The Sleeping Beauty (20 page)

At last there was a great burst of clapping from below and a silence; and then the band began to play God Save the King.
Unsteady, but really unmistakeable, the set-piece glowed on its framework – Their Majesties, in full regalia of dazzling light. ‘Splendid!’ cried Mrs Siddons, and she clapped briskly: then, deaf as she was, catching the strains of the National Anthem from below, jumped to her feet and stood at attention. Philly, in admiration, and with a sideways glance, stood up beside her. Emily thought: ‘If Mrs Siddons suddenly cast herself over the cliff, Philly would do the same.’ Feeling immensely foolish, she was obliged to stand as well. ‘Vinny would laugh!’ she thought. She was impatient to tell him, to run to him with each trivial happening, as if their married life had begun already, and in her mind, as she stood there, was heightening and embellishing the scene, for his amusement.

The next day, the Tillotsons went home. The children sat with Betty in the back of the Bentley behind their parents. Nannie and baby and the luggage followed more sedately with the chauffeur in the large Humber in which Lindsay drove to board-meetings.

Emily and Rose said goodbye to them outside the house.

‘And next week you will be going, too,’ Rose said, as the first car drove away. They waved back to the children, who were letting ribbons of seaweed stream out behind them.

‘I will go more unobtrusively.’

Nannie held up baby, as if feeling sure they must want the last possible glimpse of him.

‘We shall not talk of it, after all, as the summer that the Tillotsons came,’ Rose said. She watched them take the curve of the drive, her elbow crooked over her brow to shade her eyes.

‘The wheel has turned full circle,’ she said, ‘as wheels so often do.’

Isabella had drawn the curtains, and the afternoon sunlight was held out, except a wavering thread or two across the carpet. The room had a sub-marine look, in the greenish dusk, so that the litter of crumpled newspapers on the floor might have been lying on the sea-bed. Isabella and Evalie were resting. Their arms trailed over the sides of the chairs. Their faces were caked with a white clay, which, drying, had drawn up their skin beneath so that they could hardly part their lips to speak; from this frightening pallor their discoloured eyes looked mournfully out. The wireless, not quite tuned in, gave forth some jarring woolly little tune which they did not hear. Isabella had switched it on as she always did, as a part of her settling down in a room. Its sound broke the silence of the house when she was alone, as she was nowadays so often alone.

They had run into an end-of-summer dullness. The St Leger was behind them; but the crisp exhilaration of Autumn not yet begun. They felt anticipatory; but nothing happened. Their desire for renewal, and also novelty, was unsettling. They longed to be creative and had nothing to create. The
idea of Autumn – a romantic season – stirred them with the sensations so mistakenly associated with Spring. But no miracle happened. The town emptied. They could walk briskly along the streets now, instead of merely joining the stream of loitering, shuffling holiday-makers. The shops, cleared of summer goods, looked larger; some closed, as the Fun-fair did, for the winter. The residents returned to their own life; met for morning-coffee again and even strolled along the pier. Evalie picked up the threads of charity left loose since Easter – her bazaars and sewing-parties. Isabella had cast on stitches to knit a bed-jacket, hoping to please, but unable to imagine doing so.

The knitting lay discarded among the newspapers on the floor. Even Evalie had put hers aside while magic … – she hoped – was transforming her appearance. Both were confident that this time, under the stiff clay, new faces awaited them, rejuvenated, unbelievably braced and smoothed.

‘I can never do this at home,’ Evalie said. ‘Someone always comes in and one feels a fool.’

‘Perhaps we should take it off now,’ Isabella said. ‘It hurts to talk.’

‘What was that noise I heard?’

‘The postman, I daresay. Only bills come in the afternoon when I most long to have a letter. In the morning I seem not to need them so much. Mornings are more hopeful.’

‘But I thought I heard a door being shut.’

Laurence and the postman had arrived together.

