Cordelia

by Winston Graham

  She watched him curiously.

  ‘And will she be content with that?’

  ‘If there’s no other way, then I’m sure she will.’

  ‘You were always sure of your women, weren’t you?’

  ‘Always when it didn’t much matter.’

  She made a wry face. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that, Virginia. I didn’t mean you, I meant the others.’

  ‘I used to believe I was different.’

  ‘So you were. I’ve told you so.’

  ‘And this one – she’s different too? You’ll stick to her – you think.’

  ‘I’ll stick to her – I know.’

  ‘Is she very much in love with you?’

  He raised an eyebrow in humorous deprecation.

  ‘How can I answer that?’

  ‘If she is – then I’m sorry for her. Poor girl – the disillusion that will come.’

  As she got up, he came behind her quietly, took her by the shoulders.

  ‘Have you suffered so much because of me?’

  She twisted her shoulders free and moved away from him. ‘Oh, leave me alone.’

  ‘You’re not being fair, Virginia, are you? You’re loading the dice against me. I was never as bad as that. It was six of one and half a dozen of the other between us. What’s the good of pretending?’

  ‘I tell you I’m sorry for her. And she’ll be worse off than I am if she hasn’t even respectability.’

  ‘You mean you won’t free me?’

  ‘What have I to gain?’

  ‘You may want to marry someone else.’

  ‘I don’t want to marry someone else.’

  He was staring at her, his handsome face frustrated and angry. One more effort.

  ‘I wish I could explain it to you. I wish I could tell you all about it. Perhaps you’d understand better then. But I can’t. I’ve shirked this visit to you. I should have come weeks ago. I want to do the fair thing by you both. I want you to do the fair thing too.’

  She looked up into his face. ‘Is she very pretty, Stephen?’

  ‘Oh!’ He made a gesture of despair. ‘ What has that to do with it? I should have known better than to expect reason from a woman. I’ll go now. I’ll go and leave you.’

  She did not call the maid but followed him quietly to the door.

  ‘I’ll come in a week,’ he said. ‘Maybe it will be better that way. It will have given you time to think it over.’

  ‘No, please don’t come again.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She avoided his gaze. ‘ I don’t want you to come here again. But I’ll promise to think it over. I’ll write you. Same address?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very well. Good-bye, Stephen.’

  He took her hand. ‘Good-bye, Virginia. And I’m – I hope you’ll reconsider it.’

  He walked off down the street and heard her immediately shut the door and go in. He had an impulse to turn back and speak to her again in the old affectionate way, to try just once more to get her to see reason. But he realized that for today at any rate it would do no good at all.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The summer moved towards its close with a good deal of warmth and drought, which was very agreeable to the people living in the fine shady houses of the Grove. It was not so welcome to the thousands living and working near the banks of the Irwell and the Irk, which served as open conduits for most of the waste products of the populations concerned and stank to high heaven as they shrank, leaving pools of green slime and scums of grey filth at their edges.

  Further heat in the minds of the knowledgeable was kindled by the Irish question, the Fenian outrages, the dissolution of Parliament, and whether Mr Disraeli, who had made such a good job of the Abyssinian war, or Mr Gladstone, who had expressed his intention of dealing with the Irish Church, should sit on the Treasury Bench.

  The foundation stone for the new Town Hall, which was to outshine all other town halls ever built at any time anywhere, was laid, and women whispered that hats were to be smaller and that the crinoline was going out. There had been a scandal about a new dance, which had come straight from Paris, called the Can-Can, and which those who had seen it hinted was the height of indecency. The proprietor of the Lancashire Stingo tried to stage it, and all the idle gentlemen who hung about and chatted in groups at London Road Station, with no other purpose except to glimpse the ankles of the ladies coming down the steps, went in a body to the hall. But some spoil-sport on the city council got wind of the thing, and after one performance it was taken off.

  Uncle Pridey sent his book to a firm of London publishers, who returned it after seven weeks, saying they thanked him for the courtesy of the offer but they were advised that the claims he put forward were not substantiated by the scientists of the day.

  Two letters from Stephen. One was waiting for her when she got back from Southport, the other followed in a week.

