Friends and Relations

by Elizabeth Bowen

  “I’m afraid Laurel’s worrying,” Janet had commented, passing across the letter.

  Rodney loved Laurel, he hated to think this possible. “Surely she needn’t think we’d mind Edward if she doesn’t. Tell her of course it’s all right.”

  “I think that might embarrass them.”

  “Perhaps you’re right. Well, they’ll feel better when they’re both here in July. Do you think Edward would like to help make the golf-course? Or, Hermione’s very anxious to dredge the lake.”

  “But, Rodney, Edward will be exhausted; he wants to rest.”

  “I thought he might feel worse with nothing to do.”

  Lady Elfrida said there had been enough Tilneys at Batts and had soon afterwards left them for Ireland. Theodora exclaimed to Janet: “I can’t stand this, you are an icicle!” and confounded by Rodney’s politeness, Janet’s lassitude and the approach of the Nursing Fête, went away impressively to re-open the flat. Here she commanded a visit from Lewis, mixed some powerful drinks and told him Edward had finally ruined himself with Janet. Lewis reported to Lady Elfrida in Ireland that Edward went about looking wretched over this Batts affair and Lady Elfrida wrote crossly of Edward to Janet that he was giving himself a nervous breakdown. Rodney advised Janet to discount almost all of this. Considine went abroad.

  The Nursing Fête over, there had been an anticlimax; at Batts they began to look forward to the arrival of the Tilneys. Hermione, forgetting how little she liked Anna, crossed off the days on her calendar; her father promised that they should motor twice a week to the sea and bathe. So that news of a drastic change in the Tilneys’ holiday plans was received with consternation.

  “I don’t think they’ll like France at all. Do you, Mother? Do you think they’ll like it?”

  “You never know.”

  “Oh, I’d hate it, I know. Old France!”

  Janet wrote back at once to agree with Laurel that the Continent taken in this agreeable form should be at once stimulating to the children and soothing to Edward. Edward and Laurel had been right, of course, not to feel themselves bound. There was no question of anything more than a disappointment. Rodney and Janet perfectly understood; Rodney and Janet envied them. Those hot sands…And at Batts already the borders were going off; the delphiniums had been cut down to flower again in September. She wished all good progress to Anna and Simon’s French, and had it half in her mind to send Laurel a cheque to buy cotton dresses. She would love, Janet knew, to look pretty, crisp, jaunty, un-English in Brittany; the deep-enough droop to the wide-enough hat, though on the sands beside her weary Edward might lie with his eyes closed. “I only hope they can afford it,” Mrs. Studdart had written.

  Addressing this letter, Janet had thought: “It is certainly for the best.” But when finding no stamps in her box, none in Rodney’s, she had to send to the village, her spirit faltered. “I am not, of course, to see Edward. But someday—surely we stay related? As I said once, there will be Christmas and everything…I’d like to have asked Elfrida.”

  So that today, ten days later, she followed her letter to town. It had been her intention only to see Laurel. Rodney was sympathetic. Something had gone so wrong, or been so falsely seen, she and Laurel could hardly write to each other nowadays. Their letters read oddly: “composed.” Here was pain, far-reaching, awkward, a distortion. When Laurel and she were together, unconsciously smiling, with everything, nothing to say, they so easily spoke it was hardly to speak at all. They must meet. For here, unthinkably, was suspicion.

  These weeks, a grotesque, not quite impossible figure, had come to interpose between herself and Laurel. A woman, an unborn shameful sister, travestying their two natures, enemy to them both. Against her Laurel’s derision, Janet’s pride was powerless. She resembled each for the other, and pressing in between them since they had permitted themselves to part a little interposed a preposterous profile that to each, at the very edge of her vision, was somehow darkly familiar. “Surely Laurel could not take her for me, or I for her Laurel?” Where had the three met, how did the two, innocent, recognize the third? We know of her, we do not know her. Never overt, less than a sinner, worlds apart from Elfrida, she was the prey of all speculation, the unpitiable quarry of talk. Laurel once said: “Do you notice, it’s always the same woman whose letters are read in court?” This ever-presence in profile had, for each of the sisters, the Egyptian effective defect: from Janet’s side or from Laurel’s—could either have seen her, she was so close, or, faced her, she was so dreadful—two eyes were visible, focused elsewhere with an undeviating intentness. The look directed upon Edward its whole darkness.

