Mothering Sunday

by Noel Streatfeild

  Miss Doe was so upset for Anna her eyes were blurred with tears. Nothing! And not another parcel post till Monday. Poor old dear! She blinked the tears away and forced a note of jollity into her voice.

  “I know somebody who’s got a naughty family who need smack-ums!”

  HENRY

  Henry came down to breakfast wishing the week-end was over. Carol had insisted on this week-end and, though he had not told her so—for in matters domestic he never told her anything—he would have liked to have told her it was an impertinence, if you could use such a phrase about a wife, that she should meddle in the affairs of his family. To show Carol how he felt he wore, as he came into the dining-room, his it-is-rather-hard-that-a-man-in-my-position face, for fifteen years of being married to Carol had not taught him that she never noticed facial antics, any more than fifty years of getting to know himself had taught him that the inner Henry was never fooled by any expression the outer Henry might wear. Carol was already seated at the table reading the local paper. Henry, to attract attention to his expression, paused by her and gave her shoulder two heavy pats, which, had they been given to a wife on the stage or screen, would have caused her to look up and say “Anything the matter, dear?” Carol went on reading the local paper. Henry went to his seat feeling wrong-way rubbed. Carol was full of splendid qualities but she was either not sensitive to the feelings of a husband or—and this the inner Henry believed and the outer Henry denied—she deliberately shut herself away where feelings could not reach her.

  Unbelievably Carol’s mother, Mrs. Cussac, had trained her daughter to enable her to do this. Henry held many things against Mrs. Cussac but none more strongly than that a mother should train a daughter for what, when she became a wife, would be a subversive quality. Carol never mentioned this training, and, when he had tried to talk of it to her, used the training to retire into herself, a thoroughly aggravating and dismissing way of dealing with subjects she did not wish to discuss. Mrs. Cussac, the very first time he had met her, had told Henry about Mr. Finkelstein. Henry had not at that moment taken Mr. Finkelstein in for he was dazed at meeting the perfect girl to be his wife. Mr. Finkelstein, Mrs. Cussac told him, had lived in India and trained under a yogi. When he came into Mrs. Cussac’s life he had adapted what he knew to the American way of life. Mrs. Cussac did not say so but it was clearly a very profitable adapting. “Back there in the Far East, from what I could gather, life was all slowed up, but Mr. Finkelstein saw right away that would not help Americans. ‘The pace is fast, Mrs. Cussac,’ he said, ‘so we must move fast. Revelations are given us so that we may adapt them to our needs.’” His ‘adaption,’ according to Mrs. Cussac, had been, the moment he returned to America from India, to build himself a temple and take on, for a fee, followers or chelas of “the way,” of which Mrs. Cussac was one. Owing to the speed of American life he did not ask his pupils to meditate. “It wouldn’t help you, Mrs. Cussac, you’d get all tuckered out trying to concentrate. What you need is harmony.” The way to harmony was to pay Mr. Finkelstein large fees to learn deep breathing accompanied by beautiful thinking. “Never forget your navel, Mrs. Cussac. Each breath must press right on that navel. When the navel is pressed out and the body filled with air let beautiful thoughts flow right in.” Carol had not herself been a votaress of Mr. Finkelstein for, in Mrs. Cussac’s words, he had “passed on” when she was still a child, but by then Mrs. Cussac was sufficiently imbued with his training to hand it on to Carol.

