Chatterton Square (British Library Women Writers)

by E. H. Young

  “Yes,” said Rosamund, “and then we’d all settle down and trust the conjuror to do it again next time. What’s the matter with us all, Agnes? And anyhow, what can you and I do about it? We can’t do anything and so we don’t even think about it, at least not much, not enough. I know what’s happening, I know what may happen, but I’m fairly happy all the time and really I give more concentrated thought to planning my summer clothes and I suffer more acutely when they go wrong than I do when I face the future. But the future’s so indefinite and I can do something about the clothes.”

  “You’ve always thought too much about them.”

  “And you’ve never thought enough. D’you know that the shoulder seams of that dress are halfway down your arms? You look frightful and you’ve had your hair in that teapot handle on the top of your head ever since you put it up.”

  “What does it matter?” Miss Spanner asked. “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

  “A very nice pigskin one, though. And, after all, beauty’s important. Let’s have as much of it as we can get. And,” she added after a pause, “if the worst does happen, Fergus will be in it again, by hook or crook.”

  “And you’ll make a hero of him,” Miss Spanner said with a snort.

  “He’ll make a hero of himself, as he did before,” Rosamund said. “I won’t have you being spiteful about Fergus.”

  “I oughtn’t to be,” Miss Spanner said. “If he hadn’t gone I’d still be alone in the dear old home. But after the war—”

  “Don’t be so definite,” Rosamund begged.

  “After the war,” Miss Spanner persisted, “and it really began when we let them march to the Rhine, there’ll be a general reconciliation here and I shall be turned out. He’s gone off before now, in a temper, and come back again.”

  “He won’t come back this time,” Rosamund said. “I’d never have asked you to come and live with us if I hadn’t been sure of that.”

  “You can’t be sure of anything with Fergus.”

  “Of course you know him best,” Rosamund said with gentle sarcasm.

  “And I was a fool,” Miss Spanner continued, “to let myself be uprooted, but I’ve been a happy fool.”

  “And you can go on being happy.”

  “And a fool,” Miss Spanner said.

  Chapter II

  

  “But Mr. Lindsay,” said Miss Spanner, “can’t be in another war, can he? Not by any hook or crook. I’m glad of that. He can’t hide his limp or his face wounds.”

  “No,” Rosamund said, folding up her work. It was time to see about the family’s supper and she went through the drawing-room and down the stairs—these were wide and shallow and the mahogany banister rail was smooth under her hand—and so through the hall and down the steep, dark staircase to the basement. Dark though it was, she did not need a light to guide her. She had been born in this house and lived in it with her father until the war ended. Felix and James and Chloe had been born here too but sometimes it seemed to her that she had never left it and had suddenly found herself supplied with a large family to share its occupation. Her children were the fourth generation to live in it, for the house had been her grandfather’s, and she had a simple pride in her modest inheritance. She had been glad to come back to it when Mr. Spanner’s offer to give Felix his articles and train him in his office—another pleasing piece of continuity—had coincided with Fergus’s decision that he was tired of selling motor cars and the chance that the house was standing empty. All her roots were here, she thought, her feet prepared for the unevenness in the stone-flagged passage, and she had almost forgotten the dreadful bungalow with the corrugated iron roof which had been her first home with Fergus. Like many another man returned from the first world war, he was bent on chicken farming. As he was equipped with nothing but enthusiasm it had not been a success, but they had had a lot of fun in that bleak field sprinkled with hen-coops and wire enclosures. They had always managed to have fun together, she thought, and checked a sigh to exclaim, “Oh, Sandra!” for there was a light in the kitchen. “What are you doing? This is my job, you know.”

  “Enjoying myself. Making soup,” Sandra said, her head, like a tawny chrysanthemum, bent over a saucepan. All the Frasers were either red-haired like their father or dark like their mother and Sandra and Felix were the red ones. “It’s good for Chloe,” she said, stirring busily. “Sometimes she’s too tired to eat solid food straight away after the stuffy shop and the train. I wish she didn’t have to work in Wellsborough.”

