Howard—Mrs Butler—the tradespeople—they were all being as nice as they could be; and when, a little later on in the morning, Ellen sat at the kitchen table writing out labels for the gooseberry jam, she was cautiously aware of happiness—cautiously, because it was a thing you had to keep testing, like a tooth that has just stopped aching; though it would be better, really, if you left it alone.
But yes, she was happy. Her own relations, of course (apart from Melissa), had shown less enthusiasm than her acquaintances, but that, she supposed, was only to be expected. Their reactions had ranged from Father’s aggrieved (and utterly unfounded) assertion that it was the first he’d heard of her engagement to Leonard, and why didn’t anybody ever tell him anything?—to Adela’s dissolving into floods of incoherent weeping. Much solicitous enquiry by Ellen (Melissa contented herself—perhaps wisely—with merely adjuring her daughter not to be so silly) finally revealed the source of her tears as being twofold: first, that now “everything would be different”, and second that she, Adela, didn’t want to be a bridesmaid, it would look so soppy. Decisive reassurance on this last point only caused her to weep harder than ever over the first, and here Ellen had, alas, no reassurance to offer—either to herself or Adela. Roger’s bracing advice to his daughter to “cheer up, after all it wasn’t she who had to marry the fellow” did nothing to soothe the feelings of any of the parties concerned.
But in the end Adela had to stop crying and go to school, and Melissa and Roger had to go to work. Father, by an almost visible effort of will-power, already knew nothing about any of it, and was contentedly slashing off every shoot he could reach of the outdoor grape-vine in the hope, which never deserted him year after year, that this sort of assault would somehow encourage the wizened, sun-starved thing to produce a crop of grapes in the autumn.
It only remained to tell Cousin Laura; and Ellen found herself writing the labels more and more slowly and beautifully, and sticking them on to the jars with almost obsessional straightness, as the time drew near when she could no longer put off going to the old lady’s room. She had told herself last night that it was too upsetting a piece of news to break to an aged person at bedtime; that it would be wiser to wait till the morning; but now she regretted the delay. For why, after all, should Cousin Laura be upset? She had known and approved of the engagement for years; and even if their marriage might in actual fact affect her financial position in some degree, she could not know it; for she imagined herself to be quite independent of Leonard. And anyway Leonard—and Ellen too—would do everything in their power to see that her way of life was not altered nor her comforts reduced.
Ellen stuck the last label in place, and then arranged the twenty-four glowing jars in four rows of six in the middle of the kitchen table; and then, for even more glorious display, in two rows of twelve. Like all really enthusiastic jam-makers, she liked to delay putting her creations away in the store cupboard; she loved to leave them about for a while, in all their glory; to wipe imaginary last traces of stickiness from their shining red-gold sides with a hot well-wrung cloth. Now she gave a last lingering look at her work, and set off towards Cousin Laura’s room. There was nothing to worry about really. Cousin Laura would be delighted at the news.
And Cousin Laura was delighted.
“I’m so glad, my dear; so glad,” she declared, kissing Ellen affectionately. “I’d begun to be afraid—after all this time—that perhaps you’d changed your minds—or that you would delay your wedding so long that I would never see it. When did you say it is to be, dear?”
“Saturday,” replied Ellen. “I know it seems very sudden, but——”
“No, no, my dear. Not a bit. You mustn’t feel that.” Cousin Laura spoke warmly but a little vaguely. A smile crossed her face, distant and very sweet. “Why, you will be a June bride, Ellen dear! I was a June bride too, you know. Oh, Ellen, may it bring your more happiness than it ever brought me!”
With dreadful completeness the smile had vanished, and the sweetness too. Slow, difficult tears were beginning to glitter in the old blue eyes, and Ellen caught up the thin hand and squeezed it in pity and sympathy.
“It’s all right, Cousin Laura,” she kept saying, with soothing idiocy—for how could a lifetime’s disappointment be “all right” suddenly? “It’s all right—don’t cry, Cousin Laura. Oh, please don’t cry!”
