Company in the Evening

by Ursula Orange

  Oh dear, oh dear, I thought.

  “Yes, very,” I said, and then, since there seemed nothing else to say, “Are you?”

  “Yes, sometimes,” said Rene.

  And that, I thought, closes that interesting discussion. Now let’s try again.

  “In Harminster—” I began, but Rene was quicker than I.

  “Your mother said that when you were living in London, you used to know quite a lot of people on the stage,” said Rene, with a distinct flicker of interest lighting up her face.

  “Yes, I did know some,” I said, and told her a few names.

  “Oh! What were they like?”

  “Like? Well, like other people, of course. No, to be quite honest, I think stage-people usually are a bit of a class apart.”

  “Oh. Are they? In what way?”

  “Oh—a bit petty and childish and utterly absorbed in the gossip of their world and extraordinarily indifferent to everything outside it. Just a bit, you know,” I added kindly, seeing the disappointment on Rene’s face.

  “You didn’t like them then when you met them off the stage?” persisted Rene.

  “Yes, some of them I liked very much. They’re very easy to like. They have such beautiful manners.”

  “Oh,” said Rene, and that topic dropped.

  “You were going to say something just now when I interrupted you—I beg your pardon,” said Rene.

  (Good heavens! Had the word ‘manners’ set her off like that?)

  “Oh, it was nothing. I was only going to tell you that we have a repertory theatre in Harminster, but I’m afraid it isn’t very good.”

  “Do you like Harminster? Is it a nice place?”

  “Nice? Well, it’s a provincial town, of course. I can’t pretend that I don’t prefer London, but it has its points. It suits me because the good trains only take three-quarters of an hour to get to London—I go up three days a week, you know—and yet, so far at least, it hasn’t had any bombs to speak of. The result is, of course, that it’s horribly overcrowded. The river’s quite nice in the summer, though, and there’s nice country round—only I never seem to have time to get out to it.”

  “I expect there’s good cinemas,” said Rene hopefully.

  “Oh heavens, yes!” I said heartily. “There’s a terrific new Odeon with terrifically plush seats.”

  “Do you often go?” said Rene with another real flicker of interest.

  “Practically never, I’m afraid.” (I couldn’t help it, I just wasn’t going to raise false hopes in the girl.) “But, of course, you’ll be able to go as much as you like,” I added quickly.

  “Well . . .” Rene blushed slightly. “Perhaps I’d better wait until after Baby is born. It’s getting rather close now, you see—the beginning of November, and one doesn’t want to go in crowds very much towards the end, do you think?”

  And this, I thought, is where we ought to sit down together and have a cosy little chat about Baby. Only I did want to get on with the job of clearing Philip’s room.

  “Oh, you’ve got nearly another three months to play about in, haven’t you?” I said encouragingly. And then, because really I was trying not to be horrid, in spite of my resolution to begin as I meant to go on, “Although I expect you’re already very tired of lolloping about in a tactful smock, aren’t you? I know I was.”

  To my horror Rene blushed an unmistakable pink and it occurred to me that once again I had put my foot in it. Good heavens, did the child really imagine, as the advertisements for maternity frocks say, that nobody would have an inkling that she was a little mother-to-be?

  “Incidentally there’s a very good maternity home at Harminster,” I said. “I know the Matron quite well, so I’ll just force her to squeeze you in somehow. It really is a good one. They’re frightfully good with the babies and have nearly always got them trained to sleep all through the night by the time you come out.”

  “Poor little mites,” said Rene vaguely. “I do hope Baby will be good and not disturb you too much when I get him home.”

  “That’s all right,” I said heartily. “Don’t think me brutal if I assure you that somebody else’s baby crying doesn’t worry me at all. I shan’t expect him to be a ‘property child.’ Antonia isn’t.”

  “‘Property child’?” said Rene in a puzzled voice.

