Ladies of Lyndon

by Margaret Kennedy

  ‘You see,’ explained Lois, ‘they had met before. Mrs Cocks, since she got Agatha to go back to her, has taken her about a good deal. She wants to whitewash her as much as possible, I suppose. And Mother met them at an “At Home” and had to be civil, or people would have thought it odd.’

  She resumed her reading:

  ‘I said nothing. I just said: “Oh, Dorothy, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll come another time. Or perhaps, if Lady Clewer is not going to be here for long, I could wait in the studio until she is gone.” Just like that, taking no direct notice of her at all. James, as you may imagine, failed to grasp my meaning, and said: “Why do you call her Lady Clewer?” But I think his wife understood. I went and sat in the studio. Would you believe me, I was there for twenty minutes before Dorothy came in. Even then she did not apologize. I said very little; I told her that I could not visit at Hampstead while such disagreeable things are likely to happen. She tried to excuse herself, of course, by saying that they had not expected me. But, as I said, that only makes it worse. It’s admitting that they do these things behind my back.’

  ‘She just ignored her,’ said Hubert thoughtfully. ‘If it had been you, Lois, what would you have done? Would you have done the same?’

  ‘I think so. If I had had the presence of mind. But I’d have got flustered; Mother is always so sure of herself.’

  ‘But I don’t understand. I don’t quite get your point of view. I’ve known you receive people who, to put it baldly, were no better than Agatha, and who had fewer claims on your affection. And, after all, the scandal has never been public and she’s living quietly with her mother now.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s the family side of it….’

  ‘You mean that you are ready to accord a toleration outside the family which you withhold inside it?’

  ‘Of course, I might have known that you would take Agatha’s part,’ cried Lois angrily. ‘All men do, it seems.’

  ‘Oh, good heavens!’ groaned Hubert. ‘Why can’t you keep to the point, Lois? These digressions make all our discussions so lengthy.’

  ‘That’s exactly like you! When I bring up an argument you can’t answer, you always call it a digression. You know quite well that you can’t be unbiassed about Agatha. You can’t deny it.’

  ‘I don’t deny it. But I deny that it has anything to do with the point. I want to extract from you some explanation of your most unreasonable definition …’

  ‘Very well, then, if you admit that you are biassed where she is concerned, it seems to me that your whole position is unsound….’

  ‘Your most unreasonable definition of toleration as …’

  ‘Hubert! I wish you’d listen to me and not try to interrupt so constantly. It’s very bad manners, and we’d get on so much better if you ever listened.’

  ‘On the contrary, you interrupted me. But we’ll let that pass. I’ll listen in silence until you’ve quite finished, if you will try to abstain from hurling unanswerable but perfectly irrelevant truths at me and asking me to deny them. It gives you a specious air of victory, but it doesn’t in the least disprove my point, you know.’

  ‘I’m glad you admit that they are truths. Since you admit that, where Agatha is concerned, you are not qualified to hold an opinion …’

  ‘I’ve admitted no such thing!’

  ‘Hubert! You are perfectly impossible! If you won’t let me speak, I won’t try.’

  And Lois bent to poke the fire with hands that shook with wrath.

  ‘Since you must drag personalities into this discussion,’ went on Hubert, more gently, ‘I’d like to say this. It doesn’t seem to me that you can be very friendly with a person, fond of them and accepting kindness from them, and then suddenly chuck them. Agatha has been very kind to us both, Lois, and we have been fond of her. It seems to me to give her a claim on us. And I expect Dolly feels that way too. She owes a lot to Agatha. You don’t mean to tell me that you can, at a moment’s notice, forget the friendship of years? It’s so unlike your usual generosity of temper.’

  She said nothing, but kept her face averted. He was suddenly aware that she was on the point of tears, and he instantly grew remorseful. The quarrel became insignificant, and he asked himself angrily why she should not be unreasonable if she wished. He cursed himself for having lost his temper and was glad when tea appeared, since it would give him an opportunity of ministering to her.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to have it on the sofa?’ he suggested. ‘Let me pour out.’

