Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “To-morrow, then? I’ll be outside the Belsize Park station, and we’ll go on the razzle-dazzle together. I’d like to show you a bit of life. Seven o’clock, mind.”

  “You and your seven o’clock! You’ll be somewhere with your young lady, I know.”

  “Haven’t got one.”

  “Wouldn’t she have you?” scoffed Elsie. “No accounting for tastes, is there?”

  “I’ll make you pay for this to-morrow night, you little witch — see if I don’t!”

  Elsie had caught hold of her suitcase, and began to walk away from him.

  “Which number are you going to?”

  “Eight.”

  “I’ll ring the bell for you.”

  He did so, rather to her fright and vexation. She urged him in low tones to go away, but he continued to stand beside her on the doorstep, laughing at her annoyance, until a capped and aproned maid opened the door.

  Then he lifted his hat, said “Good-night “ very politely, and went away.

  She never saw him again.

  IV

  Elsie found the life at 8, Mortimer Crescent, a pleasant contrast to that of her own home.

  Mrs. Woolley herself never came downstairs before half-past nine or ten o’clock, and then she was very often only partly dressed, wearing a stained and rumpled silk kimono and a dirty lace-and-ribbon-trimmed boudoir cap. Elsie’s only duty in the morning was to keep the two children quiet while their mother slept. This she achieved by the simple expedient of letting them go to bed so late at night that they lay like little logs far on into the morning.

  Elsie shared a bedroom with Gladys, and Sonnie’s cot was in a dressing-room opening into theirs.

  The children were rather pallid and unwholesome, never quite free from colds or coughs, and seeming too spiritless even to be naughty. They went to a kindergarten school from eleven to four o’clock every day, and Elsie took them there and fetched them away again.

  During the daytime she was supposed to dust the dining-room, drawing-room, and Mrs. Woolley’s bedroom, but she soon found out that no accumulation of dust, cigarette ends, or actual dirt would ever be noticed by the mistress of the house.

  There was a general servant, who was inclined to resent Elsie’s presence in the house, and who left very soon after her arrival. Another one came, and was sent away at the end of a week’s trial because Mrs. Woolley said she was impertinent, and after an uncomfortable interim, during which Elsie nominally “did” the cooking, and they lived upon tinned goods and pressed beef, there came a short-lived succession of maids who never stayed.

  At first, Doctor Woolley was seldom seen by Elsie. He went out early, and both he and his wife were out nearly every night.

  Mrs. Woolley told Elsie that they adored the theatre. Elsie, who adored it too, had on these occasions, after putting the two children to bed, to remain sulkily behind while Dr. and Mrs. Woolley, after an early meal, walked away together to the Underground station. Sometimes Dr. Woolley was sent for, and could not go, and Mrs. Woolley rang up one of her friends on the telephone — always another woman — and took her instead. One evening after this had happened, the doctor returned unexpectedly early, just as Elsie had finished putting Gladys and Sonnie to bed.

  She was coming downstairs, some needlework in her hands, as the doctor slammed the hall door behind him. Instantly the prospect of a dreary evening, probably to be spent in sucking sweets and surreptitiously looking over everything on Mrs. Woolley’s untidy writing-table, disappeared.

  “Hallo! And how was you to-morrow, Miss Elsie?” cried the doctor genially.

  He was a stout, middle-aged man, jocose and very often foul-mouthed, with nicotine stains on his fingers and grease spots on his waistcoat.

  He affected a manner of speech that Elsie found intensely amusing.

  “You and I all on our ownie own, eh? Where’s the missus? — and the kids?”

  “The children are in bed, and Mrs. Woolley’s gone to the play with Miss Smith, Doctor.”

  “And haven’t you got a drink of cocoa and a bit of bread for a poor man, kind lady?”

  Elsie burst out laughing. “You’re so silly, I can’t help laughing!”

  “‘Silly,’ says she, quite the lady. ‘ How’s that? ‘ says I; to which she says, ‘ Not at all,’ says she, and the same to you and many of them,” was the doctor’s reply.

