Friendly Young Ladies (6 page)

“Half a dozen three-ha’penny stamps, please, Mrs. Coppock.” She added, because not to do so would have been unthinkable, an enquiry for Mr. Coppock, who was convalescing from a gastric ulcer.

“He’s nicely, Miss Lane, nicely, thank you. Dr. Sloane said today it wouldn’t do no harm to try a little meat. Getting about a bit now, George is. I won’t have him in the shop on account of the standing, but he does a bit of driving. That young doctor that took Dr. Sloane’s place, he had the car to take him to the station, but he wouldn’t let George lift none of the luggage and that. Said it might strain the stomach. Very clever he seemed, and talked very interesting. But Dr. Sloane’s more homely, if you understand what I mean.”

Elsie assented, to what she did not know. She walked out into the sun, along the gritty rutted road, between the old granite cottages and the new concrete bungalows, surveying the emptiness of people and things, the ebbing of life from the earth and its creatures, the hostile desolation of the sea.

After the first dead minutes, thought came to her rescue, hurrying, as beavers hurry to repair a broken dam. Something, an emergency call perhaps, had prevented him from meeting her on the cliffs, from leaving a note, from doing whatever he had planned. Or they had missed one another somehow. Or he had minded leaving her too much to say good-bye. Not one of them but convinced and solaced while it lasted. But there were too many of them. They fed the mouth, but left the belly empty. Peter had left this morning; perhaps even yesterday. Whatever sort of covering one found to throw over it, the shape of the fact underneath remained the same.

Before she slept, however, she had found the answer. Peter would write. Everything would be solved then, everything confirmed. That would be the real beginning. Meanwhile (since Peter was busy, and she had all time) she would write to him.

Within three days, the third copy was ready to be sent. She knew every word by heart, and used to rehearse the phrases to herself at mealtimes, or in the sitting-room after tea, becoming so detached from her surroundings that her parents, too, sometimes forgot that she was there. She had been too shy to speak of the future, or to ask what plans he had made for them to meet again. Peter would know how such things were done. She knew where to send it, for he had told her that, when he went away, it would be to his old hospital, to take a house appointment there. She had not known what it meant, and it had seemed very remote and far away. But she had remembered the name. She knew that letters from Cornwall were often two days on the way; so it was half a week before she began seriously to watch the post.

She rarely received letters, and in these her mother took a kindly interest, saying, as she handed them over, “Look, here’s one for
you
, Elsie, isn’t that nice? Isn’t it from Pamela? How is she getting on with her elocution now?” Marjorie was the elocutionist, and Pamela was at a secretarial college; but Elsie had good reason to know that Peter’s hand was alarmingly different from either; she wore, pinned to her liberty bodice by day and the inside of her pyjamas by night, a prescription for ferrous sulphate tablets, which she had found in the waste-paper basket.

Her day pivoted, now, round her casual-seeming shifts to intercept the mail, or, for variety, the postman. By the second week she had developed a good deal of skill in both. In the third week, she ceased to encounter the postman personally, feeling ashamed to do so; in the fourth, she pretended even to herself that she happened to be in the hall only by chance. In the fifth week, the phrases of her own letter hid in the back of her mind, and came out at odd, sudden moments, running out and across like darting mice when she was in church or sitting at tea, and making her tighten her fingers, or twist her leg painfully round the leg of her chair.

In the sixth week, in the middle of a scene at breakfast, while she was staring about her in vacant, almost unseeing misery, she saw it lying on the table a foot away from her, at the top of the morning pile. Because the scene had started before the letters came in, she was able to pick it up and put it in her pocket.

She took it to the only safe place she knew of; the outdoor lavatory half-way down the garden. It had walls whitewashed over raw stone, with cobwebs in the corners; last year’s parish calendar, fixed in the mortar with rusty nails, showed a Christmas crib with very clean shepherds, and angels who looked as if they had all been to the same public school. A number of earwigs lived behind this. The place had been an old potting shed, and was big enough to hold, besides the wide, scrubbed wooden seat, the garden roller, mower and hose, and a wooden box full of dead-looking bulbs. Through the open window a wild fuchsia dripped with crimson and imperial purple, the small firm flowers and shiny dark-red stems shining half transparently between her and the light of a bright-grey morning sky.

