The Happy Prisoner (30 page)

Mrs. North immediately sat upright and let down her feet at the idea. “That's darling of you,” she said, “but I have a souffle to make.”

“You haven't got a monopoly in eggs, ducky. Other people can make souffles, you know.”

“Not the way I make 'em,” said her mother. “Not mushroom souffles. You know how Violet likes my mushroom souffles, and it is her evening.”

“She'd eat anybody's souffle, even if it was flat in the dish. Though I shouldn't think she'd have any room after all that picking in the larder.”

“Violet, child, you haven't! I dared you—”

“Keep your hair on,” said Violet. “I was only looking. You're a mean sneak, Heather Sandys, and a lying swine. I shan't be sorry to get away from you.” Without getting up, she crawled over to the table by the side window, hauled out a dog
by the scruff of its neck, skidded it over the rugs and went out with a slam of the door that rattled all the mullioned window-panes.

“I shall miss old Vi,” said Heather. “She's fun to tease, because she always rises, like Ma's souffles. It's going to be awfully slow having no one to fight with. She's not a bad soul either, you know. I'm very fond of the old bird.”

“No one would think it to hear the way you talk to her,” said her mother.

“That? Oh, that doesn't mean a thing. It's the only language she understands. She gets out of her depth if you give her polite conversation.”

“She must be fathoms under with Fred then,” said Mrs. North. “He's so darn polite it makes me nervous.”

“Oh, they get on fine,” said Heather airily. “They just never talk.”

Contrary to tradition, Fred was coming to dinner on the eve of the wedding. John, who had had the correct night out with the boys before he married Heather, had offered to arrange a party for Fred at the local roadhouse, but Mrs. North, who was getting a little oppressed by Muffet and Miss Smutts, begged him not to leave the women on their own. “It makes it so dull for Violet if we only have a hen party,” she said.

“I shouldn't have thought it made it any more thrilling to have Fred,” piped up Heather, who never missed a cue, but her mother did not allow this sort of talk any more with the wedding so close. She herself, satisfied that it was what Violet wanted, was training herself to make the best of him. Besides being bad taste, she said, to criticise Fred at this stage, nothing that anyone said could alter the fact that he was within days of being a member of the family.

The best man, Kenneth Saxby, who had been at the Agricultural College with Fred, was coming to dinner too and going back to sleep at the cottage. He was a nice-looking, serious young man, with pimples on his forehead and an incipient carbuncle on the back of his neck which he had covered with Elastoplast. He was a vet, with a growing practice in Warwickshire, and the minute he arrived Violet cornered him for a free opinion on the canker in her old Labrador's ear.

He was brought in to see Oliver before dinner, and Oliver noticed how differently Fred behaved with someone whom he knew well. His nose was quite a normal colour. He wondered how long he would have to know the family before he would shed
his burning self-consciousness. Elizabeth came in with a loaded tray to lay the table and both men sprang at her.

“It's quite all right, thank you; I'm so used to doing it, it doesn't take a minute,” she said, picking up the little coffee table that Fred had knocked over on his way to help her. Oliver saw that Kenneth was struck with her appearance and was obviously trying to work out whether she was a superior kind of maid, a friend, or a member of the family.

Moving neatly about his room, so much at home in contrast to the awkwardness of the two men, she did indeed seem one of the family. Oliver could not imagine his room without her moving about in it. What would it be like to be awakened in the morning by someone less clean and fresh? For no one could ever look as spruce as Elizabeth before breakfast. What would it be like to have no one to whom to say the things which other people did not understand? True, Elizabeth did not always answer, and when she did she was sometimes indifferent and sometimes disapproving and sometimes even rude, but at least she always knew what he was getting at. Somehow, without seeming to be particularly interested in him, she understood his mind. Hers was rather similar: detached, independent, unexcit-able. He had long ago given up the idea of trying to woo her into tenderness. Any flirtatious attempts slid off her and left him feeling undignified. Arnold Clitheroe must have a better technique; he wondered how he went about it. It was difficult to imagine Elizabeth relaxing her guard. Perhaps she never did, and Clitheroe loved a poised and polished statue, without knowing what went on inside. Oliver thought he knew Elizabeth quite well by now, well enough at least to guess at what she was thinking. Since the wedding preparations began she had been quieter and more withdrawn than ever, getting on with a hundred jobs without being asked, yet not entering into discussions and plans. She only seemed interested in the wedding as far as the work it made. This she accepted calmly and performed efficiently. She had given Violet a really attractive brooch, which Violet had not appreciated.

