“No,” said Laura doubtfully. “Oh, no. Not at all. Why should I? Everybody talks about everything now. Not so much in the country, though. In fact, hardly at all in the country. I don’t know what people will say about Bébée, at Quinnerton.”
“Bébée, of course, is being perfectly preposterous. But apart from her, do you think people in the country are still as moral as they used to be? For instance—” Christine looked away from her sister—”does anyone who is married already, ever have any sort of an affair, or would the skies fall?”
“I think,” replied Laura, with some deliberation, “that the skies would probably fall.”
It was a positive relief to discuss with Christine, however obliquely, the question that had been in the atmosphere between them for days now.
“Of course, it might be worth while to let them fall—but one would have to be quite certain that it was,” Christine said.
“Children and things.”
“Oh yes.”
“And exactly how much one could count upon the other person. It might so easily be a case of out of the frying-pan into the fire.”
“Do you mean divorce? That kind of thing?”
“Yes, that kind of thing. I mean to say, one would prefer it to be one thing or the other, I suppose. Not just meeting at a pub half-way between London and Quinnerton and saying it was the dentist, or any hole-and-corner business of that kind.”
Laura shuddered in entirely genuine disgust.
“What an extraordinarily offensive way of wording it!”
“Well, that’s what it would boil down to,” said Christine doggedly. “The only alternative that I can see, would be running away altogether, or else chucking the whole thing for good and all.”
“Which would you do?”
“Chuck it,” said Christine without hesitation. “If I did leave one man, it wouldn’t be in order to go to another man.”
“But if you loved him?”
“I should be more likely to stay loving him, if we weren’t living together. Truly, Laura, I’m not being cheaply cynical. If one has married the wrong person, more or less—and after all, almost anyone feels like the wrong person after one’s lived with them for a number of years, I imagine—surely it’s better to go on, than to begin all over again with somebody else. It’s such waste of all the adjusting that one has learnt to do. Because the awful thing is, that one love affair is very like another. It gets to a certain pitch, and then—practically always—it declines. And it seems to me it would decline even faster than usual, if the woman knew all the time that she’d given up, say, her children for the sake of the man.”
A revulsion of feeling came over Laura.
“When you talk about giving up children, it makes one realise how utterly impossible and out of the question it would ever be, to do anything of the sort.”
“Of course.”
“I’m not speaking personally, but simply on general principles.”
“Yes, I know.”
“That sort of thing seems to be in the air, rather. What with Bébée and A. B., and one thing and another.”
At one thing and another, they left it.
But Laura knew that her younger sister, to whom she had never denied both shrewdness and candour, and to whom she was—more reluctantly—obliged to concede an experience of men wider than her own, had pronounced her verdict upon Laura’s problem of the emotions.
Christine’s theatre-party was a success, as her parties almost always were, whether she was the hostess, or the guest.
However improbable it might have seemed in advance that a quartette composed of Mr. Jeremy Vulliamy, Laura and her sister, and the psychopathic Losh, should derive intense and lively satisfaction from one another’s society, it came to pass that they did so.
The dinner was delightful, the play was amusing, and before the end of it Vulliamy had begged them all to come on somewhere and have supper and dance.
“Impossible for me, worse luck,” said the medical student. “I’ve got an abdominal at nine o’clock to-morrow. A chap with a—”
“That will do, Losh,” said Christine. “Laura, we could, couldn’t we?”
“I think I’ll go home, darling, if you don’t mind. Thank you very much, Mr. Vulliamy, but—”
“All right,” Christine interposed promptly. “I’ll go with you and we’ll make a night of it. You won’t sit up, will you, Laura?”
Laura’s lips assented, while Laura’s incurably Victorian mind recalled how she and Christine had learned, at their mother’s knee, that nothing was more fatal than for any girl to let any man perceive that she liked being taken out by him.
Vulliamy, however—and Laura now recalled that Lady Kingsley-Browne—in days other, and for herself, happier—had once spoken of him as the future richest commoner in England—Vulliamy lost none of his evident enthusiasm for Christine and her society.
Losh took Laura home.
He was an unkempt, untidy-haired creature, with a ceaseless flow of technical conversation, but he was likeable, and possessed a sense of humour.
His first observation was of that outspoken character to which Laura was by now becoming entirely accustomed.
“Christine’s got off with Vulliamy all right. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Well, I’m not surprised.”
“She is attractive, isn’t she?” Laura said, and immediately felt she was being like Lady Kingsley-Browne.
“She’s a darling, of course. I’ve been in love with her for years—with interludes, naturally. But I always knew she’d end by marrying a fellow with money. Vulliamy has money, tons of money. And will have more.”
“I believe so.”
“Well, he’s a good sort. I hope they’ll be happy.”
“But don’t you think you’re going rather fast?”
“No. No, I don’t think so. I don’t know Vulliamy at all well—in fact I hadn’t seen him since we were at school together, I don’t believe, till just the other day—but I can tell he’s in earnest. You see, he was in love with a girl who let him down rather badly, and he’d got all keyed up about her, and then Christine came along, and got him on the rebound. Reaction. It’s a well known psychological phenomenon. The other girl, from what I can gather, is a nymphomaniac. Neither more nor less.”