  “Oh, you know. Like children in books. One minute the mother adores it so much that she can’t bear to let a nurse touch it. The next minute she’s apparently forgotten all about it and is perfectly free to prance off unencumbered with Another Man—oh no, I forgot. She does usually rush in in evening dress and pick it up out of its cot after it’s asleep and clasp it to her bosom and swear one day it will understand how she’s suffering. And then she puts it back in its cot and it doesn’t seem at all disturbed by all this procedure—I suppose property children get used to it—and it goes off to sleep again clasping a rose-leaf that has fallen from her corsage. It doesn’t even eat the rose-leaf, as a real baby undoubtedly would. Oh, property children are very convenient.”

  “I don’t think I’ve read that book,” said Rene, politely bewildered.

  Oh dear, oh dear, I thought again.

  “No, nor have I,” I explained patiently, “It’s just the result of all the short stories I have to read in the office. I work in a literary agency, you know.”

  “Yes, your mother told me,” said Rene politely, but I could see her attention was wandering and I suddenly realized why. During the course of our conversation I had been rather vaguely moving about, pulling drawers open, throwing things on the floor, and now just at Rene’s feet was lying a large photograph of Raymond and myself on our wedding-day. Rene was obviously wondering whether to comment on it or not.

  Well, some time or other some reference to Raymond had clearly got to be made. I took the bull by the horns, picked the photograph up and handed it to her.

  “I think it was rather sweet of Philip to have kept that,” I said.

  “It’s an awfully good likeness of you,” commented Rene bravely.

  “It’s good of Raymond, too,” I said, not without, I’m afraid, some malicious enjoyment in her embarrassment.

  “Is it?” said Rene, and then added quickly, “Let’s see, how old were you then?”

  “Twenty-two.” I tried to keep my voice casual. I felt casual myself. (I was long past the stage when such trivial reminders of the past as photographs could hold any power to wound me.) ‘It was only Rene’s evident embarrassment that made my indifference at all self-conscious. Indeed, the poor child looked so unhappy that I relieved her of the photograph and shut it quickly away into a drawer.

  To somebody my own age I would have said outright, “Don’t worry, don’t bother to be tactful, I don’t mind.” To Rene, I just couldn’t.

  It occurred to me there and then that probably there were going to be a lot of things one just could not say to Rene. It did not augur very brilliantly for the future.

  I had shut the photograph away in a drawer, but I evidently could not shut away her embarrassment with it. I did try—I was even willing to talk about films if that was any help—but after the episode of the photograph no topic seemed very successful. In the end I helped her out of the room (she was obviously dying to go, but didn’t know how) by shoving a volume of old family snapshots at her and suggesting to her that she should look through them and take out any that she liked that had Philip in them.

  Just as she turned at the door, on her way out, to thank me again (really rather prettily) for thinking of such a nice idea, I got my first hint of the appeal she might have had for Philip—nothing sparkling and edgy that you could catch on to. Not the sort of ‘charm’ that I personally like, not poised or self-confident or humorous, but nevertheless sweet of its kind, the soft, big-eyed appreciative sort. It suddenly occurred to me that Rene was only just twenty, and might well, some day, marry again.

  Chapter 2

  *

  Mother’s parting words to me on Monday mornin
g were: “And don’t forget, darling, when I’m at Chipping Campden we can easily meet in Oxford for the day, and perhaps you can bring Antonia sometimes? And I do hope you and Rene will get on nicely together. She’s a sweet girl, really, and even if she is a bit young for you . . .”

  “Oh well, we were all twenty once, God help us,” I finished for her.

  “Vicky dear, don’t talk as if you were my age. It’s absurd.”

  “Darling mother, I can’t help feeling I’m nearer in age to you than to Rene, when all’s said and done.”

  “What nonsense, darling! I never heard such nonsense.”

  The engine whistled, the guard started slamming the doors, the train began to move.

  “Why, it seems no time at all since you were twenty,” yelled Mother stoutly after me.

  I fell back on my seat, laughing, and then found myself reflecting that really it was a good job for Rene that I wasn’t twenty now. At thirty-three I might not be her sort of person, nor she mine, but at least we could put up some sort of a show of it between us. My twenty-year-old self she would quite rightly have found intolerable.

