Ladies of Lyndon

by Margaret Kennedy

  Dolly spread an elaborately embroidered linen cloth, with a crochet border, over the plush table cover and fetched out the Spode tea-things which she had inherited from her grandmother. Sissy and Sonny were invested with bibs and mouthed their grace with some promptings.

  ‘You’ll have eggs with your teas,’ pursued the hostess, ‘after this long drive? James always gets eggs when he’s been working all afternoon. Oh, yes, you must! How many would you like? Mr Blair could do with two, surely?’

  She was very much put out at their refusal, but relented when they described to her the meal which they would have to eat on returning to Braxhall.

  ‘Not really?’ she exclaimed. ‘Then I don’t wonder you won’t eat much tea. And I expect you ate enough lunch to feed a poor family for a week, didn’t you? But …! D’you mean to say they eat all that?’

  ‘Eating’s nothing,’ said Gerald. ‘You should see what they drink!’

  ‘Oh, it is wasteful! I do think it’s shocking! Now at Lyndon sometimes I used to be surprised at all the food that got eat up in the dining-room. But that wasn’t nothing to this; and it was before the war too. But these new gentlemen, like Sir Thomas, they don’t seem to mind what they do. I don’t like all that waste. I wonder now how much butcher’s meat goes into the housekeeper’s room?’

  Agatha was unable to enlighten her on this point and a moment later she laughed at herself for the question.

  ‘It was a silly thing to ask, for I don’t believe, Agatha, that you know that much about your own house.’

  Gerald was intrigued by the manner of the two women towards each other. It was not quite what he had expected. He had gathered that the family thought Agatha too friendly with Dolly. But he had never been able to imagine them on terms of perfect familiarity. He had always pictured Agatha as the more assured of the two, smoothing, in her tactful way, the small difficulties of intercourse. He saw now, however, that Dolly dominated the alliance. He perceived in her manner, moreover, a hint of mocking tenderness, a very guarded gesture of compassion. It was possible to believe that she pitied Agatha for some reason, and it occurred to him that she would not readily sympathize with purely imaginary ills. He wondered if Agatha had confided to her simple bosom some of the hidden disquiet of which he was now so poignantly aware. He hoped that this was so. She could not have a better confidante. Since he himself could not inquire into the trouble, since it would be dangerous for him to try, he was glad that she had Dolly. But he would have thought that the spectacle of so much conjugal serenity, such maternal complacence, must be torture to a woman like Agatha, tardily reaping the bitter fruits of her mistaken marriage. Her fortitude in enduring it indicated a generosity of temper which rejoiced his loving heart.

  The voice of James could be heard halloing through the house for his tea. His wife called to him:

  ‘It’s here! We’ve got company.’ To the guests she explained: ‘We generally get it in the kitchen when we are alone.’

  The master of the house joined them. He was paler and a good deal fatter than of old, and he walked with a decided limp. His large face creased into joyful smiles when he saw his sister-in-law, and he greeted her affectionately.

  ‘You remember Mr Blair, James?’ prompted Dolly.

  ‘Of course I do. You are Agatha’s friend, aren’t you? It’s a long time since I’ve seen you, though. Where have you come from?’

  ‘I’m staying at Braxhall,’ said Gerald.

  James looked very much surprised.

  ‘What for?’ he demanded.

  ‘He has come down for the fresco lunch,’ explained Agatha. ‘And I want to know why you aren’t all coming. You certainly should, you know.’

  A peculiar expression eclipsed the candid sweetness of James’s smile. For a second he looked positively venomous, Then he became merely sulky.

  ‘I’m never going near that place again,’ he averred.

  ‘But I thought the frescoes looked very nice,’ persisted Agatha.

  He regarded her closely and in some astonishment.

  ‘Have you seen them?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, I’ve only had one little peep. I haven’t looked at them properly yet.’

  ‘No?’ said James.