  She refused coldly and they began the meal in an uncomfortable silence. She was wondering whether any man ever ends any argument with his wife without suggesting a cup of tea or a lie down. She wondered this because it simply did not occur to her that husbands have more forcible weapons at their command. The occasion of James and the window, the only occasion in her life when she had not been treated like a lady, had faded from her mind. It did not lead her to speculate why it was that Hubert never boxed her ears when she annoyed him.

  He was seeking for a topic which might mollify her. At last he inquired equably if her mother’s letter had any news of John.

  ‘Gone down to shoot at Lyndon,’ said Lois shortly.

  ‘Has he got friends with him?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought it was very good for him, should you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I suppose it’s a change for him.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Damned uphill work!’ he protested inwardly.

  Her humours, however, were seldom long-lived. She was not a sulky woman. When, after tea, he came to light her cigarette for her, she unbent and retained him with a caress.

  ‘I hate quarrelling,’ she murmured.

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘What do we do it for, then?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think we are worse than anyone else.’

  ‘We quarrel about such silly things. James!’

  ‘Not James particularly. It might have been the new tennis courts or a railway time-table. It was merely a little ebullition of the sex discord.’

  ‘No, it’s generally James. At Lyndon it was the same; he was at the bottom of every family row I can ever remember. He’s so different from us! Like a cuckoo in a sparrow’s nest.’

  ‘I was thinking the other day … you know, I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if he set a fashion. A cult of domesticity. I expect all talented young men in the next generation will marry housemaids and wheel their children out in perambulators on Sunday afternoons, and talk in words of one syllable. It’s always the accidental, the chance result of education and surroundings, which makes an impression on the second-rate mind. They’ll copy his work, of course, but that’s nothing to the way they’ll copy his personal eccentricities.’

  ‘Hampstead and Chelsea will look very odd when they are full of people modelled upon James. Dull too!’

  The telephone bell rang and Lois went to answer it:

  ‘Hello! Hello! Yes, it’s me! Lois speaking! Oh, yes, I’ll tell him.’

  She turned to Hubert.

  ‘It’s Mother. She wants to speak to you.’

  Hubert took the receiver from her.

  ‘Yes! … Yes? Oh! Oh, yes, what is it? … Oh! … Oh, I’m very sorry! Where did you say? Oh, yes, I’ll tell her. Yes, I’ll be careful.’

  He put his hand over the mouthpiece and turned to her. ‘She wants me to break to you that John died at Lyndon this afternoon,’ he said in an aggrieved voice. ‘I can’t see why she couldn’t tell you herself. Shall I offer to go up? She was speaking from Eaton Square. They’d ’phoned from Lyndon.’

  ‘Yes, you’d better.’

  He turned to the telephone again.

  ‘Oh, I’ve told Lois, Lady Clewer. Yes, she’s quite all right. I don’t think you need worry about her. Shall I come up? I can come at once. Are you alone? … Oh! … Well, ring us up if there is anything that we can do, or if you want me for anything…. Oh! … Yes, I wil
l if you like. But I really think there is no need to worry.’

  He put up the receiver and rejoined his wife by the fire. ‘The Bragges are with her,’ he said. ‘And she says I must on no account leave you. I’m to ring her up last thing tonight and reassure her about you. She seems dreadfully afraid that you’ll be very much upset.’

  Lois was looking as if she could have wished herself a little more upset. She said gravely:

  ‘Poor John. It’s very sad.’

  Hubert agreed that it was.

  ‘I wonder if he was shooting this morning. This cold day….’

  Hubert nodded.

  ‘Poor Mother! She was as fond of him, you know, as if he had been her own son. It will be very hard for her.’

  The tears which she could not shed for John rose into her eyes as she thought of her mother’s distress.

  ‘I’ll go up tomorrow,’ she said, ‘and help her about getting her things. I’ll need clothes myself.’

  Her mind was occupied with the subject for some moments, and then she said lamely:

  ‘Of course, expecting it as we have been for the last few months, it’s less of a shock….’

