Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

“Well, don’t keep Mr. Bolham waiting. Better get in, if you’re coming.”

  “I think I’ll just leave a message for Pops with the concierge. You see, I don’t want him to think — —”

  Dulcie darted into the hall again.

  Mr. Bolham assumed an expression of ostentatious resignation.

  Mary got into the car beside Mrs. Romayne, who said, “Blast the silly kid! why can’t she walk?”

  “Shall I wait, and walk down with Dulcie, sir?” Denis enquired.

  “That might be the best way — —”

  Dulcie rushed out, with her head on one side.

  “It’s all right!” she squeaked breathlessly. “I’ve left a message for Pops, explaining. You see, I know he’d hate me to miss your lovely party, Mrs. Morgan....”

  From an upper window came a shriek:

  “Dal-see! Dal-see!”

  Everyone looked up.

  Young madame Duval, clutching a thin flowered silk chemise across her figure, hung out of her bedroom window, shaking with laughter, and pointed to a small variegated heap of garments, fallen into Mr. Bolham’s balcony below.

  “On peut envoyer chercher ...?”

  “Oh, Mr. Bolham, it’s Marcelle — her bathing-dress....”

  “Tell her to buy herself a hook and line,” said Mr. Bolham bitterly.

  “Oh, Mr. Bolham, you’re such fun, always, you do make me laugh!”

  “Mes excuses ...” screamed Marcelle.

  Dulcie screamed back disclaimers, and the concierge, who had also come out on to the steps, said, with a brief and disagreeable glance upwards: “On enverra.”

  “Aren’t we going to start?” said David disappointedly. “The others will get there first.”

  At last they were off.

  (6)

  “There’s been a telephone message for you from the Hôtel d’Azur.”

  “What about?”

  Mrs. Wolverton-Gush adjusted her lorgnette — she considered that a lorgnette added distinction to her style — and read aloud — with full attention to the teaching of certain classes in elocution that she had attended in Kensington many years ago — her own transcription of Denis Waller’s message.

  “Thanks,” said Chrissie blankly.

  She looked up with her enormous dark eyes at Mrs. Wolverton-Gush, evidently not seeing her at all.

  There was a perfectly genuine remoteness — a sort of absent-mindedness — about Chrissie Challoner that often annoyed her temporary housekeeper. She would have disliked it much less if it had been an affectation. But Mrs. Wolverton-Gush, in the last fifty-eight years of a life that had already lasted a good deal longer than most people supposed, had thoroughly assimilated many harder lessons than elocution. Foremost amongst these was acceptance of the unyielding and invariable law that a woman, working for another woman, can never afford to let anything get on her nerves.

  Owing to the exigencies of life, Ruth Wolverton-Gush was a violent woman who remained calm, a bad-tempered one who exercised unceasing self-control, a grasping one who restrained all manifestations of greed and envy, and had not, for years, permitted herself the luxury of voicing her bitter grudge against the fate that had never put within her reach the only things she craved — money, and a life of ease.

  “Mr. Waller was very disappointed indeed. I could tell that, from the way he spoke.”

  “Didn’t he make any suggestion — say when he would be free?” Chrissie asked impatiently.

  “No, nothing. Only just what I wrote down.”

  “Please will you get through to the Hôtel d’Azur again, and I’ll speak to him myself.”

  “Certainly, dear.”

  Mrs. Wolverton-Gush had been told, casually and with “for goodness’ sake” tacked on to the unsuitable request, not to call her young employer Miss Challoner. No one ever did.

  Unable to bring herself to say “Chrissie,” Mrs. Wolverton-Gush compromised with a purely formal “dear.”

  Her numerous ventures into various fields of work had never until now happened to bring her into contact with the odd, informal, Chelsea-cum-Bloomsbury world to which Chrissie belonged. Its conventional unconventionalities did not shock her moral sense, which was tough — but often seriously disturbed her extremely sensitive gentilities.

