Unfinished Portrait
Page 19
‘Er – me and my husband.’
‘And what establishment do you keep, madam?’
Establishment? What a word to describe one general servant not yet acquired.
‘We live very simply,’ said Celia, blushing. ‘One maid.’
‘Nurseries cleaned and waited on?’
‘No, you would have to do your own nursery.’
‘Ah!’ The majestic one rose and said more in sorrow than in anger: ‘I’m afraid, madam, your situation is not quite what I am looking for. At Sir Eldon West’s, I had a nurserymaid, and the nurseries were attended to by the under housemaid.’
Celia cursed the yellow-haired one in her heart. Why fill up a paper of your requirements and your household and then be sent someone who would clearly only accept a post with the Rothschilds if they happened to please her fancy?
A stern black-browed woman came next.
‘One baby? Taken from the month? You understand, madam, I take entire charge. I do not tolerate interference.’
She glared at Celia.
‘I’ll teach young mother to come bothering me,’ said the glare.
Celia said she was afraid she would not do.
‘I am devoted to children, madam. I worship them, but I cannot have a mother always interfering.’
The black-browed one was got rid of.
There came next a very untidy old woman who described herself as a ‘Nannie’.
As far as Celia could make out she could neither see, hear, nor understand what was said to her.
Rout of the Nannie.
Next came a bad-tempered-looking young woman who scoffed at the idea of doing her own nurseries, followed by an amiable red-cheeked girl who had been a housemaid but thought she’d ‘get on better with children’.
Celia was getting desperate when a woman of about thirty-five came in. She had pince-nez, was extremely neat, and had pleasant blue eyes.
She displayed none of the usual reactions when it came to ‘doing your own nursery’.
‘Well, I don’t object to that – except the grate. I don’t like doing a grate – it musses up your hands – and you don’t want rough hands looking after a baby. But otherwise I don’t mind seeing to things. I’ve been to the colonies, and I can turn my hand to anything.’
She showed Celia various snapshots of her charges, and Celia ended by engaging her if her references were satisfactory.
With a sigh of relief Celia left Mrs Barman’s Bureau.
Mary Denman’s references proved most satisfactory. She was a careful, thoroughly experienced nurse. Celia had next to engage a servant.
This proved to be almost more trying than finding a nurse. Nurses at least were plentiful. Servants were practically non-existent. They were all in munition factories or in the WAACS or WRENS. Celia saw a girl she liked very much, a plump good-humoured damsel called Kate. She did her utmost to persuade Kate to come to them.
Like all the others, Kate jibbed at a nursery.
‘It isn’t the baby I object to, ma’am. I like children. It’s the nurse. After my last place I vowed I’d never go where there was a nurse again. Wherever there’s a nurse there’s trouble.’
In vain Celia represented Mary Denman as a mine of all the virtues. Kate repeated solidly:
‘Wherever there’s a nurse, there’s trouble. That’s my experience.’
In the end it was Dermot who turned the scale. Celia turned him on to the obdurate Kate, and Dermot, the adept at getting his own way, was successful in getting Kate to give them a trial.
‘Though whatever came over me I don’t know, because go where there is a nursery I said I never would again. But the captain spoke so nicely, and him knowing the regiment my boy’s in in France and everything. Well, I said, we can but try.’
So Kate was secured, and on a triumphant October day Celia, Dermot, Denman, Kate, and Judy all moved in to 18 Lauceston Mansions, and family life began.
7
Dermot was very funny with Judy. He was afraid of her. When Celia tried to make him hold her in his arms, he backed away nervously.
‘No, I can’t. I simply can’t. I won’t hold the thing.’
‘You’ll have to some day, when she’s older. And she’s not a thing!’
‘She’ll be better when she’s older. Once she can talk and walk, I dare say I shall like her. She’s so awfully fat now. Do you think she’ll ever get right?’
He refused to admire Judy’s curves or her dimples.
‘I want her to be thin and bony.’
‘Not now – at three months old.’
‘You really think she will be thin some day?’
‘Sure to be. We’re both thin.’
‘I couldn’t bear it if she grew up fat.’
Celia had to fall back upon the admiration of Mrs Steadman, who walked round and round the baby rather as she had done round the joint of meat of glorious memory.
‘The image of the captain, isn’t she? Ah, you can see she was made at home – if you’ll pardon the old saying.’
On the whole, Celia found domesticity rather fun. It was fun because she did not take it seriously. Denman proved an excellent nurse, capable and devoted to the baby, and extraordinarily pleasant and willing so long as there was a lot of work to do and everything was at sixes and sevens. The moment the household had settled down and things were running smoothly, Denman showed she had another side to her character. She had a fierce temper – directed not towards Judy, whom she adored, but towards Celia and Dermot. All employers were to Denman natural enemies. The most innocent remark would create a sudden storm. Celia would say, ‘You had your electric light on last night. I hope baby was all right?’
Immediately Denman flared up.
‘I suppose I can turn on the light to see the time in the night? I may be treated like a black slave, but there are limits. I’ve had slaves myself under me in Africa – poor ignorant heathen – but they weren’t grudged necessities. If you think I’m wasting the light, I’ll trouble you to say so straight out.’
