Caroline

by Richmal Crompton

  “I think she needs a change,” went on Philippa in her light pleasant voice. “She’s tired and rundown. And I’m lonely. I was going to ask her to stay with me later, but it would do us both good if she came now. If Robert doesn’t mind, that is.”

  Effie’s eyes were fixed on Robert. Her face was white and set. He was still looking at her in blank surprise.

  “But, Effie,” he began, then turned to Evelyn, as if for explanation and advice. The amazement was fading from Evelyn’s face. There was a faint smile on her lips.

  “You have seemed a little tired lately, darling,” she said affectionately. “I was going to suggest your taking a holiday. It’s an excellent idea. Don’t you think so, Caroline?”

  Caroline had been looking as perplexed as Robert.

  “Why, yes, I suppose so,” she said uncertainly. There was the ghost of compunction in her eyes as they rested on Effie. “I’m sorry you’ve not been feeling well, Effie.”

  “But, Effie,” broke in Robert, “I’d no idea . . . I—hadn’t you better see a doctor, dear, if you aren’t well?”

  “Now, Robert, don’t fuss the child,” smiled Evelyn. There was an air of furtive excitement about her. “All she needs is a change. Change of air and change of interest. She’ll come back a different little woman, won’t you, darling?”

  Effie’s eyes remained fixed on Robert.

  “Do you want to go, Effie?” he said slowly.

  “Yes.”

  “Come along, then,” said Philippa. “We must start at once if we’re going to catch the train.”

  Robert rose, with the air of one abandoning a problem too intricate for solution.

  “I’ll come and see you off,” he said.

  “Don’t come to the station,” said Philippa. “Just see us on the ’bus.”

  He took up the suitcase and went with them to the gate. The ’bus was approaching as they reached it.

  “Goodbye, Effie,” he said. “You’ll write, won’t you?”

  He bent towards her, and she offered him her cheek.

  “Goodbye,” she said in a dull toneless voice.

  He gave the case to the conductor, and the two of them mounted the step.

  “Goodbye, Effie,” he said again.

  She gazed at him intently for a moment, then followed Philippa into the ’bus. Evelyn came out and stood by Robert, smiling. The ’bus jerked off. Robert and Evelyn watched it out of sight, then turned and went back to the house.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ROBERT opened the door with his latch-key and entered the hall. The atmosphere of method and orderliness that Evelyn had imparted to the whole house seemed to meet him on the threshold like something tangible. Not a speck of dust anywhere. The furniture polished till it gleamed like crystal. A bowl of chrysanthemums sharply reflected in the surface of the small mahogany table by the door. No personal belongings to mar the general effect. Hats and coats neatly stowed away in the wardrobe whose purchase had been one of Evelyn’s first suggestions.

  He remembered the time when he would come home to find the hall littered with Effie’s belongings—coat, hat, gloves, scarf. She never could learn to put things in their places. The children’s toys, too, would be all over the floor—Bobbie’s engine, Carrie’s dolls. He remembered how it used to irritate him, and at the memory his heart contracted oddly. He seemed to see a small harassed Effie picking them up hastily, nervously. “I’m terribly sorry, Robert. I’d meant to get it all cleared up before you came home, but somehow I’ve been so rushed.”

  He hung his hat and coat in the wardrobe, then stood looking about him. It occurred to him suddenly that the hall was exactly like the hall of a “show-house” at some exhibition. The umbrellas in the umbrella-stand had been deliberately put there in order to lend a clever touch of verisimilitude to the scene.

  The drawing-room door opened, and Evelyn came out. Her face wore a smile of welcome.

  “Oh, there you are, Robert. I thought I heard you. Dinner’s almost ready.”

  “I’ll just go and have a wash. . . . Children all right?”

  “Oh yes. Splendid. . . . Carrie’s running a temperature again—the little monkey!—but it’s nothing to worry about.”

  Carrie was fretting for Effie, but Evelyn was convinced that she was doing it out of a perverse desire to put herself into the limelight.

