Friendly Young Ladies (4 page)

Within twenty minutes more, after Mr. Lane, who did not concern himself with Gladys’s free time, had driven off to visit a client, Peter Bracknell parked Dr. Sloane’s coupé in the lane, and rapped smartly on the door.

When nothing happened, he assumed that everyone in the house was down with influenza, having already paid two visits that day where this had turned out to be the case. So, finding the door unlocked, he walked inside, not unduly anxious over the possibility that he might be mistaken, for, as he would have told anyone who was interested, convention never bothered him much. Having hung up his overcoat in the hall, he went upstairs, tapped perfunctorily at his patient’s door, said “Hullo. Can I come in?” and did so without waiting for an answer.

Elsie lifted a hot, blurred face from the pillow, and stared at him in horror, through eyes unbeautifully glazed with tears. She had been crying whole-heartedly for the best part of half an hour, and knew that this must be evident beyond any possible remedy. Dimly, however, she took refuge in the etiquette which had obtained at her school, and which laid down that if a person who had been crying, however obviously, decided to ignore the fact, those who might have to converse with her did so too. It was awful while it lasted, but somehow one got through.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Bracknell,” she said, indistinctly, but with as social a manner as she could manage. “I’m so sorry Mother isn’t at home.” With sudden inspiration she added, “My cold seems to have got more runny again today.”

Peter walked over, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Mechanically she slid out a hot, moist hand to have her pulse taken. He took it between both of his, and squeezed it lightly, “That’s too bad, isn’t it?” he said softly; and directed a charming smile, full of the tenderest understanding, straight into her eyes.

Elsie’s response had a beautiful inevitability, like the ring of colour that forms in a test-tube when the right reagent is dropped in. Her breath caught twice in her throat, and finished up in a violent sob. She turned over quickly on the pillow, so that Peter, who still had hold of her hand, found one of his own clasped somewhere under her collar-bone. Her shoulders shook with her efforts not to make an unbecoming noise. Peter bent over her and smoothed her hair, tangled into a mat from being lain on, with his free hand.

“I always knew,” he said, “that some day or other you’d tell me all about it. I never hurry these things. They happen, in their own time.”

Elsie’s sobbing ceased, and she lay still. There was a moment of silence; a perfect moment, mutually ideal, like that which exists between a good violinist and a very good audience, in the virtuoso passage of a sonata. Neither Peter nor Elsie, for different reasons, was precisely aware of its nature. A kind of after-vibration, more moving than the words themselves, seemed to hang in the air.

“You don’t have to tell me, you know, if you’d rather not,” said Peter, with hair-trigger timing.

“I guessed you knew. Everyone who comes knows sooner or later. As a rule that’s the worst thing. But I don’t mind you. I thought I would. But in a sort of way it’s a relief.”

“I was hoping you’d feel that.”

Elsie gave a damp smile. She took it for granted that no further explanations were needed. This might have created an impasse; but not for Peter, who took such assumptions about himself for granted, and hardly expected to start from anything less. He pitched his voice a tone lower. Warm, intimate, and disturbingly different from the most affectionate sounds made by her mother or her best friend at school, it sent a little shiver down Elsie’s spine.

“Tell me about it just the same. I’d like it, and it will do you good. I want very much to help, you know.”

So, indeed, he did. His sincerity was evident to both of them, and a source of equal pleasure to each.

“There isn’t really much to tell. It’s just pretty terrible. I wonder if it often happens. One’s people not getting on, I mean.”

“You poor dear.” Peter himself was scarcely aware of having received information; he shared immediately Elsie’s conviction that he had known all along. “Yes, I’m afraid it does happen pretty often, society being the daft thing it is. Only some people notice more and feel more, and you happen to be one of them. Try not to be unhappy about it. It’s better, you know, in spite of everything, to notice and feel.”

This was a point of view which had never occurred to Elsie. It shed over everything a magic and transforming light. Like a cat’s first taste of fish, an actor’s first publicity, a boy’s first long trousers, is the first chance to be interesting that comes in the way of a girl in her ’teens. Peter saw the faint, astonished dawn of self-esteem in her dejected face, and was overjoyed. It was one of his most endearing traits never to elevate himself by lowering other people. He was a sociable creature, and liked company in the empyrean. Naturally his own head would always be a little the nearest to the sun, like that of the apex figure in a Raphael; but the rightness of this was so obvious to him that he never thought about it.

