Friends and Relations Read online

  “How long,” she said, “is the longest you’ve been in a train?”

  “Sixteen hours.”

  “Oh, Anna…”

  Naturally, Anna had travelled. Already she was in a position to disparage two or three places abroad. She drew her feet grandly under the bedclothes. The coloured blanket was prettier than anything she had at home; she understood that the Meggatts were fortunate but in some way deplorable. “You’re sick in trains, aren’t you?” she said more kindly. She picked her pillow up by the frill and thumped it out.

  The door opened: Janet, in the doorway, told herself this was shocking. She knew children ought not to talk with the light on at ten o’clock. There was nothing a child need say at that hour—she wished her own day ran in as brief cycles.

  “You two, do you know what time it is? I think you must be crazy.”

  “Father reads to me if l can’t sleep,” said Anna promptly.

  “Does he? Well, here you have to go to sleep by yourselves,” said Janet. As Anna was not her child, she sat down on Anna’s bed and looked at her kindly. They should have known each other. “Count sheep,” she suggested.

  “I can’t count sheep I don’t see.”

  Janet sympathized. “And don’t,” she added, “let Hermione talk again.”

  “Mother…”

  “No, Hermione; I’m annoyed.” Janet stroked back Anna’s hair and kissed her: alas, no fair little girl would ever be gay like Laurel. Was something drying up at the source? And why, meanwhile, was Hermione looking up at the high mild ceiling? She lay, so still, with that black moral line all round her; a bad little girl. Janet tucked Anna’s pink blankets in with a tenderness not for Anna. She turned out the light and crossed to the other bed.

  Hermione’s face came up in the dark, her arms, her whole body. She whispered: “You do love me? You do really love me?”

  Janet knelt with her face on the pillow. “That is a secret.”

  “So much that it is a secret?”

  “You’re my treasure.”

  “Mother, you smell so lovely, I’d like to eat you…More than anyone in the world?”

  Not far off, Anna lay listening in vain in the new, close darkness; waiting for Janet to disengage herself from Hermione’s arms.

  3

  On Whit-Monday the clouds gathered; Tuesday was wet. Janet drove her father and Lewis to the station. Simon came too, to buy Seccotine; he sat in the back of the car with his grandfather: two half-crowns changed hands more or less silently towards the end of the drive. Simon leaned forward to ask whether, this being so, he might buy a saw. Janet did not hear: the loud rush of the car through puddles also made some of Lewis’s talk inaudible. Eyes fixed on the streaming windscreen, she heard him remark that summer had died young and, later, was this not like a wedding day?

  “Whose?”

  “Anyone’s.”

  “Ours was fine,” said Janet.

  Lewis, looking intelligently through the rain, made some remark about the village of Batts Monachorum, to which she did not attend. She remembered, on the way back she must call with that message at the rectory, and at the station she must find out if the weedkiller had arrived yet and possibly make a fuss. “I wish,” she said, “we lived on the main line.”

  “Why?” said Lewis, starting violently. “It doesn’t matter,” he added, with reference to his own journey, though there was nothing he hated more than a rural junction. “I mean,” he said, “it doesn’t matter to me.” He suspected yesterday, from her more than normal preoccupation, that she suspected herself of having said too much—somehow, sometime, about somebody; perhaps on Sunday night. He had been at pains ever since to correct the impression. Now she was frowning at some difficulty.

  “If you really have that quarter of an hour at Doddington Junction, could you inquire about a parcel for me at the goods office? Could you really, Lewis? It would be so kind. It ought to have been delivered on Saturday. I think it’s been hung up.”

  “That must be difficult for you,” said Lewis earnestly. “I suppose I shan’t see you again for a long time?”

  “I may come up to Trevor Square for a few days.” She turned the car up the station approach, past the white palings; they splashed through the tarry puddles. Janet waved to somebody. Then: “Simon,” she called back, “look after Grandfather’s rug and his magazines.” Colonel Studdart was to have quite a send-off, but Lewis felt he had already departed. “It’s been so nice,” he said, like a ghost, getting out.

  “It’s been so nice,” agreed Janet, looking up at the station clock.