  There was one way to get Carol from behind the Finkelstein curtain of breathing and thought, and that was to find a flaw in the running of the home. Henry looked round for such a flaw. There was none. His glass of chilled orange juice, with which Carol insisted he started his breakfast, was waiting with two vitamin pills lying beside it. On his plate lay his breakfast table napkin folded so that the word “Saturday” was facing him. That set of table linen, like so much else they possessed, was a present from Mrs. Cussac. Mrs. Cussac paid fairly frequent visits to Chicago to give way to an urge to shop, which seemed to come over her in waves. She seldom needed anything herself so most of what she bought came to Carol, preceded by explanatory letters. This set of breakfast linen had been preceded by a letter which pointed out the smartness of having the day of the week printed on the corner of the napery, because even the laziest help could not get away with setting out soiled linen, for they could not be so dumb they did not know the days of the week. Henry, when Carol had told him of the gift and what the letter said, had murmured. “Very thoughtful” and nodded graciously towards Mrs. Cussac and Minnesota, where Mrs. Cussac lived. Carol’s face had expressed amusement. Henry disliked unexplained amusement but he had to bear with it on that occasion, for when he asked what she was smiling about she had not answered. It had not crossed his mind then or since to wonder how both in the country house and the London flat they always had clean table linen, though the London flat was run only by Carol and a daily woman, and the country house by Carol and a married couple called Fitch, of whom only the man was of even remote service.

  Henry, with “Saturday” across his knees, drank his orange juice and glanced round the room for some slip of one of the Fitches which Carol had overlooked. There was none. The room was in fact looking particularly pleasant. It was a sunny morning and the windows framed the lawn sloping up to the skyline, very green against the early spring blue of the sky. The house was neither his nor Carol’s choice. They had bought it when they married, because it was in the constituency and sufficiently substantial looking to satisfy the local view of the sort of home their member, now he had a wife, should live in. The inside of the house was pure Carol. Carol had a passion for the crisp, fresh, cleanable and washable. This passion had grown since the war in revulsion from the post-war shabbiness of many British homes, with their patched, darned, moth-harbouring, dust-collecting soft furnishings, and their still existing, often unnecessary, makeshifts. “There’s just no reason now not to have the lights repaired.” “There’s just no reason now to use a coffee pot with a lid that doesn’t match.” Henry, from the time of his marriage to the beginning of the war and, in a more limited way since the war had finished, had lived against a constantly changing background. Every few months some room had been, or was being, “made over.” From Minnesota came a constant flow of magazines written about the home beautiful. These were followed by many letters between Carol and her mother, which again were followed by parcels from Chicago on which Carol paid immense sums in duty. Then a room would be closed. Down would come what in her early life Carol had called “the drapes” and in came the painters and the furniture was moved around, and what had been a study in yellow or Queen Anne green re-emerged a study in white and crimson, or lavender blue, and in the re-colouring and the shifting of the furniture the room was a stranger to Henry, even it seemed in its shape. Henry’s taste was for permanence and solidity. He would have liked, no matter how full of dust and moth, velvets and brocades and furniture he had known all his life. He thought, though he had never told any one so, his mother’s house quite perfect. He had come to it first when he was fifteen and now he was fifty and, save for a few minor tidyings up, nothing had been altered, nothing thrown away. He had never mentioned his taste to Carol, for he had come to marriage empty-handed as far as furniture was concerned, and Carol had taken it as a matter of course that the furnishing of her homes would be left to her. He had apologised for his lack of possessions. “I’ve been living in that furnished flat; it seemed no good buying stuff as I shall come into a lot when old Cousin Tom dies, and probably some from my mother too.” The Cussac parents were over for the wedding and Carol and her mother had a private thanksgiving. “When I heard that old cousin who’s made Henry his heir was going strong at eighty I thought it was kind of mean you two couldn’t have everything right away, but now I’m glad as far as the furniture goes. If it was all good old stuff, why, that would be fine, but it’s the terrible things that would come too, and Henry would surely want
to keep. It just seems the British can’t get around to throwing anything away.”

  Henry gave up the idea of attracting attention to himself by legitimate complaint. He finished his orange juice, swallowed his pills, helped himself to sausages and coffee and opened The Times. The sound of The Times being opened brought Carol out of the local paper.

  “Don’t get buried in The Times, Henry. I’ll drive the first part of the road so you can read it then.” She looked at her watch. “We start in twenty-eight and a half minutes.”

