The Sleeping Beauty (8 page)

All day, her manner towards Vinny was brisk and evasive. Suspicion seemed to her more logical than the truth and its impact so very much more lasting.

‘Oh, I have always been one of those safe women,’ Isabella said resentfully.

She and Evalie Hobson had the steam-room to themselves. They sat naked on a slatted bench, knees apart, heads bowed; in an attitude of passive dejection.

‘I never endangered anyone’s marriage,’ Isabella continued. ‘Wives
like
me. You say when you’ve had enough.’

‘Another five minutes,’ said Evalie.

Isabella sighed. ‘One gets married young. My sort has to, inclining to fatness. As much as one can do to keep up with being a wife and mother, and reading all the magazines, let alone being a menace to the other sex. Now I’ve absolutely forgotten how to attract them. I wonder how I ever got Harry.’

‘We look discarded, sitting here,’ Evalie said. ‘As if we were waiting for a train which never comes.’

‘I think it is the most terrible time of my life,’ Isabella said simply.

‘Yes, so terrible.’

‘I’m sure I’ve done everything I could think of … those beauty articles … I could write them myself in my sleep. I tried
every pot of face-cream I ever saw. When I was a girl, I was really quite pretty; but unattractive all the same. You’ve got better bones than me.’ She turned and had a good look at Evalie. ‘To your face,’ she amended. ‘How arched your insteps are!’

Evalie turned her hands over and over, examining every pore of her glistening skin.

‘Sometimes,’ Isabella continued, ‘I know that wickeder wives than I liked to have me up their sleeves. “Why not take Isabella out to lunch?” I am sure they said to their husbands. Perhaps even “poor Isabella” … no, they would be too clever for that. I can just hear it. Thrusting them towards safety, so that they themselves could run off in the other direction. If they were found out, they could say: “Oh, but darling,
you
took
Isabella
out.” And because I wasn’t so terrible to look at – just undesirable in an undefined way – no one could say anything, though everyone
knew
everything.’

‘Yes,’ Evalie said. ‘My scar comes up so,’ she added. Isabella inspected it with almost Oriental courtesy, although she wished that Evalie would sometimes attend to what she was saying.

‘Shall we go now?’

They rose and drew their wraps round them.

‘What I detest is the way our breasts go out sideways when we get older. They look as if they’re tired of one another’s company.’

In the hot-room they sat down in deck-chairs. Slim girls with brown narrow backs and neatly-painted toenails guarded their beauty jealously, with towels carefully tucked up under their armpits. They sipped lemon-juice and knitted, glancing in a bored way at newcomers. An enormous woman in a pink plastic cap slowly stirred and stood up. Her dimpled thighs were like beaten pewter. In the next room, Henry Moore figures were being slapped rosy on marble slabs. The sound was like applause; a terrifying ovation.

‘We must have lost pounds,’ Evalie whispered.

‘It will all go back on again at tea-time.’

Evalie read her newspaper, and Isabella sat staring in front of her, wiping her face with her towel. She felt dreadfully low, realising now why she had been so buoyed-up of late. For weeks, she had thought that Vinny would ask her to marry him. Evalie had been certain that his weekend visits meant this and, indeed, they had appeared so. She had liked to be teased on his account and her manner had grown a little fussy and important. Laurence had become more and more sarcastic. Isabella, acquainted with Vinny’s delicacy, had expected to wait weeks or months before she had the pleasure of refusing him. She was not a cruel woman and was sure that Vinny would not suffer from this refusal, or she could not have contemplated the scene with such pleasure. The thought of her gay and tender rejection had been her chief comfort in the last few weeks: it had been constantly rehearsed. She had daydreamed of a future secure in his gallantry and affection; with occasional luncheons together; always his wistful teasing; the proposal renewed on every – say – St Valentine’s Day, half as a private joke, but nevertheless with true pleading. He would shore up her pride and look at her through kindly eyes. Her friends would be perhaps rather envious and she longed to be the subject of conjecture, a thing she had never been in her life. Vinny would be a reason for buying new clothes, ‘and one must have a reason,’ she thought now. She wiped sweat from her arms and glanced at Evalie.

‘Did you see that Jack Frost won at Leopardstown?’

‘No,’ said Isabella.

She thought: ‘They will all laugh at me now – Laurence, Evalie. I have to laugh at myself. I even seem to hear Harry’s teasing laugh in heaven.’