  Simon was not sorry to see the last of the visitors; he had a busy day before him. He glanced once at the engine, then returned to the car, where, in the front seat, he sat turning his half-crowns over and kicking the gear gently. Then his aunt Janet drove off rapidly; water went up in wings from some deep puddles. In the village he bought some Seccotine and bespoke a saw that cost seven-and-six. Perhaps Uncle Considine…perhaps even Uncle Rodney…Simon would tell them about the saw.

  The rector’s wife said to Janet: “You had quite a party for Whitsuntide,” and Janet could not help feeling proud: they had filled two pews, with, on the outside, Considine himself, rigidly carved as a pew-end, leaning a little forward during the prayers and groaning into his hat.

  “All gone?” said the rector’s wife, looking into the car.

  “All,” said Simon, “except Anna and me.” The rector’s wife laughed and invited the little people to tea. She nodded, and picked her way back up the wet garden path so cheerfully, anyone might have envied her. Janet, starting the car, did for a moment ask…Yet the rectory windows were Gothic, dark and pointed; the rector’s eye seldom kindled; he was much alone with theology, half into his roll-top desk. A poor companion, even to his Maker.

  Today this surely was the wettest village in the world: the poor late lilac was sodden; its leaves ran like gutters. Rain fell over dark doorways; the plaster cottages were distraught with it; the brick cottages sullen. Smoke from the dinner fires hung heavy, clotting the trees, and where under dark eaves the old woman still did not die, geraniums stifled, pressing close to the panes. The International Stores, full of cocoa, stood over its red reflection. No one crossed the street or even came to a door: a quenched, drenched day, thought Janet. And in the village, something suspended, perhaps finally over: evening brightly dissolving the roofs, the hourless blank of sunshine, dark lamplight, the bucket swinging up bright from the cold well. There would be worse days here, some better; none, you had to believe, final. To be consoled it was better to live indoors, without spectacle.

  Meanwhile, Simon was anxious to be at home with the Seccotine.

  At the Abbey, coming out nonchalantly between the hall pillars, Considine met them without interest. After breakfast she had seen him go out with Rodney, collars up, looks contracted, into the slant of rain. Here, however, he was once more: notably disengaged. “This will go on,” he said, indicating the weather. “Your husband likes it.” He helped her off with her coat.

  Considine was not so tall as his nephew; he was slighter, steeper about the cheek and narrower at the temple. As Rodney gained in maturity, Considine receded to a second, happier adolescence. Mutual esteem contracted to a small, pure nugget, unfruitful as metal. Irony became apparent in Considine’s manner, forbearance in Rodney’s. These last four weeks it became palpable: Considine was once more due to be out of England. This affair here at Batts, this existence, did not seem, clearly, much of an affair to Considine. His courtesy, his loyalty to herself (from this most abrupt of friends and careless of lovers) bore in strongly upon Janet that she was not his type. The plain fare of their daily companionship was Lenten (with Easter always ahead) to this uncomplaining sinner. She was, however, a fine woman; he had a keen sense of her quality. For her part, she resented a little on Rodney’s behalf that too generous smile,
that never visible shrug at their routine, their orchards…Here you had the most admirable of sober nephews, admirably rewarded.

  “Quiet again now, aren’t we,” said Considine, in civil reference to her guests’ departure.

  For himself, of course, the party had not been amusing. It was to be regretted there was no lady among them. Before the days of Rodney, Considine had been the gayest, the most unfaithful lover of his home. Batts had known flowery intermissions. Rooms long dark were unshuttered to daylight and animation; mirrors barely wiped clear of their film reflected a galaxy. Extravagant skirts brushed the lawns not then innocent of a daisy, parasols tilted this way and that on the landscape corollas of sunny silk. Country life was less rigorous, less professional; darkness came in early; legislation had not affected a summer day’s accents; candles flattered the décolletage even at midsummer; one laughed late. A week fled, even a fortnight; then the looking-glasses were sheeted still with a smile in them; shutters went up again on the last of a gaiety that had tradition but no heirs…Janet thought she must have missed the true Considine, hardly met him; she had not seen his charm in play.