Seeing her son, standing there, holding out a little white box to her, Isabella quite ignored him – as if by not looking at him she could make him disappear. She began in desperation to gather up the newspapers on the floor. Evalie held up her knitting as a screen.

The vision of those two leprous faces in the greenish gloom,
his mother’s absurd confusion, Evalie’s frenzied eyes rolling at him above a piece of red knitting, made Laurence feel the victim of a monstrous joke. He was so thrown-out by the scene that he could not think how he was expected to behave, and from awkwardness walked unsmilingly across the room, forced Isabella to take the little package and said in a cold and angry voice: ‘Some wedding-cake for you.’

She looked at it in fearful incredulity and almost backed away as if it were a cruel joke; believing that Laurence had got married himself and was choosing this unpardonable way of telling her. It seemed to her the final betrayal of her life. Her face was from necessity expressionless, but every gesture showed him her fear and bewilderment. He supposed that even the cake from Vinny’s wedding was abhorrent to her, bringing sad reminders: a cake she neither wanted to eat or have.

‘We feel such fools,’ Evalie said.

Then Isabella’s mind cleared. She dropped the racing-papers and took the little box with its silver lettering and opened it. Broken icing fell out and a card with a currant stuck to it.

‘Oh, from
Vinny
!’ she cried.

‘Why do you look so awful?’ Laurence asked.

‘We didn’t expect you. These are face-packs.’

‘What for?’

‘We hardly like to say,’ said Evalie.

‘Why are you here, Laurence?’

‘I wanted some clothes. I am going to a dance in London.’

‘You aren’t staying, then?’

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’ She tried to smile, but could not. His eyes were now on the newspapers and very slowly he bent down and picked one up.

‘What would my father have said to this?’ he asked.

‘It happens to belong to me,’ said Evalie. ‘Or, rather, to the gardener.’

‘Then why, in mother’s handwriting, do I see “Two Pounds Each Way, Fishwife” written in the margin?’ He put the paper down, strolled over to the window and drew back the curtains, then said with wonderful ease: ‘I think you know, don’t you, mother, that my father despised all money not won by the sweat of the brow. That he would only have countenanced a little flutter for fun, on what you yourself described as the Big Races.’

‘Excitement makes one’s brow sweat more than work,’ said Evalie.

He turned to face her, able to condescend because of her appearance.

‘I meant
honest
sweat,’ he said briefly.

Confidence uplifted him. He felt, faced by these two silly women, as if he were more manly than he had had the audacity to be before: he seemed to draw level with his own father; but with the additional advantage of being alive. Isabella, by her frailty and frivolity, added to his stature; and, as she stood before him with her caked eyelashes downcast, the strange inversion took place, in which her child became her parent, hoisting himself up on her shrunk authority. Though she did not know, she was, as a mother, worth her weight in gold at that moment. Laurence knew. He saw all at once a way of behaving to her. Helped by the presence of Evalie and their ridiculous appearance, he had managed to speak of his father, and subtly, without disrespectful words, revenged himself of his death and all the punishment that had been dealt out in his dying; self-reproach; the lesson of his successful life, with its high standards.

‘What sort of example is this to me?’ he asked. ‘Two pounds each way! Two
pounds
!’

‘You must allow me to spend my money as I wish, Laurence. When you were at school, I had to economise. Now I shall please myself!’

‘You don’t mean that you lose into the bargain?’

‘I try not to.’

‘It has been a great shock to me.’

‘He was teasing,’ Isabella said uncertainly when he had gone.

‘All boys tease their mothers at that age. I think it’s rather sweet,’ said Evalie. ‘It’s only a phase. What a good thing –’ She was half-way to saying: ‘What a good thing Harry can’t know about this,’ but, altered it to: ‘What a good thing
I
have not been found out,’ which was not very much better.

‘He is singing,’ Isabella said, listening. ‘How extraordinary!’

‘So Vinny sent you some wedding-cake,’ Evalie said. This was true cattiness, wounding for the fun of it.

‘I think it is Rose’s writing.’

