Friendly Young Ladies (30 page)

Thelma dropped her voice; a needless precaution, since the orchestra was playing
The Riff Song
fortissimo, but impressive.

“It was the scandal,” she said. “I hope it isn’t a
faux pas
, bringing this up, but didn’t you have a sister who ran away too? This is only what my mother said, you know. She said your father threw up his practice, and he’s taken a post with a firm that does housing estates or something like that.” Thelma’s mother had also said that they would not be so well off, but that of course was unmentionable. “Your mother said it’s not living in London she minds, it’s wondering what’s happened to you. It must be rather awful for her, I expect.”

“I did write to her,” said Elsie. The whole content of life was shifting like a kaleidoscope. Linked by Thelma’s presence to the laws of childhood, she felt her sense of sin grow terrifying and huge. Her parents felt closer than Leo and Helen, even Peter; the knowledge that an act of hers had shifted the course of their lives was appalling, unnatural. And Cornwall, the house, the garden, the familiar walk along the cliffs, struck away from all possible futures, dead at a blow … only then she realized that always, at the back of her mind, had been the thought that she would return.

Now, if she went back, it would be to a life as different from the old as her life of the present. Almost unconsciously, her mind began to probe at its possibilities. “Does my father work at home now, or does he go to an office somewhere else?”

Thelma found this question a very natural one; she had been to tea with Elsie once or twice in Cornwall. Keeping, with careful attention to good form, all traces of comprehension from her voice, she said, “He hadn’t started, when my mother met yours. But I think she said he goes up to some place in the city, or out to where the building is, and doesn’t get back till quite late in the day. I expect,” she added meaningly, “your mother’s often lonely.” She had been made a prefect lately, and felt it her duty to influence people for good. “Don’t think I’m prying,” she said earnestly; “but I feel sure your mother would understand, and be all right about it …
whatever
you’ve done. She told my mother so, as a matter of fact.”

“I haven’t done anything,” said Elsie desperately. “I’ve been staying with—with friends.” Even at this moment, the slight shadow of anticlimax in Thelma’s face did not escape her. Her Knickerbocker Glory, scarcely touched, was beginning to settle and melt. It seemed symbolic; and most unfair. Her background would, she knew, have impressed Thelma profoundly if she could have described it without giving herself away. But there was one more asset, the best of all. Taking a deep breath, she said, “I
have
been thinking, lately, of getting engaged. But of course, nothing’s settled yet.”

“
Really
?” Suddenly Thelma’s eager admiration, her envy, her respect, were like a disaster. It was as if one had bought some needless indulgence with an overdraft on the bank, which there was no hope of repaying. A flood of unwanted knowledge slid, as through a new-split fissure, into her conscious mind. She knew, and felt she had known always, that Peter only loved her a little, and occasionally; that, as she reckoned love, he didn’t love her at all; that he was no more likely to marry her than he was Leo, Helen, anyone, even the chance-met girl who had arrived with him the other night. Confusedly she felt that she herself, mortgaging the future with an idle boast, had taken the virtue out of it, cut off its growth like a seedling that one kills with hot water. It seemed, almost at once, like a thought to which she had long grown accustomed; the news she had just had jostled it in her mind.

“Can I be your bridesmaid?” asked Thelma, who felt that this was due to her.

“Oh, it won’t be for
years
yet. It’s all in the air. I don’t believe in getting married too young.” She was not trying to placate Nemesis, only to put the thing quickly away; and it was simply as a gesture of escape that she looked at her watch. It informed her that she had spent forty-five minutes where she had meant to spend fifteen. Thelma, consulted, said, “If it’s Sadler’s Wells, you’d never possibly get there now before the queue goes in.”

“I shan’t be very quick either, because I don’t properly know the way.” She cared very little, unless Leo were annoyed. Reality seemed enough for the moment, without the assistance of art; besides, she regarded ballet, secretly, as something to talk about having seen rather than to see, and had been wishing all along that Leo had suggested a good straight play.

