They had produced Jeremy comparatively late in life and it was evident that they adored him. But they liked Christine. Mrs. Vulliamy called her “quite a dear,” and Laura surmised that this was as enthusiastic a description as Mrs. Vulliamy’s vocabulary would ever permit. She was as incapable of superlatives as though rank, instead of commercial ability, had characterised her ancestors.
Their plans for the well-being of Jeremy and Christine were astonishing.
They were giving them a house in Hill Street, a motorcar, and the services of their second chauffeur.
“When they want a litde quiet in the country, they can always come here, and I daresay later on they’ll find a tiny cottage at Hindhead, or somewhere, convenient for the summer,” said Mrs. Vulliamy.
She was very nice to Laura, although it was a niceness that rather tended to make her into Christine’s mother, instead of her sister.
Christine and Jeremy went for walks, and drove in Jeremy’s car, and Mrs. Vulliamy and Laura strolled carefully up and down the immense terrace that was one of three terraces leading down to the lake, and went indoors as soon as the afternoon became a little chilly.
Nothing but the wedding, Jeremy, and Christine, was ever talked about.
“It’s quite natural,” Laura said to Alfred, dressing for dinner in a bedroom of great size and height, with thick and expensive rugs and curtains in profusion. “It’s perfectly natural, of course. He’s their only son, and of course his marriage is very important. I’m so glad they like Christine, and are so charming to her.”
“But they’re overdoing this wedding business,” said Alfred.
Laura privately agreed with him.
“The housemaid means me to wear my blue to-night,” she remarked pensively, looking at the mahogany bedstead and the lace coverlet, on the magnificence of which her blue looked very unimpressive indeed.
“Not that clothes matter very much here,” she added.
“They have a good cellar,” said Alfred.
“And a fire in one’s room—especially such a fire—is pure bliss.”
Thus did the Temples compensate themselves for the undoubted fact that, in the splendour of the Vulliamy establishment, they were slightly bored.
Laura did not actually count it a compensation, but it certainly crossed her mind frequently, that Lady Kings-ley-Browne’s daughter—so openly and so offensively thrust upon the notice of her parent’s acquaintances—had, by her own unprecedented conduct, forfeited a very fair chance of occupying the position now awaiting Christine.
Mrs. Vulliamy only once referred in Laura’s hearing to this episode in the past of her son.
“Of course, one has always wondered a little bit about Jeremy’s wife,” she temperately said. “I daresay you know that at one time he was very strongly attracted—though it was never an engagement, or anything in the least like it——”
“I know,” said Laura.
“Poor Gertrude Kingsley-Browne! I was always fond of her, and one was quite prepared to welcome the girl. I thought her extremely pretty, too.”
“She is certainly very pretty.”
But Mrs. Vulliamy continued to speak of Bébée as of the dead.
“But she must have been quite, quite without any morals at all,” she gently pursued. “Utterly depraved. One can only be thankful that it came out in time. Of course, I don’t attempt to judge her. One should never judge others, I always feel.”
“She is still in America.”
“Ah, I daresay. America is like that, I believe,” returned Mrs. Vulliamy.
What a woman, thought Laura, who might in theory agree that one should never judge others, but who frequently found herself doing so in no lenient spirit.
“Poor Gertrude’s husband was a strange man. One heard tales. Not that I wish to dwell upon them. As of course you know, he is no longer with us. But I have often thought that heredity——”
Mrs. Vulliamy sighed, and Laura said, “Yes! Of course! One does,” and thought to herself, “How idiotic this conversation is!”
“Dear little Christine is very bright and sweet. A thoroughly natural, unaffected girl.”
“Bébée was never unaffected, whatever else she was,” declared Laura warmly.
“You felt that, did you? But I’m sure you must be a wonderful judge of character.”
“I don’t think it needed that——”
“It was an infatuation,” said Mrs. Vulliamy more gently and solemnly than ever. “A sort of madness. Jeremy saw nothing but her beauty. And of course, having always been devoted to Gertrude, I was as blind as he was. But when I heard that it was all over and that the unfortunate girl had completely gone to the dogs, I said to my husband: ‘Mark my words, Anstruther, Jeremy is thoroughly well out of it,’ I said.”
Laura, unable to think of any adequate reply, could only bend her head assentingly.
“Is it perhaps growing a little bit chilly? We,” said Mrs. Vulliamy rallyingly, “are not in love. So I think we might perhaps seek the chimney corner.”
Although the implications in this small and mild pleasantry were displeasing in the extreme to Laura, she felt obliged tacitly to accept them, and to follow her hostess to the magnificent warmth and splendour of the chimney corner.
On the whole, she preferred the conversation of Mr. Vulliamy to that of his wife. He was a grave man, with a passion for his rain-gauge, and another, lesser passion for travelling in the Europe of tourists.
Every night at dinner, Laura sat next to him, and they discussed the scenery and the hotels in those parts of France, Norway and Switzerland that constituted Laura’s experience of foreign travel. She hoped, and believed, that he did not notice how very often they said the same things about these places over and over again.
Of her future brother-in-law Laura saw less than of his parents, but she perceived that Christine had been right in saying that he possessed a sense of humour.
