Caroline

by Richmal Crompton

  In the political discussion that followed Effie made several futile remarks that the others ignored. She made them in a small breathless voice, glancing resentfully at Philippa as if daring her to notice what a nonentity the two women had managed to make her in her husband’s eyes. Philippa watched her with deepening interest. She was trying, ineffectually enough, to rival them on their own ground. That was a mistake, of course. She wasn’t intellectual and shouldn’t have even tried to be. She was, by nature, light-hearted and irresponsible. She had been, Philippa was sure, gaily, artlessly amusing before Caroline and Evelyn took her in hand. And Robert? He worked hard at the office, and when he came home all he wanted was peace. He wanted it so much that he was willing to buy it at almost any price. Evelyn had, by a miracle, as it seemed, given him a well-run home, well-behaved children, and a quiet unexacting wife. He was honestly fond of Effie, and he thought that she had improved very much since Evelyn came to live with them. In the old days she had been tempestuous, high-spirited, and excitable, incorrigibly careless and forgetful. She had spoilt the children and was always having scenes with Caroline. Looking back on those days, he felt devoutly thankful for the change that Evelyn had brought into their lives. He was touched, too, by her affectionate manner to Effie. She looked after her as if she were a beloved wayward child, never taking offence when Effie was rude to her, as, he had to admit, she often was.

  Philippa was covertly studying him as he talked. Like Caroline, he had obviously inherited Gordon’s lack of humour. There was no gleam of it in his face or voice. Susan had a shy, uncertain sense of humour. It hadn’t been given much chance by Caroline, and even now it was easily quelled, but it was there. In Fay it was there unmistakably. It sparkled in her eyes and bubbled up in her clear delicious laughter. Even Caroline hadn’t been able to quell it in Fay. . . .

  The gong sounded, and they rose to go in to dinner. Evelyn went up to Effie, smiling affectionately.

  “Here’s my untidy baby coming all to pieces again,” she said, fastening a hook and eye in the grey lace dress. Then she tucked several straying strands of hair into the bun at the back of her slender neck, while the others stood round waiting.

  “I don’t know what this house and everyone in it would do without you, Evelyn,” said Caroline.

  “I don’t either,” agreed Robert good-humouredly.

  Effie jerked herself away from Evelyn’s hands with an ungracious “thank you,” and again threw that sullen defiant glance at Philippa. Well, you see how things are, it seemed to say, and I hate you for seeing. . . .

  Dinner was a pleasant enough meal. The food was well cooked and well served. Evelyn could certainly get the best out of servants. She and Caroline discussed local people and happenings. Effie had relapsed into silence. Philippa, too, was silent. It occurred to her that Caroline was deliberately keeping the conversation in channels where she could not join it, and that Evelyn was following her lead. Robert was tired, wanting only to be interested and amused, and the two women laid themselves out to interest and amuse him.

  Suddenly there came the sound of a child’s cry from upstairs. Effie laid down her knife and fork.

  “It’s Carrie,” she said.

  “Now, Effie,” remonstrated Evelyn gently. “You know what Carrie is. She’s remembered that we’ve got visitors, so she’s determined to put herself into the limelight somehow. If no one goes up she’ll be asleep again in five minutes, and if once you do start going up it’ll be a game you’ll have to play every night. Be sensible, darling.”

  Effie’s figure did not relax. Her eyes were fixed on the door.

  “She has bad dreams,” she said. “She might be really frightened.”

  “Even if she is, dear,” said Evelyn, “she’ll be asleep again far sooner if she’s left alone than if someone goes up making a fuss of her.”

  The sounds from above continued. . . . Robert went on with his dinner, frowning slightly.

  “Effie dear,” admonished Caroline, “do as Evelyn says.”

  Effie turned her eyes slowly to Caroline. They were very bright, and her cheeks were flushed.

  “Why should I?” she said breathlessly. “They’re my children—aren’t they:—not hers.”

