Richard Cauldfield looked rather shocked and not at all amused.
‘That’s very arbitrary, isn’t it?’
‘Edith is privileged.’
‘All the same, you know, it doesn’t do to spoil servants.’
He’s reproving me, thought Ann with amusement. She said gently:
‘There aren’t many servants about to spoil. And anyway Edith is more a friend than a servant. She has been with me a great many years.’
‘Oh, I see.’ He felt he had been gently rebuked, yet his impression remained. This gentle pretty woman was being bullied by some tyrannical domestic. She wasn’t the kind of woman who could stand up for herself. Too sweet and yielding a nature.
He said vaguely: ‘Spring cleaning? Is this the time of year one does it?’
‘Not really. It should be done in March. But my daughter is away for some weeks in Switzerland, so it makes an opportunity. When she’s at home there is too much going on.’
‘You miss her, I expect?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Girls don’t seem to like staying at home much nowadays. I suppose they’re keen on living their own lives.’
‘Not quite as much as they were, I think. The novelty has rather worn off.’
‘Oh. It’s a very nice day, isn’t it? Would you like to walk across the park, or would it tire you?’
‘No, of course it wouldn’t. I was just going to suggest it to you.’
They crossed Victoria Street and went down a narrow passageway, coming out finally by St James’s Park station. Cauldfield looked up at the Epstein statues.
‘Can you see anything whatever in those? How can one call things like that Art?’
‘Oh, I think one can. Very definitely so.’
‘Surely you don’t like them?’
‘I don’t personally, no. I’m old-fashioned and continue to like classical sculpture and the things I was brought up to like. But that doesn’t mean that my taste is right. I think one has to be educated to appreciate new forms of art. The same with music.’
‘Music! You can’t call it music.’
‘Mr Cauldfield, don’t you think you’re being rather narrow-minded?’
He turned his head sharply to look at her. She was flushed, a trifle nervous, but her eyes met his squarely and did not flinch.
‘Am I? Perhaps I am. Yes, I suppose when you’ve been away a long time, you tend to come home and object to everything that isn’t strictly as you remember it.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘You must take me in hand.’
Ann said quickly: ‘Oh, I’m terribly old-fashioned myself. Sarah often laughs at me. But what I do feel is that it is a terrible pity to – to – how shall I put it? – close one’s mind just as one is getting – well, getting old. For one thing, it’s going to make one so tiresome – and then, also, one may be missing something that matters.’
Richard walked in silence for some moments. Then he said:
‘It sounds so absurd to hear you talk of yourself as getting old. You’re the youngest person I’ve met for a long time. Much younger than some of these alarming girls. They really do frighten me.’
‘Yes, they frighten me a little. But I always find them very kind.’
They had reached St James’s Park. The sun was fully out now and the day was almost warm.
‘Where shall we go?’
‘Let’s go and look at the pelicans.’
They watched the birds with contentment, and talked about the various species of water fowl. Completely relaxed and at ease, Richard was boyish and natural, a charming companion. They chatted and laughed together and were astonishingly happy in each other’s company.
Presently Richard said: ‘Shall we sit down for a while in the sun? You won’t be cold, will you?’
‘No, I’m quite warm.’
They sat on two chairs and looked out over the water. The scene with its rarefied colouring was like a Japanese print.
Ann said softly: ‘How beautiful London can be. One doesn’t always realize it.’
‘No. It’s almost a revelation.’
They sat quietly for a minute or two, then Richard said:
‘My wife always used to say that London was the only place to be when spring came. She said the green buds and the almond trees and in time the lilacs all had more significance against a background of bricks and mortar. She said in the country it all happened confusedly and it was too big to see properly. But in a suburban garden spring came overnight.’
‘I think she was right.’
Richard said with an effort, and not looking at Ann:
‘She died – a long time ago.’
‘I know. Colonel Grant told me.’
Richard turned and looked at her.
‘Did he tell you how she died?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s something I shall never get over. I shall always feel that I killed her.’
