A host of disquieting implications rushed into Laura’s mind.
“Was she upset?”
“I don’t know.”
Laura thought to herself, “If Hilda gives notice, then we shall lose her and the cook.”
Such possibilities had not presented themselves to her mind during the past ten days. Now they recurred with a tempestuous force that caused her to wonder how she could ever have permitted them to remain in abeyance.
She did not, however, comment upon Alfred’s indiscretion. If Alfred was left in charge of the household, it was inevitable that he should exercise his own methods of ruling it. Laura’s sense of justice admitted as much, in the midst of her forebodings.
Applecourt stood in the light of the afternoon sun, the purple clematis was out, Johnnie’s scooter lay on the front step, and Fauntleroy rushed round the corner of the house, jumping up and down in an ecstasy of welcome.
“It’s home,” she thought and experienced an intolerable mingling of pain and joy.
“Isn’t Fauntleroy excited?” said Edward, proudly. “Look, he’s got his new collar on.”
“And look,” cried Johnnie. “Daddy’s moved the cuckoo clock to the other side of the hall!”
They were joyful and preoccupied with all that they had to show her.
Laura permitted herself to kiss them once more, although aware that neither of them really welcomed the attention, gave them their presents, and sent them upstairs.
Through the open door of the drawing-room, she could see the excessive tidiness of books, magazines, bowls, and boxes, each scrupulously dusted and replaced on the wrong spot, and evidences of Nurse’s zeal in the presence of a vase containing two spiky red geraniums on her writing-table and another one of delphinium on the mantelpiece. A rather depressing selection of correspondence lay on the table in the hall.
“I didn’t forward things that looked like bills or advertisements,” Alfred explained, “and these came this morning.”
“Nothing interesting. The Bakewells want us to play tennis on the 10th; I suppose we can. The new nurse arrives the day before. Do you think it’ll be all right to leave her with the children?”
“I thought that was what you engaged her for.”
Laura laughed.
She had expected to feel guilty, remorseful and unhappy in the presence of her husband and children.
Sometimes she had wondered whether, like the heroines of novels read in her schoolroom days, she would suddenly discover, on returning home, qualities, hitherto unperceived in Alfred, and fall violently, passionately, and legitimately in love with her own husband. In that case, her London adventure would be as a dream, and duty and bliss—improbable combination!—would become one and the same thing. But no emotional reaction came to overwhelm Laura. In the presence of her husband and children she was happy, partly because it made her so to be with them again, and partly because of the underlying consciousness that never left her, of Duke Ayland’s love and her own. She did not experience a new and emotional reaction towards Alfred, although it was a relief to be able to talk eagerly to him without being consciously obliged to avoid the fatal topics of the children and the servants through sheer paucity of subjects.
She did not—astonishingly—feel remorseful. It was already incredible to her that she should ever seriously have contemplated a confession to Alfred.
“I wrote to you about Duke taking me out to dinner?”
“Yes. I daresay a restaurant was quite a good thing, after Christine’s cooking. Is he doing anything with his music?”
“Quite a lot. He’s finished the Operetta, and he’s going to send it to me to look at.” Laura had made up this speech beforehand because she wished Alfred to draw the deduction that she and Duke Ayland meant to correspond with one another.
She gave utterance to it with a self-consciousness that disgusted her.
It seemed to her that Alfred could scarcely fail to notice the unnatural lilt given by her voice to the end of the sentence.
“While you were away,” said Alfred, “we had trouble with that cistern again.”
Throughout Laura’s first evening at home, they exchanged similar detached, but interesting, pieces of information. The presence of Hilda in the dining-room early laid an embargo upon the subject of Miss Kingsley-Browne, but Laura, between the soup and the boiled chicken, was able to remark feverishly:
“I can’t tell you what a state poor Lady Kingsley-Browne is in—as well she may be! She actually came to us—Christine and me—for help, so you can imagine how reduced she is. As for Baybay, flogging at the cart’s-tail would be too good for her.”
