Friendly Young Ladies (2 page)

But that was five years ago, and even so unpleasant a discovery had lost the force of its first impact. She had now reached the age when her mother could tacitly assume that she knew the purport of warnings about being spoken to by strange men. These she received frequently, and, sometimes, an even more impressive one about a wicked woman disguised as a hospital nurse, who went up to girls shopping alone, told them that their mother had met with an accident and been taken to hospital, and, inveigling them into a taxi with the blinds pulled down, stuck a hypodermic needle into their arms. It never for a moment occurred to Elsie to reflect whether her pale melancholy face, her brown eyes like an anxious retriever’s, her gawky sharp-kneed legs in their ribbed stockings, made up exactly the kind of quarry after which purveyors of vice might range. She lived under the threat of rape and seduction, and once, losing her mother in Truro, had wandered for nearly an hour sooner than ask anyone but a policeman the way.

The fact that she went nowhere, met nobody but her mother’s friends, and lived in a world of her own imagination, had suspended her in the most awkward stage of adolescence for quite three superfluous years. At seventeen her mind was still like Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition, with Love, represented by kings and queens in velvet, on the upper floors, and Sex, like the Chamber of Horrors, tucked away underground. Usually she could forget about the basement in rapturous contemplation of the stately tableaux above. The deepening dye from Beau Brocade (the mist was condensing into a drizzle) comforted her now. A groom from the local riding school, exercising one of the horses, cantered by, silhouetted grey against the sky, and her imagination added to him a cloak and a black mask, silver pistols, a posse of blood-hungry redcoats behind, and a sweet distraught heroine weeping for his peril in a manor over the hill. If only the clouds would lift, and she could sit down and read, she knew that she would feel better at once. But the sad rain and sodden ground wrapped her unhappiness about her and, as always at such times, extended it into an eternal future. There seemed no reason why it should not all be the same ten, or even twenty years from now. Miss Matthews at the Vicarage was, she knew, over forty, and still lived with her parents at home.

A cold, heavy water-drop ran from her hair down the inside of her collar. She began to realize that she was really wet, and, in spite of walking as fast as she could, was beginning to feel cold. She knew that she ought to go home. But if she arrived dripping, she would be noticed, and questioned, and discussed. If the rain stopped soon, and she slipped in afterwards and changed quickly, it would seem much more ordinary.

In any case, she did not want to go in yet. This evening had been a bad one. Suddenly she remembered why. It was because of what her father had said about Leo. She had guessed, she supposed, for a long time; but it had seemed so incredible that, in the absence of anything but suggestive silences, it had been easy to convince herself that she must be mistaken. Perhaps, she had said to herself, Leo had simply cheeked Father so outrageously that he had ordered her out of the house; she remembered enough of her sister to feel that this was quite likely. But surely Mother would have mentioned her sometimes (and, she thought, reproached her father with it) unless there had been something more. There was only one thing too bad to talk about.

Even now that she knew it was true, it had the inconsequence of a bad dream. Such things never happened to anyone whom one knew, let alone to one’s own family. But this had. When her mother took her to tea with the Matthews or the Garaways, people never asked, as they asked after other relations, if they had heard from Leo lately, or how was she getting on. Suddenly Elsie saw why. They all knew. Even if she conquered her wicked thoughts by prayer, even when she grew old enough to have a dress allowance, even if her mother let her have her hair waved, and she had an invitation to a dance, it was no use; she would never be like other people. Her parents quarrelled, quarrelled in front of visitors; and her sister was living in sin.

She tried to imagine what Leo would be like now. She would be twenty-six or seven, almost middle-aged. By now she must be walking the streets at night, speaking to strange men; for her mother had explained, deviously but often, that women who were led astray, or went with the hospital nurse in the car, always ended so. Probably she would have dyed her hair (Elsie’s innocence never suspected hair of being tinted unless it was an alarming shade of orange or maroon, so it was thus that she pictured her sister’s). It was all very difficult to link with Leo, for Elsie remembered her quite well, having been nine when she went away. She had spent her pocket-money, not on powder and rouge, but on telescopes, pocket compasses, knives fitted with screwdrivers and tools for attending to horses’ feet, ordnance survey maps, and hacking at the stables down the lane. Even when promoted to a real dress allowance, twenty pounds a year, she had never laid out this envied privilege cleverly, as Elsie longed to do, on pretty lace collars and artificial silk stockings; she had been apt to spend half of it at once on a plain tweed suit, and even this she did not save for Sundays or going out to tea, but wore it for almost everything, bulging the pockets with apples and bits of string.

