Complete Short Stories (VMC) (35 page)

‘Demurrings and deprecations will not escape notice either,’ said Sophy. ‘Saying “
you
do it, please”, or “you go first”. We must beware of every one of those. I will be a straightforward daughter to you, I think. It may be ageing for you, but I think it will be safer than for us to try to be like sisters.
I thought of that in Switzerland, and I decided that a daughter has privileges and a rôle to play, which a younger or inferior sister has not.’

‘As long as I am never called “Mamma”.’

Miss Sully, hovering at the foot of the stairs, heard laughter as the bedroom door opened and Lalage’s voice saying with great gaiety, ‘Who – a year ago – would have believed that we could come to this?’

They were on the stairs now, and Miss Sully hurried back to the kitchen for the hot scones. She wanted to watch the approach to the tea table.

This turned out to be disappointing. Sophy went straight to the drawing-room window and, with her back turned to the room, said, ‘Since last I saw you, Lalla, I’ve given up milk and sugar. What Father used to call “puppy-fat” turned out just to be fat.’

‘Then I must do the same,’ said Lalla and sat down before the tray and took up the tea-pot. ‘And every time John goes out, we will have those slimming meals I am always reading about at the hairdresser’s – meagre things like tomato jellies and stuffed cucumbers and lettuce juice. Meanwhile, you could have a scone, couldn’t you?’

Sophy turned from the window and sat down in a chair, opposite the one where she had always sat before.

‘Only this time,’ she said.

Miss Sully, having very slowly put a log on the fire and rearranged the tongs, was now obliged to go. At the door, she heard Sophy say, ‘Just to celebrate the occasion.’

By the time Colonel Vellacott returned from his meeting, a mode of behaviour was established between the two girls. It had often been tried out in their minds during their separation, suggested and explored with nervous tact in their letters to one another.

He found them by the drawing-room fire, Lalage winding wool from Sophy’s outstretched hands. Kneeling on the rug, Sophy rocked from side to side, and swayed her arms, turning her wrists deftly as the wool slipped off them. So often, bemused and patient, she had held Lalla’s wool for her: the knitting craze came and went, jerseys were seldom finished and, if they were, were sorry things. From past experience, neither had high hopes for this new skein.

‘A charming sight,’ Colonel Vellacott said. They had settled down together already, he was relieved to see. It was like bringing a new dog into a house where another had reigned alone for a long time. The scene might have been prearranged – the girls were so tangled up in wool that they could not extricate themselves and the kisses he gave each on the top of her head were almost simultaneous, Lalla hardly first at all.

‘That’s
that
over,’ he thought, and for no reason felt self-congratulatory. ‘That’, for him, was his embarrassment. Now, it was as easy as could be to
talk about Switzerland and Sophy most brilliantly took the lead with her descriptions of the school and the lunacy of its inhabitants.

‘Don’t!’ Lalage half-sobbed, gasping with laughter, and wiped her eyes on the ball of wool.

‘Ah, you are going into fits,’ her husband said. He remembered all the holiday laughter in this house, Lalla’s cries of ‘Don’t’ and her collapsed state, his teasing of them both and his mocking echoes of their girlish phrases. He had felt in those days wonderfully indulgent. ‘Bring Lalla back with you,’ he always told Sophy. ‘It is sad for you to be alone – and sad for her, too.’ Lalla – the poor orphan child – lived with an aunt, but was more often, in school holidays, at Ancaster, with Sophy.

‘Now, Lalla!’ he said, in a severe voice. He leant back in his chair and folded his arms with a show of excessive patience. ‘If you snort again, you must be sent away.’

‘Oh, please, I
ache
,’ she implored Sophy, holding the ball of wool tight to her ribs, her beautiful eyes glittering with tears.

‘Oh, please, I
ache
, Sophy,’ said Colonel Vellacott.

‘I am only telling you what happened,’ Sophy said, with what Lalla called her straight face.

‘The experience seems to have been worth every penny,’ her father said.

‘Yes, I am truly finished.’

The end of the wool slipped from her fingers, she sank back on her heels and looked up at her father, at last returning his gaze, smiling with love and delight, but with a reserve of mischief, too, and that pleased him most of all, it was what gave reality to her warm-heartedness. If she were dissembling her gaiety and friendliness, she would not have dissembled
that
, he thought. It would not have occurred to her as a necessary ingredient of mirth.

