Mr Challis frowned. Her tone was even lighter than usual.
‘There are certain difficulties which refuse to resolve themselves,’ he answered reservedly, turning over the pages of the typescript. Mrs Challis felt the disapproval in his voice and, being a woman who liked life to run easily, she tried to put matters right.
‘You did tell me about it, didn’t you, darling? Isn’t it about an Austrian tart?’
‘I suppose it might be described in those words,’ said Mr Challis, with a smile like an east wind. ‘It does concern a Viennese woman who is compelled by her conscience to become a whore.’
‘Gerard, darling, you know I never butt in, but honestly – no one calls them that nowadays; it’s too tatty.’
‘I do not clothe my conceptions in the language of the cocktail bar.’
‘I know, sweetie, but everybody will –’
She stopped, just in time. Everybody had laughed at one scene in Mr Challis’s last play. Hermione and Marriott are alone in the laboratory of the tsetse-fly research station in the middle of the Uganda jungle, and he has rolled up her sleeve in order to inject her with the serum, when he stops and says (harshly), ‘There is a shadow in the crook of your elbow.’ The feeling of the audience had expressed itself in an amiable and audible mutter from the stalls, where sat a man in the Tank Corps. ‘Oh, for God’s sake get on with it,’ he had remarked, and then the scene had been held up while the house laughed.
This incident had wounded Mr Challis more deeply than he cared to admit even to himself. He was proud of the pontifical influence which his beautiful, careful, serious plays exercised over the taste of educated England and America. He had wrought for himself a strikingly distinguished style. It was difficult to describe, but he himself had not demurred when one admirer had coined for it the phrase ‘a style of iron and shadows.’ He was still puzzling as to why the tension had failed at that particular moment in his play. There was nothing in the dialogue to explain the failure. He always wrote obliquely of people’s personal charms, making a man say to a woman, ‘Your throat is a taut chord,’ or ‘Your ankle bone is softly modelled.’ Why should Marriott’s remark, which was indicative of the struggle between duty and passion within him, have caused boredom in the stalls and then inane laughter? The only explanation, to which he returned again and again, was that it was the Mean Sensual Man who had laughed; the eater and drinker of husks amid the swine, who saw only the coarse side of sex. Well, there should be even fewer concessions made to him in the new play, Mr Challis promised.
‘But I expect you know best,’ ended his wife amiably.
‘I think we may take it that I do,’ he said courteously.
Unfortunately, Seraphina was not in a prudent mood that evening. She returned to the subject, against her wiser judgment, because she was curious.
‘Darling,’ she began carefully, smoothing her waves of hair back into the shingle which she had worn since she was seventeen and which was now a little too youthful for her, ‘you said her conscience forced her into being a you-know-what. It sounds awfully funny-peculiar.’
Mr Challis affected not to hear, but his wife, feeling the silent thunderbolt poised, drew back in time.
‘Oh well, I shall see it all on the first night, shan’t I?’ she said smilingly, and murmuring, ‘I’m going to see if everything’s all right,’ she made her escape.
Outside the door she gave a little giggle and thought that she would tell Hebe Dadda’s latest. Oh, what a comfort was a daughter! Husbands took up with dreary hags, and sons were angels, only girls took them away from you (as of course was natural, but hard). But a daughter, and two angelic grandchildren, and a third coming! When you had those, you could take anything on the chin.
Left alone with the typescript, Mr Challis’s expression gradually became softer. It was not the pages of the very bad novel before him which caused this thawing, for he had come across several would-be humorous scenes in it and Mr Challis had no use for humour; he had more than once publicly and severely put it in its place (where, with Shakespeare and Jane Austen, it stayed) and it was not to be found in his own works. No, it was the memory of the writer, who had hurried up to him as he was leaving the Ministry on the previous evening and thrust her manuscript at him, saying with a break in her ardent voice, ‘I don’t care what you think of me, you’ve got to read it!’ Then she had darted away, leaving him with an impression of a young pink face and brown eyes. Pleasing, distinctly pleasing, and touching too. Her name and address was on more than one part of the manuscript.
