Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  He heard her say to the Colonel:

  “Do go and write in peace in the breakfast-room, the noise in here will be ear-splitting in another minute.”

  “I’ve been writing most of the day. I was wondering if you’d care to come and listen to the Six O’Clock News. I’ve a grand fire in there.”

  Lady Arbell looked across at her daughter.

  “I’ve one or two things to see to before supper. I think I’ll wait for the news till nine. I daresay Primrose would find it warmer in there. Your batman makes a much better fire than my house-parlour-maid does.”

  Primrose remained without stirring.

  Lonergan, after waiting a moment, went by himself into his new office.

  “Ready?” cried Jess. “Does everybody understand everything? Charles, you’d better keep the score, and mind you don’t cheat.”

  She thrust paper and pencil at him.

  Primrose slouched out of the hall, up the stairs.

  These people knew how to make one feel perfectly at home and natural. Sedgewick would hand them that, he told himself, grinning at the thought of the two delighted boys who had raced one another to the bathroom and whose loud, cheerful voices he had heard a moment ago on their way down to supper.

  He thought of the painfully polite hospitality to which he was best accustomed — the obvious preparations, the apologies that deceived nobody, and — usually — the laboured nature of the conversation, taking the form of question and answer.

  Charles Sedgewick was quite certain that houses like Coombe had long ago had their day — not many of them were left, he imagined, and a good thing too.

  The privileged classes, amongst whom he unhesitatingly placed Lady Arbell and her family, were in the last ditch. Some of them would go down fighting, of course — but they were doomed, one and all.

  Girls like Primrose and Jessica would either have to earn a living or, if they married, would have to work hard in their own homes instead of paying other people to do it all for them.

  He hummed to himself “I don’t want to set the world on fire” and went downstairs.

  A decanter and glasses stood on a small table; the old gentleman — General Levallois — had come to life again and was sitting by the fire, wearing a curious old velveteen coat, and Lady Arbell and Jess were talking with Cyril Banks and Jack Olliver.

  They were drinking sherry, and Sedgewick noticed with amusement the controlled expression of disgust with which Jess was sipping at hers.

  “Have some sherry?” said the General.

  Sedgewick thanked him and refused.

  He joined the group.

  A clock struck eight.

  “Why isn’t dinner ready?” instantly enquired the General.

  “It’s Sunday, Reggie, and Ivy’s out. Supper is cold, and it’s quite ready. We’re just waiting till we’re all here.”

  “You’re not going to wait for Primrose surely.”

  “Colonel Lonergan isn’t here either,” Jess pointed out. “We must wait for a Colonel.”

  “He won’t mind if we don’t,” said Lady Arbell, smiling.

  “Here is the Colonel,” said Jack Olliver.

  “I beg your pardon if I’m late. You shouldn’t have waited.”

  “Primrose is later. Not that we ever wait for her,” remarked Jess. “Take aunt Sophy, Buster! She gets under one’s feet so.”

  The ungainly puppy changed hands.

  The General was already heaving himself to his feet and adjusting his sticks.

  “Can’t wait for Primrose,” he muttered. “Bring that decanter with you, Jess. Come along.”

  As they moved towards the dining-room Primrose joined them.

  She had changed into a long, tightly-fitting house-coat of some thick material that looked like flannel. It was a hyacinth-blue colour, and made her hair look very light and her eyes very dark.

  “Hey, what about my drink?” she asked.

  “Have it in the dining-room,” said her uncle.

  Colonel Lonergan held out a glass to Jess, and she filled it from the decanter for her sister.

  Sedgewick thought that Primrose seemed more natural, and certainly more cheerful, than she had been earlier in the evening.

  “Please sit anywhere you like,” Lady Arbell said in the dining-room. “And I think it’ll be simplest if only two people change the plates and so on, and everybody else sits still. Jess, darling — —”

  “I knew it’d be me. Here, take aunt Sophy, someone.”

  “Put the dam’ dog down!” said the General.