And Laura was indeed doing her very best not to cry. She blinked back her tears desperately, for it would be absurd—indeed it would be downright ill-mannered—to cry in front of all these people, some of whom were almost strangers to her; for this was quite a large tea party, and she had had to invite some of the wives of Dick’s business associates whom she hardly knew at all. And it wasn’t even as if she would be able to explain her tears—no, not even to her most intimate friends—for the source of her grief was not only embarrassing; it was paradoxical. Fancy enlisting all the enlightened help of modern science to prevent yourself having a child, and then crying, month after month, because it worked? The appliances of modern science always did work; they were meant to work; and with the forward march of progress they would work more and more infallibly year by year.
Laura poured fresh cups of tea for her guests as in a dream. The silver teapot did not scald her knuckles as she held it, nor did its weight make her arms ache as she wielded it, pouring … pouring … pouring. Pouring away her hopes, for she was past forty now.
Why had she submitted to Dick’s will in this for all these years? When persuasion failed, could she not have defied him? Or even deceived him? Was it conscience? Or cowardice? Or simply his more powerful personality that had held her to an acquiescence which ran counter to every instinct in her body? And perhaps—who knew?—persuasion might not have failed if she had been more persistent; if she had had the courage to be less embarrassed about raising the subject. For Dick was not a sensitive man; it was possible that for months together he forgot, or barely noticed, that her wishes in the matter were not the same as his.
And now here was this young thing beside her chattering about the baby she was expecting; and the little group of women nearby leaning forward eagerly, admiringly … questioning, congratulating and—God in Heaven!—sympathising! That, Laura sometimes felt, was almost the hardest thing of all to bear; to hear people talking of having a baby as an ordeal from which a woman might reasonably shrink. Perhaps they thought that she, Laura, had been shrinking from it all these years…. That she was one of those rich, selfish, cowardly women…. And you could hardly scream out across the elegant drawing-room, above the decorous tinkle of the teacups: “It’s my husband who doesn’t want children, not me: I want them desperately, but he won’t let me have them….”
All around Laura the voices rose and fell, the teaspoons clinked softly against the delicate china. Yet it all seemed very far away and not quite real…. Only herself, and the deep enclosing prison of the armchair were real….
There was still hope. Lots of women had babies after forty. Hadn’t they shown Queen Mary Tudor a lovely pair of twins born to a woman past fifty? Poor Queen Mary—Bloody Mary, and who could blame her? She, too, had longed for a child as Laura longed for one now. Had she, like Laura, known that recurrent dream that comes night after night to the barren? Not a dream of the baby itself—that somehow was too remote—but a dream of being in labour. The wild, incredulous joy at the beginning of the dream … and then that first, uneasy realisation that it wasn’t hurting enough … that the pains should be strong … not growing weaker every minute … such feeble, fading pains must mean that the baby was very, very tiny … scarcely real at all….
No, not real at all. Oh, the blinding disappointment of those awakenings, morning after morning! Had Bloody Mary, too, gone through it all, opening her swollen eyes on the rich hangings of her dim room in Hampton Court?
Yes, she must have know it all just as Laura knew it. The unhappy queen had even imagined herself into all the symptoms of pregnancy—as Laura, too, on a smaller scale, h
ad sometimes done. Like that lovely fortnight in May—years ago it was now—when she had felt sick every morning. Yes, really sick, as the sun rose gold and glorious into the summer sky, and the scent of the first roses came through the library window, and Paradise itself could offer no happiness to compare with these twinges of nausea.
But only for a fortnight; then, once again it had become clear that science had won—as it always did.
As it was always bound to? Sometimes Laura felt that to range the prayers and hopes of one solitary woman against all the efficiency of modern scientific birth control, with its background of painstaking skill and research, was hopeless to the point of absurdity. And yet, there were other times when she felt the exact opposite of this: that prayers and hopes of such strength as hers must be invincible; how could mere scraps of rubber, however well designed, possibly prevail against the mighty forces of the spirit?
But they did prevail. Had the scientists foreseen the menace of women like Laura, all over the world; women who in the years to come would pray ceaselessly, as Laura prayed, for these clever devices to fail? and, foreseeing this, had they made the things prayer-proof, too…?