  She walked off to the telephone, head up, bust well forward, and waist tightly drawn in. Even on the Mediterranean coast in mid-August, Mrs. Wolverton-Gush wore, beneath a striped silk dress, a stiffly boned corselet, at least three sizes too small for comfort, a tight bust-bodice, and short, high-heeled shoes. Her greying hair was smartly waved and shingled, and she had wisdom enough not to dye it.

  She was not without good looks, in spite of a coarse skin, and legs too short for her heavy torso.

  In a few minutes she came back to the sitting-room where Chrissie lay on a small, uncomfortable-looking gilt sofa, creasing her blue cotton beach-pyjamas.

  “Mr. Waller is out. They’ve gone — several of them — to lunch at the Réserve. I remember now that my friend Mrs. Romayne said last night they were making up a party.”

  “I suppose he had to go. I wanted him to come bathing with me, somewhere.”

  Chrissie looked wistful and discontented.

  Mrs. Wolverton-Gush saw that she wanted to talk.

  “Let me see, it wasn’t Mr. Waller who was sent by your friends in Hampstead? Really, there were so many of them here last night, I could hardly distinguish — —”

  “No, that was Moon. The one with the wife. I thought him an ass. Denis came with Mrs. Romayne and the other man — the noisy one.”

  “Mr. Buckland. He certainly is rather exuberant, but I assure you, dear, that he’s very much the gentleman in all essentials. And I think a personable young man to look at, don’t you?”

  “Denis,” said Chrissie unheeding, “came with them. I don’t know why. Directly he came in, I noticed him.”

  She stretched her bare arms above her head.

  “D’you mind if I talk?”

  “Of course not, dear.... If you’ll excuse me one moment, first, I’ll just speak to the girl about luncheon. You’ll have it on the loggia?”

  Thus did Mrs. Wolverton-Gush elegantly designate the little stone porch at the back of the villa.

  She went out and said a few words in atrocious French to the stout, black-haired young woman in the kitchen. Mrs. Wolverton-Gush never had the slightest difficulty in making servants understand what she expected of them. She would have been equally capable of making herself clear to Indian, Chinese, or Esquimaux servants. They understood, and they almost always obeyed.

  She came back to the living-room.

  The shutters were closed, and the room full of a soft green light. But it was the hottest hour of the day, and Mrs. Wolverton-Gush panted a little as she sat down, and hoped that there wasn’t a stain under the arms of her dress. She felt the heat very much, and would have liked a cold drink, but she was afraid of indigestion, from which she suffered severely and often. Sometimes she felt that life might have been almost bearable if she could have been freed from that incessant, nagging, physical torment.

  (7)

  To analyse every experience and discuss every emotion seemed entirely natural to Chrissie Challoner. Ever since she had run away from home at seventeen to live with a woman painter much older than herself, she had been one of a narrow circle of which the component parts were continually shifting, but never dispersing themselves. They sought self-expression, first in conversation, and secondly in various forms of art.

  Reticence was unmodern, and not practised.

  At twenty-eight Chrissie was still possessed of sensitiveness and sincerity, although both had been slightly blunted from the habit of translating everything into words — usually exaggerated ones.

  She talked openly of intimate things because such talk had become habitual to her.

  She said now:

  “Denis was the fair one — very slight and rather small.”

  “Oh yes. I s
carcely saw him all the evening. I presume,” said Mrs. Wolverton-Gush meaningly, “that he was better occupied.”

  “He was sitting in the garden with me. Gushie, I think I’ve fallen for him — absolutely. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?”

  Mrs. Wolverton-Gush, who did indeed think that it was extraordinary, made deprecating sounds.

  “The moment I saw him — looking frightened, and rather pathetic, and everybody else making the usual frightful row, talking and screaming — felt as if I’d known him before, somehow. I can’t explain. Do you believe in reincarnation?”

  “Well, of course, there’s something to be said — —”

  “I never have. I mean to say, one’s never taken it in the least seriously. But somehow it came into my mind then.... I believe I knew just what he was feeling. In fact, I’m sure that I know things about him now, that there simply hasn’t been time to find out, in the ordinary way.”

  There was a pause.

  Mrs. Wolverton-Gush polished the nails of one hand briskly against the palm of the other, so as not to waste her time, but also kept her eyes fixed intelligently on Chrissie, so as to show that she was still giving her full attention.

