Miss Buncle Married (2 page)

Mr. Abbott caught an early train home (he was quite unfit for any more business) and found Barbara pouring out tea in the drawing-room. She was alone for a wonder, and Mr. Abbott was thankful; he sank into an easy chair with a groan of relief.

Barbara looked up and smiled. “There you are!” she said, “I'm awfully glad you're so nice and early. We're dining with Mrs. Copthorne tonight.”

“Hell!” said Mr. Abbott.

Barbara was amazed. She had never heard her Arthur swear with real fervor and emphasis before (he was a very even-tempered man as a rule, quiet, kind, and reliable). Barbara was struck dumb.

“Hell,” said Mr. Abbott again, louder and more emphatically, “Hell, hell,
hell
!”

“Don't you
want
to go, Arthur?” inquired Barbara, somewhat unnecessarily.

The simple question was the last straw on the camel's back, or, to take an even better metaphor, the question was the last pint of water that burst the dam. Mr. Abbott's dam burst, and a flood of eloquence poured forth over Barbara's defenseless head. Mr. Abbott got up and walked about the room, knocking against chairs and incidental tables in his blind passage, and all the time the flood of eloquence continued. He told Barbara all he had suffered and endured, he told her exactly how he felt about dinner parties, with bridge to follow, and exactly how he felt about the friends of whose hospitality he and Barbara had partaken in the last few months. He inveighed against their rapacity at bridge, and the third-rate quality of the port and cigars they supplied. His diatribe veered from the general to the particular, and then back to the general again.

It took a long time, and a great deal of energy, and when Mr. Abbott finally ended with the distressing statement: “This life is killing me, killing me, I tell you”—he was quite breathless, and somewhat ashamed. The outburst had done him good, and he began to realize that it was not Arthur Abbott who had been speaking—not Arthur Abbott at all. It was some other Being, a suffering Being, an illogical, unreasonable, irritable Being, who had usurped Arthur Abbott's body and had ridden it all day long. This Being had behaved quite extraordinarily badly all day long; had been rude to Mr. Abbott's secretary (a most estimable and quite invaluable young woman); had quarreled senselessly with Mr. Abbott's partner; and now, to crown everything, was bullying Mr. Abbott's wife.

“But Arthur,” Barbara inquired again, when the flow of eloquence had ceased. “But Arthur, don't you
like
it—the dinners and bridge and things? I thought you liked it. Why do we do it if you don't like it?”

“Why do we do it?” echoed Mr. Abbott, stopping short in his pacing, and gazing at her in amazement.

“Yes, why do we?”

“We do it because you like it, of course,” Arthur told her in calmer accents. The Being that had ridden him all day was seeping out of him now. Barbara was having a curiously soothing effect upon his tortured nerves. “It's all right,” he continued. “It's quite all right, Barbara. Don't take any notice of what I said. It's just that I've had a frightful headache all day, and everything has been rather—”

“But I don't like it either,” said Barbara simply.

“You—you don't like it either!”

“I hate it, really,” she replied, “I'm no good at bridge, you see, and it bores me rather. I've done my best to get better at it. I've had lessons and I've read Culbertson till my head swims, but it doesn't seem to do me much good—”

“But Barbara—”

She swept on—“I was wondering how I was going to go on bearing it forever and ever, but if
you
don't
like
going out to parties and playing bridge then we needn't.”

Arthur Abbott gazed at his wife in amazement, which gradually gave place to amusement—she was a priceless person, his Barbara. Life was so simple to her; she was so matter-of-fact, so absolutely and peerlessly sane. He began to laugh, and Barbara laughed too—
her
laughter was from relief. She was tremendously relieved to discover that she need no longer look forward with dismay to thirty years of dining and bridging with her neighbors. (It might have been even more than thirty years, she reflected, because Mrs. Copthorne was sixty-five if she was a day, and she still played bridge, and played quite a sound game, and held the most devastating post-mortems over every hand. At sixty-five, Barbara thought, you really ought to be beyond caring so frightfully if your partner, in a moment of absentmindedness, trumped your trick. You ought to be knitting socks for your grandchildren or something like that.)

