The Sleeping Beauty (4 page)

‘One day you’ll want to get married.’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Laurence worked very busily, breathing on a ratchet and wiping it on his handkerchief. His business was to hide the quick, sly look he had not meant to give Vinny. ‘After all, you never have, sir.’

The ‘sir’ infuriated Vinny. It was a snub to his ‘Isabella’.

‘And,’ Laurence went on quickly, ‘farm-labourers get married, don’t they?’

‘What girl that you know, whom you would be likely to want to marry, would even contemplate it under such circumstances?’

‘I don’t know any girls. So I couldn’t say.’

He began to reassemble the clock calmly and methodically. In the hall, they could hear Isabella rattling on.

‘If I’m hard-up for a bit of money, I can always get it,’ Laurence said.

‘From your mother, you mean?’ Vinny was trapped into icy disdain, and Laurence calmly said: ‘No, I am lucky with horses.’

He shut up the back of the clock and turned the little key. Then he wiped his hands on his trousers.

‘Better not tell mother that,’ he added, ‘she might worry, thinking I should lose my head.’

‘You’ll never do that,’ Vinny thought scornfully.

Laurence returned the clock to its place on the chimney-piece. Then he said quietly: ‘I know I would never be allowed to do it – farm work I mean. I should never get my way. It is only a thing I fancy and I should not have burdened you with it. I suppose I shall have to go into business and that is why my mother is selling the house and furniture. Any advice you could give would be very useful, I am sure, as you are in business yourself.’

Vinny, who was an underwriter at Lloyd’s, ignored this; for he thought he could hear Isabella winding up her monologue. Very hurriedly he said: ‘I want you to feel that I would always do anything for you. Not only from respect for your father and mother, but from fondness for you yourself. I’ll leave you my address, and you can always write – no need to worry your … Isabella. I should be glad to hear from you in any case, especially if you have any … information … for me.’ He smiled primly. ‘I haven’t much time for studying form.’

‘What dreadful chumminess!’ Laurence thought.

‘Are you upset at having to go back tomorrow?’

‘Oh, no!’

‘Plenty of friends there?’

‘Only men,’ Laurence said cautiously.

‘You feel quite fit again?’

‘Yes, thank you very much.’

‘It was a ghastly ordeal for you, but it would be unwise to try to push it to the back of your mind.’

Laurence leant awkwardly against the chimney-piece in a rather pansyish pose.

‘Better face it as the tragedy it was, and know that you did your best and were very brave.’

‘I wasn’t really,’ Laurence said. ‘I didn’t like to tell mother
quite the truth. In actual fact, I got the wind up and left him there.’

‘That was Evalie Hobson,’ Isabella said, opening the door suddenly. ‘An old friend of mine … so amusing, Vinny. I met her at the Turkish baths.’

Laurence went up to bed early, and Vinny and Isabella took a stroll along the esplanade – a breath of fresh air before turning in, they said; an elderly phrase which always made Laurence impatient.

They walked slowly, arm-in-arm, and paused sometimes to lean over the sea-wall. He was glad that she had turned away from the cliff and that they were going towards the centre of the town and away from the rustic-work steps and the house among the trees.

‘I should like to come down again during the week,’ he said. ‘On Thursday, if you would like that, if there is anything I could do.’ (The by-election was on Thursday.)

‘How good of you, Vinny!’

‘Don’t make any arrangements for me here … I will take you out to luncheon … and perhaps you could get a room for me somewhere.’

‘But, of course, you will be with us.’

‘Not when Laurence is away.’

‘Darling, don’t be pompous. Who’s to care?’

‘I care – for your sake, if you will not care for your own.’

She was most touched by this and could not reply.

‘What silly little shoes to come walking in,’ he said.

She glanced down to see which shoes they were, then asked: ‘Won’t your mother miss you, if you are away so much?’

‘No.’

‘Shall we turn back now?’

The moon seemed to be racing up through the clouds, which
looked too cumbrous to move. Macrocarpa trees glistened under the lamps as if wet. Isabella, seeing the lighted windows at the cliff-top, suddenly said: ‘Perhaps Rose Kelsey would have room for you. It would be nice and near. If you are sure that you must be so prim.’