“It was very generous of her,” Mrs. North said, touched. “That's an expensive brooch.”

“Probably one her boy friend gave her,” said Heather. Arnold Clitheroe seemed to give Elizabeth quite a lot of things. He seemed to be hot on the trail, from what Oliver could gather from Elizabeth's guarded answers to questions.

She was looking unusually warm and pink tonight, and her eyes were smiling as if she were excited inside. She had made the enormous concession of having two cocktails. Fred and
Ken had been summoned to the drawing-room to be social. Oliver watched Elizabeth lay the table, and when she was looking it over, standing on, one leg in a way she had when pensive, he said suddenly: “All this wedding business—does it inspire you to thoughts of doing the same?”

She looked at him calmly. “I imagine I shall get married one day,” she said. “I don't mean to go on working for ever.”

“And you couldn't go home, of course. At least, I gather that from what Muffet said you'd told her.”

“Muffet,” said Elizabeth, moving a knife into exact alignment with a soupspoon, “is a lying old busybody. She'd say anything to make it look as if she knew more than anyone else.”

“You wouldn't really go and live with her, would you, like she's always planning?”,

“I suppose one could do worse. Bit too insecure for me, though. I want to keep on the right side of the law if possible.”

“With someone like Arnold Clitheroe, for instance. No one could go wrong with a name like that.”

“I could do worse.”

“Liz, you're surely not considering—? Why, the man must be at least fifty. Much too old for you, however nice he was.”

“I might. He's always asking me, but I haven't made up my mind. I tell him I want to see this job through first.”

“For God's sake kill me off and go to him then,” said Oliver peevishly. “Go ahead and ruin your life.”

“Why shouldn't I get married?” she asked. “Other women do. In fact, it's considered a bit of a disaster if they don't. Look at Vi. I mean, without wanting to be rude, no one would say Fred was the ideal husband, yet everyone's glad, because it's better than marrying nobody.” Elizabeth never came close to you on the rare occasions when she spoke her mind. She stood now with the table between them, talking to him across the room.

“But goodlieavens!” Oliver ran his fingers through his hair. “You can't compare the two. Of course, Vi isn't everybody's meat, but a girl like you—”

“Yes, what about a girl like me?”

“Don't fish. I'm not going to tell you you're pretty, if that's what you want. John can do that.”

“Oh, he does,” she said smugly.

“Stop being coquettish,” he said. “It doesn't suit you.”

“How dare you,” she said, colouring. “You are the rudest, worst-tempered man I've ever known. You think that because you're the spoiled baby of this house you can say anything you like and get away with it.”

“That's a beastly thing to say.”

“You started the beastliness.”

“That's right,” said Muffet, who never entered a room without listening outside first. “Having a little tiff. Won't do you any harm; then you can kiss and make up afterwards. How pretty you look, Elizabeth darling, when you colour up, but I expect Oliver tells you that.” Conscious of resentment, but not caring, she went on: “I couldn't bear it a moment longer in the drawing-room, Ollie. I had to come in here to make sure I was normal. That young man of your sister's behaves as if I were the phantom of the opera. I strike him dumb. When I try to draw him out with kindly conversation he just opens and shuts his mouth like a fish, and never a word comes out. The other one, his friend, is quite an interesting fellow—clever too, he's been telling me about some of his cases. He finds it very hard to get the right instruments, he says. I'm going to look round when I get back to London and see what I can find for him.”

“Fred's very shy, you know,” Oliver said. “You have to make allowances.”

