Mrs Chalmers-Robinson could not have been altogether pleased with the incident which occurred right at the end of her otherwise successful monkey-luncheon. Or she could have sensed the approach of some more detrimental episode. For she suddenly pushed back her chair, obliquely, and her throat turned stringy to announce:
“Let us go into the drawing-room. I dare say some of you would like to make up a table for bridge after we have had our coffee.”
Magda was soon apologizing to her hostess, it sounded to the maid, as she managed that heavy silver tray, so could not give all her attention. But caught the drift afterwards, and it was something different.
“But I am most terribly sorry, darling. Would not have mentioned in the circumstances. Multiple Projects certainly down the drain. Such a noise, practically everyone else has heard. Then, bang on top, comes Interstate Incorporated.”
The maid bore her tray in the dance of service, surging steadily, sometimes reversing. Her starch no longer crackled, but the tinkling coffee crystals scattered on the chased silver as the ladies helped themselves from an overflowing spoon.
Under her complexion, Mrs Chalmers-Robinson had turned noticeably pale.
“Bags did not mention any of this,” she said, “simply because he has not been here.”
Her confession was a doubtful weapon of defence.
“Abandoned as well? But darling, I shall bring my nightie. To say nothing of my toothbrush. I have made shift in so many similar situations, I am almost the professional proxy.”
Sincerity made Magda blink, or else it was the brandy weighting her eyelids. Her skin was livery as toads.
“Nothing is settled in a night!” Mrs Chalmers-Robinson bitterly laughed.
“Some things are!” Magda blinked.
The maid wove her dance. In her efforts to hear better, she forgot one or two of the steps, and bumped a lady in the small of her monkey fur. But was, in fact, hearing better.
“Then we are ruined!” laughed Mrs Chalmers-Robinson.
She made it sound like a picnic from which the thermos had been forgotten.
Magda swore she could kick herself.
“Darling,” she said, “you know I adore you. I shall pawn the cabuchon rubies that Harry gave. They have always sat on me, anyway, like bloody boils.”
“Coffee, madam?” asked Ruth Joyner of her mistress.
But Mrs Chalmers-Robinson’s attention was only half diverted. For the first time the maid realized the truth of what she had already known in theory: that a human being can hate a human being; and even though her mistress was looking through her, as if she had been a window, it began to break her.
“No, thank you,” Mrs Chalmers-Robinson answered whitely.
Before she wilted from the waist downward, and was lying, washed-out, on her own ordinarily colourless carpet.
In the natural confusion a Wedgwood coffee cup got broken. There was such a bashing and scratching of jewellery, tangling of sympathy and fur fringes, bumping and recoiling, bending and straightening, that even one or two of the guests felt faint and had to help themselves to something.
After much advice and a hard slap, Mrs Chalmers-Robinson began to stir. She was actually smiling, but from a distance, it could have been the bottom of the sea. She sat up, holding the ruins of her hair. She continued smiling – she could run to a dimple in one corner – as though she had forgotten the season of enjoyment was over. She was saying:
“I am so sorry. I have disgraced.” But stopped as she realized the presence of the undertow that must prevent her returning to the surface. “Where,” she asked, “where is Ruth?” Feeling the carpet, as if afraid her one hope of rescue was floating away from her. “I shall have to ask you all to go. So maddening.” Her laughter was letting her down into a snigger. “But Ruth, where is Ruth?”
After pushing a good deal, the maid reached her mistress, and began to pull her upright. It was not an elegant operation, but succeeded, finally, in a rush. The hostess was supported, and up the stairs, on the white pillar of her parlourmaid. At the top she would have liked to take something of a Napoleonic farewell of the dispersing guests, but the truth suddenly overcame her, and she was bending, and coughing against it, and stifling it with her handkerchief as the devoted servant bore her away.
It was a terrible evening that Ruth had to remember. Never before had she seen her mistress stark naked, and the latter’s flesh was grey. Anyone less compassionate might have recoiled from the sac of a slack, sick spider, slithering out of its disguise of silk. But the girl proceeded to pick up what had fallen, and afterwards, when it was Mrs Chalmers-Robinson propped in bed, could look full at her again.
A good stiff brandy, and the prospect of a pity she considered her due, even if she paid it herself, had restored the mistress to the pink. She was dressed in pink, too. Pale. A very touching, classic gown, which stopped before it showed how much she had shrivelled. Nor had she forgotten to frizz out the sides of her hair beneath a bandeau embroidered with metal beads.
“Whatever happens, Ruth,” she said, “and I cannot tell you, cannot even guess, myself, the details of the situation, I cannot, cannot give you up. That is, if you will stand by me in my trouble.”
The girl was very awkward, opening cupboards, and putting away.
“Oh, madam, I am not the one to let anybody down!”
She remembered the dead weight of her brother.
Mrs Chalmers-Robinson was agreeably racked. She would have given anything to be able to stuff a chocolate into her mouth. Instead, she looked at the open wardrobe. Such light as succeeded in disentangling itself from the bead fringes of the lampshade made the empty dresses look tragic.
