Dulcie herself was to travel home with Laurel on Christmas Eve to spend the holiday with her sister Charlotte and her family. It would be better than spending Christmas alone in London, she knew, yet she felt reluctant to uproot herself and be reduced in status to the spinster aunt, who had had an unfortunate love affair that had somehow ‘gone wrong’ and who, although she was still quite young, was now relegated to the shelf and good works. When Dulcie wondered, did one begin to take up good works if they didn’t come naturally? When — and how? Then she remembered the evening she had gone to Neville Forbes’s church, and his housekeeper saying ‘Bye-bye, dear — I expect we’ll be seeing you in church.’ Perhaps it wasn’t so difficult after all.
The day before they were to go, Laurel asked if she might bring her friend Marian to tea. Dulcie was delighted; she had always hoped that Laurel might bring her friends home, but the cosy student tea-parties up in the bed-sitting-room with the cooking on the gas-ring had not so far materialized. Laurel seemed to prefer to meet her friends in coffee bars or in their homes or lodgings, which were nearer the centre of London.
‘You see,’ Laurel said to Marian, rehearsing her beforehand, ‘if we were to get the idea into her head now about my moving into a flatlet in your house and get her to realize what a good idea it would be* then she would be on my side at Christmas when we discuss it at home. My parents haven’t the least idea about life in London, but my aunt is fairly reasonable — I think she’d see the point.’
As soon as Marian came into the room, Dulcie realized that she was an aunt, old, finished, fit only for the Scouts and their little jumble cart. Could it be that a generation was only ten years? Marian’s elegant appearance and deferential, almost solicitous, manner towards her made Dulcie feel like a rather fragile old lady. Even the girl’s voice seemed a little louder and more distinct than was necessary, as if she were speaking to a person who was slightly deaf. She was tall and slim, with fair hair done in a bun on top of her head and a side-swept fringe. Her dress was of the ‘chemise’ type, of a pale creamy brown shaggy material, adorned only with a string of beads that hung to her waist. On her feet were shoes with alarmingly pointed toes and stiletto heels.
‘How do you do?’ murmured Dulcie, taking the long slender hand that was languidly held out to her. ‘It’s so nice to meet one of Laurel’s friends.’
‘So kind of you to ask me,’ said Marian. ‘You’re almost in the country here, aren’t you. It seemed quite an adventure, coming all that way on the bus.’
‘The Underground is really quicker,’ said Dulcie a little sharply.
‘Oh, but it always gives me claustrophobia being shut away down there with all those people — I’ve got quite a thing about it…’
‘Marian has a lovely flatlet in Quince Square,’ said Laurel a little nervously. ‘I think I told you about it, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, with a cooker concealed in a cupboard,’ said Dulcie. ‘In a house full of young or old women? I suppose career women would be the right description.’
‘That’s rather an old-fashioned way of putting it, isn’t it?’ suggested Marian. ‘One takes it for granted nowadays that women have careers. All sorts of people live in this house, anyway, and I don’t think there’s anybody over twenty-five. As it happens, one of them is leaving at the end of the year and we were wondering if Laurel… ‘ she paused delicately.
‘Could perhaps take the room” Dulcie finished for her. ‘Well, it would depend what her parents thought, wouldn’t it. I’m only her aunt.’
‘Then you wouldn’t be — er — hurt if she left here?’
‘Hurt? Oh, no — I’m not yet enough of an aunt to be hurt in that way,’ said Dulcie laughing, glad to realize that she could still distinguish different degrees of hurt. It was surely something to be still alive and young enough to know what a real hurt could be, not like poor Miss Lord, who had been hurt by the man behind her having been served with baked beans when she had been refused. And yet how was she to square this sudden realization with her conviction that it was so much safer and more comfortable to live in the lives of other people? In her confusion she was hardly conscious of Marian’s voice, explaining something about shilling-in- the-slot meters and laundry and cleaning being included in the price of the room.
‘… lots of meals out, of course. So one doesn’t really cook very much.’