  Then he turned to Gerald and demanded:

  ‘You seen ’em?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  James assented as though he had been quite sure of the answer. Dolly, meanwhile, had been looking uneasy and now introduced a change of subject:

  ‘They’ve been looking at the gramophone, but we haven’t played it yet. Henry! Don’t get putting your fingers in the jam! Now, if you do it again you’ll get a good smack.’

  James’s face cleared instantly.

  ‘Oh, have you? Wouldn’t you like to hear it? Shall I play it to you now?’

  He put on a record of Mdme Clara Butt singing ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth,’ to which they all listened reverently while they ate their bread and radishes. Upon the faces of Dolly and James was written a complete, uncritical joy in their new possession. It was obvious that they loved an excuse for playing their gramophone.

  ‘It’s almost as good as real, isn’t it?’ said Dolly.

  Even Gerald, who hated gramophones, had to admit that this was the least offensive that he had ever heard.

  ‘Now we’ll have the “Chaconne,”’ breathed James.

  He had stopped smiling and a slight quiver ran all through his large body. The others fell silent and in the hush of the small room Agatha felt an instant’s pang of unreasoned fear of him. He fetched the record and put it into place with the soft, mysterious gestures of a priest at the altar.

  Dolly and Agatha listened with the religious expression of women who are making a genuine effort of intelligence. Dolly plaited her cotton skirt into creased folds between a work-stained thumb and finger. Agatha sat very still. Everything in the little parlour was like a dream, unsubstantial as the thick yellow splashes of sunlight which dappled the geraniums in the window and fell in sleepy pools on the carpet. In the middle of its warm illusion the motionless solidity of James seemed to melt, his brooding impassivity to shiver and break, until the vibrant air was alive with his thoughts. As for Gerald, he was a thin flame burning somewhere in the shadows of the room.

  When the concert was over James was instructed to take Mr Blair out to the bench by the porch for a smoke. Dolly and Agatha retired upstairs to the privacy of the conjugal bedroom, where Jimmy got his tea and Agatha powdered her nose. The two women lingered some time, discussing the technical side of the child’s arrival.

  ‘I was laid up longer than the other two times,’ said Dolly. ‘I wasn’t back to work not inside three weeks. I don’t know what Auntie wouldn’t have said to me. She’s always on to me for turning into a lady. Mrs Hickman, the woman that came in to do for me, was a low sort of person. The dirt! You’d be surprised; just in that little time! “Well,” I said, when I came down, “the first thing I do is to have a good clean round.” I was glad James was away at Braxhall most of the time doing those frescoes. It would have been very uncomfortable for him, not getting his meals nice like he’s used to.’

  ‘Have you seen the frescoes, Dolly?’

  ‘No, I haven’t! Not yet! And between you and I, Agatha, I’m worried about them. He’s been so funny. To begin with he was quite all right, just like he always is over his things, you know. Quite taken up with them. But then Sir Thomas kept writing and going on at him, saying they wanted stained-glass windows, and this and the other, and I don’t know what all. Until he got quite disgusted. And I got afraid, really I did! For you know he’s dreadful when he does lose his temper, which isn’t often, thank goodness!’

  ‘I rather gathered that the Bragges had been a little trying.’

  ‘That’s right. And it isn’t only this. That Cynthia, you know, well I suppose I shouldn’t talk back at her as she’s James’s sister, but first and last she’s been very nasty to us. Very nasty she’s been, just in little ways. But she
was never kind to James: he hasn’t told me the half, I’m sure, but he remembers it all. He remembers too much, as I often tell him. Because most of it happened when they was only children, and I don’t like holding things up against people. It’s not Christian. Quiet now, Jimmy, you greedy boy! You’ve had quite enough for one while.’

  ‘Let me have him for a bit.’

