Laura felt all the annoyance of the person put in the wrong by the generosity of her opponent.
Christine could afford to be generous, and good-humoured, she reflected.
Apart from an inconspicuous—but after all, comparatively short—childhood, during which she had been entirely overshadowed by the Grecian nymph Laura, Christine had made a success of her life. By this Laura meant, as almost all women do mean, that Christine had attracted men, dressed well, and kept her head.
She was just about to be married to a man who was very rich, neither old, ugly, nor half-witted, and who appeared to be in love with her. Laura had not the slightest doubt that Christine would also make, a success of her marriage, although she was entering upon it, so far as could be seen, without earnestness, without illusion, and without emotion.
Perhaps that was why.
“Only what,” thought Laura—by this time on the verge of an uneasy doze—”what is to be done, if one is by nature earnest, and emotional, and desperately given to illusions ?”
Probably there was nothing to be done.
Perhaps other people, even the successful ones, sometimes had doubts of their own competence, their ability to impress upon the rest of humanity exactly that aspect of themselves which they most wished to present.…
But did they take even such doubts seriously? Laura felt certain that they did not.
An hour later, she was surprised by the discovery that she had slept.
A symptom of middle-age, she decided pessimistically, this dropping asleep in the daytime. But it might also be regarded as a symptom of justifiable physical fatigue, after strenuous shopping, and as a result of considerable nervous tension. By the time that Laura had looked in the glass, and seen that her eyes looked less tired, and her skin clearer, she had adopted the latter explanation of her unprecedented daytime sleep.
Chapter XVIII
Alfred Temple’s procedure, when travelling with his children—a thing which seldom occurred—was entirely contrary to that of his wife, as she perceived when she went to meet them at Paddington station.
Nurse, Johnnie and Edward emerged from one third, class carriage, and Alfred, at the opposite end of the train, from another. He had deliberately separated himself from them. Laura’s own journeyings with Edward and Johnnie, on such occasions as visits to the sea, or to relations, had been of a very different description, as she could not help remembering.
She had then read aloud, in a voice low enough not to disturb other people in the carriage, and yet loud enough to be heard above the noise of the train, she had told stories, had pointed out objects of interest to be seen from the window, and had provided—and prolonged as much as possible—a variety of meals.
“A railway journey is a nervous strain for little children,” had been the explanation that she had given to both herself and Alfred.
It had also been a nervous strain for Laura, under such conditions.
Nurse, however, appeared calm, and the little boys cheerful and un-tired, although black with the unparalleled blackness only to be collected from the assiduous exploring of every part of a railway carriage.
Alfred—as well he might, thought Laura—said that they had had a very good journey.
Laura, clasping a little soft hand in each of hers, and looking from one small, beaming face to the other, was assailed by the quick rush of emotion that the sight of her children, after however brief a separation, would always rouse in her.
They looked so small, so pleased and innocent, in the noise and smoke of the big station. They were so manifestly confident of her power to protect them, and make them happy.…
“We’re not waiting for anything, are we?” inquired Alfred. “There’s no luggage.”
“No, of course not. We’ll get into a taxi at once. They must want their tea, poor darlings!”
In the taxi, Laura at once experienced the familiar difficulties of conversing satisfactorily with her husband and her children at one and the same time.
“Well, I suppose you’ve been busy, and Christine too?”
“Yes, but everything’s—”
“Mummie, have I ever been to London before?”
“Not to remember, Edward. You were once here when you were almost a baby.”
“Why can’t I remember it?”
“I suppose we go home the day after to-morrow? There’ll be nothing to stay on for, will there?” said Alfred.
“Nothing. Mrs. Vulliamy is seeing about having the presents packed up and so on.”
“Mummie, is—”
“Wait a minute, darling. Don’t interrupt Daddy.” But Alfred said nothing more, and Laura turned back to Johnnie.
“Is what, sweetheart?”
