Friendly Young Ladies (3 page)

Elsie picked up the forkful of meat which, in despair, she had just returned to her plate. She lifted it, slowly.

“Is she?” said her father. “It looks like it. Don’t force yourself, my dear. Stuff like this won’t do you any good. I’m leaving mine.”

“Every day I wonder why I work and slave to keep this house going. Thinking and planning to make things nice, and my only return is that my child is urged to belittle and criticize everything I do.”

Mrs. Lane looked, with filling eyes, at Elsie. She shut her own, raised the piece of steak to her mouth, and put it inside. She did so with a short form of prayer, but it must have been unsupported by the necessary faith. For a moment she struggled, then jumped from the table and ran for the door, while her parents sat each with an apt rejoinder frozen on the lips. She had hoped to reach the bathroom in time, but was spectacularly sick on the stairs.

Suddenly, with that feeling of delighted surprise which comes when the body succeeds in short-circuiting the will, she found she could let go of everything. She might have thrown up all her dreads and resistances along with her dinner. When her mother withdrew the thermometer from her mouth and gazed at it in tardily disguised horror, she was unmoved. When asked, just as she had foreseen, why ever she hadn’t said that she was ill, she replied easily and without shame that she hadn’t realized anything was the matter. Passively, contentedly, she allowed herself to be put into a warm nightgown and a warmed bed, and lay watching the reflected light of the new fire flapping and furling on the ceiling. Her father came in, with an armful of books from his study; rather over-genial, so that she knew he was trying to make amends for what had happened at lunch. Ordinarily she would have felt embarrassed, but now she accepted the books with just the right amount of gratitude, and afterwards pretended to be sleepy, so that he went away.

She lay curled up, a rubber hot-water bottle in a snug velvet jacket pressed to her aching spine, wondering why she had been setting her face against this heaven-sent solution, this refuge from all tribulation. Strange perversity! How pleasant illness was; the freedom from responsibility, the willing dependence—for, her pleasures being almost all daydream and reverie, she would need nothing except the simple things her mother would bring her unasked—the magical smoothing-out of mental and physical strain. She hoped she would be ill for a long time. The firelight, and the odd twist which fever gives to the perceptions, made her little room look new and different. From where she lay she took a fresh inventory of her surrounding treasures; her shelf of novels, Baroness Orczy, Dornford Yates, Gene Stratton-Porter, in shiny red two-shilling editions, her pictures of the “Piper of Dreams” and “Peter Pan,” the blue china rabbits on the mantelpiece, and, over them, “An If for Girls” framed and illuminated, which her mother had given her on her fifteenth birthday. Like the pink silk eiderdown, they lapped her safely in; the security of childhood spread welcoming arms, absolved from blame. She fell asleep, and, being restless, dreamed uncomfortably of haste and flight, and a river pursuing her upstairs.

She woke for a minute or two, some time in the afternoon, to hear her mother and father arguing, mildly it seemed and from habit rather than conviction, in the hall. Her mother was saying, “Yes, Arthur, I daresay, but Dr. Sloane
understands
Elsie. Think how good he was when she had whooping-cough. It’s so unfortunate it should have been just
this
month.” She could not hear what her father said; he was speaking from further away. It was all beautifully distant. She was glad that Dr. Sloane was on holiday, or wherever he was. He might have said she could go downstairs tomorrow. She slept again, less heavily and with intervals of half-waking, so that her daydreams continued through it with scarcely noticed lapses into absurdity. She was being rescued from renegade Arabs by Lawrence of Arabia on a milk-white horse. Culled from popular biographies and the yellow press, her portrait of this truth-driven hero was a sort of concentrate, in tabloid, of everything which had caused him in his lifetime to fly from one obliteration to the next. Happily indifferent to this, she was thanking him gracefully, and receiving his reserved expressions of admiration, when the bedroom door opened and woke her up. She turned on the pillow, to find a young man beside her bed.

