Chatterton Square (British Library Women Writers)

by E. H. Young

  “But they don’t,” said Rhoda, bluntly changing from the general to the particular. “Flora doesn’t and Father doesn’t and I don’t like them. Not a bit. I like you and Miss Spanner and Cousin Piers.” She hesitated for a second. “And I like James Fraser,” she decided to say.

  “So do I,” said Mrs. Blackett, “and you’re seeing a lot of us now, or most of us, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Rhoda agreed. There was no curious eye at the study window to be avoided and Cousin Piers came oftener and stayed much longer. He settled down. Sometimes he stayed to supper and Miss Spanner, resigning the drawing-room and balcony to the lovers, sat near the front window of the long living-room with one eye on his car and the other on the clock. But, to her regret, Rhoda was always there to see him off.

  “Very discreet,” she said, “but it doesn’t deceive me.”

  “And no doubt that’s what they are trying to do,” Rosamund said. “You’re a coarse-minded old thing, aren’t you? All this mock modesty about natural things—I don’t suppose anyone’s ever seen you in your bath—”

  “I should hope not!” Miss Spanner exclaimed. “It’s all I can do to bear seeing myself!”

  “I didn’t suggest that anyone wanted to see you there,” Rosamund said gently, “but, I repeat, you have a coarse mind.”

  “I haven’t. It’s filled with beautiful things you’ve never heard of.”

  “Not quite full though. You’ve left room in it for your horrid little intrigues.”

  “You know they amuse you.”

  “Sometimes,” Rosamund agreed.

  “And you must admit it’s a bit odd, a bit significant, one car outside our door and we know why, and another outside theirs, and we can make a good guess.”

  “Perhaps he’s lonely,” Rosamund said, “and has nowhere else to go. Perhaps he’s tired of studying criminology with George and looking at that awful waxed moustache. It bristles quite alarmingly. I found myself dodging instinctively when he approached.”

  “What’s that?” Miss Spanner said sharply but quietly. “I didn’t know you’d ever seen him.”

  “No, you don’t know everything,” Rosamund said, moving to the other end of the room and followed by a cry she could not hear without pity.

  “I don’t know anything!” Miss Spanner keened. “Nothing at all,” she said, bringing down her voice to a lower, mournful note and looking about her vaguely as though the fears she had conquered were surrounding her again. And she remembered, she had never been able to forget, because she had not understood, that look Lindsay had given her. He must have seen through her bright confidences and he had looked at her with pity because she had made them, because they had never been necessary or because already they were useless. But she pulled herself together. She was taking fright at the mere mention of a waxed moustache. Meanwhile, Mr. Lindsay was spending a long evening with the Blacketts and all the facts of the past weeks corresponded with her fancies better than with her fears, all the facts except those walks of Rosamund’s into the country.

  “I suppose,” she said, “you’ve been to Mr. Lindsay’s house.”

  “Clever Agnes! Guessed it in one!”

  “But he doesn’t come to yours any more. Funny, that. I should call that a bit of a snub. And going next door instead! That’s a slap in the face.”

  “Yes, most humiliating,” Rosamund said.

  She found it very tantalizing to picture him there, puffing at his pipe and fitting into his surroundings as he always seemed able to do because he completely lacked self-consciousness, and it was all very well to say the house was better without its masculine element. She missed the boys’ voices and their comings and goings; she even missed the nuisance Paul so often made of himself, but what she wanted most was not their noisy youth or Lindsay’s assurance that she was still beloved. She wanted the contact of a mature male mind. He could tell her no more about events abroad than she and Agnes already knew and his view of them was much the same, but discussing them with the wisest possible woman would have been less satisfactory to her than talking with a reasonably intelligent man. There was the slightly different angle from which he saw things, the elimination of the violent personal hatred she felt for those people who were cruel and rapacious and treacherous and showed these vices in their faces, and there was her own femininity which believed his must be a more balanced judgment. And Mrs. Blackett, if she wanted it, was getting the benefit of all this. Rosamund was restless and uneasy. She remembered that Piers had once been in love with Mrs. Blackett and she was jealous, though not afraid, of his memory of those days, of the early memories the two must share and speak of, in the twilight of the garden, with the tenderness of people who are beginning to grow old. She had no past to share with him, perhaps no future; all her young memories belonged to someone else and he had carried some of them away with him.

