Faster! Faster! (8 page)

She and Sal were always on excellent terms.

“I suppose,” said Frances with simplicity, “that when the game is finished we shall all know each other much better.”

“We shall probably none of us be on speaking terms,” said Sal grimly.

They wrote, pondered, frowned, glanced sideways at one another, and wrote again.

When the papers had been gathered together and mixed in a heap, Claudia drew each one out and read it aloud. The totals were put down, and the final aggregate announced at the end.

“Sylvia comes off much the best!” cried Taffy disgustedly. “She gets highest number of marks for looks and common sense. Can you beat it!”

“I got rather a lot for morality,” said Sylvia dejectedly.

“So did I,” said Mrs Ladislaw sadly.

“Sal got quantities of marks for brains and personality, and about one for morality.”

“I should very much like to talk to the person who brought my average down by only giving me two marks for honesty,” cried Claudia gaily. “I consider that if I
have
one quality in the world——”

“Mother! I gave you
ten
for honesty,” cried Sylvia. “No one knows better than your children
how terribly honest you are. Almost ruthless, some people might say.”

They all laughed, including Claudia.

Then she grew more serious.

“I think, as a matter of fact, that what Professor Quarrendon calls honesty of outlook isn't quite the same as what Sylvia so prettily calls ruthlessness.” She turned to Quarrendon. “Is it?”

“I meant,” he said in rather apologetic accents, “the—the contrary of self-deception. Knowing one's own true motives and—and so on,” he concluded lamely.

“I see,” Claudia nodded. “It's important, of course. It's partly a question of being sufficiently intelligent, isn't it? Analysing one's motives, I mean.”

The door opened and Copper came in again.

“Good God, hasn't Taffy gone to bed yet?” he apostrophized his family. “Do you know what time it is?”

The enquiry, not unnaturally, broke up the party.

Claudia, tidying up the drawing-room before going upstairs, glanced once more at the strip of paper that bore her name at the head.

She scrutinized carefully the objectionable figure 2 under the heading Honesty.

It rankled queerly in her mind.

She
was
extraordinarily candid, both with herself and with other people. Nobody, surely, who was cowardly about facing facts would so freely
permit her children to dissect her in her own presence? Sal, who didn't really like her, might have put that 2—but she knew Sal's small, clear figures, and the ladylike slope of Frances Ladislaw. This was an unfamiliar 2—sprawling, and curly. Was it Andrew Quarrendon's?

She took the question up to bed with her.

Saturday was a cloudless day, very hot and steamy after rain the previous evening, and the two girls were anxious to go to the sea and bathe.

“We could all go this afternoon,” said Claudia. “This morning I must work. An enormous pile of stuff has turned up from the office to be typed.”

“What is it?” asked Sal. “Cambridge?”

“Yes.”

Claudia sighed, and turned to Andrew Quar-rendon.

“A Cambridge don keeps us busy with some very intricate stuff, all Greek and Hebrew quotations, that's rather beyond the average typing bureau. We advertise a special department for dealing with that kind of thing.”

“Why isn't the special department doing it then?”

“It is. At least it's going to. I
am
the special department. We've nobody else to whom we could trust it. Anyway, the office is shut till Tuesday. This must have been delivered by special messenger last night, and Ingatestone sent it straight on.”

“Why didn't the fool of a woman keep it till after the week-end?” growled Copper.

“Because it's wanted by return of post. It always is. And we've never let down the job yet,”
said Claudia very decidedly.

“Is there much?”

“Not so very much. Not more than I can manage in the morning. Frances dear, you'll look after yourself in the garden—or anything you like, won't you?”

Frances said that she would.

“It's always the same thing,” said Copper, when his wife had left the room. “She can't let well alone. Fancy telling Ingatestone to send things on! I'll take any bet it could have waited till Tuesday.”

The Airedale Betsy came up to him and laid her head against his knee, anxious to restore him to good-humour. Claudia hastened in again, caught up some notes from her desk, and went out quickly.