‘Quite sure.’

‘But at our age …!’

‘I am quite sure,’ he repeated.

He was so afraid lest his excitement should be communicated to her that he withdrew his arm and pretended to be going to sneeze. Halted, fumbling for his handkerchief, he felt stricken by his recollection of the woman on the sands. Only with difficulty did he take Isabella’s arm again. They walked on more briskly, without a word; but in the hall, as she was unwinding her scarf, she asked:

‘Why do you look like that?’

Inevitably, he said: ‘Like what?’

‘You’ve stopped now. You looked …’

‘Yes?’

‘As if you were thinking of something.’

He laughed, but she was not so undiscerning that she failed to detect relief in his laughter.

‘Would you like some whisky?’ she asked. ‘I quite forgot to ask you last night. Such a terrible hostess. Harry always did the drinks.’

‘You are the loveliest hostess, because you make people happy as well as comfortable.’

‘I don’t think
I
was making you look like that.’

‘
This
night, I should like some whisky please.’

Following him into the parlour, she persisted: ‘But why
this
night.’

‘Because I had some luck today.’

‘What sort of luck?’

‘A little horse-racing sort of luck,’ he lied.

‘How nice!’ she said, after a pause. They drank in silence, with alternate glances at one another.

‘And what was the name of the horse?’ she suddenly asked, in a rallying, condescending way.

‘Well, my dear Isabella, as I imagine you don’t know one horse from another, you need not be bored with all that.’

‘Do you often do it?’ she asked dully.

‘Very seldom; but this was a special tip. My dear, don’t look so disapproving! I am sure you sometimes have had a little flutter on the Derby.’

‘Never,’ she said truthfully. Neither she nor Evalie concerned themselves with the big races. They felt contempt for those who did; as regular churchgoers must feel contempt for the crowds who worship only at Easter and Harvest Festivals.

‘I have enjoyed myself enormously,’ Vinny said, smiling at her vexation.

He awoke the next morning to a brilliant room and gulls making peevish noises near the window. He had wakened abruptly, bringing a remnant of dream with him, disturbing, erotic. In this dream, from the influence of which he lay still and bewildered, the woman on the sands had not broken away from him, nor recoiled from his touch. Having created a personality for her, and behaviour, and even response, this dream had in a way presented her to him; given her a voice and words to say.

‘But she is not even a woman I know,’ was his first thought. He wondered how he could ever make of her a stranger again; for him, their dream-intimacy had overstepped preliminary revelation, hastening them beyond solicitude for one another, even curiosity. If they were to be condemned, as dream-figures, to meet always in a void, he envisaged the uselessness of ever
seeing her again. Worse than strangers, too impatient to retrace their way, heedless of all small discoveries, lovers’ pleasures, they were committed to one another, by trickery of his unconscious mind.

When he could thrust aside the heaviness of sleep, he began to be ashamed, and struggled to call the dream a dream. This was difficult. In dreams, he had often before discovered the truth, or invented a condition which later became the truth. In dreams, he had fallen in love, and, waking, found his relationship with someone unexpectedly, perhaps irremediably, changed. He would see them afterwards in a different light, unable to believe that they did not hold the dream in common.

Today, during which church-bells rang, the sea crashed bleakly upon the rocks and footsteps hurried on the esplanade, he felt unreal and troubled. He needed to convalesce from sleep, as if from a severe illness.

They spent an edgy day. Isabella over-roasted the meal, was all hurry and confusion with no Mrs Dickens to help her. After tea, Laurence put on his army boots and the sour-smelling battledress, and he and Vinny went off to the station.

Before he went, while he was lacing up his boots and breathing heavily, Laurence said: ‘I hope, by the way, that this Vinny is not one day going to be a father to me.’

Isabella said ‘Shush’ and pointed towards the door.

‘He’s in the lavatory.’

‘Well, I will assure you, you have nothing to worry about. He’s not the marrying kind and neither, any more, am I.’

When they had gone, she began to wonder why the idea had seemed so objectionable to Laurence. She felt sad and lonely in the empty house, and longed for Thursday to come.

