Birthday Party

by C. H. B. Kitchin

  Seeing her now, with her would-be matronly air, those dimples and fourteen years on her age, one hardly believes it possible. But it was.

  “I’ve never won the mixed anywhere before,” Claude said, as we got into the car after the prize-giving.

  “She seemed quite a nice girl,” I told him. “You must play with her again.”

  “Yes, it’s still early in the season.”

  He played with her twice more, though they didn’t win, and then, when the week came for our local tournament, he suggested having a little party for it. I said it was an excellent idea, and the house was filled with people who did not ordinarily visit us.

  “It isn’t a social occasion,” Claude explained. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Good heavens, of course I don’t. Do you think Dr. Payne will let his daughter come?”

  “Oh, I should think he would only be too glad to get rid of her for a time.”

  I watched, I remember, for a blush as he said this. He blushed again a few days later when he said, “The children seem to get on very well with Dora.”

  Then the tournament was over, and she went home to keep house for her father, though, as I gathered from a remark I wasn’t meant to hear, her father had an efficient cook-housekeeper, who was by no means too old to be something more than that. Apparently the Paynes lived rather well. The doctor had a big practice and was clever with his investments. But—as another remark I overheard put it—“he wasn’t quite everybody’s cup of tea in South Mersley.”

  In early September, Claude said to me, “Do you know, I haven’t ever played in a hard-courts tournament?”

  “Would you like to?”

  “I rather think I should.”

  “Well, where is one going to be held?”

  “There’s one at South Mersley the week after next.”

  “But it’s much too far to motor there for the day.”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t try to.”

  “You’d stay with——?”

  “I should stay in London for the week. It’s less than three-quarters of an hour by train, you know.”

  “Of course.”

  “Wouldn’t you care for a few days in London too?”

  “In mid-September, in weather like this?”

  “I suppose not.”

  The early autumn was very lovely that year—as it is every year whatever the weather is like.

  “I can’t leave the rose garden now,” I said. (I was replanning it.) “And I want to plant the daffodils myself. Jackson puts them in as if they were soldiers. There are three thousand of them.”

  “Three thousand! Where on earth are they all going?”

  “In father’s cherry tree plantation.”

  “But there are some there already.”

  “None.”

  “Oh, I’m thinking of the orchard.”

  “Yes, you are. But, Claude, you haven’t to plant them. They needn’t keep you here.”

  “I don’t like gadding about while you’re so busy at home.”

  “I do it because I like it. Besides, I needn’t be lonely. I can have Gwen Rashdall here for the week. I ought to ask her down, and I know you don’t care for her much.”

  “Well, if it all fits in——”

  It all fitted in.

  So Claude played in the South Mersley Hard-Courts Championship and got as far as the semifinal in the mixed doubles—an achievement, as the tournament attracted some almost good players. The following week there was another hard-courts tournament also near London. He mentioned it at some length in a letter, and I urged him to play in it. “It’s as if you were the man and he were the woman,” Gwen Rashdall said, when I read her parts of his letter. “You ought obviously to be owning this place, not Claude.” Her habit of saying things like that was one of the reasons why Claude disliked her. I said little or nothing to her about Dora Payne, of whom (not being in our new tennis world) she had hardly heard.

  On the second Saturday afternoon of Claude’s absence, a telegram arrived for me. But it only stated, “We have won the mixed.” He was to come back on the next day, Sunday. Gwen had gone two days before. I remember Sunday was a specially lovely day, so warm in the sunshine that instead of planting my bulbs, I sat for a long time on a seat by the orchard, while the apples seemed to swell and ripen before my eyes. The salpiglossis—which for the sake of preserving a childhood’s memory I have kept as my “favourite annual”—were very fine that year, and four of our Victorian beds near the house were filled with them. Wherever I turned, there was something to notice and be fond of. The cobs were almost ready to pick. The autumn crocuses were spattering the grass round the mulberry tree. The Michaelmas daisies were beginning to turn colour and gave the long wall, which was their background, a blue and purple tinge, broken here and there by the tawny flash of a late-blooming red-hot poker, or a straggly shoot of pink hollyhocks which should have been cut down three weeks before.

  I had expected Claude for luncheon, but he sent a telephone message in the morning to say he wouldn’t be home till after dinner. In a way I was not sorry to be able to enjoy the garden by myself, without the busy distraction of his news.

  After that blaze of light and warmth it seemed absurd for the sun to set at seven. I watched it from my window, striking through the curved line of beeches that was one of our boundaries, over a couple of fields and a space of lawn and lower trees, till it caught the things on my dressing-table, each minute at a different angle, and filled the room with changing reflexions of itself. Then the last ray vanished.

  After dinner I sat in the morning-room where, thinking it might be chilly, Eames had lit the fire. Neither Claude nor I were fond of the drawing-room. But it was still warm, and I drew the curtains back and opened a window to let in the fresh air, before settling down by a shaded lamp to read.

