by Ursula Bloom
One hot sticky April day Percy Biggins was dispatched by Mr. Clements on behalf of the local sewage planning. This was when he came across something interesting. The council was proposing to lay a sewer across the fields which would take in Hayworth, until this time only served by a very unsatisfactory cesspool system. Percy Biggins was sent out to find how the land lay, and it lay through the garden of George Herrick’s cottage, where Alice was sitting in the sunshine with her child. Maturer and riper than she had hitherto been, she still had that physical quality of attraction that Percy Biggins ‒ who liked women ‒ could not miss. He was rebuffed.
Later when he went for a pint into the Hayworth Arms, he came into conversation with that gold mine of information, Mr. Biddlecombe. Mr. Biddlecombe loved a ‘nice talk’. When they had exhausted the topic of his stomach (it had been disappointingly better lately), he gave Percy the scandal line for line. He knew all about it. Percy brought it back to Mr. Clement’s office at Mainwaring, polishing it here or there, giving it a flick and a flourish, and he let it loose.
‘What ho!’ said Percy Biggins. ‘What a dark horse! Would you believe it?’
Aubrey leant over the plans for Bartlesham cottages, trying to pretend that he could not hear what was going on, but his face burnt with dismay. Percy Biggins and the doctor’s son thought it a glorious joke, and what a spree that they had managed to cash in on it! What a bit of luck! Dull old Aubrey, who’d have thought it of him? He tried to remain deaf to the two young men twittering together, knowing that it would be fatal to lose his temper, but he felt furious. He walked home that evening, he believed that he could walk away from himself. What on earth could he do next?
Go away. That was, of course, the thing to do. Right away. Cut himself adrift. Leave his mother, the house and the garden, and go out into the world and find somewhere new. Away from all this. Only Aubrey was chained by those sentimental chains that bind too tight. He was not to escape so easily. Mrs. Lester had fostered his own weakness, and had tied him to her. The initial effort required was more than he could give.
Turning a corner, he saw Alice herself. She was coming towards him and already far too close for him to escape, and she wheeled a dilapidated perambulator of the kind that smells of the soiled shawls of previous inhabitants. It rocked on its tyreless wheels, and groaned as though grumbling at its progress. It was unthinkable to Aubrey that his son should be lurching along in such a contraption, its white enamel handle loose on its iron pin, turning and squeaking in Alice’s hands. She looked older, and thicker, already her springtime colouring had set, and in an instant he saw how she had changed.
For nature cheats. She lures with a mirage of the stuff that will not endure, she makes her victims see gold where there is only dross, beauty where there is merely attraction. Then, having achieved her own ends, she has no scruples about revealing the truth of her charlatanry. Agonized, he wondered now how he could ever have fallen in love with Alice even for those few minutes. Now he did not know what to do.
They met.
He wanted not to look, but he saw her rather pitiful eyes, and the startled colour in her cheeks, for Alice, poor girl, was still in love with him. Because it was cruel not to stop and speak, he stopped.
‘Hello, Alice!’
‘Good evening, Mr. Aubrey.’
‘I hope you’re better?’
‘Oh yes, sir. I’m much better now.’
‘Is George well?’ He dared nor enquire after the baby, though he wanted to.
‘Oh yes, sir, George’s very well.’
‘Good.’
He made a little movement as though he would pass on and along the lane to Thornhill, when she stayed him. ‘The baby, sir? Don’t you want to see the baby?’
There was no escape. He went through the agony of seeing her tilt the pram towards him, pulling down the coverlet to disclose the small red face hooded in a yellow shawl. It was like every other baby’s face in the world, disappointingly so, but it was still his child.
‘I think he’s a very pretty baby,’ he lied.
Alice was too simple to recognize the lie. ‘Yes, sir, he is a very pretty baby,’ she said.
Then she set the pram back on its four wheels and started pushing it down the lane. He could hear her lagging feet and the noise that odious pram made. It had been a dreadful moment, a truly dreadful moment, and as he had stood there looking at the baby, he had been only too well aware of the two men within him. The man who wanted to own the baby, and the nervous weakling who would willingly have flown from it.
