Faster! Faster! (7 page)

It surprised her that he should think so. He hadn't, surely, just meant that it was because of her “cleverness” that Taffy resembled her mother? And yet, Claudia thought, she and Taffy had nothing else in common.

But after all Quarrendon, psychologist though he might be, hadn't been in the house twenty-four hours yet.

It would be interesting to discuss the children with him later. She could trust herself not to bore him on the subject, as mothers in general were only too apt to bore their listeners—for the simple reason that they were unable to bring a completely impersonal judgment to bear upon the subject, as she had trained herself to do.

In the library the customary background of sound was missing. Either Copper, or Sal Oliver, had ruthlessly switched off the wireless.

Claudia was vaguely sorry. She had felt that Quarrendon would see them all in a more characteristic light if the children were enjoying the privilege of their generation—incessant noise— with herself so curiously unmoved by it. Frances Ladislaw had already said how wonderful that was. Dear Frances!

She was talking to Sal Oliver now, her clear, pleasant eyes full of interest and something not unlike admiration as they rested on Sal's smart
black-and-white effect and extremely sophisticated make-up.

Claudia went up to them.

“Are you rested, Frances darling? I'd have come to fetch you downstairs, but I was writing madly up to the last minute.”

Sal moved away.

Copper was shaking up cocktails.

They were always a help in making people talk. Not that anybody was being particularly silent. Mrs Peel was moaning slightly—perhaps in admiration?—over Maurice and his snapshots, and Sylvia was talking to Quarrendon.

“You're not listening to me,” cried Mrs Ladislaw unexpectedly.

“Yes I am! Oh, I'm so sorry. Didn't I seem to be?”

Frances laughed.

“No, but it wasn't at all important. Besides, I know you've got a lot to think about.”

“So much that I sometimes feel as if I should go mad. Not till the children are grown-up, though. I must see the job through.”

“Claudia, oughtn't you to have a housekeeper: or a secretary or someone, to help you?” asked her friend earnestly.

“I couldn't afford either,” declared Claudia. “Besides, I don't think Copper would ever stand having a stranger in the house permanently.”

“He would, if it was going to save you from working so hard.”

“Oh no,” Claudia shook her head. “He wouldn't. You don't understand.”

Frances looked perplexed and sorry.

“I'm all right,” said Claudia gaily. “In another ten years even Maurice will be grown-up, and then I can let everything go.”

“You do so very much,” murmured Frances Ladislaw. “I can't think how you can go on.”

“I can't either, sometimes. But one does.”

“Won't Copper—isn't there any chance of his getting a job?”

Claudia's expression altered. Her whole face became overshadowed.

“I don't know. It doesn't seem very likely. I suppose he might.”

She carefully refrained from adding, as she might have done, that Copper didn't seem to be trying very hard to get a job. It was so self-evident that Frances, like everybody else, must have seen it for herself.

“Dinner's ready,” said Taffy at the door.

To the infinite distress of Mrs Peel, Claudia's young village parlour-maid was assisted in some of her duties by the daughters of the house.

They went into the dining-room.

“Sit anywhere,” said Claudia—again disturbing the mind of Mrs Peel.

But it sounded worse than it was.

Mrs Peel sat down, firmly and correctly, at Copper Winsloe's right hand, and Claudia had already smiled at Quarrendon and lightly sketched a movement that invited him to the place beside her. It didn't matter so much, about the others.

And the dinner itself, though far from elaborate, was well cooked and served.

“You Ve still got Mrs Price. How fortunate,” said Mrs Peel to her son-in-law, referring to the cook.

“She's quite good, isn't she? I don't suppose she'll stay, they never do,” Copper observed callously.

“I can't bear to think of poor little Claudia having servant troubles
as well
as everything else. She's got so much on her shoulders already.”

Copper muttered an ungracious something or other—what it was she couldn't hear—and turned to his other neighbour, Frances Ladislaw.

Mrs Peel, in dignified isolation—for she had nothing to say to Sal Oliver, on the other side of her—drank cold water.