  For Janet, used to a small range of thought and great clarity, this horrible illusory figure had materialized on the upward train journey. The porter shutting the door shut Janet in with it; while the train ran down through a cutting they shared darkness; while the carriage crossing the downs became a running box of light the figure, feeding on day itself, enlarged, took Janet within its outlines, occupied finally her own corner place. So much Janet that it drew on her every instinct for its defence; so much Laurel that she could not attack it.

  Janet’s dismay was formless. “Surely,” she thought, looking out at herself—for the train running under a bank, the window became a mirror—“there is nothing with me but what I am?”

  “Today”—for the fields swam up again into broad morning—“when Laurel and I are lunching together, this will be gone? Won’t this be blown away? Where shall we lunch—I think we’ll lunch out, somewhere cheerful: Laurel would like that. I shall be angry with her; really this idea of Brittany is absurd; it will be no kind of holiday with these wretched children. Really Laurel lives by exaggeration; she cannot bear to be calm. I shall say…I shall make her see…She began falling in love simply for fun, when she was fourteen. Those absurd photographs. There has never been anything Laurel couldn’t say. Or perhaps there was never anything she had to say? No, I’m wrong; she was afraid before Anna was born and she never told me. So today, when we’re lunching together…Now, soon, in two hours, at lunch…” A cold thought: “Shall I find her? Ought I to have telephoned?”

  It was inconceivable, later, that she should find Laurel missing from Royal Avenue, not to be traced. Janet was more than at a loss, she was shocked; she did not know what to do. She thought: “Has she run away from me?” Then in her anger, a rare mood accustomed to govern and contravene any mood of Laurel’s, she rang up her brother-in-law. With a shock, repeated, doubled in this new duality of her nature’s, she heard Edward’s voice. For him she had only one answer: she had come to London to see him.

  So, meeting and smiling in the Ionides’s door, they had mutely exchanged some countersign recognizing more than each other. Those ominous weeks, the silence since his departure had been discounted before they reached their table. As she first sat down, glancing his way without curiosity, pulling her gloves off slowly, she had rejoiced in this waste of moments; she was prodigal of security. In fact, she had waited so long that the narrow scope of this hour was immaterial.

  What they said had been inconsecutive. His mother’s figure crossed the screen of their talk. Janet asked, “Why were you so angry?”

  “You know that you know. Don’t let’s—”

  “All right. Look, Edward: in ten minutes we’ll both have to go. There’s nothing to say, is there?”

  “Too much to begin.”

  “Once there was nothing, now there’s too much—Is that because we’ve no future? Or is that why we’ve no future?”

  “Let’s go now,” said Edward.

  “You aren’t afraid, are you?”

  “Janet, are you?”

  “No more than if I were going to die—There isn’t, is there?”

  “Not?”

  “Any future?”

  “No. None.”

  “I know.” But bending her head with that ol
d movement she looked involuntarily into the palm of her hand as though he stood there.

  3

  Marise Gibson soon heard that Janet was in town, for Mrs. Thirdman went straight from the club to her daughter’s flat. Hoping, she said, just to catch Theodora…Theodora was out, which was perhaps fortunate; she did not like her relations to walk in without telephoning. “In view,” as she said to Marise, “of everything.”

  The two had perfected a system of half-allusion—it is not difficult for women to live together—and rarely had to say anything more direct than “What are we out of?” or “You are looking like death today.”

  Her daughter’s friend, displacing some gramophone records, proofs and curious drawings, offered Mrs. Thirdman an edge of the divan. Everything looked very low, for the cigarette-box you reached into the grate; the lamps were practically on the floor. But perhaps contrast was grateful to Marise and Theodora, who stood about so much. Still with an air of civilly concealing her amazement, Marise, very negligent, cool and imposing, made tea for the visitor. She groaned in the kitchenette.