  It was as though she were excusing herself for not feeling more.

  ‘It’s a queer thing,’ said Hubert, ‘to think of James at the head of the family. I wonder if he’ll live at Lyndon!’

  Lois looked really shocked.

  ‘Oh, Hubert! Isn’t it awful! But it must be faced, I suppose.’

  ‘There are bound to be great changes.’

  ‘I wonder what Agatha will do now, Hubert.’

  ‘Do? Why she’ll marry Blair of course.’

  ‘I’m not quite sure,’ said Lois thoughtfully. ‘I think her mother is working against it, you know. I think, now she has got hold of Agatha, she will throw all her influence to delay the marriage in the hope that it won’t come off.’

  ‘I should have thought that it was quite inevitable.’

  ‘Well, you know, Agatha’s position is quite assured. She isn’t publicly compromised; she won’t have to marry him. She’s young and beautiful and well off. Her jointure must be ample. Mrs Cocks might well think she could do better for herself than many Mr Blair.’

  ‘Mrs Cocks might, but I doubt if Agatha would. I won’t believe it. I can’t believe she’d chuck Blair now. I think you do her an injustice, Lois.’

  ‘Well … we’ll see.’

  ‘But could you forgive her if she turned him down?’

  ‘No. I don’t think I could.’

  ‘She’d brand herself as a light woman,’ he said gravely.

  Lois blushed at so outspoken a definition, and said quickly: ‘I don’t want to be unjust to her. It all depends, I think, upon the influence of Mrs Cocks. I don’t want to be hard on Agatha, really I don’t. But I feel she has every virtue except character. She has no real principles, only nice manners. When you first get to know her you think that such charm and kindness must have something fundamentally fine at the bottom of it. But you gradually grow impatient with her and you end by thinking that all her goods are in the shop window. But I’m sorry I spoke in that petty way of her before tea.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nothing. I’m sure I was most insufferable.’

  ‘We must try not to quarrel when we have a family to educate.’

  ‘Indeed we must! If I forget myself you will have to say: “Hubert! And before the children too!”’

  Lois laughed and they drew in closer to their bright fire. The bitter gale outside moaned among the larches, but they did not hear it, so entranced were they with their own living future. The storm swept the wintry land and sang a dirge in the void chimneys of Lyndon, swaying the tapestries in that room where John lay, so soon forgotten, in the chilly magnificence of a bed which had once belonged to Agatha.

  5.

  Mrs Cocks watched her daughter tear up her fourth attempt at a letter, and refrained from suggesting that there was a block of scribbling paper in the writing-table drawer. It was certainly a waste of good note-paper, but it would not do to interfere at this point. Agatha took a fresh sheet, wrote some kind of invocation at the top, and paused despairingly.

  Mrs Cocks bent over her rug to hide a smile. She suspected that this letter was to Gerald, and, if it was difficult to write, so much the better. The more often Agatha tore up her beginnings, the more likely was she to say the very things which it was most desirable that she should say.

  ‘My dear!’ declaimed the mother to herself, recounting the history of this crisis to an imaginary familiar, ‘I did nothing. Absolutely nothing! I said nothing. I just sat still and let it work. And at the last moment, without a word from me, she came to her senses. I never felt more strongly how wise it is not to interfere in other people’s affairs. As one grows older one learns the folly of it.’

  It struck her that Agatha’s mourning was really a little too much modified, even for these days of flighty widowhood. As soon as the crucial point of Gerald Blair was settled she must have a campaign with clothes and insist upon their being blacker. But not just yet. Essentials must be fought out first.

  ‘There is nothing like Providence,’ she reflected. ‘When you think of the risks the child has run, she is really likely to come out of them very well.’

  Agatha was reading Gerald’s letter over again. He wrote:

  ‘DEAREST LOVE,

  This is an impossible situation to comment on, isn’t it? I shall never, for the rest of my life, escape from remorse when I think of poor Clewer, and I expect you feel pretty much the same. I’m desperately sorry about it, and I don’t wonder if his relations feel inclined to shower all sorts of curses on our heads.

