“Oh—mother dying,” she said vaguely, feeling for some reason unable to confide these thoughts to her friend, “I couldn’t give all my attention to him—though, of course, I was crazy about him,” she added hastily.
There were times when Alda found Jean both silly and irritating. This was one of them.
“It must have been just a relief when your mother died; do be honest, Jean,” she said sharply.
“I suppose it was—in a way. But it was a shock, all the same. And poor Dad has taken it so hard.”
“Yes—how is your father? No better?” Alda had always liked Mr. Hardcastle, who was automatically at his best, like many a man before him, in the company of a pretty, lively woman whom he could not bully.
“He’s really ill, you know. He just can’t get over it.”
“It’s queer, the way he came to adore her so as they both got older. I can remember them really disliking one another, when I was a little girl about eleven.”
“She was so beautiful, Alda.”
“But such a witch, Jean! You might have been married years ago if she hadn’t taken all your young men.”
Jean looked slightly sulky. There was a pause before she answered:
“Oh, I don’t know about that. Basil didn’t like her at all.”
“Well, but you must admit she always made a dead set at them. It used to make Ronald and me feel slightly sick.”
“Well, it’s over now, so what does it matter?” Jean sighed, and began to gather up her handbag and suitcase. “I must go or I shall miss my bore-making train. It’s been lovely seeing you, darling. You always make me feel so much better. And so you think I can’t do anything about my Mr. Potter?”
“Do use your common sense, ducky. What can you do?”
“I thought perhaps I might just give him a tinkle. He might be ill or something.”
“Not he. If he really wanted to see you he’d stagger up from his dying bed. No, it’s just another of those things.”
“Mother wasn’t always so bad,” said Jean irrelevantly, arranging the surprising hat. “She gave me some advice once.”
“Now what sort of advice? Bad, I’ll bet.”
“Oh, about—attracting men.”
“She should know, of course.”
Mrs. Hardcastle had been the type of Eve-woman, at once imperious and intensely feminine, that all the virgin-huntress and the mother in Alda rose to detest. If anyone had told her that she had been afraid of Mrs. Hardcastle’s power over men, she would have contemptuously denied it; nevertheless, her dislike had been based on just that fear.
“Don’t, Alda; she is dead, after all. Oh, I didn’t take her advice. She could get away with things that other people couldn’t, of course. I just remember what she said, that’s all,” and, as if the memory were amusing, Jean smiled.
Alda asked no more questions, for she found the subject distasteful, and immediately afterwards Jean left to catch her train, having warmly kissed her friend and again assured her how delightful it had been to see her.
Alda watched her hurry past the tea-shop against a background of bright shop windows shining in the winter dusk; an ordinarily pretty young woman whose features were slightly too small, with an expensive fur coat wrapped about her nymphlike slenderness. Once she looked back to smile and wave, then she was lost to sight.
Poor old Jean, thought Alda, and poured out another cup of tea. She was to wait in The Myrtle Bough tea-shop until one of the Friends from Pagets, who had business in the town, called to take her back by car to the guest-house, where she would collect the children and catch the bus that would convey them the greater part of their way home. The dark branches and glittering decorations of a Christmas tree in the shop window were reflected in the mirror hanging above the table where she sat, and her own hatless head and irregular profile was seen there too; with chiselled upper lip and that type of nose which is perhaps the most attractive known to mankind, the Extra Short Greek with slightly wide nostrils. The curves of her mouth were full yet delicate and her eyebrows were shadowy as a child’s. Her face and lips were unpainted, and this permitted every tint and curve to attain its full natural value. It was the face of a slightly insensitive wood-nymph, with sparkling hazel eyes.
Her thoughts played complacently about her own flirtations in the days when she herself had been—as her sisters put it—“in circulation”; and she recalled the laughing but efficient kindness with which she had handled her team of admirers. Never had she felt compelled to do the telephoning or make the advances, and always it had been a problem to choose an escort from the eager group; of course, she had had to refuse a proposal now and then, but there had never been hurt feelings or broken hearts afterwards. She had been used to the society and admiration of men since her middle teens, for her father’s large house in a prosperous suburb of Ironborough had been the scene of delightful dances and parties, providing the perfect setting in which young love with honourable intentions could see its beloved in the home setting, and afterwards declare itself on the tennis court or in the vegetable garden, and her married life, on its personal side, had been cloudless and happy as her happy youth.
She thought with pity of Jean, whose upbringing and environment had been so different from her own.
Jean’s parents had married one another to spite two other people, and her own birth had been dreaded as an additional complication in lives already over-full with social activities and money. Her childhood had been conscientiously organised, and luridly brightened by too many visits to cinemas and theatres and the company of smart, corrupt servants, while her holidays had either been passed at whatever expensive school she happened to be attending (because her parents “can’t cope with Jean at home”) or with Alda’s casually kind family. Her hygienic nursery was filled with elaborate and extravagant toys, and in it her mother’s maid used gigglingly to read extracts from Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Jean while smoking her father’s Turkish cigarettes. Lady Chatterley and her lover rolled off Jean without effect, and her budding nature was saved from becoming precocious, bitter and shallow partly by its own qualities and partly by that lonely help of the lonely child: reading.