  “So nice up here, airy,” said Willa, breathless; there had been no lift. The flat was an attic; the windows, at floor-level, let in a draught round the feet and viewed some tree-tops.

  “Yes, it’s convenient,” said Marise, warming a little. “Everything fits inside everything else; we had them designed, you know. We’ve had the mantelpieces taken away, so there’s no dust. I hate a place where one cannot put things away, though one may never want to—I’m afraid this may be impossible tea, Mrs. Thirdman. You see, we never drink any. You don’t eat, do you?”

  “No, that will be lovely, I’m sure,” said Willa, gratefully contemplating her cup—in which dust from the tea-leaves rose in a light film. The alarming girl supported herself against a bookcase.

  “Do you know where Janet is staying? You see, Theodora will want to know. She can’t be with Lady Elfrida as she’s in Ireland. Besides, things are difficult just at present…You know?”

  “Won’t you keep me company?” said Willa, gesturing with the teapot.

  “Thank you; I really would rather not. Perhaps Janet might like to come here, if nothing’s arranged? She need not talk to us. As a matter of fact, we shall both be out tonight and we never speak in the mornings anyhow. But there’s plenty of hot water, she could have baths and telephone.”

  “I think there is always a little hotel she and Rodney—”

  Willa could not feel that Janet would be quite at home in the flat. In a varnished colour-scheme of almost menacing restraint there were scimitar-curves and discs and soaring angles. She saw Janet more in that little hotel near St. James’s, where if last year’s fog were never entirely polished off the brass knobs of the bed, the chintz was quite limp with prestige and the kind chambermaid who forgot the hot water remembered Rodney’s grandfather.

  Marise continued to contemplate, with alarming detachment, the little group Willa composed with the teatray and divan. “I hear,” she said, “that Edward is looking wretched.”

  “Laurel only said he was feeling the heat.”

  “But what a heredity!”

  “Oh, I do hope not!” Willa rebalanced the tray, in great agitation. “Janet did not get up in time to join us all at the club, so Edward was giving her lunch. It seemed so nice.”

  “Really?” said Marise, without moving an eyelid.

  “Sometimes, Laurel says, Edward has no time for lunch at all.”

  “Did Laurel strike you—?”

  “Look, I am taking still more of your delicious tea!” said Willa hastily.

  “I’m afraid it is too repellent. I must say,” Marise went on, “one can’t help being sorry for Edward.” And lighting a cigarette she became lost in gloomy reflection. “Did you hear,” she said suddenly, “we’ve had a green china bath put in? It’s square; the water runs in from the bottom; I must show you. It makes such a difference to life…Of course, poor dear little Laurel is so diffusive.”

  “I am devoted to Laurel,” said Willa warmly.

  “Oh? Perhaps you’re like me, no one really annoys me these days…Are you going? This is too sad.”

  “I musn’t take up any more of your time.”

  “I hate work,” said Marise, accompanying her visitor to the top of the stairs. “I would rather do anything. Theodora’ll be sorry—you do know our telephone number, don’t you?” she added gently.

  “An interesting life,” thought Willa, descending the hair-pin flights. She felt the top of her head still exposed to a cool glare; perhaps only the skylights. An interesting life, she repeated. Yet twenty-six years ago she had borne Theodora—to what? For this? And an idea remained in her mind that the furniture in the flat was made of ground glass; the idea found its way into her talk and, distressing to Alex, had to be extirpated. Marise’s manner was faultless; she had asked: “How are your hollyhocks?” But not as if she had seen a hollyhock grow.

  Willa, coming out into Buckingham Palace Road, looked longingly west towards Chelsea, reluctantly east to Victoria. An hour before the train was still on her hands, too short to drop in and see how Anna and Simon had grown, too long to spend in Gorringe’s, even the Stores. She resigned herself to the hour’s nonentity, boarded a No. II bus and was carried towards the terminus. She wished she had a married daughter in London, even a sister-in-law. She walked in St. James’s Park. “Edward Tilney,” she thought, “seems to be very much in the air just at present…”

  But later, Alex made light of it.