  In the early days of their marriage Carol had worked out Henry’s calory intake and discovered he took too much of certain foods, and suggested his cooked breakfast should be eliminated and a cereal eaten instead. The idea shocked Henry. Every right-minded Briton began the day with a cooked breakfast, and he looked upon eating a cereal instead as being as peculiar as leaving the Church of England and joining the Church of Rome. Ever since Carol’s suggestion had been made Henry had guarded his cooked breakfast as if he were a dog guarding a bone; at a hint of touching it, or hurrying him over it, he gave a near imitation of a growl. Carol heard his near growl. She took a Finkelstein deep breath, consciously pressing her navel against her girdle, and waiting expectantly for the resulting harmony. She had a special voice she used when practising the Finkelstein method, a carefully modulated, full-of-reasonableness voice.

  “Now, Henry, don’t be tiresome. The school said Paul could leave his classroom in time to be standing right outside the gates at twelve o’clock. I asked for this favour so that we need not waste time riding up that long drive.”

  “It won’t hurt Paul to wait a minute half as much as it will hurt his overworked father to be rushed.”

  Carol, unfortified by the Finkelstein method, might have snapped at Henry. Jane had first written of plans for this week-end weeks ago, and right from the start Henry had been as a wheel stuck in mud, and it had been Carol’s shoulder which urged him out of mud. It had been hard work for Carol. If Henry had ever said he did not want to go, though she would have seen that he went just the same, it would have been easier; she would at least have had something to argue about. All Henry had said when Jane’s letter had first arrived was, “A very nice thought, but I don’t think I can manage that date,” and when Carol had replied, “Why, Henry, of course you can. What could you be doing that Sunday more important than this?” Henry had put on his most pompous, a-man-in-my-position face and Carol, though she disregarded expressions, had registered that he was going to be difficult, and had written by return to say that they would manage that week-end. After that for some weeks the week-end was not mentioned; she corresponded with Jane about arrangements but she thought it better to say nothing to Henry of plans. Then one evening he had remarked, addressing her as if she was part of a public meeting that needed careful handling, “By the way, did I tell you? I’m speaking to some Primrose Leaguers in the constituency on Friday week.” Carol, fortified by Finkelstein breaths, had managed not to say one word of the many she would have liked to have said. The slyness of him! He must have fixed this meeting up with his agent way back when Jane’s letter first arrived, for the member did not address meetings in his constituency at a moment’s notice, especially not Henry who had big ideas of what was due to his position. Remembering her navel and waiting for harmony, which was slow in arriving, Carol rearranged her plans. When she spoke it was in her reasonable post-Finkelstein treatment voice. “Why, Henry, why ever didn’t you tell me sooner? I’ll write to Fitch right away and tell him to expect us. We’ll go down on Thursday I suppose? We have to come back Saturday of course. That’s the family week-end you remember.” That was the moment when Henry became as a wheel stuck in mud. He tried every way he knew to resist Carol’s shoulder. He spoke of fatigue; it might be wise, as they would be in the country, to take a week-end’s rest; he was sure the family would understand. Carol foresaw that one and fixed that they would start early on the Saturday in order to take the children out from, their schools for luncheon. “Maybe your family would, Henry, but you just can’t disappoint Helen and Paul.” There was pressure of work. Hints of consultations with his agent and the local Conservative committee. Then he spoke of headaches. Nothing would have surprised Carol. He seemed so set against the week-end he might have deliberately sprained an ankle or instructed the Fitches to burn down the house. She would not feel sure of him until she had him safely in the car.

