Westwood (26 page)

‘Didn’t they get on?’ said Margaret, hanging up the damp tea-towel.

‘He spoilt her,’ said Mrs Steggles. ‘Gave her anything she wanted and then she wasn’t
satisfied. She went off with some rich chap, so the story goes. I don’t know. It was Mrs Miller told me. She knew some people who knew them in Birmingham.’

‘Were there any children?’ asked Margaret.

‘Oh, no, I don’t think so; Dad’s never mentioned any.’

‘Mother, shall I shop, or will you?’ said Margaret, pausing at the door.

‘I hope he
will
come here often, if he wants to,’ burst out Mrs Steggles, giving a last polish to the gleaming sink. Her face was flushed and her eyes wet. ‘Poor fellow! I can sympathize.’

Margaret hesitated. She had never before taken any outward notice of her parents’ unhappy relationship, feeling that to do so would only have increased her mother’s sufferings. But her mother had never before indulged in such an outburst, and Margaret felt that it must be because she felt a need, which had become unbearable, for comfort. Perhaps it was the renewal of old torments in a new place, where she had hoped to find respite, that had broken down her control.

Father must have got hold of some new creature, thought Margaret in disgust, and just as I thought things were getting better. It was now clear that her mother’s championship of Mr Fletcher was due to her feeling that both he and she were victims of Bad Women.

At least Margaret’s sympathy could flow from her heart. She
did
feel her mother’s sorrow; she
did
feel anger at the way her father behaved, and she went over to her and put an arm about her shoulders.

‘Mother, I’m so sorry,’ she murmured, kissing her. ‘It’s such a shame –’

‘Why, my dear – that’s all right,’ said Mrs Steggles, looking up in surprise but returning the kiss. ‘It’s all all right, really, Margaret,’ she added in some embarrassment.

‘You mean – there isn’t anything new to upset you?’

‘Something did happen last week to upset me, but it wasn’t anything new and there’s no need for you to worry about it, anyway. Your turn will come soon enough,’ said her mother, with some return of her usual manner. ‘Now, let’s hurry up and get the beds done and you can get out early, or all the best greens’ll be gone – what there is of them.’

How sordid it all is! thought Margaret. If it weren’t for Westwood, and thinking how happy he and she are together, I’d have nothing beautiful in my life – nothing.

She was still thinking of Mr and Mrs Challis when she went out an hour later. Her nature was jealous, as was to be expected when a capacity for romantic passion is allied to strong feelings and both are denied expression, and her feeling for Gerard Challis was not so spiritual as to exclude jealousy. That first sight of Seraphina had filled her with a painful mingling of admiration and despair; it was not that she had hoped to attract his affection towards herself; she not only felt him too far above her, but also had a distaste for marital infidelity and intrigue which amounted to horror, but the knowledge that so lovely a creature shared his life, and was woven throughout his intimate being, emphasized the gulf between him and herself: Margaret Steggles, unlovely and heavy in manner, and craving for beauty both earthly and divine that could never be hers.

But even in the short time that Mrs Challis had spent with the two girls, Margaret’s heart had been won and her jealousy lost in admiration, and now she could think of their mutual happiness almost without pain. One doesn’t envy the angels in Heaven, she thought, as she went into the greengrocer’s.

She was at once wished a Happy New Year by Zita, who was out buying potatoes, and in the next breath was invited to go to Westwood that evening to listen to a broadcast concert of Chopin’s music, arranged under the auspices of the Free French and the Polish Governments in London. She accepted with delight, and the winter day instantly seemed to glow with colour and
the anticipation of pleasure. She arranged with Zita to go in by the back entrance to Westwood at ten minutes to eight that night.

Mrs Steggles vaguely realized that her daughter had some new foreign friend who had a job in the big house up on the hill, but she was not particularly interested and made little comment when Margaret said that she would get supper early for herself as she was going out for the evening to Westwood.

She went; she opened a narrow door in a wall and saw, high above her head, in the faint moonlight, the bust of the goddess gazing towards the little garden beyond the iron gate. Frost on the grass, every laurel leaf masked with frost! Oh, beautiful, she thought, and went down the pathway leading to the house.

