THERE ARE FOUR SEASONS, page 27
George’s new grandeur—the maid in cap and apron, the dress clothes, the visiting cards—tickled Andrew immensely, though he was fond of George, for George was a good fellow and personally unspoilt by his success. He sent money regularly to their sister, who was married to a farmer in Canada and had a large family of children. He was anxious, too, to help Andrew to rise in the social scale and still at intervals, though now without much hope, offered him well-paid posts in his firm.
“Honestly, old chap,” he would say seriously, “you ought to get out of your rut and into something better. It’ll be too late in a few years.”
“It’s too late now,” grinned Andrew. “I like my job and that’s all that matters.”
“There’s no money in it,” persisted George.
“I don’t want money,” said Andrew. “I’ve never thought that money was all it’s cracked up to be. I’m quite happy without it, anyway.”
And that worried George, because it didn’t seem natural. He couldn’t, of course, refer to what worried him most—the fact that the social gulf between them was widening slowly but surely with the years, and that Andrew seemed to make no attempt to help him bridge it. Andrew’s eyes would twinkle disconcertingly when his brother made stumbling suggestions as to the improvement of his speech and manners.
George was afraid that this was the last time Bella would let him ask Andrew for Christmas. She’d sulked about it last year, and made quite a scene about it this. There was, of course, something to be said on her side. Her father had been a dentist, unqualified but with a good manner, and they had always had a parlour to sit in on Sunday afternoon and a maid to open the door. It was natural that she should resent Andrew. She’d only married George because she thought that he would get on, and she was anxious to prevent him from being dragged back by old associations.
Bill, of course, was quite a different matter—a good-looking, well-turned-out young man, as sharp as a needle, and a credit to anyone. Bill, however, was fond of his father, and it was more on his account than George’s that Bella had given in over this Christmas visit.
Vicky was a little worried by the thought of Andrew’s going to George’s, for she had met George’s wife, an overdressed woman with a tight mouth and aggressive manner, and disliked her intensely.
“I don’t think either of us really wants to go away,” she said. “Never mind. It’ll soon be over, and we’ll be back here again.”
“Yes, Miss Vicky,” said Andrew. “That’s what I keep telling myself.”
As Vicky put her things into her suitcase, her thoughts turned to the children.
Paula had been married for three years now. She had announced her engagement to Sir Peter Daventry, her large clumsy dancing pupil, very soon after that day when they had all met at the Hall and she had first mentioned him. He was a simple, kind-hearted, somewhat conventional young man, and he worshipped Paula with an old-fashioned devotion that Vicky found rather touching. Fortunately Paula on her side was deeply in love with him and had almost unconsciously adapted herself to his ideals, moulding herself into the likeness of the wife he had always dreamed of. From the beginning she had entered his world and made it her own, presiding with a dignity that amazed those who had known the old Paula over his house in Hampshire. The inexhaustible vitality that had been the cause of her youthful wildness was diverted now to running her home, organising local activities, opening bazaars and flower-shows, attending functions. She was growing more and more correct and conventional, careful to set a good example to the village, to wear the right clothes, and to know the right people. She and her old friends had dropped each other by tacit consent.
She had had two children in the three years of her marriage, and announced her intention of having ten altogether. Already there was a hint of matronly plumpness about her figure, already something quelling in her eye when she was annoyed; already you saw in her the handsome majestic dominating woman she would be in twenty years’ time. She was revealing undreamed-of powers of organisation, showing herself unexpectedly capable in all her new duties. Her nurseries were models of what modern nurseries should be.
“It’s ridiculous,” grumbled Vicky, forbidden to take the babies out of their cots and nurse them when they cried. “I used to take you all out of your cots and nurse you whenever I wanted to and you’ve turned out all right.”
Lionel and Elaine were as devoted to each other as ever, but Vicky didn’t feel happy about the marriage. Elaine had had a bad miscarriage with her first child and had been so ill that it was thought she would not recover, and after that she had refused even to consider having another child. Lionel had supported her, growing angry when Vicky remonstrated with him.