  “We might pay him out,” said Miss Spanner after a long pause, “by refusing to buy his vegetables.”

  “Ingenious,” said Rosamund, referring to the remark, not to the idea. “Go on making a few more suggestions. They are more successful than direct questions, more like goads, and even I have to react to them at last.”

  “Well,” said Miss Spanner, thus encouraged, “I suppose it was easier to tell him in his house than here.”

  “Much. You weren’t there, for one thing.”

  “And you were quite right to tell him.”

  “I thought so.”

  “Did he know anything about it already?”

  “Not a word,” Rosamund said.

  “Oh,” said Miss Spanner thoughtfully.

  “You seem surprised.”

  “Not at all,” Miss Spanner said hastily. “In fact, I’m not quite sure what we’re talking about. And as you won’t confide in me, I won’t confide in you.”

  “Why should you?” Rosamund said with sympathy.

  “Because, though I don’t want to worry you, I think you ought to know.”

  Rosamund said nothing. She only had to wait until Agnes could contain her news no longer and almost at once she said, “That girl’s gone away too. She wasn’t in the shop when I went there this afternoon.”

  “What did you go for?”

  “To make some inquiries about my wireless set, of course,” Miss Spanner said self-righteously.

  “I don’t believe that,” Rosamund said angrily.

  “Well,” Miss Spanner confessed, “I did think it would be interesting to know. Having her holiday, they told me, and though I said she looked as though a little sea air would do her good, I didn’t get any more out of them. All tarred with the same brush, I daresay.”

  She looked round at the sound of the door being sharply shut and found herself in an empty room.

  Rosamund walked out of the house and paused for a moment on the pavement. Darkness had not fallen yet but it was coming and in the general greyness of the Square, pierced here and there by a lighted window, the evergreens in the Oval made a strong black curve, the two cars, black too, looked like large animals abandoned by their owners but faithfully and patiently expectant of them. She felt rather like that herself and spared them a glance of sympathy before she walked out of the Square and up the road. She stopped at the top of it before she crossed on to the Green. She had seen it under almost every possible condition, through all the seasons, at all hours and in all weathers, but it looked strange to her to-night. It was the Green she knew arranged as the setting for a stage scene or as she might have seen it in a dream, put down in another place where absurd, irrelevant things might happen for which she would know, even in her sleep, she had no responsibility and they could have no issue. And as she looked at the dark grass and the tall trees, their lower branches gilded where the lamplight touched them, the branches immobile and the lights steady, with a glimpse beyond of the row of houses once graced by the presence of the Spanners,
the quietness of the place within a circle of moving cars, their strong lights making the Green more remote and more inviolate, she lost some of her angry impatience with Agnes and her discoveries and, though some of the anxiety they roused remained with her, she accepted it and in doing that lost still more of it. She accepted her own state of uncertainty and restlessness, longing and reluctance, in the momentary vague conviction that she, like everybody else, was a sort of vessel into which experience and emotion was poured according to its capacity and its readiness to receive and that by receiving in this fashion, and letting the contents of the jar mingle and ferment or undergo any other change inherent in the mixture, the spirit was fed as truly as the body with material food. And this, she knew, was a different kind of passiveness from the one which resented definite action; it was not the usual resource of her natural indolence; it was the stuff out of which the right action could emerge if it were left alone with patience. It was her old faith that things would turn out as she wished changed into the belief that, though they might not turn out well for her, for Felix, for Piers, for all the people with whom her life was bound, they would not necessarily be bad as tiny contributions to the common stock.

