Friendly Young Ladies (17 page)

“Well,” he said, “if that was your first try, as I suspect, it was far the best effort I’ve ever seen. Masterly.” He slapped her waist, making a loud wet noise. “I remember distinctly I didn’t as much as get the thing moving till my second shot. I consider I owe you a pint, on that.”

“You win, all right. I’ll have to practise. Take you on again in a week or so. Come on in and have the stakes.”

Joe collected the pole, which had drifted in of its own accord. “Go and get changed first. You look a bit blue. Water’s cold today.”

“Is it? Well, maybe. What about you, like a bath-wrap or something till you go?”

“No, thanks; they’re so disgustingly clammy when you put them on again. I’ll remember not to sit on the upholstery. I can go over Helen’s stuff while you’re gone.”

“Give him a towel, Elsie, or he’ll drip over everything.” Elsie went up after her to get it, and heard her teeth chattering from several feet away. She came down, however, five minutes later, changed and smiling, though with rather more make-up than she generally wore, and poured out the drinks, keeping up with Joe one of those desultory and cryptic conversations, broken by terse and allusive jokes, to which Elsie had become accustomed and only listened, now, with half an ear. After fifteen minutes or so she remarked, casually, “Well, take whatever you like of those things. She’ll never notice they’re gone. I think I’ll get back to work now; I feel suddenly inspired. Must be the beer.”

She went upstairs, leaving Joe with the sketch-books and portfolio. Elsie thought it a little abrupt, but Joe seemed to take it as a matter of course. They behaved like this, Elsie supposed; and thought how comically inept her first speculations had been. Imagine herself strolling away in the midst of a conversation with Peter. Life must be very simple, Elsie thought (with the secret feeling of superiority which this reflection always engenders) for people so easy-going and tough.

Joe provided himself with a kitchen chair, dried his hands carefully, and settled down to the drawings, going steadily through them and putting his selections in a pile. He had evidently forgotten Elsie’s existence, and she got out her diary again, almost forgetting his, for he was a person in whose presence this came easily. Once or twice, in search of an idea, she happened to glance up, and it occurred to her for a moment that he looked rather different without his usual half-smile of indolent good-humour; coolly critical, decisive, and surprisingly shrewd. But the diary soon engrossed her thoughts again. When he had finished he filed what he had chosen, filled his enamel can at the sink, and went away humming. Elsie, remembering what Leo had said about being inspired, carefully refrained from disturbing her until lunch-time had passed by three-quarters of an hour.

It was just after four when Helen came in, earlier than she had expected. Elsie was, by this time, more than usually pleased to see her.

“I’m in time for tea after all,” she said. “Where’s Leo? Lying down?”

“Yes, she is.” Elsie stared, in amazement at Helen’s prescience. “I don’t think she’s quite herself this afternoon. She didn’t eat any dinner; she just drinks tea all the time. She doesn’t
look
very well.”

“Bother.” Helen spoke with concern, but no surprise. “She hasn’t had a go like that for ages. She was in quite good shape this morning, too. Has she been doing anything silly?”

“She did fall in the river this morning. I hope it hasn’t given her a chill.”

“Fall
in the river?” Helen’s voice mingled astonishment and outrage. “However did she manage to do that?”

“The canoe upset.” Seeing that Helen now looked frankly incredulous, she added in explanation, “She was standing up in it. Joe bet her she couldn’t punt it with a pole.”

“Oh,
damn
Joe,” said Helen heartily, and went upstairs.

From her curled-up position on the bed, huddled under a thick winter coat, Leo looked round with a pale guilty grin. Her face had the tinge of greenish vellum, and her eyes were underlined, as if with streaks of kohl.

“I’m going to get up in a minute,” she said. “I feel fine now.”

Helen sat down on the edge of the bed. “Elsie told me. Whatever on earth possessed you? You were bad enough that time you just got wet in the rain.”

“It wasn’t anything. It just cropped up, the way things do.”

“Cropped up. Don’t talk to me. This hot-water bottle’s stone cold. Have you had some A.P.C.?”