She was absorbed in the inquiries, that she found stimulating and intelligent, propounded by Johnnie.
Edward, in an endeavour to divert Laura’s attention to himself, began to ask foolish questions in a high, unnatural voice.
“Is London as large as Quinnerton?”
“Shall we see the King?”
“Is it before tea, or after tea?”
“He’s rather tired, I expect,” said nurse, reproving Edward kindly by shaking her head at him.
“Now, what engagements have you made for to-night, Laura, and is anything on to-morrow morning?” her husband inquired.
“Christine and a few relations and people are dining with us to-night at the Criterion. It’s really Christine’s party, of course. And naturally, to-morrow morning there’ll be plenty to do getting ready. We’ve got to be at the church at two o’clock.”
“Well, when can I go to look at pumps in Victoria Street?”
“You could do that to-morrow morning, I suppose. It needn’t interfere, so long as you’re back for lunch at the hotel not one moment later than twelve o’clock.”
“Shall we have all our meals downstairs with you and Daddy at the hotel?” Johnnie inquired, with round eyes
“Yes.”
“Even breakfast?”
“Yes, even breakfast.”
“Oh!” said Johnnie naively, “how lucky we are!”
Laura glanced surreptitiously at her husband, to see whether he was as much moved as she was herself by the trusting joyfulness in Johnnie’s voice and face, but if he was, he gave no sign of it.
And the next moment Johnnie, with even more fervour, had exclaimed:
“What do you suppose there’ll be to eat?”
The atmosphere of Quinnerton had, indeed, been transferred to London.
Nurse, in consideration of her unbroken three hours on duty in the train, was encouraged by Laura to remember the existence of relations who appeared to be humble prototypes of old cousin Laura and poor Selina, and to go out and see them.
Laura and Christine put the children to bed.
The bride-elect was as hilarious as they were, and seemed as much unconcerned at the prospect of the next day’s ceremony.
“Isn’t it incredible,” she remarked to Laura, as they endeavoured to restore order in the bathroom, “that after this evening I shall have a lady’s maid?”
And Laura, seriously and in all sincerity, replied: “Utterly incredible!”
“I need never darn another pair of stockings. It’s unbelievable.”
“Mum-mee…”
It was Johnnie’s well-known note, and Laura hastened to the room where one double-bed with a bolster laid down the middle of it received both the boys.
“Mummie, couldn’t you stop that noise?”
“What noise?”
“Outside,” said Johnnie pathetically. “Motors and things.”
“You’ll get used to it, darling. Don’t think about it.”
Johnnie, justifiably enough, received his parent’s counsel of perfection with contempt.
“I suppose nurse’ll be back by the time we want to start for the Criterion?” said Christine aside to her sister.
“I hope so. I told her to be.”
“Shall I sit with them
while you dress?”
“They never do have anybody to sit with them,” said Laura doubtfully.
“I haven’t any room,” said Edward loudly and suddenly, and pushed the dividing bolster with violence.
Johnnie pushed it back again.
“You go and dress, Laura. Keep still, boys, and I’ll tell you a story.”
Laura dressed herself frantically.
Her hair seemed lank and stiff, although she had washed it only two days earlier, the powder lay on her face in blotches, and on her nose not at all, and her neck and arms seemed suddenly to have become abnormally thin.
“I’ve looked perfectly nice all these days—why should I suddenly turn into a hag just when Alfred and I are dining out together in London for the first time in years?” Laura silently inquired of her unsatisfactory reflection in the mirror.
Her black dress made her look sallow, and emphasised the shadows under her eyes.
Alfred knocked at the door, came in, and was appealed to by Laura.
“What am I to do? I’ve never looked such a sight in my life. It’s this frock, I think. Black never suits me.
“Well, well,” said Alfred kindly. “Don’t worry, my dear. After all, it’s Christine they’re coming to see, more than us, isn’t it? I dare say no one will look at your frock.”
