Ladies of Lyndon

by Margaret Kennedy

  ‘How long has this been going on?’ he said, staring at her sombrely.

  ‘Oh, my good John! Nothing has been “going on.”’

  ‘Blair!’ he said again. ‘Blair!’

  Mrs Cocks began to wonder if this were not altogether too much of a good thing.

  ‘You say they were engaged?’

  ‘Wanted to be engaged. It all blew over completely. Only lately …’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not lately. Longer ago than lately…. I’m beginning to see it now…. Yes, of course….’

  ‘There I’m sure you are wrong. It’s only since the war….’

  ‘No. It was before the war. There was that time he came down to Lyndon. I remember….’

  ‘You are making too much of it,’ began Mrs Cocks anxiously. ‘There could have been nothing then, I’m certain.’

  ‘She had a photograph….’

  ‘What photograph?’

  ‘Of herself and Blair. In a tin locket. Taken at a fair or something, she said.’

  ‘Oh, that fair! I remember! But she was hardly out of her cradle then. Only sixteen or thereabouts. I packed her off to school.’

  ‘She kept the photograph.’

  ‘Sentimental creature!’

  ‘She isn’t sentimental. I’d think nothing of it if she was.’

  Mrs Cocks pulled herself together.

  ‘All this is nonsense, John. There could have been nothing that time before the war. She was on perfectly good terms with you, wasn’t she?’

  ‘She seemed to be.’

  ‘If I’d thought you were going to take it this way I would never have spoken. I thought you had more sense of proportion.’

  ‘I’ve been blind! … Blair! And that’s why, oh God damn it all, that’s why she’s always sneering at me for being too rich!’

  ‘Too rich?’ echoed Mrs Cocks blankly.

  ‘Yes, too rich. She’s got very socialist lately, don’t you notice?’

  ‘Well, she has said some very strange things. But I thought it was this house which had got on her nerves. I never could see that she objected specially to spending money on herself.’

  ‘Nor I. But I couldn’t remember where I’d heard these views before. I’ve got it now.’

  ‘Yes, he has strange ideas. And she has always been influenced by them to a certain extent. After he went to the Balkans, that time when they had been seeing a good deal of each other …’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Oh, that time in the war, after he had had pneumonia. You remember, surely?’

  ‘I don’t. I was at the Front, unfortunately.’

  In the ensuing pause Mrs Cocks began to grow desperate.

  ‘Well,’ said John, ‘when he went to the Balkans, what did she do?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Only worked in a canteen: but I felt he put her up to it. It’s no use your looking like that, John. I merely wanted to show you the sort of thing that is liable to happen if you let Agatha get out of hand. If you insist upon taking it au grand sérieux you’ll simply make trouble. And, above all, try to remember that nothing is more likely to exasperate her than the idea that she is being discussed and criticized. Family criticism is a deadly thing.’

  ‘I agree with you.’

  ‘Make love to her, as you used to do, and she’ll forget all about him. In a year’s time you will laugh at all this.’

  John did laugh, a little unpleasantly, and she began to feel that nothing she could say further would improve matters.

  ‘That was tea, that gong,’ she observed. ‘Are you coming?’

  ‘No. I think I’ll go fishing.’

  ‘John, you realize that if I thought there was the slightest danger of her caring seriously for Gerald I would never have spoken to you?’

  ‘Yes, I see that. I quite believe you think there’s nothing in it. But it’s opened my eyes to some things that have puzzled me. You can’t live with a woman, and be fond of her, and not know when she’s got something on her mind. It’s my belief that she’s loved that fellow all along. Except for a very short time when I swept her off her feet.’

  ‘I’m sure you are mistaken. And even if it were true, John, it’s no use putting it into words like that. It’s a great pity. She’s married to you and must make the best of it.’

  ‘She is and she must.’