Morning coffee with Mrs Tumulty – and she did not like her,
had invited her almost as a duty to a rejected mother-in-law – had made her wretchedly depressed. Mrs Tumulty, on the other hand, had had a fascinating day. To begin with, Rose had been so obviously put out by mention of any commotion in the early morning. ‘Such dreadful crying,’ Mrs Tumulty had said. ‘It quite alarmed me. “Someone is ill,” I said to myself.’ In reality she had heard nothing. She had merely listened to Benjamin and Constance at breakfast-time and was sure that she knew enough about children to guess when there was a grain of truth in what they said. She could also guess that there was not a grain of sincerity in Rose’s denial and puzzled, surprised look.

She and Vinny had gone for a gloomy walk along the esplanade. He was so poor a companion that when they met Isabella and she asked them to coffee she had been glad of a change and not sorry when Vinny had gone off for a haircut.

Isabella was quite aware of the curious glances people gave Mrs Tumulty, whose rusty black skirt trailed unevenly above lavender wool stockings. Dust lay in the folds of her felt hat, which every year she remodelled for the Spring, adding a cock-ade, or cutting away pieces of the brim. This year, she had stitched on a piece of glacé black ribbon and a bunch of rag violets.

In the café, Isabella had looked down at the table most of the time. Under the glass top, paper doyleys were arranged in a pattern. These seemed imprinted on her mind, as Mrs Tumulty exposed to her the fact of Vinny’s love for Emily – so great, apparently, as to make him suddenly churlish, inconsiderate, silent.

‘I can’t imagine Vinny churlish,’ Isabella had faltered.

The violets jerked and nodded – very carelessly sewn on, Isabella thought.

‘Who
could
have imagined it?’ Mrs Tumulty agreed. ‘Who on earth? Even I was surprised. And I think I know my son. I
guessed something amiss from the way he’s been coming down here, week after week.’

Isabella had raised her eyes and looked bravely across at the old woman. The second reaction from the disclosure was that she would no longer be more than barely civil to her. The first reaction had been a sense of bereavement.

‘Never underestimate a cat,’ a vet had once said to her, and she derived some amusement from this recollection; but it was a lonely amusement and could not be shared.

Now, as she sat sweating wretchedly in her deck-chair, a swarthy woman in a dark woollen swimsuit beckoned her. She went in to her massage, leaving Evalie with her newspapers. Lying on her warm soapy slab as if she were to be sacrificed, she thought: ‘How lucky that I laughed at people who teased me about Vinny! But I suppose I have never really managed to deceive anyone in my life.’

‘It is like being back at boarding-school,’ Evalie said, when they were lying side by side in their curtained cubicles.

‘For we never grew up,’ Isabella thought.

There was even Evalie’s conspiratorial chatter about racing. She now thought very highly of Jack Frost and had a great history of him to tell.

‘Saturday evenings are the worst of the week when one is lonely,’ Isabella decided. She touched her own arms rather shyly; they felt so newly smooth, so young. All the time, though, a secret damage was being done to her. The wrinkles strengthened and stood; industriously, flesh accumulated from her every little extravagance and indulgence. Her body plotted against her. Evalie took this very philosophically, even negligently.

‘Rokeby Venus was scratched,’ she was saying. ‘That we must take into account.’

‘If he married Emily,’ Isabella thought, ‘there will never be
any of the little outings I planned – lunching with him in London. Unless once more because I am thought to be so safe. A harmless treat that wives can well afford their husbands.’

Tea was brought to them.

‘The cups are so thick there’s no room for the tea,’ Evalie said. She sat up in bed and poured out. Her damp hair hung snakily round her face. ‘It is like being in a nursing-home,’ she said. ‘Any minute now I feel they’ll bring in our babies for the six o’clock feed.’

And Isabella had fallen fast asleep with a comb stuck in her hair.

‘Whatever inclined you to turquoise?’ Nannie asked the nursery-maid, Betty.

‘It just looked summery.’

She had slipped on her new coat and was turning round before the long looking-glass. The insides of the sleeves felt smooth and new.

‘How many months of the year, though, can we take the advantage of a summer coat?’

‘Well, I shall wear it this evening.’

‘It’s hardly weather for a pale colour. Far better save it for a nice day. A real scorcher you need for that shade.’

But saving clothes half wasted them. To get their true magic one must snatch them at once from their box, shake tissue-paper all over the floor, put them on and go out. Anywhere, to be seen. Her mother called it ‘hacking things on the minute you get them’.

‘Well, you look nice,’ Nannie said kindly. ‘I only thought it was different to what you’d set your mind on. I wondered whatever made you turn to that shade. You’ve got a nice choice, though; I’ll say that.’