  She lost her uncertain grasp of this idea in the practical problem of getting across the road, but her mood had altered. Gone was the impulse to run away, to be rid of her responsibilities if only for an hour, her half-formed plan to waylay Lindsay at the bridge, to get into his car and later, far out in the quiet country, into his arms. The desires remained, but one runaway in a family was more than enough and though physically she was still ardently alive and the art of attraction she loved to exercise was impatient of continued restraint, she knew her regrets would last longer than her pleasure, she remembered that Sandra would be distressed at finding her nowhere in the house, so she simply crossed the Green and skirted it on her homeward way and waved, as he passed, to a Piers who did not see her.

  Chapter XXXIV

  

  Mrs. Blackett now had the benefit of her husband’s newspaper as well as of her own. She had also the comments, denied to Rosamund, of a man whose judgment she trusted. As she read, the personal effect of events was still for her shamefully paramount and, as she listened and rejoiced in his company, she wondered he could spare so much of it when Mrs. Fraser was just across the road. Had he, like Herbert, discovered she was not free for him? Recognizing her own temporary gain, she regretted the loss for him, if such it was. She could have loved him: she believed he might have loved her. He had returned too late from the war, which Herbert had avoided with considerable address and a disappointment of which he spoke with what she took for the reserve of deep feeling. She had been innocent enough to believe in that. And she loved Piers now, she told herself, without passion which had been poisoned for her, without any desire to rouse it in him, but much as an old woman might love the man to whom she had been married for many years, more concerned for his well-being than for her own. The liveliness of his boyhood which had led her into mild adventures from which her timidity naturally shrank, was now suitably subdued and what had happened to his mind and spirit since those days she could not tell. He seemed the same, kind and tolerant, but with a proper hardness somewhere to be used when it was wanted. He had been the perfect companion of her youth and she could find no fault with him now, but then, she thought, with dry amusement, she was not married to him and if such a chance had been vouchsafed to her she would not have taken it. She would not have risked changing a perfect friend for an indifferent husband or even for a good one in whom the endearing little ways of the friend might become commonplaces or the source of unbearable irritation. She blushed to remember how once, and for a short time, she had listened for certain tones of Mr. Blackett’s voice and watched for certain movements of his long hands and found delight in what was only endurable now because she had learnt to enjoy disliking it. And he did not know, he had not the slightest suspicion, that was the best of it, and suddenly, when she and Piers were sitting in the twilight as Rosamund had pictured them and while Rhoda had left them for a few minutes, Mrs. Blackett laughed aloud, a rare occurrence, and it was yet another kind of laughter which Mr. Blackett had never heard.

  Lindsay did not like the sound of it and slowly turning his head to look at her, he asked, “What are you barking at?”

  “Barking?” she said, and seemed to listen to the memory of it. “Yes,” she said, “it was ugly. I could hear that myself. It sounded ugly and I think I must look ugly too.”

  “I haven’t noticed it,” he said. “I’ve always thought you a very comely wench.”

  “And you do still?”

  “Certainly I do.”

  “But do I look nice?”

  “That is implied in the description,” he said.

  “Then, Piers, there’s no trusting the outside of anybody, not even yours—or Mrs. Fraser’s, and she’s more than a comely wench, isn’t she? What a difficult question for you to answer! You see, I’m not nice, really, and perhaps she isn’t, either. Perhaps that happy, amused look she has is a disguise too. Sometimes,” Mrs. Blackett went on slowly, “I’m quite frightened because I feel so wicked. But not,” she went on, and he was relieved to see a humorous creasing round her eyes, “not frightened enough to try to be good.”

  “Oh, don’t try that,” he begged. “Just go on being what you are. I find it most satisfactory, if that means anything to you, and so I’m sure does Rhoda. She’s devoted to you, that child.”

  “We have so much in common—too much,” Mrs. Blackett said. “But with Rhoda I can’t pretend. No,” she told herself aloud, “I can’t do that. Perhaps I ought to but I won’t. Where’s the sense in trying to make something that won’t be very good and spoiling something else that is?”