“Why on earth didn't you say you hated it all before?” Mr. Abbott inquired when at last he could speak. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“Why didn't
you
tell
me
?” retorted Barbara.

“I thought you were enjoying it.”

“And I thought
you
were. After all they were all your friends,” Barbara pointed out, “so, of course, I thought you liked them. They called on me and invited us, and, of course, we had to ask them back—”

“And then they asked us again,” put in Arthur.

“So we had to ask them again,” Barbara added.

“Are you sure?” Arthur inquired, smitten by a sudden horrible suspicion. “Are you quite sure you're not just saying it—I mean it isn't just because you think that I—”

“I'm sure,” she replied, nodding vigorously, “quite, quite sure. It was a sort of nightmare.”

It was a little while before they were able to convince themselves and each other of their sincerity, but eventually they realized that they were in complete accord. Both craved quiet evenings by their own fireside; both were bored by dinner parties and bridge.

“We'll never play again,” said Barbara happily.

But, alas, it was not so simple as that. The Abbotts were involved with their friends in a series of gaieties; they had half a dozen engagements booked, and more rolling in daily. The Abbotts were a popular couple. Mr. Abbott played a good hand of bridge, and Barbara was pronounced to be “really very sweet.” Her bridge was poor, of course, and completely lacking in character—you never knew where you were with Barbara Abbott as your partner. Sometimes she played quite reasonably for a hand or two, and then her eyes would stray round the room, and she would fall into a kind of trance and have to be told to play and would wake up and ask what was trumps. It says a good deal for Barbara's personality and her friends' charity that, in spite of such glaring faults, they liked her, but like her they did—everybody thought that Arthur Abbott had done well for himself when he married her. They had given him up for a confirmed bachelor years ago, and they were amazed when he took a holiday in the height of the publishing season and returned to Sunnydene with a wife. “
It
just
showed
,” they said.

They all called, of course, and some of the more curious tried to find out where the new Mrs. Abbott had come from and who she was before Arthur married her. But after a few not very searching questions, they gave it up—it didn't really matter who she was. They liked her, and she was obviously a lady and obviously had money of her own. She dressed well, with a simplicity that they knew was expensive, and she had a small car she was learning to drive herself—what did it matter who or what she was; it was none of their business.
1

Thus the Abbotts had been accepted, had become popular, and had been involved in a social round of engagements from which they were now trying to extricate themselves. How was it to be done? That was the question. What excuse had they? The truth was too fantastic to be admitted openly—they would look such fools…

Barbara produced her engagement book and they pored over it while they drank their tea, and Barbara consumed crumpets in vast quantities, and Arthur nibbled toast.

“I don't see how we can get out of the Smiths',” Barbara said, “or the Gorings' either, for that matter. And Sybil Beauchamp will never speak to me again if we let her down on the 9th.”

“We must make a clean sweep,” Arthur declared.

“But how?” objected Barbara. “What excuse can we make? Tonight's easy, of course,” she continued. “There's your headache—but I had better go and ring her up now, so that she can make up her tables.”

She bolted the last crumpet and wiped her buttery fingers on

her handkerchief. “You can be thinking of something while I'm away,” she added hopefully.

Mrs. Copthorne was exceedingly annoyed when she heard about Mr. Abbott's headache, for now she was left with six—an inconvenient number for bridge—and it was too late to get anyone else (except, perhaps, the curate, and even that only made seven).

Barbara soothed her and rang off feeling rather frightened. If everybody was going to be as difficult as Mrs. Copthorne they would never escape—never. It was a ghastly thought.

She went slowly into the back premises to find the Rasts (the married couple who cooked and buttled so impeccably for Arthur and herself), and here more difficulties materialized, difficulties requiring just as much tact and patience as the egregious Mrs. Copthorne. There was nobody in the kitchen but Dorcas (Barbara's own personal maid), and Dorcas was ironing.

