Their brief and graceless dialogue was hideously clear in her memory.
“What on earth’s the matter? D’you think I’m tight or something?”
“I’m frightfully sorry, I don’t like that sort of thing.”
“My God, are you one of them? You don’t look it.”
“No, no,” said Sylvia, distressed. “I — I just don’t think that being kissed is any fun.”
“I suppose you’re temperamentally frigid,” said the young man, gazing distastefully at her through horn-rimmed spectacles. He was a Bloomsbury Group young man.
“I suppose I am,” said Sylvia, nearly in tears.
The strange idea came to her now that she would like to relate this happening, of which she had never spoken to a soul, to Andrew Quarrendon. She felt that he would be impersonal, although interested, and that he might even make her mind less about it.
She was still thinking of Quarrendon as she changed her mauve cotton frock for an evening one of dark-blue chiffon. It was an old one, bought in the sales more than a year ago, but Sylvia had always liked it.
She was brushing up her shining aureole of wavy hair when Taffy came in.
She too had changed, and was wearing a rather ugly apple-green frock with a round neck and short puffed sleeves.
“Syl, what are we going to do with them all to-night? Has Mother said?”
“Play paper games.”
“Oh, that’ll be all right. I thought it would be so awful if we just sat round and talked.”
“But that’s rather fun, sometimes.”
“Not with Grandmother there. And I’m not sure about Frances. Is it all right for us to call her Frances?”
“Yes. She said we were to. Don’t you like her? I do.”
“Oh, I quite like her. Only I’m not sure if she’d do for paper games — anyhow, not the more subtle ones. I feel she’d have qualms about being perfectly, perfectly kind when it came to personalities.”
“It mayn’t be a bad thing for someone to have a few qualms,” said Sylvia. “You haven’t, and Mother hasn’t, and I don’t think Quarrendon would have many.”
“Neither do I. I like him.”
“So do I.”
“Do you suppose he’s in love with Mother?”
Sylvia felt slightly startled.
“Somehow I never thought of that. Of course, most of her men are, aren’t they?”
“In a way, yes. A sort of intellectual way. It doesn’t mean much. Could I have one of your handkerchiefs, Syl? I haven’t one left.”
“Yes. Take one. Do I look all right?”
“You look rather nice. I like you with masses of lip-stick on. I hope Daddy’ll be late; we can have the wireless on till he comes.”
3
Maurice had already turned on the wireless. His evening toilet had been shorn of everything that he could possibly omit without attracting attention to the omission. He had rushed downstairs early in order to obtain possession of the newspaper. Only two came regularly to the house, and of these his father had one in the workshop.
The other, Maurice knew, would contain a full report of the summing-up in a revolting and notorious murder case. He was extremely anxious to read it.
“During the last generation or two,” roared a voice — for Maurice had wholly neglected the recommendations of the little book of instructions that lay on the radio regarding Peaceful Tuning— “during the last generation or two there has developed a school of composers and executive artists of great individuality — —”
The voice roared on, and Maurice, impervious to its eloquence, devoured in compressed form the life-story of a young cinematograph-operator who had first shot, and then partially burned, an elderly prostitute by whom he had been kept. He had just reached the jury’s verdict of Guilty when the door opened.
Maurice, drawing a deep breath as he relaxed, stood up politely.
It was Sal Oliver.
“Are you listening to that?” she enquired; obliged to raise her voice in order to be heard.
“Oh no,” said Maurice in surprise.
He abruptly silenced the informant.
“Why do you have it on, when you don’t even listen?” Sal asked with friendly curiosity.
Maurice considered. He was a little boy who seldom spoke at random.
“I think the noise helps me to think,” he said at last. “Some people at school have the gramophone on when they’re supposed to be studying. They say it’s a help.”
“In my day it used to be just the other way round. It was supposed to be much more difficult to concentrate when there was a noise going on.”
“That’s what Grandmother always says. But Mother doesn’t. She can always concentrate, however much noise is going on. She doesn’t mind being interrupted, whether she’s writing or anything. She says it’s only a matter of making up your mind to attend to what you’re doing.”
“I see,” said Sal.
“I made up my mind when I was quite young,” Maurice said gravely, “to try and be like her. As far as I could, I mean,” he added rather apologetically, feeling that such an aspiration might well sound slightly presumptuous.
His admiration for his mother was enormous, and he saw no reason to suppose that he would ever be hard-working and brilliant, as she was. He knew himself, on the contrary, to be very slow.
But at least he could learn to concentrate, and the people at school always said that was half the battle. Then he might get a scholarship, and it wouldn’t be so frightfully expensive for Mother, and she wouldn’t have to work so hard all the time.
As he thought of it all, his small freckled face grew graver and graver and he unconsciously breathed a deep sigh.
Sal Oliver, looking at him, suddenly asked for a cigarette. “And please light it and start it for me, Maurice,” she said in a quick, conspiratorial whisper.
Very occasionally Sal would invite him to a couple of illicit puffs.
Maurice flew joyfully to the cigarette-box.
