“Forty years old, at least,” observed Laura trenchantly to her own reflection.
From beneath her open window, fragments of Mr. Mindy’s monologue, and of Alfred’s occasional growlings, floated up to her.
“New York…Prohibition…the check system for luggage…telephone…telephone…TELEPHONE.…Now, in Massachusetts, the organisation of the whole movement…I was greatly struck…efficiency. And again EFFICIENCY.”
Finally, in antistrophe to a curt, inaudible word from Alfred, “Hundred per cent efficiency—neither more nor less.”
At this, Laura felt impelled to hasten the powdering of her nose and to go downstairs again to Alfred’s rescue, if not to Mr. Mindy’s.
“Perhaps,” said Laura, “Mr. Mindy would like to see his room.”
“I’m in no hurry, Mrs. Temple, thank you. I was just telling your husband some of my impressions of America. There can be no doubt that it’s a wonderful country.”
“It must be.”
“Just to give you one example of the efficiency of their methods of organisation,” said Mr. Mindy.
When he had finished, Alfred walked away, and Laura asked whether Mr. Mindy had seen the papers that day.
Yes, he had.
It would, therefore, be useless to attempt to shut him into the study with them.
“Don’t, I beg of you, think of entertaining me in any way,” Mr. Mindy begged earnestly. “I am perfectly content walking about this delightful garden and talking to you.”
Laura resigned herself.
Her faint, scarcely recognised, hope that a miracle might take place, and a cook appear at the desired moment, had failed to eventuate, and she was able to spend the evening in justifying to herself her determination that, cook or no cook, she would go to Great Quinn on Wednesday.
The Temples, by eleven o’clock that night, their heads buzzing with information, exchanged only one comment on their visitor.
“Does that fellow ever answer anything with plain yes or no?” demanded Alfred.
And Laura replied with conviction: “I should think never.”
She woke next morning with the thought uppermost in her mind: “The servants are going to-day, and there’ll be no cook.”
Dejection possessed her.
On principle, Laura always pathetically strove to put worry away from her in the presence of her children. She resolutely produced a smile, and made her step elastic, as she walked into the nursery.
“I’ve left Edward in bed, madam, after the night he’s had,” said nurse lugubriously.
“Was he ill? Why didn’t you fetch me?”
“He’s been coughing, off and on, the whole of the night. Sometimes in his sleep, no doubt, but sometimes the fits were so violent that he woke himself up.”
“I’ve thought he had a little cold, for a day or two—he’s coughed once or twice—I’m afraid he must be in for a bronchial attack.” Laura hastened to the night-nursery.
Edward, sitting up in bed, and sharing bread-and-milk with Fauntleroy, looked perfectly well.
“Nurse thinks you’ve got a cold, darling. Is your throat sore?”
“No, not a bit,” said Edward brightly. “Can I get up after breakfast?”
“We’ll see.”
Reassuring discoveries followed. Edward had no temperature and no symptoms. He did not even cough.
“Nurse must be an alarmist,” thought Laura. She made enquiries about Johnnie. Johnnie was quite well.
“Well, I really see no reason for keeping Edward in bed. He can’t be sickening for anything, or he wouldn’t be so hungry and so eager to get up.”
Nurse gave Laura a peculiar look.
“Well, madam, there’s whooping-cough about, isn’t there?”
“Whooping-cough!”
“They can have it without ever whooping at all, for that matter, or they can begin with an ordinary cough, and then go on to whoop, and, as often as not, they’re perfectly well in between the fits.”
“Do you suppose that Edward is beginning whooping-cough ?”
“It sounded to me very like it,” replied nurse with a deadly calm.
Laura felt as though she had never before so fully realised calamity.
“If there’s the least doubt—certainly, there is whooping-cough in the village—we’d better send for the doctor. I suppose it’s no use trying to separate the boys now?”
“Not the slightest use, madam. It may be days, or even weeks, before Johnnie begins it, but he’s bound to have it.”
