“Bay-Bay’s young man? His nose is well out of joint, now.”
“I do not personally believe that it was ever in joint,” replied Christine imperturbably. “I was walking across the Park, and I met Losh — you remember that medical student who was here the other night — the one who’s keen about sexual aberrations, you know — so we sat down under the trees, and he began to tell me about some unfortunate creature with Habits, and how perfectly splendid it was to think what a lot of cases there were simply waiting to be investigated, and presumably cured — when he said, ‘There’s a man I haven’t seen for years! May I go and speak to him?’
“Naturally, I thought anybody in whom Losh took an interest would be a freak and a degenerate — and then I saw Vulliamy and remembered him perfectly.”
“Let me see, was he good-looking?”
“Quite.”
“Did he remember you?”
“He at least had the decency to pretend that he did. And we’re going to do a theatre — you and I and Losh and him — he. It’s his party, of course. Shall you mind, Laura? Losh is really quite amusing, in his own way.”
“I’m glad you said ‘in his own way,’” Laura remarked, remembering the conversation of Losh.
She was inwardly amazed at the purely fortuitous fashion in which Christine so frequently collected the invitations of young men.
At Quinnerton there were not, and never had been, any young men, and Laura supposed — without realising that the supposition was now out of date — that since the war there had been no young men in London either.
“He’s going to ring me up, about where we’ll dine and what he can get tickets for. Tuesday — that’s two nights before you go home. Though if you can stay longer, darling, I should simply love it.”
“I can’t — possibly,” said Laura. “The children. And besides—”
“I see,” said Christine.
Laura hoped, and believed, that Christine did not see, in any very extensive sense.
The days were passing, she was meeting Duke Ayland daily, and still she failed to achieve that dispassionate facing of the situation that she so frequently promised herself.
Duke Ayland’s society had an effect upon Laura that she considered strange and unusual. His companionship stimulated her, she was happy and at her ease with him, prompted to an unreserve the depth of which constituted a spiritual luxury, and fully conscious that her own effect upon him was exactly similar.
His admiration gave her a sense of expansion. He thought her wonderful, and it was so long since anyone had thought such a thing, that any latent possibilities of wonderfulness in Laura had almost died, from sheer inanition. Duke had revived them.
She had been told the story of his life, in which actual events had apparently counted for little, and psychological reactions for much.
In return, she had unrolled for him the history of her days up to the year of her marriage, emphasising the two rather bloodless love affairs that alone could be mustered from the past — for Laura had been a person of romantic imaginings rather than actual contacts.
She wanted to speak of her marriage, she passionately wanted to be honest about it, but she had a sense of obligation to Alfred, and a Victorian conviction that Duke Ayland would think the better of her for conforming to its conventions.
One evening, dining with him alone, she fell.
“You’ve never told me about your marriage, Laura?” said Duke Ayland.
“No.”
“I wish you would.”
“It’s so difficult,” murmured Laura, her heart throbbing violently. “I’ve often thought of it—”
“Surely you can say anything to me?”
“Yes. It’s only — I’m very fond of Alfred,” said Laura, taking the plunge, and temporarily unaware that almost all wives begin conversations about almost all husbands in precisely the same way.
“I know you are.”
“I don’t think we were ever desperately in love with one another, but I know he’s devoted to me, in his own way — and so am I to him. And there are the children, of course.”
“Yes,” said Ayland, with a different intonation. “There are the children, I know.”
“I admit that if we hadn’t had children, I might have felt rather — lonely, sometimes.”
“You see,” Ayland said, without looking at her, “you and he haven’t really got very much in common, have you?”
“I suppose not.”
Laura felt this simple statement of simple fact to be the crossing of the Rubicon.
“I can’t possibly discuss Alfred, or my relation to Alfred, with you or anybody,” she exclaimed unhappily.
“I think I know exactly how you feel about it. But do you think that so much repression is really good for you or for your writing — and after all, your work does matter.”
“But does it?”
“It’s your form of self-expression, besides being a thing that’s valuable — because it’s sincere — in itself. I should say it mattered very much indeed.”
“It is really quite a new idea to me,” said Laura, without any affectation, “that my writing matters anything at all.”
Duke Ayland smiled.
“You’re the only writer I’ve ever met who thought that about their own work. If it was anyone in the world but you, I should say it was a pose.”
“It isn’t.”
“I know that. You’re incapable of posing.”
Laura experienced the double gratification of receiving a tribute, and of knowing it to be one that she did not always entirely deserve.
“It isn’t even as though I’d married when I was very young,” she irrelevantly observed.
“In some ways, my dear, you’re very young now — and always will be. I don’t know what it is, exactly — I can’t find the word I want — not exactly ‘unawakened’—” He paused, and Laura felt herself blushing.
Partly because she detested so démodée and unsuitable a manifestation of her feelings, and partly from pure nervousness, she dashed into speech.