4
Taffy had put on the apple-green frock from motives that were obscure to herself.
It was a very old frock indeed, descended to her from Sylvia — and Sylvia had worn it while she was still at school. It had shrunk badly in its last cleaning, and was now much too short. The sleeves were too tight.
And apple-green wasn’t Taffy’s colour.
Her mother had said so, and had given her a very pretty frock at Christmas — pale primrose, with tiny orange flowers embroidered all over it. Not a real evening dress, but just right. Taffy ought to have worn it to-night. She had, in fact, meant to wear it — and at the last minute had pulled out the ancient apple-green instead.
She had wondered if Sylvia would say anything — but Sylvia had apparently been thinking of her own appearance rather than of Taffy’s.
On her way downstairs Taffy rapidly evolved the running commentary that so often accompanied her through her days.
“A tall girl of nearly seventeen was hastening down the stairs. There was a far-away look in her eyes, and it was evident that no thoughts of self troubled her. Yet the hastily donned, shabby frock, faded to a soft pastel shade, served only to show off her slender grace and the deep, dark colour of her eyes. They were eyes of almost emerald green, a colour seldom seen in an English face — gipsy eyes — —”
“Is that you, Sylvia?”
It was her mother’s voice.
“It’s Taffy, Mother.”
“Come in a minute, darling, and help me.”
Taffy went into her mother’s bedroom. It was a large room, with two windows facing south. Between them stood a sort of combined writing-and dressing-table.
It was now being used as a writing-table. Papers strewed it, and half a dozen envelopes, already addressed, lay on the floor.
“If you’d stamp those for me while I finish — I shan’t be a minute — it would save time. There are the stamps — under the looking-glass.”
Her mother spoke without raisi
ng her head, still writing rapidly.
“They won’t go to-night.”
“I know they won’t. But it gets them done.”
“But they won’t go to-morrow either. At least they’ll go, but they won’t arrive till Monday.”
“I know. Be quick, please, darling. I’m going to be late for dinner.”
Oh no, you’re not, Taffy silently apostrophized her parent as she picked up the stamps and began to stick them on.
Mother wouldn’t be late. She’d get her letters finished, and herself dressed with quite incredible speed, and come downstairs at the last possible minute looking beautifully finished, and with that air of poise that maturity gave to some people — the brilliant, vital ones, like Mother.
“There! That’s done, thank Heaven. Why have you put on that frock, Taffy dear, instead of the yellow one?”
How like her! Apparently she’d never once raised her eyes, and yet she knew all the time what one had on and exactly what one looked like. Did she perhaps do it to show how clever she was? Taffy was so disgusted with herself for these thoughts — that another part of herself insisted were unjust and unkind — that her anger sounded in her voice as she answered.
“Isn’t it all right?”
“The yellow one would really be better, wouldn’t it? This one seems to have shrunk — or else you’ve grown a great deal.”
That was meant to sound as though it was quite a new idea that the green had shrunk. To gloss over the fact that Mother had pointed it out before, and one had deliberately ignored it.
“Honestly, Taffy, I think you’d look nicer in the other.”
“There isn’t time to change now.”
“Yes there is. Five minutes.”
“Have I got to?”
There was a second’s pause. Then her mother said, in the carefully neutral tone that she sometimes employed towards her children:
“No. Of course not. It’s your decision, not mine. Do exactly what you like. I think myself the green is a mistake — it’s obviously too small for you, and it’s not your colour. But it’s for you to decide, naturally.”
“Then I think I’ll keep it on,” said Taffy defiantly.
“Very well. Put the letters in the box as you go down, please, darling.”
Her mother sounded calm — almost absent-minded, as though she had already dismissed the whole topic of Taffy’s frock from her mind.
Nevertheless Taffy knew that something was still vibrating in the atmosphere between them, born of that tiny scene.
Only she didn’t know what it was.
5
Moved by a belated impulse of hospitality, Copper Winsloe emerged from the workshop, his dog Betsy at his heels, with the idea of finding a drink for Quarrendon.
The chap, although extraordinary to look at, seemed to be not a bad sort. He talked less than did most of Claudia’s friends, and, although probably clever— “a brain” Cooper mentally termed him — had so far shown no offensive signs of it.
Quarrendon was nowhere to be seen. He must have gone upstairs to dress. Copper wondered doubtfully whether the chap proposed to get into evening clothes. Still — Oxford.
He ought to be all right.
Betsy, who was young and light-hearted, made a frivolous attempt to pounce at Taffy’s cat, stalking morosely across the hall.
Copper indulgently called Betsy to order.
He was much kinder and more lenient towards animals than towards human beings.
Betsy adored him.
Everyone was upstairs.
Copper, first disposing of a drink on his own account and then of one on behalf of the absent Quarrendon, went up to his dressing-room.
As he took the loose change from his trouserpocket and placed it on the table, he reflected in a detached way that this — three shillings and eightpence — was literally all the money he had in the world.
He had never had any savings — his war gratuity had been spent long ago, and his share of the money his parents had left, divided between himself and two sisters, both of whom had married poor men, had gone, bit by bit, to his creditors.