Mrs. Lester was coming down the path just as Aubrey opened the wooden gate and went inside. She had a little basket of spring flowers in her hand, and was picking some of the pink japonica from the spreading bush at the corner.
‘What have you been doing?’ she asked.
It had always occurred to Aubrey that she had a sixth sense ‒ of which he was afraid ‒ and in some extraordinary manner she knew already that he had met Alice in the lane. Although he said, ‘Nothing, nothing at all,’ he realized that his very manner betrayed him. He was nervous because he hated himself. The self that had wanted to run away. Yet so far the other man was not strong enough.
‘You’ve been seeing that girl?’
Then she did know!
‘I turned the corner of the lane on to her and there was no going back.’
‘Aubrey, you don’t mean to tell me that you’re starting that all over again?’
‘Don’t be silly, Mother, that’s absurd! Of course I’m not doing anything of the sort. How could I avoid meeting her in the lane?’
‘You could have passed her by?’
‘I certainly didn’t linger, if that’s what you mean.’
‘You stopped?’
‘Yes, I did. Now what are you going to do about that?’
‘She had the baby with her? I suppose you looked at it. Oh dear, my cup is indeed full. It’s quite dreadful to be so humiliated when one is getting on in life.’
He was as always acutely conscious of the abominable way in which his father had behaved to her, and he was sorry. It was horrible for a proud woman like Maud Lester to be penniless and entirely dependent on her son, but, in spite of her martyrdom, she had made sure of her ground. She still fought for her own way all the time.
‘Nobody is being humiliated, Mother, you seem to forget that now I’m a man and capable of living my own life.’
‘You’ve made a pretty good mess of it so far! Heaven knows where you would have been if you hadn’t had me to help you through it! Not that I expect any thanks.’
‘You were very good to me, and I’m grateful. But now I am grown up, I have my own estate and I prefer to live my life my own way. That’s all. Please, don’t let’s argue about it.’
‘I know. People never like the relations who are really good to them. You think I’m hard. You think I’m managing. It’s only because I have your interest at heart.’
‘I know that. If I didn’t know that I’d act differently. You’ve been splendid.’
‘I’m horribly lonely.’ She turned her tired face from him towards the exquisite pink and dark green of the japonica bush in full flower. ‘Life has been such a bitter disappointment to me, and it all hurts so much.’
‘I’m terribly sorry.’
‘I don’t know what I should have done if you had turned me out of Thornhill. I couldn’t have borne it. This is my home.’
But not his any more, and he knew it. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘it was a dreadful thing, and I’m ashamed that it happened. Still, Thornhill is your home and you are here with me.’
‘Yes, dear, with you.’
He watched her returning up the path in the black frock that she wore to conform to public opinion, not because she had ever cared a couple of curses for her husband, and he was ashamed to be aware of the fact that she was the ‘old man of the sea’ in his life. He would never be able to shake her off. He would have given a great deal to have had this house and garden to
himself, but there was exactly nothing that he could do about it. He felt frustrated and stood there picking at the japonica bush, and wishing that things could have been different. Or was it that he could have been different? He didn’t know.
The gate opened quietly, and he saw that Frances Cousens was coming in. She had obviously been crying. She was wearing a pale turquoise coat and skirt, and to the lapel was pinned a little fading punch of primroses, pathetically drooping. She saw him, and stopped.
‘Oh, Aubrey, are you alone? I did so want to talk to you. I happened to be passing and peeped in just hoping against hope that you would be here.’
‘I’m here and alone, and I want someone to talk to; come into the little orchard.’
They walked to the trees where the mossy Apollo stood with his arms outstretched. In the new grass the daffies were in bud, the stone seat had moss on it, and nearby a crimson wallflower attracted the vigorous bees. The sound of their humming, and of the cuckoo in the cluster of beeches in the park, stirred him.