She spoke very low and rapidly, and with astonishing vehemence.
In something under seven minutes, she had released what Duke Ayland called the repressions of more than seven years. She had put into words resentments, regrets, despairs, and madly romantic ideals that she had never yet had the courage to acknowledge even to herself. She had cast loyalty to the winds. She had, indeed, forgotten Alfred as a man altogether. He was one with her immense, her unique, grievance against life itself.
Ever since she had awakened to conscious values, Laura had wanted, and expected to find, such things as happiness, companionship, and perfect love. Her grievance was that she had not found them.
When, in the course of years, it had been borne in upon her that she was not destined to succeed in her quest, she had found it impossible to accept defeat. She had cast from her mind any recollections that could evoke the thought of happiness, companionship and perfect love.
She had immersed herself in domestic problems of which the solution brought her neither joy nor triumph.
Instead of suffering, she had developed an irritable temper, and the habit of waking daily to a mild depression. Instead of happiness, she had experienced a timorous relief on discovering new servants to take the place of departing ones, and a trivial satisfaction when her accounts showed a balance on the credit side.
Spiritually and mentally, she had remained static for years. Emotionally, she had ceased to exist.
Laura, in effect, told Duke Ayland everything of which he had himself made her aware.
There was silence when she had finished. A revulsion of feeling overwhelmed her.
“Whatever he says, I shall hate it,” she thought, in despair.
Ayland, without saying anything at all, put his hand gently over her clenched ones, and looked at her.
He did not speak a word, and Laura translated his silence into the response for which any words must have been inadequ
ate. It stood to her for the complete sympathy and understanding that her whole being craved. Rapture and gratitude flooded her soul, and in that illuminated moment, she acknowledged to herself, without shame or dismay, that she was in love.
It neither frightened nor surprised her when Duke Ayland that evening told her that he loved her.
It had become inevitable.
He took her back to Bloomsbury and Christine was out.
“May I come in and wait till she gets in?”
“Yes,” said Laura, almost inaudibly.
Christine’s small sitting-room was very quiet, high above such traffic as passed through the square, and lit only by the small, scarlet-shaded electric lamp on the writing-table. Laura, intolerably conscious of the emotional tension in the atmosphere, murmured something about another light, and broke the spell.
“Wait,” said Duke. “Darling, you know I love you, and I’m going to tell you so.”
She stood stock still on the instant, and faced him.
“Laura, Laura — say you love me.”
The knowledge that romance had found her, after all, affected Laura so extraordinarily that she nearly fainted. Actually, she swayed slightly towards Ayland, and he caught her in his arms and held her to him.
Blindness and ecstasy descended upon Laura as they kissed.
CHAPTER XI
“What Are We going to do?” said Ayland, next day.
(He had previously been saying other things, far more agreeable to Laura than this inevitable, but difficult, enquiry.)
They were sitting in Kensington Gardens, within sight of the Albert Memorial, and Laura gazed earnestly at it before replying, as though seeking counsel of Albert the Good, so straightforwardly domestic.
At last she said:
“I’ve been trying to think. It’s so difficult to be honest. I used to say that if ever I fell in love with anybody else, the first person I should tell would be Alfred.”
“I used to say that if ever I fell in love with another man’s wife I should either persuade her to come right away with me, or else go right away myself and never see her again.”
“The first alternative,” said Laura gently, “is obviously impossible.”
“The second one is much more so, darling.”
To hear such things said in Ayland’s deep and agreeable voice, reduced Laura to an exquisite and breathtaking silence.
“Will you come away with me, Laura?”
“I could never do that. The children—”
A pang went through her as she said the words, and an unbearably vivid image came before her mind’s eye of Johnnie and Edward at home. She could feel Johnnie’s silky curls under her hand.
It was inconceivable that she should have got to a stage where such a suggestion as that of her leaving them could have been made.
If that suggestion were possible, what else might not become possible? In a confused and irrational way, she seemed to see herself deserting the children, less by an act of free-will than by the working of some mysterious and oppressive fate, for the existence of which she was nevertheless responsible.
“You don’t understand,” said Laura violently, “that Johnnie — the boys — are the most important things in the world to me.”
“I do understand.”
“There could never be any question of my doing anything that would hurt them.”
“Perhaps some day — a long time hence, when they’re both grown up—”
“Perhaps,” said Laura gently, avoiding any inward calculation as to the tale of her own years at that remote period.
She was, in fact, relieved to have softened the edges of her impassioned negation. It reassured her, that Duke should know how inexorable was her decision, and his knowledge seemed to leave her more freedom. She wanted to be made love to more than she had ever wanted anything in her life.
“We could have had the most wonderful marriage if we’d met years ago,” she murmured.
Ayland’s response was as ardent, as detailed, as she had wanted it to be.
Whatever happened, or did not happen, Laura’s dreams had for a little while come true, and she knew it.