  “Don’t talk foolishly, Effie,” said Caroline. “You know perfectly well how much better behaved the children have been since Evelyn took them in hand. You——”

  Effie pushed her chair back from the table. “Better behaved!” she flashed. “She’s making them into little prigs, if that’s what you mean. There’ll be nothing real about them by the time she’s finished with them. They may have been naughty when I looked after them, but they were real, they were themselves. She just wants little machines that behave nicely. She doesn’t care what they’re like inside as long as they’ve got nice manners to do her credit.”

  “Effie, Effie!” expostulated Robert.

  “And she does her best to make them despise me,” went on Effie, her voice rising hysterically. “She has done ever since she came here. She hasn’t managed it yet, but she will.” She sprang to her feet and went to the door. “I’m going to Carrie. . . . I don’t care what any of you say.”

  “Effie,” said Caroline in her quiet level voice, “please remember that when Evelyn came here you promised not to interfere in her management of the children.”

  Effie turned at the door and faced them, her cheeks flaming.

  “Interfere!” she echoed unsteadily. “That’s a nice word for you to use. You’ve done nothing but interfere ever since I married Robert. You’ve never given me a chance. From the very beginning you’ve never given me a chance. It might have been all right if I’d flattered you as she does, but I didn’t know . . . I didn’t understand. . . . Perhaps I would have done if I’d known what was going to happen. I don’t think I would, though. I think I hated you too much even then.”

  Her voice broke and she went out of the room abruptly. They heard her running upstairs.

  “Poor little Effie!” said Evelyn tenderly. “She gets over-tired and simply doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

  “It’s nice of you to look at it in that way, Evelyn,” said Robert, “but she’s no excuse at all for speaking to Caroline as she did. She ought to apologise.”

  “Of course she mustn’t,” said Caroline. She was smiling, but her eyes were very blue. “As Evelyn says, she’s simply over-tired and didn’t know what she was saying. It just shows us again how lucky we are to have Evelyn here to help her. She’s far too highly strung to cope with things alone.”

  “But she’s so much better than she used to be,” said Evelyn. “We used to have these little scenes nearly every day, you remember. . . . It’s nothing to worry about, Robert. She’ll be all right when she’s had a rest. She doesn’t mean any of the things she says about Caroline, and, anyway, Caroline’s such an angel that she’d never take offence.” She smiled across at Philippa. “It’s Mrs. Meredith to whom we ought to be apologising.”

  Philippa was silent for a moment. She had an idea that she was responsible for the outburst, that it was her presence that had made Effie realise afresh the humiliation of her position and give voice to the resentment in what Evelyn and Caroline passed over so lightly as a “little scene.”

  “Oh no,” she said at last. “I hate to hear a child crying, too. And some dreams can be very terrifying when you’re only four.”

  They heard footsteps in the room overhead and the sound of voices. The child’s sobs gradually died away. Then came the opening and closing of a door . . . and the opening and closing of another door.

  Effie had evidently gone to her own bedroom.

  They went back into the drawing-room for coffee, and, when she had poured it out, Evelyn slipped from the room. She returned after a few minutes, smiling.

  “I’ve looked in at both babies,” she said. “Carrie’s asleep, and Effie soon will be. One can’t take her any more seriously than one would a child. I understand her”

  “You’re
wonderful with her, Evelyn,” put in Caroline.

  “I’m very fond of her,” said Evelyn. “She’s a dear little thing and we get on together splendidly. As I said, an outburst like tonight’s means nothing but that her nerves are overstrained. She’ll be her own dear little self tomorrow. . . .”

  Later she asked Caroline to go into the nursery with her to inspect a new rug that she had bought. Philippa and Robert, left alone together, kept up a desultory conversation. Robert, in his slow somewhat laboured fashion, told her of the changes that had taken place in Bartenham since the War. He seemed extraordinarily set for his age, inelastic in mind and body, intellectual without being intelligent. Yet there was something very likeable about him, a suggestion of simplicity and kindliness and stark unflinching honesty. He wasn’t astute. He took things at their face value, without looking beneath the surface. He must have been like wax in Caroline’s hands from the beginning. His loyalty to her was almost a religion. She had been both mother and father to him. She had sacrificed her youth and her career for him. He had never in his life seen her angry or ill-tempered. She had always been calm, controlled, unfailingly sweet and selfless. He looked on her as belonging to a world apart, perfect, inimitable. Effie, of course, had, had no chance against her. From the beginning, probably, Caroline had been able to distort her every word and action in Robert’s eyes. Gradually, almost unconsciously, he had accepted her view—a view never put into words but urged subtly, irresistibly, by tone of voice and expression—that his marriage had been a mistake. He still loved Effie, but he had let them tacitly persuade him that she was a child, to be humoured and put up with, never to be taken seriously.