  Elsie giggled wildly.

  “Come along now, tell that slut in the kitchen to stir her stumps and bring some food to the dining-room. Have you had your supper yet?”

  “No, Doctor.”

  “Then you and I will make a party-carry, otherwise a tête-à-tête, otherwise a night of it. Run along and I’ll get out something that will make your hair curl.”

  Elsie had heard this formula before, and understood that the doctor would unlock the door of the tiny wine- cellar and bring out a bottle.

  She told the maid to bring supper for Doctor Woolley to the dining-room, but she herself carried in her own plate and cup and saucer, knowing that Florrie was quite aware she had already eaten her evening meal with Mrs. Woolley.

  The doctor was drawing the cork out of a bottle as she came into the room. The electric light was turned on, and the small dining-room, with drawn red curtains, and the gas-fire burning, was bright and hot.

  The doctor ate heavily of cold meat and pickles, prodding with a fork amongst the mixed contents of the glass jar until he had annexed all the pickled onions that it contained.

  He made Elsie sit down and eat too, but he made no demur to her assurance that she wasn’t hungry and only wanted some cake and a cup of cocoa.

  At first the doctor gave all his attention to the food and warmth of which he stood in need, and Elsie felt self-conscious, and as though she were out of place.

  She ceased to answer his occasional facetious interjections, and threw herself back in her chair, gazing down at her own clasped hands.

  Gradually the atmosphere of the room altered, and Elsie’s instinct told her that the current of magnetism that had never failed her yet was awakening its inevitable response in the man opposite.

  At once she felt confident again, and at her ease.

  “I say, why didn’t the missus take you to the theatre when she found I was busy?” he queried suddenly.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I suppose she never thought of such a thing.”

  “Wanted someone nearer her own age, eh? You won’t find the ladies running after someone younger and prettier than themselves, you know. Too much of a contrast.” Elsie laughed self-consciously.

  “All the better for me, eh? I’m not often allowed to get you all to myself like this, eh? Ah, when I was a gay young bachellore things was different, they was.” Elsie laughed again, this time in spontaneous tribute to the humour of wilful mispronunciation.

  “Now, what about this bottle that you made me get out, eh? Where are the glasses?”

  He found two in the cupboard of the carved walnut sideboard, and poured a liberal allowance of port from the bottle into each.

  “Oh, I couldn’t, Doctor! You must excuse me, really you must. I simply couldn’t.”

  “Oh, couldn’t you, really, awfully, truly couldn’t?” he mimicked in exaggerated falsetto. “Well, you’ve got to — so that’s that!”

  “Who says so?”

  “I say so. I. Moi. She replies I, knowing the language. Come along now, be a good girl.”

  He laid his big coarse hand on hers, and at the contact the familiar thrill of sensuous excitement and pleasure ran through her.

  “Are you going to drink it?” he said masterfully.

  “Oh, I suppose I must try it. I’ve never tasted wine before,” Elsie added truthfully.

  “High time you began, then.”

  He went back to his place, and drank in long gulps, first saying:’

  “Our hands have met — our lips not yet — Here’s hoping!”

  Elsie sipped at her glass, choked, and put it down again. How beastly!�
� she said, shuddering.

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “No, I shan’t, because I’m not going to touch the horrid stuff again.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  He came round beside her again, and held her with one arm while he tried to force the glass to her lips.

  Elsie turned her head aside, struggling and laughing.

  “You young monkey!” said the doctor, and forced her face upwards with his free hand.

  His breath was in her face, and his inflamed eyes gazing into hers. Instinctively Elsie ceased to struggle and closed her eyes.

  He kissed her mouth violently. “God! You haven’t got much to learn. Who’s been teaching you?” he asked her roughly.

  “Oh, you oughtn’t to have done that,” said Elsie feebly.

  “Rubbish! You know I’ve been thinking of nothing else since you’ve been here.”

  He sat down and pulled her on to his knee. “Now tell me all about it,” he commanded. His manner was no longer facetious, and he had dropped his jocosities of speech.

