THERE ARE FOUR SEASONS, page 22
Mabs was rather sulky because there were evidently to be no performances of any kind by the guests. Elaine could say a little piece and do a little dance, holding out the pink tulle skirts, and Mabs had rehearsed her carefully this morning so that she should do her credit and outshine all the others, and she naturally felt a little annoyed with Vicky for so firmly vetoing the suggestion.
“Jealous,” she said to herself. “Probably hers can’t do anything,” and the reflection brought a certain amount of comfort.
Nurses and mothers began to arrive and to wrap their charges in shawls and cloaks. Carriages drew up at the door. . . . Biddy came down for the children. (“They’ve all been as good as gold,” said Vicky. “Bless their little hearts,” said Biddy.)
Vicky and Celia and Hubert, left alone, set to work to clear up the disorder, moving the furniture back into its place, picking up the papers dropped from the crackers, laughing as they went over episodes of the afternoon, and remembered Mabs’ affronted expression when she learnt that Elaine was not to dance or recite.
Celia was ordering her fiancé about with a charming air of proprietorship. She looked prettier than Vicky had ever seen her, and had obviously taken more pains with her appearance than she usually did.
Then they went upstairs to say good night to the children and tuck them up, and Hubert sat on Margery’s bed, telling her stories about a gnome whom (he said) he had met in Ireland the year before. She listened entranced, her hands clasped round her ankles, her chin on her knees. . . .
They shouted for him from room to room, “Uncle Hubert, come to me.”
Celia squeezed Vicky’s hand, her brown eyes shining, and Vicky felt a sudden compunction that she didn’t quite understand.
After that, Hubert and Celia came over every day. The children adored him. He went for walks with them, played games with them, and took them on the lake in the boat (the last a great treat as the children were not allowed to go near the lake alone).
It was late May, and the fields were gay with buttercups, the woods with bluebells, the hedges with the delicate lacy flowers of the corn parsley. In the orchards sheep drowsed beneath a roof of apple blossom. In the gardens the air was sweet with the scent of wallflowers and sweet-briar, clamorous everywhere with the song of the birds.
Andrew moved about among his borders, where flaming tulips rose from a sea of forget-me-nots. The hawthorns were not yet in bloom, but their greenness was as sharp and vivid as a sword.
Through the sunny and unclouded days the children ranged the countryside with the beloved new uncle.
Auntie Celia, their old favourite, was deposed from her supremacy, and even Biddy grew a little jealous.
“You and your Uncle Hubert!” she said.
“He’ll make a lovely father, won’t he?” said Celia.
But it was not to Celia that he turned his quick amused glance when Noel got his words muddled up as he sometimes did, when Margery narrated one of her imaginary adventures; it was not Celia whom his eyes followed when the three of them were together.
Vicky tried to absent herself from these expeditions, but Celia would not allow it.
“You must come, dearest,” she said. “It’s not the same without you. Hubert likes you awfully. I can tell he does. . . . Vicky, darling”—her voice grew tremulous—“you don’t know what it means to me—you and Hubert taking to each other like this. It would have spoilt everything if you hadn’t done.”
Celia lived in a dream of happiness. Hubert loved her. He had told her so. She loved Hubert. They were going to be married. . . . These facts surrounded her like a golden wall of rapture. She saw nothing beyond them. There was nothing to see beyond them. How could there be?
She was much quieter than she had been before her engagement—quiet, with a new deep serenity.
To Vicky the sunny days took on a nightmare quality. Every word, every look, revealed Hubert’s love for her. It was almost incredible that Celia didn’t see it. . . . She lay awake through the long warm nights, tossing from side to side and wondering how it was going to end.
It ended quite abruptly one afternoon when Hubert had been there a fortnight. He had come over alone, bringing a message that Celia had had to stay with her mother, who had slipped that morning and sprained her ankle. He went out into the garden with the children, then, finding that Vicky remained indoors, came back into the drawing-room to her. She was sitting by the window, her head bent over a little blue smock she was making for Margery. He sat watching her in silence.