Here was this gifted and fortunate man, the writer of plays admired by the cultured few and yet financially successful, married to a delightful woman, father of three satisfactory children, living in an ancient and beautiful mansion, handsome in his person, and possessing ample means derived from his personal salary in the higher ranks of the Civil Service and his private income. And was he happy? He thought that he was not.
Spiritual hunger was what he suffered from; yearnings, lookings before and after, and pinings for what was not. He thought of it as a divine thirst which no religion could satisfy, and no woman (as he flung one after another impatiently aside like used matches) could assuage.
Mr Challis must be given credit for a virtue: he did work hard at his plays. Sustained by a sense of their excellence and importance and of his own unusual gifts, he laboured over their plots and their characters and their dialogue (which was full of references to mathematics and Saint Augustine) and succeeded in creating an atmosphere upon the stage as if no one had a stitch on, though nothing ever happened which justified this effect.
Yet there was a doubt in his heart. He knew that his plays were good; each one better than its predecessor. Mountain Air, the one about six women botanists and a male guide isolated in a snowstorm in a hut on the Andes, had been surer in its approach and handling than his first one, The Hidden Well, which concerned the seven men and one female nurse on the tsetse-fly research station, already referred to; while Kattë, the one upon which he was now engaged, dealt with an Austrian woman who was bandied about by the officers of a crack regiment in Vienna, and was, he felt convinced, his masterpiece.
He was for ever thinking up new permutations and combinations.
But would the public appreciate his Kattë? Ah! That was the doubt.
He was always in love with his heroines; those women of fire and dew who represented the Eternal Mistress of Man, and each time one of them went out into the world in a play he trembled for her as if she were a breathing, suffering, living woman, and it hurt him if all women did not envy her and all men long to possess her. (None of his heroines ever had any children, for he did not consider that a woman with children was also fitted to be a fiery, dewy mistress.) Each time he met a woman who seriously attracted him, he put her on her mettle by indicating that he had never met his Ideal Woman outside his own plays, and then she would try to be fiery and dewy, until the inevitable moment arrived when she had had it.
Mr Challis put the manuscript away in a drawer and gave a final glance at his reflection before going downstairs. The fact that its young author worked in the Ministry automatically ruled out any meeting for tea at some discreet café and a discussion of her manuscript, but he would certainly write the pretty little fool a kind letter; it would delight her, and give him but little trouble, and kindness never harmed one’s reputation.
He went downstairs feeling elated. Mr Challis never rubbed his hands or hummed to express his satisfaction; he left such manifestations to lesser men; but when his spiritual gloom was temporarily lifted, a watery humour broke through the cloud of his reserve like the sun coming out on a wet day, and his acquaintances and family were regaled with sly digs in Greek and cracks in medieval French.
As he crossed the hall he was surprised to observe a fire burning in the grate. A back, neatly dressed in grey with a white apron, was at that moment bending stiffly to place a log upon the blaze.
‘Grantey,’ began Mr Challis a
uthoritatively, going towards her, ‘it was quite unnecessary to light a fire. The central heating –’
Grantey slowly straightened herself and dusted her hands. ‘It’s a nasty raw night, and they’ll be cold, coming over that Heath,’ she said, as if to herself. ‘Good evening, sir,’ she added, apparently seeing Mr Challis for the first time, and disappeared through the door at the end of the hall which led to the servants’ quarters.
Mr Challis looked disapprovingly at the fire, which, in a grate that size, was necessarily upon a lavish scale. He kept a sharp eye upon the household expenses, for he was fond of money and had a strong sense of its value, and it pained him to see a fire alight when the central heating was working. It was true that it was not working well, and that Westwood was a very large and awkward house to warm; still, to light a fire at all had been an act of disobedience, a defiance of his express orders. Grantey frequently made such sallies. If she had not been such an old servant (she had been with Seraphina’s family for forty years) and if domestic help had not been so difficult to obtain nowadays, he would have taken a firmer stand with her; much firmer. And Mr Challis took up the evening paper and stood by the fire, studying its pages and warming his legs.