  “Let me go,” said Elsie.

  “Sit still.”

  “Suppose someone were to come in?”

  “No one will.”

  She wriggled a little, half-heartedly, and he gripped her more firmly round the waist. The scene degenerated into a sort of scrambling orgy of animalism.

  Elsie, although she was frightened, was also exhilarated at the evidence that she possessed power over a man — and a married man — so much older than herself.

  She knew that if at any moment he became unmanageable, she had only to threaten to call the servant, and she fully intended to do so as a last resort. But in the meanwhile there was an odd and breathless fascination in feeling that she stood so close to a peril in which lay all the lurking excitement of the unknown.

  A sudden wail from the room overhead startled them both.

  “That’s Sonnie!” gasped Elsie.

  “Oh, blast the kid!”

  But he let her go and she flew upstairs, glad, and yet disappointed, at her release.

  She dismissed Sonnie’s nightmare with sharp injunctions not to be silly, tucked him up and decided to go to her own room and not to return downstairs.

  “That’ll show him,” she murmured, simulating to herself a conventional indignation.

  In reality, she was intensely excited, and she had been tossing about her bed restlessly for nearly an hour before reaction overtook her, and she became prey to a strange, baffled feeling of having been cheated of the climax due to so emotional an episode.

  When at last Elsie slept, it was after she had heard Mrs. Woolley come in and the doctor bolt the hall door and both of them go upstairs to their bedroom, on the other side of the landing.

  Every day now held the potentialities of amorous adventure.

  Sometimes Elsie did not see the doctor all day long, sometimes they met in the evenings, with Mrs. Woolley present, and he talked in the old facetious style, watching Elsie furtively as she giggled in response.

  He very often made excuses for passing things to her at meals, so that their hands touched, and he pressed her foot under the table with his big one, or rubbed it up and down her ankle.

  There were moments, however, when they were alone together, and then he pulled her to him and kissed her roughly all over her face and neck, pushing her abruptly away at the first possibility of interruption. Once or twice, at the imminent risk of being discovered, he had snatched hasty and provocative kisses from her lips in a chance encounter on the stairs, or even behind the shelter of an open door.

  The perpetual fear of detection, no less than the tantalising incompleteness of their relations, was a strain upon Elsie’s nerves, and she was keyed up to a pitch of unusual sensitiveness when the inevitable crisis came.

  Mrs. Woolley, in a new blue dress that looked too tight under the arms, had taken the children to a party.

  The maid Florrie was out for the afternoon. Elsie, restless and on edge, terribly wanted an excuse to go down to the surgery. At last she found one, and after listening at the door to make certain that no belated patient was with the doctor, she knocked.

  “Come in!”

  He was sitting at the writing-table, rapidly turning over the leaves of a big book.

  “Elsie!”

  “Oh, if you please, Doctor,” she minced, “they’ve all gone out, and Mrs. Woolley left a message to say if you could go and fetch her and the children from 85, Lower Park Avenue, about seven o’clock”

  “Stow it, Elsie! D’you mean to say you and I are the only people left in the place? Where’s that damned slut in the kitchen, eh?”

  “It’s Florrie’s afternoon out, Doctor, but—”

  “Florrie be damned! Look here, Elsie, this sort of thing can’t go on.”

  She backed until she stood against the wall, feeling the warm blood surge into her face and looking at him through half-closed eyelids.

  “What sort of thing?”

  “You know very well what I mean. Look at me. D’you think I’m a man?”

  He thrust out his chest and doubled up his arms, standing with his legs wide apart. In spite of his grossness and unwholesome fat, Elsie thrilled to the suggestion of his masculine strength.

  “Yes,” she murmured.

  “Well, I tell you no man’s going to stand what you’re making me stand. Elsie, you little devil! Don’t you know you’re driving me mad? God, if I could tell you the sort of dreams I get at night, now!”

  “About me?” she asked curiously.

  “Shut up!” His voice was savage, and she suddenly saw sweat glistening on his upper lip and round his nose.