The first symptoms of life’s regaining normality began for Isabella during Vinny’s stay and, in the days which followed, more and more of her previous existence returned. Evalie Hobson, who had not dared to do more than write one scared letter, now began to call again. She and Isabella had only a superficial acquaintance, but this made it all the more precious to both of them. Talk skimmed along, chocolates were chosen from the box, tea drunk, sherry sipped. Scrawled notes passed between them, handbags were rummaged through for recipes and diet sheets. They met middle-age together – a time when women are necessary to one another – and all the petty but grievous insults of greying hair, crowsfeet, and the loathed encumbrances of unwanted flesh, seemed less sordid when faced and fought (though fought spasmodically and with weak wills) gaily together. They laughed a great deal over their experiments: one week they bent and stretched with such fury that Evalie broke a blood vein in her eye; the next week they drank nothing after luncheon; another time ate only grapes all day long. They counted up calories, bought new corsets and tried new face-creams; cut paragraphs out of
magazines for one another and went together to the Turkish baths. They remained the same – two rather larkish school-girls. This they realised and it was the piteous part to them of growing old. ‘We haven’t changed enough,’ Isabella once said. ‘We don’t any longer match our looks. We’ve got lost and left behind.’ ‘We ought to take up something,’ Evalie agreed. ‘Not read the books we do. For instance, we never read books written by men, do we? Just library books all the time. You see how American women go to all those lectures when they reach the change of life. It’s only trying to catch up with their looks. We ought to go in for psychology, or something like it.’

They went to two lectures – one on spiritualism, by which they were nervously amused; and one on social pragmatism, which disheartened them.

After a while, they turned to gambling. They did this not as at any reckless crisis in their lives, but because they needed money for their face-creams and fashion-papers. Industriously, they studied form; jockeys’ names became as familiar to them as their own relations’: secretly (for their husbands would have disapproved), they progressed from little flutters to a cool and steady daily appraisal of all the runners and riders; to having an account with a bookmaker instead of giving half-crowns to Evalie’s gardener. They gave up morning coffee in the town and hurried to one another’s houses to make their plans for the day and to lament or rejoice over the day before. This was more of a tonic to them for having to be indulged in secret. They missed one another very much when the House was sitting and Isabella was obliged to return to Bucking-hamshire.

That they hid their secret was no credit to their dissembling; for, when they overheard others talking of racing, their faces became so devoid of expression as to have invited suspicion if
anyone had noticed. But they were perhaps beyond the age for being noticed.

‘Wouldn’t it be dreadful if we won so much one day – on the accumulator, perhaps – that we had to
tell
!’ Evalie said.

When their husbands had suggested taking them to Good-wood for a treat, they were full of excuses: they hadn’t the right clothes and their feet would ache. ‘So much bustling about’ and ‘a very tiring day’, they said. Isabella went too far and said that horses frightened her. ‘We are not asking you to ride them,’ Harry had said. ‘You used always to enjoy Ascot.’ ‘Oh, that was in the old days,’ Isabella said. She had meant the days before she took the matter seriously. ‘When I was young,’ she added. ‘And loved nice clothes.’

‘My God!’ Evalie said afterwards. ‘We should never have got
on
with them hanging about. And fancy having to go to the Paddock and look at the horses. And ask them to put ten shillings on something – Oliver and Harry I mean.’ ‘And perhaps see Mr Syd Woods himself chalking up the odds. I should faint,’ said Isabella.

Their complicity was a bond which had loosened when Harry died. Evalie stayed away; for she could not think of anything suitable to say. They missed one another. When, on the Saturday evening, Evalie had telephoned for the first time, she heard with relief Isabella’s laughter, and on Monday morning she was round as usual with
The Sporting Life
hidden at the bottom of her shopping-basket.

On Thursday morning, Isabella was in the kitchen making a cake. Mrs Dickens was polishing the silver. Her sad and colourless face was reflected in the spoons, first wide, then long, when she turned them over. Isabella, with a cigarette in her mouth, mumbled at Evalie, and felt in her overall-pocket for a piece of paper. ‘So busy this morning. I came to my conclusions directly after breakfast,’ she said mysteriously. ‘You might look it over
and see what you think. Oh, damn, now the ash has dropped into the mixture. Never mind, perhaps he will think it’s a seed cake.’