‘Yes, it is. I remember from her letter about the bazaar. Rather a masculine hand.’

‘
They
wouldn’t have thought of wedding-cakes, I am sure. I can imagine Rose’s efforts to make a proper wedding of it.’

‘It would take more than Rose to do that.’

‘She seems to have tried so hard to make it appear respectable.’

‘Which makes me wonder how much she knows. That is what fascinates me. She was so prim at the committee-meeting. We mustn’t do this and mustn’t do that – and as she hasn’t done a thing in the town since that drunken husband of hers killed himself, I felt it was a little uncalled-for to snub me about the raffle. “Illegal,” she said, and she rolled her gloves into a ball and popped them into her handbag as if that were that. So oldmaidish. I felt like saying: “And what about your sister?”’

‘Oh, but you wouldn’t!’ said Isabella.

‘Of course not. Am I a person who
could
say: “And what about” anything? Like those Labour people at election-meetings? All the same, I’d love to know. And one day we
shall
know. I believe that wrongdoing always comes to light.’

‘What we know about has come to light obviously.’

‘Now, mother!’ said Laurence, opening the door. ‘I want to say something important and I want you to listen. If you are to be turf-mad, which a son hardly likes his mother to be, you must remember this, so do carefully attend. Seven furlongs – do you understand –
seven furlongs
– is the utmost distance for Fishwife – and the going firm. I tremble to think of my father’s money being frittered away incompetently – money earned by striving to put forward the views of nonconformist, teetotal, non-racegoing Liberals. I have been sitting in my bedroom thinking of it.’

‘Have you, dear?’ Isabella said complacently.

‘It sounds as if you were thinking about horses,’ said Evalie.

‘Let us wash our faces and make some tea,’ Isabella said.

Rose had rounded off the wedding with the little boxes of cake. She had tried to make a fuss and business of it all, to help her over her aversion to the marriage itself. Their – Vinny’s and Emily’s – carelessness about all arrangements and ceremony had served only to bare their desire for one another. ‘Oh,
not
a wedding-cake!’ Emily had protested. And Vinny had set himself against all invitations and announcements.

Rose had her ally in Mrs Tumulty, who was ready with her usual phrases – ‘a hole-and-corner affair’, ‘only once in a lifetime’, ‘something to look back upon’, ‘flouting public opinion’. She was disappointed for herself, relishing all change and excitement. Her antagonism to Emily had receded since, through her, both change and excitement had come her way: a new status for her – ‘You won’t find me the usual interfering
mother-in-law’ – a new flat near Whiteleys; a new home – theirs – for her to invade. ‘I told the workmen to change the paint. A hard gloss will wear much better,’ she had said after one of her visits, uninvited, to the little house in Chelsea. ‘But Emily chose the paint herself,’ said Vinny. ‘You must try very hard not to interfere.’ ‘That’s one thing you can never accuse me of. I just happen to know from experience that a matt surface shows every mark.’

Emily herself only smiled and agreed. This Rose noticed with revulsion. Her sister seemed lulled and sensuous; her unconcern both indecent and indiscreet. Rose had covered her own marriage with social observances, a flutter of arrangements, lists, patterns of material, fittings, house-furnishings. But Emily let her mother-in-law choose the paint for her bedroom. This negligence exposed her love, made all but their desire to live together, incidental.

‘I had eight bridesmaids,’ Mrs Tumulty said. ‘All in white. I was glad to see the Princess do likewise.’

It was difficult to imagine Mrs Tumulty as a bride, and in Rose’s mind the eight white bridesmaids followed down the aisle a battered, flapping figure, raven-black.

‘How many did
you
have?’ she was asked.

‘Only two – Emily and my cousin, Cynthia,’ she said humbly.