“I see,” said Laura hastily.
“I don’t know whether you understand—”
“Oh, perfectly.”
“So it’s quite natural that he should be attracted by Christine, who’s an absolutely opposite type. So normal, sexually, as to be almost abnormal, in these days.”
“I think this is us,” said Laura, as the taxi stopped.
“Good night,” said Losh. “I say, don’t mind my saying so, please, and don’t think me interfering—I don’t mean to be—but I wish you’d read some Jung.”
“But I have.”
“Then read more. Talk about what you read. You know, you’re afraid of your biological fate—so many women are—and the only way to get the libido into the right channel is to take out the whole question of Sex and look at it. You’re not vexed with me?”
“No,” said Laura forbearingly. “I’m not vexed with you. But if you had ever stayed at Quinnerton, which is where I live, you would understand why I don’t take out the whole question of Sex and look at it. Good-night. Thank you for bringing me back.”
“Good-night. The best thing for you to do, probably, would be to leave Quinnerton.”
“I can’t. I don’t want to, either. Good-night.”
“Good-night. Inhibitions—especially sexual ones—can be—”
“Good-night,” said Laura for the last time, and went upstairs.
Greatly perturbed, she went straight to the looking glass.
Why should everybody, even casual young men, assume that she needed advice, that she was in a fog of uncertainty? Did they also know what it was about?
Her eyes stared back at her from the mirror, large and full of alarm, and she saw t
hat what she had been aware of all the evening as a slight pallor was in reality a sickly, greenish-grey shadow, round her mouth and under her eyes.
Laura, like Mr. Vulliamy, was suffering from reaction.
It was almost a relief to her that, on the following morning at least, her chief preoccupation should be, not with Duke Ayland, but with her own exceedingly distasteful embassy to Highgate.
“I should go early and get it over,” advised Christine. “I’m frightfully sorry for you.”
“Will you come with me?”
“How can I? I’ve never even met the Onslows. I can’t walk in on perfect strangers and say that I’ve come to help my sister get rid of their incubus for them.”
“I don’t know that I shall get rid of her. Probably I shan’t. I shall ask to see her—not the Onslows at all.”
“Be sure to come back to lunch and tell me all about it; I shall be on thorns till I know. And Laura, if it’s any help, you can tell Bay-bay that she’s dished herself for good and all with the richest commoner in England. We had it all out last night. What he can’t get over is her having said to him that polygamy is a necessary concomitant of genius, and one of its highest forms of expression.”
“I shouldn’t have believed that any woman on earth could be so lost to the most elementary sense of decency,” said Mrs. Temple trenchantly.
“Or of common sense either,” Christine remarked thoughtfully. “Jeremy is quite a difficult person to shock—he’s thoroughly modern, and not particularly stupid, and she must really have gone out of her way to do it. I always said she was an ass.”
“So am I, for ever having undertaken this ridiculous mission,” said Laura.
Nevertheless, she went.
The austere-looking butler did not open the door to her, rather to her relief. A footman did so.
“Is Miss Kingsley-Browne staying here?”
“Yes, madam.”
“I should like to see her, please.”
“I don’t think Miss Kingsley-Browne has left her room yet, madam.”
Laura nearly exclaimed “All the better!” but substituted, “I would rather see her in her room. I should prefer to go straight up to her.”
“Very good, madam.”
Feeling more like a house-breaker than a caller, so fervently did she hope not to meet the owners of the house, Laura crept upstairs behind the footman, waited—resisting an inclination to flatten herself against the wall—whilst he exchanged murmurs with a housemaid, and finally was ushered by the housemaid into the guest room from which it had become at once so difficult, and so desirable, to eject the guest.
Bébée was sitting on the bed, in a pale-pink garment bordered with flame coloured feathers, smoking a cigarette in a long amber holder. Flimsy silk clothing, and tissue paper, lay over the chairs and on the floor.
“Do come in. Good-morning,” said Miss Kingsley-Browne affably. “Can you find somewhere to park yourself? I hope you don’t mind all this muddle.”
“Are you packing?” asked Laura hopefully.
“Unfortunately, yes. A. B. has to go to America. It is quite unexpected, and he is in despair about it, of course, but his publishers have cabled most urgently.”
Laura, although aghast at the extreme expedient to which her fellow-writer had been driven in order to escape from his admirer, felt relief surge over her.
“Do they go at once?”
“We sail on Saturday.”
“We?” Laura echoed incredulously.
“I have offered to go as his secretary. He hesitated a good deal about accepting, but I simply said I was coming and that ended it.”
“Your mother—”
“Have you seen Mummie? Poor dear, she’s taking such a distorted, exaggerated view of the whole thing. Has she talked to you at all?”
“A little. She is terribly upset.”
“I’m afraid she is. Well, do try to persuade her that this is nineteen-hundred and twenty-seven. I have the greatest admiration for A. B., and I can help him in a way that nobody else can. His wife has never understood him.”
“What does she say about your going to America?”
“She very ridiculously insists upon coming too,” said Miss Kingsley-Browne morosely.
