Friendly Young Ladies Page 2

  Elsie had always been a little frightened of her. They had never told one another their secrets. In the school holidays, Leo spent nearly all day over at St. Trewillian with Tom Fawcett and the crowd of boys he brought home to stay, coming back at night, dirty, and bearing trophies of rare eggs and crystal spar, with holes in her stockings, grazed knees, and once, Elsie recollected, with a black eye, which she had un-convincingly explained away. When she remembered Elsie’s existence, she had been absently kind to her, and the old dolls-house in the attic was still full of furniture which Leo had made out of woven rushes and carved wood, all very neatly contrived. During her last year at home, after Tom had gone to sea with the Elephant Line, she had still gone off mysteriously, as far as Elsie knew alone. But Elsie, it seemed, knew nothing.

  Leo’s thin tanned face floated before her, with its look of being sloped up a little at all the edges—dark-brown eyebrows, light-brown eyes, high cheekbones, long mouth and narrow chin, all slanted at almost the same angle; an old silk shirt blowing apart at the throat. Straining after coherence, she imagined it topped with a frizzed mound of puce-coloured hair, raddled and powdered mauve. Suddenly, hopelessly, she began to cry. The light rain drizzled round her, matting her hair and mingling its salt spume with the tears on her cheeks so that they ran down together, coldly, into her mouth. Her vest began to stick to her back, wetly, like a bathing dress; the wind plastering it closer. She felt as if the rain were soaking past it into her body. Her teeth were chattering. Hugging the red, slimy cover of Beau Brocade with one hand, and groping with the other under her knicker elastic for her handkerchief, she stood still for a moment, desolate and ungainly, sharing the solitude with a rough red cow, cropping the verge beside the brambles; then turned back towards the house.

  CHAPTER II

  ELSIE SWALLOWED—IT EASED, for a moment, the soreness of her throat—fastened her coat a button higher, and stepped out beside her mother, doggedly, along the cliff-path to the farm. She was reflecting that her nose would not begin to run before tomorrow, and by then they might not remember to ask whether she had worn her mackintosh yesterday. The wind’s fingers, searching between her lapels and up her sleeves, seemed to be tipped with ice; but her mother had just said that it was warmer, so she did not care to mention it lest it provoke questions.

  The road to the village was more sheltered; she wished they had been buying the eggs there instead. She could not say so, for her mother had chosen the farm to please her. As a rule she preferred the cliffs to the village, which was, in certain ways, an extension of her home. More than half of it was of recent construction; it had become, in the last ten years, a kind of annexe to the large watering-place three miles away, and Mr. Lane was the local architect. He was responsible for about thirty per cent of the new building; the remainder was speculative makeshift, flung up by jobbers and let expensively for the summer months. The spare Cornish landscape, vulnerable as an impoverished grand seigneur, could do nothing to clothe or even to soften its squalor; it scarred the rough fields like leprosy, and, since its materials were of the kind that decay but do not mellow, time only made it worse. Every year a fresh eruption, slate-grey or yellow or red, broke out on some naked slope, and round it weeds seized on the scratched earth, and dumps of rusty food-tins appeared.

  Mr. Lane’s houses, on the other hand, belonged to the residents. Their stuff and structure were solid, their fittings fitted, and their gardens were kept by the same hands from year to year. This might have given them an air of assimilation and repose, had they not been the kind of houses which, like some women, reward care and attention merely by becoming smug. They were not built to disappear into the scenery, but for people who wished their dwellings, like their afternoon teas, to be a visible bastion between their own tier of the middle class and the one immediately below. This suited Mr. Lane, who was not himself a disappearing person; and he had devoted a good deal of gusto to making each one as conspicuous as possible and entirely different from those on either side. If “St. Just” had been pebble-dashed, with a circular recess for the door and an enormous gable making the front a rhombus, “St. Anthony” must be purple brick, with a portico supported on pillars like Tudor chimneys. They were not labour-saving; Mr. Lane had never done any housework himself, and it never occurred to him, at work or at home, to imagine the activities of those who did.

