Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  Soon they were down stairs again, Christine transformed, in a frock that had been the subject of numberless conversations between herself and Laura, and an opulent nutria fur coat that Jeremy had given her as one of his wedding presents, and a little brimless blue hat with silver flowers that became her.

  The best man — now completely distinguishable from Jeremy, who had changed into a grey suit for travelling — was to see them off at the station.

  Laura, suddenly completely exhausted, felt that she desired nothing so much as to see all the guests depart instantly.

  But when they had done so, instead of thereupon becoming a person who could look as tired as she felt, Laura found that she was merely the mother of two thoroughly over-excited little boys. It was too early to put them to bed, there was no garden into which they could be sent, and nurse displayed a strong disinclination to take them for a walk “in all that traffic” as she perversely designated Laura’s suggestion of Kensington Gardens. Eventually, Laura sent her to pack and herself undertook the charge of Edward and Johnnie.

  Alfred had vanished.

  There was nothing to do except to answer the tireless questions of the boys, and to cudgel her brains until she could produce a story with which to amuse them.

  “Mummie, may we have wedding cake again for supper?”

  “No, darling, I’m afraid not.”

  Johnnie displayed unreasonable disappointment. At last they were both fetched away, to go to bed.

  Alfred, as mysteriously as he had vanished, reappeared.

  “Where have you been?”

  “I had to have a pipe,” said Alfred. “Did you say we were dining out?”

  “With the Vulliamys. I cannot imagine how we could ever have been such fools as to say we’d go,” sighed Laura.

  “I expect you’re tired. It’s always the same thing, when you have the boys on your hands.…”

  He spoke quite without rancour, but Laura, her nerves on edge, would have liked to scream.

  Screaming, however, then as always, was impracticable, and a fresh item was added to the already long list of the repressions so much regretted by Losh on behalf of Mrs. Temple.

  “I’d better go and dress,” she said instead.

  “Can we get off by the eleven o’clock train to-morrow?”

  “We decided on the one o’clock. I want to go to the Army and Navy Stores in the morning. There’ll just be time.”

  “All right.”

  Laura, without any shred of exultation left in her, contemplated the prospect of what must, in all probability, prove to be her last interview for an indefinite length of time, with Duke Ayland.

  CHAPTER XIX

  At The uninspiring hour of half-past ten next morning, Duke and Laura met in the prosaic atmosphere of Victoria Street, and with all the sense of limitation induced by the consciousness of Laura’s imminent train.

  “I must be back at the hotel at a quarter to twelve,” were her first words.

  “I can take you back in a taxi.”

  “Meanwhile — I’m very sorry, but I must go to the groceries’ department. It won’t take a minute.”

  It took several minutes, but presently it was done.

  “Where do you want to go now? Isn’t there a tea place, or somewhere we can sit and talk?”

  “There’s a tea-room upstairs, I believe. But we can’t sit there unless we order something.”

  “Coffee. Will that do?”

  Laura signed assent, and they went up in the lift.

  Laura looked at herself in the glass with some dismay. She had not recovered from her fatigue, and her face showed it.

  “We shall go home by the one o’clock train to-day.”

  “I know,” said Ayland — as indeed he did.

  The tea-room was comparatively untenanted, except by elegant waitresses, who displayed boredom at the sight of Laura, but revived when she was followed by Duke.

  They tried to take a corner table, but the nearest one bore a discouraging card that said “Reserved,” and that and the combined haughty gazings of the waitresses, caused Laura to sit down at a large table laid for four in the very middle of the room.

  “Do you like this?” said Duke doubtfully.

  “It’ll do, and there isn’t time to change,” Laura replied feverishly.

  “Darling, what’s the matter?”

  Laura knew that the true answer to this inquiry was expressed in the single word Reaction, but it reminded her too much of the medical student Losh, of the books of Havelock Ellis, and of several other things that she could not bear to recollect. So she answered instead, with an inanity that shocked herself as much as she felt that it disconcerted Ayland:

  “Nothing is the matter. I’m just tired after the wedding.”