Ann hesitated a moment, then spoke:
‘I can understand what you feel. In your place I should feel as you do. But it isn’t true, you know.’
‘It is true.’
‘No. Not from her – from a woman’s point of view. The responsibility of accepting that risk is the woman’s. It’s implicit in – in her love. She wants the child, remember. Your wife did – want the child?’
‘Oh yes. Aline was very happy about it. So was I. She was a strong healthy girl. There seemed no reason why anything should go wrong.’
There was silence again.
Then Ann said: ‘I’m sorry – so very sorry.’
‘It’s a long time ago now.’
‘The baby died too?’
‘Yes. In a way, you know, I’m glad of that. I should, I feel, have resented the poor little thing. I should always have remembered the price that was paid for its life.’
‘Tell me about your wife.’
Sitting there, in the pale wintry sunlight, he told her about Aline. How pretty she had been and how gay. And the sudden quiet moods she had had when he had wondered what she was thinking about and why she had gone so far away.
Once he broke off to say wonderingly: ‘I have not spoken about her to anyone for years,’ and Ann said gently: ‘Go on.’
It had all been so short – too short. A three months’ engagement, their marriage – ‘the usual fuss, we didn’t really want it all, but her mother insisted’. They had spent their honeymoon motoring in France, seeing the chateaux of the Loire.
He said inconsequentially: ‘She was nervous in a car, you know. She’d keep her hand on my knee. It seemed to give her confidence, I don’t know why she was nervous. She’d never been in an accident.’ He paused and then went on: ‘Sometimes, after it had all happened, I used to feel her hand sometimes when I was driving out in Burma. Imagine it, you know … It seemed incredible that she should go right away like that – right out of life …’
Yes, thought Ann, that is what it feels like – incredible. So she had felt about Patrick. He must be somewhere. He must be able to make her feel his presence. He couldn’t go out like that and leave nothing behind. That terrible gulf between the dead and the living!
Richard was going on. Telling her about the little house they had found in a cul-de-sac, with a lilac bush and a pear tree.
Then, when his voice, brusque and hard, came to the end of the halting phrases, he said again wonderingly: ‘I don’t know why I have told you all this …’
But he did know. When he had asked Ann rather nervously if it would be all right to lunch at his club – ‘they have a kind of Ladies’ Annexe, I believe – or would you rather go to a restaurant?’ – and when she had said that she would prefer the club, and they had got up and begun to walk towards Pall Mall, the knowledge was in his mind, though not willingly recognized by him.
This was his farewell to Aline, here in the cold unearthly beauty of the park in winter.
He would leave her here, beside the lake, with the bare branches of the trees showing their tracery against the sky
.
For the last time, he brought her to life in her youth and her strength and the sadness of her fate. It was a lament, a dirge, a hymn of praise – a little perhaps of all of them.
But it was also a burial.
He left Aline there in the park and walked out into the streets of London with Ann.
Chapter Four
1
‘Mrs Prentice in?’ asked Dame Laura Whitstable.
‘Not just at present she isn’t. But I should fancy she mayn’t be long. Would you like to come in and wait, ma’am? I know she’d want to see you.’
Edith drew aside respectfully as Dame Laura came in.
The latter said:
‘I’ll wait for a quarter of an hour, anyway. It’s some time since I’ve seen anything of her.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Edith ushered her into the sitting-room and knelt down to turn on the electric fire. Dame Laura looked round the room and uttered an exclamation.
‘Furniture been shifted round, I see. That desk used to be across the corner. And the sofa’s in a different place.’
‘Mrs Prentice thought it would be nice to have a change,’ said Edith. ‘Come in one day, I did, and there she was shoving things round and hauling them about. “Oh, Edith,” she says, “don’t you think the room looks much nicer like this? It makes more space.” Well, I couldn’t see any improvement myself, but naturally I didn’t like to say so. Ladies have their fancies. All I said was: “Now don’t you go and strain yourself, ma’am. Lifting and heaving’s the worst thing for your innards and once they’ve slipped out of place they don’t go back so easy.” I should know. It happened to my own sister-in-law. Did it throwing up the window-sash, she did. On the sofa for the rest of her days, she was.’
