Parade's End (81 page)

Nunlike! She would have to stand at an attitude of attention beside a telephone all her life; in an empty schoolroom with the world shouting from the playground. Or not even shouting from the playground any more. Gone to Piccadilly!

But, hang it all, she wanted some fun! Now!

For years now she had been – oh, yes, nunlike! – looking after the lungs and limbs of the girls of the adenoidy, nonconformitish – really undenominational or so little Established as made no difference! – Great Public Girls’ School. She had had to worry about impossible but not repulsive little Cockney creatures’ breathing when they had their arms extended … You
mustn’t
breath rhythmically with your movements. No. No.
No! … Don’t
breathe out with the first movement and in with the
second!
Breathe naturally! Look at me! … She breathed perfectly!

Well, for years, that! War-work for a b—y Pro-German. Or Pacifist. Yes, that too she had been for years. She hadn’t liked being it because it was the attitude of the superior and she did not like being superior. Like Edith Ethel!

But now! Wasn’t it manifest? She could put her hand whole-heartedly into the hand of any Tom, Dick or Harry. And wish him luck! Whole-heartedly! Luck for himself and for his enterprise. She came back, into the fold, into the Nation even. She could open her mouth! She could let out the good little Cockney yelps that were her birthright. She could be free, independent!

Even her dear, blessed, muddle-headed, tremendously eminent mother by now had a depressed-looking Secretary. She, Valentine Wannop, didn’t have to sit up all night typing after all day enjoining perfection of breathing in the playground… . By Jove they could go all, brother, mother in untidy black and mauve, secretary in untidy black without mauve, and she, Valentine, out of her imitation Girl Scout’s uniform and in – oh, white muslin or Harris tweeds – and with Cockney yawps discuss the cooking under the stone-pines of Amalfi. By the Mediterranean… . No one, then, would be able to say that she had never seen the sea of Penelope, the Mother of the Gracchi, Delia, Lesbia, Nausicaä, Sappho …

‘
Saepe te in somnis vidi!
’

She said:

‘Good …
God
!’

Not in the least with a Cockney intonation but like a good Tory English gentleman confronted by an unspeakable proposition. Well, it was an unspeakable proposition. For the voice from the telephone had been saying to her inattention, rather crawlingly, after no end of details as to the financial position of the house of Macmaster:

‘So I thought, my dear Val, in remembrance of old times, that … If in short I were the means of bringing you together again… . For I believe you have not been corresponding… . You might in return… . You can see for yourself that at this moment the sum would be absolutely
crushing
…’

II

TEN MINUTES LATER
she was putting to Miss Wanostrocht, firmly if without ferocity, the question:

‘Look here, Head, what did that woman say to you. I don’t like her; I don’t approve of her and I didn’t really listen to her. But I want to hear!’

Miss Wanostrocht, who had been taking her thin, black cloth coat from its peg behind the highly varnished pitch-pine door of her own private cell, flushed, hung up her garment again and turned from the door. She stood, thin, a little rigid, a little flushed, faded, and a little as it were at bay.

‘You must remember,’ she began, ‘that I am a schoolmistress.’ She pressed, with a gesture she constantly had, the noticeably golden plait of her dun-coloured hair with the palm of her thin left hand. None of the gentlewomen of that school had had quite enough to eat – for years now. ‘It’s,’ she continued, ‘an instinct to accept any means of knowledge. I like you so much, Valentine – if in private you’ll let me call you that. And it seemed to me that if you were in …’

‘In what?’ Valentine asked, ‘Danger? … Trouble?’

‘You understand,’ Miss Wanostrocht replied, ‘That … person seemed as anxious to communicate to me facts about yourself as to give you – that was her ostensible reason for ringing you up – news about a … another person. With whom you once had … relations. And who has reappeared.’

‘Ah,’ Valentine heard herself exclaim. ‘He has reappeared, has he? I gathered as much.’ She was glad to be able to keep herself under control to that extent.

Perhaps she did not have to trouble. She could not say that she felt changed from what she had been – just before ten minutes ago, by the reappearance of a man she hoped she had put out of her mind. A man who had ‘insulted’ her. In one way or the other he had insulted her!