  “Laura, I thought we were always honest with one another.”

  Laura had thought so, too, until this morning, but she did not say so, because at that moment one of the languid waitresses came and looked unsmilingly down at them and said, “What can I get you, please?”

  “What would you like?” Duke inquired.

  “Coffee, I think,” said Laura, feeling that it would probably choke her.

  “Two coffees, please. And cakes.”

  “We ought not to leave here a moment later than half-past eleven.”

  “It’s all right. I’ll see you’re not late.”

  A most unhappy silence ensued.

  Duke handed Laura his cigarette-case.

  She took a cigarette without looking at him, and lit it slowly and with great care.

  “Well, my dear, have you thought what’s going to happen?”

  “About us?” Laura said, entirely to gain time — although with no idea as to how she would employ it when gained.

  “Of course. You’re going back to the country to-day and you say you’ve no idea when you’ll come up again — and in any case, it’s damned unsatisfactory only to meet like this. I can’t stand it, Laura. I wish to God you’d come away with me altogether.”

  “If I was free I would.”

  “If you were free, we could be married.”

  “But I’m not. And apart from anything else, I’m very fond of Alfred. It would hurt him most frightfully to think that I cared for somebody else more.…”

  Duke shrugged his shoulders, the first sign of impatience that he had given.

  “But leave all that out of it. There are the children,” Laura forlornly reminded him.

  “Yes, I know. They settle it, of course. And as that’s so, Laura, surely you can see that we shouldn’t be doing any wrong to anybody if we took such happiness as we can get! Can’t we take one week together, to remember, out of all our lives?”

  “Bleck or whayte?” said the waitress abruptly, poising two vessels above the two cups on the table.

  When she had finished with them, Laura looked at her watch.

  “It’s five minutes past eleven already. I mustn’t be late. Nurse isn’t quick, and I shall have to help her get the boys ready. Besides, there’s so much traffic now that it may take ages to get to the station.”

  Laura had not, as might have been supposed from this speech, forgotten her own frantic desire to appear in a light other than one purely domestic, to Duke Ayland. But she had reached a stage of mental and physical fatigue in which she could no longer distinguish between the things she really wanted to say and the things she was in the habit of saying.

  “Darling, please don’t fuss. I promise I won’t let you be late. I’ve never seen you like this before.”

  “Sometimes I think that we’d far better never see one another again,” said Laura wildly and irrelevantly.

  “Laura!”

  “We shall spoil it if we go on like this. It’s been the happiest and the most beautiful thing in my life, and I don’t want, ever, to let it be anything less. If we were to do Alfred a wrong — I don’t care what you say, it is a wrong — and besides, the children —— No, I couldn’t bear it. Duke, I could say good-b
ye to you to-day. I could find the courage to, although, heaven knows, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. We should always remember, even when later on you marry somebody else, as of course you will. I shouldn’t have lost you altogether. And you’ll know that you’ve had something from me that no one else has ever had, or ever will have.”

  Laura, at last, had spoken, with halting and belated eloquence, but with all the sincerity that was in her.

  In the long, long look that she exchanged with Ayland, she felt suddenly that they had come spiritually close to one another again.

  “Anything else I can bring you?” the waitress superciliously enquired.

  “The bill, please.”

  “How many cakes?” suspiciously enquired the waitress.

  “None.”

  The bill was made out and handed to Ayland.

  “Ought we to go?”

  “I’m afraid so. In case it takes a minute or two to get a taxi.”

  In unbroken silence they descended in the lift to the ground-floor, and in Victoria Street entered a taxi.

  “We needn’t hurry now,” Duke said, and gave an order to the driver.

  This time Laura surrendered herself to his embrace with no attempt at resistance. And the effect of it was to shatter the frail strength of her so recent determination.