“All my pretty things!” She began to blubber.
Ruth Joyner was breathing hard. But could bear worse blows, if it would help any.
“Freshen up my glass, will you?” the mistress begged. “With just a dash of brandy. What will you think of me? Oh, dear, but I am not like this! It is the prospect of losing just the little personal things. Because, when it comes to breaking point, men are quite, quite merciless.”
This was the first time Ruth had experienced the breath of bankruptcy. She was not to know that Mrs Chalmers-Robinson would always discover some “pretty things!” to help her make an appearance in those of the approved places where she would still be allowed to sign. There are always ways and means of circumventing a reality which has ceased to be real. Jinny Chalmers was something like the mistress of a dog who salts away biscuits for her pet against a rainy day, down loose covers, and in the least expected corners, except that in the case of Jinny Chalmers she was both the mistress and the dog.
Her maid was to come across something at a future date, in the toe of an old pink satin slipper. A dutiful girl, she would have to tell.
“Oh, yes,” Mrs Chalmers-Robinson would answer, but very slowly, thoughtfully. “That is a diamond. Rather a good one, too.”
And she would take it, and put it somewhere else, almost as if it did not exist.
But for the moment, Ruth Joyner remained unaware that tragedy can be stuffed with sawdust.
She said:
“Hold hard on the brandy, m’mm, and I will bring you a nice hot drink.”
She even said:
“Every cloud has a silver lining.”
She would have loved an old, burst-open sofa, because that happened to be her nature.
She was running upstairs, and down, with hot-water bottles and things.
Until she heard the key.
Mr Chalmers-Robinson let himself in round about ten o’clock.
Ruth said:
“She is taking it very badly, sir.”
He laughed. She noticed on this occasion the network of little veins on either cheek.
He said:
“I bet she is!”
But walked tired. He was still very well pressed, though. His cuff links glittered on the half-lit stairs.
“Something has given me a stomach-ache,”
he said.
Forgetful of the fact that he was addressing a maid.
He could have been drunk, she thought. She wondered what they might have talked about if they had been walking together along the gritty paths of the Botanical Gardens, under banana leaves.
Coming and going as she had to be — it occurred to her, for instance, that he might decide to stay the night, and went to turn down the bed he used in the dressing-room – she could not help but overhear a certain amount on landings. She was also, to tell the truth, a little bit inquisitive. Though she did not listen, exactly. It simply came out from behind doors which made a half-hearted attempt at discretion.
Bags Chalmers-Robinson was telling his wife what had happened, or as much of it as was fit to share. Ruth Joyner imagined how her mistress’s brows had darkened under the bead-embroidered, flesh bandeau. Could you wonder?
“It was after the merger,” he was saying.
Oh, she said, sarcastic, she had always thought one sat back and breathed after a merger, she who was no financial genius.
He replied that she was just about the sourest thing he knew.
“But the merger!” she insisted. “Let us keep to the painful point!”
How he laughed. He said she was the most unholy bitch.
“I was always gentle as a girl,” she said, “but simply made the mistake of marriage.”
“With all its perks!” he suggested.
He was helping himself, it sounded, from a bottle.
“Which disappear overnight,” she said.
The mattress was groaning on which she lay, or threw herself into another position.
The maid knew how her mistress could whip the sheets around her at a certain stage in a discussion.
“Look, Jinny,” he said, “if only you give me your assistance, we can manage this situation, as we have the others.”
“I!” She laughed. “Well! It positively staggers me to hear there are uses to which I can be put!”
“You are an intelligent woman.”
She was laughing very short laughs.
“If you hate your husband, no doubt it is because he is a stupid beggar who doesn’t deserve much more.”
There was a pause then, in which there was no means of telling who was playing the next card.
The maid did not hear her mistress’s husband go, because she began to yawn, and sag, and crept away finally. Somewhere in her sleep she heard, perhaps, the front-door knocker clap, and in the morning she found that Mr Chalmers-Robinson was no longer there; nor had he slept in the bed she had prepared for him.
Mrs Chalmers-Robinson was particularly funny and dreamy over a cup of early tea. She had frizzed out her hair in some different way, too.
She said:
“You will not understand, Ruth – you are too good – how other people are forced to behave contrary to their natures.”
“I don’t know about that,” the maid agreed, but wondered.
Then the mistress suddenly stroked the girl’s hand, almost imperceptibly, almost unconsciously, it seemed, until the latter pulled it away. Both were momentarily embarrassed, but forgot that it had happened.
On a later occasion, Mrs Chalmers-Robinson did remark:
“I think I am only happy, Ruth, with you.”
But the girl was busy with something.
Not long afterwards, a new man brought the ice. He clattered down the back steps, on a morning washed by early rain, though not so clean that it did not smell of lantana and midnight cats.
“Good-day there!” said the new man. “Where’s a bloke expected to put it?”
Ethel, who was always cranky early, and particularly on days when she was expected to dish up something hot for lunch, did not look up, but said:
“Show him, will you?”
