by Ursula Bloom
‘To see the garden, or play tennis, or something?’ Dick grinned. Aubrey disengaged himself quietly but efficiently, adopting the cold grande dame manner of his mother.
‘I’ve got something better to do,’ said he and walked rapidly on. The shotgun discharged its contents again, this time dangerously closer, and he could hear them laughing, and was horribly afraid. He strode rapidly over the fields, trying to get out of earshot, and all the time the sense of furious indignation prevailed running at fever pitch within him. How he wished that he could be like other young men and join in that sort of activity! Enjoy it. Revel in it. Have fun. But for Aubrey fun did not lie in that direction.
He took the long way home, five good miles of it, which brought him to the parish of Fincham, a little hamlet set in the valley. Its clustering houses were ridiculously like toy ones set round a squarely cut church. There was the farm on the hill which had at one time employed Alice, and there was the rectory flanked with laurels and a single elm tree standing beside the sagging gate. Mr. Benson himself was standing there, his arms folded on the top bar, a small stout man in a grey flannel suit that bore signs of continuous wear, and a black straw hat perched forward on his head.
‘Oh, hello?’ he said to Aubrey, ‘a pleasant evening, isn’t it, but rather warm? Much too warm to last, of course.’
Aubrey knew now that he had come here for a purpose. Walking along he had had no real inkling of what was going on inside him, but now he knew. Mr. Benson could tell him about Alice Carter, and he wanted to hear of her. They chatted of the weather that was too warm to last, then Aubrey said, ‘We’ve got one of your old maids come to us. She arrived today.’
‘Yes, of course. Alice Carter.’ Edward Benson smiled tolerantly. ‘She’s quite a nice girl; stupid, you know, but nice. She comes from a bad family, dilatory, very careless. The mother’s a trollop, the father a Baptist. I don’t care for them.’
‘The girl seems nice.’
Edward Benson shot Aubrey a glance, gathering what might have happened. ‘Yes, but environment always tells in the long run,’ said he, ‘she’ll revert to type and the mother is almost mentally deficient.’
Aubrey was repelled by Mr. Benson’s narrowness, but the old habit of the facade refused to be defeated. ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ he agreed.
‘And how are all your people? Well, I hope? Your dear mother? How is your dear mother?’
‘She’s all right,’ and all the time Aubrey was wondering how he could steer the conversation back without being too obvious over it.
‘And your father? Such a character, your dear father, calls a spade a spade, and sticks to it.’
‘He’s all right too.’
Aubrey realized that he couldn’t steer the conversation back again. He stood there talking, and finally losing interest, made his adieux. It had been a most unsatisfactory walk. Mr. Biddlecombe, those horrible young Jamesons, Mr. Benson. When Aubrey came to think of it he felt that Mr. Benson was the worst of them all, the silly old fool!
Walking home slowly through the fragrant lane, he met Frances Cousens. Frances was the only child of Lady Cousens who owned the Manor House. Lady Cousens was an obese and trying dowager with long ear-rings and loops of chins vying with one another for pride of place. Although Frances was a year his senior, Aubrey knew that his mother was always hoping that there would be ‘something between them’, which embarrassed him. Frances too, in all probability. Frances was slender, beautifully made, in a way that was almost too perfect, because it gave Aubrey a sense of inferiority. Her light brown hair was always scrupulously tidy and swept back, and although later on her face might develop chins, and the lengthening lobes of the ears merit long ear-rings, tonight she was tender, and round-faced, and wholly attractive.
‘Hello, Aubrey! It was so hot that I came out for some air.’
‘I think there is going to be a storm. It feels like it. So heavy.’
‘I think so too, and how I hate thunder! It always makes my head ache and and I get horribly nervous.’
‘It makes me feel actually ill.’
‘Been over to Fincham?’
‘Yes, to see Mr. Benson. Can’t say that I like him, too prim and proper.’ And as he said it he wished that he had Frances’s poise; she was one of those people who would never have gone hot and cold because the Jamesons had let off a shotgun, or because of the embarrassing details of Mr. Biddlecombe’s stomach. He admired her for the very emotions that he himself lacked. They walked together towards the village, talking of little unimportances with the lushness of spring around them. They said good night on the green that sprawled before the Hayworth Arms, its one stunted elm looking like a screwy old woman, for its crown had been blasted by the serious thunderstorm of three years ago.