“What would you like to do this morning, Frances?” enquired Sylvia.

“I think it would be very nice to sit in the garden with a book. Please don't bother about me, because I shall be quite happy.”

“I'll keep you company, presently. In silence,” said Sal. “I shall probably sleep.”

“The only sensible way of spending a holiday in weather like this,” muttered Copper, stroking his dog.

“Oh dear! If only Claudia would do the same. I can't bear to see her working herself to death as she does.”

At this well-worn plaint of his mother-in-law's, Copper Winsloe went out, followed by the prancing Betsy in hopes of a walk.

Mrs Peel, in a pale frenzy of anxiety, turned her eyes rapidly from Frances Ladislaw to Sal,
Sylvia and Andrew Quarrendon, as though defying any of them to leave the room before she had said her say.

“She simply can't go on like this. She'll have a breakdown sooner or later. Mark my words. Claudia is living on her nerves. She's at it morning, noon, and night. Dashing up to her wretched office practically every day of the week—and the driving, alone, is a most fearful strain—the traffic nowadays —the car not always reliable—and when it's the train she has to get to the station after all—and back at the end of the day——”

At this point Mrs Peel broke off, as the only way of extricating herself from a difficult sentence, and began again. Quick as she was, her granddaughter was quicker.

Sylvia fled through the window.

The others, more considerate or less agile, were obliged to remain where they were.

“When it isn't one thing it's another, except when it's all of them at once—which it only too often is. This house, and the children—and after all, there's always endless correspondence over schools and dentists and clothes and things—
and
her office work as well. Claudia,” cried Mrs Peel frantically, “is doing three full-time jobs at once. If not more. Of course, I know she says it's absolutely necessary. But what's going to happen when she's killed herself with overwork?”

Nobody attempted to reply.

“Well, I know it's of no use to say a word,” said Mrs Peel with some inconsistency. “She'll go on and on until she's destroyed herself, and then
Heaven knows what'll happen to them all. They depend on Claudia for every single thing, from their daily bread downwards. It's she who keeps the whole thing going.”

Taffy, to everybody's relief, appeared at the window.

“Is it settled about the bathing?” she demanded.

“After lunch. We'll go to the sea somewhere. Your mother can't get away this morning. She's got some work to do.”

“Wouldn't it be better if we went without her?” Frances suggested timidly. “Then she wouldn't have to hurry. I mean, perhaps she could come down afterwards.”

“How far from the sea are you?” asked Quar-rendon. “I could come back for her later, in my car.”

“That'd be marvellous,” declared Taffy promptly. “It's only seven and a half miles. You could fetch her and the tea.”

“Taffy——” said Mrs Peel.

“She's quite right,” Quarrendon remarked. “It's a very sensible suggestion. I don't bathe, but I should like to go down to the sea as early as possible. I can take everybody in my car, and lunch—if we're lunching there—and then come back for Mrs Winsloe and the tea.”

“Yes, yes. The weather may have changed by this afternoon,” said Taffy, gazing up at a cloudless blue sky through a faintly quivering heat-haze. “How soon shall we start?”

“I'm ready when you are.”

“Well, someone had better tell Claudia,” Sal Oliver suggested mildly.

“Oh dear! It seems a great pity to interrupt her,” objected Mrs Peel.

“She doesn't mind being interrupted,” simultaneously said Taffy, Sylvia, and Maurice who had suddenly appeared out of space.

It was evident that Claudia had thoroughly impregnated her children, at least, with a full appreciation of her remarkable powers of adjusting herself and her work to the exigencies of family life.

Sylvia and Andrew Quarrendon sat on a chalk-white cliff in glaring sun, and faced a scattering of scarlet poppies flaunting boldly against the dazzling blue of sea and sky.

Far below them, on the shore, Maurice and Taffy alternately splashed about in the waves, or sprawled on the sands. It was a remote little bay, and there were incredibly few people about. Their father, who had rather surprisingly elected to come with them, threw sticks into the water for Betsy and made occasional efforts at ducks-and-drakes.

