Complete Short Stories (VMC) (3 page)

From that time, Muriel spoke on her behalf, interpreted for her, as if she were a savage or a mute, until the moment not many days later, when
she said in an amused, but matter-of-fact voice: ‘Of course, you are in love with Robert.’

Muriel saved Hester the pains of groping towards this fact. She presented it promptly, fresh, illicit and out-of-the-question; faced and decided once for all. The girl’s heart swerved in horrified recognition. From her sensations of love for and dependence upon this older man, her cousin, she had separated the trembling ardour of her youth and unconsciously had directed it towards the less forbidden – the pianist in the café for instance. Now, she saw that her feelings about that young man were just the measure of her guilt about Robert.

Muriel insinuated the idea into the girl’s head, thinking that such an idea would come sooner or later and came better from her, inseparable from the very beginning with shame and confusion. She struck, with that stunning remark, at the right time. For the first week or so Hester was tense with desire to please, anxiety that she might not earn her keep. Robert would often find her bowed in misery over indecipherable shorthand, or would hear her rip pages out of the typewriter and begin again. The waste-paper basket was usually crammed full of spoilt stationery. Once, he discovered her in tears and, half-way across the room to comfort her, wariness overtook him. He walked instead to the window and spoke with his back to her, which seemed to him the only alternative to embracing her.

Twice before he had taken her in his arms, on two of the three times they had been together. He had met her when she came home from Singapore where her father had died, and she had begun to cry in the station refreshment-room while they were having a cup of tea. His earlier meeting was at her christening when he had dutifully, as godfather, nursed her for a moment. The third encounter she had inveigled him into. He had met her in London secretly to discuss an important matter. They had had luncheon at his Club and the important matter turned out to be the story of her misery at living with her mother – the moods, scenes, words, tears. He could see that she found telling him more difficult than she had planned, found it in fact almost impossible. Rehearsing her speeches alone, she had reckoned without his presence, his looks of embarrassment, the sound of her own voice complaining, her fear of his impatience. She had spoken in a high, affected, hurried voice, smiling too much and at the wrong moments, with a mixture of defiance and ingratiation he found irritating, but pathetic. He had had so little solace to offer, except that he was sure the trouble would pass, that perhaps her mother suffered, too, at the crisis of middle-age. At that, Hester had been overcome by a great, glowering blush, as if he had said something unforgivable. He did not know if
it were some adolescent prudery in her, or the outrage of having excuses made for her enemy-mother. (For whom excuses might have been made, for she died not long after, of cancer.)

Now, as he stood at the window listening to her tears, he knew that she was collapsed, abandoned, in readiness for his embrace of consolation, and he would not turn round, although his instinct was to go to her.

He said, absurdly: ‘I hope you are happy here,’ and received of course only tears in answer.

Without physical contact he could not see how to bring the scene to an end. Bored, he surveyed the garden and thought that the box-hedge needed trimming. Beyond this hedge, hanging from the branches of fruit trees were old potatoes stuck with goose-feathers. He watched them twirling gaily above the currant bushes, not frightening the birds, but exciting or bemusing them.

She realised that he would not come to her, and her weeping sank into muffled apologies, over which Robert could feel more authoritative, with something reassuring to say in return and something to do. (He fetched a decanter of sherry.) His reassurances were grave, not brusque. He put the reasons for her distress sensibly back upon legitimate causes, where perhaps they belonged – the death of her mother, shock, strain, fatigue.

He sat by his desk and put on his half-moon reading-glasses, peered over them, swung about in his swivel-chair, protecting himself by his best old-fogey act.

‘Muriel and I only want to make you happy.’

Hester flinched.

‘You must never let this work worry you, you know.’ He almost offered to get someone else to do it for her, his sense of pity was so great.

His reading-glasses were wasted on her. She would not look at him with her swollen eyes, but pointed her hands together over her forehead, making an eave to hide her face.

‘But does Muriel
want
me here?’ she cried at last.

‘Could you be here, if she did not?’

‘But do you?’