“Would it? The whole neighbourhood would probably agree with you, I imagine. People have been talking about her quite a lot lately.”
“What people? What do they say?”
“I can’t remember any particulars. But I have a general impression that she is supposed to be going the pace, and that some young man or other, who was expected to ask her to marry him, hasn’t done so.”
“Oh, Alfred!” said Laura impressively, “I can tell you the whole story, practically.”
She did so.
Alfred’s comment was pithy.
Laura found that he was entirely correct in assuming that the amorous extravagances of Miss Kingsley-Browne were being discussed in the county. Even Mrs. Bake-well, at her own tennis party, subjected Laura to cross-examination on the subject.
“Is it true that the girl is positively living in the house of A. B. Onslow and that his wife has left him?”
“She hadn’t left him when I was there. She was sitting at the head of the table, quite in the ordinary way.”
“Was she?” ejaculated Mrs. Bakewell darkly. “Poor soul!”
“She talked to Bébée just like anybody else.”
“Poor, poor soul!”
“She—they—are off to America, I believe.”
Mrs. Bakewell shook her large head, on the very top of which a little white hat clung in a detached, independent-looking fashion.
“America is not the place to go to, in those circumstances,” she observed. “Or, rather, perhaps, it is the place to go to, from one point of view. Sometimes one feels, does one not, that it is as though brains were a positive snare.”
“I don’t think that Bébée has any particular brains. In fact, I’m sure she hasn’t.”
“It was Mr. Onslow I was thinking about. His writing—and now this madness and folly! The Onslows have no children, have they?”
“None.”
“Ah! Little feet pattering about the house—they keep one from so many, many dangers.”
Laura felt a passing wonder as to the nature of the perils from which Mrs. Bakewell had been preserved by the pattering of Cynthia’s and Theodore’s feet.
“You and I, my dear,” said her hostess, “may be thankful that we are just humdrum every-day wives and mothers, with little ones to occupy our thoughts, and plenty of work at home.”
“What would she say,” Laura enquired of herself, “if I told her that I am in love with another man, and that I have let him make love to me, and that he has asked me to run away with him?”
Her imagination was entirely unable to supply any reply to the question.
She looked unseeingly at the Bakewell tennis court, upon which two strapping Crossthwaite girls were partnering respectively a very young man indeed, and a stout, elderly clergyman.
The young man’s mother and the clergyman’s wife sat and talked spasmodically to Major Bakewell and Alfred. From time to time the mother of the very young man called out to him:
“Play up, Dickie dear!” and from time to time the clergyman’s wife ejaculated: “Quite like Wimbledon, isn’t it?”
Presently Mrs. Bakewell’s children appeared.
Cynthia and Theodore were plain, and Theodore wore spectacles, but their manners were beautiful. They shook hands, and they smiled, though rather joylessly, and they sat down upon a rush mat at their mother’s
feet.
“How are Edward and Johnnie, Mrs. Temple?” Cynthia politely enquired. “We haven’t come across them at the dancing-class lately.”
“It’s getting rather hot for dancing, isn’t it? I don’t think they’ll go again till September.”
Cynthia looked surprised and said: “Theodore and I don’t ever think it’s too hot for dancing, do we, Theodore ?”
“No, we never do. We dance in the garden sometimes. Shall we dance for you after tea?”
“Thank you very much,” said Laura, not, however, committing herself to any assent.
“You must come over to tea with Johnnie and Edward one of these days,” she added.
“Thank you, Mrs. Temple, we should like that very much. Do they play Mah Jongh?”
“Not yet.”
“They are rather small, aren’t they?” Cynthia said kindly. “But I daresay we could teach them.”
“We are so fond of the tinies,” said Mrs. Bakewell aside to Laura. “When we go to a party, we always have a crowd of babies round us immediately. Really quite wonderful, in that way.”