Kate, in the kitchen, used to giggle sometimes when Denman talked of slaves.
‘Nurse won’t never be satisfied – not till she’s got a dozen niggers under her. She’s always talking of the niggers in Africa, I wouldn’t have a nigger in my kitchen – nasty black things.’
Kate was a great comfort. Good-humoured, placid, and untroubled by storms, she went her way, cooking, cleaning, and indulging in reminiscences of ‘places’.
‘I’ll never forget my first place – no, never. A slip of a girl I was – not seventeen. They starved me something cruel. A kipper, that’s all they’d let me have for lunch, and margarine instead of butter. I got so thin you could hear my bones rubbing together. Mother was in a way about me.’
Looking at the robust and daily increasing plumpness of Kate, Celia could hardly believe this story.
‘I hope you get enough to eat here, Kate?’
‘Don’t you worry, ma’am, that’s all right – and you’ve no call to do things yourself. You’ll only muss yourself up.’
But Celia had acquired a guilty passion for cooking. Having made the startling discovery that cooking was mainly following a recipe carefully, she plunged headlong into the sport. Kate’s disapproval forced her to confine most of her activities to Kate’s days out, when she would go and have an orgy in the kitchen and produce exciting delicacies for Dermot’s tea and dinner.
It was in the nature of the unsatisfactory quality of life that Dermot should frequently arrive home on these days with indigestion and demand weak tea and thin toast instead of lobster cutlets and vanilla soufflé.
Kate herself kept firmly to plain cooking. She was unable to follow a recipe because she scorned to measure any quantities.
‘A bit of this, and that – that’s what I take,’ she said. ‘That’s the way my mother did. Cooks never measure.’
‘Perhaps it would be better if they did,’ suggested Celia.
‘You’ve got to do it by ey
e,’ said Kate firmly. ‘That’s the way I’ve always seen my mother do.’
What fun it was, thought Celia.
A house (or rather a flat) of one’s very own – a husband – a baby – a servant.
At last, she felt, she was being grown up – a real person. She was even learning the correct jargon. She had made friends with two other young wives in the mansions. These were very earnest over the qualities of good milk, where you got the cheapest Brussels sprouts, and the iniquities of servants.
‘I looked her straight in the face, and I said, “Jane, I never permit insolence,” just like that. Such a look she gave me.’
They never seemed to talk about anything except these subjects.
Secretly, Celia felt afraid that she would never be truly domestic.
Luckily Dermot didn’t mind. He often said he hated domestic women. Their homes, he said, were always so uncomfortable.
And, really there seemed to be something in what he said. Women who talked of nothing but servants seemed to be always having ‘insolence’ from them and their ‘treasures’ departed at inconvenient moments and left them to do all the cooking and the housework. And women who spent the whole morning shopping and selecting edibles seemed to have worse food than anybody else.
There was, Celia thought, a lot too much fuss made over all this business of domesticity.
People like her and Dermot had far more fun. She wasn’t Dermot’s housekeeper – she was his playmate.
And some day Judy would run about and talk, and adore her mother like Celia adored Miriam.
And in summer, when London got hot and stuffy, she would take Judy home, and Judy would play in the garden and invent games of princesses and dragons, and Celia would read her all the old fairy stories in the nursery bookcase …
12 Peace
1
The armistice came as a great surprise to Celia. She had got so used to the war that she had felt it would never end …
It was just a part of life …
And now the war was over!
While the war had been on it hadn’t been any use making plans. You had to let the future take care of itself and live for the day – just hoping and praying that Dermot wouldn’t be sent out to France again.
But now – it was different.
Dermot was full of plans. He wasn’t going to stay in the army. There wasn’t any future in the army. As soon as possible he would get demobilized and would go into the City. He knew of an opening in a very good firm.
‘But, Dermot isn’t it safer to stay in the army? I mean, there’s the pension and all that.’
‘I should stagnate if I stayed in the army. And what good is a miserable pension? I mean to make money – a good deal of money. You don’t mind taking a risk, do you, Celia?’
No, Celia didn’t mind. That disposition to take risks was what she admired most about Dermot. He was not afraid of life.
Dermot would never run away from life. He would face it and force it to do his will.
Ruthless, her mother had called him once. Well, that was true in a way. He was ruthless to life – no sentimental considerations would ever influence him. But he was not ruthless to her. Look how tender he had been before Judy was born …
2
Dermot took his risk.
He left the army and went into the City, starting on a small salary, but with a prospect of good money in the future.
Celia had wondered whether he would find office life irksome, but he did not seem to do so. He seemed entirely happy and satisfied in his new life.
Dermot liked doing new things.
He liked new people too.
Celia was sometimes shocked that he never wanted to go and see the two old aunts in Ireland who had brought him up.
He sent them presents and wrote to them regularly once a month, but he never wanted to see them.
‘Weren’t you fond of them?’
‘Of course I was – especially of Aunt Lucy. She was just like a mother to me.’
