Complete Short Stories (VMC) (37 page)

‘As you seem so sure about your typing and shorthand,’ he said one day, with a great show of tolerance, ‘and are really settled to it, I am quite willing for you to do the thing properly, to go up to London and train at some reputable place.’

But Sophy had not settled to her shorthand and typing; every day she fell back, as the other girls progressed; and now she no longer wanted to go away from Ancaster, having at the twenty-first birthday party fallen in love with Graham Dennis.

Graham and Sophy had rediscovered one another, as young people do who have lived in the same neighbourhood for years and then been separated by school, so that, meeting in the holidays, they seem almost total strangers. Violent changes of height and voice and manner were bewildering and shyness descended. Now, with all the changes made – as they thought – quite grown-up and likely to remain the same for ever, they could sum one another up, and come to a conclusion. Sophy and Graham concluded that they were in love, that they must always have loved, though first immaturity and then separation had hindered their acceptance of the fact.

To Colonel Vellacott, Graham’s National Service had not made the man of him it should. Nonchalant and without ambition, he had spent the two years cheerfully peeling potatoes or drinking in the Naafi. Promotion had seemed to him quite as undesirable as it was unlikely. To Colonel Vellacott’s questions, on their first meeting after some years, he gave unsatisfactory answers. Nor did Colonel Vellacott like his clothes – his dirty cord trousers and suede shoes and vivid pullovers. Particularly he disliked – and in a cathedral city it was out of place, as Graham himself was – the car he drove. It was an old London taxi painted yellow, with window-boxes and lace curtains. Once, Graham had had written across the back, ‘Do not laugh, madam, your daughter may be inside.’ In love, and serious at last, he had painted this over.

Even so, that
his
daughter should be inside annoyed Colonel Vellacott considerably.

‘Lots of young men have cars like it,’ Sophy told him. ‘It isn’t smart to have a new one. The older and funnier the better.’

‘Not in a place like this.’

‘We can’t
help
living in a place like this. And I think it’s amusing. You were young once yourself, remember.’

Lalage, who could not easily escape these much dreaded discussions, turned aside.

Sophy and Lalla found their so gallantly planned relationship beginning to wear threadbare. It was difficult to keep up, especially as it was so unproductive of incredulity in others – its primary aim. Their affection for one another was too easily taken for granted and few of their friends or acquaint ances seemed to find it at all remarkable. Their laughter about the hackneyed jealousies that might have threatened them was joined in by their guests, who – so infectious was the gaiety – did not realise how much of relief it contained.

Sophy was the first to find the ordeal going on too long. It had become a mere routine of good behaviour, with no congratulation in it for herself.
Miss Sully thought, observing the minute omens, that soon the situation would have more piquancy. Lalla seemed dull and puzzled, with nothing to do but mend her clothes, change her library books and water all the ferns – too often, for they began to droop and rot away.

One morning, when Colonel Vellacott was in Court and Sophy at her Typing School, Lalage, feeling more restless than ever, wandered into the kitchen, where Miss Sully was making stuffing for green peppers. Lalla sat on a corner of the table and watched, picking up bits of parsley and chewing them, holding pepper-seeds on the tip of her tongue until it tingled.

Miss Sully, mixing raisins and rice, was talking of the days when she was companion to an old lady whose footman had interfered with one of the gardener’s boys. She brought in many a Freudian phrase along with those of the cheapest newspapers and her voice dropped to its cathedral hush as it did when she talked of sex. One side of her neck was a bright red. Deftly her fingers worked and when she took up a large knife and began to chop some mushrooms, she abandoned herself almost obscenely to the job. ‘What’s for pudding?’ Lalla asked, like a little girl, as soon as there was quiet again. It had never occurred to her that she might order meals herself. She had once timidly put forward a suggestion that Colonel Vellacott would like jugged hare, but had been told that hare was out of season.

‘Well, what
shall
we have?’ Miss Sully asked, suddenly indulgent. The names of puddings at once went from Lalla’s head, although Miss Sully had such a repertoire of them – there was Cabinet Pudding and High Church Pudding and Guardsman’s Pudding and even Railway Pudding – they were mostly sponge mixtures, differing with a dash of spice or jam, or a handful of candied peel. Lalla could never remember which was which.

