The Sleeping Beauty (18 page)

The children could not disguise their impatience. The thought of going home enchanted them. ‘But you have loved your holiday?’ Mrs Tillotson said. Constance, before Benjy could deny this, said of course, but home was nice, too. She had an instinct, always useful, though often contemptibly used, of knowing what answers went down well.

‘We don’t want to forget our home,’ she said.

‘I have already forgotten it,’ said Benjy, who had not the instinct. ‘I can’t remember my bed. Perhaps Baby thinks he always lives here. It will be a fine surprise for him.’

‘Babies have no memories,’ Constance said. ‘Or they might remember being born. And no one remembers that.’

‘I do,’ said Benjy, and then looked away from his mother in embarrassment.

‘What was it like, then?’ his sister asked sarcastically.

‘Oh, nothing much,’ he mumbled.

‘You will never recognise the nursery,’ Mrs Tillotson said gaily, ‘with its new curtains and wallpaper.’

‘How lovely!’ Constance breathed sycophantically.

‘I would like to have seen it once more as it used to be,’ Benjy said, ‘then I could know if I had remembered right.’

‘But you
have
enjoyed your holiday?’ their mother asked again. A great deal of money had been spent and she wished to wring every advantage from it, even down to gratitude.

‘Oh, yes!’ Benjy said this time. He over-did his enthusiasm, lapsed into roughness, hit his sister and was taken away, crying, by Betty.

Betty was the only one grieved at the thought of leaving. To Nannie, it was a matter of indifference where she carried out her work and she had done so in Egypt and India and Singapore. Her travels had not enriched her and she brought nothing back but grumbles at the difficulties of obtaining the right brands of gripe-water, groats or rusks. She made no friends and needed none, but bent all her energies upon her charges, as no mother does upon her children. She felt no emotion for them, so they did not tire her. They were a hobby she pursued single-mindedly. Her true backgrounds were the beach and the public gardens: her excitements the occasions such as dancing-classes and children’s parties where she entered – though hoveringly – into competition with others of her kind, standing to be envied or disgraced. When Benjy cried at the conjuror, or Constance found no partner for the polka, the best consolation was in recalling other small charges who had fared better – for was not little Lady Ariadne always first on the floor, and Dominic Haig-Drummond every conjuror’s right-hand man? Seething had never been really satisfactory, except as a test to her professional skill. There had been difficulties – about Baby’s washing; uneasiness about Philly and the unsuitability of having her under the same roof – however much out-of-sight – as the children; and the whole problem of Betty and the soldier.

‘I don’t see your rising to the top of the tree if you are going to be man-mad,’ she told her. But the top of Betty’s tree was a
small house surrounded by laburnums, in a quiet neighbour-hood, far from her parents, with Laurence returning home to her in the early evening, in early summer, which it would always be.

To go back to London with everything so vaguely left endangered her dream, by which she had lately lived her very lonely life. She had a terrified vision of herself – so frantic is the impatience of the young – rejected and forlorn, with nothing, indeed, better to do than to get to the top of that bleak tree Nannie had mentioned, where those like her reigned in virginal old-age, forced to busy themselves in their declining days with other people’s children in other people’s houses.

This thought had brought her to weeping when she told Laurence the date of their departure. Her tears, contrary to all he had expected, filled him with distress. Len had spoken with contempt of girls weeping – ‘turning on the water-works,’ he called it; but Laurence felt tenderness, not disdain, and he was surprised to discover that the locality of this was his heart. The emotion had a definite situation – well to the left side of his breast, and not in the centre where clever people now insisted that the heart must be.

The occasion was a Sunday afternoon. They were out on their usual walk and were having what Len would have called ‘a bit of a lie-down in the long grass’. Laurence moved over and rested his cheek against her bosom, and he could hear her heart-beat, muffled and hurried like an expensive little watch.

‘Yes, it’s well on the left side with you, too,’ he said.

‘What is?’ She pushed his head away and went on crying.

‘Your heart.’

‘Well, of course. I’m not deformed.’

‘You certainly aren’t,’ he assured her.

‘I wouldn’t mind being a man for a little while,’ she thought, in the middle of her tears. ‘They get the best of it, us having
these nice bosoms, and they having nothing comparable to offer.’ In a detached way, she put herself in his place and almost felt her own flesh with his hands. This put her into a mood of great condescension, but the tears still flowed.

