She felt sure of it.
At first she gave, or supposed that she gave, her attention to the music, but she was not sufficiently familiar with modern composers to feel at her ease in listening to their works, and it made her nervous to feel that at any moment she might expose her ignorance.
Then Christine took up a book.
And Duke Ayland looked round at his hostess.
It was a grave, almost enquiring look, and it established spiritual intimacy between them.
Laura had met similar looks, before, although never after, her marriage, and they had been the almost certain preliminary to emotional adventures.
Was it conceivable that Duke Ayland — Christine’s friend — sought to embark upon emotional adventure with her now?
Laura remembered her own reflections in the looking-glass that evening, and decided that, after all, it was not incomprehensible that a man should admire her.
She hoped, complacently, that Christine would not mind.
Then, invaded by a sudden recollection, she hoped — wistfully, indignantly, nervously and not even wholly sincerely — that Alfred would not mind.
CHAPTER VI
The relations between Laura and her husband were as contradictory and unbalanced as those between most husbands and wives. They had been reasonably in love with one another. Alfred was — or so Laura supposed — incapable of being unreasonably in love, and she herself had expended most of her capabilities for romance in purely imaginary directions. She had, in her maiden days, composed speeches to an ideal lover that would have astonished and disconcerted Alfred to a considerable extent, had she ever spoken them aloud.
But she never had, and had never seriously wished to, and in the course of seven years of child-bearing and rearing, housekeeping, writing stories to augment her income, and talking about the bulbs to her neighbours, Laura had almost forgotten that she had once thought herself destined for a grande passion.
It was obvious, beyond question, that Alfred was not destined for a grande passion, and, once married to him, with the children, the house, the furniture, and the weekly books, all alike depending on their combined union, Laura had not considered the possibilities of romance any further, in regard to herself.
She did, however, very frequently wish that Alfred would make love to her, or even, if that was too much to expect, that he would make personal remarks to her.
But Alfred did neither. As an English country gentleman, he preferred out-door pastimes, and he did not make personal remarks because he was not particularly interested in persons, and in any case preferred silence to speech.
Laura, occasionally, and desperately, forced discussion upon him. But the results were never really satisfactory.
“Alfred, have I changed much since we were married? I don’t mean to look at — of course, I know I look older—”
Alfred withheld either assent or dissent, and gazed thoughtfully at his wife over his spectacles.
“Do you think that I’m less — enthusiastic — less alive about things?” said Laura wistfully.
“I shouldn’t think so.”
“Sometimes I feel as though my mind had lost its spring.”
Alfred, obviously from pure kindness, did not pick up The Times again and go on reading it — but it trembled slightly in his hand.
“What would you do if I suddenly said I was desperately unhappy?”
“I suppose that I should ask you what the matter was,” Alfred replied reluctantly, and this time he raised The Times about six inches from his knee.
“Well, I’m not,” Laura admitted with a small laugh. “But I’m not sure that I don’t sometimes wish I were. It’s better to feel anything vividly than to feel nothing.”
“Is it?”
“Don’t you think so?”
“I haven’t thought about it.”
There was a pause, in which Laura faintly hoped that Alfred was thinking about it now, and might presently inaugurate a mutual exchange of opinions by the expression of his own.
Alfred slowly raised The Times altogether, and began to read it.
“I’m not as enthusiastic as I used to be. I don’t get roused in the same way,” cried Laura wildly. “Should you call me adventurous nowadays?”
“Not particularly, I daresay,” said Alfred, who had evidently forgotten having once applied this epithet to Laura in the days when he sought to persuade her to marry him.
“Alfred, do you love me?” Laura insanely demanded, not because she doubted her husband’s affection, but because her desire to talk personalities had now passed the bounds of reason and decency alike.
“I shouldn’t have married you if I didn’t,” said Alfred, and he now, without compunction, opened The Times extensively and became absorbed in its pages.
Such dialogues had occurred not infrequently, in seven years, and after each one of them Laura had tempestuously decided that it should never take place again. It was undignified — degrading even — and it was bitterly unsatisfactory.
But she could not check the cravings of her nature for romance altogether. She lavished an exaggerated affection on her younger son, who greatly resembled her, and she read an immense number of novels, half unconsciously identifying herself with the central figure in each.
She had never, since her marriage, attracted the amorous attention of any man, and had, indeed, met few men at all.
She had supposed that Duke Ayland was in love with Christine.
On the evening of her tennis party, she knew that he was not.
To her mingled shame and exultation, Laura was unable to go to sleep that night for quite a long while.
It was the first time for years that she had been kept awake by anything unconnected with the children, the servants, or the need of money.
It bewildered her, and made her happy. She rehearsed a drama, in which she and Duke Ayland fell victims to an uncontrollable passion for one another, and then parted after a long scene, in which…
“Oh my heavens — and I’m thirty-four years old!” moaned Laura, pressing her face into the pillow until she was nearly stifled, as the early-adolescent nature of these fantasies was borne in upon her with sudden, intolerable clarity.
