“Rather a bore, in a way,” she declared, with preposterous affectation. “I’ve already been a bridesmaid seven times—no, eight, I think.”
“It’s expensive, isn’t it?” said Christine stonily. “My friends, I’m thankful to say, either get married in a Registry Office, or else just live in sin together.”
Young Vulliamy burst out laughing, and then glanced rather nervously at Bébée.
“I’m surprised to hear you talk of a Registry Office, Miss Fairfield,” said Mrs. Bakewell, tactfully ignoring the latter half of Christine’s speech, although Laura felt that it had probably surprised her a good deal more than the first. “It’s such an odd mistake, I always think, to talk of Registry for Registrar’s. And yet how many people do so!”
“Don’t let’s mention the word registry at all,” Laura begged. “It reminds me too much of hunting for a cook and never finding one.”
She was grateful to Duke Ayland, Christine, and Major Bakewell for laughing.
Mrs. Bakewell remarked instructively: “What I always say when people talk to me about the servant problem is—there is no servant problem.”
“How very unsympathetic!” said Christine.
Mrs. Bakewell’s indulgent smile veered round upon her.
“But not at all. Now look at me. I have no difficulties with servants. I never have had difficulties with servants.”
Alfred and Major Bakewell, unobtrusively, began to talk about the Government. Bébée and Mr. Vulliamy, more stridently, discussed plays.
It was left to Laura, Ayland, and Christine, to appear intelligently interested in Mrs. Bakewell’s method of ensuring efficiency in her domestics.
“The secret is very simple. They know that I’m not dependent on them. If the cook leaves: well and good, I go into the kitchen and cook the dinner. If the parlourmaid leaves, I clean the silver and lay the table, and even little Cynthia, mite as she is, can help me. If the housemaid leaves, why, let her leave is what I say. I can make the beds, and dust and sweep, and it doesn’t disturb me in the least. They know it. I say to them from time to time: ‘I’m not dependent upon any one of you. Make no mistake,’ I say, ‘I can do without any of you quite easily if I want to. The house will be clean and tidy, the Major’s meals well cooked, and served nicely, and everything will go on just exactly as well as usual, and rather better.’ And they know it’s true. It has a wonderful effect upon them.”
“May I ask, then, how long you’ve had your present servants?” said Ayland in a tone of respectful enquiry, that Laura hoped and believed to be gently ironical.
“Dear old Cookie has been with me—let me see, is it fourteen or fifteen years?—fifteen it is. The housemaid five years and the parlourmaid about the same.”
Christine’s eyes turned wildly to her sister, plainly demanding: “Is she speaking the truth?” and Laura gave a slight, reluctant nod.
Mrs. Bakewell, having thoroughly and successfully taken the wind out of everybody else’s sails, began competently to chew seed-cake.
The others, actuated by a common impulse, violently discussed Italy.
The Bakewells did not travel.
Italy led to music.
“I hear that you’re quite a musician, Mr. Ayland,” said Mrs. Bakewell suddenly and brightly.
Laura rose.
“If no one will have any more tea—” she murmured—and they returned to the tennis court.
Duke Ayland, lighting a cigarette for his hostess, said to her in an undertone that gave a curious intimacy to his words:
“Don’t ask me to play with Mrs. Bakewell. Please. She paralyses me. Can’t I play with you?”
Laura smiled at him confidently.
“If you want to.”
“Of course I want to.”
He was behaving to her as though she were a young girl, and it made her feel as though she was a young girl. They played together as partners, and Laura played brilliantly.
She only faltered when both the little boys, in clean holland smocks, appeared on the lawn.
Laura, looking out of the corners of her eyes to see whether they shook hands politely with the visitors or not, missed an easy shot, and forgot to apologise. Then Christine, who was not playing, appeared to be taking her nephews under her charge, and Laura, relieved, turned her attention to the game again.
But she played less well than before, and was relieved when the set came to an end, and she could hasten towards the deck chairs under the trees.
Johnnie, who had been behaving with quiet and decorum, immediately began to show off, breaking into a refrain that he knew, from agreeable experience, always caused a flattering commotion in the nursery.
“Oh, what a little short shirt you’ve got!
You’d better pull down the blind.”
On a second, and louder, repetition of the engaging refrain, Johnnie achieved his object.
Major Bakewell laughed, Edward imitatively began to sing also, and their mother turned pink and said, “That will do, boys. Where do you pick up these things?”
“My little children,” said Mrs. Bakewell, “have been taught how to sing. They can sing prettily, and in tune.”
“Can they sing, ‘Oh, what a little short shirt you’ve got’?” Johnnie enquired, quite unmaliciously.
“Certainly not. They sing pretty songs about the little squirrels, and the birds, and the great blue sky.”
Alfred Temple, at this, invited Mrs. Bakewell to play tennis again. She agreed to do so, but as she stood up remarked to Laura that one could never be careful enough, which Laura rightly interpreted as an oblique condemnation of the society that she permitted her children to frequent.
“Johnnie is a born actor,” she remarked unconvincingly, on the spur of the moment.
“Johnnie is a graceless young ruffian,” Ayland declared, coming to her assistance and sensibly lightening the atmosphere.