‘You mustn’t cry,’ he soothed her, though he did not mind her crying. ‘I shan’t see you so often, it is true; but sometimes I can get to London.’

She saw herself translated to the Corner House, but to the same sundaes and parfaits and milk-shakes. There would be nowhere to make love except the cinema.

‘We can go to the cinema and places,’ he said vaguely.

All the time they talked, his love-making was progressing from one stage to the next; although, this evening, she seemed scarcely to notice. As soon as he lay down upon her, she said: ‘I haven’t even met your mother yet.’

‘You shall,’ he quickly promised.

‘You brought that friend of yours down – Len – but you never even asked me to your house to tea.’

‘I was shy,’ he said, struggling with her underclothes.

She raised her hips from the ground to help him. ‘I thought he was really common,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think you would have friends like that. Some of the things he said!’

‘You meet all kinds,’ he murmured, his lips on her brow, his eyes shut fast.

‘I can’t think why you’re not an officer,’ she complained. Then – as if for the first time realising his immediate intention, ‘You know it’s wrong to do this,’ she grumbled; and her limbs tightened to him, fastened hard. She said no more, and the tears dried at the corners of her eyes.

She was nervous on the afternoon of the tea-party, recognising it as a crisis in her ambitions; but one which must be faced. They walked for a little while on the cliff, and each time
Laurence touched her she brushed his hand away. It did not occur to her that Isabella might be nervous, too.

‘What did you tell her about me?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. I just said you were a girl I had met.’

‘Didn’t you tell her where I worked?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Why “of course”?’

‘That can be later. You don’t have to say what people’s jobs are to someone they haven’t even met.’

Laurence felt a moment of terror as he took Betty into the house. He was, at first, relieved to see Vinny and Emily already there. He did not recognise Emily and would not do more than glance in her direction, so embarrassed was he that Vinny should have overlooked Isabella for her. He had not wanted Vinny for a stepfather; but no son cares to see his mother jilted.

Betty’s dismay at sight of Emily was profound. ‘How could’st Thou, God!’ she cried in her heart. She sat down where Isabella told her, trying in a confounded way to sort things out, feeling ensnared, but by whose trickery she could not decide. Isabella sat behind the tea-tray and chattered. Emily turned her great engagement-ring, to which she could not grow accustomed, round and round on her finger, and catching Betty’s eye, gave one fleeting, meaningless smile.

‘How nice!’ Isabella kept saying. How nice that the wedding should be so soon, that they had found a little house in Chelsea, that Betty looked after children, that it was her half-day, that she was soon to return to London. Passing the rather slopped cups of tea, she said ‘How nice!’ once or twice too often, when it was nice for no one but herself.

‘Did you meet Laurence’s friend, Len?’ she asked Betty.

‘She need not have chosen that moment,’ Laurence thought. Betty had just bitten off some very dry sponge-cake, so could only nod.

‘I thought he was so nice, didn’t you?’

Betty swallowed and looked stubborn, while Laurence prayed that she would not call Len ‘common’. He could imagine his mother’s wide-open look at that, putting nothing past her this afternoon.

‘Yes,’ Betty said sullenly. She gave a little terrified glance at Laurence, then added: ‘He was all right.’

‘He was so
sensible
,’ Isabella explained. She put such meaning into this phrase that they all felt it directed against themselves, and Laurence felt it most of all.

‘He has been so sensible that he is now confined to barracks,’ he said, in a moment of bitterness. Once it had been his object to raise his friend in Isabella’s eyes: now he wished to destroy him; he sensed, though she did not glance at him, Betty’s gratitude.

‘What has he done?’ his mother asked, prepared to hear of some injustice.

‘He has been where he shouldn’t have been, with someone he shouldn’t be with, and at a time when he ought to have been somewhere else.’

‘Otherwise all right?’ said Vinny.

‘How pompous you sound, Laurence!’ Isabella said. ‘It is just for effect.’

At his parties, when he was a little boy, she had often told him not to show-off and he had never forgiven her those humiliations. He had shown-off to hide self-consciousness and she had deepened it.