Sylvia was in a white bathing-suit that displayed her pretty, sunburnt legs and arms.

She lay flat on her front, her small face supported by her hands, and told Quarrendon the story of her life.

She had the most extraordinary feeling that he really knew a great deal about her already, and wanted to hear more. And she wanted to tell him
all sorts of things—things that she hadn't ever told anybody else.

“I never did anything special at school. I quite liked it. I never made any special friend. I used to think I'd like to, frightfully, but they were a bit down on friendships, at school. I suppose they have to be, because of wells of loneliness and all that sort of thing. Not that I should think I've got the slightest Lesbian tendency myself, should you?”

“No,” said Quarrendon.

“But I know I'm sentimental. Terribly sentimental. In my heart I think being fond of people is more important than anything else, though I wouldn't dare say so to anybody. In fact, I've often pretended that I thought it frightfully sloppy to care about that kind of thing when I've been talking with the other girls, you know. Being insincere, in fact. Just what you said one ought never to be.”

“Well, never mind,” said Quarrendon consolingly. “One has one's lapses. The great thing is that you know about it. You don't cheat yourself.”

“I dare say I do, sometimes. But I'm going to try not to. Well—” she drew a long breath, “when the others used to go on about games, and careers, and what they were going to do (mind you, quite a lot of them meant to marry and have children, except a few who disapproved of marriage on principle), I always knew that
really
I wanted, more than anything else, to care very much about somebody, and them care about me.”

“To fall in love, in fact.”

Sylvia nodded.

“I suppose so. Is that sloppiness?”

“No,” said Quarrendon again. He stopped, as if to think carefully, and then said again: “No. It's just nature, isn't it?”

“I'm glad you think it's all right,” said Sylvia gravely.

“Quite all right. May I ask you something?”

“Oh yes. Anything you like.”

She was surprised, that he shouldn't know that.

“Did you ever think of any special kind of love? I mean—it wasn't that you very much wanted children, for instance?”

“No,” said Sylvia. “I'd like to have children, quite, but not at all specially. No, it wasn't that.”

“I think I understand.”

She had never doubted it.

“I take it,” said Quarrendon, “that you never have been in love?”

“No, never. And you see—this is really the point—I sometimes wonder if I ever shall be.”

She hesitated.

“Someone—a man—once told me that I was
completely
frigid,” said Sylvia in a low, ashamed voice.

She looked at Quarrendon.

His face had not altered. He was still gazing out, through the thick lenses of his spectacles, in the direction of the poppies.

“It's nice of you not to laugh, or—or despise me or anything,” she said humbly.

“Why should I? In the first place, I'm honoured by your confidence, and in the second, what you've just told me is quite serious. Not because it's true—which of course it isn't—but because
you evidently believe it to be true.”

“I thought it might be. You see, he kissed me, at a dance, and I simply hated it. He was quite nice, really—I'd liked him, till then.”

“But you weren't in love with him.”

“Oh good heavens, no. And he wasn't, with me.”

“Then, if I may say so, he was a cad, as well as being a conceited fool, to kiss you. What right had he to expect you to tolerate it—let alone like it?”

“Girls do,” suggested Sylvia. “At least, they always say they do. It's supposed to be a sort of compliment.”

This time Quarrendon did turn round and look full at her.

She had the curious feeling that he could communicate his thought to her without speaking it aloud.

“Do you mean that they just pretend to themselves they like it, because they think they're being modern, or grown-up or something?” He nodded.

“But some really do.”

“Some, yes. But not people like you.”

“Nothing to do with my being frigid?”

“Nothing. That was just the young man, pretending. It was naturally more soothing to his vanity to see you as frigid than himself as unattractive.”

They both laughed.

“How easy it is to talk to you!” cried Sylvia.

“Is it? You don't mind my being so very much older than you are?”