Sophy kept up her spirits throughout dinner and then flagged. It was her long journey, the other two said and she agreed. ‘And you miss the clarity of that air,’ her father added.

But there were other exhaustions she could less easily endure and the chief was, she saw, that she had cast herself in a rôle that would take too much from her.

She remembered – and this was after she had said good-night and gone to her room – long ago and when her mother was alive, she herself perhaps five or six years old, being taken on a train journey, from Edinburgh, her mother’s old home it may have been. Kneeling in her corner seat, breathing on the window, breathing and wiping, in stupefying boredom, she had begun suddenly to talk in baby talk, demanding, for no reason she could now recall, in a lispy, whiny voice that had never been her own, a ‘chocky bikky’. Her mother, gently remonstrating, had made publicly clear that this
odd voice was to be regarded as a game. ‘Icky chocky bikky,’ Sophy had insisted, pouting. It was then that she had first realised her own power of mimicry; power it was and went to her head. She had become the nauseating infant she impersonated. Other people in the compartment took the lead from her mother and laughed. Sophy herself had pretended not to hear this and turned her back and breathed on the window again, but soon she could not help herself. ‘Pitty gee-gees,’ she said, pointing. When she had tired of talking, she let her eyelids droop and began to suck her thumb as she had scornfully watched other children doing. Her mother, who knew that things were going too far, but was never brisk with her in public, tried to distract her attention, but could not. The performance had been tiring, like playing Lady Macbeth with heart and soul and, in the end, Sophy had become sickened by her own creation, caught in its tentacles and quite unable to escape. Everyone else was tired, too; she knew that her mother was desperate and that glances were exchanged; but she seemed powerless to end the misery. It was too late to speak suddenly in her own voice. What voice was it, and what things did it say? She could remember putting her forehead to the cool window-pane and counting to herself, ‘One, two, then three and then I’ll speak again as I used and they will all know the other voice has gone.’ But her shyness was too great, she was too committed to the other character and had no way of breaking loose from it. Badgered, exhausted and embarrassed, she had at last burst into tears, taking refuge, as she wept, against her mother’s arm. ‘Over-tired,’ the grown-ups said. ‘Such a long journey. She’s stood up to it very well.’

Lalla and her father had said good-night and used the same words, though now the climate was to blame as well. They were no more true than when she was a child. The acting had exhausted her, and nothing else. She could have cried, as she had when a young girl, ‘Oh, my darling Mamma, why did you have to die?’ The words were so loud in her head and her breast that she might have said them aloud. They returned with the aching familiarity of a long time ago, when she had lain in bed after lights-out at boarding-school, or on their first Christmas Eve alone, with her father trying to remember everything her mother had always done, so that Sophy should not be deprived of one sprig of holly or Christmas-tree candle. In the end, unbelievably, the words had become a habit and lost their pain. Her life without her mother was different from before, but it was, after all, the same life. If Mamma had been here, she sometimes thought, accepting that she could not be.

This evening the phrase sprang at her with a sudden freshness, the first time for years. She sat down on the edge of her bed and her hands dropped into her lap, palms upwards in a gesture of hopeless inertia. ‘If she were alive,’ she thought, ‘she would be downstairs with Father, and Lalla here
with me, as she ought to be. Or not under this roof at all. And I should be relieved of this tiring pretence, that won’t end with the end of the train journey, as it did before. It will be there waiting for me in the morning and all the mornings after – having to be gay and unselfconscious – as if it were a perfectly normal thing for one’s father to marry one’s school-friend – fifty-three and eighteen and all plotted and planned with me safely out of the way in a foreign country,’ she added, feeling self-pity. ‘I must be gracious and hand over my home and my place in it and have, day in, day out, my constant companion chosen for me.’

Sometimes, at school, Lalla had stolen marches on her. She could remember well the case of the borrowed treasure and the broken promise, the forgotten appointment, the betrayed confidence. Many instances came to her mind from the dark place where they had long ago been thrust impatiently away.