  With many false starts and wasted sheets she eventually sent off a letter which did not satisfy her at all.

  STEPHEN, DEAR STEPHEN,

  Please don’t write again; it isn’t safe, for the letters in this house may well miscarry. So I beg of you, don’t write again. Thank you so very much for what you say. Nursing my thoughts, I feel so weak – and yet so strong. Strong and rich in your love for me and in my own love. I remember and think of nothing but the hours we spent together, believe that.

  Last night Mr Slaney-Smith suggested we should hold a séance among ourselves just to see if anything happened; of course we did not, but it brought back my first meetings with you so vividly that I could settle to nothing all evening.

  But it is better that we keep apart and do not see each other. Let us wait like this for a time; it’s fairer to everyone. I have been away to Southport for two weeks and may go again, somehow it is easier when the distance is greater and there is nothing to remind one.

  Essie’s wedding is on the twenty-fourth of next month; I expect you will know that.

  Your, D ELIA

  Brook read his poems at the first autumn meeting of the Athenaeum, and the City News commented on them as being romantic in tone and having a certain lyric quality suggestive of a minor Herrick. One was called: ‘ To Patience’. Others were: ‘ Your Silver Shoe’, ‘Sing Only to Me’, and ‘Helen’. Listening to them, and to the growing confidence with which, fortified by a large glass of whisky at the start, he read them, she was puzzled at the contradiction in him. She did not reason it right out but was vaguely distressed at this deep fund of romantic idealism in him, which their marriage, however hard she had tried, had failed to tap. He saved all his dreams for his pen. Stephen was the true romantic, not Brook. She hadn’t stood a chance.

  ‘Delia,’ said Esther next day, ‘ we’re all perplexed about inviting Mr Ferguson to the wedding. In a way he knew Hugh before I did, and it seems common courtesy. But we all feel he doesn’t really like mixing with us Blakes – except you, of course, and everyone says you’re quite a pet of his now. But you’re Brook’s wife and we’re just troublesome in-laws. What d’you think we should do?’

  ‘I’m not at all a pet of his,’ Cordelia said. ‘Why don’t you ask him?’

  ‘All right, I will. And what about Uncle Pridey? He’s rather a lamb. D’you think we might?’

  ‘Of course you might. But I can’t pretend to guess what he’ll say.’

  Uncle Pridey said: ‘This bacon is better than the last lot; nice and streaky with a good quality fat. I had an invitation this morning, young woman. Do they expect me to dress up, because I’ve nothing to dress up in.’

  ‘No, I’m sure it won’t matter a bit, Uncle Pridey. They’ll be delighted to see you just as you are.’

  ‘Suppose there’ll be something to eat?’

  ‘I’ll tell Father there must be.’

  ‘Very well, then. Get me a card or something when you’re out next time, will you? Expect they’d like it formal. Are there any more kidneys?’
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  Mr Ferguson said: ‘I’ve had an invitation to Esther’s wedding, Cordelia. I should like to accept. She’s your sister, but you know yourself now how difficult it would be for me to spare a day.’

  He was watching her as he made the excuse, and she got a queer feeling out of the realization that he cared a little what she thought.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I’ll certainly explain.’

  ‘In the meantime,’ he said, ‘will you give them this with my good wishes?’

  When Esther was given the sealed envelope she found inside a cheque for a hundred guineas. She was so delighted that she went dancing and singing round the house, waving it under everyone’s nose. Mr Ferguson’s stock rocketed.

  Mr Scott, Sr, was connected with the Cheshire Lines railway. They were people in a comfortable way of life, but they had no ‘side’, Mr Scott being a lanky grey-bearded man with a strong Glasgow accent, and Mrs Scott, very much his junior, a plump Campbell from Oban. Hugh Scott had just been made a sub-editor of his paper.

  Stephen was a little late at the church and she did not see him at all until afterwards. At the breakfast he was two places away. Teddy and a girl called Eunice being between. Mr Blake had insisted on giving his eldest daughter an equally good send-off, so this, too, was being held at the Albion Hotel. Uncle Pridey took a particular fancy to the cold tongue and salad.