  “Who else, mummie?”

  “I think Captain Sedgewick, if he will.”

  “Mummie, he’s asked to be called Charles.”

  Lady Arbell looked an enquiry.

  “That is correct,” said Sedgewick, smiling.

  “Certainly. Then, Charles, would you mind helping her?”

  “Charles is quite a good name for a footman, isn’t it?” Jess observed. “Or James or William. Jack would have to be John, and Buster simply wouldn’t exist.”

  “Not even as Cyril?” suggested Banks.

  They laughed and talked.

  Primrose was an exception. She sat next to Colonel Lonergan, but appeared to have little to say to him. When she did speak it was from one corner of her mouth, and it struck Sedgewick that she made no effort at all to join in the general conversation.

  The Colonel did, though.

  He kept on trying to include his hostess in whatever it was that Primrose was muttering — Sedgewick couldn’t always hear her — but Lady Arbell, though she always answered, usually with simple, acquiescent phrases, didn’t seem to want to be included.

  She left the Colonel to her daughter, and talked to Jack Olliver, sitting beside her.

  Sedgewick himself occupied the chair on her other side.

  He tasted his soup — a thin, pale soup that was not even very hot. His mother would have seen to the soup herself, if the maid had been out, and it would have been hot, and strongly flavoured. On the other hand, she certainly wouldn’t have entertained visitors at all, on her servant’s evening out.

  He glanced at the two subalterns, and saw how much at ease they were, although Jack Olliver at least, Sedgewick guessed, had never before sat at a table where the men waited on the women. His mother and sisters, if he had any, would always do the waiting and expect Jack and his father to sit still.

  The General, at the other end of the table, was looking at a menu-card — good lord! — and not talking.

  “That menu is for my brother’s express benefit,” said Lady Arbell’s soft voice, sounding as though she were rather amused. “He knows, and we all know, that Sunday supper is always the same — soup, and cold meat and salad, and anything we can get, nowadays, for a cold sweet — but he likes to see it written down beforehand. I can’t think why.”

  Sedgewick laughed. He was amused, and rather impressed, that she should have guessed the trend of his thoughts. She was certainly a good hostess, in spite of having a bad cook and insufficient heating and an out-of-date bathroom.

  She noticed things, even while she seemed to be giving her full attention to whoever was talking to her. And she talked very little herself, and what she did say was on the subjects chosen by her guests: seldom drawing attention to herself or her own opinions.

  Sedgewick was dispassionately, consistently interested in every manifestation of what he always firmly described to himself by the out-moded expression: Class-distinctions.

  He thought their importance overrated, nowadays, but he also thought it foolish to deny or to ignore their existence. They were there, they did create a barrier — of which the middle classes were more conscious than anybody else — and it would take generations to eliminate them. Unless, indeed, England caught the Russian infection and was swept into a bloody revolution, with the firing-squad for those whose ancestors had enjoyed privileges long since denied to their descendants.

  Slightly to his own surprise, Captain Sedg
ewick found himself talking to his hostess on the subject.

  She was a good listener, and presently he noticed that she had somehow caused young Banks to go and help Jess with the waiting instead of himself.

  “I’m afraid I’m neglecting all my duties.”

  “No, you’re not. It’s your turn to sit still. Please go on talking to me. The English revolution is taking place now, all the time, isn’t it?”

  “I hope so. It’s needed.”

  “I’m afraid it is. Though I still hope there’s enough genuine democracy established in the country by now to prevent a revolution of the Bolshevik kind. But perhaps I’m wrong about that, and it’s a kind of dreadful, necessary short cut?”

  Lonergan joined in.

  “A short cut to where? Not, I think, to freedom for the individual, or to the development of the creative spirit. I was in Russia for a month or two in ‘37 and from the little that I was able to see, everything was harnessed to the State — family, individual and art.”

  “That’s one reason why the Russians are doing so magnificently now, isn’t it, sir?” Jack Olliver enquired. Only deference to his commanding officer, Sedgewick knew, had given that interrogative twist to the sentence.