But probably all her circumstances had changed. Before Edith Ethel had uttered her impossible sentence in that instrument her complete prospects had consisted of no more than the family picnic, under fig-trees, beside
an
unusually blue sea – and the prospect had seemed as near – as near as kiss your finger! Mother in black and purple; mother’s secretary in black without adornments. Brother? Oh, a romantic figure; slight, muscular, in white flannels with a Leghorn hat and – well, why
not
be romantic over one’s brother – with a broad scarlet sash. One foot on shore and one … in a light skiff that gently bobbed in the lapping tide. Nice boy; nice little brother. Lately employed nautically, so up to managing a light skiff. They were going tomorrow … but why not that very afternoon by the 4.20?

‘They’d got the ships, they’d got the men,

They’d got the money too!’

Thank goodness they’d got the money!

The ships, Charing Cross to Vallambrosa, would no doubt run in a fortnight. The men – the porters – would also be released. You can’t travel in any comfort with mother, mother’s secretary, and brother – with your whole world and its baggage – without lots of porters … Talk about rationed butter! What was that to trying to get on without porters?

Once having begun it her mind went on singing the old eighteen-fiftyish, or seventyish, martial, British, and anti-Russian patriotic song that one of her little friends had unearthed lately – to prove the historic ferocity of his countrymen:

‘We’ve fought the Bear before,

And so we will again!

The Russians shall not have Constantino …’

She exclaimed suddenly: ‘
Oh!
’

She had been about to say: ‘Oh,
Hell
!’ but the sudden recollection that the War had been over a quarter of an hour made her leave it at ‘
Oh!
’ You would have to drop war-time phraseology! You became again a Young Lady. Peace, too, has its Defence of the Realm Acts. Nevertheless, she had been thinking of the man who had once insulted her as the Bear, whom she would have to fight again! But with warm generosity she said:

‘It’s a shame to call him the Bear!’ Nevertheless he was – the man who was said to have ‘reappeared’ – with his problems and all, something devouring… . Overwhelming,
with
rolling grey shoulders that with their intolerable problems pushed you and your own problems out of the road… .

She had been thinking all that whilst still in the School Hall, before she had gone to see the Head, immediately after Edith Ethel, Lady Macmaster had uttered the
intolerable
sentence.

She had gone on thinking there for a long time… . Ten minutes!

She formulated for herself summarily the first item of a period of nasty worries of a time she flattered herself she had nearly forgotten. Years ago, Edith Ethel, out of a clear sky, had accused her of having had a child by that man. But she hardly thought of him as a man. She thought of him as a ponderous, grey, intellectual mass who now, presumably, was mooning, obviously dotty, since he did not recognise the porter, behind the closed shutters of an empty house in Lincoln’s Inn… . Nothing less, I assure you! She had never been in that house, but she figured him, with cracks of light coming between the shutters, looking back over his shoulder at you in the doorway, grey, super-ursine… . Ready to envelop you in suffocating bothers!

She wondered how long it had been since the egregious Edith Ethel had made that assertion … with, naturally, every appearance of indignation for the sake of the man’s Wife with whom, equally naturally, Edith Ethel had ‘sided’. (Now she was trying to ‘bring you together again.’ … The Wife, presumably, did not go to Edith Ethel’s tea-parties often enough, or was too brilliantly conspicuous when there. Probably the latter!) How many years ago? Two? Not so much! Eighteen months, then? Surely more! … surely, surely more! … When you thought of Time in those days your mind wavered impotently like eyes tired by reading too small print… . He went out surely in the autumn of … No, it had been the first time he went that he went in the autumn. It was her brother’s friend, Ted, that went in ’16. Or the other … Malachi. So many going out and returning, and going out and perhaps not returning. Or only bits: the nose gone … or both eyes. Or – or Hell! oh, Hell! and she clenched her fists, her nails into her palms – no mind!

You’d think it must be that from what Edith Ethel had said. He hadn’t recognised the porter; he was reported to have no furniture. Then … She remembered… .

