Thank Heaven Fasting (25 page)

“Oh yes, I think she thought herself very much in love,” said Lady Marlowe, looking amused. “He was quite presentable, too—much better manners than one has oneself—that kind of person always has, I believe. But of course, you know him.”

“I've always felt so guilty,” Mrs. Ingram declared, “at having been responsible, in the first place, for his ever coming to you.”

“But, my dear Imogen, not at all. Who, in Heaven's name, could have foreseen what happened? In fact, it couldn't have happened with anyone's daughter except mine. I'm sure I often wonder what sins in my past incarnations I must be expiating to have had only daughters—and
such
daughters!”

“You're always so amusing, Theodora, but it really is too bad of you to talk like that. Poor Cecily!”

“My dear, I think it's poor me. First of all I can't get either of them engaged to anyone, either for love or money, then Cecily says she wants to marry the doctor, then Frederica takes to her bed and has hysterics, and finally Cecily says she doesn't want to get married after all and breaks the whole thing off again.”

“Then it was Frederica,” said Monica, half under her breath.

Lady Marlowe heard, and gave her a shrewd look.

“You guessed, did you? How dreadfully poor Fricky does give herself away, doesn't she? Well, of course she's always bullied Cecily within an inch of her life, and Cecily has let her do it, and this is the result. Frederica simply wouldn't
let
her marry.”

“Oh, my dear Theodora,” Mrs. Ingram protested, “oughtn't you to have interfered?”

Lady Marlowe shrugged her shoulders.

“If it had been a really good marriage—but one wasn't too keen on it, after all, and as I said to them both, If Cecily is so completely under Frederica's thumb as all that, I really don't think she's fit to marry anybody. She ought to be old enough to know her own mind by this time.”

“Do you mean that she just gave it up because Fricky told her to?” Mrs. Ingram asked incredulously.

“Practically. At least I believe there was a tragic scene or two, and the young man was perpetually asking for interviews with me—which I need hardly say he didn't get. Miss Batten saw him, several times—you remember poor old Batten, who's been with us for years and years—and said he was most earnest and melodramatic, and threatened her with Cecily's committing suicide or going off her head. As I said when she told me, he must have a considerably exaggerated idea of his own value!”

Monica moved uneasily.

“Did he—Dr. Corderey—say anything to Frederica?”

“Say anything to Frederica!” echoed Lady Marlowe derisively. “My dear, according to Batten, it was Frederica who did all the saying. She made a fearful scene, and appealed to Cecily in front of him, and told her she'd got to choose between them. Naturally, as Batten said, anyone who knew Cecily would have known perfectly well that she'd never fail Frederica in front of anybody else. It simply isn't in her to do it. She's had this morbid dependence on Fricky all her life and it isn't going to vanish into nothingness at the word of a man she hasn't known more than a few months, as you may
suppose. It's been the ruin of Fricky and Cecily,” said Lady Marlowe calmly, “that they were never forcibly separated when they were children.”

“Then Dr. Corderey was right,” Monica said.

Both her seniors stared at her in astonishment.

Then Mrs. Ingram said, “Don't be silly, darling,” and Lady Marlowe, raising her eyebrows, asked for another cup of tea.

“Oh, I'm so sorry—do forgive me, Theodora. But really, I've been so absorbed in what you were telling us … Well, my dear, what's going to happen now?”

Lady Marlowe emitted her high, unfeeling laugh.

“My dear, all the excitement having died down, and Corderey having been got rid of, the faithful Batten wrote to me—I need not tell you that I'd left the house and gone to stay with the Evelyns, and various other congenial people—and so back I went.

“Cecily was looking like death—but she's always done that at intervals, after all—and Fricky was quite unbearably sulky and injured—God knows why, having got her own way! I simply read them the Riot Act. This, I said, is the last straw. I'm not going to give either of you any more chances. It's no pleasure to me, I said, to be seen about with two young women of nearly six foot high who can't smile, can't talk, can't dance, can't hold themselves properly, and in fact can't do anything at all except make absurd scenes and be intense about one another. It's the thoroughly unnatural, I said, and I'm not in the least surprised that between you, you've managed to put
off
every man who's ever looked in your direction.