Laura found herself once again lifting the weightless teapot and pouring out the tasteless, endless tea. “Perhaps,” she thought dreamily, as she poured, “perhaps it will be better when there is no more hope at all. In five years, perhaps … or in ten?”
Strange how the five years … the ten … passed, and the hope was indeed over, and she was still sitting in this chair. The tea party was over, too—why, of course it was—how silly!—it had been over for years! And the library door was opening to admit not another visitor, but her husband, Dick. Dick, with a strange exultation in his face … an excitement … a radiance … that she had never seen before.
Another woman? Well, naturally. There had been several before now, and Laura hadn’t really minded so very much, not after the first one. She had tried to be broad-minded and modern about it all, and had even encouraged Dick to talk to her about his affairs, as if she were once again the little sister, the trusted confidante, and not a wife at all.
She knew, of course, who the girl was this time; that pretty, fair-haired little fool, so very young and so absurdly in love with this married man thirty years her senior. Laura braced herself to be modern and broad-minded all over again—it got easier with practice: but even as she did so, some instinct told her that this time the blow was to come from a different quarter; one against which she had no defence.
Richard Fortescue had never been a very perceptive husband, nor very sensitive to his wife’s feelings—or, indeed, to any feelings other than his own. But even if he had been fully aware of the cruelty of the words he was about to utter, it is doubtful if he could have controlled them, so powerful was the irrational, utterly unpremeditated exaltation from which they sprang:
“She’s expecting a child!” he gasped, almost breathless with joy. “My child! To think I never guessed it would feel like this!”
Laura did not answer. Indeed, she did not find occasion to speak to Dick again till many months after the divorce. But that very night she wrote him a letter. It took her till long past midnight in the empty, desolate house, peopled only by the ghosts of her non-existent children.
No, not only by them; for were there not also the ghosts of all the cheated, disappointed women of the world? Like herself, and Bloody Mary.
CHAPTER XVIII
ELLEN TIPTOED TO the door, uneasily aware that to all intents and purposes she had been eavesdropping. At first she had thought that Cousin Laura was deliberately confiding in her; but as the tired voice dropped lower and lower, becoming at last a monotonous, scarcely audible mumble, she began to realise that the old lady was talking to herself—was, indeed, reliving the unhappiness of her middle life. Ellen could not follow all she said, of course; nor could she know that the thin hands, that now and then twitched a little as they lay paper-white against the dark dress, were really pouring tea from a vanished silver teapot into delicate china teacups long broken. But the main outline of the tale was clear to her, and above all its climax, for this was shrilled out with such awful clarity that Ellen turned instinctively towards the door, almost expecting to see the figure of her father entering—her father as she had never known him, in the prime of his middle age, and of his selfishness.
Yes, his selfishness. Neither her daughterly affection nor her admiration for so many of her father’s other qualities—his hardihood, his determination, his invincible vitality—had ever quite blinded Ellen to this major flaw in his character; but never, until now, had she considered its significance.
For always, ever since she could remember, her father had been an old man; and in the old so many grave faults can appear as mere lovable eccentricities. Father’s morning rows with Mrs Butler, for instance; or his bland ignoring, whenever it suited him, of the very existence of the tenants on whom his own and his daughter’s livelihood depended: simply because he was an old man, one smiled affectionately, even admiringly, on it all, and put up with the inconvenience it caused. But how would exactly the same behaviour appear in a younger man? Rude—inconsiderate—intolerably self-centred—that was the answer, and Ellen faced it wryly. So that was what Father was like—had always been like. A selfish, inconsiderate young man had grown into a selfish, inconsiderate old man—divested of all sentimentality, that was the bare truth.
But is there such a thing as a bare truth? Ellen stood another moment, her fingers on the handle of the door, and looked back at the old lady, now sleeping peacefully in her big chair. Father’s selfishness, his blindness to all wishes but his own, had embittered her life. That had been unforgivable. And yet those same qualities of Father’s displayed still, day after day, in his life with his daughter, were no longer unforgivable. Instead, they were endearing and amusing—yes, even lovable. They did not merely seem so, they were so. Perhaps it was something to do with the Forgiveness of Sins, thought Ellen, a little confusedly, as she slipped out of the room. If, as some claim, wickedness is due to be wiped away entirely after death, it would seem only reasonable that for a little while before death wickedness should seem to grow less and less wicked.
