by Ursula Bloom
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Darling, what a little idiot you are!’
She stared at him and now she knew that she was utterly dismayed. The colour came and went from her face, and she felt foolishly youthful, she did not know how to cope with the situation, and even whilst she thought this, it had got completely out of hand. ‘You’re being incredibly silly,’ she said, but her voice had become quite unreal.
He kissed the hand that he held, closing the fingers over the kiss with elaborate care, and handing it gravely back to her. ‘Now tell me all about it?’ he suggested.
Frances would never know why she told him anything, but somehow or other she did. ‘It’s dreadful that you should have found out, but my marriage has been the most awful failure. I never loved Aubrey as I ought to have done; we married because we were both horribly unhappy living at home with uncongenial mothers, and then, then I found out things.’
‘What things?’
‘I thought I could be happy, but Aubrey is the most extraordinary person. He had a baby in the village, the girl used to be housemaid at my mother-in-law’s, but instead of sending her away he let her marry a ploughman and stay on. It’s been most difficult. He promised me that he wouldn’t talk to her, but he did. I met them in the lane talking to one another.’
‘Yes, but he can’t be thinking of that kind of a girl when you’re about.’ Michael had an arm around her, encouraging in its kindliness.
‘I don’t know. I despair of ever knowing what Aubrey means. Now I realize that I dread his return, because the girl is still there, and the little boy is growing up. The awkward part is that he’s a clever child ‒ like Aubrey who, in his own way, is quite clever ‒ and he goes to the grammar school. There’s a busy-bodying little parson’s wife who butted in and arranged all that.’
‘Francie, don’t worry. Many a man has a wife and a mistress, but it’s the wife who is the one that counts.’
‘At the same time I don’t intend tolerating it right under my own nose, with all the village talking.’
‘You’re going the wrong way to work to stop it.’
She began to cry a little, she hadn’t thought that she would be so weak. Instantly he turned, and once again she knew that she was slipping over the cliff edge, as he kissed her. Aubrey had never kissed her that way. Life suddenly changed. Without being fully aware of what she did, she put up her arms and kissed him back, long and ardently. She hadn’t thought that she could do that, either.
‘There!’ he said triumphantly as he released her.
‘Mike, we must be mad. Quite mad.’
‘I don’t believe it. I believe that we are the two sane people in a mad world.’
‘But where is all this leading us?’
‘I don’t know, and what’s more, I don’t care. You love me, and I love you. That’s all there is to it.’
At the moment she did not want to query it, for she was so very happy. Excited and exhilarated, by what was happening, she sat there with his arms about her. She ought to be afraid of the future, of what was happening to them both, but she was not afraid. She believed this was the first time in her life that she had been completely and utterly happy.
When she drove the car home much later, she wondered sympathetically if the same thing had happened to Aubrey when he had started his affair with Alice. Had he suddenly lost all sense of perspective, and slipped over that cliff edge into the unutterable happiness beyond? It was perilously easy to do this; she knew it now. And if so, she had a stab in her heart that she was blaming him unfairly and that it wouldn’t do.
She put the car into the garage, trying to comfort herself with the wholly womanly assurance that his case had been very different, for everything was different for a man in this world. That was it, she thought as she walked up the garden, everything was different for a man. He had by far the easiest time of it.
But all the same she knew that she was in love with Michael Carey, and he with her. Whatever happened this secret had got to be kept from the rest of the world, because it was horrifying to contemplate what people would think of her, if they once discovered what was afoot. There was Sister with the lynx-like eye, and the other patients, who found life dull and amused themselves with prying upon one another, and magnifying petty scandals.
Just for the moment she couldn’t close the chapter; she hadn’t the strength of mind. She couldn’t shut Michael out, she had had so little from life that she had to take just some of the joy, before she finally dismissed him from her. They would have to pretend to the outside world that they meant nothing to one another, and then, just when she believed that they were succeeding so well, Hilda Stevens mentioned it to her. She never had liked Hilda Stevens, now she loathed her.
