Alfred and Emily

by Doris Lessing

  Mary Lane was not surprised. She had thought from the start that when the glitter of that wedding had worn off, Emily would be needing advice. From the moment she had seen the photograph of Emily’s fiancé, her heart had sunk. ‘Yes, it did sink into my boots,’ she had told Daisy, who had said that Emily was not the old Emily, but perhaps this doctor of hers would be right for her new state, which was all fashion and furniture.

  Emily and Mrs. Lane sat outside the little house in garden chairs, where the road that led to the station was visible.

  Mrs. Lane waited for Emily’s revelations, and chatted. A plump fair woman appeared in the lane with a pram, in which were two infants.

  ‘That’s Betsy, you know, Alfred’s wife,’ said Mrs. Lane, and called out.

  ‘It’s late for their lunch,’ called back Betsy, but wheeled the pram, bought by Mr. Redway – ‘You deserve the best money can buy’ – a little way up the path.

  ‘They are lovely babes; they are twin boys,’ said Mrs. Lane, waving at the three. ‘Betsy, do come soon and let me indulge myself.’

  Mrs. Lane, with the new twins down the lane, had hardly been able to tear herself away, but then Betsy had said that she felt she could manage now, and Mrs. Lane restricted her visits.

  Betsy wheeled the pram near to the two women lolling in their chairs.

  The babes were certainly most delightful, and Mrs. Lane fussed a bit with them until she remembered that Emily was there for her attention. Betsy went off, slowly, homewards.

  ‘I haven’t managed to get pregnant,’ remarked Emily.

  ‘Well, it hasn’t been very long, has it?’

  ‘It didn’t take her very long,’ said Emily.

  ‘Do you mind? Are you worried?’

  And now Emily did not know what to admit to first. She wanted to talk to her friend, tell her about the unhappiness that was dragging her down. Not having got pregnant was the least of it.

  Mrs. Lane had expected confidences about the marriage bed, not to put too fine a point on it. That diffident, sensitive, fine-drawn man – Emily needed something more, well, more like herself, strong and forthright.

  But today Emily seemed neither. Compare this Emily with the girl who had come to announce her wedding, alive with success, with accomplishment; victorious was the word Mrs. Lane used of that Emily. The cat that had swallowed the cream. But now? She was thinking that William didn’t seem much of a man – certainly not one right for Emily – but she wasn’t going to introduce the subject. Mind you, it is easy to be wrong about the quiet ones, she had reflected.

  No marriage counsellors in those days, but if Mary Lane had been one surely she would have warned of incompatibility. She was, however, a wise woman, and must have noted often enough that Nature does not seem to care much about the happiness of her children when making matches.

  Emily finally got around to saying that she was so unhappy she could die, and she didn’t care if that sounded silly.

  But she didn’t say why. Mrs. Lane waited for her to confide, say anything that could be latched on to, but no. She would have liked to ask, ‘Do you have fun in bed?’ as Betsy and Alfred did – Betsy was not shy about confidences. But to use the word ‘fun’ of serious Dr. Martin-White – no, one could not.

  Emily began to weep. She cried and cried, sitting on the grass by this woman whom she had always said was her real mother, and she put her head in Mrs. Lane’s lap and went on sobbing while Mary stroked her head.

  ‘Emily,’ Mrs. Lane attempted, ‘have you kept up with your music?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  ‘And you used to be so busy…Are you playing tennis?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would William not want you to do that?’

  ‘No, he would like me to play tennis – with the right people.’

  And so Mrs. Lane got nowhere and Emily went off back to London.

  She could not tell Mary Lane what was wrong because she didn’t know.

  Emily had been brought up by an authoritarian father, in a strict cold house where everything went along by rule and rote. From that she escaped to the hospital, with its hierarchies, its disciplines, its order. She had lived her entire life bounded by rules and regulations and discipline. And now – there was nothing, and she did not know what it was she missed. That had been the start of this present misery: she felt cast out on to a sea of possibility with no chart. And there was worse. Her husband was not a loving man and there was certainly no fun in bed. But she didn’t know enough to realize what she missed.