  He held the door open for her, and she gave up the attempt to reason with him. She was uneasy and almost sorry she had spoken. She had wished to bait him a little; to brace him up by suggesting that he had a rival. She had not supposed that he could be capable of any desperate jealousy; his self-confidence was too genuine for that. But she thought that a small attack upon his complacency would be good for him. He must be made to realize his own extreme good fortune in being ‘most damned in a fair woman.’ For Mrs Cocks held the views of a lady who is beautiful, gently nurtured, bred to claim homage as her due, heiress of all the achievements of civilization and profoundly ignorant of its basic brutalities.

  A few phrases, caught as she crossed the ante-room, restored her belief in herself. Through the open door came the emphatic voice of Lois:

  ‘… and if it’s only half as pronounced as it was in London, two years ago, it’s enough to kill poor John outright.’

  Lois and Cynthia fell suddenly silent at her entrance, and as she sipped her tea she felt that she had, on the whole, done very wisely. It was true that John had taken her words far more seriously than she had intended, but if the whole family were discussing the affair like this it was obvious that he must hear of it sooner or later, and she was glad that she had got in her say first. Braxhall, as she saw it, contained a good deal of inflammable material. She had little doubt of her daughter’s ultimate discretion and had genuinely persuaded herself that the affair was, for Agatha, a mild sentimental adventure. But she was deeply alarmed at the possibilities of family gossip in such a house.

  Reviewing her three young people, as she grasped them, she thought that they should not be hard to manage. Here was John, aggrieved and resentful, his petulance continually inflamed by the ardent sympathy of his stepmother. Agatha was obviously more than a little bored and ready to grasp at an occasion for emotional entertainment. Gerald, she supposed, was like nothing so much as a fluttering moth, drifting helplessly back to his candle, despite the counsels of prudence. Altogether the situation, spiced by the malice and inaccuracy of the other ladies, had the makings of a very fine explosion. There would certainly be wigs on the green if a woman of tact and determination had not, by heaven’s grace, been upon the spot.

  She was right, as far as she went, but she had the misfortune to gauge the emotions of her protagonists at far too low a point of intensity, misled by the understatements of modern speech. Disturbances which she beheld as embryonic had already reached the most sinister proportions; her trio were rushing together, doomed to inevitable impact. She knew nothing of the misgivings, the sense of inward betrayal, with which Gerald Blair had accepted Sir Thomas’s invitation. She could not guess his resolution, faithfully kept since his return from the Balkans, to see his cousin no more; or how that resolve had been overthrown by a chance report that Lady Clewer was looking miserably ill and unhappy, an idea which gave him such anguish that he was constrained at last to end it by coming to see for himself,

  Likewise she underrated the effect of her bracing counsels upon her son-in-law who was, at that moment, lashing the trout stream in a mood which rang all the changes upon despair and fury. Of the three, indeed, Agatha was the least discomposed and the least deserving of compassion. She was still able to disguise to herself the nature of her own feelings. For her the mere prospect of seeing her cousin again, after a long separation, had so much of pleasure in it that she was able to postpone the thought of ultimate issues. She knew that he had avoided her since his return to England; she believed that she knew why. She had applauded his wisdom and grieved over its cruelty. Now that he had inexplicably changed his mind she was able to stifle apprehension in her g
ladness that he had done so. She walked about the woods until she was tired and then returned to Braxhall. Finding that the hour was still early, she lay down with a book upon a sofa near the window. There, half hidden in a haze of cigarette smoke, she was found by her husband on his return to the house.

  John, during the interval by the river, had become an angry man. In the first shocked perception of the truth he had been too much stunned for emotion. He had stated the facts with a sorrowful calm, seeing them too clearly to be resentful. But this spasm of insight was short-lived. An accurate realization of any truth is generally followed by a mood of bitter rebellion against it, and in such a mood he sought his wife. She roused herself to greet him with that conscientious friendliness of tone, that manufactured interest in his affairs, which so deeply exasperated him.

  ‘Well, what have you been doing?’

  ‘Fishing.’

  ‘Did you catch anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How tiresome for you,’ she murmured, and waited a moment.