  Twenty. In my last year at Oxford. Cocksure, arrogant, gloriously patronizing towards my parents and indeed towards almost everybody of an older generation. The sort of young woman who takes a pride in announcing at a tea-party in her parents’ drawing-room that she is an agnostic. The sort of young woman who has affairs ‘on principle’ and tells you all about the principle. (Actually I hadn’t. I meant to once, but baulked at the last minute to my secret shame.)

  ‘Showing off’ it is called in the nursery, and public opinion is very rightly against it. I can’t think why public opinion wasn’t more against me—or perhaps it was, and I just didn’t notice, invulnerable in my shining armour of youthful idiocy. Or perhaps I got away with it just because I was twenty and rather striking-looking and popular in my own circle and attractive to men. If people take one, as is sometimes said, at one’s own valuation I was certainly pretty expensive in those days.

  How I wanted smacking and how I enjoyed those radiant, insolent, flaunting years, and how Raymond and I used to laugh and mock and prance gaily about all over other people’s feelings and susceptibilities and reticences and prejudices. Because I was twenty and he was twenty-four and we were both on the crest of a wave and mutually in love we ourselves had no reticences or prejudices of our own at all. Those that we had been brought up on we had already discarded as painlessly as milk-teeth. We had had no time to acquire others, because nothing in our young lives had ever seriously hurt us.

  Raymond had just been called to the Bar. His prospects were not bad, as he had what are called ‘useful connections’ (both his family and mine went in for the law), but meanwhile, of course, no one could call him overworked. He employed his spare time in writing a novel, and it actually got published and had a certain amount of success. It hit the taste of the time, being wittily cynical in a superficial Noel Cowardish kind of way. I thought it brilliant.

  At this time I was working for my degree, but the terms at Oxford are only eight weeks long, and, in the vacations I used to stay with a married friend of mine in her London flat. When Raymond and I went out together in the evening I used to get the most exquisite intoxicating sensation that he and I between us owned London—lamp-lit streets, winking electric signs, the hooting jam of taxies in Shaftesbury Avenue after the theatres came out, the statue of Eros in the middle of Piccadilly and all.

  We were married in 1932, and divorced in 1936.

  * * * * *

  And now I had got to break the news to Blakey. Rene was coming in a fortnight’s time.

  Antonia came running out to meet me at the gate, and, as always, I felt that absurd instinctive uprush of delight and relief at being once more reunited with her after a few days’ separation. Bless her, what a satisfactory and exquisite thing a four-year-old daughter in a cotton frock with dangling sun-bonnet is! I packed her up and hugged her, revelling in the scent of her newly-washed hair, in the soft touch of her grubby little hands artlessly smearing earth on my brat travelling frock, loving the whole feel of her in my arms—a piquant mixture of solidity and fragility—luxuriating in her affectionate greeting of me and knowing perfectly well and not minding in the least that the real reason why she was so thrilled to see me again was because I had promised to bring back the doll’s frock my mother had been knitting for her. The fact that, on Friday, I had been quite pleased at the prospect of three days’ holiday from Antonia was not really in the least inconsistent with my delight at seeing her again, as every mother will realize.

  “I’ve got the frock in my suitcase here,” I said instantly.

  “Oh Mummy, where? May I see? May I unpack for you?”

  Bless her, she couldn’t really be ‘spoilt’ if she was so thrilled over a tiny present of the sort. (If there’s one thing that infuriates me it’s the way people always imply that only children must be spoilt. I am uneasily conscious of the truth of this generalization and therefore furiously on the defensive about it.)

  “Can you unpack for me really beautifully, darling—put everything in the right place—while I have a cup of tea and talk to Blakey?”

  Antonia nodded self-importantly, lips pursed up.

  Of all the extraordinary treats the child likes, ‘unpacking’ is about the favourite. God knows why I should have been honoured with a passionately tidy child—neither heredity nor example can have anything to do with it. When I first discovered it I was quite horrified. I think I felt if she was going to be ‘tidy’ she couldn’t be long for this world. Nowadays I have just accepted it and even make use of it on some occasions—although a little guiltily owing to a vague feeling that it would be ‘better’ somehow for her to be romping vaguely about and getting dirty.