She began to talk, quickly, nervously, saying anything that came into her head, trying to stave off the moment that she knew couldn’t be staved off much longer.
Suddenly he caught her hand in his.
“Vicky, I can’t go on pretending. I love you. You know I do.”
“But Celia . . .” began Vicky, her heart beating wildly.
“She means nothing. I was mad. I wanted a wife and home and children, and I thought she’d make a good wife. I thought I loved her. But the moment I saw you I knew I didn’t, knew I never had done. Vicky, my love for you is—my whole self. I haven’t any existence apart from it. . . . I can’t go on living without you. Vicky, you can’t——”
“Celia loves you,” said Vicky.
He waved the reminder aside impatiently.
“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m sorry, but—it doesn’t. I suppose I’m every kind of villain there is, but—Celia doesn’t matter. Only you matter. Vicky, do you love me? For God’s sake, tell me.”
Vicky looked at the dark narrow face, at the kindness and sincerity and humour of the grey eyes, the firmness of the finely moulded lips, and was conscious of a pang of regret. He was the husband of every woman’s dreams—tender, patient, protective. One could always feel safe with him. . . . But it was too late. And—she didn’t love him. It was Philip—unreliable, blustering, incalculable, faithless—whom she loved and would love for ever with all her soul and body.
She shook her head.
“I’m sorry . . .” she said.
He went out.
She heard him telling the children that he couldn’t stay, that he had to go back at once to Auntie Celia.
The next day Celia came over. Her face was white and drawn.
“Hubert’s gone home, Vicky,” she said.
“Why?” asked Vicky, aware that her voice sounded forced and unnatural.
“He—we broke off the engagement last night.”
Then the children called her and she went up to the nursery and played with them noisily all afternoon.
Neither she nor Vicky ever made any other reference to the affair.
Chapter Nineteen
THERE was an air of bustle and activity over the Hall, particularly the nursery and schoolroom. Lionel and Noel were coming back from school to-day, and Paula and Margery were busy hanging up the decorations—the flags, the festoons, the “Welcome Homes”—that were part of the day’s ceremony.
Before going to school the two boys had had daily lessons from Roger at the Vicarage. Roger, despite his dreaminess, was an excellent teacher and had a knack of getting on with children. Then Lionel went to school, and Noel fretted for him so much that he was allowed to join him the next term. Noel, striving ever to mould himself on Lionel, was already less timid and sensitive, his life so completely filled by a schoolboy’s normal interests that he had little time to brood over imaginary slights and unkindnesses as he had so often done at home.
They had all been deeply distressed when Lionel first went away, but it had made less difference than they had expected. While taking his full part in the school life, he managed still to organise the activities of the nursery at home, demanding regular reports of their doings, editing the magazine, and even carrying on their favourite “paper games” by correspondence.
Vicky had engaged a governess for Paula and Margery—an eager enthusiastic young person called Diana Everett, who was an ardent champion of the “New Woman” movement and aggressively masculine in dress and manner. Philip detested her, but she was conscientious and good-tempered and taught the children well, though she found them disappointing from the point of view of the Cause. Paula (now fourteen) was completely uninterested in her sex’s wrongs, but deeply interested in the other sex, and ready instinctively to try to attract any member of it who entered her orbit, while Margery wept so bitterly over stories of sweated female labour that Vicky forbade Miss Everett to mention the subject to her again.
Margery, emerging from her childhood’s world of dreams, was difficult and stormy tempered, given to fits of naughtiness, followed by fits of exaggerated despair and remorse. Paula was wild and intractable as ever, but with a sunny gaiety that forgot both offence and punishment as soon as they were over.
Miss Everett was only engaged for the term time and went home the day the boys came back from school. She never knew whether to be pleased or offended at this arrangement. It gave her three months’ holiday in the year, for which her friends envied her, but, on the other hand, it prevented her having any influence over Lionel and Noel, and “the men of to-morrow” were, of course, vitally important to the Cause.