  He regretted, she thought, no one. They were all scattered, tarnished, unwillingly dead. He was, however, deprived…“Perhaps,” Lewis had suggested, “we do not enjoy ourselves.” Perhaps one knew fewer ladies, perhaps they were less agreeable. In talk there appeared an asexuality, a competitiveness. Janet did not even know what Lewis meant; she supposed many women had always been dull. She would have invited anyone likely to entertain Considine: she could not think of anyone to invite. It was fortunate, she considered, that he was fond of children.

  He was not fond of children. Simon bored him, the manly little fellow. Anna was, of course, a woman in embryo. But Hermione, had she indeed been Elfrida’s granddaughter instead of his own niece, might have been said to show a touch of her grandmother’s spirit.

  Though Elfrida’s had been a hard spirit. She had not, by any account, treated Considine well. Her silence from any reproach had, at the time of the débâcle, been cruelly positive; in itself a wound for him. Fresh from the break-up in her life, that scandalous light only shifting from her a little, she had countered any approach from him, forbidding tenderness by her discernment, by her lucidity like an untouched girl’s. He might never have moved her. It remained impossible for him, now as then, to tell at what point he had committed himself to failure. She undid passion. By an ironic denial in every look, every word, every letter that they each now needed the other for reassurance, she made it impossible for him to be at her side where, since the débâcle, the world looked for him. Legally accurate on the plane of emotion, she made out an over-good case for his instability. Having now only him, she sent him away finally. She had perhaps injured him, perhaps even vitally. Then she had persistently sought the light man in him, match for her light woman. Under her dry-eyed farewell look, her last tragic un-regret, in Paris, he had certainly desiccated. Leaving Europe, he left behind with her in that cold apartment, where she had created out of a dire intimacy with her surroundings, as in a sick-room, an icy but very real hearth, the whole spring of his being, a manhood she had demanded then undone. His active life, since its entire divorce from conviction, became spectacular; fame quenched notoriety, reputation succeeded rumour; she might have been said to have “made” him…It appeared, nowadays, natural that they should not have married; their separation took on the prestige of an old alliance. Some retreat of prejudice had permitted her to repair her own honour. Yet Considine lived and apparently flourished, as Edward’s father, more notably sinned against, had broken-hearted declined and died: her victim.

  So at Batts, for Rodney and Janet he remained a problem, an unmatched figure hardly sterner than in porcelain, lacking its pair. Their own world was smallish, equable and domestic; for Considine’s entertainment they could think of no one but Elfrida. Again and again—with an eye to Edward—they had rejected the proposition; always with less fervour. Today (it was to be memorable) this rainy Tuesday, because he tapped the weather-glass, because he helped Janet off with her coat sighing, because her guests who had gone had not amused him, the portentous structure of this refusal quietly came down. It had been for years a shell. Today proved to be one of those weekdays, vacant, utterly without character, when some moral fort of a lifetime is abandoned calmly, almost idly, without the slightest assault from circumstance. So religions are changed, celibacy relinquished, marriages broken up, or there occurs a first large breach with personal honour. Rodney and Janet suddenly saw no reason why Elfrida should not visit at Batts with Considine.

  About five o’clock, in a premature twilight, when the children had already begun to quarrel and come out one by one from the schoolroom with Seccotine on their hands, the afternoon post came in. Lady Elfrida wrote, proposing herself for Saturday. “It’s a pity she cannot come,” Janet thought immediately. She re-read the letter and summarized it for Rodney. “Her cook’s ill; she wants to shut up her house.”

  “And she would like to see you,” said Rodney, “but naturally she does not say so.” He liked the woman. And because there was more rain than even Rodney desired, because Janet, Elfrida’s friend, looked more deprived than she knew and Considine rasped him (that yawn, feline, like one of his own masks!), Edward’s tabu all of a sudden became intolerable. Rodney no longer regretted that he did not like Edward better. “I can see no reason,” he said, “why she should not come.” Passing his cup across for more tea he added: “At any rate, I want her.”

  “But we can’t ask Considine to go?” said Janet quickly.

  “Naturally not.”

  “So they’ll both be…?”