In her desperation, she felt that she could ask any questions. The only advice he ever wanted to give young people was not to press desperation too far, uncreative as it is;
not
to admit recklessness. Muriel had once made similar mistakes. It seemed to him a great fault in women.

‘I shall only mind having you here if you cry any more. Or grow any thinner.’

He glanced down at his feet. She was not really any thinner, but Muriel had begun her work on her clothes, which now fitted her and showed her small waist and long narrow back.

‘You are bound to feel awkward at first with one another,’ Robert said. ‘It is a strange situation for you both, and Muriel is rather shy.’

Hester thought that she was uncouth and sarcastic; but not shy, not for one moment shy.

‘I think she is trying so hard to be kind and sympathetic,’ he continued, ‘but she must make her own place in your life. She would not be so impertinent as to try to be a mother to you, as many less sensitive women might. There is no precedent to help her – having no children herself, being much older. She has her own friends, her own life, and she would like to make a place for you, too. I think she would have loved to have had a daughter … I can imagine that from the interest she takes in your clothes, for instance.’ This was true, had puzzled Hester and now was made to shame her.

Muriel opened the door suddenly upon this scene of tears and sherry. Hester, to hide her face, turned aside and put up her hand to smooth her hair.

‘Miss Graveney’s address,’ Muriel said. She stood stiffly in front of Robert’s desk while he searched through a file. She did not glance at Hester and held her hand out to take the address from Robert before he could bring it from the drawer.

‘Thank you, dear!’ She spoke in her delicately amused voice, nodded slightly and left the room.

Outside, she began to tremble violently. Misery split her in two – one Muriel going upstairs in fear and anger, and another Muriel going beside her, whispering: ‘Quiet! Be calm. Think later.’

Hester, with her new trimness, was less touching. She lost part of the appeal of youth – the advantage Muriel could not challenge – and won instead an uncertain sophistication – an unstable elegance, which only underlined how much cleverer Muriel was at the same game.

Muriel’s cleverness, however, could not overcome the pain she felt. She held the reins, but could barely keep her hands from trembling. Her patience was formidable. Robert had always remarked upon it since the day he had watched her at work upon her own wedding cake. There were many things in her life which no one could do as well as she, and her wedding cake was one of them. She had spent hours at the icing – at hair-fine lattice-work, at roses and rosettes, swags and garlands, conch-shells and cornucopias. She had made of it a great work of art, and with a similar industry, which Robert only half-discerned and Hester did not discern at all, she now worked at what seemed to her the battle for her marriage.

Conceived at the moment of meeting Hester, the strategy was based on implanting in the girl her own – Muriel’s – standards, so that every success
that Hester had would seem one in the image of the older woman, and every action bring Muriel herself to mind. Patience, tolerance, coolness, amusement were parts of the plan, and when she had suddenly said: ‘Of course you are in love with Robert,’ she had waited to say it for days. It was no abrupt cry of exasperation, but a piece of the design she had worked out.

Before Hester could reply, Muriel stressed the triviality of such a love by going on at once to other things. ‘If I were a young girl again I should have a dark dress made, like a Bluecoat Boy’s – a high neck and buttoned front, leather belt, huge, boyish pockets hidden somewhere in the skirt. How nice if one could wear yellow stockings too!’

She rested her hand on her tapestry-frame and forced herself to meet Hester’s eyes, her own eyes veiled and narrowed, as if she were considering how the girl would look in such a dress.

Hester’s glance, as so often in the innocent party, wavered first. She had no occupation to help her and stared down at her clasped hands.

Muriel began once more to pass the needle through the canvas. Diligently, week by week, the tapestry roses blossomed in grey and white and blood-colour.

‘Don’t you think?’ she asked.

She swung the frame round and examined the back of the canvas. It was perfectly neat. She sat sideways in her chair, with the frame-stand drawn up at one angle. Her full skirt touched the carpet – pink on crimson.

‘Why do you say that?’ Hester asked. ‘What makes you say it?’ She sounded as if she might faint.

‘Say what?’

‘About Robert.’ Her lips moved clumsily over the name as if they were stung by it, and swollen.