  “You ought to be the mother of the family,” Rosamund said. “But have you done your homework? Where’s Paul?”

  “He’s got toothache.”

  “Oh dear! Badly?”

  “I don’t know. You can never tell with boys, but I put some brandy on cotton wool and he’s put it on the place.”

  “He has no business to have toothache,” Rosamund said with annoyance. “He went to the dentist in the holidays.”

  “He eats too many sweets.”

  “Such a horrid pain,” Rosamund murmured, leaning against the table.

  “Would you have it for him if you could?” Sandra inquired. “I wouldn’t, not for Paul. It’s funny, I would for any of the others but somehow, with Paul, I can’t feel it matters very much.”

  “I don’t think it’s at all funny. I think it’s horrid.”

  “I didn’t mean funny like that. I meant queer.”

  “Very queer,” Rosamund said. “Don’t you like him?” she asked in a troubled tone.

  “Of course I do, only he doesn’t seem quite human, not as human as a dog. More like a tadpole, something that’s going to turn into something else.”

  “Well, that’s just what he is.”

  “And I feel as if he hadn’t any feelings.”

  “You’re quite wrong there. It’s just that he can’t sort them out. He’s a nice, messy, ordinary schoolboy,” Rosamund said, her eyes following the geometrical pattern of the linoleum, black on a brown ground. “What wonderful stuff this had been,” she said. “I remember when it was put down.”

  “Yes, darling, you’ve told us that several times already,” Sandra said.

  Rosamund sat down rather heavily. “Am I a bore?” she asked.

  Sandra’s thin little face wrinkled with amusement. “You’re lovely,” she said. “I’d like to kiss you, under your eyes.”

  Rosamund held up her face obligingly. It was broad where Sandra wished to kiss it with a generous yet fine line to the chin and it would still be beautiful when she was an old woman. It depended on its structure, not its colour, though her big mouth was red enough without assistance and her eyes were more blue than grey.

  “But don’t drip soup on me,” she said. “Put the spoon down first. And you didn’t answer my question. You mustn’t let me be boring. I think about the past so much because I was so happy. I suppose I was spoilt, but nothing nasty ever happened to me in this house. I can’t remember being hurt or sad or lonely. Perhaps I was thick-skinned. Perhaps it made me a little careless about other people. I always expect them to get along as happily as I did.”

  “So we do,” Sandra said stoutly.

  Rosamund shook her head. “It’s a different world. There’s too much in it, too much of everything, except time. And yet, for Agnes, there must have been far too much of that. More than forty years in that dreary house on the Green and chapel twice on Sundays as well as Sunday School! And blancmange and apricot jam for supper, the cheapest kind of apricot jam, every Sunday of her life! And the smug smiles of those godly old skinflints!”

  “Is she happy now, d’you think?” Sandra asked anxiously.

  “She says so.”

  “I don’t see how she can be really, she looks so funny and she has nobody of her own.”

  “She has dozens of cousins and aunts and uncles and I just
saved her in the nick of time, she was so used to doing what she was told, from going to live with the worst of them.”

  “She must have changed a lot then,” Sandra said. “She isn’t a bit meek. I call her prim and rather disapproving, but somehow nice.”