She was then – ten minutes before she interviewed Miss Wanostrocht, ten seconds after she had been blown out of the mouth of the telephone – sitting on a varnished pitch-pine bench that had black iron, clamped legs against the plaster wall, nonconformistically distempered in torpedo-grey: and she had thought all that in ten seconds… . But that had been
really
how it had been!

The minute Edith Ethel had finished saying the words:

‘The sum would be absolutely
crushing
… .’ Valentine had realised that she had been talking about a debt owed by her miserable husband to the one human being she, Valentine, could not bear to think about. It had naturally at the same moment flashed upon her that Edith Ethel had been giving her his news: He was in new troubles; broken down, broken up, broke to the wide… . Anything in the world but broken in… . But broken … And alone. And calling for her!

She could not afford – she could not bear! – to recall even his name or to so much as bring up before her mind, into which, nevertheless, they were continually forcing themselves, his grey-blond face, his clumsy, square, reliable feet; his humpish bulk; his calculatedly wooden expression; his perfectly overwhelming, but authentic omniscience… . His masculinity. His … his Frightfulness!

Now, through Edith Ethel – you would have thought that even
he
would have found someone more appropriate – he was calling to her again to enter into the suffocating web of his imbroglios. Not even Edith Ethel would have dared to speak to her again of him without his having taken the first step… .

It was unthinkable; it was intolerable; and it had been as if she had been lifted off her feet and deposited on that bench against the wall by the mere sound of the offer… . What was the offer?

‘I thought that you might, if I were the means of bringing you together …’ She might … what?

Intercede with that man, that grey mass, not to enforce the pecuniary claim that it had against Sir Vincent
Macmaster.
No doubt she and … the grey mass! … would then be allowed the Macmaster drawing-room to … to discuss the ethics of the day in! Just like that!

She was still breathless; the telephone continued to quack. She wished it would stop, but she felt too weak to get up and hang the receiver on its hook. She wished it would stop; it gave her the feeling that a strand of Edith Ethel’s hair, say, was penetrating nauseously to her torpedo-grey cloister. Something like that!

The grey mass never would enforce its pecuniary claim… . Those people had sponged mercilessly on him for years and years without ever knowing the kind of object upon which they sponged. It made them the more pitiful. For it
was
pitiful to clamour to be allowed to become a pimp in order to evade debts that would never be reclaimed… .

Now, in the empty rooms at Lincoln’s Inn – for that was probably what it came to! – that man was a grey ball of mist! a grey bear rolling tenebrously about an empty room with closed shutters. A grey problem, calling to
her
!

A hell of a lot … Beg pardon, she meant a remarkably great deal! … to have thought of in ten minutes! Eleven, by now, probably. Later she realised that that was what thought was. In ten minutes after large, impressive arms had carried you away from a telephone and deposited you on a clamped bench against a wall of the peculiar coldness of torpedo-grey distempered plaster, the sort of thing rejoiced in by Great Public (Girls’) Schools … in those ten minutes you found you thought out more than in two years. Or it was not as long ago as that.

Perhaps that was not astonishing. If you had not thought about, say, washable distemper for two years and then thought about it for ten minutes you could think a hell of a lot about it in those ten minutes. Probably all there was to think. Still, of course, washable distemper was not like the poor – always with you. At least it always was in those cloisters, but not spiritually. On the other hand you always
were
with yourself.

But perhaps you were not always with yourself spiritually; you went on explaining how to breathe without thinking of how the life you were leading was influencing
your
… What? Immortal soul? Aura? Personality? … Something!

Well, for two years… . Oh,
call
it two years, for goodness’ sake, and get it over! … she must have been in … well, call
that
a ‘state of suspended animation’ and get that over too! A sort of what they called inhibition. She had been inhibiting –
pro
hibiting – herself from thinking about herself. Well, hadn’t she been right? What had a b—y Pro-German to think about in an embattled, engrossed, clamouring nation, especially when she had not much liked her brother-Pros! A solitary state, only to be dissolved by … maroons! In suspension!

But … Be conscientious with yourself, my good girl!
When that telephone blew you out of its mouth you knew really that for two years you had been avoiding wondering whether you had not been insulted!
Avoiding wondering that. And nothing else! No other qualified thing!