  When she yearned to be back at the Royal Free, Sister McVeagh, it was the order, the certainties, she wanted.

  Emily felt she was in a deep black pit, with tall smooth sides. In training, she had ‘done’ neurasthenia, but that aspect of nursing had not interested her. Now she was sorry. If she could have put a name to the dark pit, she would have felt better. But one thing she did have to hold on to. She would have to get herself out of this place. No one else could. Who had rescued her from her overwhelming father? She had. Only she. No one else.

  ‘I am going to have music evenings,’ she said one night, into the dark. She had not known until this moment that she was going to say this.

  She knew her husband was lifting himself on his elbow to stare at her.

  She had not said, ‘We shall have…’ No. ‘I am going to have…’

  The formidable machine of that energy of hers was behind that I. It was rescuing her.

  She waited for disapproval, but all that came was, ‘But with no staff, surely a social evening is not possible?’ He hadn’t said no, hadn’t sent towards her a deadly ray of the disapproval, which, she felt, had pushed her over into the pit.

  ‘You’ll see,’ she said. ‘In the first place, I’m going to keep the staff at two: a cook-housekeeper and a housemaid. And I am going to send out the washing to the Chinese laundry…’

  ‘I really cannot be expected to involve myself with these domestic arrangements,’ said he. But he was leaning on his elbow still, looking through the dimness of the bedroom towards her.

  In the hospital, Sister McVeagh would return from a visit to the laundries with a gay ‘A vision of hell.’ Or ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’ She had hated that laundry and here it was again in her own home, the boilers, the mangles, the washboard, the steam irons, the pile of coal in the corner.

  ‘I need you to know,’ said Emily. ‘We must agree on it. It will be expensive, the laundry, but with only two wages to pay…and I plan to get in staff for special occasions.’

  ‘I see you have already planned it all,’ said he. Was he still leaning up on his elbow?

  He was not a mean man. Her household allowance was generous, and so was her dress allowance: he liked her to be well dressed. But it was bitter, that moment when he handed her the money in its separate envelopes. She had earned her own living since she was eighteen, and perhaps of the by now many things that dismayed her about her marriage, it was that moment, that money, handed her with a smile, that dismayed her most. But that was not the point.

  ‘We have to agree,’ said Emily, and now she was insisting on the we, was she? ‘If we are going to have musical evenings and entertain, then the bill for wages will be more.’

  She heard him settle back into bed. And he wasn’t angry a bit. No, he was pleased, she could feel it. A most improbable conclusion was forcing itself on her. All this time he had been wanting her to be a hostess. ‘That is what he married me for,’ Emily told herself, incredulous. Me, Sister McVeagh. Is that how he saw me? That’s why he chose me? (She was not saying, ‘He chose me because he loved me.’ That conclusion did not impress itself.)

  A hostess. Me? And yet she did have it all planned out, and as she talked into the dark, new decisions, already made by her, apparently, came to her tongue, as if she had previously sat down with a piece of paper and a pencil.

  ‘I am sure you will do it well, Emily,’ was her reward that night.

  Is that what he
had been waiting for all this time? Could he not have said?

  Emily made the change with the staff, and did something else. She went around the new smart shops that were offering all kinds of domestic novelties, and bought the very newest, one of the earliest vacuum-cleaners – clumsy and heavy, but what a revelation. She bought a dozen ‘labour-saving’ appliances. She had a telephone installed on every floor – a house then might have just one.

  The first musical evening was a great success. She played well, and he had a pleasant tenor; some of the other doctors turned out to be talented.

  She embarked on a dinner party; he chose the guests.

  She had some luncheon parties, for the wives of his colleagues.

  During this time an invitation came from Alfred and Betsy Tayler to the christening of their twin boys. But the date clashed with a party she was giving. Daisy went, stayed the night with her mother, and told Mrs. Lane that Emily had turned into a socialite: ‘You’d never believe it, Mother.’ Mrs. Lane did believe it; she kept an eye on Emily’s doings through the gossip columns, where Dr. William Martin-White’s and Mrs. Martin-White’s parties often featured.