  In any case, Anna and Simon would not have been found at home in Royal Avenue. Their mother had sent them out with the cook, with a shilling each, to take tea under a coloured umbrella in Kensington Gardens.

  “But we would rather go to the pictures.”

  “Oh, Anna, this lovely day!”

  “But the weather is always the same inside the pictures.”

  Laurel knew she would weep, here, in the hall, with Sylvia watching. (The persistence of Sylvia in Laurel’s life after so many years may appear remarkable. She had left, of course, shortly before Anna’s birth, crossed the Park, occupied several situations in Bayswater, become a lady housekeeper, had a fine little boy by a commercial traveller and returned to Laurel a year ago, at very much higher wages and still more respectable.) It was half-past three and, composedly as a visitor, her sister, Janet, waited for Laurel upstairs. As in a dream, Laurel could not get to the drawing-room, where Janet waited. It was terrible. Sylvia, opening the hall door, let in some of the hot afternoon. The sun had gone off the front of the house; that was one mercy.

  “Cheer up, Anna; we’re going to Brittany.”

  “I don’t want to go to Brittany; I wish I had never been born.”

  When Sylvia had got them both out and shut the door, Laurel said: “So do I!” furious. Down the Avenue, she could picture the two of them lagging, angry, disconsolate, on their way to the 49 bus; Anna in the gay pink smock she had been given to wear at Batts, Simon with a panama in imitation of Considine’s. Sylvia had orders not to return them before their bedtime. Then what did Mrs. Tilney propose to do about dinner? “We won’t have any dinner; we’ll dine out somewhere!” Of course, Edward would be furious.

  Last year, she would have told him to look for another wife.

  When Laurel did reach the drawing-room, where Janet sat in the high-backed chair by the empty grate, it was not, as one mistress of a house to another, necessary for Laurel to explain…In ten years, many of the wedding presents had been broken or put away. The room was sadder, civiller, less inconsequent, a room that ten years ago, with some tears and quarrels but all in a glow, had been contrived together and chatted about. Its order was now fixed; you must not move the furniture or a patch of ghostly new carpet appeared, that had not faded. The cupidy clock ticked on, a heart on its pendulum: Cousin Richard who had presented it was now Simon’s g
odfather, safe in New Zealand. The shagreen cigarette-box was still in evidence.

  “—Oh, it’s empty, Janet; I’m so sorry.”

  “I don’t smoke, really.”

  “No, but you did want to—Is the traffic too loud? Shall I shut the window?”

  “The King’s Road traffic?” said Janet, surprised. “No, I hardly hear it.”

  “You see how it is: there’s never anywhere for the children to be when they’re not anywhere special—Why do you look at me?”

  “Was I looking? How?”

  “You were—Oh, what is the matter!”

  Janet could not begin to say; there was no measure for this. She felt strong and light, unlike herself, with a new spirit. She might be dead, for she could no longer be called to account. Dead, but not disembodied; there was a singular pleasure in feeling her right hand lie on her left, in looking down at the rose she wore, in being, in such a powerful stillness of body, bodily present here in this room with Edward written across it, among the restless evidences of his life.

  Laurel saw Janet would not understand. Her tone changed; she said: “But how good you were to come up!”

  “I had to, of course I wanted—” Janet began. She broke off and went over to Laurel to comfort her. “Don’t, don’t,” she cried, all consternation and pity. She could not see Laurel’s face, which was against her shoulder; she was mistaken, Laurel was not weeping. A shiver, as at some terrifying awakening, passed for a sob. Wide open, Laurel’s unseen eyes, unseeing, were dark and steady with incredulity. Relaxing her body she gave herself up to Janet’s consolation idly, as though to a child’s. Her head dropped, her hand made a fumbling, afflicted movement on Janet’s shoulder. She let consternation flow through her out into a void. In the room, life all centred in Janet, in her passionate fatality. For minutes this travesty of consolation continued.