They were washing up in that horrid little butler’s pantry, and it was a particularly disgusting washing-up, for there had been liver and bacon for lunch.
‘I wouldn’t think too much of Michael Carey’ said Hilda, and her casualness was overdone. ‘He has a shot for every girl he wants and then leaves them flat. Once he was quite sweet to me, but I got his number first.’
‘He’s hardly likely to look at a married woman,’ said Frances with the dignity on which she prided herself.
‘Oh, isn’t he? That’s all you know. Marriage doesn’t make you immune from that sort of affair, even though our grandmothers thought that it did.’
‘I think you’re talking rubbish. Wait a moment, whilst I get a clean tea towel, this one is soaking.’
‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ said Hilda as she rinsed the plates under the tap.
It meant that Hilda had seen something, or heard something, and neither of those things suited Frances’s plans. She fell back on the only form of self-defence that she knew, even if it was a poor one, and she began to bluster a trifle. ‘Now what are you driving at, Hilda?’
‘Well, anybody can see how the land lies.’
‘Don’t be so silly. I’m far too old and wise to be interested in a man years younger than I am. I can’t think where you got the idea from.’
‘He’s only two years younger than you are. You’re a year older than I am, and I’m twenty-twenty-eight and he’s twenty-seven. He told me so the other day.’
‘What on earth were you two doing, discussing it?’
‘We are free to talk about what we like. If you’re going to turn huffy, well, that’s that. I only did it for your own good. You’re getting fond of him, and you’ll get hurt.’
There were moments when Frances would have dearly loved to have the privilege of boxing Hilda’s ears, but she could do nothing save continue with the distasteful washing-up, her mouth buttoned close, and her heart hammering furiously. Later she gave herself the chance to tell Michael what had happened, waylaying him in the hall that ran at the back of the home, and begging him to be more careful.
‘We have got to think of my husband.’
‘He isn’t your husband really. You’ve got nothing in common with one another, and you haven’t lived together for years.’
‘Michael, if you start that shocking argument, I won’t ever speak to you again.’
‘I’m starting nothing. You admitted the whole thing yourself, you know you did. Why not be straightforward and come out into the open and let the world see the mistake and have done with it? Of course everybody knows about it. What do you suppose villagers spend their time in doing? Sorting out other people’s business, of course!’
‘I would never admit it. It wouldn’t be decent.’
‘I may be queer, but I think it far more indecent to behave like this. Most of us put on rose-coloured glasses when we fall in love, and it means that we are all liable to make mistakes. It’s nobody’s fault, just sheer bad luck. I’m probably looking at you through a glorious shade of pink pebble, but all the same I’m in love with you, and what’s more I’m willing to undergo any of the unfortunate consequences of that love.’
‘Oh, Michael, don’t. This
has got to end. It has got to end the moment ‒ the moment I’m strong enough …’ Her voice trailed off into a little girl’s pathetic tone. She wasn’t strong enough to end it, and she knew it. The dignified, stately Frances she had believed herself to be, had crumbled. She could do nothing about it.
‘It isn’t going to end. You don’t want it to end, neither do I. We are both aware of that, but I’m the only one who can say so.’
She wished that he had not this accurate capacity for sizing up her feelings, and handing them back to her on a plate just as Salome was offered St. John the Baptist’s head. And what was worse, her thoughts looked about as repulsive. She was ashamed to be feeling this way, but try as she would, she could do nothing about it.
It’s got to end, she thought. But how?
She was still thinking that when she stood on the station platform awaiting Aubrey’s train. She had thought of nothing else for weeks, and she couldn’t sleep because of it. The home would finally break up, Michael would go away, and she couldn’t bear to part with him. It was her duty to go on living at Thornhill, if only because of what people would say. She had a husband, she had a mother-in-law; they expected this much of her.