A ball went over the net into a distant flower-bed, and Laura was forced to admire the alacrity with which Cynthia and Theodore leapt up unbidden in pursuit, no less than the efficiency with which they found the ball and returned it to the players.
“Theodore is such a regular boy,” Mrs. Bakewell said confidentially to Laura. “Anything to do with a ball—it doesn’t matter what it is—and just the same with machinery!”
Whatever Mrs. Bakewel’s syntax, her meaning was clear.
“Johnnie cares more for books than anything else,” Laura said firmly. “He really has quite a good memory.”
“Has he—now has he!” Mrs. Bakewell absent-mindedly ejaculated. “I wonder where he gets that from. Up to seven years old, my treasures have always run wild. The doctor wouldn’t hear of anything else. There are brains enough there, he used to say—more than enough. Build up the bodies first, and you’ll find when they do begin, that they’ll get on all the faster. And I’m bound to say that he was right. Lessons have never been any trouble to us. I taught each in turn to read, at seven years old. Not a day before.”
“Johnnie could read quite well at five, but I don’t think it’s done him any harm.”
“Perhaps not. It’s difficult to tell, though. It’s later on that these things—but, of course, one can’t really say.”
“One can only do one’s best,” Laura assented, since the platitudes of a hostess are best met by platitudes from her guests.
“Indeed, yes, and that’s where one feels that our poor, poor friend has perhaps failed. And now this terrible retribution! (Darlings, run into the house for mother and see if tea is ready). Bébée—unfortunate girl—was always spoilt, and this is the result. Her life ruined, before she is thirty.”
Infinitesimal though Mrs. Temple’s regard might be for the object of Lady Kingsley-Browne’s over-indulgence, she found herself protesting at so trenchant a criticism.
“She is very foolish, of course—idiotic, and very badly behaved—but do you think that people’s lives are easily ruined nowadays? It seems to me that they can do almost anything, especially girls.”
“Everything is very lax, I quite agree, but I am not aware that tampering with the seventh commandment is ever looked upon lightly by decent people,” said Mrs. Bakewell with great directness.
Laura felt herself beginning to blush, whether for the outspokenness of Mrs. Bakewell, or from her own sense of guilt, she scarcely knew.
“Probably Bébée will come home again when her mother does,” she said hastily. “I daresay a great deal of it is only talk.”
Mrs. Bakewell shook her head and looked doubtful, but Cynthia and Theodore, gracefully bounding across the grass, came to tell her that tea was ready, and Laura’s tête-á-tête with her hostess came to an end.
For the remainder of the evening she played tennis very badly.
Such self-confidence as she could now boast had deserted her. The knowledge that her play was growing worse and worse, discouraged and disconcerted her, and discouragement and disconcernment, as usual, sapped her vitality, so that she felt herself becoming plainer and less attractive every moment.
It was a great relief to her when the Bakewells could be thanked, taken leave of, and left.
“I really think I’d better give up tennis altogether,” Laura dejectedly observed, in the well-worn phrase that is heard so often and so regularly every summer in rural circles. “I get worse and worse.”
“You were off your game to-day,” Alfred agreed, leniently.
“I don’t think I have ever been on it. If I ever have a daughter, I shall have her taught to play games, to dance, and to hold herself properly. I don’t believe anything else in the world matters.”
Laura’s husband, according to his wont, made no comment upon so rational and feasible a scheme of education.
The days slipped by, and already Laura’s stay in London had become dreamlike.
Duke’s letters, although she would scarcely have owned it to herself, were faintly disappointing. She did not wish him to write indiscreetly, and she knew that it was principally for her sake that he never did so, but nevertheless only the most reckless of letters could really have satisfied her, after the nature of their conversations together.
He still wrote about books, and about Laura’s work, and his own music, and he alluded—but guardedly—to their London meetings.