“She was desperately ill, Mother. Surely you remember.”
“But she’s perfectly well again now, Lionel.”
“She had a bad shock. It frightened her. A woman doesn’t get over those things. She’s delicate and highly strung.”
Vicky felt that he was arguing to convince himself as well as her. Elaine, lovely and childish-looking as ever, poured out what maternal tenderness she had upon her Pekinese, cuddling it and crooning over it, talking baby language to it, and decking it out in ribbons. It made Vicky feel a little sick to see her holding it out to Lionel and saying, “Div oo’s Daddy a tiss, den.” And it was worse still to watch Lionel respond, to see him, too, giving to the grotesque little creature a tenderness that he secretly longed to give to his own children. He would have made, of all the men Vicky had ever known, the most perfect father. And something in him hungered for children, was incomplete and frustrated without them.
Vicky had been afraid that Mabs would wreck the marriage by her interference, but that fear had proved unfounded. During one of her visits Mabs had criticised Lionel too unguardedly, and Elaine had taken offence. Mabs had departed in high displeasure, and, though the quarrel between them had been patched up, their relations were still strained and Mabs now seldom visited her daughter.
Elaine’s loveliness made it inevitable that men should admire her, but all her love was still given to her husband. It was too intense, too possessive a love, thought Vicky. She was jealous of everything that separated him from her, even his work. She had persuaded him to take a partner, though he didn’t want to and could easily have managed the practice alone.
“Darling, don’t go . . .” she would plead when he was summoned to a case. “Don’t leave me. Let Jim see to it. What’s the good of having a partner if you do all the work yourself? You were out all yesterday evening, and I was so lonely here by myself.”
He tried to persuade her to make friends, but she wouldn’t.
“I don’t want anybody but you,” she persisted. “I hate every minute I’m not with you.”
She would persuade him to go away with her, leaving his cases to his partner.
“Just for a week. Do, darling. I just never get you to myself at home. Jim can see to everything. . . . Well, darling, he can always ring you up and tell you how they’re going on. Do, Lionel. Popsy wants an ’ickle holiday, doesn’t ’oo, darling? Tell Daddy ’oo doos. Tell Daddy Mummy wants to have him all to herself for a bit wivout his silly patients bowering him all the time.”
She took no interest in his cases and would not even let him tell her about them.
“No, don’t, darling. I hate them. I wish they didn’t exist, then you’d have to stay with me all day.”
The thought of her waiting for him at home, the prospect of her reproaches, however loving, when he got back to her, the feeling of compunction that oppressed him whenever he had to stay away from her longer than usual, poisoned all his pleasure in his work. There was a look of strain in his face nowadays that worried Vicky. It would have been better if he loved his wife less, or if she could have found some distraction.
And Margery? Somehow Vicky didn’t like thinking of Margery’s marriage, either, especially because in Margery’s case there nagged a tiny sense of guilt. If it hadn’t been for that holiday in San Remo, perhaps Margery wouldn’t have married Brian. If Brian hadn’t been there, courteous, considerate, charming, handsome, with an unobtrusive air of sympathy and understanding, if Vicky hadn’t perpetually enlarged upon what marriage to a divorced man would mean to Margery, to her children, even to Mark himself—but it was no use thinking of that now.
They had come back from San Remo engaged, Margery pale and listless but somehow at peace, as if the very making of her decision had brought relief. She had written to Mark to tell him of her engagement and had not seen him again. And it wasn’t really an unhappy marriage. Vicky kept assuring herself of that. Certainly at first Margery had been happy and in love with her husband. It was just that Brian was rather unfortunate. He had quarrelled with his uncle soon after the marriage, and after leaving his uncle’s firm had got a job as a commission agent that hadn’t turned out well.