“I’ve got a free period,” said Thelma eagerly, “till three o’clock.” She was reluctant to surrender Elsie so soon, with her half-told adventures and her probable capacity for being influenced further. “Why don’t you come for a walk with me instead, and we could talk some more—if you feel like it, of course, I mean. Your friend will have given you up by now, in any case.” The friend was probably, she reflected, an undesirable influence from whom it would be a kindness to separate her. The story of this afternoon would improve with keeping.

“Well, I don’t know, really. …” But she felt in herself an unwillingness to be alone with her news and her discoveries. With Thelma, she still felt dramatic and rather more than life-size, and the edges of reality were decently muffled. Already her mind was selecting a safely expurgated, but impressive saga. “All right,” she said. “We really might just as well”: and leaned back in her chair, enjoying, against a background of chaotic thought, the sight of Thelma making her excuses to the intrigued, inquisitive Phyllis and Joan.

Leo watched the tail-end of the queue disappear into the theatre with feelings of exasperation sharpened by anxiety. She ought, she reflected, to have arranged to meet Elsie at Charing Cross and bring her here; she could be relied on to get into the wrong bus or otherwise lose her way. She ought, by this time to recover it without undue alarm; still, the child would be flustered and disappointed, and Leo blamed herself. She strolled down to the box office; there might be a couple of returned seats, even separate ones would be better than nothing. There turned out to be only one, at the extreme end of the dress circle. She bought it, for Elsie if she appeared, or, if not, for herself.

In the end, she waited outside till the first interval. Was it possible, she wondered, that some observant constable had pounced on Elsie and identified her? So many people succeeded in disappearing every year that one had not taken the chance very seriously; still, it existed. At least, thought Leo, it would solve the problem which was becoming, as far as she was concerned, increasingly knotted. Leo was unused to responsibility, either material or moral, for other people; it sat on her heavily. The need to bowdlerize, for days on end, large tracts of her own personality in what had been the freedom and privacy of her own home, affected her less as a nuisance than as an insidious attack on her rather defiant integrity. Now that she had managed to involve herself in bowdlerizing Peter as well, it had become, she felt at times, almost too much to deal with. In the intervals which these concerns allowed her, she thought often and unhappily about the household in Cornwall.

Beyond all this, the economics of Elsie’s future, and even of her present, were beginning to nag. The budget of the
Lily Belle
was a fluctuant affair, based on haphazard give-and-take; to such systems of finance
à deux
, one-sided liabilities are disastrous. Leo for her own part had lived on Helen cheerfully for weeks on end, reversing the process when her royalties came in; their accounts, where any existed, had been scribbled on the backs of envelopes, correct, perhaps, to the nearest pound. This had now become, on Leo’s side, unworkable. No mathematician, she had wasted hours of writing-time in inaccurate computation, whose results Helen tore up indignantly and threw away. The friction thus engendered, though no more than skin-deep, was trying to people used to no friction at all.

Leo found that her meditations had reached a point when the astute policeman had the hopeful promise of a
deus ex machina
; and became, at once, heartily ashamed of herself. She made another survey of the street, was rewarded by a trickle of audience emerging between ballets for a turn in the air, and decided to give it up. If nothing had happened, Elsie had her ticket home and knew how to get there; if anything had, there was nothing to be done. Leo went in, found her seat, and settled into it just in time for the rise of the curtain on
Façade
.

It happened to be an especial pet of hers. In particular, she never got tired of the Dago; he epitomized what seemed to her the more comic aspects of the heterosexual scene. The last self-satisfied wag of his tail as he accepted the coy invitation of the red handkerchief to come inside, rejoiced her this time as much as ever. She thought of Peter; thought how outraged by the thought Peter would be; and laughed again after everyone else had stopped.