She had a duty to herself. Only suddenly she had become a stranger to herself. The stranger frightened her.
Then, when she saw Aubrey leaping out of the train in overdone boyish exuberance, and in that wretched corporal’s uniform ‒ really, he might have got a commission, if only for her sake ‒ she could have screamed. He looked long and lean, he had always had the capacity for putting up an excellent facade, and now he gave her the impression that he was delighted to be back again. His return came between herself and Michael. If Aubrey had never come home; if he had been one of the enormous list of missing (not that she wished him any harm; she was, in fact, appalled in one way that the thought should ever occur to her); how different everything might have been!
She didn’t love Aubrey. She loved him a good deal less now than when he had joined up. The drive home was sickening, with fatuous attempts at conversation, and the whole of the subsequent evening was sickening too. Thank goodness, he accepted his old bedroom without question, that was one gigantic hurdle taken, she told herself, and lay back relieved. She could not have borne an argument just now.
Two days later, however, he came to her when she was at work in the sewing-room. During the war years Frances had been unable to get anyone to come in and do the mending for her and, much as it went against the grain, she herself had to occupy the tiny room allotted for sewing at the top of the stairs. It was small, and inclined to stuffiness, for it faced west and caught the fullness of the afternoon sun. The birds always made a great noise for they nested under the eaves above it; but, situated as it was, well away from the trees, it had a hard bright light which was excellent for sewing.
Once a week Frances came here, hating the job, and she darned and mended, and plied the sewing machine diligently, but only because nobody else would do it for her. She felt that in one way it was degrading. But the world was changing a good deal. That also had slipped over a cliff edge, but loveliness did not lie beyond. The world was definitely unpleasant to live in now.
She had come up to the sewing-room directly after lunch, to make a big attempt to break the back of the pile of linen which lay there awaiting her attention. When the door opened she was very surprised to see Aubrey put his head round it. She did not believe that she had ever seen him inside this room before, and could not imagine what he wanted from her.
‘I wanted to talk to you, Francie.’
‘Did you?’
He sat down on a pile of old hat boxes which had snippets in them, and out-of-date fashion books. The old dressmaker’s model was lying on its side in the corner, its upholstered bosom in grey calico looking almost profane against a skirt of meshed wire. Aubrey looked angular, she thought, and quite wrong against this workaday background. He was still very tan.
‘I’m rather busy,’ she said, setting sides to middle, and loathing it.
‘I wanted to have a little talk. I thought perhaps it would be very suitable if we went out into the orchard with the Apollo. Once before ‒ if you remember ‒ we had a very happy little talk there.’
‘I know.’ By her tone he realized that she was erecting a barricade and trying to shut him out. ‘But I wonder if you have chosen a very good time, Aubrey? There is such a lot to do, and it has got to be done.’
‘Can’t you get somebody in to do the sewing? What’s happened to old Miss Farthingay? She used to do it.’
‘She’s gone away. She went into a war job and made quite a lot of money. It’s money that is the root of all evil. They overpaid people dreadfully, and it’s turned their heads. Now they don’t want to work.’
‘Rough luck on you. I’m sorry. But all the same we ought to have a talk, you know. We can’t go on putting it off. We are starting life together again.’
‘Yes, I know.’ Only they weren’t. They were not together, and she did not mean them to be together. Not yet, anyway.
‘I thought perhaps it would be a good idea if we went away somewhere on a second honeymoon? After all, there’s always Mother here, and she is a third person. For the time being I do feel we ought to be alone together, to give us the chance to rediscover one another.’
The thought of a honeymoon alone with Aubrey horrified her as much as the thought of a honeymoon alone with Michael exhilarated her. She couldn’t possibly do it. Besides, if she went away now, she would lose some of the precious days with Mike. She couldn’t do that either.
‘I have my work to do, and even if the war is over for some people, there is still a lot left for others to clear up. And I like your mother; she has had a dreadfully difficult life, poor thing, and we have rather grown together. I’m sorry for her.’