  “I know I can’t expect you to understand — or anybody. In fact, I don’t really understand myself. Of course, I’ve fallen in love before, hundreds of times, with men and with women. But this is different.”

  Chrissie stopped to laugh.

  “One always says that, doesn’t one? It doesn’t mean anything, any more. But this — between me and Denis — It’s not physical. That may come later — I don’t know, and I don’t much care, either. But I think it’s partly that which makes it so extraordinary. It’s on another plane to the ordinary sort of affair that one’s known so often.”

  “Do you think that he —— ?”

  “I think he felt like I did — but he’s frightened,” said Chrissie. “I don’t know what his life has been, but I’m pretty sure he’s always been afraid — and always most terribly lonely. I don’t know that it’ll be altogether easy to make him not afraid ... but my God, it’s going to be worth trying.”

  “But surely you’ve not really — So short an acquaintance I mean....”

  “Yes, really, Gushie. It’s — it’s like something I’ve been waiting for all my life, come true.”

  Mrs. Wolverton-Gush, entirely unable to believe that Chrissie was not playing a game of make-believe peculiar to people who wrote novels, was quite at a loss what sort of answer to make, and finally cleared her throat.

  Chrissie lay on the sofa, lost in dreams.

  CHAPTER V

  (1)

  “We thought you were never coming! Mr. Waller, you and Dulcie are the last of the Mohicans.”

  Gwennie’s pronunciation of this word, that she ingenuously rendered as “Moy-high-cans,” made everybody laugh.

  Mary Morgan experienced a feeling of relief. She wanted the party to be a success. At forty, she still knew the incredulous sadness of childhood, whenever a party failed. In anticipation it still seemed to her that people, and sunshine, and an expedition somewhere, to see something, and interesting food eaten out-of-doors, must give pleasure, and promote kindness and gaiety.

  Fifteen years of married life had taught her that men — for she thought of Mervyn as “men” — had not this capacity for enjoyment. She always shelved the thought, and felt that this time it would be different. She reminded herself now that Mervyn liked a boat. And she ascertained, by peculiar means that were intuitional rather than visual, that Mervyn was at any rate starting off in good spirits, talking about motor-boats to Mr. Bolham.

  The children were happy, and the faint indication of the night before that David might be going to start a stye on his left eye had disappeared.

  Relieved and light-hearted, Mary stepped into the boat, and immediately took off her big cretonne hat and laid it across her knees. Daily, she was consciously glad that she had never cut short her beautiful hair, that it was still thick and soft, with a strong natural curl. Almost every time that she looked at Mrs. Romayne, this passing satisfaction recurred to her with added strength.

  Looking at Mrs. Romayne now, strident in black-and-orange stripes, displaying her long bare legs, Mary reflected what an odd assortment of people the boat contained and her optimism suffered a moment’s check.

  Could a party really be very successful that included Mrs. Romayne with Patrick and Buckland — the boy looked so worried — and Mr. Bolham with his detested, and evidently rather unnerved, secretary — and Mervyn and the children and herself?

  She felt that she was leaving somebody out, and looked round again, then realised that — as usual — Dulcie Courteney was odd-man-out. Unfortunate and unattractive child, thought Mary, her eyes instinctively seeking out her Olwen, so undeniably beautiful.

  Olwen sat in the bows with Patrick. They were not talking. Olwen was looking down into the water, her face grave. Mary felt that already she no longer held the clue to Olwen’s thoughts. Her eldest child had passed from the transparent candour of infancy to the mysterious and incalculable reserves of adolescence.

  She looked down at David sitting next her, and met his eyes fixed on her. Raising his eyebrows, he made a pantomime enquiry that Mary well understood. Smiling, she shook her head in energetic repudiation of even the slightest qualm of sea-sickness.

  Gwennie sat opposite to her mother, and talked briskly and with determination to Denis Waller.

  “Do you like horses?”

  “Very much.”

  “So do I. They’re my favourite animals. If you had to be an animal, what would you choose to be?”