  “It’s the heroine complex,” she said. “Effie encouraged it by taking notice of all her fads and fancies. What the child really needs is a little wholesome neglect. I just laugh at her—kindly, of course—and she’s growing more sensible already.”

  Robert agreed, but he didn’t feel quite happy about it. The child looked peaky and sullen. She’d been a bundle of mischief before Evelyn came. Her high spirits had, in fact, got on his nerves so much that he had welcomed Evelyn’s regime with heartfelt relief, but now he wasn’t sure. Was it quite natural for children to play as quietly as Carrie and Bobby did? And those nightmares from which Carrie awoke screaming night after night. . . . She’d never had them in the old days. Was Evelyn’s regime, kindly enough—he knew she was never unkind to the children—too repressive? Effie used to romp with them, but since Effie had gone they had grown quieter than ever. Evelyn discouraged all “noisiness” and “roughness”. Perhaps—oh well, he didn’t know. It was the women’s business. Caroline approved, and, if Caroline approved, it must be all right.

  His thoughts went idly back again to the early days of his marriage. Effie, singing and laughing and forgetting things and leaving things about, playing absurd tricks on him, preparing absurd “surprises”. . . . It had delighted him throughout the honeymoon, but when ordinary life began he felt that method and dignity should take its place. But Effie had remained harum-scarum and flighty. Her attempts at housekeeping had been ludicrous, and, what was worse, she had not seemed to realise the seriousness of it all. She laughed at her mistakes, made jokes of her ignorance. Caroline had tried to help her, but—even now the memory brought back something of the old resentment—she had behaved atrociously to Caroline, refusing her offers of help with almost incredible rudeness. Despite that, Caroline had continued to stand by, showing no resentment, unfailingly kind and patient. Few other women would have done it. But then Caroline wasn’t like other women. She was herself, unique—the only woman Robert had ever known in whom it was impossible to find any fault.

  He came out of the bathroom and stood for a moment at the door of the night nursery. He would have liked to go in and see the children, but he remembered that that was one of the things Evelyn had been most emphatic about when she took over the reins of the household. Goodnight visits to the children after they were in bed unsettled them and made them wakeful. Even Effie was not supposed to go in to see them if she came back from shopping or a tea-party after they were in bed. It was quite right, of course. Caroline had supported Evelyn, and that alone proved that it was right. It was strange how, since Effie had gone, his thoughts kept turning to the days of their early married life—to the elfin harum-scarum Effie who’d had such an endless store of little intimate jokes with him, jokes that seemed very silly now but that he’d enjoyed quite as much as Effie in those early days, before he realised the importance of settling down to a dignified family life in a well-ordered house. It was the expression on Caroline’s face, he remembered, that had first roused him to the importance of that—Caroline, who, too kind to hurt Effie’s feelings by any criticism, still could not hide her conviction that it was time Effie’s silliness came to an end, and that she applied herself seriously to mastering the business of housekeeping. It would all have been so simple if Effie had responded to Caroline’s kindly offers of help.

  He went slowly downstairs to the hall and looked again at the letter-rack on the wall by the door, in which his letters were always put. A few circulars . . . nothing from Effie. He had had only one letter from her since she went to Philippa’s—a short impersonal letter, giving him a bald account of all she and Philippa had done since the
y left Bartenham (they seemed to be going about a good deal), but with no mention of her return. It might have been written by the merest acquaintance.

  “What sort of a day have you had?” said Evelyn.

  She was sitting by the fire, working at a green smock for Carrie.

  “Not too bad,” he said.

  “Well, come and sit down till the gong goes. I’m sure you’re tired.”

  He felt a sudden irritation at being invited to sit down in his own house, as if she were the mistress of it and he a guest. He had thought her perfect while Effie was still here, but since Effie had gone all sorts of unimportant little things about her had been getting on his nerves.

  She looked up again, smiling, from her work.

  “I hope you’ve been energetic and started the crossword puzzle,” she said. “I simply haven’t had a minute since morning.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t. . . .”