Elsie sat down on the dirty garden roller; it would have been sacrilegious to use the edge of the seat, and its presence shamed her. She wished there had been somewhere else to go; but it would be time, in a few minutes, to help her mother make the beds. She did not open the letter at once, though there was so little time. Perhaps it was the residual wretchedness from breakfast, or the cold, cloudy light, or those barren posts and slowly cooling expectations, that made her pause with her finger hooked in the envelope, feeling chilly and damp in the palms. But she interpreted her dread as the turmoil of ecstasy, and, ripping the fold, took out the letter, two sides of one sheet and one and a half of the next.

Dear Little Elsie,

It was good to hear from you and to know that you still think kindly of me and that our talks together helped, maybe, to give you a fresh slant on things and make life seem less on top of you. I am glad that I was there, though no doubt if I hadn’t been someone else would; you were due for a new impetus of some sort, and the Zeitgeist has a way of producing such things at the appropriate moment from one source or another. It has been my luck to assist at such moments once or twice in my life and each time it has made me very happy, as happy as when I delivered my first solo baby, which I did in a back kitchen assisted by a girl of fifteen and four canaries in a cage over the bed, who shouted encouragement at suitable intervals. I wondered then what the baby would make of its job of living, as I wonder now about you; it’s an awesome business launching people off and watching them make towards the horizon out of your ken. But something tells me you will get there and come back with the Golden Fleece, for I saw a Jasonish look in your eye. Sometime we will meet and you shall tell me travellers’ tales.

I have been very busy of late. …

Elsie ranged through it, as a hungry bird will range through straw, seeking a stray ear of corn. A novel Peter had read and thought well of; a hospital dance about which he hinted, without actually specifying, doings both broad and deep; and the fact that Peter must now be on his way to the wards, as he had a bunch of case-histories to get for his chief.

Think of me sometimes [it finished] for I shall often think of you and wonder how you’re making out.

Love from

PETER
.

P.S. Give my respects to your sister when you see her.

She turned the letter over; perhaps this was not, after all, the last page, people sometimes skipped one and then came back. But no, there was nothing more. She put it down in her lap, and looked at the small square of the window. Years afterwards she remembered the cracked green paint showing the wood, a chrysalis, brown and glossy, gummed to one corner, and the little hanging flowers like clear drops of blood.

It was her sense of inferiority, the arrested child in her, that saved her faith. It kept from the death of her dreams the sense of outrage; so that it differed not in kind, but only in degree, from the times when she had had to come back from reading
Beau Brocade
on the cliffs at sunset, to a quarrelsome supper of tepid cocoa and cold brawn. It was cruel indeed, but natural and explicable; striking the present from under her, it did not destroy the future, only made it recede to the old and familiar distances. The style of the letter, set against those of aunts and school friends whose eloquence was the point of exclamation and the word twice underlined, dazzled her so much that its substance became, after all, inevitable, and even its patronage a compliment. When, having shed a few tears, she tucked the envelope inside her knicker-elastic and got up to go, a new mirage was taking shape already in the haze of her horizon.