  Carol had great powers of concentration and really had been reading the local paper, but at the back of her mind was a tumult of thought, a tumult which had raged off and on all her married life and been brought to a roar by this week-end. Why did Henry see so little of his mother? Was it just the British were cold? Carol, brought up on the American matriarchal system, could not believe that it was just normal Britishness. A world which did not revolve round the mother was unworkable. So sure had she been of this that throughout her married life she had done her best to see Henry’s mother held her rightful place in the family circle. It was not easy; Henry’s mother did not seem to know what her rightful place was. It frightened Carol. It meant upsetting the balance of life as she had been brought up to know it. It meant that Helen and Paul, especially Paul, did not act towards her as she and her brothers had acted towards their mother. It meant Henry was far too independent; he seemed unaware that the woman governed the home and should just naturally be deferred to. It took from her the ways of holding her husband and family to which she had been trained. Back home her mother was not just loved, she was an institution. All plans had always been thrown aside by her father if, for some reason, real or contrived, her mother did not want something to happen. The relationship between Carol and her mother was of the closest. Right from the time she could toddle they had been friends, conspiring to see that Carol was better turned out than other children, and later dated up, to the glory of the Cussac reputation and so that not one moment of her glorious youth was wasted. It was “Mother dear, may I have?” all day long, and the answer was “Why yes, my darling.” There was warmth and colour in the relationship; they said lovely things: “Haven’t I got just the most darling daughter?” “Did you ever know any one quite so adorable as this mother of mine?” Nobody ever said things like that in England. Carol had two brothers and the relationship between their mother and themselves was even tighter than that between Carol and her mother. They never, even when they married, quite grew away from being mother’s little boys. They brought their troubles and worries to her and were not ashamed of showing their emotions before her. Nor their mother of showing hers before them. How did you get that wonderful relationship in Britain? How could you get it into your home when it was not in the home of your husband’s family, and your own parents only came over on occasional visits, so were not there to show how things should be? It was unbelievable but this week-end, in the fifteen years that she had been a Caldwell, was the first real family mother-loving occasion that had taken place. Of course of those fifteen years six and more had been war, or immediate war aftermath years. Carol was on what, for Britain, was warm terms with her sisters-in-law and their husbands. She had never failed to remember a special day in any of their lives, and always “said it” with a parcel. Sometimes, in her more despondent moments, it seemed to her that her only connection with the Caldwell family was trails of satin ribbon and wreathed wrapping paper. The sad thing was she liked some of them so enormously, and more than liked her mother-in-law, but she was afraid to show it; saying you liked them seemed to embarrass them. Sometimes, when alone and relaxed, Carol did not bother with the Finkelstein method but let herself go and cried like a baby. “Oh, this ghastly British reserve! Oh, this coldness! If Helen and Paul grow up that way I’ll die.”

  Carol stared for concentration at her empty coffee cup, but it took a lot of Finkelstein method before she felt really harmonious. Henry was fond of his children, but he was not always as considerate for them as he should be. It was all very well to joke about them, call
ing them horrors and so on, she often did it herself, but Henry actually felt tough about them. He would not think it mattered cutting five minutes off Paul’s time with them. He would not worry lest he might be hurting the child. When at last she spoke her voice was grave.

  “Why, Henry, you don’t mean that. There’s little Paul just counting the minutes until he sees us.” Carol always finished her breakfast with a glass of iced water. She sipped some of it now before she changed the subject so that Henry should have time to feel ashamed. “Then there are the table reservations. That White Hart Hotel gets so crowded Saturdays and Sundays. I wrote that we would be there at one-thirty sharp. That means we have to be at Parkfield to collect Helen not one minute after one-fifteen.”

  The only thing Henry liked about the week-end was that he would see his children for an hour or two, but Carol’s mapping of his day, and the sweet reasonable tone in which she spoke brought out the worst of his temper. He muttered, “Lot of blasted arrangements!”

  Carol decided not to hear the mutter, but, all the same, if Henry was to be at all bearable over the week-end he must be put in his place. She opened the local paper.

  “Your speech is reported in full; they say you were impressive but ‘it was a disappointment that Sir Henry Caldwell had nothing constructive to say. The Primrose League had hoped for something more thought provoking than rhetorical ragings against the sins of omission and commission of the Labour Party. It was discouraging to many that their member found himself unable . . .’”