  In the nursery Caroline inspected the rug rather absently. Suddenly she said, “What do you think of my mother, Evelyn?”

  Evelyn had been watching Caroline all evening in order to have the right answer to that question when it came. She felt that she was making no mistake when she replied.

  “Darling, I don’t really feel I know her well enough to say.”

  Caroline was apparently satisfied.

  “She’s had an unhappy life, of course.”

  “Unhappy?” said Evelyn. “Anyone less kind than you would say that she’d made other people’s lives unhappy. Your heart’s too big, you know, Caroline. Will you never think of yourself?”

  As Caroline and Philippa walked home that night, Caroline said lightly:

  “Well, now you’ve met all the family. I expect you find us terribly boring. A very ordinary, humdrum set—not the sort of people that things happen to.”

  Philippa was silent for a moment. She was thinking of Susan’s brooding tragic face, of Effie’s passionate outburst. Then she said as lightly:

  “I don’t think you can say that of anyone.”

  Chapter Eleven

  CAROLINE sat by the fire in the drawing-room, her eyes fixed absently on the flames. Richard had arrived home from Madeira last night, and she was expecting him to tea today. She had taken unusual pains with her appearance, arranging her fair hair more loosely about her ears and putting on a new dress of black georgette with a soft fall of lace at the breast and full chiffon sleeves. Philippa had now been with her a month, and Caroline was taking stock of the situation. It had not been a happy month. Philippa’s influence—she admitted it reluctantly—had not been for good. There was nothing that one could actually lay one’s finger on, but there was unmistakably a blurring, however faint, of those standards that Caroline had set herself so resolutely to maintain. Something of flippancy crept into nearly every discussion in which she took part. It was as if her spirit could not breathe the air in which Caroline’s habitually lived. Worldliness . . . it informed her every word and movement. It lay about her like a faint but noxious miasma. And it was affecting Fay, Fay who was so young and impressionable, so sensitive to every new suggestion, Fay whose standards were, of course, not yet sufficiently formed to enable her to resist this subtle encroachment of evil. Caroline had always disliked the giggling type of schoolgirl, irresponsible, disrespectful, interested in the trivialities of dress and personal appearance, and it was hard to see Fay, under the influence of her own mother, developing these qualities. At the sound of Fay’s soft giggle coming from Philippa’s bedroom, an actual physical pain would shoot through Caroline’s heart.

  Philippa encouraged Fay to mimic her school mistresses (Fay was a good mimic, but Caroline, sensing the danger that lay in it, had always discouraged the accomplishment) and to arrange her hair in a different and more becoming way. She had even brought back a new dress for her from one of her shopping expeditions in London. The new dress had been particularly galling to Caroline. It was so plain in design that she could not reasonably object to it as unsuitable for Fay, and yet it had an air of sophistication that was actually, Caroline considered, more unsuitable than any amount of frills and furbelows would have been.

  The old Fay, of course, was still there, and at a grave glance from Caroline would reappear at once—serious, responsible, earnest. She still listened docilely enough to those helpful little talks by which Caroline had always tried to mould her character and instil into her something of her own high aims.

  “It’s not that laughing and joking is wrong, dear. Why, you and I often have quite good jokes together, don’t we? It’s that—well, we’re not put into the world just for fun, and once one begins making fun of things—even little unimportant things—one never knows where it will end. It tends to make one forget the real seriousness of life. So you see, darling, I do so want you to try hard to conquer the part of you—well, the part of you that isn’t my Fay. . . .”

