I’ve got a natural turn for that sort of thing.”
Claire almost always believes herself to possess a “natural turn,” whatever that phrase may denote, for any form of achievement in which she heard of someone else’s success. I am prepared to agree with her, within limits, but when it came to science, I could only preserve an indiscreet silence.
Claire, pathetically dependent on the appreciation of other people, fathomed its meaning all too easily.
Her gloom deepened.
“Youth, to-day, has opportunities such as we never dreamed of,” she said, and then looked still more dissatisfied. And indeed she detests a truism, and is not often guilty of uttering one.
“Opportunities? I’m sure I can’t think why a pretty girl like Sallie should want opportunities of cutting up dead rabbits and things,” said Christopher simply. “Morbid rot, I call it.”
III
CHRISTOPHER had been with us for rather more than a week, when the concert arranged by Lady Annabel took place at the Drill Hall. We all went, and were given seats in the front row, with the Ambreys and the Rector and Lady Annabel. Immediately behind us sat Mrs. Fazackerly, with Captain Patch and two Kendals. Two more Kendals, with Puppa, Mumma and poor old Ahlfred, were just in front.
“We couldn’t get seats all together. I was so vexed about it,” said Mrs. Kendal, with her usual emphasis. “Aileen and Dolly are sitting with Mrs. Fazackerly, which is very nice indeed, of course, but we should like to have sat all together. Ahlfred is at home for his holiday, and it would have been nicer if we’d all been together. A very poor programme, isn’t it? What do they mean by ‘Mrs. Harter, Song’? Who is Mrs. Harter? Puppa, do you know who Mrs. Harter is?”
“Never heard of her in my life.”
Undeterred by a certain ungraciousness in the reply, Mumma addressed the same question collectively to Amy, to Blanche, and to Alfred. Unenlightened by them, she gazed wistfully at the inaccessible twins, and then remarked with stony pertinacity —
“It would have been nicer to have had seats all together. I wonder if Aileen or Dolly knows who Mrs. Harter is. I could have asked them, if we’d all been sitting together. I must say, I do wish we could have got seats all together.”
I explained Mrs. Harter to her.
“Oh! The daughter of old Ellison, and she married and went to India. I always say,” Mrs. Kendal rejoined, with that mingled emphasis and absence of relevance which characterises so many of her remarks, “I always say, that the world is a very small place after all. Puppa, do you hear that? This Mrs. Harter, who is put down on the programme a
s Song is the daughter of old Ellison, who married and went to India, Sir Miles says. I suppose that means she’s come back from abroad.”
“Her husband is a solicitor in Singapore, I’m told,” said the Rector.
“Oh, I see!” said Mumma, so emphatically that it seemed quite a visual achievement. “I see. We had some dear friends in India, who went on to Singapore, once, and they liked it very much. The wife, I’m sorry to say, was drowned in a boating accident there. That rather spoiled their stay.”
It seemed almost unnecessary to agree with so self-evident a probability, and only Sallie Ambrey murmured to herself—” Oh, surely not!” and then giggled inaudibly.
Then Lady Annabel Bending came in, and we all clapped, not only because she was the promoter and organiser of the concert, but because she had, as usual, so obvious an air of expecting it.
Lady Annabel cannot forget her Government House days. She occasionally alludes to her present husband as “H.E.” and then corrects herself and says “The Rector, I mean,” and on entering a public place, such as Church, she has a curious way of bowing her head graciously from side to side as she slowly walks to her place.
Where she is, one looks for a red carpet. Lady Annabel is a small woman, but she dresses beautifully and carries herself with great distinction. In many ways she resembles the late Queen Victoria.
She received the applause with bows, and a slight, grave smile and then mounted the platform and gave us a short speech, to which I confess that I did not listen very attentively.
The usual Cross Loman entertainment followed. We have, for the most part, fathomed one another’s talents by this time, from the piano solo with which Miss Emma Applebee begins, to the “Imitations” given by young Plumer, the butcher’s assistant.
. With your kind permission, I will now give a rendering of a small boy reciting Six ‘Undred at ‘is mother’s party... Imitation of an ‘en that ‘as just laid an egg... I will now conclude with a short sketch of my own, entitled ‘The Baby in the ‘Bus’..
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 239