Laura, actually, sometimes found her replies difficult. As usual, she had not had any opportunity for reading books that everybody else was reading, until everybody else had nearly forgotten them, and she herself had done no writing at all since coming home. She found that her letters to Duke Ayland were becoming a patchwork of comments upon what he had written to her, and of humorously extravagant descriptions of domestic calamities and festivities at Applecourt. Rightly aware that this form of epistolatory wit is generally more amusing to the writer than to the reader, Laura bitterly assured herself that her letters resembled nothing so much as a most inferior imitation of Jane Welsh Carlyle’s.
She urgently desired to see Ayland again, and had a quite irrational feeling that to do so would in some way clarify the whole situation.
“Anything would be better than to go on like this,” Laura sometimes wearily thought, but she did not particularise “anything” nor really know what she meant by it, since her determination not to break with Duke was second only to her determination that she would never wrong Alfred or the children.
With a vague consciousness that she was only marking time until her next meeting with Duke Ayland, Laura returned to her accustomed routine.
It was diversified in precisely the usual manner.
“If you please, ’m, I don’t think the new nurse quite understands about the nursery slops. It’s her place to do them and not mine, I always understood.”
“Mrs. Temple, I’m really very sorry to trouble you, but I think I ought to let you know at once that next term I’m very much afraid I shan’t be able to go on teaching the boys. My mother’s asthma…”
“I haven’t been able to do anything with the kitchen stove this morning, ’m. I think it must be the wind”
Dear Madam,
We beg to inform you that your account is now overdrawn to the amount of Twelve Pounds Fourteen Shillings and Sevenpence…
Dear Madam,
May we very respectfully draw your attention to the enclosed account which is now considerably overdue? As our Annual Audit of Accounts commences this week, we shall be greatly obliged by your cheque at an early date.
Assuring you of our best attention at all times.
We are, dear madam,
Obediently yours,
Harker & Co.
£2 4s. 8½d.
Laura, though far from exhilarated by such communications, found them less overwhelming than she had once done, since she had now a major preoccupation to distract her attention.
At the end of the summer, domestic calamity again overtook her, and the married couple that constituted the staff at Applecourt, gave notice. Laura advertised, went to the Registry Office, wrote letters and sent telegrams.
It was all very familiar and unsuccessful.
The evenings, which had temporarily been animated by Laura’s numerous accounts of her experiences in London, degenerated again, and Alfred read The Times, and later fell asleep, while Laura battled silently with the dismal phrases that kept on rising to her lips and that were concerned exclusively with the servants, the children and the question of expense.
Then Lady Kingsley-Browne returned home, and Laura, actuated by mixed motives of genuine compassion and still more genuine curiosity, went to see her.
Bébée’s parent was in the rose garden, snipping off dead blooms and bestowing them in a large basket.
At the approach of Laura she raised a ravaged and exhausted, but composed face, and greeted her kindly.
“So nice of you to come, dear! Let’s sit down on the stone bench—it’s so wonderfully warm, isn’t it—and tell me all about yourself.”
“At the present moment, I’m, as usual, looking for a cook. I suppose you don’t—”
Lady Kingsley-Browne shook her head.
“I’m afraid not. And I’m so sorry you’re in difficulties again. I know what it means.”
From this, Laura silently dissented, the loss of a cook in a house where a kitchen-maid and scullery-maid remain, not being in her opinion, comparable to the loss of two servants from a house in which only two servants are ever employed.
“One has so much to cope with, one way and another, but the only thing is to be philosophical. Things pass. When I find myself out here, amongst all these dear things,” said Lady Kingsley-Browne, looking down at the dead roses in her basket, “I realise that it is so true that Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse! The only thing, is not to let oneself be overwhelmed.”
The melancholy resignation of her so materially-prosperous neighbour roused Laura to agitated pity. She murmured something entirely incoherent, that yet conveyed the suggestion of a question.
Evidently poor Lady Kingsley-Browne realised only too well that any question addressed to her at the present juncture by any intimate, could have only one bearing. Although her child’s name had not been mentioned, she replied at once:
The Way Things Are Page 17