“Lawks, what a turn you gave me, Miss Bar—Mrs. Abbott, I mean,” Dorcas exclaimed, “creeping in so silent like that. I put out your black lace tonight (you don't want to mess up your best at old Mrs. Copthorne's) and I'm giving your velvet a press while Mrs. Rast is out. Her face is enough to turn the milk sour.”

“Where are they?” Barbara inquired, looking round the kitchen vaguely as if she expected Rast and Mrs. Rast to appear from behind the dresser or out of the stove. “Where are they, Dorcas?”

“Who? The Rasts? Out,” said Dorcas, dumping down her iron with a bang. “Both of them's out—gone to the pictures. They're on speaking terms for a wonder.”

“Oh dear, what a bother!” Barbara said.

“Good riddance, I think,” replied Dorcas. “But you better go and start dressing, or you'll be late,
madame
.”

Barbara smiled. When Dorcas called her “madame” or spoke of her as “Mrs. Abbott,” she invariably said it in inverted commas, as if that were not Barbara's name at all, but only a sort of secret which she and Barbara shared to the exclusion of everybody else. Dorcas had been with her all her life; first as her nurse, and then as her maid and general factotum in the little house at Silverstream, so it was difficult for Dorcas to realize that Barbara was now not only grown up, but actually married.

Barbara felt the same about herself. She still felt that she had to grow up. Sometimes in the middle of a party, she would suddenly be overwhelmed by the conviction that she was not really grown up—not like other people. Surely other people of her age had not got all the queer childish ideas and inhibitions that she had; were not beset by shyness at awkward moments; were not burdened by a total inability to express themselves in decent English, as Barbara was. The queer thing was that Barbara could
write
decent English, had, in fact, written two novels which had sold like hotcakes, and, like hotcakes, had given quite a number of innocent people a good deal of pain; but, when it came to talking, Barbara was lost.

No, she was not like other people. Other people took grown-up things as a matter of course—things like late dinner, and wine, driving cars and going to the theater; things like marriage and housekeeping and ordering commodities from the shops; whereas
she
was just playing at it all the time, pretending to be grown up, when, really and truly all the time, she was just Barbara—a plain, gawky child. She had the same body (bigger now, but indubitably the same, even to the rather intriguing brown mark, shaped like a little mouse, on her right thigh. Nobody ever saw it, of course—except herself, and even then, only in her bath—but it was still there—a visual testimony to the fact that she was still the same as she had always been, Barbara Buncle and no other). She still had the same, rather unsatisfactory hair (though its poverty was now somewhat mitigated by a permanent wave), and she was still frightened of “bright” people, and of thunder, and big dogs, and dentists, and still had the same courage to bear her fears without a sound. Last, but not least, she still enjoyed the same things—ice cream, and sweet cakes, and crumpets with the butter oozing out of them—and she still loved being out at night when the stars were shining, and going late to bed, and having breakfast in bed. Someday, she was convinced, somebody would find out that she was an imposter in the adult world.

“You'd better go and get dressed, madame,” said Dorcas again. “You haven't too much time, and your hair's all over the place. I'll come and do you up when I've finished this.”

“But we're not going,” said Barbara. “That's what I came in to see Mrs. Rast about. Mr. Abbott's got a headache.”

“There now!” exclaimed Dorcas, “there now—and the Rasts out! What a to-do!—not but what I can cook something for your suppers just as nice as her.”

“Of course you can, Dorcas,” agreed Barbara diplomatically.

“Yes,” said Dorcas complacently, “we managed all right at Tanglewood Cottage, didn't we, Miss Barbara—Mrs. Abbott I mean—but Mrs. Rast will go clean dotty when she hears I've been poking round her larder.”

“Well, you'll have to,” said Barbara, “I don't see how she can be more disagreeable than she always is, and Mr. Abbott will want something to eat.”

“He'll get it, don't you worry,” Dorcas promised. “I'm not afraid of that old cat. I can stand up for myself, I hope.”

“I wonder what there is!” Barbara said, moving vaguely in the direction of the larder.