Friendly Young Ladies (12 page)

Elsie looked away, trying to think of Peter; Peter who had made her feel exalted, emancipated, brave and in the right. She had kept faith with his revelation; but he was not here to tell her so. Only Leo was here, lighting absently another cigarette, perplexed, uncompromising, cruelly real. Elsie snatched her handkerchief up from the hem of her stocking, and burst into tears.

“I can’t help it,” she sobbed. Confused thoughts, which she had never shaped consciously even to herself, broke from her in words, to which she listened as if someone else were speaking. “I’m not like you. I can’t live like that, standing by myself and fighting everyone. I haven’t wanted to be deceitful. I wanted to be good to both of them, and for everyone to be happy. It’s easy for you to talk, you’ve never tried. You don’t know what it’s like to think up something that will please one of them, and know if you do it the other will behave as if you’d done it to hurt them. And in the end you just never do anything, you’re afraid even to
be
anything, you just go on one day after another, making yourself smaller, and flatter, and duller; you daren’t say yes or no because it’s sure to be taking sides, you feel mean and wicked if you go out of a room and mean and wicked if you stay. You’ve forgotten what it’s like to try extra hard to be good and find you’re more in the wrong than ever. … I know I’ve been underhand, going to Mother’s drawer and saying I was spending the day in Newquay. It makes you underhand. And now you say I’m wrong, too. I may as well go back. I’ll never know how to live properly. I’ll make a mess of everything I do.”

Leo had blown out her match before it touched the tobacco. Slowly she put the unlit cigarette back in the box, and got to her feet. She came round behind Elsie and put a hand on her shoulder. Her touch was diffident and Elsie, shut in her own misery, did not feel it.

“Elsie. Elsie, stop a minute. Don’t. There’s nothing to cry about.”

But Elsie, deaf and blind, wept on.

“Shut up!” shouted Leo in her ear. “Stop it! I want to speak to you.” A sharp twinge of pain shot through her shoulder, as Leo’s strong fingers dug into it. She winced, gulped, and opened her eyes.

“What is it?”

“Well, when you’ve got a minute to listen, I just wanted to say I’m sorry. I’ve been a fool. I often am. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know. I thought I’d train at something. I’ve got fourteen pounds.”

“We’ll think later. Don’t worry; you can stay here as long as you like. No, I mean it, we’d love to have you.”

Elsie was silent; only her eyes ran over again. She wondered, as she mopped them, why sudden kindness should produce this effect; there seemed no sense in it.

“I’ll be a nuisance to you,” she sniffed.

“Of course you won’t. You’ll probably be a great help. Look how you did the pumping.” She retrieved her cigarette, and lit it. “Helen and I spend a lot of time working. I hope you won’t be bored.”

A momentary concern arrested Elsie’s tears. “You’ll get into trouble, staying away because of me.”

“That’s all right.” Leo looked a little amused. “I take a morning off now and again. I’ll do some in the afternoon. Come on, let’s get out the canoe.”

“I’ll just get my hat.”

“Hat? Don’t be crazy. What you want to do is powder your nose. Use some of mine.”

The canoe was beached, in the garden. To find a garden was such a surprise that Elsie forgot the aching sensation of recent tears. It ran the length of the houseboat, reached by a little plank bridge, and ran about a dozen yards deep along the bank; it was fenced with a white wooden rail overgrown with ramblers, which, as thick as a hedge, overflowed the top of it and dripped down again into the long grass of the lawn. There was a rickety arch, covered with roses too—some of them had the beginning of buds already—and, in the tangled grass, an apple-tree in flower. The willow she had seen from her window grew there too, at the water’s edge.

“It’s in rather a mess,” said Leo unregretfully. “We just do it when we feel like it, you know. You’ll have to watch out in the canoe, if you’re not used to them. It’s just a question of sitting tight.” It was a Canadian canoe, not at all new, but light, slender and well made. Leo, holding it steady, showed her how to drop her weight all at once into the middle. It seemed, at first, terrifiyingly unstable; but, as with a bicycle, the sense of balance came in time. They glided out into mid-river; Leo, perched in the stern, dipped the single paddle with long firm strokes, almost soundless, which thrust them forward with effortless speed. “There’s Joe,” she said suddenly, and lifted the paddle over her head with a carelessness which rocked them dangerously, so that Elsie, clutching the sides, was too frightened to look at the island and see who replied, and next moment they had turned away. She watched Leo instead. Her face was quiet, open and impersonally happy. She looked, Elsie thought, like a nice boy but less alarming. It seemed, at this moment, strange ever to have been afraid of her; stranger still to have taken seriously the things that were said at home. Elsie wondered, all over again, what reckless scrape could have created the misunderstanding.