She threw him a grateful glance.
“Come on,” said Christine, “let’s play.”
For the rest of the evening, Laura’s attention was divided between her guests and her children. But underneath her pre-occupation, she was conscious of a faint, but wonderfully stimulating, glow of pleasure and excitement, because she saw that Duke Ayland was attracted by her.
He remained to dinner, when her other visitors had severally expressed appreciation and gratitude, and gone home.
“Don’t let’s change, of course,” Christine said.
They sat agreeably under the trees, with a new and sudden sense of intimacy as they discussed the departed visitors.
“Do you think Bébée Kingsley-Browne pretty, Duke?” said Christine suddenly.
And Duke replied promptly and sensibly:
“Not in the very least.”
Laura’s already soaring spirits mounted perceptibly higher at this ungallant and unjustifiable verdict.
“Her young man was a prize ass, wasn’t he?” Christine went on, demolishing her fellow-players with whole-hearted thoroughness. “Only a prize ass would allow himself to be dragged round the country at Baybay’s chariot-wheels like that. She always has someone or other in tow, but they never last long.”
“Is she engaged to Vulliamy?” said Alfred.
“Good heavens, no. We should have heard of it fast enough if she had been,” declared Christine derisively. “It’s my opinion that Baybay would give her eyes to be seriously engaged, and no one has ever yet been fool enough to ask her.”
Laura, who found the conversation strangely exhilarating, realised, as the gong sounded from the house, that she had forgotten to go and say good-night to the boys.
Remorseful, she ran upstairs.
Afterwards she took off her hat, arranged her hair before the looking-glass, and powdered her nose, and went downstairs without a single misgiving about her own appearance, the appearance of her dinner-table, or the probable reactions of her servants to an extra place in the dining-room.
And all was well, from the cold chicken, the salad, and the junket and cr
eam, to the complete absence of any interruptions from Johnnie.
After dinner, Duke Ayland played the piano, at Christine’s request.
She and Laura listened to him, and Alfred appeared to listen also—but after a little while he began, by degrees, and with a certain effect of absent-mindedness, to obtain possession of The Times, behind which he gradually vanished, presumably still listening, but perhaps less intently. Laura had the curious feeling that the player would not care if neither Alfred nor Christine paid any attention whatever to his music.
It was not to them that he was playing, but to her.
She felt sure of it.
At first she gave, or supposed that she gave, her attention to the music, but she was not sufficiently familiar with modern composers to feel at her ease in listening to their works, and it made her nervous to feel that at any moment she might expose her ignorance.
Then Christine took up a book.
And Duke Ayland looked round at his hostess.
It was a grave, almost enquiring look, and it established spiritual intimacy between them.
Laura had met similar looks, before, although never after, her marriage, and they had been the almost certain preliminary to emotional adventures.
Was it conceivable that Duke Ayland—Christine’s friend—sought to embark upon emotional adventure with her now?
Laura remembered her own reflections in the looking-glass that evening, and decided that, after all, it was not incomprehensible that a man should admire her.
She hoped, complacently, that Christine would not mind.
Then, invaded by a sudden recollection, she hoped—wistfully, indignantly, nervously and not even wholly sincerely—that Alfred would not mind.
Chapter VI
The relations between Laura and her husband were as contradictory and unbalanced as those between most husbands and wives. They had been reasonably in love with one another. Alfred was—or so Laura supposed—incapable of being unreasonably in love, and she herself had expended most of her capabilities for romance in purely imaginary directions. She had, in her maiden days, composed speeches to an ideal lover that would have astonished and disconcerted Alfred to a considerable extent, had she ever spoken them aloud.
But she never had, and had never seriously wished to, and in the course of seven years of child-bearing and rearing, housekeeping, writing stories to augment her income, and talking about the bulbs to her neighbours, Laura had almost forgotten that she had once thought herself destined for a grande passion.
It was obvious, beyond question, that Alfred was not destined for a grande passion, and, once married to him, with the children, the house, the furniture, and the weekly books, all alike depending on their combined union, Laura had not considered the possibilities of romance any further, in regard to herself.
She did, however, very frequently wish that Alfred would make love to her, or even, if that was too much to expect, that he would make personal remarks to her.
But Alfred did neither. As an English country gentleman, he preferred out-door pastimes, and he did not make personal remarks because he was not particularly interested in persons, and in any case preferred silence to speech.
Laura, occasionally, and desperately, forced discussion upon him. But the results were never really satisfactory.
“Alfred, have I changed much since we were married? I don’t mean to look at—of course, I know I look older—”
Alfred withheld either assent or dissent, and gazed thoughtfully at his wife over his spectacles.
“Do you think that I’m less—enthusiastic—less alive about things?” said Laura wistfully.
“I shouldn’t think so.”
“Sometimes I feel as though my mind had lost its spring.”
Alfred, obviously from pure kindness, did not pick up The Times again and go on reading it—but it trembled slightly in his hand.
“What would you do if I suddenly said I was desperately unhappy?”
“I suppose that I should ask you what the matter was,” Alfred replied reluctantly, and this time he raised The Times about six inches from his knee.