It was the first of many journeys along that path, for throughout January and February she was invited by Zita to attend their ‘private concerts’ in the Little Room, two or three times a week. Her work at school began to suffer, and so did her health, for after she returned home, bemused by the splendid sounds still ringing in her ears, perhaps exalted and stirred by a distant glimpse of Gerard Challis, she would sit until one or two in the morning correcting the exercise-books which she should have dealt with earlier in the evening, and in the morning she never awoke in time to take her dressing and breakfast in comfort, but had to be aroused by her mother, who scolded her while she was hastily swallowing the meal. In time, however, she grew used to being slightly poisoned by lack of sleep and even found that her senses responded more acutely to sounds and colours, and that her brain was stimulated by the privation.

She decided that if she chose to do without sleep it was no one’s business but her own.

She found Zita’s company less trying on these evenings than at any other time, for she never talked, or even moved, while music was in progress, and when it was ended she appeared at her best, soothed and calm and almost like a rational being. Sometimes when the concert was over they would have a modest supper together on a tray in front of the fire; some sandwiches and coffee coaxed from Grantey, or sausage-rolls brought by Margaret and washed down with little bottles of beer provided by Zita, but usually Margaret went straight home through the cold dark night with themes from some Beethoven sonata or Brahms symphony singing in her head, relieved that the echo of the lovely sounds had not been dispelled by an hour of gossip.

The Little Room was reached by three downward steps at the end of the corridor, and had for generations (so Zita told Margaret) been used as a sewing-room. It had a faded but still gay wallpaper of bright little leaves and berries on a white ground, which had been designed and made by William Morris, and was sunny and quiet. It was pleasant to think of women sewing here in the sunlight throughout the last two hundred years; the shadow which the seated, peaceful figure threw upon the wall changing in the course of time from a profile crowned with a mobcap to a profile with short hair crowned by a ribbon bow; the needles and cotton gradually becoming finer, the material upon which the seated figure worked changing from the lustrous stiff satin, the cotton printed with tiny sprigs of flowers, of the eighteenth century, to the thin rayons and brilliant patterns of the twentieth. In the world outside the Little Room great events occurred, and
continents were conquered, and empires were built or destroyed, and the backwash of these happenings came into the sewing-room in the shape of materials, stuffs from America or Bradford or Japan; and women sat tranquilly sewing at them, while the sunlight shone into the Little Room and the shadows of young trees, that gradually grew massive and tall, danced upon its walls.

Margaret had been disappointed to learn that the Challises had been living at Westwood for only ten years, for she had hoped that the family had lived there for generations. However, Mrs Challis did carry on the tradition of this room, for there were two sewing-machines standing on a large firm table in a corner, and in one cupboard there was an Ellen Maria, or dummy, upon which dresses could be modelled, with the slender waist, rounded hips and full bosom which were evidently the measurements of some Victorian lady, and Margaret wondered very much how Ellen Maria came to be there, for she was sure that the dresses worn by Mrs Challis were never planned upon such a creature. Another sign of the room’s traditional use was a little work-table made of polished mahogany, with a ‘well’ covered in striped yellow and blue silk for holding heavier materials, and when Margaret once ventured to open its drawer she found a nest of boxes and containers covered in faded cherry-red moiré, for sewing implements, and many reels of brilliant cotton and silk. This was the room where Grantey came to ‘run-up’ little frocks and undergarments for Emma, and Zita came to mend the linen, and she confessed to Margaret that it was here that she had found the materials for Margaret’s Christmas present, having asked Mrs Challis if she might take something pretty from the rag-bag.

The rag-bag was as large as a sack and hung in the cupboard with Ellen Maria for company, and once when Zita was delving into it, on an evening when there was no music to which they wanted to listen, Margaret delved too, and was impressed by the variety and quantity and attractiveness of its contents; pieces of turquoise velvet, strips of black gauze starred with silver, scraps of lilac silk, fragments of lawn of a fairy fineness, and most striking of all – a ragged old Doctor of Laws gown, made of thin red cloth resembling felt.