“A penny for them,” Leo said.

Elsie blushed; but here in the sunlight, with the fresh wind in her face and the open water ahead, there seemed no undertones, no mystery, no danger except the decreasing one of upsetting the canoe. She smiled and said, “Nothing, really.”

“What did you expect me to be like?”

“Well—I suppose I expected you to have changed a lot.” Suddenly and to her own surprise, a gust of confidence carried her on. “I mean, I see now there must have been a mistake. Or perhaps they meant something else, and I missed the point. They sort of—said things, you know, without saying them. And nobody talked about you, as if there was something queer. And then my being away at Aunt Lottie’s when it happened, and everyone refusing to say where you were and that I’d know when I was older … you don’t ever like to ask, when people say that.”

Leo trailed the paddle; the canoe glided onward with its accumulated speed.

“Well, if you feel old enough now, why didn’t you ask me?”

“I was going to. But I didn’t know if you’d like it.”

“Compared with watching you deliberate about it,” said Leo, “it’s a holiday.” Her voice was light and careless; but to know that after all these years it was coming now so simply, gave Elsie the sensation that everything around them was standing still to listen. “It’s a long time ago. Eight years. I can’t think how you managed not to find out. But I suppose you didn’t want to very much. One wouldn’t. Did you get the general impression that I ran away with a man?”

Elsie put her hand over the side, and fished up from the cold pull of the water a strand of weed. Examining it closely, she said, “Well, yes, I suppose.”

“Don’t look so nervous. You’re not having breakfast at home now. Of course I did.”

“Oh,” said Elsie. She pulled off some of the weed and dropped it back into the water.

“Well, you must have known that.” Leo dipped the paddle again; a movement as easy and unconscious as walking. “How astonishingly tactful ordinary people are. You’ve lived all these years in the village and nobody ever told you who it was?”

“I didn’t think it would be anyone I knew.”

“How could it be anyone you didn’t? It was Tom Fawcett.”

“Tom
Fawcett?
” Her imagination stopped of its own accord, unassisted. She remembered only an overgrown, light-haired schoolboy who made elementary jokes with the unpredictable effects of a half-broken voice, and had a reputation for foolhardiness on the cliffs.

“I don’t think you met him,” said Leo, “after he went to sea.”

“I hardly met him at all. I didn’t know he was back, or there when it happened. Nobody said.”

“Social amenities are a wonderful thing.” The smoothness of Leo’s stroke disguised its increasing force and speed. Her face looked bright and hard. She seemed, Elsie thought, very cheerful about it all. “It’s a silly story. You may as well have the whole thing and get rid of it, mayn’t you? There’s nothing to it, anyway.”

With sudden inspiration, Elsie said, “So
that’s
why we stopped calling on the Fawcetts any more.”

“Yes, that would be why.”

“I used to think,” Elsie’s voice was tinged with faint regret, “that it was an artist.”

“Well, no.” Leo’s mouth curled at the corners, making her look a little like Helen’s portrait of her. “No, not exactly. Look out, keep her steady while this launch goes by.”

The canoe bobbed and plunged on the triangular wash; but Elsie was too preoccupied to think about drowning. When the water was smooth again, Leo said, “He’d just finished his first year as an apprentice. He had an extra spell of leave, as it happened, because his ship had fouled a lighter and sprung some plates. He came straight home from Avonmouth to please his people, instead of going up to town on a binge with the others, and of course he got a bit restless and bored. We saw a good deal of each other. I envied him like hell, naturally, and wanted to hear all about it; and we had a look round some of our old climbs. And one morning one of us, I forget which, said, ‘What about that thing we always said we’d do, climbing the Green Man and staying there till the next low tide?’ You know the Green Man.”

Elsie nodded. It was a great tooth broken off from the point of the headland, with a grass cap on its flattened top, and sides like those of a tower.