“I'm going to let each of them have an allowance, and they can stay where they are, in the country, with Batten to pick up the pieces when they fight.”

Lady Marlowe began to draw on her gloves.

Monica watched her with a kind of dreadful fascination.

Did she know that she was cruel?

“Good-bye, Imogen. Of course, all this is entirely private. I know I can trust you and Monica.”

“Of course. We've thought so much about it all.”

“Sweet of you, my dear. Well, now you know the whole story. Monica, you must go and stay with them when the weather gets rather nicer, if you wouldn't be too bored. They'd love to have you, I know, and I'm sure you could put a little sense into them if you tried.”

She laughed again.

“Really, one's daughters! Not that you're anything but extremely lucky in yours, Imogen—I've a very soft corner for dear little Monica, as you know. I've always said she should have a diamond bracelet as a wedding-present, and so you shall, Monica. Don't leave it too long, my dear.”

Lady Marlowe kissed Mrs. Ingram, adjusted her veil in front of the glass, and was seen downstairs to the waiting motor-car by Monica.

When Monica returned to her mother Mrs. Ingram said thoughtfully: “What a cat she is!”

Both of them knew that the reference was to Lady Marlowe's final injunction to Monica, not to leave it too long.

“What utter nonsense, her telling us that it was private about Cecily. As if I didn't know perfectly that Theodora will make a thoroughly good story of it wherever she goes for months to come!”

“I don't see how she can,” Monica observed.

“Well, really, I don't know that it isn't the wisest thing she can do. Everyone knows perfectly well how disgusted she is that both the girls have been failures, and so she may just as well make a joke of it. People are anyhow going to say spiteful things, whatever line she takes.”

“Yes,” said Monica, “I suppose so.”

Mrs. Ingram began to replace the cushions on the sofa.

“Ring, darling. This room needs tidying; the newspaper seems to be up here instead of in the library. There's one thing, anyway. Those wretched girls needn't feel that neither of them has ever had a look-in of any kind. Even though it didn't come to anything, Cecily can always tell people that there
has
been a man who definitely did ask her to marry him.”

One day Mrs. Ingram unexpectedly said to Monica:

“Is Carol Anderson at all in earnest, darling?”

Monica, startled, did not know how to reply, although she understood perfectly what her mother meant.

“Because if he's not, there's no real use in his continually coming here, and in your going about with him. It may put off other men who might really mean something.”

“What other men?” Monica demanded with sudden bitterness. It was Mrs. Ingram's turn to look startled.

“Don't talk like that, darling,” she began automatically, and then checked herself as though realizing the futility of her own admonition.

They looked at one another in silence for a moment.

Then Mrs. Ingram turned her eyes away from Monica, and said, in a tone so unwonted that Monica scarcely recognized it as an expression of timidity:

“Naturally I'm only too glad you should have him here. And he's very nice in many ways, though I'm not sure dear father would have thought him good enough for you, quite——I was only just wondering if, perhaps, if he was taking up your time rather unfairly, and not going to be of any real use at the end of it all.”

“We're friends, mother. That's all.”

“Darling, there's no such thing as friendship between an unmarried man and woman.”'

Monica knew very well that from that Victorian stronghold her mother could never be moved.

She reflected gloomily how true it was that she saw a great deal of Carol, and that it had not led, and probably never
would lead, to his asking her to marry him. He was continually inviting her to accompany him to picture-galleries, concerts, plays, and even on expeditions to the country.

He was an agreeable companion, especially when he forgot to try and impress her, and as he became more assured of her liking and sympathy he became more natural with her, and therefore more likeable. Sometimes Monica could succeed in forgetting that she was a woman and Carol a man, and that if she could not make him fall in love with her, it was something between a disgrace and a misfortune.