  Rosamund laughed and went to lay the supper table. This was in a pleasant room behind the kitchen and on a level with the garden and the use of it saved much carrying up and down the stairs. What should have been the dining-room was the bedroom of the elder boys and this was one of the arrangements which met with Miss Spanner’s disapproval. She said it was like cheap seaside lodgings to have people sleeping on the ground floor and she was ostentatious in shutting a door apt to be left open and reveal intimate garments hanging on chairs. What troubled her more, coming as she did from a house where affairs of the toilet were a secret and her father and she carefully avoided meeting each other unless fully dressed, was the Fraser habit of emerging from their bedrooms, scantily attired, and having animated conversations on the landing and Rosamund was as bad as any of them though, merely because it became her figure better, she did wear a flimsy dressing-gown. The family never seemed so talkative as when they ought to have been asleep and Miss Spanner wished to make a necessary excursion across the passage. It was a sign of the times, she thought, evidence of the slackness, the absence of standards, which had brought the country to its present pass, when nothing was really important or urgent and everything would turn out all right in the end. But much of what Sandra called her primness and disapproval was, in fact, the disguise for a sort of shy bewilderment. She was on unfamiliar ground. She had known these children from their babyhood. For years after Rosamund left Upper Radstowe, Miss Spanner had spent a fortnight’s holiday with her until she found it easier to stay at home than to endure the veiled reproaches, the astonishment that she should care to leave her ageing parents, the reserve of their welcome when she returned and, when the Frasers came back to Upper Radstowe two years ago, Felix and James were young men and Chloe was a young woman. Chloe was like her mother, with the same modelling of the face and soft, dark hair, but her eyes were more grey than blue and she had not the gaiety and sparkle of Rosamund at that age. She seemed remote and a little mysterious to Miss Spanner and her air of withdrawal, not severe but elusive and no doubt alluring to the young men who pursued her, seemed to the older woman who only reached her outposts, a little affected, a trifle disdainful. It was different with the boys, for Miss Spanner was a woman, after all, and what she did not understand in them was their chief attraction. She felt a thrill of pleasure when they teased her with grave courtesy, a sensation she had felt for a short time, long ago, when the young man who taught the big boys at the Sunday School and wore collars much too large for his thin neck, had gone out of his way to walk home with her. He was very tall and she remembered how he had bent down to hear what she said as though this were precious to him, but she remembered it as seldom as possible. Her one little success had changed to a pitiable failure, for when he called at the house on some pretext or other, Mr. Spanner had made short work of him and he avoided her thereafter. Perhaps he had thought it would be a good thing to ally himself with Mr. Spanner who was somewhat higher in the social scale than most members of the congregation and known to be a man of means but he had made off at the first rebuff. Loving her for herself—and why should he?—an army of Spanners would not have quelled him. He had married soon afterwards and now he had a family of boys, all with dangerously thin necks, and they might have been even worse, Miss Spanner reflected, if she had been their mother. On the whole, things were just as well as they were; she could have contributed nothing in the way of physical beauty and as her admirer had, inevitably, become a deacon, she would have been tied to the chapel for life. Now she was as free as air, no one in the world could be freer and, as she took her place for supper, she marvelled at the ease with which Rosamund carried the responsibilities of her family. She sat at the head of the table and, in the last resort, she was authority; until that moment, she might have been another daughter of the house. She did not cast a quick maternal eye on her children, divining their moods and the degrees of their fatigue, watchful for signs of trouble. It was Sandra who did that. Paul had gone to bed with a swollen face and a sleeping pill and there was nothing more to be done for him but, before she could eat with appetite, she had to make sure all was well with the others, Felix in a good temper, James no more silent than usual and Chloe no more tired, and she had already been told that Miss Spanner, if not actually happy, was less unhappy than she might have been and that was comforting. Chloe said, “Good soup,” and sent a nod of thanks across the table and, thus encouraged, for there were times when it was not safe to question Chloe, Sandra asked, “Did you sell anything nice to-day?”

  “Not much.”

  “Luxury trade,” said Miss Spanner significantly.

  “People have to be clothed.”

  “Not at your Miss Pringle’s prices.”

  “But it’s important to be dressed properly.” Chloe refrained from glancing at Miss Spanner. “It ought to be considered as an art.”

  “But you don’t design the dresses.”

  “No, I show them off”

  “I call it a most undignified occupation,” Felix said, frowning and pausing in the doorway with a pile of plates. It was the boys’ turn to clear away and fetch the dishes, the girls’ turn to wash up.