‘And I am sure,’ she went on, ‘that whatever his boyish exuberance leads him into, he has his head screwed on all right.’

‘“Boyish exuberance” is an excuse you would never make for me.’

‘We will leave that until we see the exuberance,’ Isabella said lightly. ‘Emily dear, shall I have your cup?’

‘It is filled,’ Emily said in a startled way.

‘To overflowing,’ Laurence murmured, for now he
was
showing-off and he returned Isabella’s hard glance with another of the same kind.

‘What I feel about Len,’ she said, in a different, reasonable voice, ‘is that his kind are really the backbone of the country. In wars, and so on.’

‘He is the salt of the earth, too,’ Laurence said. ‘He would not’ (Isabella’s voice rode above her son’s mutterings and her face was flushed) ‘
ever
go to pieces in a crisis.’

Vinny, who knew the truth of the occasion when Laurence had gone to pieces, stood up quickly and handed round a plate of scones. Laurence, who saw that Vinny had remembered his own frank description of his father’s death, reddened and then paled.

‘Perhaps there won’t be a war,’ Betty said, still dwelling on Len’s qualities, and hoping to make her mark.

‘Oh, you can’t change human nature,’ Laurence said carelessly.

‘If there isn’t a war, I still see him seizing his chances, working hard – ambitious; thrifty; buying his own house …’

‘I certainly can’t see him buying one for anyone else.’

‘… never content to stay in a rut, not hoping to throw away his advantages, as you do, Laurence – education, background.’

Betty blinked her eyes as she drank her tea.

‘Len has no education,’ Laurence said, ‘and we all have background.’

Isabella, having exposed them all to an agonising moment, now went smoothly on, to cover it, she thought. ‘You know Laurence’s great ambition in life, Vinny? To be an agricultural-labourer.’

‘Oh, is it?’ Vinny said with a relieved smile. ‘I believe he once mentioned it to me.’

‘His classical education will stand him in great stead.’

‘I always think it does that,’ Vinny said. ‘If it has been a pleasure, as it is a privilege, nothing can take the experience from him. Why should we want to make money from it as well? It should stand a farm-labourer in as good stead as anyone – and perhaps better than a lawyer, for instance, who must learn, I presume, to pronounce Latin afresh; or a psychologist, who has to put his Greek to some funny uses.’

‘It wasn’t a pleasure,’ Laurence murmured.

‘I never know what “stead” means,’ said Emily.

‘Five pounds a week is the summit of Laurence’s ambition,’ Isabella continued, and her glance took in everyone but Betty, at whom the words were aimed.

‘Six pounds,’ Laurence said.

‘Six pounds then, darling,’ Isabella said with a broad, indulgent smile.

‘It sounds a great deal,’ said Emily, whose natural extravagance had been in abeyance for years and who, even nowadays, rarely entered a shop; but Betty, Isabella noted, seemed not to agree. She was dreadfully at Isabella’s mercy, they all saw. She accepted or refused what she was offered with a startled alacrity, and when Laurence asked her to accompany him to the place on the main road where he took up his position for begging a lift to Aldershot, she picked up the silk net gloves, on which Isabella’s eyes had dwelt, and stood up at once.

When they had gone, Isabella went out to fetch drinks. By the time she returned, some arrangement seemed to have been reached by Emily and Vinny, for Emily at once excused herself.

‘Must you go?’ Isabella looked from one to the other, the decanter in her hand. She was unwilling, after her bad behaviour, to be left alone.

‘I must help Rose,’ said Emily.

‘She will soon have to manage on her own.’

‘We shall make some other plans for her,’ Emily said, ‘but we have not made them yet.’

‘Not even a quick drink?’

‘Vinny will stay. He is always ready for a drink.’

‘I can’t let you walk home alone, if Vinny can,’ Isabella said. ‘Or I shall feel I am really out-of-step with the times. Laurence has astonished me enough for one day. He not only doesn’t see the girl home, but makes her trudge along with him.’

Vinny thought: ‘It is the least she has suffered today.’

‘Give him his drink, darling,’ Emily said, and she put her gloved hand in Isabella’s and her cheek to Isabella’s cheek. ‘It will keep him out of the kitchen while I am getting the supper.’

‘And we shall have a lifetime together,’ Vinny said, giving word to their happiness.