Elsie had always been a little frightened of her. They had never told one another their secrets. In the school holidays, Leo spent nearly all day over at St. Trewillian with Tom Fawcett and the crowd of boys he brought home to stay, coming back at night, dirty, and bearing trophies of rare eggs and crystal spar, with holes in her stockings, grazed knees, and once, Elsie recollected, with a black eye, which she had un-convincingly explained away. When she remembered Elsie’s existence, she had been absently kind to her, and the old dolls-house in the attic was still full of furniture which Leo had made out of woven rushes and carved wood, all very neatly contrived. During her last year at home, after Tom had gone to sea with the Elephant Line, she had still gone off mysteriously, as far as Elsie knew alone. But Elsie, it seemed, knew nothing.

Leo’s thin tanned face floated before her, with its look of being sloped up a little at all the edges—dark-brown eyebrows, light-brown eyes, high cheekbones, long mouth and narrow chin, all slanted at almost the same angle; an old silk shirt blowing apart at the throat. Straining after coherence, she imagined it topped with a frizzed mound of puce-coloured hair, raddled and powdered mauve. Suddenly, hopelessly, she began to cry. The light rain drizzled round her, matting her hair and mingling its salt spume with the tears on her cheeks so that they ran down together, coldly, into her mouth. Her vest began to stick to her back, wetly, like a bathing dress; the wind plastering it closer. She felt as if the rain were soaking past it into her body. Her teeth were chattering. Hugging the red, slimy cover of
Beau Brocade
with one hand, and groping with the other under her knicker elastic for her handkerchief, she stood still for a moment, desolate and ungainly, sharing the solitude with a rough red cow, cropping the verge beside the brambles; then turned back towards the house.

E
LSIE SWALLOWED—IT EASED,
for a moment, the soreness of her throat—fastened her coat a button higher, and stepped out beside her mother, doggedly, along the cliff-path to the farm. She was reflecting that her nose would not begin to run before tomorrow, and by then they might not remember to ask whether she had worn her mackintosh yesterday. The wind’s fingers, searching between her lapels and up her sleeves, seemed to be tipped with ice; but her mother had just said that it was warmer, so she did not care to mention it lest it provoke questions.

The road to the village was more sheltered; she wished they had been buying the eggs there instead. She could not say so, for her mother had chosen the farm to please her. As a rule she preferred the cliffs to the village, which was, in certain ways, an extension of her home. More than half of it was of recent construction; it had become, in the last ten years, a kind of annexe to the large watering-place three miles away, and Mr. Lane was the local architect. He was responsible for about thirty per cent of the new building; the remainder was speculative makeshift, flung up by jobbers and let expensively for the summer months. The spare Cornish landscape, vulnerable as an impoverished grand seigneur, could do nothing to clothe or even to soften its squalor; it scarred the rough fields like leprosy, and, since its materials were of the kind that decay but do not mellow, time only made it worse. Every year a fresh eruption, slate-grey or yellow or red, broke out on some naked slope, and round it weeds seized on the scratched earth, and dumps of rusty food-tins appeared.

Mr. Lane’s houses, on the other hand, belonged to the residents. Their stuff and structure were solid, their fittings fitted, and their gardens were kept by the same hands from year to year. This might have given them an air of assimilation and repose, had they not been the kind of houses which, like some women, reward care and attention merely by becoming smug. They were not built to disappear into the scenery, but for people who wished their dwellings, like their afternoon teas, to be a visible bastion between their own tier of the middle class and the one immediately below. This suited Mr. Lane, who was not himself a disappearing person; and he had devoted a good deal of gusto to making each one as conspicuous as possible and entirely different from those on either side. If “St. Just” had been pebble-dashed, with a circular recess for the door and an enormous gable making the front a rhombus, “St. Anthony” must be purple brick, with a portico supported on pillars like Tudor chimneys. They were not labour-saving; Mr. Lane had never done any housework himself, and it never occurred to him, at work or at home, to imagine the activities of those who did.