“Give my respects to your sister when you see her.” It broke the emptiness, giving imagination a point to rest on. It was not a new idea, it had only increased its urgency. Second only to Peter, Leonora had become a symbol. During the weeks of post-watching, Elsie had often found vicarious compensation in thinking about her and picturing, in the light of Peter’s instruction, what she had become. The rouge and the maroon hair were long forgotten. Intense sombre eyes, and a heavy dark knot worn low on the nape, took their place; for Elsie had decided that it could only have been an artist with whom Leonora had accepted life. Artists were the only romantic strangers with whose appearance she was familiar; she often passed them, at a shy distance, on the cliffs or in the more presentable parts of the village, tanned, absorbed and interestingly shabby, and had longed to edge up, like the children, for a nearer look at the canvases which transmuted the daily scene into something rich and strange. One or two of them had been quite young, and by agglomerating the most attractive features and clothing of these, she had arrived at a satisfying image of Leonora’s. That, of course, would have been eight years ago; by this time he would be famous, probably an R.A. (it happened that Peter had never given her the benefit of his views on art), and Leonora, dressed in a Chinese shawl or (for one must not run away) naked on silk cushions, posed for him, arranged fruit and flowers in his studio, and entertained his gifted friends.
Trilby
, which had rather shocked her at the time of reading, came in very usefully now. She had read somewhere of the Café Royal, and saw it in her mind’s eye buzzing with excitement as Leonora (she had dropped Leo, which did not go) floated in on the arm of her lover, who, since his rise to eminence, wore a cloak and a pointed beard. The lesser artists would point them out to one another: “Yes,” they would say, “he met her in a little village in the wilds of Cornwall, and ran away with her. It caused a terrible scandal, and her family have quite cast her off. But he worships the ground she treads on, so I don’t suppose she cares.” Or perhaps she was in her own right a celebrated model, living beautifully and passionately, not with just one R.A. but with two or three.

She must, of course, have changed a good deal. Recalling the ample nudes in the Senior School library book on Modern French Art, and comparing them with her dimming memories of Leo, thin and brown and dressed in the out-at-elbows ruin of good tweeds, Elsie could not help feeling that this was very likely. But that would only make their meeting more touching and dramatic.

As she lay in bed that night, she got out the letter again. She had read somewhere, she remembered now, that people often put the most important thing in the postcript. Perhaps it had all been leading up to that. Perhaps it was a test. “When you see her”; not “if.” She sat up in bed, her brain too restless to let her body be still, and, going to the window, stood staring at the strip of moonlit sea which showed beyond the tamarisks and firs.

E
LSIE STOOD AT THE
door of her mother’s bedroom, with her hand on the knob. Before she turned it, she looked again at her watch. It was half an hour since Mrs. Lane had started; long enough to be fairly sure that she would not come back for something she had forgotten, which happened two or three times every week. There could hardly be less than a couple of clear hours. Gladys was ironing, and her father did not count, for, though he would have been affronted if a paper-weight on his own desk had been displaced, he took for granted that the women of the house lived on top of one another in a conspiratorial huddle. She opened the door.

With the door still open, she stood still inside the fresh, neat, cologne-scented room, with its Edwardian display of silver-topped glass and photographs in fancy frames. She had done nothing yet. She might be here for anything; to see if it had been dusted, or if the flowers on the table wanted fresh water. She could look and see, and go away again.

Perhaps, if she committed this wickedness, it would be for nothing. There might be several reasons, if one could think, for putting a birthday present, unopened, quickly away among the wrappings of the rest, and saying nothing about it. Perhaps her mother had had a girlhood sweetheart, who had remained faithful for thirty years. Perhaps. … But after every theory was exhausted, Elsie was still sure. She simply knew.

She went over to the little glass vase of primroses. The water was quite clear, but one of the flowers was drooping. She lifted it out, then put it guiltily back again. Perhaps she had been mistaken about the whole thing, after four months. She ran her mind over it, seeing it all as clearly as yesterday; her father saying “Many happy returns, Maude” with the ceremony that belongs to a military armistice, and handing the invariable envelope with the cheque; the dry ritual kiss thankfully got over; her mother turning to the presents, opening Elsie’s first, as she always did. She always had, ever since Elsie knew what birthdays were, when she and Leo had both been children. Elsie remembered reflecting once that before she was born, Leo’s must have been first; but, as her mother used to say sometimes, Elsie was the baby now. Leo had always got on with her breakfast, and seemed not to notice. Elsie’s present had always been “just
exactly
what I was wanting,” and Leo’s “How
very
nice.” It had seemed to Elsie that Leo spent a lot of money on odd, plain-looking things. She had felt rather superior about it. It was queer to think of this today.