‘Probably quite unnecessary,’ said Dame Laura robustly. ‘Thank goodness we’ve got out of the affectation that lying on a sofa is the panacea for every ill.’
‘Don’t even let you have your month after childbirth now,’ said Edith disapprovingly. ‘My poor young niece, now, they made her walk about on the fifth day.’
‘We’re a much healthier race now than we’ve ever been before.’
‘I hope so, I’m sure,’ said Edith gloomily. ‘Terribly delicate I was as a child. Never thought they’d rear me. Fainting fits I used to have, and spasms something awful. And in winter I’d go quite blue – the cold used to fly to me ’art.’
Uninterested in Edith’s past ailments, Dame Laura was surveying the rearranged room.
‘I think it’s a change for the better,’ she said. ‘Mrs Prentice is quite right. I wonder she didn’t do it before.’
‘Nest-building,’ said Edith, with significance.
‘What?’
‘Nest-building. I’ve seen birds at it. Running about with twigs in their mouths.’
‘Oh.’
The two women looked at each other. Without any change of expression, some intelligence appeared to be imparted. Dame Laura asked in an off-hand way:
‘Seen much of Colonel Grant lately?’
Edith shook her head.
‘Poor gentleman,’ she said. ‘If you were to ask me, I’d say he’s had his conger. French for your nose being put out of joint,’ she added in an explanatory fashion.
‘Oh, congé – yes, I see.’
‘He was a nice gentleman,’ said Edith, putting him in the past tense in a funereal manner and as though pronouncing an epitaph. ‘Oh, well!’
As she left the room, she said: ‘I’ll tell you one who won’t like the room being rearranged, and that’s Miss Sarah. She don’t like changes.’
Laura Whitstable raised her beetling eyebrows. Then she pulled a book from a shelf and turned its pages in a desultory manner.
Presently she heard a latch-key inserted and the door of the flat opened. Two voices, Ann’s and a man’s, sounded cheerful and gay in the small vestibule.
Ann’s voice said: ‘Oh, post. Ah, here’s a letter from Sarah.’
She came into the sitting-room with the letter in her hand and stopped short in momentary confusion.
‘Why, Laura, how nice to see you.’ She turned to the man who had followed her into the room. ‘Mr Cauldfield, Dame Laura Whitstable.’
Dame Laura summed him up quickly.
Conventional type. Could be obstinate. Honest. Goodhearted. No humour. Probably sensitive. Very much in love with Ann.
She began talking to him in her bluff fashion.
Ann murmured: ‘I’ll tell Edith to bring us tea,’ and left the room.
‘Not for me, my dear,’ Dame Laura called after her. ‘It’s nearly six o’clock.’
‘Well, Richard and I want tea, we’ve been to a concert. What will you have?’
‘Brandy and soda.’
‘All right.’
Dame Laura said:
‘Fond of music, Mr Cauldfield?’
‘Yes. Particularly of Beethoven.’
‘All English people like Beethoven. Sends me to sleep, I’m sorry to say, but then I’m not particularly musical.’
‘Cigarette, Dame Laura?’ Cauldfield proffered his case.
‘No, thanks, I only smoke cigars.’
She added, looking shrewdly at him: ‘So you’re the type of man who prefers tea to cocktails or sherry at six o’clock?’
‘No, I don’t think so. I’m not particularly fond of tea. But somehow it seems to suit Ann –’ He broke off. ‘That sounds absurd!’
‘Not at all. You display perspicacity. I don’t mean that Ann doesn’t drink cocktails or sherry, she does, but she’s essentially the type of woman who looks her best sitting behind a tea-tray – a tea-tray on which is beautiful old Georgian silver and cups and saucers of fine porcelain.’