“Well, I’m not,” Laura admitted with a small laugh. “But I’m not sure that I don’t sometimes wish I were. It’s better to feel anything vividly than to feel nothing.”
“Is it?”
“Don’t you think so?”
“I haven’t thought about it.”
There was a pause, in which Laura faintly hoped that Alfred was thinking about it now, and might presently inaugurate a mutual exchange of opinions by the expression of his own.
Alfred slowly raised The Times altogether, and began to read it.
“I’m not as enthusiastic as I used to be. I don’t get roused in the same way,” cried Laura wildly. “Should you call me adventurous nowadays?”
“Not particularly, I daresay,” said Alfred, who had evidently forgotten having once applied this epithet to Laura in the days when he sought to persuade her to marry him.
“Alfred, do you love me?” Laura insanely demanded, not because she doubted her husband’s affection, but because her desire to talk personalities had now passed the bounds of reason and decency alike.
“I shouldn’t have married you if I didn’t,” said Alfred, and he now, without compunction, opened The Times extensively and became absorbed in its pages.
Such dialogues had occurred not infrequently, in seven years, and after each one of them Laura had tempestuously decided that it should never take place again. It was undignified—degrading even—and it was bitterly unsatisfactory.
But she could not check the cravings of her nature for romance altogether. She lavished an exaggerated affection on her younger son, who greatly resembled her, and she read an immense number of novels, half unconsciously identifying herself with the central figure in each.
She had never, since her marriage, attracted the amorous attention of any man, and had, indeed, met few men at all.
She had supposed that Duke Ayland was in love with Christine.
On the evening of her tennis party, she knew that he was not.
To her mingled shame and exultation, Laura was unable to go to sleep that night for quite a long while.
It was the first time for years that she had been kept awake by anything unconnected with the children, the servants, or the need of money.
It bewildered her, and made her happy. She rehearsed a drama, in which she and Duke Ayland fell victims to an uncontrollable passion for one another, and then parted after a long scene, in which…
“Oh my heavens—and I’m thirty-four years old!” moaned Laura, pressing her face into the pillow until she was nearly stifled, as the early-adolescent nature of these fantasies was borne in upon her with sudden, intolerable clarity.
Viewed in the morning, they seemed so very much more ridiculous, that it became impossible to view them at all, and they were added to the long list of things that Mrs. Temple would not permit herself to remember.
“To-day,” she said to Christine, “I shall call upon the Crossthwaites at Marchland. Will you come, or not?”
“I’ll see what Duke is doing,” Christine returned, with simplicity and candour.
In the course of the morning, Duke came up to Apple-court.
Laura saw him from the drawing-room window.
“Go out to him, Christine,” she told her sister. “And I think you’d better not ask him to lunch. It’s only the mutton, cold.”
“He won’t mind that,” said Christine, and she went out.
Laura sat at her writing-table, her back to the window, and wrote steadily:
“Please let me have two pounds of scrag-end by mid-day to-morrow, also three or four kidneys.”
And her mind, entirely unbidden, put to her the strange question:
“Does he ever kiss her?”
In Laura’s day—that Grecian-nymph period that now appeared so remote—to let oneself be kissed was something that classed one. There was the sort of girl
who did let herself be kissed, and the sort of girl who didn’t—also, although not officially recognised, the sort of girl who didn’t, but who pretended that she did. Laura, herself, had spiritually hovered on the borderland between the first and the last of these.
In her years at Quinnerton, she had come to realise that this distinction was no longer a recognised one. But never had she understood it with the vivid apprehension of that morning, when Christine went out to meet Duke Ayland under the apple-trees.
They did not come into the house, and Laura remained motionless, with her pen transfixed immediately above the word “kidneys,” for some time.
There was a tap at the door.
“Come in!”
Miss Lamb, the daily governess, came in. She was a brisk, plain young woman, with a faux air of efficiency. In reality, she acted from intelligent impulses rather than from reasoned principles, and could attack a difficult situation better than she could sustain it.
“Do come in, Miss Lamb.”
“I’m so sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Temple,” said the governess, with a respectful glance at the writing-table. She was one of Laura’s rather limited number of admirers in the world of literature, and Laura instinctively drew the blotting-paper across the postcard to the butcher.
“It’s—I’m afraid—about Johnnie. I told him I should come to you. His disobedience, Mrs. Temple, really is beyond everything. Simply, he’s flatly defiant. And he makes Edward naughty, too.”
“He has so much more character than Edward,” Laura murmured.
“Oh, he has plenty of character”
“But of course,” said Laura, rousing herself, “it won’t do. I’m so very sorry, Miss Lamb. I know how tiresome he can be. What was it this time?”
A long indictment followed, in which Fauntleroy figured “…and fond as I am of animals, Mrs. Temple, a dog is a dog, and naturally has habits—” said Miss Lamb incontrovertibly. “So I told Johnnie I should give him extra lessons for that, and the result is that I have been able to do nothing with him all the morning. And it is such waste of time.”
“Shall I punish him?”
Miss Lamb’s face grew pink.
“I know one hates the idea. Perhaps if you spoke to him,” she suggested.
The Way Things Are Page 7