Perhaps Brian wasn’t quite as steady as they’d thought he was, but he was unfailingly pleasant and kind. Nothing could ruffle his good humour. And Margery was devoted to Sandy, her baby. That must compensate for a lot. . . .
Noel was the only one of them who didn’t seem to have changed at all in the last few years. He was still living in his rooms in Bloomsbury and wearing his hair too long and dressing oddly and writing poetry that didn’t rhyme and forgathering with an earnest crowd of long-haired men and short-haired women. Vicky was secretly amused by it all. As long as Noel was happy she didn’t care how odd he was. . . .
Andrew drove her down to the station, bought her ticket, and put her into a carriage.
“Take care of yourself, Miss Vicky,” he said as he wrapped the rug carefully over her knees.
“Yes,” said Vicky, “and take care of yourself.”
Andrew was thinking resentfully of Miss Vicky’s children, who, he considered, were selfish and thoughtless and “put on” her shamefully.
Vicky was thinking resentfully of Andrew’s sister-in-law, who would probably snub or ignore him throughout his visit.
“Oh, well,” she said, “we’ll both soon be back—won’t we?—settled nicely down in our rut again.”
Their eyes dwelt on each other rather wistfully as they said good-bye.
Vicky sat at the long dining-table and looked around her. The centre of the table was filled with crackers and holly and lit by tall candles. Peter, at the head of the table, was a typical country squire, red-faced and jovial. Paula, opposite him, glowed with health and happiness. She dressed in too matronly a style for her age, thought Vicky, but Peter liked it, and that was all that mattered.
Noel, in deference to Peter’s well-known conventionality, wore a dinner-jacket instead of the purple velvet coat that was his usual evening attire. He wore, too, a monocle—a recent acquisition, which, he thought, gave him an air of distinction. He had assumed an expression of detached amusement as suitable to the affair, but he had nevertheless taken a good deal of trouble in his choice of presents and had been very much pleased with the presents he received in return.
“I adore Christmas,” he said. “It’s such an amusing blend of the Roman Saturnalia and the nineteenth-century Dickens.”
Elaine’s eyes kept seeking Lionel’s across the table. She was very quiet and shy. She never seemed to have much to say to anyone but Lionel. And Lionel was too responsive, too sensitive, too conscious of her need of him, too ready against his will and instinct to confine himself to the narrow world she made for them. They both should have married other people, thought Vicky, with a sigh.
Brian was making himself pleasant to Peter, talking of dogs and horses and sport and hunting. Brian didn’t take any interest in such things, but he had the knack of being able to talk to people about what interested them as if it interested him too. He had the jargon of anything at his fingers’ ends. He was charming, thought Vicky, watching him—too charming, perhaps. Too pleasant, too adaptable, too conciliatory. He agreed with everyone on every subject. He was agreeing with Peter now that the country was the only possible place to live in, but he would just as easily have agreed with someone else that it was only possible to live in town. Perhaps he really hadn’t any views of his own. Strange that it should have been the very pleasantness she distrusted now that had first attracted her to him. She had thought: He may not be clever or rich, but he’s good-tempered and kind and straightforward. She was a little less certain of the last now. His eyes had a curious way of shifting from yours as he talked, as if he were afraid of their giving something away.
A pity he hadn’t a better job. It meant that he was living on Margery’s money and, of course, she hadn’t very much. Margery was watching Brian as he talked, and Vicky tried to read her expression. Her mouth was rather tight, and there was a hard look in her eyes that had not been there before her marriage.
Then Peter made some reference to Sandy and her whole-face softened. . . .
Peter enjoyed having his wife’s relations round the Christmas table like this, but he was looking forward to the time when their numbers should be swelled by his own children. He was by nature a patriarch. Home life satisfied the deepest needs of his nature. He wanted a large family, children at every stage of development growing up around him, opening like flowers in the sun of his love and protection. Already he seemed to see a crowd of laughing boys and girls round the old mahogany table.
“Shall we pull the crackers now, Mother?” he said to Vicky.