  Elsie did not doubt—since even her mother never questioned it—that her father’s houses were in the choicest taste. The grey Cornish farms she scarcely counted as houses at all, rather as extensions of the cliffs and exposed rocks. She liked them chiefly because she had never heard them discussed at meals. But today, when they reached Tregarrock’s, she only noticed that in its warm kitchen the cold she had been feeling turned suddenly to waves of heat, which, curiously, made her dread the wind outside more than before. As they walked back over the cliffs it was straight in their faces, and she felt a sharp little pain in the top of her chest when she tried to breathe. It was not quite like the pain one got after running too hard; besides, they had not hurried. Her mother was chatting happily about people in the village, and pointing out signs of spring. Her round cheeks were glowing with exercise and recovered good spirits; presently she remarked that it was a shame to go in, and suggested a long detour.

  Elsie agreed that it would be very nice. She could not even enjoy a feeling of unselfishness; in her heart she knew the truth, that she could not nerve herself for fuss and excitement of any sort, even the kindest. “But, darling, why ever didn’t you let me know first thing in the morning? Fancy coming out in a cold wind like this.” “If you’d only tell me, dear, when anything’s the matter. …” It would all be so right and proper and natural that Elsie herself could not understand why she still went on, one foot after the other, in animal dumbness. Like a sick animal she felt guilty too. But it made no difference.

  “You’re very quiet, Elsie dear,” her mother said suddenly. “You’re not unhappy about anything, are you?”

  “No, Mother dear, thank you, of course not. I say, look at those lovely new lambs.”

  The moment, which Elsie knew well, tided over. Almost more than the scenes themselves, Elsie dreaded conversations with her mother about them afterwards. Each was too much involved to be of any assistance to the other, and the only result was to make jangled fibres, which might have straightened into silence, vibrate afresh. To this usual fear was added, today, a new one; that her mother might decide that this was the time to tell her what it was that Leo had really done. Once or twice before, during the warning about strange men, she had felt some special revelation trembling on the brink; now she knew, for a certainty, what it was, and the thought of knowing more added itself to the strange hot and cold and the pain in her chest, so that she shivered as if with ague.

  Mrs. Lane allowed herself to be led away among the lambs; but she looked faintly disappointed. She always expected, in spite of all previous results, that talking things over would make her feel better. Elsie chattered away, about sheep, about birds, about the Tregarrocks, trembling all over with suppressed tension and with cold.

  By the time they got in, it was almost lunchtime. Elsie parted reluctantly with her thick coat and scarf, feeling that she would have liked to keep them on for the rest of the day. She made up for it by putting on a short-sleeved jumper under her long-sleeved one. The extra bulk, clothing her thin curve-less frame, made her look almost entirely amorphous; she surveyed the effect apathetically and went downstairs.

  There was steak and onions for dinner. The smell greeted her in a rich golden-brown wave as she reached the dining-room; and without warning her stomach heaved. She sat down, wondering how much of her portion she could conceal as debris round her plate, or under her knife. She had reduced this to a fine art, for feeling sickish at mealtimes was no novelty to her; a sensational discussion had induced it several times. But it did not, as a rule, begin of its own accord.

  Her father came in, complaining of the cold and of one or tw
o people who had crossed him that morning. To Elsie’s relief, her mother, still glowing from the walk, agreed sympathetically instead of urging him to see the best in them. Unluckily she added a short rider, for emphasis, which betrayed the fact that she had missed most of the point at issue. Mr. Lane indicated this, and went on to remark that the steak was overdone.

  “Really, Arthur!” Mrs. Lane had just succeeded in persuading herself that the steak was very nice, so her annoyance was natural. “There’s no pleasing you. It’s a lovely piece of steak, and only the least bit more cooked than last time, when you said it wasn’t done enough. Elsie’s enjoying it, aren’t you, dear?”

  Elsie picked up the forkful of meat which, in despair, she had just returned to her plate. She lifted it, slowly.

  “Is she?” said her father. “It looks like it. Don’t force yourself, my dear. Stuff like this won’t do you any good. I’m leaving mine.”

  “Every day I wonder why I work and slave to keep this house going. Thinking and planning to make things nice, and my only return is that my child is urged to belittle and criticize everything I do.”