‘If I had time I make slippers for
all
at my Club,’ said Zita, covetously handling the beautiful old material, ‘but time I haf none.’

Grantey and Cortway did not like the kind of music which Zita liked, so Mrs Challis had had to buy another wireless cabinet and install it in the Little Room. It was a good one, for Mr Challis’s meanness vanished when confronted by The Arts, and he would not permit great music to be heard in his house in a distorted form through an inferior instrument. Grantey and Cortway therefore sat in comfort in the servants’ parlour listening to their type of music while Zita and Margaret sat up in the Little Room in equal comfort listening to the late Beethoven quarters.

Music from the Little Room did not penetrate to the rest of the house, and Margaret soon abandoned her hope that Mr Challis would be attracted by the sounds and frequently drop in; indeed, after her second visit she ceased to expect to see him and only delighted in the music; with the knowledge that he was somewhere in the great house adding to her happiness.

She had from the first decided that she must take the greatest, most subtle care to keep her secret from Zita. She knew that it would be difficult, for Zita had the devilish capacity for stumbling upon secrets often possessed by excessively feminine women, and Margaret knew that if she once discovered that her friend cherished a romantic adoration for Mr Challis she would either tease or become sympathetic, which would be worse. Therefore Margaret was careful only to ask such questions about the house and its master as were natural where two such interesting objects were concerned, and cultivated precisely the most convincing mixture of respect and
interest when Mr Challis’s tastes and activities were under discussion.

Her desire to become an accepted visitor at Westwood was favoured by the fact that when Hebe and Alexander had been living there for the first months after their marriage while looking for a house, they had both taken up with anybody who was odd or amusing or what Alexander called ‘nice’ (a word upon which he put his own interpretation) and filled the house with people who might, with a host and hostess of less elegance, have created a squalid milieu.

After the young people had moved to Hampstead, life at Westwood had become more conventional, but the tradition created by Hebe and Alexander lingered. Mr and Mrs Challis were used to meeting intense young women in the corridors and talkative old men in the shrubberies, and to hearing that the strangers were friends of the Nilands, and so it seemed as natural to them that Margaret should drop in whenever Zita wanted her to come as that Zita’s young men should brew coffee and jabber Czech in the kitchen. Margaret was indeed an improvement upon some of their former visitors, and Seraphina liked her quiet clothes and her courtesy (though she was a little inclined to smile at the seriousness of the latter), while Mr Challis had received from his wife the impression that Zita’s new friend was musical, and he knew that she admired his works, while her eyes had betrayed that she admired him, so he felt benevolent towards her, if no more.

In the darkest months of the winter he thought about little besides his work at the Ministry and
Kattë
, which he now knew was to be his masterpiece. Kattë herself had changed since he first conceived her six months ago. She had then been a dark girl with burning eyes. She was now a fair girl with laughing eyes, and whereas the tragedy as he had originally visualized it lay in Kattë’s determination to degrade herself because her lover falsely imagined her to be degraded, and she felt that an inner degradation must already exist in her because of his mistrust, the tragedy now lay in Kattë’s fatal attraction for men, which she could not help and which bewildered and distressed her by the pain which it inflicted. Mr Challis fairly spread himself over this theme, and he felt that he had created in Kattë that spirit of joy and light love, which could so swiftly turn to tragedy, dwelling in the Vienna of the years before the First World War.

If he knew that
Kattë
was his best work so far, he concealed from himself the increasing pain which accompanied its creation, and explained his persistent longing for Hilda by the fact that she was – not his model, but his spring, his inspiration, for the character of the new Kattë. Experienced dramatists, he told himself, do not convey mannerisms and traits of character direct to paper and thence to the boards, but mannerisms and traits pass through the furnace of the creative artist’s imagination and thence emerge transformed to gold. Of course he had not ‘written a play about’ Hilda; but Hilda had taught him more about Kattë, and by stimulating his imagination, Hilda had enabled him to create.