‘Only breakfast and a hot drink at night perhaps,’ said Dulcie, clinging on to reality. She began to wonder if she were not perhaps obsessed by the idea of these hot drinks.
‘I don’t really have breakfast,’ said Marian.
‘I don’t suppose I should want to bother much with cooking,’ said Laurel.
‘Well, it’s up to your parents to decide how you may live — until you’re earning your own living, that is. It’s not my responsibility at all,’ said Dulcie lightly.
‘But you do think it would be a good thing?’ Laurel persisted.
‘It might be … Isn’t that the front door bell?’
In the slight confusion that followed, Marian left the house, teetering down the path to the bus stop on her stiletto heels, and Senhor MacBride-Pereira entered it, padding softly in his orange suedé shoes. Dulcie took him into the drawing-room, wondering why he had called and if it was too early to offer him a glass of sherry. Then she saw that he was carrying in one hand, partly hidden behind his back, a round box done up in Christmas wrapping-paper.
‘Plums,’ he said. ‘Plums of Elvas, from Portugal.’
‘Oh, Elvas plums — how delicious!’ Dulcie exclaimed.
‘For you, Miss Mainwaring, a small token for this festive season and a return for your gift of Balmoral plums.’
‘The Victoria plums I gave you in the summer? But those were from the garden,’ said Dulcie, confused by the unexpected present.
‘And these are from the garden of a distant relative in Portugal. They are picked individually and preserved by a special process. He is a cousin of some kind, many times removed, as you say; his grandfather and mine were second cousins.’
‘I see,’ said Dulcie, trying to work it out. ‘It must be pleasant in Portugal now.’
‘But better in Brazil. I look in your Sunday papers and I see the weather report — “Estoril: rain, 49-63 degrees”. It does not say what it is like at Copacabana.’
‘No, I suppose it’s too remote for us.’
‘Estoril is like Bournemouth,’ declared Senhor MacBride-Pereira.
‘Would you like a glass of sherry?’ suggested Dulcie. ‘I was just going to have some myself,’ she added, hoping that this did not sound too unlikely.
‘Thank you, that would be delightful.’
‘Are you spending Christmas in London?’
‘No, strangely enough I am going to Bognor Regis, where a lady of my acquaintance has a delightful “bungalow” — I believe you call it that?’
‘Well, yes,’ said Dulcie, unable to picture it exactly. ‘A bungalow by the sea can certainly be delightful.’
‘She — this lady of my acquaintance — will take me to the Midnight Mass at a fashionable church.’
‘That should be nice,’ said Dulcie, wishing that the sherry would improve her conversational powers. ‘Nice’ was hardly the word to use to describe a Midnight Mass, and indeed Senhor MacBride-Pereira was soon correcting her, though not for the reason one might have supposed.
‘No, Miss Mainwaring,’ he said, ‘it is not nice — that does not describe what it is. In Latin America, and especially in Brazil, it is not considered nice for a man to go to church.’
‘Oh, I see. You mean it’s not done?’
‘That is it — “not done” — I must remember that.’
Dulcie drank deeply of her sherry and was conscious that the front door bell had rung again. But Laurel would answer it.
This time it was Paul Beltane who entered the house. He wore a duffel coat and carried in his arms a large plant of some kind shrouded in white paper. A pinkish blossom peeped ou
t from one corner, revealing that it was an azalea.
No doubt Dulcie had ordered one to take with them to her parents, Laurel thought, irritated at the idea of its awkwardness in the train.
‘Hullo, Paul,’ she said.
‘I just came to wish you a happy Christmas,’ he said, thrusting the plant towards her.
Laurel was reminded of the evening Aylwin Forbes had called with the flowers for Miss Dace, but this was for her.
‘How sweet of you,’ she said.
‘I hope you’ll like it.’
‘Thank you — it’s lovely.’ She peered down inside the paper. ‘An azalea — how pretty.’ Her voice faltered a little, for suddenly she could see them all standing in the shop waiting to be bought. It was, in a way, doing him a kindness to take it off his hands. And yet why should not flowers from a florist be as exciting as flowers from any other man? Thinking this she looked up at him, about to say something else, to sound more grateful, when, to her amazement, she found herself enfolded in his arms, being roughly and passionately kissed.
‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ he said at last, ‘but I couldn’t help it.’
‘Oh,’ she said, looking at him with new interest. Then she noticed his hands, slightly red from being in the cold flower water and now covered with scratches. ‘Your poor hands!’ she exclaimed, taking them in hers. ‘What have you done to them?’
He smiled faintly. ‘I’ve been making holly wreaths,’ he said. ‘There’s always a big demand at Christmas.’
‘For graves, you mean?’
‘Yes, and people like to hang them on their front doors decorated with ribbons and things.’
‘That’s in the best part of Kensington, of course.’
‘Yes…’
The drawing-room door opened and out came Dulcie and Senhor MacBride-Pereira, looking slightly flushed and dishevelled. But that, thought Laurel, seeing the glasses and decanter through the open door, was not because he had seized her in his arms in a passionate embrace.
Chapter Thirteen
IT was well into January before the dinner party, to which Aylwin and Maurice were to be invited, was finally arranged. It so happened that the evening chosen was also Laurel’s last evening at Dulcie’s house, before she left to ‘take up residence’, as it were, in the flatlet house in Quince Square. It had not been so difficult as had been feared, to persuade her parents to agree to the arrangement. Charlotte, Laurel’s mother, revealed an unexpected and presumably long suppressed desire to live a ‘bachelor girl’s‘ life in London; the idea of a bed-sitting-room with a little cooker hidden away in a cupboard, a concealed washbasin and a divan bed piled with cush-ions was to her as romantic as an elopement to the South of France with a lover might have seemed to one of a different temperament. It was rather sad, Dulcie thought, that an apparently happily married woman should confess to a secret hankering for such a life. And yet, stealing a glance at her brother-in-law, at that moment preoccupied with classifying a pile of Masai warriors’ spears and shields left to the local museum by a retired colonial servant, she could appreciate that perhaps a desire for escape was not so surprising. Many wives must experience it from time to time, she thought, especially those whose husbands smoked old pipes that made peculiar noises, and were so preoccupied with their harmless hobbies that they would hardly have noticed if their wives had been there or not. Dulcie herself had been asked about Marian and whether she seemed a suitable kind of friend for Laurel, but here she was at something of a disadvantage, for she could remember only the external details of Marian’s appearance, like her little pointed feet, and could not say more than that ‘there seemed to be no harm in her’.
‘She’ll find it expensive living on her own,’ said Viola, when she and Dulcie were preparing for the dinner party.
‘Yes, I suppose she will — and yet these girls do seem to manage somehow. I imagine they get taken out quite a lot. Laurel said that Paul Beltane was going to invite her to dinner — had actually done so, I think. And if she’s in Quince Square — who knows,’ she laughed, ‘there may be crumbs from Aylwin Forbes’s table.’
‘It’s hardly that kind of a table,’ said Viola obscurely.
‘You mean crumbs wouldn’t fall from it? Or if they did they’d be swept up quickly and efficiently by those servants we heard listening to the television in the basement?’
‘Well, yes. But I shouldn’t think he’s likely to invite her to a meal.’
‘You never know what may happen after this evening,’ said Dulcie gaily. ‘Listen, that must be Miss Lord arriving. I do think it was kind of her to offer to help.’
‘It makes a change from her routine — but she isn’t going to wait at the table, is she? That seems to be carrying things a little too far. I told Aylwin it was going to be quite a simple dinner.’
‘Did you?’ said Dulcie, rather annoyed. ‘Well, I suppose one could have a servant handing the dishes, whatever was in them.’
Viola had not offered any help, except that of arranging a few tulips and narcissi on the table. Dulcie had asked her advice about the food, but she had not seemed interested and only remarked that Aylwin had once said he didn’t like tomatoes. Dulcie, therefore, had been careful to avoid any dish containing these ‘love apples’, as she now called them to herself, saying over the phrase ‘Aylwin can’t take love apples’ with a good deal of enjoyment. But she had not repeated it to Viola, who did not seem to be amused by such trivialities.