  Mrs. Lane looked, with filling eyes, at Elsie. She shut her own, raised the piece of steak to her mouth, and put it inside. She did so with a short form of prayer, but it must have been unsupported by the necessary faith. For a moment she struggled, then jumped from the table and ran for the door, while her parents sat each with an apt rejoinder frozen on the lips. She had hoped to reach the bathroom in time, but was spectacularly sick on the stairs.

  Suddenly, with that feeling of delighted surprise which comes when the body succeeds in short-circuiting the will, she found she could let go of everything. She might have thrown up all her dreads and resistances along with her dinner. When her mother withdrew the thermometer from her mouth and gazed at it in tardily disguised horror, she was unmoved. When asked, just as she had foreseen, why ever she hadn’t said that she was ill, she replied easily and without shame that she hadn’t realized anything was the matter. Passively, contentedly, she allowed herself to be put into a warm nightgown and a warmed bed, and lay watching the reflected light of the new fire flapping and furling on the ceiling. Her father came in, with an armful of books from his study; rather over-genial, so that she knew he was trying to make amends for what had happened at lunch. Ordinarily she would have felt embarrassed, but now she accepted the books with just the right amount of gratitude, and afterwards pretended to be sleepy, so that he went away.

  She lay curled up, a rubber hot-water bottle in a snug velvet jacket pressed to her aching spine, wondering why she had been setting her face against this heaven-sent solution, this refuge from all tribulation. Strange perversity! How pleasant illness was; the freedom from responsibility, the willing dependence—for, her pleasures being almost all daydream and reverie, she would need nothing except the simple things her mother would bring her unasked—the magical smoothing-out of mental and physical strain. She hoped she would be ill for a long time. The firelight, and the odd twist which fever gives to the perceptions, made her little room look new and different. From where she lay she took a fresh inventory of her surrounding treasures; her shelf of novels, Baroness Orczy, Dornford Yates, Gene Stratton-Porter, in shiny red two-shilling editions, her pictures of the “Piper of Dreams” and “Peter Pan,” the blue china rabbits on the mantelpiece, and, over them, “An If for Girls” framed and illuminated, which her mother had given her on her fifteenth birthday. Like the pink silk eiderdown, they lapped her safely in; the security of childhood spread welcoming arms, absolved from blame. She fell asleep, and, being restless, dreamed uncomfortably of haste and flight, and a river pursuing her upstairs.

  She woke for a minute or two, some time in the afternoon, to hear her mother and father arguing, mildly it seemed and from habit rather than conviction, in the hall. Her mother was saying, “Yes, Arthur, I daresay, but Dr. Sloane understands Elsie. Think how good he was when she had whooping-cough. It’s so unfortunate it should have been just this month.” She could not hear what her father said; he was speaking from further away. It was all beautifully distant. She was glad that Dr. Sloane was on holiday, or wherever he was. He might have said she could go downstairs tomorrow. She slept again, less heavily and with intervals of half-waking, so that her daydreams continued through it with scarcely noticed lapses into absurdity. She was being rescued from renegade Arabs by Lawrence of Arabia on a milk-white horse. Culled from popular biographies and the yellow press, her portrait of this truth-driven hero was a sort of concentrate, in tabloid, of everything which had caused him in his lifetime to fly from one obliteration to the next. Happily indifferent to this, she was thanking him gracefully, and receiving his reserved expressions of admiration, when the bedroom door opened and woke her up. She turned on the pillow, to find a young man beside her bed.

  He was a slight brown-haired young man, who demanded prompt attention with a pair of interested blue eyes, and looked quite used to receiving it. Elsie’s consciousness, crawling forth from comfortable shadows, felt rather as people do who walk out of a cinema into direct sun—dishevelled, squinting, and embarrassingly revealed. She would have put her head under the clothes again, but was prevented by a sudden and compelling recollection that she was seventeen and a half years old. Instead she blinked, and allowed her eyes to go slightly out of focus.

  Her mother, whom she noticed now for the first time, said, “Elsie, dear, here’s Dr. Bracknell to see you. He’s looking after Dr. Sloane’s patients, you know, while he’s away.” Her voice contained a well-bred, but inadequate, suppression of regret. The young man smiled at her as if she had paid him a charming compliment. She added, with flustered cordiality, “So good of you to turn out again at the end of your round.”