  “Why not?”

  “But then Edward…”

  “I really can’t see…”

  “No, neither can I, Rodney. But then…”

  “I’m sorry for Edward, but life has really got to be lived somehow—Never mind if it’s overdrawn, Janet; I only want half a cup; water it down.”

  Janet tilted the kettle. Rodney so seldom spoke of Life that, surprised, she poured herself out a cup she did not want. “But then Laurel may feel she ought to take the children away.” She and Rodney considered the possibility. But they could not help knowing the Tilney children were, in their parents’ view, only too well where they were.

  Lady Elfrida’s coming occasioned little disturbance. Considine liked the idea. She was to succeed Colonel Studdart in the Fourposter Room at the head of the stairs; a housemaid re-lined the large presses. Hermione set out to finish a pen-wiper against time.

  “No one wipes pens nowadays,” remarked Anna. “Bags I do the flowers.” Hermione was setting in early to be the daughter at home. She made pen-wipers, hair-tidies and lavender bags she forgot to fill. She came alive socially twice a year, at the Nursing Fête and the Church Bazaar, where she sold little wilting bouquets, helped with raffles and relieved the stallholders. No one asked anyone else what they thought of Elfrida’s coming; she appeared, like some unearthly bright visitant, to glide, to plane bird-like across the sky of the week, in their full view, soon to alight, above all discussion, upon the rising pinnacle of Saturday. She produced confidences and estrangements, like a ghost rumoured, perhaps seen.

  Edward wrote seldom to Janet, he did not write now. It was Laurel who concluded:

  “…and angelic of you to give Anna those pink smocks. She wrote Edward a great description of tea at the rectory; I think she is naturally funny, don’t you? Of course we have never forced this or shown her anything ‘comic.’

  “Of course you must do what you think about Elfrida. Of course you are quite right to agree with Rodney. I’m certain a change will do her good. She came round here the other day looking like death and kept her taxi for three-quarters of an hour. You must not mind if it seems to us as though there had been an earthquake. Because it does rather. Edward is not asking about anything, so please do not ask
about Edward. He’s terribly tired this summer and I just don’t think he can cope with anything more. If it is difficult about the children, will you send them home? I will be ready for them any day you wire. Of course, though, they would be terribly disappointed.

  “(Man come about the carpets.)

  “I don’t think I feel so much as though there had been an earthquake, but as though I should never see you, or you would be different, or it would never be July. Funny to think I thought our carpets would never fade enough. The man just now was horrid and said of course I didn’t expect cleaning to bring the pile up, did I? Of course I did. Why else should cleaning be so expensive? I expect he wanted to sell me a carpet, don’t you? But, oh well, I hope you’ll all be happy at Batts—Forgive me, Janet; I expect in a house like yours one has more of an outlook. But I do feel a bit like the carpets. Now I am going to Ranelagh with the Coutts.

  “It’s no use asking me what Edward feels about this because I don’t know. I am having the red georgette done up, with a bolero. But Mrs. Coutts is a fearfully faded blonde: we all do—Oh, if Simon and Anna do seem to quarrel, just say something funny and make them laugh. That’s what I always do. But they don’t quarrel really. By the way, they say Hermione sacrifices her teddy-bears; do you think she ought to?

  “Janet, I’m not angry really; I can’t help how I seem, London’s so hot. I wish I had lawns and lawns—Well, you’d feel the same way if it were Rodney, wouldn’t you?

  “Anyhow, I should think you’d rather not know how Edward feels, as you’re committed?”

  “It’s hot in London, Laurel says,” said Janet, folding this letter. She always had to cover Laurel a little; Rodney was juster to her than was just. “Edward says nothing,” she added.

  Considine was already a new man. Heavy dews fell, the glass moved to Set Fair, the present relaxed its grip on the house. Considine talked louder, expanded personally, took on an edge. Even Janet became a woman to him; he remarked her slowness, her beautiful limbs, her heavy eyes, her decorum. He understood Rodney and thought of the two as lovers. It was today triumphantly Saturday, a hot blade of sunshine: Elfrida would be with them by tea-time. Without reflection, Considine anticipated her coming.