The conversation was fairly general.

Claudia, an excellent and animated talker, dominated it for the most part.

Quarrendon, although saying little himself, turned his large head towards her almost every time she spoke, and his face crinkled into laughter frequently—for she could be very amusing.

Taffy sat on his other side. She kept up a low-voiced chatter to Maurice—but Maurice answered at random, and often not at all, for he was listening to his mother and the other grown-up people.

Presently Taffy spoke to Andrew Quarrendon.

“Which would you rather, play paper games
after dinner, or go and see a talkie?”

“I'd rather do almost anything, than go and see a talkie.”

“I thought you'd say that. Well, it's a pity. You miss quite a lot. Maurice and I are terrific fans. Not Sylvia, so much.”

“Tell me something about the fascination of the films,” suggested Quarrendon. “You see, I really know very little about the subject.”

“But you've been?”

“Oh yes. Several times.”

“Whom did you see?”

“I haven't the slightest idea.”

“Haven't you
really?
Do you know what the pictures were, then—what they were called, I mean?”

“One of them was a very bad version of Wells's
Invisible Man.
Another was an inaccurate presentation—and a vulgar one at that—of part of the life of King Henry VIII.”

“Didn't you think my Charles was marvellous?”

“Who is your Charles?” said Quarrendon, a glint behind his thick lenses betraying his lack of ingenuousness.

Taffy laughed.

“I'd crawl anywhere, any day, on all-fours, in any weather, to see my Charles act in any film,” she remarked earnestly.

“I always like an understatement,” said Quarrendon mildly. “It gives such an effect of austerity. Tell me some more.”

“Have you
honestly
never seen Garbo—or Norma Shearer—or Gary Cooper?”

Claudia, at the foot of the table, turned round.

“It's a great blow to my pride,” she said, with mock solemnity, “that my family is completely film-struck. Film-stars, to this generation, are what musical-comedy stars were to ours, I suppose.”

“Oh dear,” said Mrs Peel. “Lewis Waller.”

She added nothing more.

It seemed enough. Her attitude towards Lewis Waller and his erstwhile unparalleled vogue was clearly indicated, and it was not difficult to gather that, further than Lewis Waller and the matinée-idol, her mind had failed altogether to register the march of dramatic popularity. Claudia began to speak to Quarrendon about modern plays.

Taffy relapsed into complete silence.

After dinner—and after Sylvia had dealt with the wireless until a reasonably subdued accompaniment of orchestral music from London had been provided for the conversation—they played games.

“I shall be very bad at this kind of thing,” Frances Ladislaw confided to Sal Oliver. “I suppose they're all terribly good at it?”

“I'm afraid they are, rather. But it won't matter in the least. I'm bad too.”

Claudia had produced pencils and slips of paper.

“Shall we begin with Twenty Things?” she suggested. “That's easy.”

“I know that one,” Frances murmured joyfully. “You each suggest a heading in turn—an animal,
or a battle, or a famous man, and they all have to begin with the same letter. Isn't that it?”

“That's it,” said Sal. “Afterwards, everyone reads out their list, and duplicates have to be crossed out.”

“Are we ready?” asked Claudia. “Let's try and think of original things, not just battles or admirals or famous people. We've had those so often.”

A thoroughly disapproving “Oh dear” came quietly, but angrily, from her mother.

“Maurice, you're the youngest. You start.”

Maurice was ready.

“A chemical.”

“Very well. Taffy?”

“A quotation from Shakespeare.
A
and
The
don't count.”

“I'll say a botanical term,” Claudia observed.

“Frances, what's yours?”

Mrs Ladislaw, with some courage, declared for a battle. Sal supported her, in the spirit, by saying: “A character in history. Any nationality.”

Claudia smiled, and wrote busily.

Copper, as regardless as Frances of previous instructions, gave them: An English town. Sylvia took them to a higher level with: A character out of Thackeray. The standard fell again with Mrs Peel's prettily worded suggestion of a Sweet-scented Flower, and was brought up once more by Quarrendon's more original, if less charming, request for a Famous Murderer.