Mrs Dickens, who guessed what they were up to, could not understand their secrecy.

‘What time is he coming?’ Evalie asked.

If she had been a spy, Mrs Dickens thought, she could not have slipped the paper into her glove more expertly. The only wonder was that she did not swallow it.

‘Before lunch. He is staying at Rose Kelsey’s as he obviously couldn’t stay here again, with Laurence away.’

‘Oh, naturally not,’ Evalie said.

‘At the weekend, Laurence was here all the time.’

‘Quite.’

‘He has to have the garden-room, they are so full up with Tillotsons.’

‘I suppose so,’ Evalie said.

Mrs Dickens thought their conversations oddly flat, and wondered if they were devised for her benefit. Sometimes, they even forced her to join in, and she did so resentfully, quite rightly detecting condescension in their voices. Something revivalist in their tone whenever they turned to her, antagonised her – ‘And what do
you
think, Mrs Dickens?’ or, with wonderful tolerance, ‘I’m afraid Mrs Dickens won’t agree with us at all.’ At election-times, Evalie said, benignly: ‘And how’s Labour getting on, Mrs D.?’ Isabella (who had been told not to, by Harry) said nothing. Mrs Dickens was torn in two today. She had loved Harry, who, as she said at home, was the one she could get sense out of; but he was dead now and beyond being hurt and she would above all like the Liberals to get a slap in the face at the by-election. Harry’s successor was a Lady Violet Liberal, although Harry himself had tended to be the Lady Megan kind. Mrs Dickens was Doctor Edith Labour, but she
had been brought up Liberal, she sometimes admitted, though not Lady Violet Liberal.

She looked quickly away from the cake Isabella was putting into the oven, as if she had glimpsed something indecent. It was bound to rise up in the middle and crack into two blackened peaks. Slack mixture. Hot oven. Salute to the British Housewife, she thought malignantly. All that we heard on the wireless in the war, not mentioning the wasted ingredients.

‘If you could ring up Mr Woods for me,’ Isabella said, when she was seeing Evalie off. ‘I may not get a chance with Vinny here.’

‘Oh, naturally, my dear. I only wish I could see him for an instant. Vinny, I mean.’

‘Yes, it is a pity,’ Isabella said firmly.

‘Never mind, I do have a vivid picture of him in my mind, from all you’ve said.’

‘Such as what?’

‘Oh, that kind, effeminate sort of man who is so nice to women.’

‘Vinny is extremely manly – very broad across the shoulders. He went half-round the world once, serving before the mast.’

‘My dear, you say everyone has served before the mast. Except me.’

Isabella, who hoped to tidy herself before Vinny came, did not reply.

The garden-room was a small, dank bedroom on the ground floor. It had a glazed door opening on to a gravel path and shrubs, and oddments of furniture not needed in other parts of the house. Rose Kelsey apologised for everything and hoped, aloud, that the bed was properly aired. The room was only used
in summer emergencies, she explained, and this Vinny soon proved to himself by finding some old heather in the waste-paper basket, discarded, he supposed, by last year’s guests. He did not think he would be very comfortable. The carpet was worn away by so many gravelly boots coming in through the french window. An orange cover clung limply to the sagging bed. Rose said: ‘The children are above. I hope they won’t disturb you.’

Rose was the most English-looking woman he had ever seen. Her light-brown hair was taken back neatly in a bun; her carriage was straight, but stiff. She had grey eyes and a beautiful skin; large feet and lovely hands. Her clothes – as Isabella had warned him – were unconsidered; for she wore a satin blouse with her tweed suit and pale shiny stockings with brogues. Her manner was frigid, though she was not at a loss for words: in fact, she was rather brisk and under control and Vinny could not imagine her being otherwise. He had seen too many mothers like her – on railway platforms as the school-train went out, and standing on doorsteps in Harley Street with their children – to wonder how she had ever come to have a child. He now took that miracle for granted, supposing that everyone has their informal moments.

Such women are a product of English imperviousness and courage which contain both fanaticism and narrow loyalties. In foreign countries (and Rose seemed so much a soldier’s wife) the lack of sensuality was a defence and at times a maddening challenge. The attribute was always jealously fostered and guarded by husbands.