‘What about rice pudding?’ she asked. ‘I haven’t had that since I was at school.’

‘Well, we can’t very well have rice two courses running, can we?’ Miss Sully asked, laughing gently and pointing at the dish of peppers, now ready for the oven. ‘And you will have to give me plenty of warning for rice pudding, because the grain must soak at least an hour, you know.’

Lalage hadn’t known.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ she asked, jumping down from the table. It was only eleven o’clock.

‘Well, now, you could run the ribbon through the hem of Miss Sophy’s petticoat. I know she’ll be wanting it this evening. Then I can get on with some scones for tea.’ (‘Without you under my feet,’ she seemed to imply.) By the time she had told Lalla where to find the petticoat and then the ribbon and the bodkin, she thought that she could have done the job herself.

‘The shiny side of the ribbon facing you, mind,’ she warned her, thinking, ‘Really, she’s as useless as a little doll.’

When Lalla had finished that small task, she carried the petticoat to Sophy’s room and laid it carefully on the bed, hoping she would be touched and grateful when she discovered it there. ‘And I would do anything for her,’ she thought, ‘if there were anything else to do.’

She went over to the window and looked down into the courtyard – so still and full of heat and the scent of honeysuckle this sunny morning. On the wall below her was the starry jasmine that framed her own bedroom window. She leant out, resting her elbows on the rough stone sill, feeling insecurely attached to space and time – the seconds would never tick on till luncheon, or the silence be broken, or the sun ever again go in.

It was the room behind her that overcame, at last, her sense of unreality – though she had turned her back upon it, she felt it awaiting her attention – Sophy’s room, where Sophy shut the door on all that she pretended downstairs and where she was confronted by her own thoughts, which she kept imprisoned in this place. They were almost palpably imprisoned, Lalla suddenly felt, and she spun round quickly from the window as if to catch them unawares.

The room was menacing to her now and laden with treachery, its air heavy with secrets. The clock ticked slyly and a curtain lifted slowly and sank back full of warning. It was an alien territory and one where Lalla knew she had no right to be. Even the way the towels hung by the basin expressed hostility, she thought, and so did the truculent angle of the looking-glass. It did not seem too fanciful to imagine mute things infected by Sophy’s own antagonism.

A letter addressed to Graham lay on the writing-table, the envelope unsealed and the pages sticking out from it as if as a reminder that they were to be added to, or something else enclosed.

In terror, Lalla thought, I could find out if I cared to, just where I stand with her and why, for weeks, she has shrugged me aside in that bright, cold way.

She recoiled and then, almost immediately, stepped quickly forward and drew the pages from the envelope, very careful to make no sound, lest Miss Sully, far below in the kitchen, would prick up her ears and sense the treachery.

‘It is the worst thing people can do to one another,’ she told herself, ‘and I knew nothing about myself, when I believed that I could not.’

The first lines – Sophy’s lament at Graham’s absence for five whole days – Lalla passed over. She was looking only for her own name and, sure that she would find it, turned to the second page.

‘Father, of course, will disapprove and say that I should not go, for he gets more stuffy and morose each day. Anyone young is what he can’t bear nowadays, and all that we two do is vulgar and absurd. I wish that Lalla
would try to be a wife to him and not a romping schoolgirl still. I should think he would like to be quiet for a while and serious, and so should I. To see him all the time exposed to her high spirits – that gather
me
in, but exclude him – and in any case they are far beyond his powers – is quite painful. He is less and less in the house, and when he is, is so sour and gruff. But he can’t – so far – be gruff with
her
, so is with me instead. Where can it end? But all the same, I’ll brave his wrath and tell him that I’ll go away with you.’

There was no more. Very gently, Lalla folded the pages and put them inside the envelope. Then she tiptoed from the room. Her heart beat so loudly that she thought it would betray her. Her hands were icy-cold, and hurt, as if they had touched poison.

She tried to eat luncheon, but failed. The sight of the dish of peppers reminded her of how short a time ago she had been sitting in the kitchen, bored and restless, but still innocent and loving.