She was not clever, but she was affectionate, and her instincts were sound, and upon this surface, as she entered her teens, the hierarchy of the English novelists imposed their pictures—romantic or picaresque, subtle or passionate—of the world. Through Dickens and Scott to Rider Haggard and Baroness Orczy she passed by way of Conan Doyle to Kipling; she lingered hand in hand with Stanley Weyman to discover Hugh Walpole and Arnold Bennett, and thus, through Thomas Hardy and Marion Crawford, she walked out into the contemporary world of Charles Morgan and Ethel Mannin, Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene, and—so led and comforted—her poor little nature was saved alive.
It will be remarked that her taste was catholic, and none the worse, we believe, for that. It is doubtful if your picker and chooser and sniffer gets as much pleasure (not that pleasure is what he reads for, of course; he reads because, like Guinness, it is Good For Him) from his careful choice as does your plunger and wallower and gasper, who enjoys Ben-Hur equally with Tess of the D’Urbervilles and is usually devouring three books at once.
By the help of the novelists, and her own nature, Jean had slowly learned to tolerate her unsatisfactory life and to find amusement and entertainment, even some contentment, in watching the scene about her. But she was affectionate; novels could not satisfy her need to love, rather than to be loved, and she began with crushes upon Gary Cooper and Clark Gable and ended by fixing all her longings and hopes upon marriage—and upon any personable man who showed any signs of interest in her.
The reader will have gathered what had been happening at intervals to Jean and her personable men during the past fifteen years, and all that she gained from each successive disappointment had been an increase in her own responsiveness to life, and the slow development of a half-amused, half-rueful philosophy. And Alda and her sisters, who did not notice su
ch developments in their friends’ characters unless they were verbally announced, continued to tease old Jean about her passion for reading novels.
Alda, having worked out her train of complacent reflections, began through force of habit to wonder if there was any man in the neighbourhood who would “do for Jean,” and decided that the only hope was Mr.-Waite-who-has-some-books. True, she herself did not know him, but he had provided her with an excellent excuse for getting to know him when she returned his loan, and she resolved to rush through To Haiti in a Ketch and the rest and make his acquaintance as soon as was possible. If he were at all presentable, she would cultivate him.
However, the few remaining weeks before Christmas passed so busily and quickly that she almost forgot Mr. Waite and his books; she put the latter into a cupboard to get them out of the way and never even opened one of them, for she spent every evening after the children were in bed making toys and paper decorations. Her family had a tradition of splendid old-fashioned Christmases, which she had determined to carry on with her own children, and she was also anxious that Jenny, Louise and Meg should harvest a few rich memories, at least, from these restless, homeless years. Therefore she fashioned silver stars from the tops of milk bottles and dolls’ clothes from scraps of old silk and miniature furniture from cotton reels, and saved sugar and points to expend upon the Christmas dinner—at which there was now a faint hope, though only a faint one, that Ronald might be present.
Sometimes from her window she saw that hooded figure which was vaguely reminiscent of the Ku-Klux-Klan, moving among the coops on rainy mornings, and wearing an equally concealing hat drawn down over his eyes on finer ones. There was something dreary about the sight, and she felt disinclined, when she did remember him, to make Mr. Waite’s acquaintance. She disliked the company of depressed, complaining people so much that she would put up with more than most women if only the offender were cheerful, and she sometimes showed strong impatience with the doleful whining fits that overtook Louise.
Jenny was growing to be a companion to her mother, for she was in some ways older than her age, and could reply to Alda’s remarks with something more than childish chatter. She was intelligent, and had a robust humour of her own, but whether she was also clever, or sociable, or ambitious, or possessed a bump of veneration, her mother was not in a position to know. These are qualities which require the presence of other children to draw them forth, and Jenny saw no children but her sisters. In education she was backward even for a child whose schooling had been interrupted, reading with difficulty those childish books which she preferred, but Louise quickly discovered the tattered, grubby hoard concealed in the cupboard and had read every book at Pine Cottage within the first week. Alda, whose own judgment of books had been formed by twelve years of marriage to a clever man, dismissed Pat Takes a Hand and Mystery at Red House as “not books at all,” but Louise, with the aid of that Philosopher’s Stone, a child’s imagination, extracted golden pleasure from the shoddiest story. As for Meg, she had only just been introduced to the Flopsy Bunnies (to whom we recently saw a reference in The Condemned Playground which convinced us that Mr. Connolly would see eye to eye with Mr. McGregor).
Every morning the children went down to the farm to fetch the letters. Sometimes they came back rejoicing, when Mr. Hoadley had already bicycled into Burlham for them; sometimes the comely, cross girl who brought them in on her bread-van every other day was late, and they returned empty-handed. The letters were then brought up in the middle of the morning by one of the Italians.
There was some confusion in the family over the Italians, for to Jenny, Louise and Meg, Emilio, with his teasing and his gifts of tiny baskets deftly woven from straw, was “the nice one,” while Fabrio, who seldom spoke, and handed in the letters with a brief smile or none at all, was “the nasty one.” Alda, however, while pitying both young men, preferred Fabrio’s reserve to his friend’s over-bold stares.