It was a reasonably successful game, although Claudia and her children obviously enjoyed it
better than did their visitors, with the possible exception of Quarrendon.

Mrs Peel, however, definitely disliked it. She challenged other people's inspirations, defended indefensible ideas and errors of her own, and maintained, in the face of all opposition, that Thermopylae was the name of a well-known Greek writer.

When Taffy offered to fetch the encyclopaedia, Mrs Peel rose and said that she should go to bed. She had, she declared, been fighting against a bad headache all the evening.

Maurice politely opened the door for her, and she went.

Sal said quietly to Frances Ladislaw: “It's a curious thing, but whenever any family plays paper games, it almost always ends in somebody's either being sent to bed, if young, or going there of their own accord, if old.”

Nevertheless they went on playing paper games. Claudia was very amusing and brilliant, and the children frightfully intelligent.

Presently Taffy suggested a game that they hadn't, she said, played for ages.

“You make out a list of qualities—good and bad—and mark people as you think they deserve, with ten as the maximum. One's got to be honest. Nobody knows who puts what, and then each total is added up and one sees where everybody stands.”

“What fun,” said Copper satirically. “This is getting a bit too intellectual for me. Come on, Betsy.”

He walked out unceremoniously.

“Wait a minute,” said Claudia. “Does anybody want the Second News? It's on now.”

Her ear was apparently trained to distinguish the time-signal through the noise of any number of people talking and laughing at once.

“I do,” said Sal.

She was obliged to move close to the radio in order to get it, even after Sylvia had adjusted the wave-length. It never seemed to occur to the Winsloes that other people might not possess the remarkable faculty of their mother and themselves for attending to several things at once.

The suave and cultivated tones of the B.B.C. announcer gave them various pieces of information.

Maurice, looking regretful, rose, said goodnight, and went to bed.

“Cricket: At the close of flay to-day——”

“All right,” said Sal. “Shall I turn it off?”

“We can get something from Paris,” Sylvia suggested. “Dance-music or something—I'll put it on very softly.”

Presently a muted rhythm crept over the air. An attentive ear could distinguish the accompanying words:
“Last week we said Goodbye”

“Now!” cried Taffy. “What qualities are we going to give marks for?”

“Is this really a good game?” Quarrendon enquired of his hostess.

Claudia laughed.

“It all depends. I shouldn't play it with my mother, for instance.
My
children enjoy it, but then I've always allowed them—encouraged them
—to criticize other people quite freely—themselves included.”

“And yourself?”

“Oh yes. The last thing I want is to be on a parental pedestal, like the Victorian parents. I want my relationship with my children to be as honest as possible.”

He nodded without speaking.

“Have we got to put down what we really think?” Frances Ladislaw enquired.

Taffy assured her that the whole value of the game depended upon complete candour.

“After all,” she added, “nobody knows what marks you give. Who are we taking?”

“All the present company,” Sylvia suggested.

“O.K. Mother, Sal, Frances, Professor Quarrendon, Syl., Taffy. Now what qualities?”

“Not too many, or it'll be bedtime before we've finished. Supposing we each suggest one?”

“Good looks,” said Sal.

“Brains,” murmured Frances wistfully.

Claudia said “Personality.”

“Let's have some bad ones!” cried Taffy. “I'll say Morality.”

Quarrendon laughed.

“That's Copper's old joke,” said Claudia, smiling, as she wrote it down.

Sylvia gave them “Common Sense.”

“Sincerity,” said Quarrendon. “I mean honesty of outlook. Call it honesty for short.”

“We haven't had that one before,” Claudia observed.

She looked pleased.

“The highest marks you can give for anything is ten, and the lowest, nought. Everybody to put down what they really think.”

“We don't really all know each other anything like well enough for this,” Sal remarked.

“First impressions are valuable,” Taffy retorted.