Sleep in Peace (52 page)

One form of stimulation which was found effective, in Hudley as elsewhere, was dancing. Everybody suddenly began to dance. Laura gravely considered whether she should descend to such frivolity, or whether she ought not rather to devote herself entirely
to Art now that the War was over; but she loved dancing and craved excitement like the rest, so she decided that artists ought to know all forms of life, and prepared to descend into the social arena. For different reasons Gwen, Ludo and Laura had none of them danced during the last four years; their steps were out of date, they discovered, so they took private lessons, and for several hours a week solemnly walked up and down chilly rooms, learning the one-step and the fox-trot. They were all nimble on their feet and learned quickly, however, and very soon were able to join one or two of the innumerable dancing classes which were now started amongst the various social cliques of the town. At first Mr. Armistead objected to Gwen's attendance at these classes; a young married woman living apart from her husband should avoid, he said, every hint of scandal.

“Nonsense, Papa,” said Gwen firmly. “People don't worry about that sort of thing since the War.”

It was the charter of! the new era. Mr. Armistead, grumbling and unconvinced, yielded, and his three children walked and twirled in the hotels and cafés of Hudley, to their hearts' content.

There were
thés dansants
held locally in the afternoon, at which one danced in an afternoon dress and hat; at these the women far outnumbered the men, and it was usual for women to dance together, and to go in pairs for that purpose. Gwen and Laura were lucky, people said, in having each other at hand to go with, and certainly the arrangement had its conveniences. But the sisters did not enjoy dancing together, for their temperamental antipathy expressed itself strongly in this rhythmic action; Laura, who always played the man, found Gwen perverse and refractory, while Gwen complained that Laura had no idea how to steer. At night there were subscription dances, held by all sorts of institutions, political, charitable, social or religious, to raise money and keep their members together, or organised as mere money-making propositions by hotels and dancing-teachers. At these dances—to which one went very early, always half an hour, and often a whole hour,
before the appointed time—the women again, owing to the War, far outnumbered the men; and here, too, it was permissible at first for women to dance together, though naturally the younger and prettier women took pride in not being obliged to do so. At these dances Ludo, kind and conscientious as ever, partnered his sisters regularly, but he was rather clumsy and uncertain on the dancing floor. Coloured streamers, balloons, celluloid balls and shafts of coloured light added to the gaiety of these dances and exhilarated Laura. All the Armisteads attended at least one evening dance a week, and often two or three, while Gwen and Laura danced on Saturday afternoons as well, taking Ludo with them if the weather were too wet for him to play golf or watch football.

The tickets for all these dances formed quite a considerable item of expenditure, but that did not matter, since Blackshaw Mills were doing so well. The necessary clothes, shoes, hair ornaments and underwear—fortunately long gloves were not now fashionable—also formed a considerable item; Laura, who in 1918, at the age of twenty-four, had only possessed two evening dresses in her life, now found herself buying a new one every other month, with all the appropriate adjuncts; and in common with every other girl of her class in Hudley, she spent large amounts of money and time in making herself crepe-de-chine underwear of delicate hue. Indeed underwear was revolutionised by this perpetual plunging into evening dress. Gwen, who had hitherto been perfectly satisfied with combinations of honest wool with short sleeves and high backs, coloured moire petticoats, and cambric camisoles with shoulder-straps of white, machine-made “needlework”, now perceived that these latter at least could no longer be worn, and her talent for needlework was brilliantly employed in bringing the Armisteads' camisoles up to date.