Elsie did not doubt—since even her mother never questioned it—that her father’s houses were in the choicest taste. The grey Cornish farms she scarcely counted as houses at all, rather as extensions of the cliffs and exposed rocks. She liked them chiefly because she had never heard them discussed at meals. But today, when they reached Tregarrock’s, she only noticed that in its warm kitchen the cold she had been feeling turned suddenly to waves of heat, which, curiously, made her dread the wind outside more than before. As they walked back over the cliffs it was straight in their faces, and she felt a sharp little pain in the top of her chest when she tried to breathe. It was not quite like the pain one got after running too hard; besides, they had not hurried. Her mother was chatting happily about people in the village, and pointing out signs of spring. Her round cheeks were glowing with exercise and recovered good spirits; presently she remarked that it was a shame to go in, and suggested a long detour.

Elsie agreed that it would be very nice. She could not even enjoy a feeling of unselfishness; in her heart she knew the truth, that she could not nerve herself for fuss and excitement of any sort, even the kindest. “But, darling, why ever didn’t you let me know first thing in the morning? Fancy coming out in a cold wind like this.” “If you’d only
tell
me, dear, when anything’s the matter. …” It would all be so right and proper and natural that Elsie herself could not understand why she still went on, one foot after the other, in animal dumbness. Like a sick animal she felt guilty too. But it made no difference.

“You’re very quiet, Elsie dear,” her mother said suddenly. “You’re not unhappy about anything, are you?”

“No, Mother dear, thank you, of course not. I say, look at those lovely new lambs.”

The moment, which Elsie knew well, tided over. Almost more than the scenes themselves, Elsie dreaded conversations with her mother about them afterwards. Each was too much involved to be of any assistance to the other, and the only result was to make jangled fibres, which might have straightened into silence, vibrate afresh. To this usual fear was added, today, a new one; that her mother might decide that this was the time to tell her what it was that Leo had really done. Once or twice before, during the warning about strange men, she had felt some special revelation trembling on the brink; now she knew, for a certainty, what it was, and the thought of knowing more added itself to the strange hot and cold and the pain in her chest, so that she shivered as if with ague.

Mrs. Lane allowed herself to be led away among the lambs; but she looked faintly disappointed. She always expected, in spite of all previous results, that talking things over would make her feel better. Elsie chattered away, about sheep, about birds, about the Tregarrocks, trembling all over with suppressed tension and with cold.

By the time they got in, it was almost lunchtime. Elsie parted reluctantly with her thick coat and scarf, feeling that she would have liked to keep them on for the rest of the day. She made up for it by putting on a short-sleeved jumper under her long-sleeved one. The extra bulk, clothing her thin curve-less frame, made her look almost entirely amorphous; she surveyed the effect apathetically and went downstairs.

There was steak and onions for dinner. The smell greeted her in a rich golden-brown wave as she reached the dining-room; and without warning her stomach heaved. She sat down, wondering how much of her portion she could conceal as debris round her plate, or under her knife. She had reduced this to a fine art, for feeling sickish at mealtimes was no novelty to her; a sensational discussion had induced it several times. But it did not, as a rule, begin of its own accord.

Her father came in, complaining of the cold and of one or two people who had crossed him that morning. To Elsie’s relief, her mother, still glowing from the walk, agreed sympathetically instead of urging him to see the best in them. Unluckily she added a short rider, for emphasis, which betrayed the fact that she had missed most of the point at issue. Mr. Lane indicated this, and went on to remark that the steak was overdone.

“Really, Arthur!” Mrs. Lane had just succeeded in persuading herself that the steak was very nice, so her annoyance was natural. “There’s no pleasing you. It’s a lovely piece of steak, and only the least bit more cooked than last time, when you said it wasn’t done enough. Elsie’s enjoying it, aren’t you, dear?”