“About twenty grains. … He fell in and I laughed at him; I couldn’t back out myself after that, could I?”

“After which you went and swallowed a pint of cold bitter, I suppose.”

“Well, naturally, seeing I lost.”

“
But why on earth? Why didn’t you tell him you had an off day, like anyone else would?”

“Maybe they would, in one of your filthy hospitals.”

“Oh, nonsense. It isn’t 1890.”

Leo’s mouth shut in a straight obstinate line. After a while she said, awkwardly, “It makes you feel a fool.”

“I just don’t get it. Joe of all people, too. I don’t know what you’ve noticed in his books, or his conversation either, to make you think his mother didn’t instruct him in the facts of life.”

“There are times,” said Leo, “when the facts of life strike me as so damned silly I stop believing in them. Have you got any cigarettes? Mine were in my pocket when I went in. A smoke’s all I want, and I’ll be fine.”

“Of course. Couldn’t Elsie have gone out and got you some? What’s she been up to, hasn’t she done anything about you at all?”

“She flaps about. I told her to read a nice book or something. Asking what’s the matter. One feels such a fool. … This is better. Don’t bother with that bottle, I’m coming down now.”

Elsie, who liked to please, had taken Leo’s injunction literally. Her diary had been brought up to the minute, and there had been nothing else to do. Partly from a sense of social duty, partly because Leo’s library contained nothing more alluring, she had settled herself with the thinnest of four volumes, severely bound in dark blue, which she had found in the downstairs book-case where the more presentable books were kept.
Remission.
J. O. Flint. She need only read enough to be able to converse intelligently about it. Recalling Leo’s remark about fairness, she had formed beforehand a very good idea of the kind of book it would be; the kind, no doubt, which had been recommended to them at school to broaden their minds on social problems. They had read them up in the holidays, and had informal discussions about them in class. Each side of each problem had been represented by one good character and one bad, and the debating points shared out between them in equal numbers, like counters in a board-game. She had been quite expert in picking out the argument without reading every word. Sooner or later, the subject of Joe’s books was bound to come up when he was present; and she was anxious not to hurt his feelings by making it evident that she had not read even one of them. So far, no opening had occurred; he had discussed with Leo, at various times, the sales, binding, advertising, printing and general negotiation of books, but had not referred at all to the process of writing them; and once, in the belief that she was listening to another of such conversations, she had been some time in realizing that it was beer he was talking about instead. It was all very odd and unlike what one had imagined. None the less, she was determined to be ready with something appropriate and polite to say about
Remission
, even if it were all as dull as the title. She opened it in the middle; the first chapters, explaining everything, generally by long conversations between distinguished men in clubs, were always the worst.

She read a paragraph, a page, three pages, with growing sensations of discomfort and surprise. No politics, no economics, no pro and con; instead a clear and meticulous description of a dead baby, which its mother was washing on her lap and dressing in the clothes it was to be buried in. Elsie had never seen a baby, or, for that matter, anyone else dead. After reading a hundred words, she felt that she had, and that her previous ideas on the subject had been inaccurate. It would have been excusable, she felt with an obscure sense of injury, if it had made one cry in a pathetic, comfortable way. One ought to be told what to feel, eased into a nest of emotion which had been warmed up for one beforehand, not left to feel on one’s own responsibility, to ask questions that disturbed and frightened one, to be made, somehow, ashamed of not wanting to ask them. The worst of it was that there was nothing to take hold of, nothing to argue with except what one felt oneself. Without a word of generalization, only a picture built up with a detail here and a detail there, one was left not simply with a dead baby, but with death itself. For no reason on which one could put one’s finger, it made death seem a thing with which one had to come to terms while one was living, even a kind of door in oneself through which it was necessary to pass in order to live. It was all very quiet, terrifyingly quiet and cool. It offered no escape and no promises. It simply put the thing before one, and left one alone with it.