“I’ve noticed ever since I was a baby. But I’ve never told anyone but you.” She could not, if she had thought it out for a day, have thanked him more suitably. He squeezed her hand. With her heart in her mouth, she squeezed his back.

“Of course,” he said, “it’s obvious at a glance that things are badly wrong. What is it, exactly? Is one of them carrying on with someone else?”

Elsie gasped; she even let go of him. She was shocked to death.

“Oh,
no
. Nothing like that. I mean, they wouldn’t.”

“M-m, no, of course not. Probably be a lot happier if they did.”

Elsie gazed at him, horror at this blasphemy mingled with a secret admiration. Her face registered both like a cinema screen.

“Well, after all,” said Peter, radiating the vast toleration of his twenty-eight years, “they’re just a part of universal human nature, you know, and subject to the same laws. What you want to do is to get it out of your head that you’re the only person to whom this has ever happened. I’ll tell you something if it’ll make you feel better. My people got divorced when I was fifteen. I was at school when it came out in the papers. They had to take me away and send me somewhere else.”

“Oh. I
am
sorry.” Elsie felt as if years of experience had passed over her since this morning. Here she was, dealing with unthinkable situations, having them discussed with her as an equal. “That must have been terrible for you.”

Peter smiled remotely. “It was an upheaval at the time. Later on they both married other people, and now they’re reasonably good friends. I get on quite well with all four of them.”

In Elsie’s social circle, divorced persons were mentioned in almost the same breath as girls who spoke to strange men in the street. Her horizons were dissolving in every direction. The excitement of it was enormous. Her very blood seemed to be circulating at a different rate.

“My people don’t believe in divorce,” she said.

Peter nodded. “That’s the tragedy. They imprison themselves, and you have to pay.”

“When it gets too bad I go for a long walk and try to forget about it.”

“That’s how you picked up your bronchitis, I suppose?”

“It might have been. I did get rather wet.”

“God! You poor kid.”

He stroked his hand gently over her thin round shoulder. Should he kiss her? he was thinking. It seemed a shame not to; it would probably make her happy for the rest of the day. She was looking much less unattractive already. All she wanted was a tonic, the sort that didn’t come out of a bottle. There were, however, limits even to Peter’s capacity for professional indiscretion; nor had he lost sight entirely of the fact, which had never crossed Elsie’s mind, that when doctors visit young female patients, a chaperon is considered all to the good. He compromised by smoothing back the hair from her forehead. This seemed to do very well.

“From now on,” he said, “you’re going to feel different about everything. Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I believe I am.”

“I know you are. I’ll be here for another three weeks, you know. We’ll go for a walk one day, and talk things over properly. Shall we? Now I’ll have to go. But I’ll be thinking about you.”

The sun had come out. Elsie lay, after he had gone, and watched the golden square from the window move across the bedroom wall. A blackbird was singing. It was as though she had never heard one before.

Peter was bucketing the Ford along the rough road, whistling the “Soldiers’ Chorus” from
Faust
. The roof was open. He felt delightfully full of the sea air and of himself.

They had succeeded in making one another very happy.

I
T WAS SHORTLY AFTER
this that Elsie began to keep a diary. It was her second. She had meant, after altering the dates at the top, to use up the unfinished third of the old one, which she had allowed to lapse when she left school, finding that few things happened except those she had no wish to record. With this idea in mind, or perhaps to postpone the pleasure of writing (since the words were already in her head) she beguiled a twilight interval between tea and supper by reading it through. Ritual meant much to her, and was beginning to mean more than ever, so she opened it, carefully, at today’s date of two years ago. The entry was reticent; a row of five asterisks, with another row of five exclamation marks below. The pencil had broken off in the middle of one of them; this was the only incident she could remember of a day which she must evidently have supposed to be carved upon her heart. She tried again, a week later. This page was more informative. It began with a six-pointed star, drawn carefully in the margin with red ink.

“Did
Faerie Queene
in Eng. Lit. today. Got to the part about Britomart. It is lovely. I could just see her in her armour looking just like M. did that time she had us into the VI Form Room and put us on our honour about the cloakroom basins. I am going to call her Britomart to myself from today onwards. If Miss Taylor only knew!!!”

There were several more days with red stars. She read three or four of them, and presently remembered what the five asterisks had celebrated.