  I hardly heard Claude coming into the room, and before I had put my book down I felt his hand on my hair and his face touching mine as he kissed me. It was a more affectionate greeting than we generally gave one another. Then he sat down in an armchair opposite mine and lit a cigarette. A moonbeam struck the carving of the gunroom door, which was between our chairs.

  “Well,” I said, “so you won. I’m delighted.”

  “Yes. It’s been a marvellous fortnight.”

  He began to tell me about it, little things which I could have guessed, and were clearly leading up to something bigger which, though I might guess it too, would have to be expressed in difficult words.

  “What did you do to-day?” I asked, thinking I had better help him.

  “To-day? Oh, I met Arthur and Lilian last night, and they made me promise to spend the day with them. You know how often I’ve promised to go and see them. They’ve got a very pretty little place, but of course that part of Hertfordshire’s getting very towny. It’s only about fifteen miles from London.”

  For a short time we talked about Arthur and Lilian.

  “I suppose you had a celebration dinner last night?”

  “No. These tournaments break up very quickly, you know. Dora had to get back home, and I thought I’d just dine somewhere quietly and go to a show when, as I told you, I met Arthur in the bar and . . .”

  “Dora must have been very pleased with herself.”

  “She ought to be. She won the second set entirely on her own. I played like a rabbit. . . . I suppose the children are well?”

  “Oh, perfectly.”

  He lit another cigarette, and I prepared myself for his voice to change when he next spoke. It did.

  “Isabel, I’ve had a letter I think I ought to show you. I found it at the hotel when I got back last night. From Dr. Payne.”

  “Oh!”

  While I read it, he fetched himself a whisky-and-soda. I can still rem
ember some of the pompous phrases.

  “As a father and a medical man I can assert . . . This hesitation to disclose your intentions . . . In point of time a short period, but in point of the closeness of your association, a long one . . . Her acquaintance with you has already caused her to reject a very suitable offer for her hand . . . Failing an explanation, I must for her sake forbid my daughter to speak to you again . . .”

  My first thought was, “The man has written too soon. He’s done for himself by this.”

  But I was wrong.

  “You see?”

  “Yes, Claude. It’s a most—unfortunate letter. Why rush things so?”

  “You mean me?”

  “No, no. Dr. Payne, of course. He ought to give you time to know your own mind, however well he thinks he knows Dora’s.”

  “Isabel dear, I think I do know my own mind. I have enjoyed this summer so enormously. You don’t suppose it was just the tennis, do you?”

  “Oh, there was never any need to think that.”

  He looked puzzled by my remark, which indeed began to puzzle me. I think I meant two or three different things by it.

  He answered it by saying, “The point is, this letter brings things to a crisis.”

  “In a sense, yes. But not really, if you know your own mind.”

  “I know my own mind so far as I’m concerned. But there are other people to think of.”

  “You mean——?”

  “You and the children, of course.”

  “As for the children——” I began. I wanted to gain a little time before we discussed my position, and it was no effort to convince him that the children would not suffer if he married Dora. She had already shown that she liked them, and, more important, they seemed to like her. When their mother died Joan was seven and Ronnie only four. Now Joan was ten and Ronnie seven. They wouldn’t resent a new mother.

  “My only fear is she may spoil them.”

  This seemed greatly to reassure him. After all, who could blame him for giving them an over-indulgent stepmother?

  “Well, if that’s out of the way, I’ve only to ask you how you’d feel about having her here,” he said. “Not even she would ever expect you to go. She knows how you’ve helped me here since Mary died.”

  “My dear Claude, we had all this out when you married Mary. It would be ridiculous of me to think of staying. I went away before. I only came back as a stop-gap.”

  “Don’t speak of it like that. And Dora’s not quite like Mary, you know. Dora will need your help—for a long time. She’ll rely on it.”

  “I don’t think she’ll want any help from me at all. Of course, I’ll do what I can. I’ll pay you long visits, and——”

  “Oh, Isabel, you make me feel I’m driving you away.”

  “Nonsense! If I don’t convince you you’re not, I shall feel I’ve never had any right to be here at all.”

  I took his part and he mine. We did it well. He said things on my behalf which I should hardly have liked to plead even to myself. “Your interest in this place, your devotion to the garden . . .” He was almost eloquent. So was I.

  “Don’t you see, Claude, this is rescuing me from a rut? Here I am, at forty-three, settling down as if I were fifty-three, or even sixty. Life still should have a few surprises for me.”

  I spoke almost as if I might get married. He believed it or, at least, thought it possible. So, I suppose, it was.

  “I can afford,” I said, “a flat in London—during the interregnum, if there is to be one. Before, I mean, something happens to show me the way. Or a cottage in the country, if the mood takes me. But I think a contrast would be—more useful to me, before I quite lose touch with all the interesting people we used to know. Why, after Christmas, I might go for a cruise.”

  No, I can’t have said a cruise, because cruises were hardly commonplaces in 1922. How easy these anachronisms are! I suppose I actually said “travel abroad.” But whatever it was, he jumped at it. The strain of holding out against me was too much—as it had always been. He gave in.