Perhaps it is a baby already, Sophy thought, when Lalla, too sick to stay, had left the room. She now had her father to herself and in a nonchalant voice said: ‘Graham and I think of going to France in August, as soon as Denise’s wedding is over!’

‘You couldn’t choose a worse month,’ said Colonel Vellacott and threw down his napkin and stood up. ‘I’m worried about Lalla. I think I’ll go up to her.’ Sophy sat alone. Her eyebrows were raised and she looked down at her plate with an air of surprise and curiosity.

Afterwards she went to her bedroom. The petticoat threaded with its scarlet ribbon lay on the bed, and she wondered if Lalla had done it. She could imagine her trying to while away her mornings with one trivial task after another, spending as long upon them as she could. She pictured her standing in this sunny room, with the petticoat over her arm, feeling lonely and out-of-place. Then a fearful intuition sprang upon Sophy and she swung round and looked for the letter she had so carelessly left on the table. It lay there, just as she expected, and with a trembling hand she picked it up and stared at it. ‘I have been read,’ it seemed to say.

Miss Sully could now watch things worsening daily. The laughter had worn off: it was strange to her that it had lasted so long.

Lalla recovered from her sickness, but was dispirited. Her attitude towards her husband changed, was appealing and conciliatory and overanxious. With Sophy she was reserved. They had drawn a long way apart and the distance was clouded with suspicions and mistrust.

Colonel Vellacott, as the letter had stated, was less and less in the house,
and when she was alone, Lalla paced up and down, clasping her hands tight to her breast, and then the other words of the letter echoed over and over in her mind, with burning emphasis – ‘Where can it end? Where can it end?’

‘You are run down,’ her husband told her. He was wonderfully solicitous, yet bored. She seemed unreal to him, but he would do his best for her. This summer he was feeling his age; marriage had drawn too much attention to it, and so much youth in the house underlined it. Once, he had thought it would have the opposite effect.

‘You need a holiday, poor Lalla. And you shall have one. In September I should be able to get away for a couple of weeks. How would you like to go to Florence?’

Yes, she would like to go to Florence and she smiled and nodded; but she thought, ‘I am not really used to him
here
, and now I must try to get used to him in a foreign country.’

She tried hard to be more wifely to him, but when she made attempts at serious discussion, he smiled so fondly, so indulgently, that she was aggravated. Sophy watched her attempts with grim understanding. ‘I know what
this
is all about,’ she thought.

So they were all going abroad – Lalla and her husband sedately to Florence, and Sophy and Graham, full of secrecy and excitement, to France. There was a great difference, Lalla thought.

‘I neglect you shamefully,’ said Colonel Vellacott. ‘I promise I will mend my ways after our holiday. I will come off some of my committees.’

‘But couldn’t I go with you?’ Lalla asked. ‘I should be so interested to hear you speak. Just this once?’

‘You would be bored to death and, in any case, I’m afraid tonight’s meeting is in camera.’

To her own distress, her eyes filled with tears. She was most dreadfully sorry for herself and grieved that no one else was.

She knew that the tears were a pity and that he would think her more childish than ever. ‘Where will it end?’ she wondered, as he patted her cheek, saying ‘good-bye’.

Sophy was out with Graham, Miss Sully listening to a Murder play on the wireless in her sitting-room. ‘I could teach myself Italian, perhaps,’ Lalla thought, and she went to the study and looked along the shelves, but, though there were many books written in Italian, she could find none to teach the language to her. One was expected to know it already.

‘In Florence, they will all gabble away and leave me out of it,’ she thought, growing sorrier and sorrier for herself. ‘It really is too bad.’ Now, they were to be joined in Italy by Major and Mrs Mallett, old friends of the
Colonel’s, a pleasant elderly couple, who still regarded the Colonel as of a younger generation.

‘They are only going because he would be so bored with just me,’ Lalla thought, crossly. ‘Oh, I have been complaisant for too long,’ she decided. ‘I have tried hard and given in and got nowhere.’

She thought that, instead of meekly waiting up for him, she would go up to bed, without telling Miss Sully even. She would turn out the lights and if she were not asleep when he came home, she would pretend to be.