Riders in the Chariot (42 page)

For the most part, however, Mrs Chalmers-Robinson was to be found alone, in her depleted décor, in the house which had survived by legal sleight of hand. It had been very complicated, and exhausting. Now that it was more or less over, she lay on the sofa a good deal, and rested, and in time learned how to enter the lives of her friends from a distance. She found that she knew much more than she had ever suspected. If she had been capable of loving, compassion might have compensated her for that insight by which, as it happened, she was mostly disgusted or alarmed.

Except in the case of her maid, Ruth Joyner. Here the mistress was chastened by what intuition taught her. To a certain extent affection made her suffer with the girl, or it could have been she was appeased by a sensuality she had experienced at second hand.

When the maid told her mistress of her approaching marriage, the latter replied, "I hope you will be terribly happy, Ruth."

Because what else would she have said? Even though her words were dead, the shape and colour of their sentiments were irreproachable, like those green hydrangeas of the last phase, less a flower than a semblance, which such ladies dote on, and arrange in bowls.

"I have been happy here," Ruth replied, and honestly.

"I would like to think you have," her mistress said. "At least, nobody has been unkind to you."

Yet she could not resist the thought that nobody is unkind to turnips unless to skin them when the proper moment arrives.

So she had to venture on.

"Your husband, will he be unkind to you, I wonder?"

She positively tingled as the blade went in.

Ruth hesitated. When she spoke, it sounded rather hoarse.

"I know that he will," she said slowly. "I do not expect the easy way."

Mrs Chalmers-Robinson was almost gratified. It related her to this great, white, porous-skinned girl as she could not have been related otherwise. Then her loneliness returned. Because she could not have been gathered into the bosom of anything so comic, or so common, as her starched maid.

She began to buy herself off then.

"I shall have to give you something," she said. "I must try to think what."

"Oh, no, m'mm!" Ruth protested, and blushed. "I was not expecting gifts."

For, as she understood it, poverty was never a theory, only a fact.

The mistress smiled. The girl's goodness made her feel magnanimous.

"We shall see," she said, taking up her book to put an end to a situation that was becoming tedious.

As she closed the door, Ruth Joyner suspected that what she had done in innocence was bringing out the worst in people. If she had seen her way to explain how she had surrendered up the woundable part of her by certain acts, everybody might have striven less. But to convey this, she was, she knew, incompetent.

So the house continued to bristle with daggers looking for a target.

The cook said, "One day, Ruth, I will tell you all about the man I did not marry."

And: "It is the children that carry the load. It is the children."

"My children will be lovely," Ruth Joyner dared to claim. "My children will not fear nothing in the world. I will see to that."

Looking at the girl, the cook was afraid it might come to pass.

Then, a couple of evenings later, the bell rang from Mrs Chalmers-Robinson's room. She had gone to bed early, after a poached egg. So Ruth climbed towards the mistress from whom, she realized, she had become separated.

"Ruth," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson began, "quite frankly I am unhappy. I have something--no, that is underestimating--I have every, everything on my mind. Why do you suppose I was picked on? Upon? On! You know I am the last person who should be forced to carry weights."

And she would have eased hers from off her hair, but encountered only the parting, which needed attending to.

It was obvious Mrs Chalmers-Robinson had had a couple.

"Sit down, won't you?" she invited, because that was what one said.

But Ruth remained standing. She had never faced the better-class people except on her two legs.

"Ruth," said the mistress, "Science, I find--though this is in strictest confidence, mind you--Science is, well, something of a disappointment. It does not speak to
me
_, me
personally
_, if you know what I mean."

Here she beat her chest with her remaining rings. By that light the skin appeared as though it had been dusted with the finest grey dust.

"I must have something personal. All this religion! Something I can touch. But nothing they can take away. Not pearls. Oh dear, no! Pearls get snapped up amongst the first. Or men. Men, Ruth, do not like to be touched. Men must touch. That is not even a secret. Give me your hand, dear."

"You would do better with an aspro and a cup of strong black coffee," advised the maid, almost stern.

"I should be sick. I am already sick enough." Mrs Chalmers-Robinson shuddered.

Her mouth had wilted and faded to a pale, wrinkled thing.