He was a slight brown-haired young man, who demanded prompt attention with a pair of interested blue eyes, and looked quite used to receiving it. Elsie’s consciousness, crawling forth from comfortable shadows, felt rather as people do who walk out of a cinema into direct sun—dishevelled, squinting, and embarrassingly revealed. She would have put her head under the clothes again, but was prevented by a sudden and compelling recollection that she was seventeen and a half years old. Instead she blinked, and allowed her eyes to go slightly out of focus.

Her mother, whom she noticed now for the first time, said, “Elsie, dear, here’s Dr. Bracknell to see you. He’s looking after Dr. Sloane’s patients, you know, while he’s away.” Her voice contained a well-bred, but inadequate, suppression of regret. The young man smiled at her as if she had paid him a charming compliment. She added, with flustered cordiality, “So
good
of you to turn out again at the end of your round.”

“Of course not. I was grumbling this morning at not having enough to do.” His voice was like his eyes, brisk and alert. One had the feeling of something exploratory, a bright little ray, like the ray of a pocket-torch, flickering here and there. He turned it without warning on Elsie. She blinked, and sank down, imperceptibly she hoped, into the clothes. “Well, young woman? You sound a bit wheezy. Been going out without your mackintosh?”

Elsie had, at once, the feeling that this was no more than she had expected. It did not occur to her to reply. Forgetting even to blink, she lay looking over the top of the sheet, waiting for whatever else he might decide to confront her with.

“Oh,
no,
” said her mother, shocked. “Elsie’s always very careful, ever since she had whooping-cough so badly.”

Elsie had hardly expected him not to notice her relief; but neither had she expected him to let her see that it amused him.

“There’s a lot of ’flu in the towns,” he said. “Breathing hurt you anywhere?”

“Only a bit at the top of my chest.” Her voice had grown very hoarse since the morning; she was thankful for this, suspecting that her nervousness would have made it sound odd in any case. She felt both bewildered and guilty about this. She took her own way of life very much for granted, and it did not occur to her as being out of the ordinary that, except for the curate and one or two assistants in shops, this was the first man between sixteen and forty that she had conversed with in years.

“How long ago was this whooping-cough?” he asked her mother, taking a thermometer out of its little metal tube and popping it under her tongue.

“Some time ago now. She was only ten. But Dr. Sloane made her wear a cotton-wool pneumonia-jacket, and since then we’ve been
very
careful.”

“Can I have the pulse a minute?” He sat down on the edge of the bed, so that she had to uncurl her knees to be out of his way, and took her wrist in a cool, firm hand. Then he produced a stethoscope, and slid it up under the jacket of her pyjamas. Elsie, feeling agonizingly shy, coughed and breathed and said ninety-nine when he told her; he was so close that she could hear his own breathing, even and easy as it was. She was relieved beyond words when he sat up and put the instrument away.

“This whooping-cough was about four years back, then?”

With what seemed to herself startling abruptness, Elsie croaked, “I’m not fourteen. I’m seventeen and a half, nearly.”

“Well, well.” He went over and rinsed the thermometer in the washstand ewer. His voice, cheerful and impersonally friendly, made her feel for a moment quite at ease. As he wiped the thermometer on the towel, he glanced up at her. It gave her an odd, uncomfortable feeling, which only lasted a split second: he had had an almost proprietary look, as if he had collected a specimen of something, not beautiful but rare and curious, and were wondering how to set it up. Being both self-conscious and fanciful, and acutely aware of both, she dismissed the sensation with the shame of the adolescent, which comes so often that it is an annoyance, an irritation under the skin, rather than an emotion. He was looking down now at the thermometer as he put it away, and his profile, so detached and self-contained, underlined her foolishness.

Her mother was saying, with a pleased kind of casualness, “People are often surprised when they hear Elsie’s age. But I married almost out of the schoolroom, you see.”

It took Elsie nearly half a minute to define the vague unsatisfactoriness of this remark. Then she remembered her sister Leonora, who must now be twenty-seven. In the comfort of being ill, she had forgotten her. After Dr. Bracknell had given his clear exact instructions and gone away, she found herself wondering what he would say if he knew she had a sister like that.

The thought upset her so much that she put her head under the bedclothes, though there was no one in the room.