When the curtain fell, she sat for a minute or two nursing her enjoyment, then got up to buy a programme because she had forgotten what the last ballet was to be. It was, she found,
Horoscope
, which was better than she had hoped. She read, with lingering anticipation, the familiar names, shifting in her seat from time to time to give more restless balletomanes passage to the street or the bar. When she looked up, a scattered lane of empty seats led her eye along till it was arrested, four or five rows forward, by the outline of a head she knew very well. It was Joe; preoccupied, at the moment, in reading his programme too. A little star of pleasure and happiness shot up within her, and hung for a moment like a rocket at the top of its trajectory, sharpening the edges of things with light. She rose in her seat, to make her way round to him; then stopped and sat down again, while the rocket turned earthward, diminished to a fading point, and went out. He had looked up from the programme in his hand, smiled and spoken; but not to her. He had not seen her, and she drew back in her seat, for she no longer wanted that he should.

The woman in the seat beside him was not, after all, in the least like the one in his book. In the first place, she was not so young; older perhaps by a few years than he. She might have given Leo as much as ten. It was hard to be sure, for she was of a type that matures early and ages late. She was not beautiful, or anywhere near it; but her face, a little too broad, and her firm quiet body, had the confidence of women who have never missed beauty, having had all they want from life without it. She wore a plain dark-red dress which was neither good nor bad; chosen, it seemed, with a thoughtless negative taste, assimilated to herself, and forgotten. She was almost wholly lacking in the paraphernalia of female competition; but its absence was like the absence of small change in the handbag of a queen. Hers was the rare, prideless assurance of the woman whose womanhood has not only succeeded, but has known what to take of success and what to leave aside. She was the kind of woman of whom other women say that they don’t know what men see in her. But Leo knew.

She saw them talk together for a while, and then cease to talk. There was between them the accustomed ease of people for whom intimacy has long become a background, not a preoccupation. She knew, before she had watched them for three minutes, without hearing even the tone of their voices, that they were old lovers, grown, perhaps, a little careless in the security of years.

Well, she said to herself, turning her eyes away, this was nothing new. It had been a certainty familiar to her imagination since the first weeks when she had received Joe as a friend. She had not minded then. She had often believed since that she was glad of it. Why should it be different now?

For it was different; it hurt her bewilderingly, like a pain in some part of one’s body that has always been healthy and strong. She looked at the woman again; her maturity, the sexual poise and confidence marked all over her, qualities Leo had seen and recognized with indifference elsewhere, were not indifferent now. They turned in the heart like a sword. There was no sense in it, she thought.

It was in her mind for a moment to leave the theatre, but the idea revolted her as soon as she had formed it; a female kind of resource, almost on a level with fainting or weeping or boned stays. It might even attract Joe’s notice, for by this time all other outgoings were over. He might look embarrassed; he might smile, wave, introduce her. He might do all these things. She sat looking before her, stubbornly confronting her own emotions as one might try to outface an enemy by staring him in the eyes. She had always, till now, got rid of unwanted things more readily by this means than by running away. But it was only like thrusting oneself against something sharp; the pain increased as one pressed it home. Perhaps, she said to herself, this only seemed to matter because she had been in a mood, worried about Elsie already. It might be better to consider that instead. Perhaps, after another five minutes’ waiting, Elsie would have turned up. She would have been occupying this seat; noticing nothing, probably, for she was unobservant, or remarking afterwards, between earnest platitudes about the ballet, “Joe was there. No, I didn’t speak to him. He was with a friend. Oh, just an ordinary sort of woman.” (“Middle-aged,” Elsie would probably add.) “She looked quite nice. I think she may have been some sort of relation; they were rather like each other, in a way.”

Leo smiled; the bitter flavour of the joke was, for the moment, restorative. She looked up, and was just in time to see that Joe and the woman were talking again, before the returning tide from the gangways silted up the space between.

The lights went down, the curtain parted, a blue dropcloth displayed the signs of the Zodiac. The orchestra began. She sat alone, not penetrated by the music; the warring measures of the planets, disputing mortal destinies, had nothing to say to her, nor the young lovers caught in their beams. With a passing irony she recalled that she had been born in August, between the signs of the Lion and the Virgin; a fancy of her mother’s, born of this fact and a chance-read magazine feature, had been responsible for her name. The lion, she remembered, was fabled to humble himself before the virgin. But this legendary reconciliation had, it seemed, somehow failed to take place; perhaps something had happened to spoil his temper.