Seraphina did not go down into the kitchen, because Grantey was in charge there and everything would be in order, but she glanced into the morning-room, which the family had used as a dining-room since the war. A tiny dark woman in a black overall was moving about, setting the table.
‘Good evening, Zita,’ smiled Seraphina, and immediately prepared to depart.
‘Goot efening, Mrs Challis,’ said the little creature eagerly, and her eyes brightened and grew moist, and over her incredibly sensitive and mobile face, whose expression changed several times a minute, there passed a look of shy and mournful pleasure.
‘Everything all right?’ inquired Seraphina.
‘Everythink. Except dot I am so sad. But you do not want that I tell you about it,’ and her face became extinguished, as if someone had blown it out.
‘Not now,’ said Seraphina firmly, ‘but I’m sorry to hear you’re sad again.’
‘I am always sad, but it is nodding, and I do not wish to worry you, Mrs Challis. It is somesing Mrs Grant say to me.’
‘I’m sure she didn’t mean it.’
‘Dot is what make it so hurtful, Mrs Challis. I am not like you English. I feel it in my heart,’ and she spread a surprisingly youthful little hand upon her bosom, ‘I feel and I feel.’
‘Never mind, Zita. There’s a lovely concert on the wireless to-night at eight o’clock. Drop everything else, and be sure you don’t miss it.’
‘Oh sank you, Mrs Challis! Dot is goot! I shall enjoy much to hear it. It will make my heart cry, and I shall then be better. Ach! – no – I forget – I haf to go out and make a speech.’
‘Oh – too bad. We –’ and Seraphina smiled radiantly and went away, thinking: poor little beast, but really she is a trial.
The staff of Westwood, like that of every other big house in Great Britain, had been much reduced by four years of war, and at present most of the rooms were shut up, while the family lived in two or three of them and were waited upon by Grantey, her brother Cortway, who drove the car, and Zita Mandelbaum, one of a series of refugee mother’s helps. Grantey had a reserve of daily women in the neighbourhood who still came in to scrub and polish, but their ranks were thinning steadily as the British Restaurants and part-time work in local factories lured them away, and it was a source of constant – though silent – anxiety to her lest one day she should be left entirely without help for ‘the rough.’
Before the war Grantey had been cook-housekeeper, and had kept a parlourmaid, housemaid and kitchen-maid contented and in order, while Cortway looked after Mr Challis’s clothes as well as carrying up coals and cleaning the car. But slowly the orderly hierarchy had crumbled; the kitchen-maid, who was the humble but necessary keystone of domestic efficiency, was tempted by an offer to do bookbinding in the firm which employed her uncle, and left; the parlourmaid and housemaid refused to prepare vegetables or to undertake any of the rough kitchen duties, and while they were still working under protest, they were both called up. Grantey understood their reluctance to depart from the duties for which they had been trained, but deplored their unadaptability; she herself had begun as a maid in the Braddon nurseries, but was so devoted to her Miss Seraphina that in the course of years she had become more than willing to perform any duties that the perilous and changing times might make necessary. She was a natural servant, performing all her tasks with conscientiousness and perfection; and knowing her keenest pains and pleasures through the fortunes of the family which she served.
Neither household realized that if anything serious happened to Grantey their comfort would collapse.
8
Zita went on laying the table, arranging the wine-glasses and thin, ancient silver spoons and forks with the pleasure which beautiful objects always gave to her beauty-loving nature. Although she looked much older, she was only twenty-three, and although her nose was long and she had a moustache, she was never without a lover; a large and spotty, or small and sallow, young man with whom she would hold interminable conversations in the Old Vienna Café at Lyons Corner House on her afternoons off. She never had any difficulty in acquiring or changing her admirers, and she was always in a state of indecision, indignation, apprehension and general ferment about them. She was easily hurt and easily moved, but she was far from always coming off worst in the scenes with her followers; indeed, as they were also easily hurt and easily moved, she often came off best; and fat letters would arrive for her on the day after one of these scenes, beginning, ‘Zita –’ and covering twelve pages with spiky handwriting and recriminations, or a stiff masculine voice would demand on the telephone to speak to ‘Miss Mandelbaum, pliss, if iss conwenient,’ and when she came, it would melt into abject apologies.