  “You wouldn’t think so if you saw me doing it,” Chloe said, “but there wasn’t much of that to-day. Miss Pringle played Patience behind the screen and I pretended to be busy in case people looked through the window, and the Patience came out three times and that put Miss Pringle in a very good temper and she said perhaps she’d take me to Paris, flying, next time she goes.”

  “Lovely!” Sandra said enthusiastically.

  “She’d better go soon,” Miss Spanner said in hollow tones.

  “Why?” Chloe asked. She looked round the table. Felix was frowning, he was a ready frowner; James had lowered his eyelids. “Oh, I see,” she said vaguely, “but I don’t believe it,” she added, at the sight of Miss Spanner’s tightened, down-turned lips. Miss Spanner had an irritating air of knowing more than she cared to say. She looked important as though she had special information she must not divulge. It was quite enough to produce scepticism or the pretence of it. That was the effect it had on Rosamund.

  “Don’t be gloomy, Agnes,” she said, and in that quiet room at the back of the house and the back of the Square, the little garden meeting the longer one of an invisible house, with birds singing in the bushes and a distant, homely sound of hammering from someone who was mending his fence, preserving his possessions, maintaining decency and order, the squabblings, the shoutings, the comings and goings and the threats in a land so very far away and no concern of theirs, seemed like an old story of another age and not quite real.

  “All right,” said Miss Spanner. “By all means let’s be merry ostriches while we can.”

  Chapter III

  

  But Felix had frowned and James had dropped his eyelids for their own reasons, not for the one Miss Spanner attributed to them. They had faced the probabilities of the future, they knew what part they would have to play in it and had no illusions about it. They were proud of what their father had done in the last war but they did not want to emulate him. They were a generation too late to see war as a gallant adventure, worth while for itself. They knew that, leaving out the chance of death or mutilation, the lives they had planned would be disrupted, perhaps ruined. Felix was soon to take his final examination in law, James was studying agriculture at the University; he had always wanted to be a farmer. Let those who would be less directly involved talk about it if they chose. These two, knowing without words that their views were identical, had hardly discussed it between themselves. In their close companionship confidences were quite unnecessary and they made no comment on Miss Spanner�
�s little gibe as they left the house together.

  Months ago, on her first arrival in Upper Radstowe, Flora Blackett, across the road, had noticed the regularity with which these two young men strolled by and she was always at the window of her bedroom to see them go. That she might not miss them, she had given up having the coffee her mother made in her father’s study after the evening meal, at one time a much valued privilege which her younger sisters did not yet enjoy.

  “It keeps me awake,” she said.

  “But we should like to have you with us,” said her father. He looked forward to this hour when, his day’s work done and his spirits restored by a good meal, he could enjoy the company of his favourite daughter and they could talk together or he would talk to her of the things that interested him. He assumed that they also interested her and she had always been responsive, following his lead, ready to adopt his enthusiasms, and he could not offer her anything better than his books and his comments on them, yet, when she said, “Just for a few minutes, then. I must work, you know,” his disappointment was cancelled by his approval. She was to go to the University in the autumn and had preparatory work to do. It was true that her father’s window looked onto the Square but what would she have seen of the Frasers from that position? She would see nothing but their backs, while, from her own room, she could indulge in anticipation, in the hope that they, or at least one of them, would look up and see her and determine to see her again. She soon learnt that on one night they would appear at about eight o’clock, half an hour later on the next, and so, alternately throughout the week, except on Sundays. The late nights were those on which they washed the supper dishes and a peep into the basement kitchen would have revealed them with their coats off and their shirt-sleeves rolled up, busy at the sink, young gods turned scullions. She would have been horrified and then touched by their condescension, just as she was heartsick at their lack of curiosity, even when she flung the window open, and full of admiration for their masculine indifference.