Nurse’s unconditional surrender to misfortune left Laura aghast. She herself had no experience of nursing infectious illness and she was fully prepared to believe that nurse knew what she was talking about.
“How long does it usually last?” she asked faintly.
“The actual catching stage would be about six to eight weeks, though I suppose they’re never really safe to be with others until the cough is gone. And my word, doesn’t it hang on! I’ve known a child to whoop the whole of the year round, when she’d started it in June.”
“And this is August,” said Laura.
“They say it goes in May.”
“And that would be ten months.”
Nurse shook her head.
“Whooping-cough is like that, madam. I ought to know. I lost a little brother and a little sister with it, besides nursing the little girl in my last place. Poor little mite, she’d turn black in the face, when she’d a whooping fit on. Many’s the time I’ve thought she must choke to death.”
“We must see what the doctor says,” Laura unhappily repeated. “Don’t let Edward or Johnnie know that we think it may be whooping-cough. Perhaps—perhaps after all it may turn out to be nothing.”
But inwardly, Laura felt certain that it would turn out to be something.
She went to find Alfred, in obedience to the usual instinct for passing on bad news, but he had already gone downstairs, and from the dining-room she could faintly hear the steady booming of Mr. Mindy’s voice.
The attention that she was able to give him, during breakfast, was even more perfunctory than that of the previous evening.
In response to a telephone message, the doctor came, assured Laura that Edward was probably beginning whooping-cough, and that Johnnie would in that case almost certainly catch it, and generally confirmed everything that nurse had said.
“It’s like a nightmare,” thought Laura. She had the exaggerated horror of childish ailments that belongs to the mother of only one or two children, and that is necessarily outgrown by a woman with a large family.
“He’ll be all right,” said the doctor cheerfully, referring to Edward. “Let me know if you hear a real whoop, or if he starts being sick after coughing. And watch the other little chap.”
With this wholly superfluous injunction he went away.
Laura went straight to her husband.
“Edward has whooping-cough,” she announced tragically.
“Who says so?”
“The doctor.”
“Picked it up in the village, I suppose. Is Johnnie bound to get it too?”
“They think so.”
“Well, I suppose it can’t be helped,” said Alfred—inadequately, his wife felt.
“They’ll be infectious for about seven or eight weeks—perhaps longer, and it lasts ages and ages.”
“I daresay. I remember being in the sanatorium with it myself at school, and I think I spent most of one term there. There’s nothing particular to be done, I suppose?”
“Oh no, nothing. Edward doesn’t seem in the least ill, although nurse says he coughed in the night, and Johnnie hasn’t got it at all yet.”
“The only thing to do is to go on just as usual then and keep them away from other kids.”
“I shan’t be able to go to Great Quinn,” said Laura suddenly.
Alfred looked mildly surprised.
“I thought you weren’t going anyway, because of the cook. I daresay I can run you in another time. In any ca
se, Wednesday is early closing day.”
Chapter XV
A New and painful line was inscribed in the domestic calendar of Applecourt forthwith.
“The summer when the boys had whooping-cough,” was what it would ultimately become, but in these early stages, time, for Laura, was measured by “The day before Edward really began to whoop,” or “Just after Johnnie was sick in the night for the first time.”
The boys did not have to go to bed, as invalids. They pursued all their usual avocations, excepting their lessons, and every time that Edward ran across the lawn he had a severe fit of coughing, and every time that Johnnie thought his mother was not sufficiently harrowed by their plight he whooped until he was violently sick.
Sometimes they seemed to be getting better, and Laura said: “I daresay they’ll have it quite lightly,” and nurse replied: “Whooping-cough is like that. Coming and going. You’ll see, they’ll start again the first wet day.”
And they always did start again, sometimes without even waiting for the first wet day.
Laura took Johnnie into her room at night, banishing Alfred to his dressing-room and forgetting to make even a pretence of compunction about it, and Johnnie’s cough—which very often failed to wake him at all—destroyed her rest and seemed to tear at the muscles of her own throat and chest.
