Company in the Evening

by Ursula Orange

  Well, that’s how it is, you see, and of course the only problem is Rene. I know I told her there’d always be a home for her with me, and for the baby too when it comes (I do hope all these sojourns in the shelter won’t affect it mentally!), but the trouble is there just isn’t room in Aunt Maud’s cottage, and really I can’t help thinking she’d be happier with people nearer her own age. She’s only nineteen, poor child, and I’m afraid sometimes she pines a bit. There’s nobody for her here among all us old people, except Mrs. Grantham’s Sylvia, and I tried to make them chum up, but they tiresomely wouldn’t. Have you any possible suggestion? I haven’t breathed a word about all this to Rene yet, and of course the last thing I want is to make her feel she’s not wanted, particularly as the poor child hasn’t any parents of her own. Couldn’t you come down for a week-end soon and we could talk it all over? I make Rene sleep under the stairs—I draw the line at the shelter at night!—so you could have your old room. A kiss to my darling Antonia and tell her I have nearly finished knitting the doll’s frock. Let me know soon, darling, whether you can come, won’t you?

  Much love,

  MOTHER.

  Poor Rene! “The last thing I want is to make her feel she’s not wanted.” I knew my mother’s tender heart well enough to know that this was absolutely sincere. I would even refrain from pointing out to her that the plain truth was that Rene was not wanted. Poor Rene! Newly widowed, expecting a baby, very little money, no relatives at all of her own. Could anything be more pathetic and more of a nuisance—the nuisance of it, of course, recoiling back on the pathos, and making that worse!

  As for the girl herself, I hardly knew her. I had only seen her about twice, and nineteen and thirty-three rarely immediately find each other in sympathy. We had not known her at all until Philip had suddenly produced her while he was on leave in February and announced that he was getting married to her the next week. It was no use pretending that she hadn’t been, at first acquaintance at any rate, a bit of a shock to Mother, although Mother with great dignity and good sense had refrained from all criticism, even to me. When I murmured something a little awkwardly to her about it being a democratic world these days, and probably how much better that it should be, she had agreed instantly. “In any case,” Mother had added, “they’re getting married next week, so there’s nothing more to be said.” Nothing more was said.

  I could not help wondering how Mother and Rene had been getting on together during this summer. I had only seen them for one short week-end just after Philip’s death, when an emotion common to all three of us had temporarily obscured any trivial difficulties of contact and relationship. Rene had just been obliged to give up her job (she was a shorthand typist) because of her pregnancy, and Mother had urged her to come and have the baby at Winterbury Green. She had settled in the following week.

  No one knows better than myself that emotion, of whatever kind, dies down. Life just cannot be lived at a level of “darling Philip’s poor widow” any more than a marriage can remain in the ecstatic honeymoon mood. I could not help suspecting that everyday difficulties were already beginning to make themselves apparent. The habit of ordinary life is deeply engrained in most of us. Even with the sirens wailing and the whole country facing the blackest crisis in its history, Mother had found time to mind about whether Rene ‘chummed up’ with Mrs. Grantham’s Sylvia or not. ‘Tiresomely’ she hadn’t. And now Mother was wondering whether she wouldn’t be happier living with people nearer her own age. Wondering whether someone wouldn’t be ‘happier’ somewhere else: we all know what that means.

  Of course, I should have to ask Rene to come and live with me at Harminster.

  Because it was Mother I was really bothering about and not Rene, I would not be grudging about it to Mother. I would say a lot of things that were true. I would say that Blakey (my old family retainer—she had been my grandmother’s maid and was now half-cook, half-nurse to my child Antonia) and I were often hard put to it to get through the work. That, on days when I had to go up to the office, and everything had perforce to be left to Blakey, Rene could help me by doing the shopping. I would say that Blakey would be thrilled by the prospect of Rene’s baby. I would say—and this was really, stretching a point when you visualize a baby in arms and a child of four—that it would be nice for the children to have each other. I would say that Rene could have the little room at the head of the stairs—and I would not say how my heart quailed at the prospect of clearing out the accumulation of lumber. I would not say myself, but I would allow Mother to say, that Rene would be “company for me in the evening.”

  I have never tried to make Mother understand that, of all the unhappiness my divorce has brought upon me, loneliness has never been in the least a part. A sense of failure—yes. A rather frightening feeling of being alone against the world—yes. Regret that Antonia should be brought up without a father—yes. Loneliness—no. Lack of “company in the evening” is to me an absolute luxury. During the day I am, generally speaking, working for the convenience of other people. Either I am at the office (three days a week) or, if I am at home I am working or looking after Antonia or trying to get well ahead of the shopping. In the evenings I please myself and nobody but myself—and if it suits me to have a bath at seven o’clock and retire to bed with the crossword, an anthology of poetry, a novel and a bit of knitting and have Blakey bring me a tray of liver sausage sandwiches and coffee, why on earth shouldn’t I?

  I made up my mind, there and then, that, if Rene was to live with me I would begin as I meant to go on.