“
Can
one climb the Green Man?”

“Oh, Lord, yes, we’d done it before. So we thought we would. We got up it all right, and the tide came in according to plan, and surrounded us—it runs to about fifty feet out there—and it was all rather fun. We still had plenty to talk about, or rather Tom had, and it was quite amusing when the sea was right up and the spray breaking round. But it was a long time going out, and we finally got to the end of our conversation. So after a while Tom told me what a nice girl I’d grown into, and started kissing me. It was a bit of a novelty—to me, at any rate—and it seemed to pass the time as well as anything, so we kept it up for a bit. It’s a place that gives you the feeling of being very remote from everywhere; all the houses, and so on, on shore look rather like toys. I suppose it can’t have occurred to us that a couple of people on the Green Man, at high tide, are rather more noticeable from the other way on. Anyway, Father got the field-glasses out, and before long, he and Mother were snatching them from hand to hand. At least, that’s what I gathered when I got back.

“Well, I suppose I expected some sort of dressing-down, for the climb. But Father had hardly started before Mother wanted to know when the engagement was going to be announced. The sort of thing one can laugh off if one’s had time to think of it oneself beforehand. Silly to get annoyed, anyway. Father, of course, immediately took the opposite line, and said no one was likely to have me after making a public show of myself. And they started on each other, fixing the blame for my upbringing. You can guess. I suppose I was feeling a bit on edge, what with one thing and another. Anyhow, I said they could settle my future between them any way they liked, because I wouldn’t be there; and left rather quickly. I went blinding along, the way one does, and ran slap into Tom, who’d been down to the village. He knew what it was like at home of course, who doesn’t, so I didn’t need to explain much; I just said I was going away and not coming back. I don’t suppose I really meant it. But Tom said ‘Damned good show, let’s go together somewhere.’ After that I didn’t like to back down; I never had with Tom about anything before.

“So we just doubled back and collected a few things. When I got in I could hear them still at it. I went upstairs and packed a rucksack without disturbing them. Tom told his people some story about having run into an old pal who’d asked him down for the weekend, and we met up at the station, with our luggage, under the eyes of the vicar’s wife, who was there meeting someone’s train. We thought that was the funniest thing yet. We decided we’d go as far as Exeter and then think where to go next. So we did that.”

“And where did you go next?” asked Elsie after an expectant pause. Leo seemed to have forgotten to finish; she was exchanging salutes with a weathered-looking man in a new, pencil-thin sculler.

“That’s Bill Brooks,” she told Elsie, as if this were more interesting and important. “He builds boats.”

“Does he? You were going to tell me where you went to, after you got to Exeter.”

“Where we went? Oh, nowhere. At least, nowhere together. Soon after we got to Exeter, we decided it wasn’t such a good idea, after all.”

Elsie loosed a deep sigh of relief. She had known, she said to herself, that it had only been something like this. But how good it was to have it said, clear and tidied away; no more doubts, no dark corners. The sunny morning, unshadowed now, expanded her heart.

“What a good thing,” she said earnestly, “that you realized in time.”

“Yes.” Leo looked at the twist of her paddle in the water. “Wasn’t it?”

“But then what happened?” Elsie prompted; her sister’s attention showed, again, an irritating tendency to wander. “What did you do next? How did you get here?”

“Oh, the next part’s even sillier. I thought after that I’d go up to London.”

“But why didn’t you come home? I mean, if you hadn’t. …”

“Well, there was the vicar’s wife. And besides, I didn’t feel like it. … Tom was a bit worried about what was going to happen to me. You might say, I suppose, that he could have thought of that sooner; but we were both only nineteen, and he’d had a year of taking life pretty much as it came. I didn’t want him fussing. I cooked him a tale about someone in town who’d promised to get me into journalism any time I liked, so that cheered him up, and we went our various ways. He was too scared to go back home himself; I don’t altogether blame him, old Fawcett was Anglo-Indian and frightfully pukka, if you remember. However he was all right, because he was due to sail in a few days anyway so he didn’t have long to lie low. I expect his people had simmered down by the time he got home again.”

“I do think,” said Elsie, giving the judgment due weight, “that after he’d compromised you, he ought to have looked after you better than that.”