‘I daresay, but surely a honeymoon is permissible without my mother? We could slip off to the Wye Valley, or the Lorna Doone country or somewhere attractive. I feel, Francie, that in a way we have lost one another. The real one another. We ought to make some attempt to meet again.’
She compared his gentleness with the forcefulness of Michael. Michael would take no nay, she could never have refused him anything. Aubrey’s mildness was too simple. It irritated her.
‘I don’t think it is much use being sentimental over things, Aubrey?’
‘I should have thought that marriage demanded some small sentiment?’
Desperately she fell back on her old arguments, if only because she could think of no others. ‘What about the way that you behaved over the Herricks?’
‘Must we go back to that?’
‘Yes, we must. It stands between us for ever. That child goes to Mainwaring grammar school, that wretched little Mrs. Benson has been looking after him. She’s another of your girl friends.’
Horrified, Aubrey looked at her. ‘One of my girl friends? What on earth do you mean?’
‘You’re always saying what a wonderful person she is, and I think she’s just horrible. Untidy. Looks silly. Always butting in. I detest her. And whilst she behaves like that over the boy, she makes me the laughing-stock of the whole neighbourhood.’
‘If you wish it so much, I’ll make a big effort to get the Herricks moved away, but I’ll only do it if you are prepared to come back to me.’ Aubrey was quite surprised at the firmness of his tone. ‘But before I started uprooting other people’s lives, I’d want to be quite sure. About you, I mean.’
‘I don’t see what you mean.’
‘Well, either we’re married, or we’re not. Which are we?’
‘We’re married, of course.’
‘We can’t go on this way.’
‘Well, you can’t rush me into decisions when I’m doing the mending. I shall want time to think about it.’
‘You mean that, even if I did uproot the Herricks, you wouldn’t want to live with me?’
‘Oh, Aubrey, don’t start being foolish. There is a lot of sewing to be done, and
I’ve got to get on with it. I can’t waste the entire afternoon talking nonsense when you know perfectly well that you don’t mean a word of what you say. You’ll never send the Herricks away, you’ve always said so.’
‘The old woman’s dead now. That makes a difference.’
‘It’s too late to do anything, the damage is done, and you were the one who did it.’
She threaded the needle of the machine with over-elaborate care, and put a sheet under the foot. She began to turn the handle vigorously, so that it made a purring sound like a bee’s, but it was not a pleasant hum like the hum a bee makes, it was wholly mechanical. For a short time Aubrey sat there watching her and, although she never glanced at him, she knew that he was watching her, and that his throat was constricted.
At last he got up. ‘Well, if it’s all no use …’ he said and went away.
She had won.
She went on turning the handle of the sewing machine, well aware that behind the sound of bees buzzing, her heart was making a little frightened noise of its own.
‘Did you tell him?’ asked Michael the next afternoon when Frances was on duty. It was the moment for the patients’ milk. These days they did not refuse it when Frances brought it, because they knew better; also she did not spill it in white puddles on the tray.
‘No, it wouldn’t be any good.’
‘You aren’t telling me that you intend to waste the rest of your life hanging about with a man whom you don’t give a damn for?’
‘I do give a damn for Aubrey. He has some very good qualities, very praiseworthy ones, and he’s clever.’
Michael pulled her apron and jerked her towards him. ‘You can’t start talking prunes-papa-potatoes-prisms to me, because I won’t have it! You don’t care if he’s clever or got good qualities. Women never admire good qualities in men, it’s the bad ones that interest them. You’re not the little prude you pretend to be. Tell Aubrey the truth about me, or I will.’
She was appalled. ‘You couldn’t do a dreadful thing like that, what on earth would he think?’
‘I should have the greatest pleasure in going to him and saying, “Sir, I have seduced your wife, is it to be pistols for two, or an honest-to-God divorce?” ’