  They had moved, she and Stephen, agreeably but distantly, like casual friends, overdoing it in their efforts to be natural. At the sight of him, after being near him for ten minutes, her good resolutions of the summer were already scattered. His mere physical presence … She struggled for judgment and failed at the very outset.

  She thought: What is to become of us? If they ran away to London, as he had suggested once, perhaps they could get lost. But it was not really lost, could never be that. If only they could dissolve out of people’s thoughts; that would be really starting afresh. Already she felt such a cheat. She had a fidelity towards and an affection for Brook. There was no getting away from it. What she was contemplating at this moment was something from which any decent woman would shrink in horror. She would become an outcast. Unclean, unclean! At present her family were proud of her. She would be letting them down – and so down. It was perhaps silly to let other people’s opinions loom so important. They must not be the final arbiter. But because of them, if she ran away, she would never feel quite whole again.

  A smaller party than Cordelia’s, this; she was surprised that Mr Slaney-Smith was here, less the prize boy than he had been at her wedding but still very much in prominence. She also saw Mrs Slaney-Smith for the first time, a small, sallow, mottled little woman in lavender with an intense whispering undertone of a voice and a nervous habit of glancing over her shoulder. All her hurried movements seemed to be under the shadow of Mr Slaney-Smith, dominant, criticizing, eternally rational. She took a fancy to Cordelia.

  The cake was cut and everyone was tremendously jolly. Mr Scott, well primed, got up and made a speech which began with flattering references to his new daughter but somehow ended up in praise of Robert Bruce. Mr Blake, warned off clocks by his entire family, hummed and ha-ed for a few minutes and then said that a happy marriage must be like a sundial which could be read in all weathers and found steadfastly showing its true bearings.

  Then Hugh Scott got up to thank the fathers for their speeches and the guests for their presents. While he was doing this Cordelia noticed that Eunice Trent was looking very uncomfortable, and the girl suddenly gave one or two convulsive jumps. Then she leapt to her feet with a piercing scream.

  ‘Oh! Oh! Something! Oh!’ She gave a sideways leap across the room, past a startled waiter, shaking her crinoline skirt hysterically.

  ‘What is it, what is it?’ said Mrs Blake. ‘ Does she have fits?’

  Two or three of the guests got up and moved towards the screaming girl. The waiter followed her solicitously. Then, in the sight of at least a dozen people, a mouse dropped to the floor and ran scuttling away under one of the sideboards.

  At once there was panic. Women screamed and tried to scramble on chairs, two fainted, several waiters rushed towards the sideboard and dragged it away from the wall while Hugh Scott grabbed a knife and others took up fire-irons.

  ‘It’s gone!’

  ‘No, there it is!’

  ‘Don’t drive it this way!’

  ‘Open the doors!’

  ‘I’ve got it! Look! Look! Hand me a stick.’

  They flushed the mouse from behind the sideboard, but it slid away and found refuge under a low table with a fern on it. They took away the fern and moved the table.

  ‘Don’t hurt it; catch it!’ screamed little Anne, dancing round in an agony of apprehension. ‘Don’t hurt the tweeny little thing!’

  ‘Now then!’

  ‘Careful! Those are my fingers!’

  ‘There he is. Ach! Ach!’

  At the last moment, when apparently caught, the mouse made a despairing dart for liberty and flew across the carpet, swerving round Mr Slaney-Smith’s shining boots, and escaped into the lobby of the hotel.

  With infinite patience, quiet was restored. Some of the ladies looked sheepish as they were helped down from their chairs, and the two who had fainted were given brandy. Eunice burst into tears of shame at the dreadful thing which had happened to her. They tried to comfort her and patted her hand and told her there, there, but it was all over now, and gave her a drink of champagne. The manager of the hotel bustled in gesturing and apologetic.

  Mr Blake and Mr Scott were full of indignation. It was monstrous, they said, that any civilized hotel of this modern era should be so negligent as to allow vermin to be at large in the dining-room, and at a wedding party when there were many gently brought-up ladies to be alarmed and upset. This and much more they said, though Mr Scott, who was now feeling very happy indeed, spoiled the effect by sticking a finger in the manager’s button-hole and ending: ‘Ma dear-r fellow, why don’t ye buy a cat?’