  ‘She’s going in for the Honourable this and Lady that,’ said Daisy. ‘She invited me to a musical do and I was sitting next to our ambassador in Berlin.’

  ‘You know, Daisy,’ said Mrs. Lane, after a heavy silence. ‘I don’t like it. I don’t see her in that life. That’s not really Emily.’

  But Emily was playing this role as if she had never done anything else.

  ‘You wanted a hostess,’ she might silently tell her husband. ‘Is that what you wanted? Well, here I am.’

  When he went off to some dinner or a meeting, Emily was with Daisy in that house she felt was really her home. Other nurses came and went, but Daisy kept on the flat.

  Emily felt she was escaping when she went to Daisy’s. And there, too, she heard news of her husband, the eminent cardiologist. She might have found him disappointing as a husband, but it was like a seal of approval on her choice to hear how highly he was held in the hospital, in the medical world generally.

  But she often thought that she would not be able to stand her life if she could not have slipped off sometimes to be with Daisy in her old home.

  Many a widow, thinking that the funeral, if not the reading of the Will, would mark the end of all that could be expected from her in the way of public griefs has found that some problems are just beginning.

  William died unexpectedly of a heart-attack, without warning, in the spring of 1924, and none of the letters of condolence from the many Martin-Whites hinted at trouble, until one arrived from Cedric, a nephew, son of William’s elder sister.

  Do you remember me, Aunt Emily? I helped carry Uncle William’s coffin last Monday. From something I heard you say it occurred to me that you have no idea of the busy intrigues that have been going on about your house. Did you know the family covet it? I thought I should warn you.

  After the funeral there had been a formal goodbye to the popular Dr. William Martin-White at the Royal Free Hospital. And some of the family, in the medical profession themselves, attended; but Emily had invited all the Martin-Whites, some of whom she had hardly heard of, to the house for sherry and cake on a Sunday afternoon.

  The folding doors of the first-floor reception room had been leaved back and there revealed was the capacious and elegant room where Emily and William had had their concerts. The grand piano, usually prominent, was pushed out of the way; so were the harp and the music stands. There were vases of cheerful daffodils, Emily having rebelled against the white flowers that had emphasized the funeral. She wore black, but had a large white collar: the parlourmaid she had hired for the afternoon also wore black, and a frilly white apron. In fact the scene was more festive than funereal and Emily expected reproaches, which came at once from William’s sister, Jessica, who was in unrelieved black.

  ‘My dear Emily,’ said Jessica, ‘how well you do look.’

  If Emily had shed tears, any traces were well hidden. She urged her guests to help themselves from the trays that stood about. Cedric, an immediately engaging young man, rather military in style – the current vogue – arrived late, winked solemnly at Emily, and looked pretty well, if not jolly, himself.

  ‘Now that we are together,’ said Jessica, well supplied with sherry and fruit cake, ‘I hope that there will be an opportunity for a discussion.’

  ‘Oh? What about?’ enquired Emily, acknowledging Cedric’s contribution with not a wink – she could not have gone so far – but a smile.

  There were about thirty people in the room and some of them Emily had not seen since the wedding. She did not know who they all were.

  ‘Well,’ enquired Jessica, brushing crumbs from her black folds, ‘shall I begin?’

  ‘Please do,’ said Emily. ‘But I am mystified.’

  The air was electric with the results of the ‘intrigues’ Cedric had warned against.

  ‘Some of us feel, dear Emily,’ said Jessica, ‘that you might perhaps think it right to live in a perhaps rather less grand style. This is surely too large a house for one person.’

  ‘Really?’ said Emily. ‘I had not decided to move.’

  ‘Now surely, Emily,’ said Jessica, ‘it must have occurred to you that William would have wished for you to live more modestly.’

  ‘But we know what William would have wished,’ said Emily, ‘because there was a will, and the house was left to me.’

  This sharp riposte, which was giving Emily a good deal of pleasure, did not please Jessica. But some people were recognizing that Sister Emily McVeagh was in the room, with her famously sharp tongue.

  ‘Did dear William not perhaps indicate his wishes to you? He must have had thoughts.’