‘I must get away,’ she thought, and her hands sprang to life and were clenched tight, drumming on her knees. ‘I must run away from my own home, as soon as I have come back to it.’ In Switzerland, she had longed for it so much, in that clear air her father had mentioned, faced for months at a time with the monotony of the snow, and the dark trees that never shed their leaves, as trees ought, she was sure. ‘Write to me about England,’ she had begged her father and Lalage. ‘Describe a nice drizzle, a beautiful muggy evening with the fallen leaves sticking to the pavements. You describe it for me, though; not I to you.’

Instead, they had written to say that they were getting married. They had met several times in London, for both had been lonely, missing Sophy. In their loneliness they had flown together, and clung, and wished to remain so for ever. The loneliness had been much stressed – orphan and widower, as they constantly referred to themselves. Companionship (and Sophy was to share in this, too) and common interests (both liked going to plays, but seldom did so) were enlarged upon. Love itself was not once mentioned and Sophy was glad that it was not. She was to fly home for the wedding – very quiet, just the three of them and Lalage’s aunt. But Sophy would not go. She was on her way up to a chalet for the winter sports and had made arrangements which she could not confuse. She knew that they were glad to have her stay in Switzerland and she was glad to do so, although she was sure that if she had not gone there in the first place, she could have prevented things from reaching such a pass.

Her bedroom, above her father’s, overlooked the courtyard and when she heard footsteps out there, she went across to the window and looked out. It was almost dark. Lalage and her father were going for a walk in the rain. He opened the courtyard door into the street and as Lalage passed through it, put his hand on her shoulder.

‘Ah, yes, and bedtime, too,’ Sophy thought, turning away. ‘Beyond one’s imagination, thank God. I hope I can hide my revulsion from her. I dare say there’s nothing to stop her having a baby even. It is perfectly possible.’

Their footsteps and voices faded away down the street. The drizzle continued, and downstairs Miss Sully was singing ‘Oh, what a Beautiful Morning’.

‘I must get a job,’ Sophy thought. ‘Without a day’s delay.’

‘Sophy’s job’ was soon a great topic of conversation.

Colonel Vellacott was full of facetious suggestions. At every meal some new one came to mind, and Sophy grinned, and wondered if her face would crack in two, as her heart must.

‘Oh, hush, I can’t hear of it,’ Lalage would beg her husband, and stuff her fingers in her ears. ‘Sophy, please! You will make me think you are running away from
me
and it will be as Miss Sully predicted.’ She kept her hands pressed to her cheekbones, ready to make herself deaf again, if necessary. Her bracelets slid down her thin arms to her elbows. Her eyes were full of pleading.

‘Affected,’ Sophy thought. ‘She used not to be. Father loves it.’

‘I always meant to get a job,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t have just stayed here and looked after the house – which Miss Sully does much better anyhow.’ But this was dangerous ground and she stepped from it quickly. ‘I should have taken the Secretarial course with you, Lalla, if Father hadn’t made me go to Switzerland first.’

‘
Made?
’ said Colonel Vellacott.

‘Persuaded, then.’

‘Your French was horrible.’

‘Well, “made” me, then.’

‘You’d have loathed the Secretarial School,’ Lalla said complacently. ‘I hated every moment.’

‘And was glad to leave it and get married,’ Sophy thought. ‘So it was typing and shorthand that drove you to it. He hasn’t, after all, a spectacular enough amount of money to be married for. And love? If you love him, you show none of it. Perhaps I inhibit you and force you to keep it for when you are alone. In which case, the sooner I go, the better.’

She felt absurdly in the way, but also shut out that they should turn to secrecy because of her.

It was not easy to slip away from Lalage, her too-constant companion, but, one morning, she managed to, and set out, as if on an illicit errand, through wet alleyways towards the Market Place. It had rained for all of the fortnight she had been at home, but had this morning stopped. The clouds had
lifted and broken open and bright light, though not yet quite sunshine, poured down over the puddles and dripping eaves. Slate roofs dried rapidly and pavements steamed. It was the end of April.

‘We begin the second of May,’ said the Principal of the Secretarial School in Market Street. She underlined this date on the application form. ‘Your father will complete this for you.’ She thought it strange for the girl to come there on her own, making enquiries. Sophy stared at her hands, which were a dark plum colour, scarred from broken chilblains. Clumsy as they were, she used them affectedly, drawing attention to them with hooked fingers as she wrote, and then by twisting round an engagement ring of dull little diamonds.