‘Well, then, don’t you want to see them? We could have them to stay, if you liked.’
‘Oh, that would be rather a nuisance.’
‘A nuisance? If you’re fond of them?’
‘Well, I know they’re all right. Quite happy and all that. I don’t exactly want to see them. After all, when you grow up, you grow out of your relations. That’s only nature. Aunt Lucy and Aunt Kate don’t really mean anything to me now. I’ve outgrown them.’
Dermot was extraordinary, Celia thought.
But perhaps he thought her equally extraordinary for being so attached to places and people she had known all her life.
As a matter of fact, he didn’t think her extraordinary. He didn’t think about it at all. Dermot never thought about what people were like. Talking about thoughts and feelings seemed to him a waste of time.
He liked realities – not ideas.
Sometimes Celia would ask him questions like, ‘What would you do if I ran away with someone?’ or ‘What would you do if I died?’
Dermot never knew what he would do. How could he know till it happened?
‘But can’t you just sort of imagine?’
No, Dermot couldn’t. Imagining things that weren’t so seemed to him a great waste of time.
Which, of course, was quite true.
Nevertheless, Celia couldn’t stop doing it. She was made that way.
3
One day Dermot hurt Celia.
They had been to a party. Celia was still rather scared of parties in case a fit of tongue-tied shyness should come over her. Sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t.
But this party (or so she thought) had gone remarkably well. She had been a little tongue-tied at first, and then she had ventured on a remark that had made the man she was talking to laugh.
Emboldened, Celia had found her tongue, and after that she fairly chattered. Everybody had laughed and talked a great deal, Celia as much as anybody. She had said things that sounded to her quite witty and which even seemed to have appeared witty to other people. She came home in a happy glow.
‘I’m not so stupid. I’m not so stupid after all,’ she said to herself happily.
She called through the dressing-room door to Dermot.
‘I think that was a nice party. I enjoyed it. How lucky that I caught that ladder in my stocking in time.’
‘It wasn’t too bad.’
‘Oh, Dermot didn’t you like it?’
‘Well, I’ve got a bit of indigestion.’
‘Oh, darling, I’m so sorry. I’ll get you some bicarbonate.’
‘Oh, it’s all right now. What was the matter with you this evening?’
‘With me?’
‘Yes, you were quite different.’
‘I suppose I was excited. Different in what way?’
‘Well, you’re usually so sensible. Tonight you were talking and laughing and quite unlike yourself.’
‘Didn’t you like it? I thought I was getting on so well.’
A queer, cold feeling began to form in Celia’s inside.
‘Well, I thought it sounded rather silly – that’s all.’
‘Yes,’ said Celia slowly. ‘I suppose I was being silly … But people seemed to like it – they laughed.’
‘Oh, people!’
‘And, Dermot – I enjoyed it myself … It’s awful, but I believe I like being silly sometimes.’
‘Oh, well, that’s all right, then.’
‘But I won’t be again. Not if you don’t like it.’
‘Well, I do rather hate it when you sound silly. I don’t like silly women.’
It hurt – oh, yes, it hurt …
A fool – she was a fool. Of course she was a fool, she’d always known it. But she’d hoped, somehow – that Dermot wouldn’t mind. That he’d be – what did she mean exactly? – tender to her over it. If you loved a person, their faults and failings endeared them more to you – not less. You said, ‘Now, isn’t that like so and so?’ B
ut you said it, not with exasperation but with tenderness.
But then men didn’t deal much in tenderness …
A queer little pang of fright swept over Celia.
No, men weren’t tender …
They weren’t like mothers …
A sudden misgiving assailed her. She didn’t really know anything about men. She didn’t really know anything about Dermot …
‘The men!’ Grannie’s phrase came back to her. Grannie had seemed perfectly confident of knowing exactly what men liked and didn’t like.
But Grannie, of course, wasn’t silly … She had often laughed at Grannie, but Grannie wasn’t silly.
And she, Celia, was … She’d always known it really, deep down. But she had thought, with Dermot, it wouldn’t matter. Well, it did matter.
In the darkness the tears ran down her cheeks unchecked …
She’d have her cry over – there, in the night, under the shelter of the darkness. And in the morning, she’d be different. She would never be silly in public again.
She’d been spoilt, that’s what it was. Everyone had always been so kind to her – encouraged her …
But she didn’t want Dermot to look as just for one moment he had looked …
It reminded her of something – something long ago.
No, she couldn’t remember.
But she’d be very careful not to be silly any more.
13 Companionship
1
There were several things, Celia found, that Dermot didn’t like about her.
Any sign of helplessness annoyed him.
‘Why do you want me to do things for you when you can perfectly well do them for yourself?’
‘Oh, Dermot, but it’s so nice having you do them for me.’
‘Nonsense, you’d get worse and worse if I’d let you.’
‘I expect I should,’ said Celia sadly.
‘It isn’t as though you can’t do all these things perfectly. You’re perfectly sensible and intelligent and capable.’
‘I expect,’ said Celia, ‘that it goes with slightly sloping Victorian shoulders. You want, automatically, to cling – like ivy.’