  Here Cedric coughed, to hide a laugh, and Jessica looked hard at him. ‘Not everyone agrees with the majority,’ she said. ‘Cedric, for one, said he hoped you would not end your music parties.’

  ‘How could William have indicated anything, since he did not know he was due for a heart-attack?’ said Emily. ‘I don’t think such a degree of prescience could have been expected.’

  Cedric coughed again.

  ‘Well, Emily, it is right that you know our thoughts. Your situation has been discussed, and at the very least you should take some notice of our wishes.’

  ‘I am more concerned with William’s wishes,’ said Emily. ‘Not that I had any idea that you were so concerned about me. When I have thought it all out, I shall of course let you know what I propose to do. But I shall not be throwing myself on to a funeral pyre.’

  Cedric laughed outright and some of the younger members did too.

  ‘We told Aunt Jessica you weren’t going to go quietly,’ said Cedric.

  ‘Cedric,’ rebuked Jessica. ‘That was uncalled-for.’

  ‘All that money William left you,’ said Cedric. ‘That’s the trouble, you see. Naturally they want to know what you are going to do with it.’ There, he had said it.

  ‘Cedric!’ said the older aunts and uncles. ‘This is too bad.’

  ‘Cedric, you are taking no care for Emily in her time of grief.’

  ‘Well, you are, so that should be enough,’ said Cedric.

  There was a good deal of money. Emily had had no idea at all of the extent of her William’s little fortune. It was large enough to be called that. His father had been a stockbroker, had invested well, and the family had lived frugally. Until, that is, William married Emily and then she had made the house so elegant and, above all, so up-to-the-minute with her housekeeping devices.

  ‘Some of us have been thinking,’ said Cedric, still determined to annoy the older Martin-Whites, ‘that this house would be perfect for a young couple. I shall be getting married – but I am already well housed. There’s young Raleigh: he’s marrying a cousin, so it would be kept in the family.’

  Emily was annoyed, but entertained, too. How glad she was that William had not much liked his family, if this was how
they went on.

  ‘I shall bear in mind,’ said Emily, ‘that Raleigh and – who?’

  ‘Rose,’ said Jessica, regaining command of the proceedings. ‘Raleigh and Rose. I am sure Rose would appreciate your wonderful domestic arrangements.’

  ‘I shall keep in mind that Raleigh and Rose want my house,’ said Emily. ‘Now, how about some more sherry, Jessica – Cedric, Tony…’

  ‘You see, Emily,’ said some old buffer, whom she seemed to remember was an uncle Henry, ‘all that money, I am sure William would hate to think of it being frittered away.’

  ‘Well, I don’t propose to do the house up again – redecorate. Nor do I need a new wardrobe. So rest assured, Uncle Henry.’

  Surely they must have been heartened that her ideas of extravagance were so limited.

  ‘You could give this house to Raleigh and Rose and live in theirs in the country,’ said a cousin.

  ‘Why should I live in the country when I never have?’ said Emily. ‘Believe me, when I have made decisions, if any, I shall let you know.’

  And so ended the family pow-wow on Emily’s future.

  Emily was in fact badly shocked by William’s death and not only because it was unexpected. She had thought of him as young – well, not old, not even middle-aged. He had been fifty, surely not of an age when one thought of anything definite, like retirement, let alone death. But what was throwing her into a perplexity was that her life had become so bound up with his; since they had married everything she had done and thought had been for William. And where was Emily McVeagh? Not so far away, obviously. But for ten years that was what she had done: she had been William’s. And now what? She was forty. She could go back to nursing if she wanted. Already suggestions had been coming her way. She felt torn loose, floating…

  She could marry again. But she could not imagine a man she would want to marry. However one put it, she had been married to William for better or for worse. After ten years, what kind of profit or loss could be made? She did not know how to start. And if she could not say what had happened to her – and she saw it, felt it, as something, somebody, taking up the strands of her life and twisting them up with his – then how could she even begin to think what to do next? She had been Emily McVeagh, a decided, definite, bold character, and now she was nothing; she was something that drifted.