Ayland told her all those things about herself that she had most wished to believe, but had been forced to doubt since for so many years no one had appeared to perceive them. Under the magic of his words she could feel herself actually verifying them.
He found her beautiful, and courageous, and lovable and gifted — and she became so.
“I have never been alive before,” thought Laura, her mouth trembling.
They talked for hours.
Nothing that they said was new, except to themselves.
At last Ayland returned to that aspect of the case which Laura, even in her own thoughts, preferred to shelve.
“You know what you said, just now, about telling your husband. You don’t still feel that’s necessary, do you?”
“I can’t deceive him.”
In the silence that followed, Duke’s carefully unspoken retort seemed to become almost audible.
“You may say, what else am I doing now? — and you would be right. But I don’t know what I shall do when I see Alfred again. I’m going home in two days now.”
“But you’ll come up again?”
“I don’t know.”
“Laura, darling! Don’t you want to see me again?”
“I want to more than anything else in the world. Couldn’t you come down to Quinnerton again?”
“It’s very difficult for me to meet your husband,” said Ayland slowly.
“He didn’t dislike you, you know,” Laura said, experiencing a strange moment of pride that this should have been so.
“I didn’t dislike him, either. But of course he doesn’t understand you — he isn’t fit to be your husband. He has never known how to make you happy.”
“He’s very fond of me.”
“That makes it worse, because, being what you are, it will prevent your ever having the courage to break away.”
Laura shook her head.
“The children—”
They were back at the children again.
As though knowing that, against that bulwark of Laura’s virtue, there could be no assault that would avail anything, Ayland changed the subject. They talked, inexhaustibly, about themselves.
Laura, obliged at last to go back to the flat in Bloomsbury, felt that Christine must inevitably ask her what had happened. It was impossible, that the whole of life should have become transformed for her, and that she should show no sign of it.
But Christine, if she did see what appeared to her sister to be so unmistakable, made no comment.
She met Laura at the door and said, low and rapidly, in the domestic French employed by everybody and supposed to be entirely incomprehensible to everybody else:
“Il y a une femme qui attend, dedans. Envoyée par le Registry Office. Une nurse. Assez gentille.”
“Oh,” said Laura, startled.
It was very difficult, to be thus suddenly thrust back into the atmosphere, so familiar and yet now so remote, of nursery necessities.
“I’ll go to my room. You’ll see her in the sitting-room, won’t you?”
“Very well.”
Laura instinctively took the little mirror out of her handbag, powdered her nose, felt a moment’s astonished wonder at the shining of her eyes, and went in to interview the nurse.
She seemed much nicer than any other nurse that Laura had interviewed.
Gentle and pleasant, with a ready smile.
The violent anxiety that, on previous similar occasions, had led Mrs. Temple to urge upon the applicant’s notice every possible deterrent to the situation, was absent. Indeed, a kind of spiritual haze seemed to have interposed itself between Laura and reality.
She asked questions, she smiled, as though in a dream. Unprecedently, she heard herself saying: “So long as the little boys are kept well and happy, I don’t really mind…I like them to be happy.”
Happiness, she felt as never before, was the only thing that mattered.
It ought to be attainable by everyone.
The little books about Education, about Diet, and about Sex-Enlightenment of Children by their Mothers had faded away — insignificant ghosts of the past — she did not seek to extract the nurse’s views on these so important points.
She said:
“Have you satisfactory references?”
“I have them here, madam.”
Laura, still in a dream, read a letter on stamped blue paper, another one on expensive white with red lettering.
They seemed to be nice, enthusiastic letters.
Charlotte Emery was evidently a treasure.
She looked a treasure. Her kind, middle-aged face gazed at Laura as an older woman’s face does sometimes gaze at a younger one’s — with a touch of wistfulness, of un-envious admiration.
It was a very long while since Laura had met that look — but she recognised it unerringly. It was her own rejuvenation, her secret rapture, that had drawn it forth.
She engaged Charlotte Emery to come to Applecourt in a week’s time.
The anxious quest of so many days had been brought to a successful conclusion in half an hour.
“Well?” said Christine, when the nurse had gone.
“I’ve engaged her. I like her very much.”
“How splendid! You think she’ll be able to manage Johnnie?”
“Oh yes, I think so.”
Christine looked rather surprised at this unprecedented optimism.
“I never really think Johnnie is as difficult as you make out, you know. Of course, he’s terribly precocious, but he can be a perfect darling when he likes, and any nurse is sure to get fond of him.”
“They get fond of him more easily than he does of them. Johnnie has been so very much with me.”
“How excited the boys will be to get you home again!” said Christine.
Laura said with sudden passion: “Not half so excited as I shall be,” and went to her room. She wrote a letter to Alfred, telling him the things that she thought would interest him — there were not many of them — briefly announcing the satisfactory acquisition of Charlotte Emery, and giving the time of her own arrival at Quinnerton.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 292