  “You’ll find the frock in a piece of tissue-paper, and when you’ve unpacked everything perhaps you’d like to put it on Susie and bring her down to show me?” I suggested, calculating rapidly that all this would probably take her long enough to keep her well out of the way while I had my talk with Blakey. I badly wanted to get it off my chest, so that I could settle to some work that evening, and I also wanted to be interrupted after I had got it off my chest, so really Antonia was being delightfully useful.

  I carried the suitcase up to my room, dumped it on the floor, opened it for her and left her to it.

  I knew that, when I went up again, I should get my usual fond smile out of seeing my hair-brush, comb and jars of cosmetics ranged with absolutely military precision on the dressing-table.

  Blakey was clearing away the tea-things from the dining-room as I went downstairs. She will not permit Antonia to have tea in the kitchen when I am away, although Antonia loves it, and it must be much less trouble for Blakey than carrying trays into the dining-room. When Blakey is out Antonia and I often treat ourselves to this luxury.

  For sheer engrained snobbishness I do not think you can beat the ‘old family retainer’ type, like Blakey. I suppose she is about sixty now, and, ever since she was fourteen she has been in service, always, one understands, in the best families. After listening to her earlier reminiscences I sometimes wonder whether she didn’t consider it a bit of a come-down to enter my grandmother’s house, because, after all, my grandfather was only a K.B.E. However, I suppose she thought it better to be head-housemaid in a staff of five rather than one of the under-housemaids in a staff of twenty or so. In any case, she stayed with my grandmother for more than twenty years, and towards the end of my grandmother’s life, when the old lady was something of an invalid, she rose to the position of a sort of mixture of housekeeper and personal maid. When Philip and I, as children, were brought to my grandmother’s house, Blakey always used to carry us off to her special sanctum and give us ‘squashed-fly’ biscuits out of a tin covered with sea-shells. I thought the tin about the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life, and did not mind at all that it was not airtight, and the biscuits, in consequence, always tasted stale.
One could not, I felt, have everything.

  Grandmother died in 1937 at the fine old age of eighty-five. It was then that Blakey came to me. Antonia was one year old, and I was living in a flat in St. John’s Wood with a nurse for Antonia and a ‘daily woman’ who was always being prevented from turning up. As a matter of fact, it was a rather more extravagant establishment than I could really afford, but Blakey, when she saw the squalor to which I was reduced, was absolutely horrified. I honestly do not think that, living all those years in Grandmother’s house, she had noticed how the world around her was changing. Anyway, she came to tea and found me on my hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor, the daily woman having once more followed her usual routine of not turning up. Blakey was so shocked that she insisted on coming to me the next week.

  I believe there were terrible battles between Blakey and Nanny in the flat, but really, all that year (the year before the war) I was too harassed by the strain of going back to work and my private unhappiness over my divorce and trying to be a good mother to Antonia in spite of everything, that I just hadn’t the energy left to bother about their quarrels. When the war came and I had to move out of London, I let the nurse go without feeling much of a pang. I thought it probable that Blakey was the difficult and unreasonable one (she had never quite got over the fact that Nanny was out for a walk with Antonia while I was scrubbing the kitchen floor, although really one hardly engages a college-trained nurse to scrub the floor while one takes one’s baby out oneself), but, on the whole, I preferred her about the place. She was a link with old times. She was a part of my childhood. In her own obstinate, loyal, rather maddening way, she was genuinely devoted to me and, much as, intellectually speaking, her attitude to life appalled me—“Miss Vicky, it’s my opinion that Nurse sets herself up to be as good as you are.” “Well, Blakey, why not? So she is.” “There now, Miss Vicky, what a thing to say! How you do talk!”—I could not help finding it infinitely restful. I was glad that it was Blakey I was taking to Harminster with me on the outbreak of war. She was devoted to Antonia and Antonia to her, and the child was past the stage which nowadays necessitates playing about with veal broth and sieved vegetables. Blakey, I am sure, would think of giving a child food, not ‘a diet sheet.’