  * * * * *

  “Darling, it’s a weight off my mind. I can’t tell you what a weight off my mind it is,” said Mother. She added happily, “I shall write to Maud this evening.”

  It was Sunday afternoon. Since my arrival on Friday, everything had been fixed up. Slightly to Mother’s horror—she belongs very definitely to a generation which believes in “breaking the news gradually”—I had even insisted on tackling Rene on the subject. The atmosphere of Mother and me playing at Conspirators together was tiresome, and in any case there was a genuine need for decision and action. I pointed out to Mother that one could hardly sell the house over Rene’s head without at least telling her. Mother looked relieved when I said I ought to be the one to approach Rene, and murmured that she was sure I’d do it very tactfully.

  “I dare say I shall be quite tactful,” I said cheerfully, “because you see I genuinely shan’t be embarrassed and you undoubtedly would be.”

  With Rene I took the tone that I myself would have preferred had I been in her situation. I was business-like and got down to practical details as soon as possible. I didn’t actually tell her in so many words about the liver-sausage sandwiches in bed, but I did say she should have a bed-sitting-room of her own with a fire in it, and left her to draw her own conclusions.

  If there is one thing I can never bring myself to do it is to bemoan, either directly or indirectly, my divorced state. I suppose it was partly this that led me to eschew all sentiment in my conversation with Rene. I told her, I hope convincingly, that she would be welcome. I told her what I myself would have liked to hear in her place—that she could be a help. I tried to be cordial and not too take-it-or-leave-it. In point of fact, it wasn’t even that for the poor girl. It was quite simply ‘take-it.’

  I think even at the time I had an inkling that what Rene would really have preferred would have been a good cry on my shoulder, and a sort of ‘we’re two lonely women without men to look after us, let’s face it together’ attitude.

  Mother, however, subsequently reported, with decorously subdued glee, that Rene had spoken to her about the scheme and seemed “really to have taken to the idea.” It was just after this that Mother made the remark about a weight being off her mind.

  “Well, now that the weight is off,” I said, a little naughtily, “would you mind telling me how much it weighed, so to speak? I mean, what is Rene like to live with?”

  Mother has a very expressive
face. I could see loyalty and a desire to confide having a lovely pitched battle in her mouth and eyebrows.

  “Well, put it like this,” I said hastily. “Just give me a little advice on how to treat her.”

  Mother saw through this, of course, but nevertheless could not resist the lure.

  “Well, darling, she really is a bit . . .” Mother paused awkwardly, and I knew perfectly well what she was trying not to say.

  When I was about nineteen and suffering from a terrific anti-snob complex (one had to make some protest against the really extraordinary smugness and arrogance of the wealthy retired upper-middle-class inhabitants of Winterbury Green), I practically forbade Mother to use the word ‘common.’ I said, with the delightful idealistic gusto of nineteen, that it made me feel sick. (“But Vicky, I don’t like the word either, but what am I to say?” “Oh, don’t you see, Mother, it isn’t a question of phraseology, it’s your whole attitude I object to.” Goodness, what mothers of semi-intellectual daughters of nineteen have to put up with!)

  On this occasion, being fourteen years older, I merely helped Mother out.

  “Genteel?” I suggested.

  “Exactly!” Mother looked relieved. “You know, darling, it’s all very well to say the world’s changed and nobody minds about that sort of thing nowadays, but all I can say is in Winterbury Green they just do. Perhaps they oughtn’t to, but they just do.”

  “I’m sure they do,” I agreed. “And even if they oughtn’t to, one can hardly enter a room saying, ‘This is Rene and the world’s changed and nobody minds about this sort of thing nowadays.’”

  Mother laughed. “You know, Vicky, people are such awful cats. One after another they all come up and ask me where Philip met her.”

  “Where did he?” I said, suddenly curious.

  “Oh, she was a typist in his office. Her parents have been dead for ages. She lived with an aunt or something—who’s now dead also.”

  “I wonder if she cried on Philip’s shoulder and told him she was so lonely,” I murmured.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, nothing. She just struck me as the type, that might be rather good at crying on people’s shoulders. And you must admit that Philip’s shoulder rather lent itself to that sort of thing.”

  “Poor Philip,” sighed Mother. “He was too tender-hearted.”

  “He got that from you, darling. Whereas I’m brutal and bitter like Daddy.”

  “No, Vicky, I won’t have you saying things like that about yourself. You’ve inherited your father’s brains, of course, and made use of them, and you’ve led a different sort of life to anything I ever wanted. But that doesn’t mean you’re brutal and bitter or any such nonsense of the sort.”

  “Mother, you are sweet,” I said, laughing. “Wonderful how the maternal instinct to defend one’s child persists, isn’t it?”

  “Of course it persists,” said Mother, and then added hastily, “but whether it persists or not it would be just silly to say you were brutal and bitter—although Heaven knows you might have become so, after all you’ve—” Mother broke off guiltily. She knows I hate her to talk like that.

  “Oh Mother!” I said reproachfully. “Can’t you—won’t you once and for all accept the fact that I have no reason to feel bitter against Raymond? No more reason than he has to feel bitter against me.”