  When he had kissed her, and she lay breathless against his shoulder, her hands clasped in his, it was as though her words had meant nothing.

  In real life, Laura dreamily reflected, a moment of crisis was always followed by days and nights and days of anti-climax. One had to go on. And the thing that had been real and sustaining melted imperceptibly into the thing that was expedient at the moment.…

  “Don’t answer me now, angel,” whispered Duke. “You’re tired out. Think it over, and remember that I adore you, and then perhaps one day you’ll feel that you can come to me, and give us both the most wonderful memory—”

  “Perhaps,” murmured Laura, fired by his desire, and by the ardour of his love-making, and by the knowledge that she was going back to an existence in which love-making played no part at all. The emotional instant of renunciation had passed — defeated, as are all emotional instants, by sheer force of Time’s continuousness. Impossible to renounce in a crowded lift and with a train to catch. Almost equally impossible to part as lovers should part in a taxi drawn up outside a London hotel.…

  Duke and Laura achieved neither one thing nor the other.

  She had renounced him, but she had also half-promised to give herself to him. It was an incredible, inconsistent, and nerve-racking state of affairs.

  But things, Laura knew, are like that.

  She crawled upstairs, the muscles of her throat aching from a sense of constriction.

  The packing was finished, and the suit-cases stood in a pile in the middle of the floor. The beds had been stripped, and the slops had not been emptied — a peculiarly dreary combination of effects.

  Laura looked into the next room.

  Edward was alone, rather pale and heavy-eyed.

  “Where are Johnnie and nurse?”

  “He’s having to be washed in the bathroom. He got himself all black downstairs, while nurse was packing. Mummie, I think I’ve got a cold.”

  Laura’s heart sank a little lower.

  Edward’s colds were tempestuous affairs, necessitating bed, and an immense number of pocket-handkerchiefs, a supply of cold cream, and frequently a subsequent cough-mixture.

  It was Laura’s belief that no other child in the world had such severe and prolonged colds as had Edward.

  As she looked at him, the voice of Mrs. Bakewell seemed to ring in her mind’s ears:

  “We got through this winter without any colds at all Just the simple, healthy life they lead, and the right sort of clothing.…Let me see, it must be nearly two years since Cynthia had a cold. The cold habit is really so unnecessary.…”

  “Edward, are you sure?” said Laura.

  But she knew from his face that he was right, and presently he began to sniff — a recurrent, irritating sniff, that would increase in frequency and violence until a second, worse stage was reached.

  One could only hope that it would not be reached before the evening, and prophesy brightly:

  “Well, I daresay it won’t be very bad, and you can go to bed as soon as we get home.”

  “But I don’t want to go to bed,” said Edward, beginning to cry.

  “Oh, darling, don’t be silly!”

  “I hate bed!”

  Nurse and Johnnie came in.

  “Why, what’s the matter? Do I see a little boy crying? Who’s this little boy?” said nurse, affecting not to recognise the tearful Edward. “Whoever’s this? Our little boys don’t cry. It must be some strange little boy.”

  “Johnnie dear, don’t jump on the bed like that. Nurse, Edward tells me he has a cold.”

  “Yes. He has,” nurse said decisively. And she added to Laura aside, “Overtired, both of them. But he was quite all right when I left him — quite bright.”

  Laura knew that it was she who had quenched her son’s brightness, and she could see that nurse knew it, too.

  She did not attempt to defend the position. “Would you like a cup of tea before we start, nurse?”

  “Oh no, thank you, madam. I can never eat anything before a journey. I didn’t touch any breakfast this morning,” said nurse proudly. “But the boys have had some milk and biscuits.”

  “Here’s daddy,” said Johnnie.

  “Are you ready? The man’s here for the luggage.”

  “Quite ready,” said Laura, taking a last mechanical, unsatisfactory look at herself in the glass.

  The train was crowded.

  Laura took Johnnie on her knee, and nurse took Edward, and Alfred stood in the corridor. Strange women, hatless, and in thick, hot, crumpled clothes, made advances to the boys and offered them food.