‘Robert? Oh, yes! Don’t fuss, dear girl. At your age one has to be in love with someone, and Robert does very well for the time being. Perhaps at
every
age one has to be in love with someone, but when one is young it is difficult to decide whom. Later one becomes more stable. I fell in love with all sorts of unsuitable people – very worrying for one’s mother. But by the time I met Robert I was old enough to be sure that
that
would last. As it has,’ she added quietly; and she chose a strand of white silk and began to work on the high-lights of a rose petal.

‘I once fell in love with a young man who drank like a fish,’ she continued, for Hester seemed stunned into silence. ‘He was really an evil influence. Very flashy. You remember how I warned you about Rex Wigmore your first day here?’ She began to shake with mirth. ‘Trying to be my own anxious mamma all over again. And all the time it was Robert! How lucky! For Robert is so gentle, so kind. He would never harm you. Nothing but good could come of a girl loving
him
. Yes, I can see Robert
doing very well indeed, until the real one comes along. How furious he would be to hear us discussing him like this – men take themselves so seriously.’

‘I am not discussing him,’ Hester said, an ugly stubbornness in her manner. She snatched a handkerchief from her pocket and began to fidget with it, crushing it and smoothing it and staring at it in a bewildered defiance.

Muriel’s white hand smoothed a woollen rose. ‘I always leave the background till last.’ She sighed. ‘So dull, going on and on with the same colour.’

‘It isn’t true. He’s my cousin, much older … your husband … I … does he know?’

‘Well, I haven’t asked him. Men are too vain. I dare say he knows all right, though. It’s very good for them, at his age … makes them feel young.’

So Hester saw herself thrust into the service of nature, a coarse instrument, as good as anonymous. Muriel, spared such humiliation, could well smile, and congratulate herself. ‘Don’t fuss,’ she said again in her most laughing voice. ‘If I had known you
would
, I wouldn’t have said it.’

‘I wish I could go away.’ Hester wrung her hands and looked towards the windows as if she might escape through them. ‘You hate me being here. And now …’

‘Now?’

‘Now you believe this about me, how can you bear me to be here? No wife could.’

At this, a stern, fastidious look came upon Muriel’s face. She was silent for a moment, then said in a quiet and serious voice: ‘I … as a wife; Robert … as a husband; our private life together I must leave out of this. It is between us only, and I never discuss my marriage.’

‘There is no need to be rude to me,’ Hester shouted, so great her frustration, so helplessly she felt herself up against Muriel’s smooth contempt. She was forced into childishness.

At her outburst – for all of today was working for Muriel, she thought – the door opened.

‘But surely there is nothing sinister in that?’ Beatrice Carpenter asked. She was Muriel’s closest friend and they were walking in the park before dinner. ‘Young girls often cry. You rather surprise me, Muriel. You sound hysterical yourself.’

‘It was the atmosphere of the room. It trembled with apprehension, and when I opened the door Robert looked at me with a dumbfounded expression, his eyes opened wide over those awful half-moon glasses he
will
wear, they – his eyes – looked so
blue –
a little boy’s look, little boy in mischief.
“Don’t spank me, Nanny.” I hated him for a moment. Oh, I felt murderous. No, but I truly itched to hurt him physically, by some violent and abusive act, to hit him across the mouth, to …’ She broke off in astonishment and looked about her, as if fearful of being overheard.

‘You
are
in a bad way,’ Beatrice said. ‘The girl will have to go.’

‘I know. But how? I have to be clever, not insistent. I can’t be put into the position of getting my own way, for it would never be forgotten. It would last all our lives, such a capitulation, you know.’

Other married women
always
know; so Beatrice only murmured cosily.

Muriel said: ‘The self-consciousness is so deadly. When I go back, he will look at me to see how I am likely to behave. Every time I go into a room, he glances at my face, so that I can no longer meet his eyes.’

‘I never think embarrassment is a trivial emotion,’ Beatrice said.

‘It has altered everything, having her here; for we were just at an age of being able, perhaps, to relax, to take one another for granted, to let ourselves slip a little. It is a compensation for growing old, and one must find a compensation for that, if one can.’