"What do you believe, Ruth?" she asked.

Though she did not want to hear. Only to know.

"Oh dear, madam," cried the girl, "a person cannot tell what she believes!"

And much as she regretted, she was forced to wrench her hand away.

Then, it was realized by the woman on the bed, who would have given anything for a peep--she was all goggly for it--this white tower, too, was locked against her.

So she began to bare her teeth, and cry.

Although rooted firmly in the carpet, the white maid appeared to be swaying. The light was streaming from her shiny cuffs. But it no longer soothed; it slashed and blinded.

"If I was to tell," the creature attempted, "it doesn't follow that you would see. Everybody sees different. You must only see it for yourself," she cried, tearing it out helplessly at last.

"Tell, Ruth, tell!" begged the mistress.

She was now quite soppy with necessity, and ready to mortify herself through somebody else.

"Tell!" she coaxed with her wet mouth.

One of her breasts had sidled out.

"Oh, dear!" cried the girl. "We are tormenting ourselves!"

"I like that!" shouted the woman in sudden fury. "What do you know of torments?"

The girl swallowed her surprise.

"Why, to see you suffer in this way, and nothing to be done about it!"

So obvious.

"My God! If even the patent saints fail us!"

There were times when her teeth could look very ugly.

"I am ignorant all right," admitted the maid, "and helpless when I cannot use my hands. Only when it comes to your other suggestion, then I feel ashamed. For both of us."

Indeed, she streamed with a steady fire, which illuminated more clearly the contents of her face.

When the woman saw that she had failed both to rob and to humiliate, she fell back, and blubbered shapelessly. She was screwing up her eyes tight, tight, as if she had taken medicine, but her words issued with only a slack, spasmodic distaste, which could have been caused by anything, if not herself.

"Go on!" she said. "Get out!" she said. "I am not fit. Oh God, I am going round!"

And was hitting her head against the hot pillow. She could not quite succeed in running down.

"Take it easy, m'mm," said Ruth Joyner, who was preparing to obey orders. "I dare say you won't remember half. Then there will be no reason for us not to stay friends.

"See?" her starch breathed. "After you have had a sleep."

She had to touch once, for pity's sake, before going.

In the short interval between this scene with her employer and her marriage to Tom Godbold, Ruth Joyner was engaged by Mrs Chalmers-Robinson in noticeably formal conversation. For the most part the mistress limited herself to orders such as: "Fetch me the
grey
_ gloves, Ruth. Don't tell me you forgot to mend the grey! Sometimes I wonder what you girls spend your time thinking about."

Or: "Here I am, all in yellow. Looking the purest fright. Well, nothing can be done about it now. Call the taxi."

On the latter occasion, Mrs Chalmers-Robinson was bound for a meeting of some new company formed round about the time her husband got into trouble, and of which she had been made managing director. But Ruth, of course, did not understand anything of that.

Only once since the débâcle had the maid encountered her employer's husband. Standing in a public place, he was engaged in eating from a bag of peanuts. His clothes were less impressive than before, though obviously attended to. He had developed a kind of funny twitch. He did not recognize the maid, in spite of the fact that she approached so close he could have seen the words she was preparing on her lips. He was comparatively relaxed. He spat out something that might have been a piece of peanut-shell, from out of the white mess on his tongue. And continued to look, through, and beyond strangers. So the girl had gone on her way, at first taking such precautions of compassion and respect as she might have adopted for sleepers or the dead.

And then, suddenly, there was Ruth in her ugly hat, standing before her mistress in the drawing-room. Her box had been carried off that morning. The ceremony would take place early in the afternoon.

It was evident that for the occasion of farewell Mrs Chalmers-Robinson had decided to appear exquisite, and to send her servant off, not, perhaps, with a handsome cheque, but at least with a charming memory. She was firm in her refusal to attend the service in the dreary little church. Weddings depressed her, even when done in satin. But she would lavish on the stolid bride a sentimental, though tasteful blessing, for which she had got herself up in rather a pretty informal dress. She had made herself smell lovely, Ruth would have to recall. As she received her maid from the Louis Quinze
fauteuil
_, assurance, or was it indifference, seemed to have allowed her skin to fall back into place. Even by the frank light of noon, the parting in her hair was flawless--the whitest, the straightest, the most determined. And as for her eyes, people would try to describe that radiance of blue, long after they had forgotten the details of Jinny Chalmers's décor, her bankruptcy, divorce, and final illness.