Her bedroom fire was still being kept up. She jumped out of bed, and, moving the fireguard, stood for a moment in her pink crochet bed-jacket and winceyette pyjamas, holding a sombre Byronic pose with the book poised over the flames. When she had dropped it in, she watched it with an enigmatic smile, poked it well under, wiped her hands on the underside of her towel to get rid of the blacklead from the poker, and returned to bed.

This ceremony, satisfying in itself, left the new diary still unhoused; but she remembered her Latin Unseen book, of which only a page had been used. It began “Then Horatius the gatekeeper, ‘Friends’ he said,” and ended with a derogatory sentence in red ink. Removing this, she headed the clean new sheet:

IMPRESSIONS OF LIFE

ELSA LANE

and held it away from her to study the effect.

Through the left-hand wall she could hear a leisurely arhythmic sound, of moving and pausing footsteps and of light objects being shifted and set down again. She recognized it, without thought, as that of her mother dusting in the next room; it was a settled, soothing noise. Against its background, she bent her knees to support the limp covers of the book, chewed urgently at her pencil for a minute or two, and began to write.

“March 9th. I have been reading an old diary I wrote when I was a child at school. How long ago it seems! Now I am older I realize how foolish it is to imagine that something worth writing down would happen to one every day (at least to an
ordinary
person, particularly a girl), so I shall not use this book to put down going for walks or what I had for dinner, but only thoughts that I may wish to remember in later years. Recently I have been thinking a good deal, owing to my illness and to a new influence that has come into my life.

“For instance: when one is young one is always worrying about whether one’s parents understand one. As one grows up, one realizes that this is a mistake to expect, as old people are less adaptable and the important thing is that one should get to understand
them
.

“At school one gets crushes on people and later one thinks one has been silly. But when one is more mature one knows that it is Nature and that one’s feelings have only been practising, ready for something real and beautiful.”

This completed a page. She had, in any case, meant to begin the next paragraph on a fresh one.

“There is something very touching to the heart about a Doctor who is
young.
One thinks of the years before him, with his eyes bent on sad and sordid things, doing good all around him, but missing romance in his own life, like Sir Galahad.” She re-read the last two words doubtfully, altered them to “St. Francis,” crossed it out, and decided to end the sentence with “life” after all. “He would need to marry someone with a great love of Beauty to keep him from becoming lonely and disillusioned in middle age. Someone younger than himself would probably be best for this.”

She re-read this paragraph several times, elaborating the capitals and adding shape to the down-strokes; and was going over it for the fourth time when footsteps, and the rattle of crockery on a tray, sounded on the stairs. She thrust the book quickly down the neck of her pyjamas, and tied the pink ribbon bow of her bed-jacket firmly over it.

It happened that, at much the same time on the same day, Peter was writing too. He had just finished making up the books for the evening; there was a good fire in Dr. Sloane’s consulting-room, and a comfortable patient’s chair; writing materials lay around him, and it required less energy to start a letter—which would, in any case, have to be written sooner or later—than to resettle himself in the sitting-room with a novel. He poised his pen, full of that virtue peculiar to the bad correspondent who writes a letter in any circumstances at all.

“Darling,—Blessings on you for yours of the other day” (it could hardly be more than three weeks, after all) “which was full of delights, as always.” (He had lost the letter, or, if not, it was somewhere upstairs.) “This is a far cry from St. Jerome’s, and it requires a definite effort of the imagination to picture you, at this moment, mentioning the deficient swab to Tonky, while a queue of caesars and ruptured fallopians forms in the anaesthetic room.” (This was putting the day back some hours; “washing instruments,” he felt, lacked style.) “But I don’t doubt your humanizing and humourizing influence has the usual Orpheus touch in the jungle of temperaments.” (He wondered, passingly, whether she would know who Orpheus was; but, if not, she would certainly look it up.) “Queer to think that my leaving-party and all that went with it—and still does, praise be—was a year ago last Christmas. What a night that was; and queer, too, to remember how it surprised us. Yes, you’re right” (he remembered this part) “of course it’s time I struck roots somewhere. But I still think I’ll strike firmer ones as a result of nosing around first and doing a bit of spotting. It’s no use sinking one’s exiguous capital irrevocably in a practice, only to find that the surrounding scenery saddens your guts, and the natives worship a divine aspidistra on Sundays. I wouldn’t bury that shining wit of yours in the thick brown wool of an industrial suburb.”