  Olliver was a convinced young Communist.

  “No doubt it’s one reason,” Lonergan agreed. “It’s also why their Moscow and Leningrad art galleries have the most superb Dégas hanging next to the most deplorable canvases on which ardent young propagandists ever splashed rivers of scarlet blood onto white snow.”

  “Does every picture tell a story?” asked Sedgewick, amused.

  “It does. And it’s always the same story. Either the soldiers shooting the peasantry, or the peasantry shooting the aristocracy. No, I’m wrong. Sometimes it’s Lenin addressing the workers on his way to or from exile.”

  “Why not?” drawled Primrose. “I think that might make rather a good picture.”

  Lonergan laughed.

  “Ah well, I’m prejudiced, you see. I think freedom of expression is essential to art, and that artists should have nothing to do with propaganda.”

  “You’re only thinking of painting. What about the Russian ballet?” Primrose demanded.

  “Quite right,” said Lonergan. “I’ll give you that. It’s as good as ever it was.”

  “I’m glad they’ve kept something,” Lady Arbell said.

  “Perhaps when their new order is more firmly established the Russians won’t feel it so necessary to sacrifice the individual to the State.”

  “Obvious,” said Primrose, and her upper lip twisted contemptuously.

  Lonergan turned.

  “Obvious is exactly what it isn’t,” he said coolly. “The Soviet Government, for the past twenty years or so, has been bringing up a whole generation with a set of clearly defined ideals. They may be good ideals or they may be bad ones — either way they’ll stick. Freedom of expression, or even of thought, will have ceased to be looked upon as a right.”

  “How utterly tedious,” said Primrose.

  Her tone was insolent and the subalterns exchanged glances.

  Colonel Lonergan raised his eyebrows.

  “Is it the Soviet system you’re referring to or my, no doubt uninformed, views about it?”

  “Both.”

  Sedgewick had no particular prejudice against rudeness — he thought it, in fact, rather smart and modern — but he objected strongly to it when directed against a senior officer in the presence of his juniors.

  For a moment he felt horribly embarrassed.

  “Do you know,” said Lady Arbell, “that you’ve none of you got anything to drink? Beer is all I can suggest, except water. On the sideboard, Jess.”

  She had seemed not to raise her voice, but it carried clearly — and the conversation about Russia was over. The General began to speak about beer, Jess and young Banks were jumping up and fetching the beer bottles, the Colonel returning attentive-sounding comments to General Levallois’ assertions.

  So that was how one did it — and it worked.

  It seemed to Sedgewick a characteristic evasion of a difficult moment — but he admired it all the same.

  And one had to be fair. In a better assorted company the discussion, whether polite or impolite in its expression, might have been allowed to go on. This evening it could only have been disastrous.

  Doubtless, too, in the eyes of Lady Arbell, Sedgewick himself, Banks and Olliver, Primrose and Jess, were all of them too young, and too completely lacking in social diplomacy, to be allowed their heads in a political debate amongst their seniors.

  He glanced at the pale, defined profile of his hostess and noted her serious, attentive and yet withdrawn expression. It occurred to him that she must, years ago, have been pretty, although of a type that made no appeal to modern taste.

  Most interesting, thought Charles Sedgewick — rather pleased with his own capabilities for dispassionate observation — to meet a woman like this one — so evidently intelligent without being intellectual, whose standards of behaviour were still ruled by the careful, useless, utterly obsolete training of a vanished social system.

  VIII

  “Gosh! That heavenly green liqueur! I didn’t even know we had any,” cried Jess naïvely.

  “Uncle Reggie did. He thought it was a good occasion for producing a liqueur, after what I’m afraid was rather a dull meal,” said her mother.

  She poured out the coffee, and the young soldiers made polite protests in defence of the meal, just over.

  “What’s the other stuff?” asked Jess. “Is it brandy?”

  “Yes.”