A nature which puts such zest into all its activities cannot truthfully be described as unhappy, and although Zita (if anyone should be rash enough to question her and thus open the floodgates) always said that she was unhappy, she was not always so. When she was happy she was very happy; she both melted and shone, like a boiled sweet left in the sun. Music made her happy, and sitting up very late at night talking about herself, and the casual notice of the Niland children. The beauty of Westwood was always new and delightful to her, and so were the beauty and the kindness of Mrs Challis, for whom she had an adoration. She considered Mr Challis, to whom she had not spoken more than a dozen times, to be the wisest, noblest and most gifted of men, and Alexander’s pictures moved her to loud exclamations of pleasure.
She belonged to a Free German Club with headquarters in Swiss Cottage, and there she would go on most evenings after dinner, heedless of the blackout and the difficulty of the cross-country journey, often having to walk home because she had missed the last bus.
Grantey crossly dismissed her as mad, but admitted that she worked hard and could make a few branches and some leaves look ever so nice in a vase, and lay a table nicely, too. In Grantey’s eyes she was such a bird of passage in Westwood, so like all the other refugees who had worked there for a little while and then departed, that she was hardly a person at all.
But there was one point upon which Grantey treated Zita with respect and pity. Her family had lived in Hamburg, and when she spoke of them, and of what had happened to them, Grantey would press her lips together and work faster and faster at whatever she was doing, until at last she would burst out with, ‘Never mind, Zita my girl, the mills of God grind slowly but they grind exceeding small, and as sure as my name’s Alice Grant, that wicked man will have to pay for what he’s done,’ and then she would give Zita a quick pat on her thin shoulder and in a moment tell her to make herself a cup of coffee.
But what Zita missed most at Westwood was a confidante. She came from a large, affectionate, talkative family with many girl cousins and relations to whom she had been able to pour out
her joys and troubles, and at Westwood there was no one who wanted to listen to her. No one liked sitting up over a dying fire until one in the morning, making fresh coffee and talking and talking and talking; people were always saying that it was time they turned in, had their beauty sleep, went off to Bedfordshire, and they tended to keep their joys and sorrows to themselves and expected Zita to do likewise. She found this hard to do, and although she met plenty of Tonis and Trudas at the Free German Club in whom she could confide, it was not like having someone close at hand.
In the kitchen, Grantey and her brother, Douglas Cortway, were preparing dinner. Here Science was harnessed in the service of Gastronomy, and amid the elaborate and expensive machines Grantey and Cortway moved about like two obstinate secretive gnomes whom there was no pleasing. Both were small, and both were thin and elderly, and their grey hair was brushed back in the same way, and their lips were pressed together in the same disapproving line.
Grantey was stirring a sauce at the stove, while Cortway polished a little silver shell designed for holding salt.
‘I saw that Miss Steggles to-day,’ said Grantey presently.
‘You did? Where was that?’
‘Getting off the bus this evening. She didn’t see me, and I was over the other side of the road or I’d have gone up and spoken to her. She’s a nice young person. Not like some of them. I liked her way with the children, too. I wonder how she’s getting on with that teaching in her new school.’
‘You ought to ask her in for a cup of tea some time.’
‘Oh well, I don’t know about that,’ answered Grantey with reserve. ‘We’ll see when the better weather comes. I’ve got plenty to do just now, with all this knitting and making things for the new one. Miss Seraphina said she wanted the Spanish dish for the mussels; I’ll go and get it. Here, you can be getting on taking the beards off these here creatures,’ and she untied a small sack smelling pungently of the sea, and poured a stream of muddy dark-blue mussels into some fresh water.