Viewed in the morning, they seemed so very much more ridiculous, that it became impossible to view them at all, and they were added to the long list of things that Mrs. Temple would not permit herself to remember.
“To-day,” she said to Christine, “I shall call upon the Crossthwaites at Marchland. Will you come, or not?”
“I’ll see what Duke is doing,” Christine returned, with simplicity and candour.
In the course of the morning, Duke came up to Apple-court.
Laura saw him from the drawing-room window.
“Go out to him, Christine,” she told her sister. “And I think you’d better not ask him to lunch. It’s only the mutton, cold.”
“He won’t mind that,” said Christine, and she went out.
Laura sat at her writing-table, her back to the window, and wrote steadily:
“Please let me have two pounds of scrag-end by mid-day to-morrow, also three or four kidneys.”
And her mind, entirely unbidden, put to her the strange question:
“Does he ever kiss her?”
In Laura’s day — that Grecian-nymph period that now appeared so remote — to let oneself be kissed was something that classed one. There was the sort of girl who did let herself be kissed, and the sort of girl who didn’t — also, although not officially recognised, the sort of girl who didn’t, but who pretended that she did. Laura, herself, had spiritually hovered on the borderland between the first and the last of these.
In her years at Quinnerton, she had come to realise that this distinction was no longer a recognised one. But never had she understood it with the vivid apprehension of that morning, when Christine went out to meet Duke Ayland under the apple-trees.
They did not come into the house, and Laura remained motionless, with her pen transfixed immed
iately above the word “kidneys,” for some time.
There was a tap at the door.
“Come in!”
Miss Lamb, the daily governess, came in. She was a brisk, plain young woman, with a faux air of efficiency. In reality, she acted from intelligent impulses rather than from reasoned principles, and could attack a difficult situation better than she could sustain it.
“Do come in, Miss Lamb.”
“I’m so sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Temple,” said the governess, with a respectful glance at the writing-table. She was one of Laura’s rather limited number of admirers in the world of literature, and Laura instinctively drew the blotting-paper across the postcard to the butcher.
“It’s — I’m afraid — about Johnnie. I told him I should come to you. His disobedience, Mrs. Temple, really is beyond everything. Simply, he’s flatly defiant. And he makes Edward naughty, too.”
“He has so much more character than Edward,” Laura murmured.
“Oh, he has plenty of character”
“But of course,” said Laura, rousing herself, “it won’t do. I’m so very sorry, Miss Lamb. I know how tiresome he can be. What was it this time?”
A long indictment followed, in which Fauntleroy figured “…and fond as I am of animals, Mrs. Temple, a dog is a dog, and naturally has habits—” said Miss Lamb incontrovertibly. “So I told Johnnie I should give him extra lessons for that, and the result is that I have been able to do nothing with him all the morning. And it is such waste of time.”
“Shall I punish him?”
Miss Lamb’s face grew pink.
“I know one hates the idea. Perhaps if you spoke to him,” she suggested.
“Very well. Would you send him here, at once?”
“Thank you, Mrs. Temple. And I’m so very sorry to have to worry you like this.”
Laura was sorry, too. She laid down her pen and assumed an expression of severity. Would Johnnie be cross, or injured, or tearful, or simply indifferent? In any case he would be what Laura’s little books spoke of as “difficult.”
The door opened.
Laura’s severe expression became more pronounced.
“Good-morning. Am I interrupting you?” said Duke Ayland. “Of course, I can see I’m interrupting you — but what I really mean is, mayn’t I go on doing it?”
His eyes, as well as his mouth, smiled at her.
Laura smiled in return, and felt her preoccupations mysteriously drop from her. Johnnie came into the room, with his most casual air.
“Did you want me, mummie?” his infantile tones guilelessly enquired.
Laura, unable to summon back her expression of severity, could at least dismiss her smile, and did so.
“Go and wait for me in my room upstairs,” she directed.
It was against the principles of the little books to let a child feel itself disgraced by rebuke in the presence of a stranger — but it was not this consideration only that prompted Laura’s forbearance.
She wished neither to drive Duke Ayland from the room, nor to appear before him in the light of a mere mother and housewife.
“In your bedroom?” said Johnnie with interest.
“Yes,” said Laura, disregarding the interest.
Her son departed with alacrity.
Ayland had seated himself upon the window-sill.
“I hope you’re writing, although if you are there’s even less chance of my being allowed to stay and talk — but I’ve always wanted to see a real live author at work.”
“I’m anything but a real live author,” Mrs. Temple declared, with the utmost sincerity. “I am writing to the butcher, if you want to know. Figuratively speaking, I always am writing to the butcher. My other sort of writing I have to do when I can — generally in the evenings after the children have gone to bed.”
“Do you mind?”
“I do, rather. When I meet people like A. B. Onslow, it makes me realise that there’s a world where books, and writing, and art, are things that matter. But, of course, you live in that world yourself.”
“That’s why I like the other better. One gets bored with people who take themselves, and their work, so terribly seriously all the time. Your sense of humour seems almost too good to be true.”
At this tribute Laura felt her sense of humour, which had certainly lain torpid most of the previous night and all the morning, reviving again.