“Shy? No one's shy with me; I can talk to anybody. But not to your future brother-in-law. Fve never met such heavy going.”

Mrs. North came in, untying the heliotrope apron with the labelled pockets. “I'm all ready to dish up,” she said, “if you are, Elizabeth. I thought I'd never be ready. My goodness, how we've got through it all, I don't know. I keep going into the larder to gloat over the food; it really does look swell. Those fruit jellies of yours are setting perfectly.”

“I was going to put some cream on top,” Elizabeth said. “I thought they looked rather dull.”

“Couldn't be half as dull as that fellow in there,” said Lady Sandys in her clear, carrying voice, jerking her head towards the thin wall of the drawing-room.

That fellow in there did the wrong thing, of course, by turning up next morning and asking to see Violet.

“She mustn't see him! Don't let her see him!” Mrs. North scuttled down the stairs when she heard his voice in the hall. “It's terribly bad luck for the bride and bridegroom to meet on the wedding morning. Surely you know that?” she asked him crossly. She had been up since half-past six, and, so far, everything possible had gone wrong, from a sulky kitchen fire and soured milk to a child sick on the carpet and Violet's petticoat showing two inches below her dress.

Fred was understood, through his stammering, to say that
one of the horses was sick and Ken wanted some drugs. He himself must stay and help Ken with the horse, and the only other man who could drive had just put a load of grass into the dryer and could not leave the machine.

“Wouldn't you know it? “wailed Mrs. North. “Wouldn't you know something like this would have to happen? I wanted to keep Violet in the house all morning to be sure of her being ready on time. If she goes jaunting off to Shrewsbury, Heaven knows when she'll get back.”

“B-but it's a matter of life or death, Mrs. N-N-N”—gulp—“North,” said Fred, who had a sense of the dramatic on occasion.

“Heather, I suppose you couldn't—?”

“I couldn't,” said Heather firmly. “I've got all the flowers in the house to do, and the children to dress. And you're not going to make John go in that draughty car.”

“What's all the rumpus?” Oliver heard Violet come thumping down the stairs. “Oh, hullo, Fred,” she said casually. “How d'you like my dress? This petticoat thing isn't meant to show; they're just pinning it up.”

“He mustn't see it! Fred, don't you dare look at her. Have you children got no sense of what's right? Violet”—as Fred started his stammering explanation again— “I'm afraid you've got to take the car and get some drugs from Shrewsbury. One of the horses is sick. And if you're not back by twelve o'clock—”

“Which one?” Violet was immediately businesslike. “Colic? Marigold? Whee-ew!” She whistled like a man. “When should she be foaling?” In a moment she burst into Oliver's room, her hair dishevelled from trying on and a flap of white silk hanging down at the back of the red silk dress in which she was going to be married.

“Can I borrow your trench coat, Ollie?” she asked breathlessly. “It's raining like stink, and I don't want to get this fancy dress wet going to the garage.”

“Now, Violet.” Mrs. North followed her into the room. “You're not going out in that dress. You just go upstairs and take it off before you go.”

“Can't, Ma, no time,” said Violet over her shoulder on her way out.

“The horse won't die for the sake of two minutes. You
can't
go shopping in your wedding dress! And I have to alter the petticoat.” Her mother pursued her at a trot.

“Do it when I come back.”

“I'll never have time. Take it off now.”

“Oh,
Ma
…” Oliver heard their arguing voices fading down the passage and presently his mother came back and lectured him for five minutes about his sister. She was rattled this morning. The capable command which had borne her through the last few days had succumbed at last to the waiting accumulation of fatigue. Her round, creased face was quivering with near tears.

“I shall never get through this day, Ollie, never. So many things have gone wrong already and I feel there are so many more to come. I can't face it. What shall I do? I can't face it.”

“Oh rot,” he said, “you'll sail through it.” It made him uneasy to see her crumple. He remembered his childhood's sudden panic of insecurity if he ever saw her tired or crying. Who could cope with life if she could not? “Go and have a drink, old dear,” he told her. “A good strong one, that's all you need.”