“And anyway,” she reflected, with one of those twists of logic as consoling as they are indefensible, “it’s my own fault for listening like that when Cousin Laura was talking to herself. If I’d been honest, and gone away as soon as I realised she wasn’t talking to me, then I’d never have heard the whole story.”
Besides, the story wasn’t new. This was another of the rather slantwise props with which Ellen bolstered up her peace of mind as she hurried through her work that morning. In its essentials, she had known of the unhappy family tangle ever since she could remember: how Father had once been married to Cousin Laura, and had left her for Ellen’s mother. Ellen had even known—hadn’t Leonard been reminding her of it only a few days ago?—that Cousin Laura had always wanted a child of her own, which must have made Ellen’s birth doubly hard for her to bear. These new details that she had just learned, Ellen assured herself, did not add anything of significance to what she already knew of the long-ago tragedy. They did, indeed, highlight Father’s blind selfishness—but then his blind selfishness had always been inherent in the whole story. Nothing fundamental had been added to what Ellen already knew of him and of his past.
But something had been added to what she knew of Cousin Laura. An uneasy new light had somehow been thrown on the old lady’s character, and for some reason Ellen could not get it out of her mind, busy though she was for the rest of that morning. Pity, of course, was a part of her feeling—painful, helpless pity for a life so cruelly disappointed. But mingling with the pity, Ellen gradually became aware of another feeling; a feeling more compelling, more uncomfortable; and it was not until quite late in the afternoon that she suddenly recognised it as fear.
Curiously enough, this recognition came to her not here in this memory-ridden old house, nor even while she was
alone, with leisure for introspection; it came to her—of all places —in the heat and bustle of an Oxford Street store, just before closing time.
Ellen hadn’t meant to go into town that afternoon—she hadn’t meant to buy a new dress for her wedding at all, so hurried and casual did the whole business seem. But Melissa had insisted, and had backed up that insistence by the very practical kindness of taking the afternoon off work herself so that she could stay with the old people and give Ellen a chance to go into town.
So now here was Ellen, moving nervously along between the rails of summer dresses, glancing this way and that, ready to make a headlong retreat should her eyes light on that dread warning: “For Teens and Twenties.” Surely no shoplifter caught in the act has ever looked half as guilty as the ordinary, well-intentioned woman who is caught examining clothes that are too young for her.
But it was all right. By great good luck Ellen had made her way straight to that rare section which is neither for Taller Women nor Shorter Women nor Younger Women not Maturer Women nor Fuller Figures, but just for women. She relaxed in relief; then braced herself for the next ordeal. In a minute—at most two or three—one of those intimidating young women with perfect figures, flawless youth, and savagely blacked-in eyes would come and ask her what she wanted; and the problem was this: Should she let them think that she was just choosing a dress? Or should she admit that it was to be her wedding dress? Sympathetic advice based on the real truth would, of course, be immeasurably more helpful—but would it be sympathetic advice that such an announcement would inspire? Was it not just as likely that the beautifully made-up little face would register a moment of blank surprise; that an intimidating blackened eyelid would flicker disdainfully as much as to say: “What, an old frump like you? Coo!”
But, after all, it was a pleasant, elderly woman who served Ellen. She was delightfully sympathetic and interested, assured Ellen that she didn’t look a day over twenty-five, and helped her to choose a dress which really seemed to vindicate this opinion. Ellen flushed with pleasure as she examined her unfamiliar reflection in the soft corn-coloured silk which had so unpredictably made her hair seem a rich chestnut instead of plain brown and her complexion smooth and delicate as a young girl’s. The assistant, who had so shrewdly recommended the unusual colour, was almost as pleased as Ellen herself; tired though she must have been at the end of this long hot day on her feet, she smiled at her customer with genuine pleasure and pride:
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