The telegram that Laura had sent Duke Ayland, explaining that she could not meet him in Great Quinn, seemed only one calamity amongst many, although on the day that she sent it, a phantasy, on stereotyped lines, had come unbidden to her mind. A mother and a dying child. Parents brought together again over a little cot. A passing infatuation driven away for ever in the stark light of tragic reality.
But Laura’s love for Duke was not a passing infatuation. If there was one thing that she was certain about, it was that.
She had disgustedly dismissed her own morbid imaginations, and sought and found reality in the farewell speeches of Mr. Mindy, fetched away for his meeting.
The new cook came, and within twenty-four hours left, declaring that she hadn’t known she was coming to a children’s hospital.
The usual period of stress ensued.
Then, gradually, Laura found that she was becoming inured to the sounds of whooping-cough, to the smell of creosote, and even to the presence of a terrible little pink bowl carried about by nurse for emergency use, and callously spoken of by Edward and Johnnie as “the sick-bowl.” Once more there were two servants—faintly unsatisfactory—at Applecourt, once more Laura tried to write short stories in the evenings, once more she exchanged letters about books with Duke Ayland.
Then Christine wrote her.
Darling
It does seem a pity that I can’t come to stay, and that you, I suppose, can’t leave the boys, because we could have rather fun just now. The fact is, that I am now formally and properly engaged to the richest commoner in England, and we shall be in “The Times” as soon as we’ve seen his parents. You’ll like Jeremy when you know him more, although he’s not in the least clever, but he has a sense of humour, and is quite-quite. I’m sorry for poor Lady K.B. but it’s Bay bay’s own doing. He was honestly in love with her, and wanted to marry her and I am what Losh calls the “reaction.”
I’ve met the parent Vulliamys—both very nice, in a Du Maurier style—and I think Jeremy has prepared them. He’s writing to them to-day, and I daresay they’ll ask you down there, when I go.
Anyway you simply must come up here for a day or two, when we begin to make plans. It’ll have to be a Church wedding, of course, though not “obey”—and I really prefer it myself, because of a wedding-dress and so on. Is there any hope that the boys will be well in time to be pages? I am now—incredible to relate—in a position to say that I can give them their suits—and of course, I’d adore to. We shall probably be married in the last week of October, but I’ll write again directly.
My engagement ring is one colossal emerald, square, set in platinum—absolutely heavenly.
Anything else we can talk over when we need. No, I won’t be a pig! I know you’re dying to ask if I’m in love with him. Darling Laura, I’ve never been in the least romantic, and I’m not now, but I’m quite enough in love not to feel that I’m taking a mean advantage of having been the first decent woman he met after the affaire Bébée. I truly think we shall understand one another very well, and ought to be very happy. For goodness’ sake, try and think of something I could call him instead of that awful “Jeremy”
Yours,
Christine.
Although Laura had exchanged speculations with her husband on this very contingency, and had hoped, and yet felt ashamed of hoping, that it would come to pass, she felt something like a shock.
Christine and the richest commoner in England. …Not that Laura wanted to dwell only on that aspect of the case, but it persisted in obtruding itself. She strove frantically to recall what Lady Kingsley-Browne had told her. Norfolk and rhododendrons, and a general impression of great opulence, was all that she could recapture. She could not, even, recall Vulliamy himself with very great distinctness.
Certainly she would have to go to London. She thought what fun it would be to help choose Christine’s trousseau.
She sat down and wrote four excited pages to her sister.
“Alfred?”
“What?”
Alfred was doing something to a small plant that stood in the bed just beneath the drawing-room window.
“Guess who’s engaged to be married!”
“Bébée Kingsley-Browne.”
“Good heavens no! She’s still chasing A. B. Onslow round America as far as I know. I don’t suppose any decent man will ever look at her again.”