“And what does he say?”
“He will have to let her come. The truth is—you see I am perfectly dispassionate about it—he hasn’t the courage to face a scandal. I should be perfectly prepared to go away with him. I make no secret of it—but he won’t hear of it. He wants us to say good-bye to one another, in fact, but as I’ve told him, he owes it to his work not to turn his back on love.”
Laura drew a long breath.
“My dear child, are you sure you haven’t lost your head over this? I know he finds you attractive, and pretty, and he may have made love to you—but when it comes to breaking up his home, and leaving a wife to whom he’s been married for years, and creating a considerable scandal—don’t you really think it’s expecting too much of a man of his age?”
The imperturbability of Bébée’s reply, delivered through a cloud of cigarette-smoke, left Mrs. Temple, if possible, more entirely convinced than before, of the futility of her errand.
“I daresay it is. But I am determined not to leave him until I have made him see that I am as necessary to him as he is to me.”
Chapter XIII
As The train gained speed, and Laura gazed out of the window, she felt that she had been away for a lifetime.
Duke Ayland had come to see her off at Paddington, and so had Christine. The memory of Duke’s eyes looking into hers, and of the grasp of his hand, had entirely obsessed her thoughts for the first half of the journey.
Later, she began to realise that she was coming home, and as the outline of flying fields and hedgerows on either side became familiar, the focus of Laura’s imaginings altered.
At the junction, she changed from the express to the local train, and crossing the platform, was reminded of her encounter there with Lady Kingsley-Browne. She remembered with amazement that it had taken place less than three weeks ago.
“If anybody looks like a rag now,” thought Laura, whose memory was as retentive as that of everybody else on certain counts, “it’s probably that unfortunate woman herself. Bébée is dancing attendance on a man who has a wife of his own already and doesn’t want her in the very least, and Jeremy—the richest commoner in England—is falling in love with somebody else. Shall I go and see her, or would it be more tactful to leave it alone?”
Laura’s charitable speculations occupied her until the end of her journey.
Alfred was on the platform, the two-seater, dusty, shabby and familiar, in the lane outside, and the two little boys waving excitedly from the back seat.
“Oh, Alfred, how nice of you to bring the boys! How are you all?”
Laura, absurdly inclined to tearfulness, had kissed Alfred fervently before remembering that she had been certain that her first kiss would recall Judas to her mind, sped through the barrier, was recalled in order to produce her ticket, failed to find it, searched agitatedly, recovered it, and was free to exchange rapturous greetings with Edward and Johnnie.
“Darling—oh! how did you get that bruise?”
“I just fell off the banisters. I wasn’t at all brave,” said Johnnie, anticipating his parent’s next inquiry. “I screamed and roared as if I’d been killed on the spot. Nurse said so.”
“Never mind! It must have been a frightful bump.”
“I’ve lost another tooth,” said Edward. “Look!”
“I see, darling.”
“Is this all?” Alfred enquired.
“That’s all. Oh—no—wait a minute—”
“Have you got my engine, mummie?”
“Yes, darling, and Edward’s football.”
“Did you say there was something else, Laura?”
“My hat-box, I thought—Oh, it’s there. Then that’s all.”
“What’s in that basket, Mummie?”
>
“I’ll show you when we get home.”
“Well,” said Alfred, “how are you? I think you look better than when you went away.”
“I am. Have the boys been good?”
“Just as usual, I think.”
“But nothing special? That’s a frightful bruise on Johnnie’s forehead.”
“Mummie,” yelled Edward from the dickey, “Faunt-leroy caught a rabbit yesterday.”
“Did he, darling?”
“How did you leave Christine?”
“She’s very well, and oh, Alfred, you’ll never guess who—”
“Mummie!”
“Yes, Johnnie.”
“Mummie, will there be time to unpack our surprises before tea or shall we have to wait till after?”
“I think I can let you have them at once. I put them in on the very top of my suit-case on purpose.”
“Have you heard anything of the Kingsley-Brownes, Laura? There’s been a lot of chat going on.”
Laura twisted her head round again from the unnatural angle at which she was obliged to hold it in order to converse with her sons.
“Have I heard anything of them?” she ejaculated. “I defy you, or any sane person, to guess what I have been doing. Will you believe it, that Baybay is more utterly lost to any sense of decency than we supposed, even, and has insisted upon—”
“Take care! They can hear every word—”
“Oh, I suppose they can.” Laura lowered her voice.
“Alors je te dirai plus tard. Alfred, how is the garden looking?”
“Wants rain.”
“It hasn’t rained once all the time I’ve been in London.”
“Mummie, do you see that a tree’s been cut down there?”
“Yes, I do, Edward. Did you see it come down?”
“No, I didn’t see it come down, but I saw it when it was lying on the ground, and I guessed someone had cut it down.”
Laura’s head came round again.
“How have the servants been, Alfred?”
“All right. I had to speak to Hilda the other day.”
“You had to speak to her!” echoed Laura, aghast. “What about?”
“Only about her work. She wasn’t doing it properly, so I had to speak to her.”
The Way Things Are Page 16