With bitterness Copper remembered that before the war he had been quite well off, and had enjoyed life, on a tea plantation in Ceylon. The climate had never troubled him, and he had had sport, and cheap polo, and the kind of society that he enjoyed. His idiotic war marriage had stopped all that. One couldn’t take a girl like Claudia to live in the Far East. She’d have been miserable, out of her element altogether. After the war was over, she had said that of course she’d go — if Copper really wanted it. Probably she’d meant it too. But there seemed to be a doubt about her health — Mrs Peel making a fuss, and insisting on getting an opinion from some old woman of a doctor. And of course the doctor, probably seeing what was required of him, had said that Claudia wasn’t any too strong. So they had stayed in England.
Claudia not strong!
Copper’s mouth twisted into a smile at the thought. As he had told Sal Oliver, he scarcely knew how he and Claudia had reached the stage at which they now found themselves — and that didn’t apply only to the continual financial pressure against which Claudia struggled gamely, and to which Copper himself had long since surrendered without resistance.
In the early years after the war he had tried hard to get a job, and had failed again and again.
Then Claudia’s father died, and she had inherited some money. They had lived on it — and much beyond it — for years. Claudia had decided to start a business that had gradually succeeded, and developed into London Universal Services. Then she had bought Arling. It would, she said, be better for the children to live in the country.
It would give Copper something to do.
It would prove cheaper in the long run.
Copper believed in none of these reasons. Claudia wanted to live in her old home, that was all.
He didn’t even understand why. It wasn’t like her, surely, to be sentimental.
Arling was well enough, but the purchase mortgage remained unpaid, bills were always coming in, and to-morrow’s money was never quite enough to meet yesterday’s demands.
Copper savagely kicked off his boots. The thought of his financial position always made him
sick with impotent fury. He closed his mind to it as far as possible.
But the subconscious knowledge was always there, driving him to irritability with his children — his expensive children — just as his resentment at his own inefficiency made him seek to assert himself with Claudia, grumbling and contradicting like a sulky schoolboy.
He didn’t quarrel with her, because Claudia wouldn’t quarrel.
She hadn’t time, probably.
It was the rush-life, for Claudia.
Copper, who never had anything to do that he felt to be worth doing, could only evade the horror of conscious thought by drinking rather too much, and taking his dog for long, aimless walks.
There was nothing to look forward to any more, and when the next war came, it would settle him. Copper put his three shillings and eightpence into the pocket of his evening trousers.
If they played Bridge, he might win some money from Claudia’s guests.
Otherwise there would be nothing more to come until Claudia, on the first of the month, placed five pounds on his table in the workshop.
It amused him, to realize that she should feel herself to be sparing his pride because she did not hand him the money outright, as he had seen her hand pocket-money to the children.
6
In her room, Mrs Peel rose fretfully from the bed on which she had been lying.
She was fretful because nobody considered her important any more, and because her grandchildren were being brought up all wrong, and her daughter Anna hadn’t written to her for over a week and her daughter Claudia had too much to do. A vague idea possessed Mrs Peel that a general rearrangement of all the lives connected with her own was required, and that it was she who was best fitted to undertake it, if only she knew w
here to begin, and if only they weren’t all so obstinate.
With the thoroughness of her generation, she took off five or six under-garments, put on several others instead, curled her fringe with hot curling-irons, and carefully selected a turquoise brooch, a little turquoise heart on a gold chain, and a gold curb-chain bracelet to wear with her black chiffon evening dress. This was cut with a small V-shaped opening, and it showed a skin whiter than that of either of her granddaughters, for she had been brought up to protect her complexion as carefully as her virtue. Looking at herself in the mirror, she wondered whether Frances Ladislaw, whom she had not seen for years, had found her much changed. A nice creature, Frances — far nicer than Sal Oliver, whom one had never liked.
What Claudia could see in that woman!
At intervals Mrs Peel had made this enquiry of Claudia, and Claudia had always replied that Sal, who knew everybody, brought a number of clients to the office, and had put capital into the business besides. She wasn’t a great personal friend — Claudia hadn’t time for friendships with women, anyway — but she was a useful and efficient partner.
“You cannot say she’s Really a Lady,” was the invariable reply of Mrs Peel.
It annoyed her that Sal should be spending the week-end at Arling. The presence of Quarrendon, although one could not say that he was Really a Gentleman, she found more endurable. A man — any man — was always an asset to any party. But there ought to have been a young man for Sylvia.
“Poor little thing,” murmured Mrs Peel as she shook three drops of eau-de-Cologne — Johanna Maria Farina — onto a clean handkerchief.
She went downstairs, rustling a good deal. A vague, habitual regret crossed her mind for the long-ago days when she had been the mistress of Arling and everything had been done properly.
Scarcely anything was done properly now at Arling. Claudia hadn’t the money, and hadn’t the time to spare. Heaven knew, and so did Mrs Peel, that Claudia did wonders. If anything were to happen to Claudia, thought Mrs Peel not for the first time, where would they all be?
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 427