Now she said, trailing a white hand, "I expect you are the tiniest bit excited."

And laughed with the lilt she had picked up early on from an English actress who had toured the country.

Ruth giggled. She was grateful for so much attention, but embarrassed by some new stays, which were stiff and tight.

"I won't be sorry when it is over," she had to answer, truthfully.

"Oh, don't hurry it! Don't!" Mrs Chalmers-Robinson pleaded. "It will be over soon enough."

Then she moistened her lips, and remarked, "You girls, the numbers of you who have been married from this house! Falling over one another! Still, it is supposed to be the natural thing to do."

In certain circles, this would have been considered deliciously comic.

Yet Ruth could not help but remember sad things. She remembered stepping back onto a border of mignonette, along the brick path in front of her father's house, while trying to disguise her misery, and how this had risen in her nose, sweeter, and more intolerable, as people said good-bye with handkerchiefs, to wave, and cry into.

"Oh, madam," the words began to tumble clumsily, "I hope it will be all right. I hope this Violet will look after things."

"She has an astigmatism," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson revealed with gloom.

"The milk is on the ice. And bread in the bin. If Ethel is not back. And you want to cut yourself a sandwich."

If, indeed.

At last the nails were driven. Ruth realized she was biting on a mouthful of hair. It became untidy, always, without her cap.

Mrs Chalmers-Robinson took the stiffly gloved hands in both her cajoling, softer ones.

"Good-bye, Ruth," she said. "Do not let us prolong last moments; they can become ridiculous."

For that reason, and because emotion disarranges the face, she did not kiss her departing maid. But might have, she felt, if circumstances had been a little different.

"Yes," said Ruth. "They will be expecting me. Yes. I had better go now."

Her smile was that stupid, she knew, but something at least to hang on to. So it stuck, at the cost of strain. She listened to her shoes squeak, one after the other, as she crossed the parquet. She had polished it the day before, till her thoughts, almost, were reflected in it. A fireworks of light, brocade and crystal cascaded at the last moment on her head, just before she closed the door in the way she had been taught to close it, on leaving drawing-rooms.

So Ruth Joyner left, and was married that afternoon, and went to live in a shed, temporary like, at Sarsaparilla, and began to bear children, and take in washing. And praised God. For was not the simplest act explicit, unalterable, even glorious in the light of Him?

Mrs Godbold was sitting on the edge of the chair, in that same shed which had started temporary and ended up permanent. Several of the children continued to cling to their mother, soothed by her physical presence, lulled on the waves of her reflective mind. Kate, however, was going about sturdily. She had rinsed the teapot, saving the leaves for their various useful purposes. With an iron spoon, she had given the corned breast an authoritative slap or two. Soon the scents and sighs were stealing out of pan and mouths, as fresh sticks crackled on sulky coals, and coaxed them back to participation. Eyes could not disguise the truth that the smell of imminent food is an intoxicating experience.

Even Mrs Godbold, who had felt herself permanently rooted amongst the statuary of time, began to stir, to creak, to cough, all of it gently, for fear of disturbing those ribs which had copped most of her husband's wrath. She would have risen at any moment, to resume her wrestling, as a matter of course, with the many duties from which it was useless to believe one might ever really break free. When Else, her eldest, came in.

Else Godbold often got home later of an evening now. Since it had been decided that her fate was secretarial, she had learnt to bash out a business letter, and would take on any other girl, for speed, if not for spelling. As for her shorthand, that was coming along, too: she accepted dictation with disdain, and sometimes even succeeded in reading her results. In her business capacity, she caught the bus for Barranugli every morning at 8:15, in pink, or blue, with accessories of plastic, and a cut lunch. Else had begun to do her lips, as other business young ladies did. Cleverly balanced on her heels, she could make her skirt and petticoats sway, in a time which might have provoked, if it had sounded less austere. Else Godbold was ever so impressive, provided her younger sisters were not around.