  As he did not seem to be inclined to talk she returned to her book. At the end of a couple of minutes, aware that he had not moved, she glanced up at him again. He was looking at her with some earnestness. She asked:

  ‘Did you want anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is anything the matter?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sure it isn’t the Scotch express?’

  She referred to a difference of opinion which had occupied them earlier in the day, concerning the time and route of their journey North. She felt that she had been obstinate and was sorry for it. Half consciously she gave him that swift, upward smile with which she had been wont to reduce him. It reached him now, in his trouble, like a mirage, a hint of unsubstantial bliss. He was consumed by his need of her, by the impossible hope that she would love him again and help him to escape from all this grief and fury, the uneasy, insecure present, and the implacable menace of the future. He fell on his knees at her side and would have taken her in his arms, but she recoiled.

  ‘I only wanted to make it up,’ he pleaded almost humbly.

  ‘I know. You have only one way of making up our disagreements and I find it monotonous.’

  The heavy fog of rancour, which had momentarily lifted, clouded his mind again. He turned from her and stood looking out of the window. It was as though he had met the full shock of his own doom for the first time—had received his first inkling of life’s impermanence. A man of sufficient courage and small imagination, he had taken the doctors’ verdict with equanimity. The thought of death was very disagreeable to him but it had no appalling significance. He had seen it often enough, and had faced it continually, as a matter of course, for four years. He did not wish to leave a world which he found very pleasant, but he was protected by that providential egoism which shields most normal people. He had no real conception of the universe going on without him. His agony at the thought of relinquishing his wife had been tempered by his inability to imagine her continued existence after his own dissolution.

  But now the merciful veil was torn from his understanding and he was learning the vanity of all property. A sense of possession had informed his entire attitude towards his surroundings; his love for Agatha was permeated by it. And this sense was outraged by the realities forced upon him. He grasped his limitations, knew that he would lie forgotten, senseless clay, while she, the living woman now before him, would pass into the possession of another man. It was one thing to know that she might marry again; it was another to imagine her married to Blair. His spirit could not submit to such a possibility, and yet he knew that he was helpless.

  A car was climbing the long hill, and the sound of its approach floated distinctly through the open window. Agatha heard it and was transformed, glowing warmly, for she knew that it brought her cousin. It was an instant’s self-betrayal, but it revealed her to John, who had turned sharply and marked the fleeting radiance. He left her immediately, unable to trust himself in speech.

  She dressed for dinner hastily and went down to the marble corridor leading to the hall. Gerald was there and she watched him for a moment unperceived, as she stood at the turn of the stairs. He looked very uneasy, as though he had arrived by mistake into this sanctuary of the sleek, the idle and the luxurious. His bearing was that of a stranger in a strange land, and he was having a look at Cynthia’s portrait with a public gallery expression on his face.

  She decided that she would take him with her to see Dolly and James. He would like their household. It would be nice to take someone there who found it as admirable as she did. In another second she would call to him, and see him start, and turn and smile at her.

  ‘Did you arrive in your evening clothes?’ she said.

  He did not start as much as she had expected, having braced himself for this encounter so tremendously that nothing could quite take him by surprise. But he was a little pallid as he came towards her.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t. But I changed in record time. I thought it was later than it is.’

  They sat down together on a carved settle and plunged into the instant, eager conversation of their youth. She tried to describe to him the frescoes in the hall. The effort overset them both and their mirth, floating upwards, greeted the other inmates of Braxhall as they descended the stairs in procession.

  3.

  She took him over to Bramfield the next day. Dolly heard the car turn into the lane and was at the gate to welcome them. She was not much changed since the days of her Clewer servitude. Her figure was broader, perhaps, but her hair still shone with its old flame and her freckled face was comelier than ever. Henry and little Agatha clung to her skirts, while in her arms she held Jimmy, her youngest.

  ‘Well, Agatha,’ she cried, as she kissed her sister-in-law, ‘you are a stranger! I thought you were never coming to see us again. But you’ve been busy, I expect. Sonny! Kiss your Auntie, you bad boy! It’s funny how he hates it: thinks he’s too old. How do you do, Mr Blair? I’m very pleased to see you. You will be staying at Braxhall, I suppose?’