“There are very few decent men about, nowadays.”
“Well, one of the ones there is, is engaged to someone who’s not her,” said Laura, her sense of construction temporarily in abeyance.
“That friend of Christine’s—the musical fellow—what’s his name?”
“Do you mean Duke Ayland ?”
“Yes.”
Laura felt as if she had received an unexpected blow.
“No. Certainly not.”
“Then it’s Christine, I suppose?”
“Darling, you’re quite right. How clever of you! Christine is going to marry that Mr. Vulliamy who played tennis here once. I saw him again in London. I think he seemed nice. I believe,” said Laura as casually as she could, “that he is very rich indeed—or his parents are.”
“If they’re the Northfolkshire Vulliamys, they are very rich indeed,” Alfred assented. “Well, well, I’m delighted to hear it. Congratulate her from me.” And he went back to the little plant again.
Laura thought, not for the first time, that men were odd. Personally she felt that she could have gone on talking about Christine’s engagement for at least another hour. Alfred, however, evidently considered that the last word on the subject had been said.
“Nurse will be excited, anyhow,” thought Laura rather forlornly. “Servants always are.”
After that, letters, and even telegrams, fell upon Apple-court in profusion. Dates were settled, and unsettled, congratulations were exchanged, and Laura and Alfred were invited by Jeremy’s parents to spend a few days in Norfolk.
“It really is impossible,” said Laura wistfully. “I’d love to go, and it’s nice of them to ask us, and of course Christine wants us to—but I don’t see how I can leave the boys.”
“What d’you keep a nurse for?”
“Do you mean that you’d like to go, Alfred?”
“I think a change would be good for you.”
She looked at him almost incredulously.
Theoretically, Laura was perfectly well aware that her husband loved her, and was solicitous for her welfare, but actually, he said so little about it, and that little so very seldom, that she was apt to receive any demonstration from him in touched astonishment.
“We needn’t be away for more than three or four days, I suppo
se, and it seems to me only fair to Christine for us to accept. You’re her nearest relation.”
“The kindest thing might be to keep away,” said Laura, humorously and quite insincerely, since the thought that the acquisition of the Temples as connections would be of advantage to the Vulliamys, who had made their fortune in trade only two generations earlier.
She accepted Mrs. Vulliamy’s invitation, and passed in strict, and rather discouraging, review, Alfred’s wardrobe and her own.
Nurse, who had been quite as much excited as Laura had hoped by the news of the engagement, and who had discovered for herself without having to be told, the wealth of the bridegroom, declared that the boys could be left without any hesitation. She even, reversing every former prediction, sought to persuade Laura that they could safely act as pages at the wedding.
“And walk up the church with the pink bowl between them,” said Mrs. Temple sardonically. “No thank you, nurse. I’m sorry in a way, of course, but the excitement would certainly have upset Johnnie for days afterwards, and you know what he’s like.”
Nurse, who knew well what Johnnie was like, still refused to find either argument unanswerable.
The Temples decided to go to Norfolk in the car. Laura, who did not drive it herself, was persuaded of the economy of this method of travelling. “It saves two railway tickets,” she declared, and ignored petrol, meals on the way, and the new tyre that Alfred was obliged to purchase before they could start.
It was long since Laura had stayed in a country house, longer still since she had stayed in one of the dimensions of Castle Gate.
Two centuries earlier, a coach-and-four was alleged to have passed round the hall, and up the staircase—although not driven by a Vulliamy, since at that date the Vulliamys, in so far as Castle Gate was concerned, had not existed.
But here they now were—very like a Du Maurier drawing, as Christine had said. Mrs. Vulliamy, tall, grey-haired, unjustifiably distinguished-looking, and wearing a string of very beautiful pearls under a carefully neutral-coloured woollen jumper, and Mr. Vulliamy, equally tall, grey-haired, and unjustifiably distinguished-looking, and with beautifully waxed tips to his white moustache.
The Way Things Are Page 19