  The manager was extravagantly sorry, but under his sorrow he was angry and suspicious; he saw the wedding guests back to their seats and then went off to cross-examine the porter, the boots, and the receptionist. In the meantime Hugh Scott, who privately thought the whole thing funny and was only afraid of making his private feelings public, prepared to go on with his speech.

  But he found another man taking the floor and cracking his knuckles in concern as he tried to talk Hugh down. That uncle of Cordelia’s with the tuft of beard and the lantern jaws. When Hugh saw that the old man was holding a small cigar box he gave up his speech and listened too.

  ‘Of course,’ said Uncle Pridey. ‘ Should have given you the present at the proper time, but what with one thing and another … And the lid must have come off in my pocket. Unnecessary fuss, in my view, over a mere mouse. Can’t understand it, really I can’t. Clean, healthy, inoffensive little things.’

  ‘What?’ said Hugh. ‘What’s that? Was that your mouse?’

  ‘Was going to be yours,’ said Uncle Pridey. ‘Knew Esther liked them because she came and admired them one evening. Didn’t know what to get you both for a wedding present and thought you might be interested. Tame they were, perfectly tame, able to do small tricks. But you scare the poor creatures making such a hullabaloo. They don’t understand. Not used to so much noise.’

  ‘Oh, Pridey,’ said Brook angrily, ‘you are a fool. Haven’t you sense enough to know other people don’t feel the way you do–’

  A word in the old man’s sentence had caught Cordelia’s attention.

  ‘Were there more than one, Uncle Pridey? Are the others safe?’

  He opened the box. ‘No, they’re all gone.’

  ‘How many were there?’

  ‘Only four,’ he said.

  The pandemonium which broke out now made the earlier disturbance seem quiet and restrained. Those who had been foremost in assuring Eunice that it was all over now and that there was nothing at all to get hysterical about ins
tantly saw the terrible experience she had gone through happening to them. Every other chair round the table was immediately occupied, elderly ladies leaping as fast as young, with screams and squeals – all except one of the faints who had not recovered and another who fainted to join her. The men, too, got a little confused, some shouting that the doors should be shut, the others to leave them open. One shouted for a bucket of water, and Mr Scott, Sr, gambolling about with a glass of champagne in his hand, kept calling: ‘Why don’t ye buy a cat? Why don’t ye buy a cat?’ Hugh Scott held the hand of his young bride and kept passing her up bits of wedding cake. Stephen sidled up to Cordelia, while Brook was expostulating with Uncle Pridey, and said: ‘This can’t go on. I must see you. When can I see you?’

  Then a second mouse was flushed from among the folds of the velvet curtains and ran a gauntlet of stamping feet and cracking pokers, to double across under the wedding table and to disappear between the manager’s legs as he returned flushed-faced with the receptionist.

  Shouting to make himself heard, Mr Scott tried to explain the position, the manager nodding his head emphatically all the time as if to say, ‘Just what I thought.’

  Then Pridey put a hand in his pocket and said: ‘Oh, well, this little chap didn’t get far,’ and took out a third mouse, wriggling between his finger and thumb.

  He might have expected this to quiet things down, but instead it set some of the ladies off screaming again because they couldn’t bear even the sight of a mouse, looking brown and mousy and sniffing and waving its forepaws.

  Pridey opened the little cigar box and popped the mouse in and clicked the lid and Stephen said: ‘I must see you. I hear Brook is going away again next week.’

  ‘It isn’t decided yet.’

  ‘Oh, yes, it is,’ he said grimly. ‘ He told me so today. Promise you’ll see me then.’

  ‘I’ll write,’ she said desperately.

  The fourth mouse was not to be found. They hunted under the furniture and cross-questioned Pridey and raked about in odd corners. At last they began to conclude that this eccentric old man, whom someone had made the mistake of inviting to the wedding, had probably miscounted his own pets or lost one on the way to the church. The ladies were revived and reassured and the waiter went round with a new bottle of champagne.