“And does anything else really matter, after all?” was Mrs. Temple’s not-very-happily worded enquiry, after imparting this opinion to her sister.
“Not much, certainly,” Christine agreed dispassionately. “But as a matter of fact there are lots of other things I like about Jeremy. He is very generous, and easy going, and we both enjoy doing the same things in the same way, which is a great mercy. He can’t bear gardening, and he likes going abroad, and we both like London, and we neither of us can endure playing Bridge.”
“Have you ever thought what you’ll talk about in the evenings after dinner, when you’ve been married some time, and there isn’t anything new to say any more?” Laura solemnly enquired.
“I haven’t written out a list of subjects suitable for keeping a husband entertained, if that’s what you mean, but I have made up my mind that on evenings when we’re by ourselves, if I can’t be amusing, or amorous or interesting—then I shall go to bed with a headache and advise Jeremy to go to his Club,” said Christine.
Laura left the Castle Gate fully convinced that Christine was about to embark upon the most successful phase of a thoroughly successful career.
The wedding was to take place in London. Edward and Johnnie—subject to the approval of the doctor, and to the complete elimination, for some weeks previously, of the pink bowl—were to act as pages, and Alfred was to give away the bride.
“You and your husband, of course, will act in loco parentis” said Mrs. Vulliamy to Laura. “That will be so delightful.”
“But I,” said Christine privately to her sister, “am going to pay all the expenses. I’ve got quite a lot of money saved—truly I have—and I’m simply going to blue it on this.”
“Christine, are you—I daresay you will think me very absurd and conventional—but are you happy?”
“Frightfully,” said Christine placidly.
“I’m glad,” said Laura, almost tearfully.
Christine shook her fair head disapprovingly, kissed Laura, and changed the subject. Laura never knew whether Christine placed to her
discredit this brief dialogue as a merely sentimental impulse, or whether she suspected any of the stifled longing that possessed her sister for opportunities that it seemed to her she had never had. For Laura, confronted by Christine’s security, Christine’s contentment, and Christine’s absolute conviction of present and future happiness, was obsessed by a positively frenzied sense of contrast.
She did not wish—except spasmodically and without real fervour—that Alfred had been rich, but she wished with a ceaseless, half-suppressed passion, that now coloured the whole of her days, that she could become possessed of Christine’s freedom, Christine’s detachment, and Christine’s powers of conducting her affairs with judgment and intelligence. Laura, in fact, shared with several hundred thousands of other people a vain desire to combine the opportunities of youth with the experience of maturity.
She was also in the grip of a variety of other desires, mostly incompatible with one another, such as a longing to be made love to by Duke again, and an exhausted feeling that it would certainly simplify matters never to see him any more, a conviction that she could never let Alfred know that she had fallen in love with another man, and a weak desire to tell him all about it in the hope that he would remain sufficiently unmoved to take away from her any sense of guilt.
“I suppose Freud would say that I had better set about murdering an infant in its cradle,” reflected Laura, with stark and joyless humour, “in preference to nursing an unacted desire. What would Freud say to my present state of mind?”
Laura’s question was purely rhetorical. If she had dwelt upon the subject, which she had no wish to do, she would have known too well that Freud, had he been in a position to pronounce a verdict, would have declined to look upon her case as being in any way peculiar, unique or interesting. For she could not deny that there is nothing either peculiar, unique or interesting, in wishing for more love, more admiration and more attention than one is ever likely to receive.
Edward and Johnnie received with varying degrees of enthusiasm the information that they were to be pages at their aunt’s wedding. It had evidently been easy for nurse to inoculate Edward with some of her own excitement, but the un-suggestible Johnnie was inclined to parade his own originality by adopting an opposite point of view. The unfortunate Edward was torn between his natural tendency to enjoy whatever he was told was enjoyable, his unvarying instinct for imitating Johnnie, and his desire to propitiate nurse. It was left to Laura to make up his mind for him, and as usual she did so with a mild contempt for his vacillations, and a contrasting admiration for his characterful junior. In Edward she saw all the acquired characteristics that she least admired in herself, in Johnnie’s those that she had not had the strength to develop, but that might once have been hers.
She wondered from time to time, remembering Mrs. Bakewell, whether it might not be possible to live in her children, as the phrase runs. It did not seem so.
Edward, physically independent and spiritually and mentally undeveloped, did not really interest his mother as an individual. She knew that more and more, as time went on, he would live in a world of games and machines and little, unrelated facts about things and animals—never about people—and that in that world he would, rightly, have very little place for her. The bond between them, such as it was, was unlikely to survive the needs of his childhood.
For Johnnie, her love was vivid, and even passionate. He possessed the power to hurt her. She was the secondary luminary in his ego-centric world. But his need of her, also, would diminish, as he came to realise more and more the importance—the, to him, supreme importance—of his own effect upon other people. Johnnie’s very likeness to herself would defeat any attempt on Laura’s part to monopolise him.
Nor did she seriously wish to do so—for she had read several very alarming works about the strange, and indeed scandalous, effects of what the authors rightly termed Vampire-Mothers, upon the subsequent careers of their children.