‘Now tell me all about it, what’s been happening to you, Frances?’
‘It’s Mother.’
‘It’s Mother with me!’ and he tried to laugh, but it wasn’t a success.
‘I ‒ I know this is very disloyal of me, but there has been the most sickening row. And I hate rows. Mother is so pig-headed over things. She will treat me as if I were still six years old, and that in itself is quite maddening. The life of an only daughter condemned to live at home is appalling.’
‘You’re not alone there. The life of the only son is nothing to write home about. Why don’t you leave home, take a job, or something?’
‘Because how could I? I’ve had one of those good educations that fit a girl for absolutely nothing. That’s the truth. Now I’ve got to stick it, and sometimes, and always in the spring, it is quite, quite unbearable.’
‘Spring aggravates matters. Mother is on the rampage too. A martyr. I know my father treated her horribly, but she won’t let it alone. She harps on it. What is worse, she will interfere with everything I do. I can’t be myself.’
‘Neither can I, and today Mother has been a good deal worse that I have ever known her before.’
‘Why don’t you marry?’
‘Because nobody has asked me. Whom do I meet whom I could marry? Oh yes, I know, I’m trotted along to a few hunt balls in the winter and a few garden parties in the summer, with Mother fussing round me. Local young men go further afield for their wives, and I don’t blame them. I daresay I sound depressed, but you’d be depressed about it all.’
‘I am depressed about it all, very depressed,’ he said.
They sat quietly for a moment with only the enchanting sound of the bees and the cuckoo. Spring radiated the place, and the two of them as well. He put an arm round her, and her body did not resist him, but quivered a little.
‘Look here, Frances, we’re just a couple of over-mothered young people trying to find our real selves. We’ve got a common bond.’
‘I know.’
‘Frances, we could get married? We have so much in common, and we’ve been through some pretty sticky times of much the same brand. My dear …’
She began to cry. She hid her face in her hands, and her tears moved him, so that now he was sure this was the right thing to do.
‘Frances, I do love you, you know, and in the right way. Being in love doesn’t count, it is deeply caring for a person that matters. This isn’t impulse. I suppose I’ve been thinking about it for a very long time. Darling don’t cry.’
‘Oh Aubrey, I don’t know what to say.’
‘I’ll say it for you. We’ll be together for always, because you are going to say yes, aren’t you, dear?’
‘I don’t know. Is it right?’
‘Of course it’s the right thing to do. Of course it’s right. Now kiss me.’
She turned her face to his and kissed him. Now he knew that he was doing the right thing. ‘You’re a pet,’ he said.
‘I think I’ve always loved you, Aubrey. Together perhaps we can build up a new world. Together we can break away.’
‘Of course we can, and we will.’
‘Together we can do anything. I suppose your mother will want to go on living here, that will be only natural?’
‘Of course she will. But we’ll give her a suite and make her stay in it. I’ve never been able to do that whilst I was alone, because she has crept out with my loneliness as her excuse.’
‘Oh, Aubrey dear, we mustn’t be frightened. We must work this together. I ‒ I’m fairly pigheaded myself, you know.’
‘You won’t grow masterful? I don’t think I could bear any more masterful women.’
‘I certainly won’t be masterful with you.’
‘Darling!’ he said, and kissed her again.
Mrs. Parkin returning home from the shops, saw it out of the corner of her eye as she plodded up the path with the white violets pushing their way under the box edgings. Such goings-on, said Mrs. Parkin to herself, and only hoped none of the younger maids would see. It would only give them ideas.
Nine
Aubrey and Frances went into the house to tell his mother, just as Milly was bringing the tea into the drawing-room. Mrs. Lester sat on the sofa reading The Times, which lasted her all day. She looked at the two of them and guessed something, they really had no need to tell her.
‘This is what I’ve always wanted,’ she said, ‘I am not losing a son but gaining a daughter, a very dear daughter,’ and she kissed Frances warmly.
It was exactly what she had wanted.