‘What are you going to wear?’ Dulcie asked.
‘Oh, my old black dress. It’s really the only suitable thing I’ve got. I might do something to it.’
‘Wear that Spanish shawl, perhaps?’
‘Do you think it would look nice?’ Viola asked doubtfully.
‘Lovely — the only thing is that the fringe is apt to be awkward, getting into the food, isn’t it?’
‘I could slip it off when we were eating. What are you going to wear?’
‘My old black.’
‘I didn’t know you ever wore black.’
‘No, I don’t in the daytime, but I have a black dress. I suppose in a way I’m the powder-blue-wool type, with a single string of graduated pearls — but I don’t always act in character.’
‘You haven’t asked another man for Laurel — to make up the numbers.’
‘No. I suggested asking Paul, but she seemed to think it wouldn’t be a good idea — he’d probably be very shy. So we shall be two men and three women. But I shan’t count myself,’ said Dulcie hastily. ‘I shall hardly be a woman at all, flitting backwards and forwards between the kitchen and the dining-room — looking to see if people have what they want, and all that sort of thing.’
‘You will be playing the most womanly part of all,’ said Viola. ‘Laurel and I will seem insignificant by comparison.’
‘Miss Lord will do the washing up, so perhaps I shall come into my own presiding over the coffee tray.’
‘The silver coffee pot, of course, Miss Mainwaring,’ said Miss Lord, who had just been cleaning it. ‘It’s a long time since you used that. This instant coffee, made in a moment in the cup with boiling water or milk, is all very well, but it hasn’t got the tone of real coffee, has it. Not that it isn’t delicious,’ she added quickly, as if fearful that the manufacturers might overhear her disloyalty, so close was her contact with them through the waves of commercial television, ‘and of course for people who live alone and busy housewives it’s really the best thing.’
‘What wine are we having?’ asked Viola bluntly.
‘A Clos Vougeot 1952,’ said Dulcie. ‘I asked the man at the wine shop to advise me, and of course we have dealt there for years, so I feel I can rely on him.’
‘Yes, I think that is suitable with roast duckling,’ said Viola.
‘And I got some gin because Maurice doesn’t like sherry Dulcie continued. She sensed that Viola was rather bored with the whole thing, and suddenly she too began to wish that her guests weren’t coming and they could
just have soup and cold ham or scrambled eggs on a tray by the fire.
Aylwin Forbes, on his way in a taxi because he had been unable to work out how one made the journey from Quince Square by public transport, was still wondering if he ought to have stopped somewhere to buy flowers for his hostess. Then he remembered that it was really more correct to do this after a dinner party. Miss Mainwaring — he really must try and find out if she had a Christian name — would no doubt have arranged her floral decorations by now. He pictured an Edwardian dinner table, with carnations in little silver vases and smilax trailing down the corners — like those illustrated in the old bound volume of Every Woman’s Encyclopaedia, which had been a favourite childhood book in the lounge of his mother’s hotel in the West Country. But of course it wouldn’t be like that at all. The table would be rather bare, with mats showing Old Cries of London or Venice in the eighteenth century. Anyway, he couldn’t be always arriving at this house with bunches of flowers, he thought, remembering the last time. It would be embarrassing, to put it mildly, if Viola thought they were for her. He wondered if the attractive young girl who had opened the door to him — Miss Mainwaring’s niece, was it? — would be there. He hoped so, for he liked pretty young girls; it was, perhaps, a weakness that he shared with many of his middle-aged colleagues in the academic world, though not the sort of thing one could compare notes about.
The taxi was beginning to slow down in an effort to find the house.
‘I think it’s the one with the white wooden gate,’ said Aylwin, leaning forward.
‘Ah, yes, where the gentleman is going in now,’ said the taxi driver, preparing to stop.
‘No, not that one,’ said Aylwin quickly, ‘stop a little farther down, please.9