  Silence. If Mother hadn’t really rather a sweet face, I should say she was looking as obstinate as a mule.

  “Can’t you?” I persisted.

  “Vicky, there’s one plain fact that nobody can get over. It was Raymond and not you who . . . who . . .”

  “Pretend you’re in church and say ‘committed adultery,’ ” I suggested. (Not the sort of witticism that Mother likes, but she was annoying me.)

  “Very well then,” said Mother stoutly, “who committed adultery. Nobody can get over that, can they?” she repeated triumphantly.

  “Nobody of your generation and upbringing, perhaps, Mother, I suppose it’s incomprehensible to you if I say that to myself and, most of my friends, it’s really rather irrelevant?”

  “Well, Vicky, since you ask me straight out, I do find that incomprehensible. Yes, I do.”

  “Well, I think that makes it game, set and match to you,” I said, getting up, rather thankful that the conversation could now be closed.

  I went up to Philip’s room because, before I left the next morning I had undertaken to perform the melancholy task of clearing and sorting his things—a job Mother had never had the resolution to make herself do until the prospect of selling the house had forced it upon her. I had found her that morning in his room gazing unhappily around at the infinitely pathetic accumulation of a boy’s junk. Philip had never had a home of his own in London, only lodgings, and had continued until the end of his life to keep the majority of his possessions at home.

  Ever since I had helped Mother after Father died I have thought the aftermath of death—the sorting, the clearing, the throwing away—most cruelly and unfairly poignant. Unfair, because why should inanimate objects, even though once handled and treasured by their owners, suddenly become imbued with such unbearable pathos, when, during their owner’s lifetime they held no sentiment whatsoever for one? Philip’s room was particularly calculated to disturb a healing grief, because it was stuffed full of a boy’s treasures and redolent of the passing of the years—a Kate Greenaway picture inherited from the night-nursery, a cricket bat that he had had when he was twelve, a college blazer. Really, I had thought angrily that morning, as I stood in the doorway and watched Mother looking helplessly around, really it was unbearable that she should have to set about such a task. Almost angrily I had told her that I would see to all that, adding, unkindly perhaps (but I was cross with myself because tears were stinging my eyes), that it wouldn’t be so bad for me as for her.

  It wouldn’t. Fond as I was of Philip, obviously one’s grief at the loss of a brother is on an entirely different plane from one’s feelings at the loss of a son. Moreover, Philip was five years my junior, so that we had not really shared our childhood together. To be quite honest, I doubt if we had ever known each other really well. Probably, had he lived, we should have discovered each other as real persons in the thirties when the distance in age would have dwindled to insignificance.

  He was a gentle unassuming person, the sort of man whom one imagined living a nice ordinary undistinguished life, adequate in the office (he was a solicitor like my father), happiest in his own home. He would have adored his children, had a few very faithful friends, and no enemies at all, lived to a ripe old age and died, mourned quietly by all who had ever known him. That was, I felt, how it ought to have been for him—so much more appropriate and fitting somehow than a soldier’s death on a foreign beach at the age of twenty-seven.

  I had once remarked to Mother that I ought to have been the boy and Philip the girl, and she had almost agreed with me.

  I caught sight of myself in the glass, and suddenly found myself wondering if I did look bitter. I came nearer to have a better look.

  Thirty-three. Traces of the hag, of course. Plenty of bone in the face, thank God (I have always abhorred pudginess), but plenty of lines too. One begins stoutly to assert that they give character.

  Raymond used to say I wasn’t pretty but that I had a “smart” face. He liked me to use plenty of make-up, and it has become second nature now, so that I feel half-naked without lipstick or polish on my nails or my hair properly set. Of course, in London, my appearance was quite unremarkable, but in provincial Harminster it sometimes suddenly occurs to me that I don’t look in the least like any other woman in the room.

  Well! there I was, thirty-three, and I hadn’t got a husband or much security or much money or the prospect of peaceful companionship in old age; but I had got a home and a child and a job, and, if I had known through and through what ‘disillusionment’ means, I had known passionate love too, and if I was sometimes frightened about the future, an apprehension usually shouldered by t
he man, I had known also the joy denied to many wives, the solid satisfaction of earning money. If you added it all up the answer honestly didn’t seem to me to be ‘bitterness,’ and anyway, who the hell wants an unlined face?

  There was a movement in the doorway and, turning, I saw Rene.

  Nobody is pleased to be found looking at himself or herself in a mirror. My immediate instinct was to cover up my slight embarrassment by saying something quickly.

  “This is all horribly Time-and-the-Conways, isn’t it?” I said, gesturing vaguely round at the room.

  Rene looked puzzled, and I had time to reflect that my remark was not happy. It was unnecessarily allusive and possibly a little flippant—not what I should have chosen for Rene as my opening comment on Philip’s death. Well, she shouldn’t have startled me.

  “Time and the Conways was a play on in London by Priestley,” I explained. “But perhaps you didn’t see it?”

  “No—no, I didn’t,” said Rene. A pause. “Are you—are you fond of going to the theatre?”