M
RS. LANE HAD REACHED
the end of her tether. She told her husband so before she left the room, and repeated it to herself as she stood, wiping her eyes, in the hall. This declaration marked a certain high level in their temperature chart which they only reached once in a week or so; but she always believed at the time that it had some desperate kind of finality. In much the same way the white ewe-goat in the next field, brought up short by her length of chain, would suddenly look outraged, and go through motions of being about to pull the whole thing out of the ground. Presently she would forget, and begin to eat her way round in a circle again. With Mrs. Lane, the crisis lasted longer, and, though the outcome would be the same, she never entertained this thought for at least a few hours afterwards.

They no longer quarrelled, in any decisive sense of the word. In their first two years of marriage they had exhausted the materials for it. Even after the brief, remorseful, shamefaced attempt at turning a new leaf which had produced Elsie, the succeeding quarrel had been only a kind of pot-pourri of the first half-dozen. They had, now, no mortal shocks in store for one another, only reiterated exasperations. Arthur Lane knew that his trenchant criticisms of people and current affairs seemed to his wife an ill-natured picking of holes; and, resentful that so unjust an image of himself should be projected by one unable to meet him on equal intellectual ground, conformed to it more and more. Maude Lane could not understand, after two years or twenty-nine, why her husband should treat with contempt her wish to read cheerful books about nice people, rather than those she described as sordid, morbid, or gloomy; or why he should be irritated by her natural efforts to believe, on the minimum of evidence, that people and facts were as she wished them to be. The truth was that they had never loved one another, only images of their own devising, built up from books and the romantic conventions of their young day; no moment of pitiful, of humorous, of self-forgetting light had ever revealed either of them to the other, for the passion of mind, or even of body, was lacking which might have kindled the spark. So Maude did not mellow Arthur, but rather serrated his edges; and Arthur did not temper or sharpen Maude, but on the contrary led her to associate logical thinking with coldness and disillusion, sentimentality with kindness and faith. Having no trust in one another’s fundamentals, it was hardly surprising that they felt no eagerness to concede in little things, such as the arrangement of rooms, or meals, or social engagements; their disagreements in these matters, like fragments of a cracked mirror, reflected in miniature their central dissatisfaction, but were too trivial and too hopeless to bring them back to it. Even Leonora had not shocked them into self-questioning: it had been too late. Each had seen in her an extension and condemnation of the other. Thus it was that they no longer had quarrels; only rows.

Each had effected a kind of semi-adjustment to this routine. Mrs. Lane’s natural optimism was such that always, at the back of her mind, floated a cloudlike expectation of sudden, revolutionary good fortune or escape. Like Elsie, she daydreamed constantly, not of romantic encounters, but that some stranger to whom she had once done a kindness died and left her a comfortable income, or that she made the acquaintance of a charming family, well-to-do but not so smart as to be awkward, who invited her and Elsie for long country house visits, or on a world cruise. It was rarely that one or another of these visions was not present to tinge the background of her thoughts, and to give to the discomfort and unhappiness of her married life an illusion of transience. Thanks to their friendly company, she recovered from the family scenes in about half the time taken by Elsie after merely witnessing them, and rather more quickly than her husband, whose procedure was to exhaust their emotional possibilities and then bury himself in his work. After twenty-seven years of married life she looked, though they were much of an age, at least ten years the younger.

But now and again there came moments when, though she never really ceased to believe that something would turn up, she felt a kind of panic at the thought of having to wait for it. This was one of the moments. Only one consolation was in reach, to go upstairs and talk things over with Elsie. Dear little Elsie; one had been so careful, all this time she had been ill, to keep everything from her, though perhaps, being so sympathetic, she had guessed sometimes. …But Dr. Bracknell had been so cheerful about her on his last visit, and seemed such a clever, experienced young man. Just a little chat, and then out to the village to blow the cobwebs away. …

Within half a minute of slamming the dining-room door behind her, she was on her way upstairs. Within half an hour, she was walking up the lane towards the village, her face lightly powdered over, feeling better already. It was Gladys’s half-day, but the grocer’s man had been, and if anyone else called, Arthur would have for once to answer the bell.