Richard was delighted.
‘How absolutely right you are!’
‘I’ve known Ann for a great many years. I’m very fond of her.’
‘I know. She has often spoken about you. And, of course, I know of you from other sources.’
Dame Laura gave him a cheerful grin.
‘Oh yes, I’m one of the best-known women in England. Always sitting on committees, or airing my views on the wireless, or laying down the law generally on what’s good for humanity. However, I do realize one thing and that is that whatever one accomplishes in life, it is really very little and could always quite easily have been accomplished by somebody else.’
‘Oh, come now,’ Richard protested. ‘Surely that’s a very depressing conclusion to come to?’
‘It shouldn’t be. Humility should always lie behind effort.’
‘I don’t think I agree with you.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘No. I think that if a man (or woman, of course) is ever to accomplish anything worth doing, the first condition is that he must believe in himself.’
‘Why should he?’
‘Come now, Dame Laura, surely –’
‘I’m old-fashioned. I would prefer that a man should have knowledge of himself and belief in God.’
‘Knowledge – belief, aren’t they the same thing?’
‘I beg your pardon, they’re not at all the same thing. One of my pet theories (quite unrealizable, of course, that’s the pleasant part about theories) is that everybody should spend one month a year in the middle of a desert. Camped by a well, of course, and plentifully supplied with dates or whatever you eat in deserts.’
‘Might be quite pleasant,’ said Richard, smiling. ‘I’d stipulate for a few of the world’s best books, though.’
‘Ah, but that’s just it. No books. Books are a habit-forming drug. With enough to eat and drink, and nothing – absolutely nothing – to do, you’d have, at last, a fairly good chance to make acquaintance with yourself.’
Richard smiled disbelievingly.
‘Don’t you think most of us know ourselves pretty well?’
‘I certainly do not. One hasn’t time, in these days, to recognize anything except one’s more pleasing characteristics.’
&
nbsp; ‘Now what are you two arguing about?’ asked Ann, coming in with a glass in her hand. ‘Here’s your brandy and soda, Laura. Edith’s just bringing tea.’
‘I’m propounding my desert meditation theory,’ said Laura.
‘That’s one of Laura’s things,’ said Ann, laughing. ‘You sit in a desert and do nothing and find out how horrible you really are!’
‘Must everyone be horrible?’ asked Richard dryly. ‘I know psychologists tell one so – but really – why?’
‘Because if one only has time to know part of oneself one will, as I said just now, select the pleasantest part,’ said Dame Laura promptly.
‘It’s all very well, Laura,’ said Ann, ‘but after one has sat in one’s desert and found out how horrible one is, what good will it do? Will one be able to change oneself?’
‘I should think that would be most unlikely – but it does at least give one a guide as to what one is likely to do in certain circumstances, and even more important, why one does it.’
‘But isn’t one able to imagine quite well what one is likely to do in given circumstances? I mean, you’ve only got to imagine yourself there?’
‘Oh Ann, Ann! Think of any man who rehearses in his own mind what he is going to say to his boss, to his girl, to his neighbour across the way. He’s got it all cut and dried – and then, when the moment comes, he is either tongue-tied or says something entirely different! The people who are secretly quite sure they can rise to any emergency are the ones who lose their heads completely, while those who are afraid they will be inadequate surprise themselves by taking complete grasp of a situation.’
‘Yes, but that’s not quite fair. What you’re meaning now is that people rehearse imaginary conversations and actions as they would like them to be. They probably know quite well it wouldn’t really happen. But I think fundamentally one does know quite well what one’s reactions are and what – well, what one’s character is like.’
‘Oh, my dear child.’ Dame Laura held up her hands. ‘So you think you know Ann Prentice – I wonder.’
Edith came in with the tea.
‘I don’t think I’m particularly nice,’ said Ann, smiling.
‘Here’s Miss Sarah’s letter, ma’am,’ said Edith. ‘You left it in your bedroom.’
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