Nothing could be more evident than that, if he was at all in love with her—which Monica doubted—he did not know it himself, nor ever intend to know it. He was introspective, vain, and imaginative, and not passionate, and his idealization of his affair with Viola Lester appeared to satisfy him emotionally. He still spoke of it, although less frequently, and from time to time worked up a recrudescence of despair, convincing to himself if not to Monica.

It sometimes vaguely crossed her mind that it would be satisfactory to tell Carol the truth about himself, and even to laugh—frankly, and with friendliness—at his childlike self-deceptions, but she was afraid of losing his friendship, and would not risk it. He was her chief outside interest in life, even though she had almost given up hope that he would ever want to marry her.

Monica did not, nowadays, know many unmarried men. She no longer went to dances, and her mother had ceased to entertain.

Mr. Pelham and one or two other middle-aged men still called faithfully upon the widow and her daughter on Sunday afternoons, and once Monica met Claude Ashe, whom she had not seen for years, in the Park.

He talked to her for a little while, looking curiously unaltered, but they had nothing to say to one another, and although she knew that he was not married she felt no wish to meet him again.

It was when she got home, after that encounter, that
Monica deliberately stood and examined her own reflection in the mirror for some time. Something had told her that Claude Ashe, who had once admired her so much, had seen a far greater alteration in her than she had in him.

She sought to discover wherein it lay.

Except that her fresh colour had faded and her hair become a dull, instead of a bright, brown, she could not see any very startling changes in herself. She was thinner, certainly—and the little line between her eyebrows and the faint downward drag at the corners of her mouth had not been there in her early youth.

It wasn't that.

It was something vital, magnetic, that had gone out of her. Something that had attracted men.

Monica caught her breath, and turned away from the mirror.

Day by day, life seemed to her more utterly dreary and devoid of interest. She even thought of trying to find an occupation for herself—visiting a Settlement, or going to help at an East End Club—but she knew that the mere suggestion would distress her mother, who would see in it a public admission of the fact that Monica was a failure.

Vernon Ingram had died in the winter. In the summer following his death, Mrs. Ingram was trying to make up her mind where she and Monica would spend August and September. Various old friends had sent kindly invitations, but Mrs. Ingram could not bear the idea of accepting any of them.

“People mean to be very kind, I know, but there's always something going on in a country house—people coming and going, and young things playing tennis, and perhaps music in the evenings—I couldn't stand it. But you'd better go without me, my darling.”

She did not really expect Monica to go without her, as they both knew, and the suggestion was not even seriously discussed between them.

Scotland, where they had always gone before, was declared by Mrs. Ingram to be equally intolerable.

“Everything would remind me so terribly. … It would all be just the same, and my life so different, so absolutely changed.”

She began to cry.

Evening after evening they went over the same ground. It sometimes seemed to Monica as if her mother did not really want to make up her mind at all. At last she said:

“Why shouldn't we stay in London, and not go away after all?”

“We couldn't stay in London through August, darling. There isn't a soul left. You know that as well as I do. Besides, the servants must have their holidays.”

“Shall we try going abroad, somewhere?”

“You and I by ourselves? Darling, you don't understand how difficult it would all be without a man. We've always had dear father to see to everything and take care of us before.”

Decision seemed as far off as ever.

Late in July Carol Anderson went to Scotland. He told Monica that he should miss her dreadfully and that they must write very often to one another. He was to be away until September.

“I hope you'll have a good time, Carol, and enjoy yourself,” said Monica.

“I don't think I ever enjoy things exactly,” said Carol thoughtfully. “To be perfectly honest with you, I never can see that there is anything to enjoy in life.”

He gave her his melancholy smile.

“I used not to be like that, of course. I have quite exceptional powers of enjoyment by nature, I believe.”