They sat on the sofa, and a little later they made plans for the future apportionment of the house. Mrs. Lester was now prepared to accept the morning-room as her sole sitting-room, but showed fight on the subject of rendering up the best bedroom with its gracious view of the park, and the gazebo window. Frances suggested that she might like the side wing where the old nurseries had been, but instantly Mrs. Lester’s mouth set and her eyes became stubborn.
‘I’ll talk her round,’ said Aubrey when he went down to the gate to see Frances off.
‘She’s dreadfully stubborn. I thought my mother was bad, but yours is a good deal worse.’
‘You leave her to me,’ though he didn’t like the job.
They kissed again, with the hyacinth scent and the sound of the cuckoo and all the panoply of spring that cheats so hard. When he came back to the house, he knew that his mother had already galvanized all her forces against him. She was still sitting on the sofa primly with The Times folded, and Milly had removed the tea, though there was that rancid scent of hair oil lingering about the place. Mrs. Lester looked at him coldly.
‘I suppose, Aubrey, this is where I ought to go? Unfortunately I’ve nowhere to go to. It is shocking to be old and so tragically alone.’
‘Nobody is talking of your going, Mother. This is your home. I told you you could stay here for always, and you darned well can. But I do think you ought to realize that Frances is to choose which bedroom she likes.’
‘Of course. I don’t mind being pushed into an attic, if that is what you two want. All the same, I can’t imagine what people will say when they know.’
‘There aren’t any attics in Thornhill, and the west wing is particularly nice. You’ve always liked it till now; there is a lovely view of the woodland.’
‘Only I don’t happen to like woodland. It depresses me. Not that I suppose that’ll worry anybody.’
He stood lolling against the Adam fireplace. ‘Mother, you are going to make it very difficult for us if you insist on fighting inch by inch for everything and always wanting your own way. There is a law of give and take in this world.’
‘Very well. I’ll give up my room. It hurts me more than I can say, but I suppose when you get to my age you must expect to be hurt.’
‘Oh Lord! I do wish you’d be reasonable. Please, Mother, for the love of Mike try to be a bit helpful.’
‘Well, aren’t I being
helpful? I’ve given you my room. Already you have flung me out of my own sitting-room, what more do you want?’
‘If you will take this attitude it isn’t possible to discuss it with you. Do stop being a martyr.’ He had not thought that he would be able to say it!
She burst into tears. It was frightful to see her crying, he did not remember having seen it before. She walked out of the room rapidly, with the handkerchief pressed to her eyes. He was horrified that she would go upstairs and take poison! Fantastic thoughts menaced him. Supposing she went away, where would she go? He had won a victory, a small one, but it was a victory, and meeting her at dinner tonight was going to be about the most awkward thing in his life. He groaned at the thought of it.
Mrs. Lester made Milly take dinner into her own room.
Aubrey was married in August.
After the first ecstasy of becoming engaged, older people took control. Lady Cousens, his mother, and even Frances, all stipulated for a big wedding. They wanted a fuss, the very thing that Aubrey wished to avoid. He was made to settle far more on his bride than he had originally intended.
Business matters usurped the happier moments. He was moody and unhappy. He had won a victory over his mother, and never for a moment did she forget to remind him of it.
The night before his wedding he went off for a long stroll. He went to Fincham. He hadn’t meant to take that route, but the village was so full of the wedding, and Mr. Biddlecombe lying in wait for him (full of the warning that when a man marries his troubles begin), so that tonight Aubrey was avoiding the place.
The rickyard was quiet; the young Jamesons were elsewhere. He turned into the small plantation already with the first whisper of autumn in it. The sycamore leaves had bronze rims, the silver birches trembled. The wood knew that the summer was spent, and soon the first frosts would whiten the grasses and stain the brambles with scarlet.
He saw Kay approaching. She wore no hat, but then he always thought of her like that. She gave the appearance of wearing clothes too big for her, but her eyes were brilliant, and she laughed.