  Elsie decided to begin to cry. “It frightens me when you shout at me like that. Perhaps I’d better go,” she said sobbingly.

  “No, no, no! I say, what a brute I am! Come here and be comforted, little girl.”

  He sat down heavily in the revolving chair before the writing-table and held out his hand.

  Elsie advanced slowly, without looking at him, until she came within reach of his arm. Then he caught hold of her and drew her on to his knee, gripping her tightly until her weight sank against his shoulder.

  “Let me kiss all the tears away. What a hound I am to make you cry! Was’ums very mis’mis?”

  He petted and soothed her, kissing the back of her neck and her dust-coloured curls, murmuring absurd, infantile phrases.

  Presently he whispered: “D’you love me?”

  ‘Elsie laughed and would not answer, and he struggled wit, her playfully, pulling her about, and grasping at her with his big hands.

  After the horse-play, she put both arms round his neck and lay still.

  “I want to know something,” said Doctor Woolley slowly.

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t you know more than a good little girl ought to know?”

  “What about?”

  “About — life. About being kissed, for instance. I’m not the first, my girl, not by a long, long way. You’re the sort that begins early, I know.”

  “You’ve a nerve!” Elsie ejaculated, not knowing what to say.

  “Well, it’s true what I’m saying, isn’t it? I mean, you’ve let fellows kiss you?”

  “Just boys, perhaps.”

  “Hasn’t anyone taught you anything besides kissing, eh?”

  “Of course not! What do you take me for, I’d like to know? Mother brought up me and my sister like ladies, let me tell you. Besides, I don’t know what you’re driving at. I’m sure.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then I’ll show you.”

  “No!” screamed Elsie in a sudden, only half-assumed, panic.

  She sprang up, but he pulled her back again.

  “You silly little fool! You don’t suppose I’d really say or do anything to frighten you, do you? Why, you’re much too precious.”

  He kissed her again and again.

  “
Tell me one thing, though. You did know what I meant, didn’t you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Of course you did! A girl like you couldn’t help knowing. My God, I wish I’d known you ten years ago. I wasn’t married then.”

  “You oughtn’t to talk like that.”

  “Why not? It’s true. Amy’s as cold as ice — not a real woman at all. And she’s as jealous as the devil. I’ve always wondered why she let anyone like you come into the house at all. It’s a miracle she hasn’t spotted us yet.”

  “It’d be all up with me being here if she did,” said Elsie shrewdly.

  “If you go, I swear I’ll go with you,” said Doctor Woolley, but he said it without conviction, and Elsie knew it. “Can’t do without you, little one, at any price, now. But you’ve got to be even sweeter than you’ve been to me yet.”

  Elsie shivered a little, excited and disturbed, and in part genuinely shocked.

  “When will you, Elsie?”

  His breath on her neck was hot and hurried.

  She jumped off his knee. “Oh, look, it’s getting on for half-past six! You’ll have to be off.”

  “Come back! You haven’t told me what I want to know yet.” He grabbed at her dress.

  “Listen!” cried Elsie.

  In the second during which he turned, arrested, she slipped out of the room.

  Her heart was beating very fast, and her face burning. She half expected him to follow her, but he did not do so; and she was partly relieved and partly disappointed.

  She saw him again at supper, which the Woolleys always called dinner, and the consciousness between them caused a singular constraint to pervade the atmosphere. Mrs. Woolley, for the first time, seemed to be aware of it, and every now and then turned sharp, bulging brown eyes from her husband to Elsie, compressing her thin lips until they formed a mere hard line in her red face.

  When the meal was finished, she told Elsie to go upstairs and fetch one of her evening dresses. “I want to see if I can’t smarten it up a bit,” she explained. “I’m in rags, not fit to be seen.”

  “I’ll stand you a new frock, Amy,” said the doctor suddenly. “How much d’you want, eh?”

  “Oh! Why, whatever’s up, Herbert? I’m sure it’s ages since I’ve had a thing, and I’d be only too delighted”