  But now about us, since it’s no use maundering over follies which can’t be remedied. Dearest, I can’t help being very glad that we can get things put straight before I sail, though it sounds brutal to say so. I’m arranging about a special licence immediately and would like to see you as soon as possible, for we shall have a good deal to talk over and settle. When can you see me? I’m not supposing that you can possibly manage to sail as soon as I do, since it’s such short notice, so I’m taking no steps about fixing up your passage until I hear from you. Is that right? I have in fact made up my mind to do without you for some months longer, but you must try to come over as soon as ever you can, for you’ve no idea how much I miss you all the time.

  I’m getting intensely keen on the job, you’ll be glad to hear; the more I learn of it the more I like it, which is uncommon luck.

  Ever yours,

  G.’

  It was such a confident letter. Not even ‘Shall I see about a special licence?’ but ‘I am arranging about a special licence immediately.’ Its confidence appalled her. She felt totally unable to tell him that she was unsure in her own mind; that she doubted her power to be happy in New York or to make him so. She took a fresh sheet and wrote:

  ‘MY DEAR LOVE,

  I’m glad you’ve been so prompt about all arrangements. Come and see me early tomorrow. I rather think I could manage to be ready to sail when you do, if it’s possible to book my passage as late as this. I cannot endure a further separation if it can be avoided. But we will discuss that when you come.

  Always your loving

  AGATHA.’

  She then reverted to an earlier page, on which she had written ‘Dearest Gerald,’ and added:

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll think I’m failing you horribly, but I really think it would be a pity for us to get married in such a hurry. We must allow a decent interval to elapse. My leaving you and coming here was a concession to the proprieties, and having gone that far, we might as well do the thing thoroughly. Couldn’t you go out for a year or eighteen months, and then, if you liked the work, I could join you and we could be married? Or you could come back if you had decided against remaining in New York. I don’t want to make you feel I’m backing out, my dear, but I think it’s rather a pity to let ourselves be rushed in any way. There is no need. We have behaved badl
y about John and I feel that it would be bad taste, under the circumstances, to force things blatantly upon the world by getting married the moment I am free.

  I can see you any time. I go out in the afternoons occasionally for a short walk, but otherwise I’m pretty sure to be in, as I’m not, naturally, going about very much just now. I do want to preserve decorum, as far as possible, in this very difficult position.

  Ever yours most affectionately,

  AGATHA.

  (Don’t be angry with me for feeling all this, Gerald dear.)’

  These letters she placed side by side and looked from one to the other helplessly. Then she rewrote the second, leaving out the words ‘There is no need,’ for she blushed when she thought of Gerald reading them. But still, she could not decide which to send. The second letter, even when amended, was a contemptible production; she knew what Gerald would think of it. But she considered that it would be even more cowardly to send the first unless she was sure that she could live up to it. She would be jeopardizing his happiness in order to sustain her own self-esteem.

  Glancing furtively at her mother she blessed the rugs which were apparently so all-absorbing. Advice and interference at this moment would be the last straw. But her perplexities had evidently passed unnoticed. She sat weighing one letter against the other until the maid came in with the afternoon post. There was a note directed to her in Dolly’s neat board-school hand:

  ‘MY DEAR AGATHA,

  Can you come up some time, quite soon, please, and see James and I? We are very much upset about something, and would like your advice. We would come to you only James is working very hard all day now and in the evening it’s difficult for us both to get away as the girl goes out. So we hope you won’t mind us asking you to come, dear Agatha, and that you are feeling alright and not too much worried by the Trouble in the Family.

  With very much love from us both, yours affectly,

  DOLLY AND JAMES CLEWER.’

  Agatha determined to go up to Hampstead that very afternoon. Also she would postpone her decision about these letters she had written until after her visit. It struck her that her point of view depended enormously upon domicile, and a few hours in another milieu might throw fresh light on the situation. She reacted to life so differently in different places, and the most decisive step of her career had been taken because she had been at Bramfield and at Braxhall upon the same day.