More dejected than ever, Laura went to the children while Christine went to dress.
She came back in apple-green and silver, her fair hair looking quite golden, her mouth artificially—and most becomingly—scarlet.
“Alfred is quite right,” thought Laura. “Why on earth should anyone look at me, or my frock?”
She was very nearly relieved to know that Duke Ayland would not see her that evening. But the recollection that followed—that he would not see her on the following evening either, and that she was going home the day after that, made her miserable.
Nurse as nearly as possible made them all late for dinner, since Laura refused to leave the boys alone, and Alfred refused to receive his guests without her, but she arrived breathlessly just as Christine announced coldly that it was eight o’clock.
“I’m very sorry if I’m late, madam, it’s such a way from Balham.”
Laura remembered Queen’s Park, where old cousin Louisa lived, and felt the parallel complete.
The Temple dinner party was too strictly a family affair to be wholly successful. The relations of Laura and Christine did, indeed, congratulate Christine warmly and kindly, but they also displayed a faint tendency to wonder whether she had ever done anything to deserve so much good fortune. And again Laura was sensible of a slight disposition on the part of everybody to treat her as though she were Christine’s mother,
They were all very kind, and very cheerful, but there was none of the abandon that had characterised the gatherings of Christine’s friends, as distinguished from her relations.
Family parties, Laura reflected, never display abandon. Impossible to present to one’s relations any aspect of oneself beside the one to which they have always been accustomed, and which they expect. They labelled one, as it were, in one’s nursery days: “Mary’s Laura is so fond of reading,” or “little Christine is the quiet one,” and if, later on, one liked dancing as well as reading, or became animated, ratherà than quiet, they did not seem to notice it.
Laura, in the view of her relations, had long been “Laura lives right in the country,” and they adapted their conversation to her supposedly rural point of view.
It was comparatively early when the party came to an end, and the Temples and Christine returned to the Knightsbridge Hotel.
“Good night,” said Christine. “Thank you so much for the party. I thought it all went off splendidly.”
They heard her singing in her bedroom:
“The more we are together
The merrier we shall be.”
“I suppose,” said Alfred, with some solemnity, to his wife, “that girls nowadays don’t have to be told things the night before their wedding?”
“Certainly not,” said Laura. “They didn’t have to in my day, either.”
Alfred knew to a week the difference in age between Laura and her sister, but even with him it seemed necessary to establish the fact that they really did belong to the same generation.
The wedding of Christine and Jeremy, next day, was to Laura a bewildering, exhausting medley of subjective and objective impressions.
She was, at one and the same time, the sister of the bride, the hostess, together with—strangely—the wealthy Mrs. Vulliamy, at a social occasion of some magnitude, the mother of two little pages, of whom everybody said, “Aren’t they too sweet?” and the wife of Alfred Temple, who farmed his own land in the depths of the country.
And she was Laura Temple, loving, and loved by, Duke Ayland.
She wished that she could have been aware of herself in one of these aspects, and one only.
Her good looks, now for ever fallen between the two stools of Greek-nymph and woman of the world, were still under a cloud and she put on her coffee-coloured lace dress, and hat with a curving feather, very badly, because she was hovering helpfully between the respective toilets of Christine and the boys.
“Madam, they look a picture,” said nurse, referring entirely to the boys.
“That blue suits them both,” Laura answered with calm, for fear of making them vain, and gazing at them with untempered adoration in her face. But she knew, and she knew that nurse knew, that Johnnie’s curls—as usual—gave him a vast advantage over his brother.
She was, in her heart, glad to remember that both the little girl bridesmaids were taller, older, and plainer than Johnnie, and that the hair of both was perfectly straight.
Undoubtedly Johnnie—after the bride herself—would be the clou of the procession.
Christine’s wedding-dress, her newly-acquired pearls, her lace veil with soft bunches of orange-blossoms on either side of her face, suited her admirably, and she had powdered her face artistically, and entirely omitted to rouge it.