She smiled.
“What was A. B. Onslow like?” enquired Ayland.
“His hair was dyed,” returned Laura thoughtfully.
“Was it?”
“Yes.”
Duke Ayland looked serious and even interested, but Laura suddenly woke to the inadequacy of her appraisement.
“He was very nice really, and a delightful conversationalist, and took the trouble to talk to me.”
“Do you know,” said Ayland abruptly, “that you have an inferiority complex?”
It was such a very long while since anybody had talked to Laura about herself, that she would have admitted to any complex in the world in order to prolong the process.
“Have I?” she said with great interest. “Tell me what makes you think so.”
They discussed Laura’s inferiority complex at some length — thereby considerably diminishing it.
“So that it’s perfectly absurd of you,” said Duke Ayland gently, in conclusion, “to speak of A. B. Onslow as though he was on some eminence right above your head. He ought to think himself extraordinarily lucky to have had the chance of meeting you.”
At this extravagance, Laura looked in sheer amazement at its originator, but he went on calmly:
“Where did you meet him? Does he often stay down here?”
“At Lady Kingsley-Browne’s. I thought he admired Bébée, the daughter — the girl who was here yesterday.”
“The six-foot high girl, who couldn’t take your service?” enquired Mr. Ayland.
“Yes,” said Laura shamelessly.
“And A. B. Onslow admired her?”
Ayland’s tone was reflective merely, but Laura deduced that his own predilections were not likely to follow the direction taken by those of the novelist.
She changed the conversation.
“Where is Christine?”
“She said she was going to the village.”
“Oh, didn’t you want to go with her?” exclaimed Laura ingenuously.
“I wanted to talk to you.”
This time their eyes met, and Laura, her heart suddenly beating faster, saw that Ayland’s were ardent, earnest and compelling.
She looked away again, after a long, strange moment, and said with great abruptness:
“I liked what you played to us last night.”
“I wanted you to like it. I’m glad you did.”
“Tell me something about your music, won’t you?”
She really wanted to hear, and she also wanted time to recover her own composure, severely shaken by a recrudescence of emotions that she had supposed herself to have long outgrown.
The clock struck twelve times, and Laura did not hear it.
But she heard the opening of the drawing-room door, and saw the rather timid, apologetic entrance of her elder son.
“Mummie,” said Edward— “How do you do, Mr. Ayland? I’m quite well, thank you — Mummie, Miss Lamb says, is Johnnie still being punished or can he come out with us?”
Laura leapt to her feet.
“Oh dear — I’ll be back in a minute — I’ve forgotten—” Dismayed and incoherent, she hurried upstairs.
For the first time in several years, Laura had suffered a temporary amnesia, and had ceased to be aware of her own motherhood. She was forcibly reminded of it as she entered her bedroom, where Johnnie, decked in the slender contents of his parent’s jewel-case, disposed of at random on his fingers, on the front of his holland overall, and round his legs and arms, sat absorbed in a small volume of Dr. Marie Stopes, that had been bestowed by Laura beneath a pile of her more intimate under
wear at the back of her chest of drawers.
“Johnnie! Where did you find that book?”
“In a drawer,” said Johnnie negligently.
“You shouldn’t open my drawers, as you very well know,” said Laura, restraining her violent inclination to snatch Dr. Marie Stopes away and merely detaching Johnnie’s grasp very gently.
“You were such a very long time coming. Need I be whipped now?” said Johnnie pathetically.
Laura found herself trying in vain to recall what his offence had been. At last she said:
“I never said I was going to whip you, Johnnie. I hope you’ve now had time to think over how badly you’ve behaved, and that you’ve made up your mind to be sensible and obedient for the rest of the day.”
“Yes,” said Johnnie, looking a good deal surprised and relieved.
“Then run along. Wait — take off those brooches and things.”
Johnnie obeyed, his fumbling gestures a good deal accelerated by his mother, who felt a nervous desire to have her duty accomplished, so that she might return downstairs.
When she did so, however, the spell was broken.
The atmosphere had altered, and Christine was leaning in at the open window, hatless and sunburnt and smiling.
“I’ve just told Duke that we’re going to pay calls this afternoon, and that he can do some work for a change. But couldn’t he stay to lunch, Laura ?”
“I hope so,” said Laura, all gracious hospitality.
“Thank you, I’d love to.”
“It’s a cold lunch — if you don’t mind—”
“I don’t mind—” Duke Ayland assured her — and’ he said it very convincingly indeed.
Just before the gong was sounded — Laura had never had a parlourmaid of the kind that announces lunch at the drawing-room door — Alfred Temple came in, glanced unfavourably at Ayland as he greeted him with a sound rather than a word, and went, as usual, to wash his hands as the clock struck one.
All through lunch, Laura had the unwonted feeling that she was being amusing, pretty, and thoroughly competent.
Even after Ayland had gone away, it persisted, and was not impaired by Alfred’s sardonic enquiry, addressed to Christine:
“Wouldn’t your young man like to come and live here, and save himself a daily walk?”
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