Unfortunately, as time went on, dances were not unmixed bliss for Laura. She loved dancing; but Ludo had the programmes of two sisters to fill, and Gwen, though no lighter on her feet than Laura, proved much more popular at dances than her younger
sister. She was better known in Hudley society, having established herself there before the war; also she was prettier, wittier, less brusque and intense arid perhaps, since she was married, safer; perhaps, too, Laura, whose experience of men was limited to the chillingly official, the brotherly, and the altogether too warmly intimate, alarmed her partners by variations of manner suited to those extremes. At any rate, to Laura's chilled dismay, it gradually became clear that men always preferred the elegant and
convenable
Gwen to her younger sister. So long as it was considered legitimate for girls to dance together Laura did not care, but gradually this custom dropped, and if there were not men enough to go round—and there never were; how could there be after the war?—Laura usually had to spend a good deal of time sitting out, with a too-bright smile! and an aching heart, on the red velvet seats round the wall.

She could not bear to admit defeat and give up going to dances; what would Papa say? And besides, she loved to dance. So she learned skill, instead, in devices to conceal her loneliness and isolation. Each evening when she drove off with her brother and sister, bathed and brushed and glowing, in her new evening dress of green or primrose, with a spray of imitation leaves or tinsel thread on her dark springy hair, pleased with her appearance, hopeful and happy, she carried in the pocket of her new fur coat, as a kind of insurance, a book—usually one of those handy little volumes of the Popular Library of Art. Then when her programme, as so often happened, disappointingly showed a horrid gap, a lengthy blank, she went off to the cloakroom and sat there reading; if not altogether content, at least able to feel that her occupation was superior to that of those who declined to partner her, and that her evening was not wasted. She read monographs on Durer, Leonardo and Rembrandt in this way, dodging behind coats when another dancer entered the room. Sometimes she even took out pencil and scrap of paper, and drew the cloakroom attendant, or studies for a figure composition of a dance. At first
there was an element of conspiracy about all this which was pleasing, but after a while, when the programme gaps persisted and the novelty of her mode of filling them wore off, dances became gloomy work; it was bitter to have one's unpopularity, one's unattractiveness, one's lack of friends, thus pressed upon one. Little by little she learned to realise as a fact—had she known it before the War? Laura forgot; but in any case she had hoped so much from this new era—that she was not a success in Hudley society.

For it was the same on all social occasions; Laura was hopelessly out of key.

She was now for the first time in constant contact with the adult middle-class women of her native town, and the experience was, to her, quite shocking.

The details of their lives were so ostentatiously designed to display wealth, and at the same time so ugly, that Laura found them almost intolerably vulgar; their furniture, their cushions, their ornaments, their preferences in plays and books, were indescribably tasteless and banal—and what was worse, they thought them perfect. They gazed at Laura with a faint smile and a supercilious stare, as if she were not quite right in her head and it was a pity for her, poor thing, when she occasionally proffered some observation about taste, in London or in the world of art regarded as axiomatic, but hitherto unheard-of in Hudley.

For topics of conversation they had only clothes and servants; all others, such as politics, economics or art of any kind, were greeted with embarrassed distaste, and the subject turned as rapidly as possible. (The only exception to this was made in favour of music, which by long tradition was considered respectable in the West Riding.) Laura was fond of pretty clothes, but the earnestness of their attention to what they should put on struck her as comic, and she had a habit of remarking that since of course all fashion was quite arbitrary and idiotic one might as well enjoy every pretty fashion which came along, which Hudley found quite horrid; it upset both old and young, who each regarded the style
current in their youth as the best possible. Of servants they spoke with a callous inhumanity which made Laura writhe. Not that they were unkind to their servants; on the contrary. But they regarded, them as sub-human, of different clay from themselves. That servants should love, should desire pretty clothes and enjoyment, should resent an insult, seemed to them not so much wrong as absurd.

Their hospitality was based on a law of paying back, and designed to display their own resources rather than to give their guests pleasure.

It was a social
gaffe
of the first order to appear to admit, in any detail of personal or household equipment, that one spent less money on it than one's neighbour; it was one's plain duty to try to convince that one spent more. A girl of Laura's acquaintance, for instance, took pains to inform her that in her household all washing was sent to the laundry, instead of being performed at home in the old-fashioned economical Yorkshire way; the only articles they washed at home, she urged, were a few small pocket-handkerchiefs. Queer-shaped handkerchiefs, was the comment on this of Ludo, who passed the house in question every day and saw the family wash hanging out there regularly every Monday. That anyone should think a deception so petty worth their while amazed Laura, and she laughed over it with Ludo heartily; Gwen laughed, too, but at the explosion of the pretence, not its triviality.