She gathered up all the discarded paper and Betty ran to her
room where her stockings steamed in front of the gas-fire. She put them on carefully and they steamed on her legs for a few minutes more. She thought that the dangers of damp clothes were easily overemphasised. Nannie made her hold the children’s vests to a looking-glass, searching for the faintest film; but she never did when she was on her own.

She tied a silk scarf over her hair and gave her reflection an odd look or two. Her eyebrows lifted; her nostrils dilated. ‘I beg
yours
!’ she seemed to be saying. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t had the pleasure.’ ‘I certainly am
not
going your way.’

‘To be out of uniform! To be out!’ she thought, as she ran downstairs.

Laurence arrived unexpectedly and the house was empty. Isabella was still at the Turkish baths. The fire was laid, but not lit. The evening paper was on the doormat. He took it into the kitchen, spread it out on the table and carefully worked out his day’s winnings, which came to two and threepence. Then he made himself a cup of tea; but he really liked Army tea, orange-coloured, with condensed milk if possible. The empty house made him feel restless, and after a while, he wrote a note to his mother and went out.

The shops were beginning to close. He did not often look into shop-windows; but now he examined them carefully for want of much else to do. Rhubarb on bright blue paper, pork-pies cut in halves to show the pink, marbled meat and grey jelly, piles of black-puddings, faggots, all suggested a cosy domesticity which he missed at Aldershot, where no one went out to choose and buy the food they ate. The florist’s disturbed him – the cool, scented interior. He breathed deeply, standing by the open door and looking in at the pots of ferns on the damp wooden floor and then at a green-and-brown orchid with a hanging jaw. He would have liked to buy some flowers for his
mother – even the orchid – and his hand touched his money in his pocket; but then he did not know how he would ever give it to her, and feared lest she should be too pleased, so that he would be made guilty and embarrassed. He wandered on.

At the end of the street, where the gardens were, he could see trees with pale pink blossom, and this he thought very pleasant after all the chestnuts and the raspberry-coloured May at Aldershot. He was not unhappy there; but he never again cared for chestnut-trees; just as, although he had not been unhappy at school, Lombardy poplars, which had bordered the playing-fields there, now had a discouraging effect upon him.

The lovely violet light over the town, flowing down the streets, stirred him; even – for he was a guarded and cautious youth – excited him. A weekend at Portsmouth, with his best friend, Len, had begun the unsettling. Len’s mother had constantly talked of what she called ‘Len’s young lady’. The young lady had come to tea on Sunday. She sat on the arm of Len’s chair and kept slapping his wrist. They were the centre of attraction and much indulged. Laurence had envied Len the lordly way in which he sprawled in his chair, grinning, fondling the girl, being waited on by his mother. ‘Bye-bye, Laurie,’ the young lady had said. She kissed Len’s mother, and she and Len went out to the back-door to say goodbye. They were a long time gone and Len loafed back, scratching his head, smiling to himself. Laurence, trying not to show curiosity, had become grumpy and silent. He would dearly have liked a young lady of his own, even if like Len’s she said only ‘So what?’ and ‘
I
should care!’ He could not imagine ever having anyone of his own who would have such an easy relationship with his mother, kissing her goodbye, winking at her, joining that confederacy against the foibles, the conceits of men. The idea staggered him: yet it was not impossible to see his mother playing much that kind of role – chiding, affectionate, woman-to-woman. The imaginary
young lady assumed any part he liked to allot her; only he himself was intractable.

The most bitter thing for a child is to see in another just the kind of son his mother deserved, and Laurence was always doing this. Whenever boys teased their mothers, flung about their homely banter (American youths in films did it most of all), he realised how exactly they complemented Isabella, and he mourned for her; then longed to leave her, before some terrible and alien phrase was forced from him in pity.

All of his friends made better efforts – unless it was no effort at all – the Lens and Syds and Rons, whose names sounded so strangely to Isabella, used until now to Hay-Hardy and Ross-Amberley and Bagshot-Hepburn Minor. (‘Surely, dear, you don’t call them by their Christian names?’) At no cost to themselves that he, Laurence, could see, they fell into the necessary chiding, rallying and rudenesses required of them. This rather contemptuous attitude which mothers seemed to delight in from their sons, was strongly resented when coming from their daughters. ‘Don’t you speak to me like that, miss!’ Laurence had been interested to hear Len’s mother snapping at her daughter. ‘Fancy wearing red at your age!’ the girl had said – a remark which, when made by Len a little earlier, had elicited chuckles, mock fury, and a flustered: ‘Oh, get along with you,’ when he had tried to kiss her. Laurence was fascinated by this scene and wondered if a sister of his own would have eased his lot and made him behave more naturally.