  The crème-de-menthe and the liqueur brandy came as an agreeable surprise after the indifferent coffee, and Jess delightedly distributed glasses.

  “I bet everyone except uncle Reggie and Colonel Lonergan will choose crème-de-menthe.”

  Sedgewick nodded.

  “As you say.”

  “Well, you’re wrong. I hate that filthy, sticky, green poison. Me for the brandy-bottle every time,” Primrose declared.

  “Gosh! It always makes me think of being sick. They gave me some once at Rockingham, when I had a bilious attack,” Jess remarked. “It was foul.”

  “This is probably not quite the same type of brandy, my dear,” the General informed her rather drily. “But as I doubt whether you’d notice any difference, by all means leave it for those who do.”

  Lonergan, smiling, accepted his glass from Jess.

  “It is not, indeed,” he appreciatively remarked. “This is worth its weight in gold, nowadays. One can’t get the stuff in London, under a small fortune.”

  “The last brandy I had in London was one you bought me, as it happens, Rory my pet,” said Primrose.

  The casual term of endearment, to which she managed to give a contemptuous twang, came with a rather shocking effect, and again Banks and Olliver looked at one another, slightly aghast.

  Jess and Sedgewick both stared openly at Lonergan.

  His blue, angry eyes were gazing straight at Primrose.

  “Last is the word,” he said.

  For a split second the atmosphere in the hall was electric.

  A tiny, clashing sound of tinkling glass broke into it sharply.

  Valentine’s liqueur-glass had slipped from her fingers and lay shattered against the hearth.

  A small stream of green was slowly oozing its way towards her shoes.

  “How careless — and what a waste of crème-de-menthe!” she said meditatively.

  “Have mine, Lady Arbell,” Sedgewick offered.

  “Or mine, mummie. Only I’ve drunk half of it.”

  “Get your mother another glass from the pantry, Jess. Or ring for one of the damned servants.”

  The two subalterns were hastening to the rescue, Olliver with his handkerchief and Banks with a piece of blotting-paper snatched off the desk. The old spaniel, Sally, sniffed at the mess.

  “Come off it, Sally!” cried Jess. “We can’t have you taking to
drink at your time of life.”

  The young men took up the joke enthusiastically, relieved from the strain of a moment earlier.

  “Perhaps Sally’s a secret addict.”

  “Her real name’s Sarah, I expect. Sarah Gamp.”

  “Gosh, I shan’t send this handkerchief to be washed for a month. The bouquet’s marvellous!”

  “Thank you so very much,” Lady Arbell said. “I’m sorry to have given so much trouble.”

  “I’ll fetch you another glass, mummie. Here, Jack, take aunt Sophy.”

  “You can bring two glasses, Jess,” said her uncle. “We’ll send one up to Madeleine.”

  “Okay. We’ll all take it up to her. Madeleine’s a pet,” Jess informed the officers. “She’s French, and she adores having visitors, especially soldiers.”

  “Here, can’t I fetch those glasses for you?”

  “You don’t know where they’re kept.”

  Jess raced for the red baize door, and the young men followed her, laughing and jostling one another.

  The door was left swinging and banging as their voices echoed away down the distant, stone-floored passage.

  Lonergan got up to shut it.

  Primrose looked at her mother and said, speaking more inaudibly than ever:

  “You needn’t have wasted a glass, to say nothing of a drink. Rory and I understand one another okay, and we’re neither of us in the least afraid of a scene, or of saying what we mean.”

  “Please say it somewhere else, then, Primrose, and not in front of Colonel Lonergan’s own subalterns,” Valentine answered quietly.

  She received unexpected support.

  “Damned bad form, the way you spoke just now,” the General curtly told his niece.

  Primrose stood up.

  “I seem to be a bit unpopular.”

  She turned to Rory Lonergan, who had come back to the fire.

  “My relations aren’t liking me at all. They think I’ve insulted you or something.”

  Lonergan looked, not at her but at her mother. The look was a profoundly troubled one.