She was so calm that Laura thought she must be inwardly a little agitated.
The sisters looked at one another, smiled, and then Laura kissed Christine, felt furiously indignant at the realisation that she wanted to cry, and said in a strangled voice:
“You look perfectly lovely. Alfred is downstairs, quite ready, and he’s ordered the car to be at the door five minutes after we’ve started. I’m taking the boys now.”
“All right,” said Christine, in a perfectly natural voice. “Tell Alfred to walk up the aisle slowly. I never can bear a bride who scuttles.”
“How modern one gets,” thought Laura, absurdly, remembering the infectious agitation of all her own nearest relations on the occasion of her marriage to Alfred.
She had supposed that in the church she would see Duke Ayland, since he had taken pains to inform her of the spot at which he intended to place himself, but actually, she saw only the most unexpected people, such as Poor Selina, in a hat entirely composed of pink and mauve orchids, and a vaguely familiar smile, above white kid gloves and gold bracelets, that suddenly identified itself as belonging to Mrs. LaTrobe.
“Dear little people!” murmured Laura automatically.
There was a red carpet, and a striped awning, and the usual crowds of people outside the porch, and a group of clergymen with bald heads and fluttering white surplices, inside it.
Johnnie and Edward and the two little bridesmaids stared at one another with hostility, were reluctantly compelled into partnership, and left in charge of their nurses and of a competent and elegantly dressed person whom Laura never remembered to have seen before.
She turned into the church.
“Mummie! Are you going away?”
“It’s all right, dear,” said everybody, making reassuring signs to Edward.
Laura looked round frenziedly for nurse, who nodded.
“How does one wed?” she heard Johnnie inquire in loud, interested tones of the nearest
clergyman, in accordance with his habitual instinct for focussing the general attention upon himself.
The church seemed wonderfully full.
A strange young man, with a face like a harlequin, murmured something that Laura did not hear, but to which she replied, “I am the bride’s sister,” and begged her to come with him.
She obediently followed him up the church, to a front row of chairs, of which two nearest the aisle were vacant. In the corresponding row on the other side, she saw the bending form and aquiline profile of Mrs. Vulliamy, and the tail-coated outline of Mr. Vulliamy beyond her. A Vulliamy aunt, with diamonds, and two expensively-clad, attenuated daughters, were immediately behind them.
They bowed gravely to Laura, who bowed back again.
The organ stopped and then began again. It played a well-known hymn that Laura recognised as the signal for the bride’s entrance. In a sudden panic, she looked for Jeremy, about whom she had altogether forgotten.
But he was there, at the chancel steps, almost entirely indistinguishable, unless one knew him very well indeed, from his best man. But then, so are almost all bridegrooms.
Alfred was conducting Christine up the aisle…not scuttling…and her bouquet, that Laura had not seen before, and that must have been mysteriously waiting at the very door of the church, made her look even more exquisitely bridal.…Then the children…
But Laura really only looked at Johnnie, who was fortunately on the side nearest to her. He was the youngest, and the only one with a mop of curls, and he wore a serious, intent, innocent expression that made his mother want to burst into tears.
Then he caught sight of her, and at his sudden, joyful radiance, Laura, whilst smiling back again, felt two enormous tears roll from her eyes.
To cry at a wedding—could anything be more banal, sentimental and unmodern ?
She bit her lip violently, and fixed her eyes upon the baldest and most prominent of the clergymen.
The service proceeded, and Christine Fairfield exchanged her name for the less euphonious one of Jeremy Vulliamy.
Laura was thinking of her sister, and of Alfred—who had said “I do” under pressure from the baldest clergyman, and had then looked rather appealingly at Laura, and come to occupy the seat next her—and of the boys, now fidgeting mildly, and of the words of the marriage service. But she was also thinking, retrospectively, of her own wedding.
The Way Things Are Page 23