“Yes,” said Ruth. “The kitchen chest is just through here. In the larder: Then there’s a second one, along the passage, beside the pantry. You’ll have to mind the step, though.”
The man was crossing the girls’ hall, where Ethel sat with a cup of tea, studying the social page. From the man’s hands hung steel claws, weighted with double blocks of ice. It looked like rain was frozen in it.
Then he had to go and drop one of the big blocks. How it bumped on the brown lino, and lumps of ice shooting off, into corners. Ethel was ropeable, while Ruth tried to calm her down.
“It’s all right, Ethel. I’ll get the pan, and clean it up in two shakes.”
The man was already groping after the bigger of the broken bits. His hands were rather pinched and green from handling so much ice. But he did not seem to worry about his clumsiness.
“Good job we missed the cook’s toe!” he joked.
But Ethel did not take it good at all.
“Oh, get on with it!” she said, hitting the paper she was reading, without looking up.
Ruth was glad to lead the man to the pantry ice-chest.
He had one of those long, tanned faces, too thin; it made her think of used pennies. He was rather tall and big, with hollow-looking eyes. He was wearing a greenish, old, digger coat, from which one of the buttons was hanging, and she would have liked to sew it on.
“That is it,” she said, closing the lid of the chest. “And double on Saturdays.”
“If I stay the course till Saturday,” he said.
“But you’ve only begun, haven’t you?”
“That don’t mean I’m all that shook on the job,” he said. “Ice!”
“Oh,” she said. “No.”
They were crossing the girls’ dining-room, where already there were pools of water from all those pieces of half-melted ice.
“No,” she repeated. “But if it is you that comes.”
Then she thought she would have a look at his face, just once more, although it was a kind of face that made her shy. What it told her was so different from all she knew of herself; it was the difference between a knife and butter. But she would have gone on looking at the man’s face, if he had not been in it. In her mind’s eye, she saw him without his hat. She liked, she thought, black hair on men.
“Gunna rain,” said the ice-man.
“Yes,” she said, “it looks like that.”
Looking at the sky as though she had just discovered it was there. Still, you had to show an interest.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s a funny old weather.”
She agreed that it was.
“You never know, do you?” she said.
Then he jerked his head at her.
She almost overbalanced from the step to watch the new ice-man go, the rotten stitches giving in the seams of his old overcoat.
“I thought you was going to do something about all this nasty mess,” the cook complained.
“Yes,” said the parlourmaid. “I’ll get the pan.”
“A cloth and a bucket,” said the cook, “is what you’ll need by now.”
That evening as she waited for the mistress to finish powdering herself, Ruth Joyner announced to the dressing-table mirror:
“There was a new ice-man called today.
“But Ruth, when I expect to be stimulated!” Mrs Chalmers-Robinson protested.
Because she could not have felt flatter. She had a headache, too.
“I mean,” she said, and frowned. “I should like to be taken out of myself.”
She would have liked to descend a flight of stairs, in some responsive model, of lamé, in the circumstances, and the faint play of ostrich feathers on her bare arms. Her legs were still exceptional; it was her arms that caused her anxiety.
“Tell me something beautiful. Or extraordinary. Even disastrous.” Mrs Chalmers-Robinson sighed.
She did also hope suddenly that she had not hurt the feelings of her dull maid, for whom she had about as much affection as she would ever be capable of giving.
Ruth thought she would not say any more. But smiled. She remembered as much as she had seen of the ice-man’s rather strong neck above the collar of the greenish overcoat.
If she did not dwell on that image, it was because her upbringing suggested it might not be permissible. Though it continued to flicker forth.
The following morning, as the mistress’s spirits had not improved, the maid was sent to the chemist at the corner. When she returned, and had handed over the little packet, she could not resist looking in the pantry chest. The fresh ice was already in it, double for Saturday. So there she was, herself imprisoned in the mass of two solid days, from which no one would have heard her, even if she had been able to call.
Once she went and stood for company beside the cook, who had been very quiet all these days, and was now stirring mysteriously at a bowl.
“What is that?” the parlourmaid asked, though she did not particularly want to know.
“That is what they call a liayzong,” Ethel answered, with a cold pride that obviously would not explain further.
On Sunday evening Ruth went to service, and felt sad, and got soggy in the nose, and did not care to sing the hymns, and lost a glove, and came away.
On Monday she clattered early downstairs, in fresh starch, because she had heard, she thought.
“How are we?” the ice-man called.
“It’s still you, then,” she said.
“How me?”
“Thought you was fed up.”
He laughed.
“I am always fed up.”
“Go on!” She was incredulous.
Then she noticed. She said:
“The button fell off that I saw was going to.”
“What odds!” he said. “A bloody button!”
“I could of sewed it on, easy,” she said.
But he dumped the ice in the chest, and left.
Most days now, she coincided with the ice-man, and it was not all by trying; it seemed to happen naturally. Once he showed her a letter from a mate who was starting a carrying business between the city and the near country; and would he come in on it? The name, she discovered, was Mr T. Godbold, from the address on the envelope.
Riders In the Chariot Page 32