  Agatha took the child while Dolly buttoned up her frock and put a few pins into her hair. The room was very small and almost filled by the double bed and the baby’s cradle squeezed against the wall. James’s Sunday clothes, newly brushed, hung over the foot-rail of the bed, and Dolly now folded them neatly and put them away in the bottom drawer of a little wardrobe. Agatha tried to imagine herself and John submitting to the enforced propinquities of such a marriage chamber and felt dismayed at the idea. It showed her how slender was the bond between them. Their union would have been quite unendurable if they had been forced to live as Dolly and James lived, as the majority of the human race have to live, without the means for privacy.

  Her mood of the moment was such that she was inclined to view her own advantages over Dolly in the light of a calamity. She envied a simplicity of existence which, at another time, might have struck her as wanting in refinement. Seeing all things from her cousin’s standpoint, and exaggerating, if possible, his distrust of those civilized amenities which depend upon a large income, she found the Bramfield household an admirable institution. She saw in the undecorated austerity before her a symbol of that marriage which endures against accident, against shock and change, because illusion has no part in its foundation. Such a companionship she had once desired for herself: she believed that it would mitigate the unbearable solitude of her spirit. But she and John could never compass it. She had forfeited such hopes for ever and ever when she became his wife.

  ‘Do you know that a million married people are now living apart?’ she asked Dolly suddenly.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A million married people are at this moment living apart in England alone. And, dear knows how many more don’t want to.’

  ‘Well, I never!’ Dolly was shocked. ‘Is that really true? Isn’t it awful? The papers is full of these divorces nowadays.’

  ‘What’s the cause of it all, do you think? Why are there so many more unhappy marriages than there used to be?’

  ‘I don’t think there are any more than there used to be, I don’t. Only people won’t put up with things, not like they used to. It’s the same all round. Look at the way people used to have to work before there was any Unions. Twelve hours a day, even for little children! It was awful! Auntie used to tell me about when her mother was a young woman, away up in Leeds; and you couldn’t believe that such things could have happened. People must have taken things a sight more quietly than they do now.’

  ‘Then you think there were always unhappy marriages, but people didn’t rebel against them.’

  ‘Yes, I think so. My mother! When I think of what she had to bear! No woman wouldn’t stand it nowadays.’

  ‘But isn’t it a good thing, don’t you think? Why should people endure misery if they can escape from it? When a person rebels, it’s progress really.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, Agatha. I see what you mean and I’m sure you are right in a way. Only I get thinking sometimes…. It seems a pity…. Sort of like this. The way we go on now, people act silly and then find out new ways so as not to suffer for it. They don’t study not to be silly. That isn’t going to make the world any better, not in the long run.’

  ‘But is anything likely to make the world better in the long run?’

  ‘Godly living will,’ said Dolly firmly, ‘and nothing will do instead of that, not if it’s ever so.’

  ‘Oh, Dolly! But what is godly living?’

  ‘I should have thought you’d know that as well as I do. It’s obeying what our conscience tells us.’

  ‘But if you’ve made a mistake so that you can’t … you can’t … if you have got yourself all into the wrong atmosphere…. What I mean is, you can’t be godly or anything else genuine if you are absolutely out of harmony with your life. Listen! Suppose a woman was married to a man who wasn’t unkind or unfaithful or anything, but she just found she didn’t love him, and felt that her life with him was absolutely at variance with her conscience … and … and there was another man … whom she ought to have married, who had the same ideals, with whom she could lead a better life? Which do you think she ought to do, stay with her husband, or go to this other man?’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to say,’ said Dolly, looking embarrassed. ‘How d’you mean, lead a better life?’

  ‘Well, if the other man had … say, a religion that she believed in and that her husband couldn’t ever, ever understand. After all, it says in the Bible “leave all and follow Me.” I don’t want to be blasphemous, but couldn’t it be a sort of … call?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m sure. I never heard of anyone getting a call that way, though I’ve heard plenty of people telling about their religious experiences.’

  ‘But it might be.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it might. Only it seems a funny idea. I think anybody’d have a hard job to persuade themselves that it was right. Why, supposing she had little children to care for?’