  “Well — I don’t know, Gwennie. I think perhaps a dog.”

  “I see. I dare say you’d make quite a good dog. I’d be a pony. Do you like riding?”

  “Doesn’t your tongue ever get tired, Gwennie?” her mother enquired, from a sense of duty to other people.

  “Never,” said Gwennie brightly.

  Mary, smiling a little, glanced apologetically at Denis, thinking how good-natured he was with children. He smiled back at her, rather nicely, and answered Gwennie in a way that struck Mary as being more natural than usual.

  “I haven’t done a lot of riding. You see, I’ve mostly lived in London.”

  “Have you? Then I suppose you’ve never hunted?”

  “I’m afraid not, Gwennie.”

  “Oh, Mr. Waller!” cried Dulcie shrilly. “What about that time you had the accident? When you hurt your head, you know.”

  Denis crimsoned.

  “That wasn’t hunting, Dulcie. Just riding.”

  “What happened?” demanded Gwennie. “Did you fall off?”

  “Something like that.”

  “That’s why he doesn’t dive,” added Dulcie. “But I’m sure you told me it was when you were out hunting, because I remember.”

  “You must have misunderstood me, Dulcie. I’m sure I couldn’t have said so. I’ve never been out hunting.”

  Mary felt vaguely sorry for the little secretary. He looked so completely discomposed, although she did not quite see why, and she was glad when an exclamation from Buckland, of no intrinsic worth whatever, gave a different turn to the conversation.

  Buckland was in his customary high spirits.

  No wonder, thought Mary, with a tart contempt that she would have applied to no one else. Buckland was having, she supposed, the time of his life — made free of motor-boats, motor-cars, expensive hotels, an unaccustomed excellence and variety of food and drink, and the society of his betters. (In the latter category, Mary did not really include Mrs. Romayne.)

  “Shall we swim, after lunch, mummie?” David asked.

  “No,” said Mary firmly.

  “Not after bouillabaisse; you’d probably have an apoplectic fit and sink to the bottom,” Mervyn assured his son.

  David smiled dutifully, then looked quickly up at his mother.

  She nodded.

  “It’s all right. I’ll ord
er an omelette specially for you,” she whispered, remembering.

  David’s little sensitive face flushed.

  “Won’t that look rather babyish?” he whispered.

  “I don’t think so. Besides, I shall be having one too,” she whispered back, making up her mind on the instant.

  “Oh. But are you sure you don’t mind?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “Really quite sure, mummie?”

  “Absolutely,” said Mary, with serious and immense conviction.

  “Voilà, messieurs-dames,” said the boatman, waving as if to introduce them all.

  The Hotel awaited them.

  A long table had been laid, drawn up close to the low parapet-wall overlooking the sea.

  “They won’t bring the bouillabaisse immediately,” Gwennie officiously explained to Denis Waller. “They only make it when the people actually arrive, so then they’re sure it gets eaten. It’s very expensive to make.”

  “I want to take some snaps,” said Dulcie. “I can take them while we’re waiting.”

  She produced a Brownie camera and looked into the viewfinder, although the party was scattered about the garden and it was evident that she was focussing no one in particular.

  “I’d like a group. A group would be lovely, wouldn’t it, Mrs. Morgan — wouldn’t it, Olwen?”

  “Better wait till we’re all sitting down,” Mary Morgan suggested. “You could take the whole table then, couldn’t you?”

  She moved away, and leaned against the wall, her back to the water. As usual, domestic preoccupations filled her mind.

  Did Mervyn look as if he were enjoying himself? There wasn’t anybody much to amuse him. He was smoking a cigarette, and seemed quite content. Her eyes rested on him for some time, and her mind registered automatically the fact of his entire unresponsiveness. It no longer hurt, but could still faintly surprise her. Temperamentally a romantic, Mary had been disillusioned by life, marriage, and motherhood, again and again. Yet still she remained a romantic at heart, continually awaiting something that never came. Mervyn remained unaware, as he always did, of her eyes and her thoughts fixed upon him, but when she turned her head away and looked at her children, Olwen glanced up quickly and gave her mother a lovely, flashing smile.