The older women seemed to delight in discovering, by a subtle inquisition, all such details as tended to minimise or discredit a household.

Once, for example, when it fell to Laura to take Geoffrey and Madeline to a party, she was disgusted to hear, while they and some other children were waiting for their cars or escorts at its close, their hostess's mother asking each little girl about her frock, where it was bought and so on. To Laura's amusement these questions elicited from the literal Madeline the information that the frock she wore was her second best.

“My new one won't be ready till next week,” explained Madeline conscientiously, and added: “Mother thought this one would do for this party.”

The grandmother coloured, laughed in a forced manner, and— Laura being out of sight though not of hearing—actually said publicly to Madeline that the petticoat of the little girl next to her was as nice as Madeline's frock. This was an insult, and Laura advanced to defend her niece, but Madeline, having inspected petticoat and frock, remarked calmly:

“I don't think so.”

Laura was overjoyed by this frank snub, but Geoffrey was so incensed by Madeline's social misconduct that he would not speak to his sister all the way home.

If curiosity was regarded as a natural prerogative, where a woman was the interrogator, nothing was so much resented when she was the interrogated; and this reserve was carried to unnatural heights.
Keep thy sen to thy sen
, that old Yorkshire motto, though publicly smiled at was privately followed; blinds, for instance, were drawn over the windows with the utmost stringency the moment a light was switched on within, however beautiful the pageant of stars thus obliterated, lest any passer-by should penetrate the family's
arcana
.

Thoroughly practical and efficient housewives, the Hudley women regarded their activities as an end and not a means; they understood the necessity for sound joints of beef, but it never occurred to them that the body was nourished so that its owner might proceed to higher satisfactions. If their children were warmly clothed and well fed, they were certain that all was well with them; for they believed that if material needs were satisfied, a life must necessarily be happy. Consequently, the ugly bickering which disfigured much family intercourse was considered natural and indeed even praiseworthy; it was referred to with pride as
speaking one's mind
. That anyone could suffer under it, or prefer to enjoy a suaver mental climate at the expense of some
sacrifice of material comfort, was considered an absurdity unworthy of sensible self-respecting persons. Of a man who had married a woman socially “beneath” him, they often exclaimed: “She makes him a very good wife”—in a tone of intense surprise; while to sacrifice a winter coat in order to take some cultural lessons (except music lessons) was regarded as a wild eccentricity, tolerable only in the very rich.

In real distress the Hudley housewives were warmly kind, but here again they tended to offer, and to value most highly, material gifts rather than spiritual consolation.

Work they regarded as a degrading, though oddly pleasurable, necessity, and the less one was obliged to do the higher one stood in the social scale.

In a word, decided Laura, it was a society solidly based on material values, and contemptuous of all others. The return of the war-weary had painted these values in gayer colours, but their substance remained unchanged. In such a society Laura was not able, and did not wish, to feel at home.

Social pleasures therefore did not attract her, and she had no household duties to occupy her time, for the Armisteads now kept a housemaid and a nurse beside Mildred, and Gwen supervised the household alone, with a jealous efficiency which resented any proffered help. Laura turned, therefore, with renewed ardour to her art. She made an appointment with Mr. Quarmby, and ran to it joyously, eager to know where she might best find an opening for her skill. But Mr. Quarmby, who had spent the later War years instructing artillery officers in map-reading, was not encouraging.

“You're not very highly qualified, you see,” he told her bluntly. “I don't just see where you could get in—and besides, there's all the men just coming back. You might perhaps get a post in one of the smaller girls' schools. Otherwise, I don't just see…. There's commercial art, of course.”