When they met alone, this way, he enjoyed talking to Frances, it was her mother and his mother who altered everything and spoilt it all for both of them. He loped up the garden, hands in pockets, and round in the direction of the woodhouse he saw the flutter of a cambric apron and knew that Alice and Milly were there together.
Three
The great adventures flash suddenly into life, threads of gold zigzagging through the drab of everyday existence. Aubrey knew that he felt an ever-increasing delight in the presence of Alice, and that he made excuses to speak to her, pretending that they were not excuses, even to himself. The affair moved rapidly as such affairs do.
One afternoon he found her in the vegetable garden gathering mint for the roast lamb that night. She knelt in the hot dry border, and he knew that her black frock would retain some of the aromatic essence long after the mint was dead. She had taken off her cap, and her hair was soft and fluffy like the yellow down on a maturing duckling before it turns to dingy brown. He liked the look of her hair and longed to touch it; he liked her tender curves; she was buxom with youth; everything about her contrasted with his mother, the only other woman with whom he compared her.
He stopped. ‘You’re happy here?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes, sir.’
‘You like Mrs. Parkin?’
Alice didn’t like Mrs. Parkin, whom she found both cross and arbitrary, but she said, ‘Oh yes, sir’, readily enough, because her mother had warned her that one must always agree with gentry or commit a bad social blunder.
‘We hope that you’ll stay with us a very long time,’ said Aubrey. Mindful of the gardener’s rude predictions on the day of her arrival, Alice said nothing, and he, jumping at the wrong conclusion, said quickly, ‘You don’t mean that you’re thinking of leaving us already? Why, Alice, you do like us? You do like me?’
Already the affair was taking on the personal angle. Neither of them noticed it. It seemed that she flowered for him in the herb bed with her foraging hands that were greened by mint, and her capless head golden with the babyish curls. ‘Oh sir, I do like you. I like you very much,’ she said.
Aubrey knelt down beside her. He felt exhilarated.
‘I knew that I liked you the very first time that I saw you, Alice,’ he said, and he was surprised to find that he had hold of her wrists, and could feel the thinness of her bones; he had longed to touch her, and now the actual moment of contact was in itself a glory. He wasn’t a stranger any more. This was himself, a personality with no need to draw a veil across its face. He started talking quickly, saying silly things that he believed to be beautiful, and all the time Alice stared at him with amazed eyes, making only the briefest replies. Her throat constricted with pride that he had even deigned to notice her. Against the lovely background of a garden in spring, these two young people were carried away, they rushed into a romantic emotion believing themselves to be pioneers on hitherto unexplored territory.
At last Alice realized it was not a dream. She drew away her hand. ‘Mr. Aubrey, this isn’t right.’
‘It’s quite right. You must trust me, you know.’
‘Yes, sir, of course, but ‒’
He had the glorious feeling that he was a knight errant able
to defend her, that she was, anyway for the time being, his lady. Then he heard the sound of footsteps coming out on to the gravel before the house, a woman’s footsteps, brushing the earth in antithesis to the solid tread of a man. He knew that it was his mother. ‘Quickly!’ he told Alice, ashamed that the very sound of a tread should be so alarming. ‘Quickly! Run into the house, and leave this to me.’
She scampered away, and he knew that she was scared. He straightened his tie, trying to hide his own feelings, dug his hands deep into his trousers pockets and sauntered up the garden to meet his mother with what he hoped to be complete sangfroid. He looked at the blue rows of delphiniums with white eyes, and the hollyhocks like paper flowers associated with carnival and ballet, and he knew as he approached Maud Lester that her woman’s intuition had recognised that something was amiss. He knew it by the way in which she walked, carrying her grizzled head high, with the little whiskers falling awkwardly from her nape to the stiffened net collar, rather like short hay in a badly made rick.