Paula and Margery were besieging Andrew in one of the greenhouses, begging for his potted fuchsias and heliotropes to put on the schoolroom window-sill.
“It’s to make it look nice for Lionel and Noel,” pleaded Paula. “Do let us have them, Andrew darling.”
Philip was in London, and Vicky, who always found it difficult to reconcile his claims on her with the children’s, was conscious of a half-guilty wish that he would not come home these holidays. He had spent a week at home last month and had been thrown by his horse on the first day of his visit and twisted his ankle. It had only been a slight sprain, but pain of any sort terrified him, and he had groaned aloud all night, so that neither of them could sleep. Vicky had tried to be sympathetic, but it had been impossible to keep up indefinitely the excessive sympathy he demanded—especially when she had to go about her usual household duties in the morning.
“My God, Vicky!” he had moaned. “Are you made of stone? Don’t you care how much I suffer?”
He had been even more difficult when Noel had pneumonia last year. He had been distracted by anxiety for the child, unable to remain still for a moment, pacing the corridors, bursting noisily into the sick-room with armfuls of fruit and sweets and toys, pestering the child continually with questions as to how he felt. When told that his presence upset the invalid and asked to keep away from him, he had, of course, been desperately hurt. . . .
Andrew came across the lawn to where Vicky sat in a basket-chair busy with her mending, his impassive freckled face relaxed into a half smile.
“They’ll leave me nothing in my greenhouses before they’ve finished, Miss Vicky,” he said (even Philip had now given up trying to break him of the “Miss Vicky”), and added, “What time are you expecting them?”
“The 3.15. We’re all going to the station. You’ll fetch their luggage in the cart, won’t you, Andrew? Any time will do. They’ll have their handbags with their night things.”
“I’ll go after tea,” he said. “I’ve got the gooseberries and currant bushes to prune, but Bill can come up and help me do that to-morrow.”
“What are you going to do with Bill when he leaves school, Andrew?” said Vicky. “Would you like him to come here?”
“Well, Miss Vicky, George—my brother, you know—wants to take him into his bicycle shop, and the boy’s keen to go. All for machinery, boys are, nowadays—bicycles and such-like.”
The solemn little boy had done well for himself, and now had a bicycle shop of his own in Fenton. Vicky occasionally saw him in the village. He still looked very solemn, but there was a prosperous air about him. He belonged to a different class from Andrew. He was an employer of labour, a man with a stake in the country.
“I suppose Ellen wants him to go there?” said Vicky.
Ellen’s and Andrew’s marriage had turned out happily. Ellen was as quiet and gentle as ever, Andrew as uncommunicative, but there was a bond of understanding between them that went deeper than words.
“Yes,” said Andrew. “She says she’d like the boy to come to you, but one must think of what’s for his good.”
“I know . . .” said Vicky.
“Andrew,” called Paula. “Do come and help us. We can’t get the tennis net right.”
Andrew went off to them with his slow clumsy gait.
There was a sudden jangle of a bicycle bell and Celia swept up the drive.
Hubert had passed completely out of Celia’s life, and no other suitor had appeared, and now at twenty-eight she seemed to have settled down into the traditional spinster’s rut. She was very bright and energetic and helpful, and spent her time running the various parish organisations and acting as a sort of unofficial curate to Roger. The local gossips often put their heads together and wondered if anything would come of it, but even the sharpest-eyed of them had failed as yet to discover anything lover-like in the demeanour of either.
Celia laughed just a little too much and too often, and could talk of nothing but her parish work, and Vicky—still with the old familiar sense of compunction—found her rather boring.
As the children emerged from childhood, Celia became less popular with them. Her boisterousness embarrassed them, and she continued to treat them as if they were small children. They had begun to avoid her, making little grimaces at the mention of her name. A visit to Ivy Lodge to have tea with Auntie Celia was no longer a nursery treat. Paula even mimicked her vivacious, faintly spinsterish manner.
She propped her bicycle against the terrace balustrade, took a parcel from the basket carrier on the handle-bars, and came down the steps to Vicky.
