Faster! Faster! (6 page)

“Yes there is. Five minutes.”

“Have I got to?”

There was a second's pause. Then her mother said, in the carefully neutral tone that she sometimes employed towards her children:

“No. Of course not. It's your decision, not mine. Do exactly what you like. I think myself the green is a mistake—it's obviously too small for
you, and it's not your colour. But it's for you to decide, naturally.”

“Then I think I'll keep it on,” said Taffy defiantly.

“Very well. Put the letters in the box as you go down, please, darling.”

Her mother sounded calm — almost absent-minded, as though she had already dismissed the whole topic of Taffy's frock from her mind.

Nevertheless Taffy knew that something was still vibrating in the atmosphere between them, born of that tiny scene.

Only she didn't know what it was.

Moved by a belated impulse of hospitality, Copper Winsloe emerged from the workshop, his dog Betsy at his heels, with the idea of finding a drink for Quarrendon.

The chap, although extraordinary to look at, seemed to be not a bad sort. He talked less than did most of Claudia's friends, and, although probably clever—“a brain” Cooper mentally termed him—had so far shown no offensive signs of it.

Quarrendon was nowhere to be seen. He must have gone upstairs to dress. Copper wondered doubtfully whether the chap proposed to get into evening clothes. Still—Oxford.

He ought to be all right.

Betsy, who was young and light-hearted, made a frivolous attempt to pounce at Taffy's cat, stalking morosely across the hall.

Copper indulgently called Betsy to order.

He was much kinder and more lenient towards animals than towards human beings.

Betsy adored him.

Everyone was upstairs.

Copper, first disposing of a drink on his own account and then of one on behalf of the absent Quarrendon, went up to his dressing-room.

As he took the loose change from his trouserpocket and placed it on the table, he reflected in a detached way that this — three shillings and eightpence—was literally all the money he had in the world.

He had never had any savings—his war gratuity had been spent long ago, and his share of the money his parents had left, divided between himself and two sisters, both of whom had married poor men, had gone, bit by bit, to his creditors.

With bitterness Copper remembered that before the war he had been quite well off, and had enjoyed life, on a tea plantation in Ceylon. The climate had never troubled him, and he had had sport, and cheap polo, and the kind of society that he enjoyed. His idiotic war marriage had stopped all that. One couldn't take a girl like Claudia to live in the Far East. She'd have been miserable, out of her element altogether. After the war was over, she had said that of course she'd go—if Copper really wanted it. Probably she'd meant it too. But there seemed to be a doubt about her health—Mrs Peel making a fuss, and insisting on getting an opinion from some old woman of a doctor. And of course the doctor, probably seeing what was required of
him, had said that Claudia wasn't any too strong. So they had stayed in England.

Claudia not strong!

Copper's mouth twisted into a smile at the thought. As he had told Sal Oliver, he scarcely knew how he and Claudia had reached the stage at which they now found themselves—and that didn't apply only to the continual financial pressure against which Claudia struggled gamely, and to which Copper himself had long since surrendered without resistance.

In the early years after the war he had tried hard to get a job, and had failed again and again.

Then Claudia's father died, and she had inherited some money. They had lived on it—and much beyond it—for years. Claudia had decided to start a business that had gradually succeeded, and developed into London Universal Services. Then she had bought Arling. It would, she said, be better for the children to live in the country.

It would give Copper something to do.

It would prove cheaper in the long run.

Copper believed in none of these reasons. Claudia wanted to live in her old home, that was all.

He didn't even understand why. It wasn't like her, surely, to be sentimental.

Arling was well enough, but the purchase mortgage remained unpaid, bills were always coming in, and to-morrow's money was never quite enough to meet yesterday's demands.

Copper savagely kicked off his boots. The thought of his financial position always made him

sick with impotent fury. He closed his mind to it as far as possible.

But the subconscious knowledge was always there, driving him to irritability with his children—his expensive children—just as his resentment at his own inefficiency made him seek to assert himself with Claudia, grumbling and contradicting like a sulky schoolboy.

He didn't quarrel with her, because Claudia wouldn't quarrel.

She hadn't time, probably.

It was the rush-life, for Claudia.

Copper, who never had anything to do that he felt to be worth doing, could only evade the horror of conscious thought by drinking rather too much, and taking his dog for long, aimless walks.

There was nothing to look forward to any more, and when the next war came, it would settle him. Copper put his three shillings and eightpence into the pocket of his evening trousers.

If they played Bridge, he might win some money from Claudia's guests.

Otherwise there would be nothing more to come until Claudia, on the first of the month, placed five pounds on his table in the workshop.

It amused him, to realize that she should feel herself to be sparing his pride because she did not hand him the money outright, as he had seen her hand pocket-money to the children.

In her room, Mrs Peel rose fretfully from the
bed on which she had been lying.

She was fretful because nobody considered her important any more, and because her grandchildren were being brought up all wrong, and her daughter Anna hadn't written to her for over a week and her daughter Claudia had too much to do. A vague idea possessed Mrs Peel that a general rearrangement of all the lives connected with her own was required, and that it was she who was best fitted to undertake it, if only she knew where to begin, and if only they weren't all so obstinate.

With the thoroughness of her generation, she took
off
five or six under-garments, put on several others instead, curled her fringe with hot curling-irons, and carefully selected a turquoise brooch, a little turquoise heart on a gold chain, and a gold curb-chain bracelet to wear with her black chiffon evening dress. This was cut with a small V-shaped opening, and it showed a skin whiter than that of either of her granddaughters, for she had been brought up to protect her complexion as carefully as her virtue. Looking at herself in the mirror, she wondered whether Frances Ladislaw, whom she had not seen for years, had found her much changed. A nice creature, Frances—far nicer than Sal Oliver, whom one had never liked.