  ‘I was wondering if you’d remember me,’ said Gerald as he shook hands.

  ‘I should think I did,’ Dolly assured him. ‘You came to that lecture Mr Ervine didn’t give, in the Lyndon Reading Room. I remember. Shake hands with Mr Blair, children.’

  She took them up the garden path, pausing to allow them to admire the lilies and hollyhocks in the small beds.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘they are a sight. We got second prize at Bramfield show last year, in the cottage garden competition. I always said we might of got first, if James hadn’t spent so much time on the vegetable marrows. He was quite gone on them, and couldn’t attend to nothing else.’

  ‘And they didn’t count?’

  ‘Not as flowers, they didn’t. They are vegetables, you see, Mr Blair. We had one was the biggest in three parishes. I told James about a young fellow I knew that grew a prize marrow and carved a verse of a hymn on the rind. “God moves in a mysterious way,” it said. And when the marrow grew, it grew. James would have it that he must put something on ours. So he drew out a picture; Jonah sitting under a gourd, like in the Bible. But as the marrow got bigger it went sort of crooked, and spoilt it. He was vexed about it.’

  ‘How is he?’ asked Agatha.

  ‘Very well, thank you. Though his leg pains him now and again. He’s apt to get rheumatism into it. He’s working now, so I won’t call him, if you don’t mind. But he’ll be in for tea and he’ll be ever so glad you’ve come. If I’d known, Agatha, I’d have made drop scones. And I’d have put Sissy into that frock you sent her. I do think it’s lovely. I don’t know wherever you got that nice embroidery. I never saw anything like it before.’

  ‘I got it at the Russian shop in the Brompton Road.’

  ‘Oh, Russia! I expect they do lovely work there. But tell me, do you think it’s all true what it says in the papers about these Russians?’

  ‘It can’t all be tr
ue,’ began Gerald at once.

  ‘That’s what I say. It sounds awful! James read me a bit out of John Bull last Sunday that said there wasn’t a house left standing, not a man, woman nor child left living, where the Red Armies had been. And then we read some more in the Daily Herald, only this time it was about the White Army. And James said: “Well, but isn’t that the other side?” And I told him you can’t believe everything you see in the papers.’

  ‘It’s very difficult,’ agreed Agatha thoughtfully. ‘It’s broadminded of you, Dolly, to take John Bull and the Daily Herald. We only take The Times.’

  ‘Well, we don’t get time to read the paper every day. But we do a bit on Sunday. Come into the parlour, won’t you? I do believe you’ve not been here, Agatha, since we bought the gramophone.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. Dolly, how exciting! What did you do that for?’

  ‘James got it for my birthday. That is it.’

  ‘But it’s a beauty! These cabinet ones are so much the nicest.’

  ‘It’s second-hand,’ said Dolly. ‘We couldn’t have got such a good one new. But James got this off a friend that was short of money and wanted to get rid of it. It’s as good as new.’

  Agatha felt vaguely surprised at the idea of James having a friend. But, when she thought it over, she could see no reason why he shouldn’t.

  ‘Those cheap ones,’ continued Dolly, ‘well, they wouldn’t do at all. We didn’t like all that sort of scraping they made; you can’t seem to hear the music. But this is just what we wanted. I’d play it to you now, only James isn’t here. I expect he’ll turn it on after tea.’

  ‘Oh, I do hope he will. What records have you got?’

  ‘Not many yet. We haven’t had it so very long. We’ve got a lot out of the “Messiah.” That’s my favourite piece. I sung in it once in our chapel choir at home. It’s grand! But I expect you’ve heard it often. Then we’ve got a thing, I think it’s called “Chaconne,” that James likes. He heard it in Paris. And we have some comics for the children. And I got “Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes’ when I was over in Oxford once. I think it’s a very pretty song, but James regularly has his knife into it and broke it by accident. At least, he said it was. Sissy, lovey, just look into the kitchen and see if the kettle’s boiling!’