  ‘Oh … I mean a woman without children.’

  ‘Did you? But then there’d be her husband. What would he do? He’d have to get another woman to look after him most likely. And she wouldn’t be his wife, not unless he had enough money to divorce the first one. And then they’d be living in sin.’

  ‘I … meant … fairly well off people, who could afford divorce.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ cried Dolly enlightened. ‘You mean a lady, not any sort of woman?’

  ‘Y—yes. I suppose I do naturally think of a lady when I think of an imaginary case.’

  ‘Well, you see, I naturally don’t.’

  ‘Is there so much difference?’ said Agatha wonderingly. ‘But if it was any woman, Dolly? Would you condemn her if she left her husband and went to a man she loved better?’

  ‘I couldn’t say unless I knew her. I would if I thought she was light. But it isn’t only that kind that do such things.’

  Through the window the smell of lilies was blown in from the garden and the voices of Gerald and James murmured on in intermittent conversation. The noise of the car in the lane reminded Agatha that she must get home early. She began to tie her veils.

  On the way home she said to Gerald:

  ‘Dolly thinks that our much-vaunted civilization is too much occupied with palliatives. She’s very strong upon the folly of substitutes for godly living, as she calls it. She thinks we concern ourselves too much with averting the consequences of our own acts instead of eradicating folly and vice themselves.’

  ‘Dolly’s views,’ said he, ‘are so sound that they are apt to be a little obvious. What desperate remedy was she referring to in particular?’

  ‘It was divorce,’ said Agatha, after a moment’s pause. ‘We were discussing unhappy marriages and whether there were more now than formerly.’

  Gerald looked straight in front of him and said in a detached, discursive tone:

  ‘Nobody but the parties themselves can say what constitutes a happy or an unhappy marriage. Evils which to one section of society, or one generation, seem quite unbearable are beside the point to another. I remember seeing that so strongly once when I was reading some letters written by an old boy in the seventeenth century (I rather think it was Halifax) to his daughter. He was obviously devoted to her; and his advice about bearing ill-treatment from a husband comes as something of a shock. I don’t think it referred to any special husband: I mean I don’t think she was even grown up at the time. It was just on general principle. He counsels the child as to the best way to endure brutality, drunkenness, and flagrant infidelity as if they were inevitable, as they probably were in those days. But he was a sane man, and very fond of the girl, and one gets the
impression that he quite expected her to be happy and prosperous, as I’ve no doubt she was.’

  ‘It’s very odd,’ said Agatha. ‘I suppose it all depends upon what one expects to get. In a way marriages of convenience must be much more likely to be happy than marriages for love, because they are based on less extravagant expectations. Either way it’s a toss up.’

  ‘It’s ultimately based, I fancy, upon the question of common ideals; unity of outlook. Whether the pair concerned have the same conception of their environment, the same purpose in life. The usual considerations determining a love match don’t necessarily ensure that, any more than would the business propositions behind a marriage of convenience. Look at our present host and hostess! They are, to me, as good an example of a happy marriage in one way as Dolly and James are in another. I can imagine either making another partner miserable. But together they are complete, and Braxhall is a wonderful expression of their joint outlook.’

  Agatha was silent, her mind busy with unspoken applications. She was dismayed by the unconcealed bitterness of his tone towards Braxhall for she felt that Lyndon fell under the same condemnation. The Bragges merely proclaimed blatantly an ideal of life which, in her own household, was discreetly and beautifully intimated. So, in the light of their earlier encounters, did she interpret all his scornful remarks. But she did him an injustice. He was long past criticizing anything that was hers.

  He changed the subject, feeling, with an obscure sense of self-preservation, that matrimony, happy or otherwise, was no safe topic for himself and Agatha. He said that he was intrigued by James and the frescoes.

  ‘I don’t understand him. There must be something behind it which nobody can have understood. He spoke in such an odd way when I was sitting in the garden with him. I shall go and have a look at the things as soon as I get back.’