Laura, with a vague idea of sublimating her desires, thought of Alfred, of her own writing, and even—it must be admitted, as a last resource—of The Poor. But Alfred had already got everything that she had to give him, her writing was obliged to be subordinated to the claims of housekeeping, and The Poor, Laura honestly felt, were better catered for by existing organisations than by the manufactured activities of her own superfluous energy.
She arranged to go to London a week before Christine’s wedding, and to let nurse, the boys, and Alfred follow at the last moment.
“I shall see Duke,” she thought, her heart beating faster.
And, she added, tempering her own momentary exultation :
“This must be settled one way or the other. I can’t go on like this—and it isn’t fair on him, either.”
A general sense of unfairness, in fact, possessed her. Things, she felt, were not fair on Duke, on Alfred, on the children, on herself.
Things must be redressed.
In this way did Laura, like a timid horse approaching an obstacle with sidelong steps, bring herself to the point of acknowledging that her love-affair was within sight of a crisis.
Chapter XVI
“I Should like to hear about it. I am interested,” said Lady Kingsley-Browne, with what Laura could not help feeling to be a creditable effort of generosity.
“I don’t say that I was not surprised, but I was interested. I know you so well—I’ve met and liked your sister—the—the young man has stayed here. How did it all happen?” said Lady Kingsley-Browne, putting Laura into a difficulty.
For it was impossible to reply: “The engagement of my sister to the richest commoner in England was brought about by his astonishment and disgust at the atrocious conduct of your daughter, the original object of his affections.” She decided upon a tempered truthfulness.
“Jeremy was very unhappy when he found that Bébée—that she cared for somebody else—and he happened to meet Christine just then. Of course, she knew the whole story and was dreadfully sorry for him, and he seems to have taken her into his confidence from the very start. And they made great friends.”
“Ah, yes. So often—on the rebound.”
“Oh yes,” agreed Laura, perfectly understanding, and anxious to concede everything possible to anyone so profoundly humiliated as she felt her unfortunate hostess to have been.
“I think we shall find tea in the library,” said Lady Kingsley-Browne, with her old, vague air of having no personal concern with the activities of her well-trained servants. “Come along, my dear. It’s so nice to see you, and I have something to tell you.”
Remembering the last announcement made by the same informant, Laura indulged in a brief variety of hair-raising conjectures as to the direction taken by latest activities of that informant’s daughter, but she judged it prudent only to emit a wordless sound of interrogation.
“Come along,” repeated her neighbour. “We can have an undisturbed chat over the fire. I hope your good man won’t be in too great a hurry to pick you up on his way home.”
“He is at a meeting. They always take a little while.”
“It was nice of you to come,” said Lady Kingsley-Browne rather wistfully. “And I always meant to thank you, dear, for writing to me yourself as you did, before the engagement was announced.”
Laura felt touched.
“Christine and I didn’t want you just to see it in The Times.” she murmured.
“So very kind and thoughtful. But I must tell you that Bébée, poor darling child, has taken up quite a new line.”
“Oh, what?” exclaimed Laura, her tone of dismay betraying her conviction that any new line followed by Bébée must necessarily be a disastrous one.
“She is leaving him—in fact, she already has left him. She has—it seems a most extraordinary thing, I know—but she has taken up religion. At least, I suppose you might call it a religion. Do come nearer the fire, Laura. I wonder if there are any scones, or anything hot? Oh yes—I see something in the fender. I do hope you like muffins?”
“Thank you. But do please go on——”
“It seems as though Bébée has so much personality, poor darling, that she has to express herself in ways that might, in anybody else, seem almost odd.”
“Yes.”
“It seems that she has met a man—I’m sure things would have been just the same had it been another woman——”
Lady Kingsley-Browne paused, but as Laura felt equally sure that whatever “it” might be, things would not have been the same had it been another woman, she made no reply.
“It just happens to have been a man—Ernest Blog is his name, but Americans so often have names that we think odd—well, he has discovered, or invented, a tremendous new creed, and he has quite converted Bébée to it. And the really bright spot is, that they are on their way to England, to—to try and spread it.”
“They?”
“She has joined him,” explained Laura’s neighbour, with determined matter-of-factness, “as his secretary.”
“Like she did with A. B.,” said Laura reflectively.
“Mr. Blog is not married. You may say that simplifies things, in a way—but, of course, in another way, it makes them more complicated.”
“Yes, I see it does.”
“Bébée, I always feel, is a law unto herself,” said Bébée’s mother pleadingly.
“Indeed, yes.”
“One really can hardly judge her by our middle-aged, matter-of-course standards. So much more idealistic and enthusiastic. I can’t tell you how ardently she has taken up this new creed.”
“What, exactly, is it?”
“Well, from the letter she wrote me—her handwriting is always a little difficult, but one could make out a good deal, here and there—Mr. Blog lays down just one or two broad principles. Nothing sectarian, you know—it rather reminded me of the Women’s Institute movement, that I know you’re so keen about, in that way. But sort of guiding lines, that make life simpler for all of us.”
The Way Things Are Page 20