‘If it is raining,’ Rose said, ‘you could go up this staircase and across the landing – the bathroom is there – and then down the main stairs to the dining-room; but if it is fine, it is quicker to go round the garden way.’

Seeing Vinny touching the catches of his suitcase she
hurried out, through the shrubbery to the lawn, where Isabella was walking up and down in front of the house.

Vinny spread about a few of his possessions, then opened the door leading to the stairs. He found himself in a sealed-off part of the house beyond the kitchen. A tap dripped and a cistern hissed. There was a depressing smell of scrubbed deal, still wet. At the top of the stairs, which were covered with old linoleum, was a baize-padded door. He imagined his room having once been a housekeeper’s sitting-room.

To get to the front of the house, without climbing the stairs, he could see that he would have to go through other rooms and that Rose had shown she was unwilling for him to do so. Even using the staircase made him feel guilty and he hoped that he met no one.

It was the dead time of the day, just before four o’clock, and the landing was full of shadows and deserted, with all its doors closed. A draught lifted a mat outside one bedroom. It looked like a poor spent animal lying at a door and panting its last. Even the door itself shook frantically, tugged by the wind, and he visualised the bleak room beyond it, with curtains flying out like flags from the opened, seaward windows.

It was the dreariest house, he thought; an inherited, unaltered house. The only touch upon it for years had been the shabby touch of time. Nothing lively was added: no one had put up a new picture or tried a different colour anywhere. ‘I am too much for them,’ the house cried, and the exquisite Sheraton chest-of-drawers on the landing had a bloom upon it, and its oval handles were tarnished. This Vinny did not like to see. He loved furniture; and the love, cancelling out his recent caution, took him across the landing so that he might run his hand over the bow-front and lift the brass handles. He forgot Isabella on the lawn and simply desired to spend half an hour polishing the mahogany. He knelt down to examine the boxwood inlay and
was still on his knees when one of the landing doors suddenly opened. It was the one behind the fretted mat.

Was he always, he wondered, to be in the wrong with this woman – running into her in the dark; wrong in his dreams; and seeming now, at best, a ridiculous, an insufferably prying interloper? She gave no sign of recognition or surprise, and when he stood up and began to explain and apologise, glanced at him with indifference and then bent to straighten the mat. He thought: ‘I have never heard her voice, except in my dreams’; and when she spoke he was amazed because it was unexpectedly light and faltering.

‘Rose has other pieces you should see – a William-and-Mary tallboy with beautiful marquetry in the drawing-room.’

He especially disliked the period; for it seemed to him un-English – an adjective he often fastidiously applied to anything too decorated.

He remembered Isabella on the lawn. ‘I should like to see it, another time.’

She rested her hands on the banisters and leaned over, looking down into the hall. Her hair, like her sister’s, was knotted back; but with what a difference, he thought: since it seemed arranged not merely for neatness but from a habit of beauty.

He wondered why the phrase ‘habit of beauty’ had occurred to him. Her beauty had not gone: it was, in fact, the staggering perfection he had first thought it. Her dark dress dramatised the whiteness of her skin and her flawlessness. Yet the feeling that her beauty was over persisted in him, however much the beauty itself remained before him as contradiction.

‘I am here,’ she called, and she drew back from the banister-rail and went to the head of the stairs. Seeing her more clearly in the light which flowed up from the hall, he thought that her face contrasted strangely with her hurried way of speaking and
her graceful nervous movements, and as she ran downstairs it looked expressionless, with a slack grace, like the portrait of a great beauty by a not very great painter who had caught all the listed features, but not the living stir of loveliness – the ripple, and quickening, without which beauty is … is terrifying, he decided.

He followed her slowly down the stairs and saw her disappearing through a door with her arm round a girl’s waist. Rose’s daughter, he thought, who, Laurence had said, was ‘not all there’.

A grandfather clock in a corner whirred asthmatically ready to strike and he started at the sound. He cast a quick glance round at the red-papered walls burgeoning with antlers and masks, barometers, warming-pans, and stepped out on to the lawn.