At the children’s request, she asked Mr. Hoadley if they might give the prisoners some cigarettes and, permission having been somewhat unwillingly given, a shopping expedition was made into Sillingham.
At Bettany’s, the biggest grocery shop in the High Street, two of the four young ladies employed were married to Canadian soldiers and hoping to sail for their new homes within the next few months, and one had tender memories of an American private. Louise could hardly have chosen a less appreciative audience to hear her announcement that they were “going to buy some cigarettes for the poor Italians,” and only the fact that the four young ladies of Bettany’s knew the children as old acquaintances from Pagets prevented their comments from being sharp indeed.
“May we go and have tea at the Linga-Longa?” implored Louise, casting a wistful glance at the bedraggled curtains of the only café in Sillingham, as Alda hurried the pram past it on their way home. The winter day was drawing towards dusk.
“No, Louise.”
“Oh, why not?”
“Because it’s smelly and gipsies go there.”
“That’s just what I like,”
“That’s just what I like,”
said Jenny and Louise together. Meg had fallen asleep in an uncomfortable position and Alda paused to rearrange her head against the cushion.
“Oh, Jenny, do you remember that one with the yellow scarf? I expect he’d kidnapped thousands of children,” Louise continued dreamily, and began to wander back towards the café just as a lorry, narrowly avoiding the kerb, drew up with a rattle and a roar. A man jumped down, slamming the door after him, and hurried across to the café, where a girl’s pretty, untidy head looked out laughing to welcome him. The door shut on them both.
“It’s so lovely,” mourned Louise, with her nose against the window. “Oh Jenny, there are pink cakes to-day!”
“Do come along, Weez, it will be dark before we get home,” said Alda sharply; she wanted her tea.
“Well, can we go there for my birthday treat?” asked Louise, reluctantly moving on.
“What a treat!”
“It’s my birthday and my treat.”
“Even you said the cakes were nice and the tea was hot when we went there, Mother,” said Jenny with her judicial air.
“But it wasn’t clean, Jenny. I do draw the line at dirty places.”
“And the ladies are all so pretty and nice. Even the old fat one was kind,” put in Louise.
“I give you all that, but I don’t like gipsies and dirt. Now that’s enough, come along.”
She hurried them away, down the long High Street which gradually ran out into fields. They left the village half in daytime business, and half in evening peace; curtains had been drawn across the bow-windows in some cottages, but in many of the small square houses of cream or grey stucco, built in the early years of Victoria’s reign, the blinds were still up, and within, sitting in a room filled with strong gold light, was an old woman knitting as she listened to the wireless, a man lingering at the tea-table with the evening paper, a child bent over its homework. Evergreen bushes swayed and sighed in the evening wind, shutters were going up at the chemists and the butchers; it was that hour before winter dusk when the air clears and the sun sinks in purple mist even as the first star shines out in the icy blue.
“Lucky creatures!” said Alda, as three young women sailed past them on bicycles.
“Do you think we shall ever have bicycles, Mother?” asked Jenny.
“Of course we shall, darling. Next year, perhaps. As soon as father comes out of the Army and goes back to the college.”
“We could go exploring.”
“And you could take Meg in a basket at the back.”
“Meg’s nearly old enough to have one for herself. By the time we all have them, she will be,” said Alda.
“We could have super picnics.”
“And get to the sea, perhaps. It’s only fifteen miles away.”
“It would be so lovely, Mother.”
This conversation had been gone over many times before but ne
ver lost its wistful fascination. Alda and Ronald had been enthusiastic bicyclists before their marriage, and had presented Jenny with a tiny bicycle almost as soon as she could walk, but they were only beginning to take rides as a trio when the Second World War broke out, and the bicycles had been destroyed with their home in Ironborough. Bicycles for all five was the family ambition, and had a good fairy given Jenny, Louise and Meg one wish, they would have unhesitatingly demanded in a shout: “Bicycles!”
“When shall we give them the cigarettes, Mother?” asked Jenny presently.
“To-morrow, if they bring the letters.”
“Need we give them to the nasty one? I’d much rather give them to the nice one.”
“We’ll give them to whichever one comes. Look, there’s the camp.”
The low sheds behind the wire were faintly visible by the starlight—for it was now dark—and the glow from their own windows, while smoke from the kitchens indicated that the evening meal was being prepared. Alda thought that the bustle and animation pervading the scene made it seem homelike, intensified as it was by the lonely sighing wind and the black sky and leafless trees; indeed, really it looked cosy, decided Mrs. Lucie-Browne.
6
SHE HARDLY NOTICED the presentation of the cigarettes to Fabrio the next morning, as her attention was immediately caught, after taking the letters from him, by one which had a black border addressed in Jean’s writing. She tore it open and hastily read what she had half-expected; Mr. Hardcastle had died some days ago after a short illness which he had lacked the inclination to resist, and he was to be buried that day.
Poor Jean, thought Alda, she didn’t care much for her father, but it must have been a shock, and there will be everything for her to settle—the lease of the flat, all that furniture—the car—and what on earth will she do with herself afterwards?