‘Wasn’t that Alice?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ but even though he made a swaggering effort, he could not deceive her.
‘I wish you wouldn’t talk to the servants, Aubrey, it only turns their heads, and they’re silly enough as it is. There’s no need to make them sillier.’
He did not know why he said ‘I wasn’t talking to Alice’, probably only because it was part of the facade he put up and could not escape.
‘I saw you through the trees. Very silly, because you have nothing in common.’
He wished that he could tell her that they had the one thing in common, loneliness, with the heady attraction of youth. But he said nothing.
‘If you must start talking to girls, why not encourage Frances Cousens? She at least has the merit of being in your own position of life.’
‘I always find her very unapproachable.’
‘You can’t expect a lady to accept clandestine kisses with the ecstasy of a housemaid,’ Maud snapped.
He wished she wouldn’t say things like that, it always made him feel such a fool. If only he could have a row with her, rout her and wound her, he would himself become a new person. He would be triumphant. But a man does not rout and wound his mother, he could only suffer her rebukes, feeling hot and cold and awkward with almost the gaucherie of a youth.
‘Really, Mother, there was nothing in it.’
‘Not for you, but those girls are so easily led astray, and after all Alice comes of poor stock.’
‘Quite a lot of brilliant men and women have come from poor stock. What about William Shakespeare? Napoleon? What about Lady Hamilton?’
‘Oh, Lady Hamilton!’ and his mother’s lip curled.
‘She helped the navy at Naples, she saved England. It’s so queer that a man may be immoral and a hero, but a woman apparently cannot be both. I should have thought that England would have done well to remember that had there been more Emmas there would have been more Nelsons.’
Maud was not erudite; she had acquired merely the skimpiest outline of Emma Hart’s history, because her governess had deemed it inadvisable to go too deeply into it. ‘It is,’ she commented, ‘always so easy to correct one’s parents.’
‘I didn’t mean it that way, Mother.’
‘I don’t know what you did mean. Here you are flirting with a housemaid, and apparently you expect me to be pleased about it. Really, Aubrey, you are the most trying boy.’
‘I wasn’t flirting. Naturally I feel about the servants as you do, they’re just servants.’ And all the time he knew that he was taking ambush behind his facade. He had no choice.
They walked down the garden through the churchyard, dry and crumbling, through the far lychgate, and into the post office which smelt of pear drops and cheap cheese, of closed clean windows and too bright sun. The new stiff blinds were half down and smelt of dress.
Aubrey said no more, but inside him he resented it bitterly.
It was the fête season and Aubrey was expected to take his mother over to Fincham in the Rover that his father had bought him.
In the heat even the sagging maroon gate of Fincham rectory looked festive, arched as it now was with small triangular flags and hung with Chinese lanterns for which was charged an entrance fee of sixpence. The Lesters arrived late and after making several purchases which Aubrey had to shuffle inside the car in the stable yard, they sat down to tea on the rectory lawn.
Everyone was here, and Mr. Benson had reserved a large round table for his friends, nicely segregating them from the common people at the small tables. There was Mrs. Weston, the squire’s wife, who wore the badge of the Royal Yacht Squadron in her sailor hat, a pop-eyed, nervy little woman for ever exclaiming ‘Oh Lor’!’ There was Lady Cousens, stolidly whaleboned at hip and waist, celluloid propping her sagging chins and loops of dewlaps, and with Frances looking coolly lovely in pale pink with a wide hat. But her mother was an unfortunate reminder of what Frances would possibly become later on.
Mr. Benson was very pleased to have important people at his table, and he bustled about, fussing, and over-officious for their comfort. Later his wife joined them. Until this moment Aubrey had never met Kay Benson. He had heard of her, of course, because there had been a good deal of local talk at the time of their marriage. She was twenty-eight to her husband’s fifty-five. Kay had been at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and report had it that she was a ‘blue stocking’. She was a smallish creature, very thin, and she had never cared too much for clothes, so that her white blouse bulged untidily above a serge skirt that was too big for her slender hips. Her dark hair was pushed on top, but even that had been done as though the effort required was too much, and her face was moist with hard work. It had the sheen of a pearl on it. She was not in the least attractive, and disappointedly Aubrey recognized this, yet at the same time he noted the intelligence of her eyes which were set in clearly blue white that had almost an oriental glow. They were the only important feature in her unimportant little face.