  “Of course not. I was grumbling this morning at not having enough to do.” His voice was like his eyes, brisk and alert. One had the feeling of something exploratory, a bright little ray, like the ray of a pocket-torch, flickering here and there. He turned it without warning on Elsie. She blinked, and sank down, imperceptibly she hoped, into the clothes. “Well, young woman? You sound a bit wheezy. Been going out without your mackintosh?”

  Elsie had, at once, the feeling that this was no more than she had expected. It did not occur to her to reply. Forgetting even to blink, she lay looking over the top of the sheet, waiting for whatever else he might decide to confront her with.

  “Oh, no,” said her mother, shocked. “Elsie’s always very careful, ever since she had whooping-cough so badly.”

  Elsie had hardly expected him not to notice her relief; but neither had she expected him to let her see that it amused him.

  “There’s a lot of ’flu in the towns,” he said. “Breathing hurt you anywhere?”

  “Only a bit at the top of my chest.” Her voice had grown very hoarse since the morning; she was thankful for this, suspecting that her nervousness would have made it sound odd in any case. She felt both bewildered and guilty about this. She took her own way of life very much for granted, and it did not occur to her as being out of the ordinary that, except for the curate and one or two assistants in shops, this was the first man between sixteen and forty that she had conversed with in years.

  “How long ago was this whooping-cough?” he asked her mother, taking a thermometer out of its little metal tube and popping it under her tongue.

  “Some time ago now. She was only ten. But Dr. Sloane made her wear a cotton-wool pneumonia-jacket, and since then we’ve been very careful.”

  “Can I have the pulse a minute?” He sat down on the edge of the bed, so that she had to uncurl her knees to be out of his way, and took her wrist in a cool, firm hand. Then he produced a stethoscope, and slid it up under the jacket of her pyjamas. Elsie, feeling agonizingly shy, coughed and breathed and said ninety-nine when he told her; he was so close that she could hear his own breathing, even and easy as it was. She was relieved beyond words when he sat up and put the instrument away.

  “This whooping-cough w
as about four years back, then?”

  With what seemed to herself startling abruptness, Elsie croaked, “I’m not fourteen. I’m seventeen and a half, nearly.”

  “Well, well.” He went over and rinsed the thermometer in the washstand ewer. His voice, cheerful and impersonally friendly, made her feel for a moment quite at ease. As he wiped the thermometer on the towel, he glanced up at her. It gave her an odd, uncomfortable feeling, which only lasted a split second: he had had an almost proprietary look, as if he had collected a specimen of something, not beautiful but rare and curious, and were wondering how to set it up. Being both self-conscious and fanciful, and acutely aware of both, she dismissed the sensation with the shame of the adolescent, which comes so often that it is an annoyance, an irritation under the skin, rather than an emotion. He was looking down now at the thermometer as he put it away, and his profile, so detached and self-contained, underlined her foolishness.

  Her mother was saying, with a pleased kind of casualness, “People are often surprised when they hear Elsie’s age. But I married almost out of the schoolroom, you see.”

  It took Elsie nearly half a minute to define the vague unsatisfactoriness of this remark. Then she remembered her sister Leonora, who must now be twenty-seven. In the comfort of being ill, she had forgotten her. After Dr. Bracknell had given his clear exact instructions and gone away, she found herself wondering what he would say if he knew she had a sister like that.

  The thought upset her so much that she put her head under the bedclothes, though there was no one in the room.

  CHAPTER III

  MRS. LANE HAD REACHED the end of her tether. She told her husband so before she left the room, and repeated it to herself as she stood, wiping her eyes, in the hall. This declaration marked a certain high level in their temperature chart which they only reached once in a week or so; but she always believed at the time that it had some desperate kind of finality. In much the same way the white ewe-goat in the next field, brought up short by her length of chain, would suddenly look outraged, and go through motions of being about to pull the whole thing out of the ground. Presently she would forget, and begin to eat her way round in a circle again. With Mrs. Lane, the crisis lasted longer, and, though the outcome would be the same, she never entertained this thought for at least a few hours afterwards.