He always addressed her as mother and treated her with a deference and consideration that made her feel she ought to be wearing a shawl and a cap.
They pulled the crackers, then began to examine their contents, laughing and exclaiming. The noise had made Vicky’s head ache and she became suddenly drowsy.
She wondered what Andrew was doing and hoped that his sister-in-law wasn’t being unkind to him, then realised that it didn’t matter if she was, because Andrew wouldn’t care. They would be back again soon in their comfortable rut in the ugly little house that she had grown to love so dearly.
She thought of the tiny overcrowded drawing-room, with the children’s photographs and Philip’s portrait over the mantelpiece. Her eyes grew dreamy and the room with its chattering occupants seemed to fade away.
She was conscious only of Philip—Philip who had come back to her in the end. . . .
Chapter Twenty-Three
ANDREW really was tiresome, thought Vicky, as she sat down with a flop of exasperation in her deck-chair and took up her book. Every year she showed him the piece in the gardening paper that said the climbers should not be pruned with the ramblers, and every year he did them together. She’d found him doing it again this afternoon, and when she remonstrated he had said, “Very good, madam,” and had gone off in a huff to hoe the herbaceous border, leaving both ramblers and climbers altogether. He’d sulk now, perhaps, for the rest of the day, but it did her good to “have it out” with him occasionally, though she always began to feel a little lonely and desolate if his respectful manner lasted for long.
Although she allowed herself to criticise Andrew, she never allowed anyone else to, and would defend him vehemently when the children attacked him. They attacked him frequently, resenting, in particular, what they called his “familiarity.”
“The way he speaks to you, Mother! He might be your equal.”
“Well, dear,” Vicky would say mildly, “when you really come to think of it, he is.”
They referred to him as “mother’s mascot” and were angry when they found, as they often did, that she had discussed their affairs with him. Vicky had only to begin “Andrew says—” for them all to groan in unison.
Katie had had to go home for a year to nurse her mother, and Vicky’s domestic arrangements had been somewhat uncertain, as maids were now difficult to get in the country. She herself suffered from rheumatism and could not do much housework, and more than once in a crisis Andrew had done the whole work of the house.
“What is that man supposed to be,” said Paula to Margery when they were discussing Vicky’s affairs together, “a chauffeur or a charwoman? The last time I went there he was scrubbing out the bathroom.”
“Or a sick nurse?” said Margery. “The last time I was there Mother was in bed and he was cooking all her meals and taking them up to her.”
It was a warm September afternoon, and Vicky began to doze over her book. She roused herself, sitting up straight and fixing her eyes resolutely on the print. She mustn’t get into the habit of dozing like that. It marked her as an old woman, and she wasn’t really old yet. . . . Only fifty-eight. Fifty-eight was nothing.
The book wasn’t very interesting, though the librarian had told her that it had had excellent reviews and that everyone was reading it. Books nowadays were never as interesting as they used to be.
She laid it on her knee, and her gaze wandered round the garden again. The little lead figure in the middle of the rose garden had been given her by Lionel. He had bought it for her on his last leave before he was killed. Only a week after he went back the casualty station where he was working had been hit by a shell and there were no survivors.
Vicky had been in the drawing-room when the telegram was brought to her. She had sat there, staring dry-eyed at the photograph of Lionel in his uniform on the mantelpiece, unable to believe that it was true.
Andrew, who had seen the telegraph boy come to the door, entered the drawing-room and clumsily laid his dirt-ingrained hand on her shoulder. Then she had broken down and sobbed, and Andrew had knelt by her, murmuring, “There, there, Miss Vicky. Don’t take on like that. . . . There, there. . . .”
Elaine had been so completely prostrated by the news that for a time the doctors had feared for her reason. She could neither eat nor sleep. She locked herself up for hours in Lionel’s room and refused to allow anyone to touch his things. Finally she took some prussic acid that she found in the dispensary and raged weakly at them for trying to save her.