  Another strange thing was that since Effie had gone all the zest seemed to have vanished from the interests that he and Evelyn had in common. Effie had taken no part in them, but she had been there in the background. He missed her poignantly from the background, more, in fact, than he had ever dreamed he would. The savour seemed to have gone out of everything. He felt restless and depressed.

  “Lazybones!” she teased, with a smile that increased his vague irritation against her.

  The dinner-gong sounded in the hall, and Evelyn rose, folded up her needlework, and preceded him into the dining-room. Yes, it was all too tidy, too cleared up, he decided as he went through the hall. He hated untidiness, but there ought to be something of someone’s lying about somewhere . . . the sort of thing that made a difference between a home and a display of “specimen rooms” in a furnishing establishment. He felt a bit nervy tonight. . . . He missed Effie. And he had a little nagging sensation of remorse that he wouldn’t face but that yet depressed him. Perhaps he hadn’t taken as much notice of her lately as he ought to have done. He’d been tired and just wanted peace when he came home in the evening. As long as she was there he hadn’t worried about her or even—he had to confess it—thought about her. She had been rather quiet lately, he remembered. Perhaps she hadn’t been well. Philippa had noticed it, and Evelyn had noticed it. Evelyn ought to have mentioned it to him, he told himself resentfully. He couldn’t be expected to—yes, he could be expected to notice it, he ought to have noticed it. . . .

  Evelyn took her place at the foot of the table opposite him. She had been sitting at the foot of the table for some time now. It was easier for her to keep an eye on the children when they were there, and it hardly seemed worth while to change places with Effie for the only meal the children did not have with them. He had never resented Evelyn’s sitting opposite him when Effie sat between them, but now, illogically, he did. He resented, too, the mistress-of-the-house air that hung about her as she sat there, handsome, well dressed, smiling at him across the table. And he was ashamed of his resentment, remembering her unflagging zeal in his service, her careful training of the children, her methodical ordering of the house. He ought to be grateful to her. Well, hang it all, he was grateful to her, but—he missed Effie. And he was worried about Effie. Suppose she were really ill and they were hiding it from him. Women did hide things from one. Even Caroline, from sheer affection and a desire not to worry him, might keep a thing like that from him. Suppose Effie had gone to London to have an operation. He saw her lying in a hospital bed, white and still. He saw himself hurrying to her side . . . perhaps too late. Even the letter she had written to him might have been a blind. She might have written it from hospital just to lull his suspicions. Women were capable of such things. . . .

  He interrupted Evelyn’s account of the conversation she had had with Bobby’s headmaster’s wife, whom she had met in the town, to say, “Do you know if Caroline’s heard from Effie, Evelyn?”

  A slight expression of annoyance crossed Evelyn’s face.

  “I really don’t know,” she said. “She hadn’t when I last saw her. I expect Effie’s far too busy enjoying herself to write.”

  That reassured him but left an after-sting. He didn’t altogether relish the thought of Effie’s being too busy enjoying herself to write. Surely she could enjoy herself at home. But could she? Again that nagging little feeling of compunction stirred at his heart. It was a long time since he’d taken her anywhere. Of course, there weren’t many places in Bartenham where he could take her, but in the old days they used to go up to London for a night occasionally and see a show or go to a dance. . . . They’d stopped doing it when the children came, but there wasn’t any reason why they shouldn’t do it again now that Evelyn was in charge. Caroline hadn’t approved of their doing it, he’d forgotten exactly why. But, anyway, it was his business, not Caroline’s. . . . That thought startled him, and he felt almost guilty at having admitted it into his mind. He was for ejecting it immediately and pretending that he had never admitted it, but suddenly he decided not to. It wasn’t Caroline’s business. Caroline was wonderful in every way, but, after all, a man’s relations with his wife were no one’s business but his own. Perhaps Caroline had never quite understood Effie. Perhaps . . . no, better not pursue that line of thought. It was too thorny, too fraught with mental discomfort. Effie was a dear little thing who’d been somewhat flighty at first, but now, thanks to Caroline’s help and guidance, had settled down nicely and was very happy and comfortable in the home that Evelyn had made so happy and comfortable for them all. Effie, indeed, was remarkably lucky. Not many wives and mothers had as few responsibilities and were looked after as well as Effie.