“Hallo, darling,” she said, kissing her exuberantly. “Isn’t it terribly thrilling? I hardly slept a wink last night, I was so excited. When are they coming? The 3.15, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Vicky, thinking that Celia’s absorption in the young nieces and nephews who treated her so cavalierly was rather pathetic.
Celia was tearing the brown paper from the parcel she was carrying.
“I brought a few sweets for them and these little dolls for the girls and the pencils for the boys. I’ll just pop up and put them under their pillows.”
Vicky couldn’t, of course, tell her that to the children her appropriating Vicky’s habit of putting little presents under their pillows was a sort of desecration and made them furious. In any case both Paula and Margery had long ago given up playing with dolls.
“You’ll all be back for tea, of course?” went on Celia, with a studied carelessness that had a wistful note behind it.
Celia used to be asked to tea on the first day of the holidays as a matter of course, but lately the children had insisted that she shouldn’t be.
“Not Auntie Celia,” they groaned. “She spoils everything. She’s such an old ass.”
So Vicky, feeling self-conscious and guilty, had not asked her. But she couldn’t refuse the pleading in her eyes, especially with her presents scattered on the grass at their feet.
“You’ll come to tea, dear, won’t you?” she said, as carelessly as Celia, steeling herself to endure the children’s reproaches. (“Oh, Mummy, why did you? It’s all spoilt now.”)
Everything in Celia seemed to bubble up in delight.
“Of course, I’d love to, darling. How sweet of you! I’ll settle Mama for her nap, then I’ll come straight over, shall I?”
“How is Mama?”
“Much better. It’s one of her good days, to-day.”
Mrs. Carothers was growing slightly—very slightly—senile. On her good days she was quite normal. On her bad ones she would ask where she was several times an hour and mistake Celia for an afternoon caller, entertaining her with the conversational topics of twenty years ago.
“What are they doing to-morrow?” went on Celia. “Would they like to come over to Ivy Lodge to tea?”
“I’m sure they’d have loved to,” said Vicky insincerely, “but Roger’s asked them to the Vicarage.”
“Perhaps they’ll come to Ivy Lodge another day, then. Mabs is at the Vicarage, isn’t she?”
“Yes. And Mark and his wife. Mrs. Abbot’s rushed off her feet and simply adoring it.”
“It’s rather a pity they’ve come just now, because it’s a very busy week for Roger with the scouts going into camp on Monday. However—I must go and find the poppets. Where are they?”
She always called Paula and Margery “the poppets,” much to their disgust.
“Somewhere in the garden, I think,” said Vicky. “Worrying the life out of Andrew.”
“I’ll go and find them.”
Celia ran off towards the greenhouses calling “Poppets! Poppets!” as she ran.
Vicky slowly folded up her mending and put it away in her basket. She had a hundred household matters to see to, and it would be her last chance of seeing to them in peace for a month. The children couldn’t bear her not to be with them even on the smallest expeditions. (“Oh, do come, Mummy. Never mind about the old house. It won’t be any fun at all without you.”)
As she went up the terrace steps, she heard Celia’s voice raised in a peal of laughter, in which Paula and Margery joined somewhat half-heartedly.
The smile faded from her lips. If it hadn’t been for her, Celia would perhaps have had children of her own to play with. . . .
The Vicarage, usually so quiet, was full of life and activity. Mabs and Walter and Elaine were there, as well as Mark and Helen. Mark had married a cousin of the subnormal aristocrat and held now a lucrative post in the city. He was a good-looking man, his heaviness of build redeemed by his height and the perfection of his tailoring. His old absorption in sport had resolved itself into an occasional game of golf at the week-end, and the bombastic manner of his boyhood had grown into a pleasant geniality that had nothing of conceit in it.
His wife was a slender exquisite creature, radiantly fair but with a Chinese cast of countenance that gave a faintly exotic impression. The two of them seemed to bring the atmosphere of another world into the quiet Vicarage—a sophisticated world of wealth and fashion, of seasons in London and holidays on the Riviera.