‘But still – two are better than none,’ said Mrs Tumulty. ‘I had a three-tiered cake and I cut it with Digby’s sword. We didn’t have hotel weddings in those days. We had our own house and marquees in the garden and the bridesmaids staying overnight. A proper old rumpus. All the aunts and uncles.’ This long-ago wedding grew in all their minds as the days went by. It assumed a grandeur suggesting Tsarist Russia or the Hapsburgs. In the end, a photograph was brought out, showing a group of ill-favoured girls and absurd young men standing before a conservatory. The bride’s mother sat wearily on a fancy chair; two
young bridesmaids were arranged on a moth-eaten rug in front. The bride loomed authoritatively over her husband, who barely reached her shoulder and looked as if he thought it effrontery to do as much.

‘Something to keep and look back on, you see,’ Mrs Tumulty said. ‘A day you never forget. Poor Lottie Bloxham, look at her swollen face. She had toothache all day long. Your godmother, Vincent.’

‘Yes, mother.’

‘Or
was
, I should say.’

In her robust way she wanted the wedding with all its symbols of thrown rice and floating veil; but unlike Rose, who wanted only the symbols, she felt a curiosity about the marriage itself; told Emily some nauseating details of her own honeymoon and would watch her figure with attention in the months to come.

It was not a successful wedding for anyone. Vinny and Emily only endured the attempts made to enhance it – the confetti Mrs Tumulty threw about so recklessly, the cake which Rose had ordered. They escaped impatiently – Rose put her cheek to Emily’s, Mrs Tumulty stood out in the road like a policeman, signalling the car out.

They drove from London through suburbs where women were shopping, as if the day were no different from another; children ran home from school and traffic blocked the roads. In this banal scene, a sensation of the enormity of his behaviour, the step he had taken, swept over Vinny. With his beloved beside him, he began to suffer terror and loneliness, a feeling of being singled out, abnormal, monstrous.

At six o’clock, they stopped at a large roadhouse for a drink. Still shedding confetti, they stood in the empty bar, nervous and depressed by the day, what had been made of it. A curious malaise drifted over them. The stale air of the bar, the ticking
clock, seemed to demand ‘Now what?’ Mrs Tumulty, with her blushful qualms, could scarcely have felt more apprehensive than they – left at last with the burden of one another’s personalities; the terror of striking a false note; or none. With more drink, and darkness, and a loosening of the claims of the day, the mood dissolved. The world appeared less callous to them and once assured of this they could forget it, and begin their happiness.

Rose returned to Seething, having made what she could of the wedding. Mrs Siddons welcomed her with solicitude as if she were returning from a funeral: for travel seemed thought to be a serious illness. Rose, convalescent, drinking tea, felt the anti-climax of after-arrival. Going away had made the house seem shabbier and she noticed little faults about it, as if she were seeing them for the first time. Once, keeping it in good order had been part of her dedication to Emily; part of her scheme against Emily’s nature. To enslave her with comfort, to lull her, imprison her, had been her absorbing intention and had kept her busy and inventive. But at the first touch of love, the inanimate things had lost all power: now they had lost their power for Rose, too. She looked upon the worn carpet, the chipped cup, with indifference. She had no motive now for furbishing, contriving; no purpose but to keep up a home for Philly, from whom instinct continually turned her thoughts away, though guilt turned them back. The girl’s abnormality was too fitting a reminder of the terror of her birth, the humiliations of Rose’s married-life. There were also temptations so taboo that they could enter her mind only by a sudden assault – thoughts of release, of deliverance; and, glancing across at Philly now, such a thought pierced her fatigue. ‘People would say it was all for the best,’ she told herself and stood up suddenly and went to the window. ‘I am her mother,’ she thought; and to Mrs
Siddons’ talk of household matters replied only vaguely. ‘We must surely live for some other person,’ she thought, ‘even if it should be someone with whom all horror is related.’ Mrs Siddons, who at this moment was cutting Philly’s bread-and-butter into strips, seemed contented enough, could devote herself to the girl, without inhibitions, and with full play to her feelings of pity; might even feel genuine grief, a sense of loss if … whereas, her own mother …