  Evelyn was telling him those little bits of local gossip that she always managed to collect and that generally he found so interesting, but, like everything else, they seemed to have lost their savour since Effie went. Perhaps he was a little run down himself. Pity Effie had rushed off like that on the spur of the moment. They might have taken a holiday together, leaving Evelyn in charge of the children. He could have arranged it if he’d had a week’s notice. It was years since he and Effie had gone away together without the children. . . . The dinner was excellently cooked and excellently served, as were all the meals since Evelyn’s arrival, but somehow he didn’t feel hungry. That little nagging feeling of anxiety and compunction about Effie worried at the pit of his stomach all the time, taking away his appetite.

  When they went back to the drawing-room Evelyn poured out coffee, and he lit her cigarette for her in silence. There was a small secret smile on her face. She looked like a woman who is sure of herself, who can afford to bide her time. When he had put aside his coffee cup she handed him the paper.

  “There!” she said. “See what you can do. There are some of your specialities for you. You know I can never do anagrams.”

  He took the paper and sat for some moments, looking at it unseeingly. His uneasiness was gradually yielding to the sense of well-being induced by the cosy firelit room, the cigarette, the coffee, and a feeling of pleasant end-of-the-day weariness. It was silly of him to worry about Effie. Philippa had asked her to go and stay with her, and Effie had naturally jumped at it. Effie had always enjoyed going up to Town, even for a day, and it was a long time since she’d had the chance of going. And what was more natural than that she should go with Philippa then and there? Philippa evidently wanted company, and they were both rather impulsive. He wasn’t sure that he altogether approved of the arrangement. Effie was impressionable, and, although Caroline was loyalty itself, he couldn’t help knowing that she’d not had too easy a time with Philippa. She had not said a word against her, but he had gathered that she’d found her irresponsible and frivolous—as, of course, one would expect a woman of her history to be. He knew that Caroline had been glad for Fay’s sake when Philippa left Bartenham. He glanced across at Evelyn, sitting on the other side of the fireplace, her head bent over the little green smock, her firm white hand drawing the silk in and out with gentle rhythmic movement. He felt ashamed of his feeling o
f irritation with her. Thinking of Philippa had made him realise her merits again. She was wonderful—more like Caroline, in fact, than any woman he had ever known. And how kind she always was to Effie, how motherly and tender and patient! Just like Caroline. . . . Yes, they were lucky to have her. Women like Caroline and Evelyn were the salt of the earth. One was apt to take them for granted till one came across women like Philippa, who had frittered away their lives in self-indulgence and lived only for pleasure, who in their old age were almost as silly and flighty as they had been when they were young. Caroline had hinted that Philippa had even tried to attract Richard, but Richard, of course, had too much sense for that sort of thing. Oh well, there was nothing really to worry about. Effie had just gone away for a short holiday. Meanwhile he was very happy and comfortable here with Evelyn. . . .

  He made a slight movement with his head as if dismissing a problem that was now completely solved, and turned his attention to the crossword puzzle.

  Evelyn went on with her needlework in silence, that small secret smile still on her lips. She understood his state of mind as well as if she could actually read his thoughts. He was restless and uneasy without Effie, but that would soon pass. He was not introspective or analytical. He accepted things at their face value. He liked peace and quiet and his creature comforts—and those she could give him. Already he depended on her more than he realised. Effie had gone, and not for a moment did Evelyn think that Effie would ever come back. She didn’t quite know why she was so confident on that point, but she was. She knew that Effie would never come back. Not while she was there, at any rate, so what she had to do was to consolidate her position, and ensure that she would be there. After all, only she was aware by what ceaseless pinpricks, administered under a cover of affection, even of tenderness, she had made Effie’s position in the house intolerable. She hated Effie—had hated her from the beginning, even before she had realised the possibilities of the situation. She hated her for her inefficiency and vagueness and weakness, for her appealing, blue-eyed prettiness. . . .