  Fay would become serious, anxious, repentant, as she listened, but she seemed now to try to avoid the talks instead of, as once, looking forward to them. Philippa’s influence, Caroline was sure, was coming between them, subtly poisoning their relationship. Only yesterday Caroline had heard Fay laughing in Philippa’s bedroom, and when she came out had said:

  “What were you laughing at in Aunt Philippa’s room, dear?”

  The new sulky look had come into Fay’s face as she replied:

  “Nothing, Caroline. Just a joke that Aunt Philippa made.”

  “What was it?”

  “It wasn’t anything. I mean, it would sound so silly repeated.”

  “What was it, dear?”

  Flushing and looking still sulkier, Fay repeated a joke that seemed to Caroline utterly futile. She listened gravely, then said:

  “And what did you find in that to laugh at?”

  Fay, crimson-faced with shame or anger—Caroline had not been sure which—flung away from her into her own bedroom without answering.

  A scene like that between them would have been impossible before Philippa came to the house. Caroline did her best to keep Philippa and Fay apart, of course, but she herself was away from the house a good deal, and it was clear that despite her precautions they were seeing a good deal of each other. More than once she had considered asking Philippa to go, but she could not help looking on herself as a personification of the forces of good and Philippa as the personification of the forces of evil, and to ask Philippa to go would be to own herself beaten, to betray the high standard that she had set herself, that she had never yet failed.

  And it wasn’t only Philippa and Fay. She was worried about Susan too. She had actually obtained from the headmistress of Merton Park School the promise of a post on the staff for Susan, and Susan, instead of accepting it with gratitude, was vacillating, putting off her decision, making excuses. When Caroline argued and reasoned with her, she would mutter that “Kenneth didn’t like it,” once bursting out with an “Oh, do leave me alone, Caroline.” She had apologised immediately, but even so, refused to give a definite decision.

  “Susan darling, she can’t wait for ever. She’ll have to appoint someone soon.”

  “Let her appoint someone else, then,” said Susan as if with relief. “I don’t want to worry Ken about it any more. He simply hates the idea.�
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  Effie, too, was causing her anxiety. She had thought that Effie had at last reconciled herself to leaving everything in Evelyn’s hands, but there had been several of the old scenes between them lately. Carrie had become somewhat difficult to manage, and Evelyn had rightly been very firm with her, but Effie had wanted to give in to the child and let her have her own way, talking a lot of nonsense about her “nerves,” as if a child of four could possibly suffer from nerves. Evelyn had appealed to Caroline and in the end they had both appealed to Robert, and Robert had told Effie quite firmly that she must not interfere with Evelyn’s management of the children. Once more Effie had sulkily acquiesced, but relations between them were strained, and there was an air of tension in the house. It was bad for the children and made things extremely awkward for Evelyn. Evelyn, of course, was the redeeming feature in the situation, loyal, dependable, clear-sighted. Only yesterday she had told Caroline that she had disliked Philippa since her first meeting with her.

  Fay . . . Susan . . . Effie. . . . Caroline felt more depressed than she ever remembered feeling before. She faced the fact that the poison was working in her own soul, too, blurring her serenity, undermining that faith in herself and her ideals that had never before failed her. Again she stiffened her resolution. This visit of Philippa’s was sent as a test. It must not find her wanting. She must purge her mind of its dislike of Philippa and rekindle that old desire to help her and influence her for good. She must cling to the knowledge that good is stronger than evil.

  She glanced at the clock. Richard would be here any minute now. Richard. She’d never missed him before when he’d been away, but this time she’d missed him acutely. Her thoughts returned to their last interview, at which he had asked her to marry him, and for the first time something within her weakened at the memory.

  He loved her and—she realised it now as she had never realised it before—she loved him. Surely it wouldn’t be cowardice to rest from the struggle in the comfort of Richard’s love. He would probably ask her to marry him again today. She wouldn’t actually make up her mind to say “yes,” but—she felt very differently from what she had felt that day four weeks ago when he had last asked her. She had felt so strong then. Now she felt tired, dispirited, as if the burden she had taken upon her were more than she could bear.