She flopped tiredly into the empty kitchen chair beside him, and she made no attempt to disguise her weariness.
‘It’s the heat,’ she said, ‘usually I have lots of vitality, but never in hot weather. I go limp and I’m like this. It’s such a nuisance when there’s a fête on and I’m wanted to be a real help, not just hang about.’
Her husband looked reprovingly at her. ‘If you took things as calmly as I do, Kay, you wouldn’t knock yourself up. The fête is going splendidly, and we have a beautiful day for it; it couldn’t be better. No need for a fuss. Have some cake?’
She took it, eating like a child who is really hungry, and Aubrey saw Frances looking at her. They were opposites, these two, and he knew it.
‘There’s a good deal too much work attached to these fêtes,’ said Kay, ‘collecting all the stuff together, sorting it, pricing it, committee meetings, and quarrelling with the stall-holders. I’ve been on my feet for three whole days. Edward doesn’t realize it; either his feet don’t hurt him or he keeps off them. I wish I knew how he does it.’
‘You won’t be able to dance later on?’
‘Won’t I? I’ve never missed it yet.’
As she looked at him he saw how vivid was the flame that burnt in that small body; he knew why her eyes were so brilliantly alive. She was an intensely real person; she had the quality of reality that so few have.
Afterwards the lawns were cleared, and the company drifted about in aimless groups waiting for the dancing to begin. Eventually the brass band arrived with miscellaneous uniforms, and gate fees were doubled in consequence. Then they started up with a lively tune, and after the first hesitancy, young couples were tempted out on to the shaved grass. The impetus gathered way. Aubrey saw Kay standing alone, and he went across to her by the bushes, already shadowy with evening.
‘You said you danced?’
‘I do.’
He put an arm round her, immediately aware that she wore no whalebone contraption like his moth
er, but that her slender body was entirely yielding. She danced gladly, he would not have believed that her feet hurt her. When the band stopped she turned to him.
‘I’m sorry that’s over, for I really enjoyed it. Now I’ll have to go back to sausage rolls and ginger beers. If I leave it all to the churchwardens’ wives they only make a mess of it. You’ll have to excuse me.’
‘Of course.’
He was surprised to find that he let her go with regret. He wondered why that gaily impulsive creature could ever have married a dry old stick like Edward Benson. Why did people consider her to be a ‘blue stocking’? She wasn’t. He was sure of that.
He found that his mother had gone home with Mrs. Weston and that now he was free to do what he liked. Frances and her mother had departed too, there was nobody left to dance with, for now Kay Benson was entirely occupied with the refreshments, so he stood aside, watching proceedings. Paper lanterns were being lit within and now hung in the trees, yellow bobbles of light. As he stood there, he saw Alice near him. That was a surprise. A pleasant one. She was wearing her best frock, a cheap green one, too tight across her full bosom, and much too loose about her hips. She must have seen him for some little time, though he had only just realized that she was there.
‘Oh, hello!’ he said. Suddenly the evening had changed. The moon was rising, the stars were bright.
‘It’s ever so lovely, sir, isn’t it?’
At this moment he wanted to dance with her; he was eager to take her into his arms, but he daren’t, because what would people say? He knew that she wanted to dance, that she was waiting to be asked, and disappointed by the delay.
‘I’m dog tired,’ he lied.
They could talk, he suggested, and they went to a little bench overhung by the shrubbery, where no one could see them. The jasmine showered about it, the evening primrose mixed its sweetness with the essence of syringa from the starry bush which stood overloaded with blossom at the corner of the lawn. Alice was not flame-like and alive like Kay Benson, but rounded and soft, and Aubrey knew that she disturbed him. He tried to choke down the emotion, but it refused to be choked. He sat holding her hand, trying not to think of her appealing little body, yet knowing that much as he wanted to draw back, he was rapidly approaching what was to be a mountain peak in his life.