  “I’m rather in the dark,” Lindsay said quietly, and she parried that suggestion by saying, “Yes, it’s getting late.”

  “And you want me to go?”

  “I want Rhoda to go to bed. She won’t go until you do. But I should like to stay here all night and steal quite a lot of time.”

  “Then why don’t you? You’d have to wrap up well, though.”

  “Ah, I meant with you,” she said simply! “Talking when we want to or just feeling safe.”

  “Safe? You’re not nervous, are you, alone with these two girls?”

  “I meant safe in my mind. Exorcised. There’s something in confession, after all.”

  “Not much in yours,” he said.

  “But enough—for you. Come again soon. D’you think, with all this growing fuss, Herbert will hurry home?”

  “You can answer that better than I can, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be necessary.”

  “And you sound sorry.”

  “I don’t like the look of things. I don’t like the smell of things. We’re told the meek shall inherit the earth. What did that mean exactly, I wonder. Our meekness looks like allowing someone who’s very far from meek to inherit someone else’s earth. So long as it isn’t our own! And it won’t stop there. You might as well try to cure a man-eating tiger of his bad habits by throwing him a few unimportant people. They wouldn’t be seriously missed and he might be satisfied. Well, I’m going. Good night. Sleep well.”

  “Not if I can help it,” Mrs. Blackett said lightly. Where was the sense in having a bed to herself, to be able to turn when she chose, put on the light, sit up and read and, best of all, stretch out her limbs without the danger of encountering another body, if she lost consciousness of these privileges in sleep? There would be plenty of opportunity for sleep when she would be glad enough to have it.

  “What’s Cousin Piers been saying?” Rhoda asked as her mother remained in the hall after he had gone and seemed to be lost in thought. “Anything worrying?”

  Mrs. Blackett looked up. Quite evidently, nothing was worrying her. From under raised eyebrows she gave Rhoda the mischievous look no one else ever s
aw and her teeth, catching a corner of her lower lip, seemed to deprecate her own daring.

  “What are you thinking about?” Rhoda asked.

  “Something rather funny.”

  “Tell me, then.”

  “Perhaps. I’m not sure,” her mother said, and like Rhoda, like James Fraser, she wished there were a back entrance to the house, for how could she get that double bed removed and two small ones brought in, without the knowledge of the whole neighbourhood? But did she care about that? Again, she was not sure. And it would be a very expensive business. Mr. Blackett, who liked to believe he lived in Spartan simplicity, was inclined to confound the simple with the best when it was a question of his comfort and the cost of that thick box spring and excellent mattress was on a different scale from most of the modest household expenditure, but then, as he had said, that bed was meant to last a lifetime and at the remembrance of those words and all they meant, Mrs. Blackett nearly decided to get rid of it, together with the big sheets and the blankets and the plump, featherweight eiderdown. This was the chance to do it and she would welcome, rather than dread, the ensuing storm, but no, she could not do it. If not in all her thoughts, in all her actions she was a lady. She could not sell what was not hers; she could not take advantage of his absence to offer him what he would think, what indeed, among other things, was intended to be an insult, with the knowledge of his children and the still more humiliating knowledge of the neighbours. He would certainly not like Mrs. Fraser to witness the exchange of one bed for two and he would be right. It could not be done in that way and she doubted whether it could be done in any other; and if it were, generously and kindly—a most unlikely happening—she knew she would be disappointed. The life she had made for herself would need some readjusting for, with such a change in him, she would have to change the tactics she had perfected and, in that deep part of the mind where motives lie snug and hidden, was the fear of being robbed of one of her many grievances. She wanted to keep as many as she could get. That desire was unacknowledged. It simply turned in its place and settled down again, but she was genuinely shocked at having contemplated playing such a trick on him. It would have been, and she could hardly have condemned it more strongly, unforgivably bad manners.