Elsie would have known what to say about a book like this if it had come out of the library in the ordinary way. There was enough suffering and sordidness in real life; a good book should make one happy; one asked the library assistant for the next one on the list. This was her mother’s method and Elsie had always followed it out; for she too disliked depressing books and demanded suffering, if any, in the grand manner. She had never imagined the possibility of being confronted with this kind of thing by a personal acquaintance. It was too awkward for words. She turned over a number of pages rapidly. A phrase met her eye which she had not thought possible outside the Old Testament. She looked again, to make sure. Yes, it was true, and so was the preceding paragraph. What was more, not three hours ago she had been sitting, all unaware, in the same room as the man who had written it. She shut the book, blushing to the roots of her hair, looked over her shoulder to see if anyone was watching, and put it back on the shelf, offering up a prayer of thankfulness that she had not told Leo she was going to read it. It was unfair of Leo. She ought to have warned her. Of what, Elsie was not sure, but she found herself resenting Leo more than the book itself; for taking everything as a matter of course, for being always unembarrassed, for being able to discuss books like this in terms of royalties and serial rights in the same voice as if they were bottled beer; for the whole armour of masculine impersonality which Elsie had sensed without knowing what it was that she had felt and resented; for an unsettling suspicion that one was living on a brittle surface, and that underneath it things might be other than what they seemed. She thought of this morning’s horseplay, so childish that she herself had felt, by comparison, quite mature. It caused one to wonder, at what seemed the safest and most ordinary moments, where one was, where everyone was. It engendered thoughts which, Elsie felt, it would not be possible to communicate even to Peter.

Her mind, following methods of its own, set about tidying up this uncomfortable mess. It did so partly by a process of forgetting; partly by the use of disinfectant adjectives such as “clever” and “difficult”, partly by going into Mawley to exchange
Stargleam
for
Mirabelle’s Man
. Like the aspirin, phenacetin and caffeine which Leo had been swallowing upstairs, these remedies might have been inadequate separately; but taken all together, they worked in time.

She had dreaded Joe’s next appearance; but, when it happened, the cure was already almost complete, and his presence finished it. She was washing up the tea-things, and looked up from the rattle in the bowl to find him at her elbow, drying them. “Leo not in yet?” he said, in the manner of one who has already ascertained the answer; and turned to replace the crockery in its correct places on the dresser, with which he seemed rather more familiar than Elsie herself. It was, immediately, as if he had been in the place all day. As he moved about the galley he told her about trouble he had had in the morning with the corpse of a dog which had fetched up against the island and, when dislodged, persistently returned. “Finally I roped it, and towed it down river. I never roped a floating body at home; nothing much for bodies to float in. Too bad Leo wasn’t there.” He drifted into the living-room, and settled down with a book. It would have been as difficult to be disturbed by the comings and goings of the postman.

He had come, as it turned out when the others got back from the village, to tell Helen that Alcox liked her drawings and wished to see what she could do with an article. This he had brought, together with an invitation to lunch with Alcox at the Ivy. Helen said “Joe,
darling!”
and cast herself into his arms. But Elsie’s excitement and confusion were only momentary. It was as if a nice, spontaneous child had been offered a visit to the circus by a reliable uncle. Joe returned the demonstration in a comfortable, matter-of-fact way, remarking “Wear your fleecy-lined bloomers, ducky; he’s a licentious old goat.” In a last anticipation of drama, somewhere between hope and dread, Elsie stole a glance at Leo. She was sitting with a cigarette on the edge of the table, looking at least as pleased as either of the other two.

When Joe left, Elsie went with him. To fill in, as he remarked, the interval till opening time, he had offered to give her a punting lesson. She went. She had forgotten every word of
Remission.

“What a pity it seems,” Leo said when they had gone, “that she didn’t know somebody like Joe ten years ago.”

Helen looked up for a moment. Leo had spoken absently, without emphasis; the thought seemed, somehow, an old one, older by a good deal than Elsie’s coming.

Helen only said, “And after all that, I never asked him to my party. Or did I?”

“Yes, you did. Or perhaps it was me. He’s coming, anyway.”

“I hope it won’t bore him, all hospital people.”

“Not him. He likes trade jargons. He’d listen fascinated to a party of undertakers, I feel sure. Bearing in mind your previous hospital parties, it’s Elsie’s reactions that bother me, if you want to know.”