What Claudia could see in that woman!

At intervals Mrs Peel had made this enquiry of Claudia, and Claudia had always replied that Sal, who knew everybody, brought a number of clients to the office, and had put capital into the business besides. She
wasn't
a great personal friend—Claudia hadn't time for friendships with women,
anyway—but she was a useful and efficient partner.

“You
cannot
say she's Really a Lady,” was the invariable reply of Mrs Peel.

It annoyed her that Sal should be spending the week-end at Arling. The presence of Quarrendon, although one could not say that he was Really a Gentleman, she found more endurable. A man—any man—was always an asset to any party. But there ought to have been a young man for Sylvia.

“Poor little thing,” murmured Mrs Peel as she shook three drops of eau-de-Cologne—Johanna Maria Farina—onto a clean handkerchief.

She went downstairs, rustling a good deal. A vague, habitual regret crossed her mind for the long-ago days when she had been the mistress of Arling and everything had been done properly.

Scarcely anything was done properly now at Arling. Claudia hadn't the money, and hadn't the time to spare. Heaven knew, and so did Mrs Peel, that Claudia did wonders. If anything were to happen to Claudia, thought Mrs Peel not for the first time, where would they all be?

Exactly as Taffy had surmised, Claudia finished her letters—they were nearly all business letters—and dressed herself with speed and skill.

Her black draperies, closely defining her slim figure and leaving her slender arms bare, were very plainly cut, and had cost a good deal of money. Claudia realized perfectly that, at forty-three, one had to spend money if one was to appear well dressed. And she cared a good deal about appearing well dressed. That was partly the result of upbringing, and partly the desire to attract, which was strong in her.

She dressed, powdered her face, put away her things, moving lightly and quickly. She was pleased at the thought of the large party that would sit down to dinner. Copper, after a few drinks, would be in a good temper instead of a morose one, and she herself, Claudia well knew, was always stimulated by an audience. The presence of Quarrendon, too, excited her faintly, but agreeably.

He had been attracted by her when they first met in her office. The second time he came, Claudia, only half by accident, had been on the point of going out. It was nearly one o'clock, and they had lunched together.

She had talked to him about her work, and asked about his own. It was Claudia's boast that, unlike nearly all women, she could conduct a conversation that was free from personalities.

That was why men always liked her.

She felt sure that she had no illusions about her powers of attracting men. She never deluded herself that, because she was still good-looking in a distinguished—and out-of-date—classical style, people still admired her for her looks. How could they, when the world was so full of soft, unlined, pink-and-white faces, heads of bright, unfaded hair, and shining eyes? Claudia never wasted her money on ridiculous and ineffectual attempts to rejuvenate her appearance. She was content with—or at least resigned to—the knowledge that she looked exactly what she was—a highly intelligent, vital, efficient woman of forty-three.

An occasional pang of self-pity might from time to time overtake her, when she realized that she was tired, that she was working to the limit of her capacity and beyond it, and that her married life was not a happy one. Claudia told herself that she knew these passing weaknesses for what they were and was not deceived by them. Her clear-sightedness, she felt sure, was beyond question. It was her great asset, enabling her to make allowances for Copper, for her children when they required it, and for her mother when Mrs Peel's mournful and unending commentary became unendurable.

In her own office, however, Claudia omitted—deliberately and of set purpose—to make allowances. The fury of intensity with which she
attacked her own work, and accomplished it, set the standard there.

She always felt that nobody else put work, as she did, before every personal consideration, and although she seldom put the fact into words, she knew that everybody else in the office felt it too.

Claudia carefully drew her lip-stick across the well-cut lines of her mouth. It was not at all a bright lip-stick—only just enough to relieve the clear pallor of her skin. Not like Sylvia's bold, pretty scarlet curves.

Claudia's thoughts switched quickly over to the subject of her children.

She adored them.

Her relationship with Sylvia was a marvellous one. That was because she'd always, as a mother, been so very careful not to dominate her children. She'd let them make their own decisions, choose their own friends, live their own lives. She herself had just worked for them—was working for them still.

They knew it, and their love and admiration and trust was her reward.

Though Taffy … Taffy was going through a difficult phase. Claudia frowned at herself in the glass, then smiled. Sylvia, her eldest, and Maurice, her son, meant more to her than did Taffy. It was better to face the fact courageously.

She loved Taffy, because Taffy was her own child, but fundamentally they were not really in sympathy. Of Claudia's three children she felt that Taffy was the only one to whom she had failed to
impart her own passion for absolutely straight thinking.

Taffy, Claudia could plainly see, dramatized herself continually. It was a difficult tendency to correct, and Claudia owned to herself frankly that it was a characteristic she found peculiarly irritating. One of the few things about which it was very, very difficult to be entirely just, detached, and understanding.

“I suppose,” she thought, “that's because my own bent is exactly the other way. I've been honest with myself all my life.”

She often made this assertion.

Her little clock struck eight and Claudia lightly pushed into place the dark waves of hair over her brow and went downstairs.

Quarrendon was just ahead of her.

His evening clothes bore a strange, mangled appearance, almost as though they had been slept in the night before. No doubt he had done his own packing, and done it very badly.

As they reached the foot of the stairs, he turned and spoke to her.

“I like your children.”

“I'm so glad,” she answered cordially. “They are nice, aren't they? Don't you think Sylvia's pretty?”

“Oh yes. But I meant I liked them as people. Why do you call the second one Taffy?”

“She was christened Theodora. I don't quite know how it came to be Taffy. She's a queer child, in some ways. Easily the cleverest of them. In fact, the other two are not clever at all.”

Claudia was always careful to display the modern spirit of utter detachment in discussing her children.

“She's the only one who's like you, isn't she?” said Quarrendon thoughtfully.