  4

  Claude married Dora Payne in December, 1922. I spent Christmas with them, and took a flat in London. Then, when I was preparing thoroughly to detest the year, my Aunt Eleanor died and left me some of the money her rich husband had left her. I can’t pretend it made no difference to me. I got rid of the flat, which I hated already, and moved into a house—this house, this L-shaped drawing-room, where the female novelist has just had tea with me and asked me about the gunroom—this drawing-room where the first pale sunset of yet another year has struck the silver tray and sugar basin.

  I have wondered, sometimes, how much Claude resented Aunt Eleanor’s will. The money should have been left not to him, perhaps, but to the house in which he lived. It gave me a false importance—the power, for instance, to restore the hall when it needed doing up. I insisted on being “generous” over this. Oh, those arrivals with my architect, my builder! Even at the time I felt guilty, though no one welcomed me with anything but thanks and praise. But it was too early in my exile to be detached, to smile when I heard of the dinners Dora couldn’t give, servants she couldn’t manage, the long painstaking adjustment of herself that she was making. Yet the one sign I was waiting for from Claude—the sign that he had ceased to be in love with her—never came.

  He hadn’t “only married a tennis-racket,” as Gwen Rashdall so wittily asserted. They did play tennis the summer after the wedding, but without much success. Indeed, Dora played when she ought to have given it up. Perhaps it was only fair that the game which gave Joan and Ronnie a stepmother should have prevented them from having stepbrothers and stepsisters. The following summer, after her long convalescence, Dora played again. But she had lost her skill and soon ceased to try. Claude was now definitely too old. I have no reason to think that those years were anything but happy for him.

  Then suddenly came his death. Despite all our efforts at the inquest, a verdict of suicide was returned. No worry about health? None, so far as we and his doctor knew. Money? He had enough to keep things going, with a little care. His “affairs were all in order.” His domestic life? Perfectly happy. Then, why . . . ?

  We made the most of an attack of influenza, which he had caught towards the end of October. It was not a severe attack. He was not more than three whole days in bed. But might it not have produced a depression—yes, he had been rather depressed, but not to that point—or a brain-storm, sufficient to account for what he did? Sufficient, that is to say, to spare us and his children the words “while of unsound mind.” The jury were not convinced, and gave the verdict we dreaded.

  Joan somehow heard.

  “Does it mean,” she asked me, “that we’ve got insanity in the family?”

  We were in the morning-room, while Dora, upstairs, was going through Claude’s things.

  “It means nothing at all,” I told her. “They’re old-fashioned words which the law still uses. There’s been no sign of insanity ever in our family. Look at me. I come from the same stock. Do you think there’s any insanity here?”

  I tapped my forehead in melodramatic fashion, trying to frighten her into common sense. She said “No,” doubtfully, as if making a reservation about me.

  “You’re quite right, dear,” I went on, “to have asked me about this. And you must promise to talk to me if ever it worries you again. But it needn’t. Your grandfather was perfectly lucid till an hour before he died. And his father—that’s to say, my grandfather—did his accounts on his deathbed, when he was eighty-eight. Your mother, too, was a most clear-headed woman. I think you take after her.”

  Her thoughts had wandered a little.

  “Then I can tell Ronnie——” she began.

  “You must tell Ronnie nothing—because there’s nothing to tell him.”

  �
�Then why didn’t you let him come back for the funeral?”

  I explained to her that Ronnie was three years younger than she was, which meant that, being a boy, he was really a child in comparison with her. An imaginative highly strung child, too. For her, there was no shock, because there was nothing to be shocked about, except for our natural grief at losing Daddy. But for Ronnie there would have been a shock—beyond his natural grief. It was our duty, and Joan’s duty too, to see that he never heard exactly what happened—or didn’t hear it for a very long time. We had written, I told her, to Ronnie’s headmaster, who promised to see that Ronnie shouldn’t get hold of a newspaper. He had even told Ronnie a long story about the accident, saying that Eames was in the room when it happened. Eames was prepared to support the story if Ronnie should question him, and it was for Joan, if necessary, to support the story as well.

  “Even if I have to tell an untruth?” she asked.

  “Yes, even if you have to tell an untruth. Now, listen, Joan—this is what Ronnie has been told.”

  I gave her the account we had sent to Mr. Peters. She listened, as if to an interesting story, and I knew I had made her an ally over it. If it worried her—well, she had the strength to bear it. Ronnie, I didn’t think, had. At least, I didn’t care to put him to the test.

  “And shall we go on living here?” she asked, when I had finished.

  “Of course. You and Auntie Dora and Ronnie will go on living here, and when Ronnie’s twenty-one the place will belong to him. But you’ll be married yourself before that happens and have a home of your own.”

  “But you never married, Auntie Isabel.”

  “You shouldn’t ask older people why they never married. They may have some intimate or sad reason which they don’t want to tell you. Mind, I don’t say that I have. But if you like, you can think that I was too busy looking after your grandfather to think of marrying. You won’t have anyone to look after, except Ronnie, and I expect he’ll soon get a wife to do that for him. Now, have we talked it all over?”