  Johnnie became unendurably restless, and Edward sniffed, and occasionally sneezed.

  “You ought to have his adenoids seen to,” one woman remarked to Laura, gazing expertly at Edward. “He looks like adenoids.”

  “What do adenoids look like?” said Edward in a pessimistic tone.

  “They look like something perfectly hidgeous” Johnnie replied with the grave, perfectly unmalicious freedom of speech peculiar to the nursery.

  Laura was unable to forget her own preoccupations in keeping her children amused, because there was practically nothing that could be done to amuse them, and she was equally unable to remain still and face her own thoughts, because of the constant, unrelated demands of Edward and Johnnie upon her attention. Alfred, in the corridor outside, imperturbably read the paper. From time to time he looked round at them, and once he came to the door of the carriage and spoke. (Laura’s prestige went up when the hot and crumpled ladies opposite saw that she had a husband of so unmistakable a type as Alfred. They ceased to comment upon the probability of Edward’s adenoids, and only smiled at him instead.)

  Laura, in snatches of silence, wondered whether Alfred knew anything of the crisis through which their domestic life was passing. He behaved as though he knew nothing. And yet, even if he knew everything, she felt certain that he would behave in precisely the same way. Alfred was like that — imperturbable, unalterable, in many ways unobservant, and yet with peculiar qualities of solidity and kindness — qualities, as Laura well knew, eminently desirable in a husband.

  She, however, wanted a lover.

  Ayland’s suggestion of a week to be spent together kept on recurring to her mind.

  “Perhaps a long time hence,” thought Laura, with a vague feeling that this procrastination made the project less immoral. But the real truth was that she was so much tired that the only kind of week she could bear to contemplate for the present would have been passed almost entirely in sleep.

  At the Junction it was raining hard.

  “We shall soon be home now,” said Laura, with fictitious cheerful
ness.

  Eventually they were home — though not soon.

  This time there were no flowers in the drawing-room, and the pile of unforwarded letters was formidable.

  “Where is Fauntleroy?” said Edward, rushing out into the rain.

  “Oh, stop him!” cried Laura.

  Nurse and Johnnie also hurried out into the rain.

  “Johnnie, not you! Come back!”

  “Where on earth are the servants?” said Alfred, putting immoderate pressure upon the front door-bell.

  “They only didn’t hear us drive up. It’s all right, Alfred. Here she is. Good afternoon, Mary.”

  “Good afternoon,” said Mary, whose salient characteristic was that she never addressed either of her employers by any term of respect.

  “Is everything all right, Mary?”

  “Quite all right.”

  “We shall be glad of tea whenever it is ready,” said Laura, rather intimidated.

  “Take up those bags,” said Alfred, kicking the lighter of the suit-cases.

  Mary instantly obeyed, and was thus spared the sight of the boys’ re-entrance into the hall, hilariously followed by Fauntleroy, and their subsequent progress up the stairs, leaving wet and mould behind them.

  “Excited at getting home,” said nurse benevolently to Laura.

  “Edward had better go straight to bed after tea.”

  “I’ll get their things unpacked the soonest possible minute.”

  Laura, expert in detecting the finer shades of meaning in domestic formulas, deduced that nurse thought she was being slightly inconsiderate.

  “Send them down to me as soon as they’re — as soon as you’ve all had tea,” she said hurriedly, “and you can come for Edward when you’re ready for him.”

  “Very well, madam.”

  “What about tea?” said Alfred.

  “Dear, you’ve this moment sent Mary upstairs. She’ll ring the gong directly the tea is in the dining-room.”

  Alfred walked into the drawing-room. He appeared to have no curiosity about his unopened correspondence.

  Laura listlessly examined her own share. The letters all looked uninteresting, and yet as if every one of them would require an answer. Laura instantly felt that she never wanted to write another letter as long as she lived.