The grandfather clock struck seven. Upstairs there was the sound of bathwater running. Charles must be in after all, and wet from his walk, taking a bath. It was ominous that he had gone straight upstairs and had not looked into the drawing room first on his return. This meant that he had not shaken off his mood. And we were still the parasites.
“I’m not looking forward to supper,” said Niall. “It’s going to be that affair of sitting round the table and nobody saying anything. Except Polly. And she will start one of her conversations: ‘Oh, Mummy, I must tell you what the children said when they were undressing.’ And it will go on and on.”
“It will break the silence,” said Celia. “Better for Polly to talk than one of us. And Charles never listens, anyway. He’s used to it, like a ticking clock.”
“I would not mind if the children said something funny, but they never do,” said Niall. “Perhaps what they said was funny originally, and then Polly squeezes the humor out of it.”
“You’re very hard on Polly,” said Celia. “She’s such a good sort. Really, I don’t know how this house would run without her.”
“If only we didn’t have to eat with her,” said Niall. “It brings out the worst in me. I want to pick my teeth and belch.”
“You do that, anyway,” said Maria. “And I agree about feeding with Polly, but what is her alternative? A tray? Where, and who carries it? And what is put on it? A leg off our cold chicken?”
“She has that, anyway, in the dining room,” said Niall.
“Yes,” said Maria, “but she does carve it off herself. It would be much more insulting if one cut it and sent it out to her somewhere on her plate, like the dog’s dinner. And, anyway, it all started in the war, when everyone had high tea at half-past six. People became community-minded.”
“I never did,” said Niall.
“You didn’t have to,” said Maria. “So typical of you to fire-watch on some old warehouse where nobody ever went.”
“It was very dangerous,” said Niall. “Things dropped all round me as I stood alone on that curious-shaped roof. Nobody will ever realize how terribly brave I was. Far braver than Charles, who was doing something with S.H.A.E.F. or whatever it was.”
“It wasn’t S.H.A.E.F.,” said Maria.
“They all sounded the same,” said Niall. “Like you and E.N.S.A. People got so used to uniforms and strings of letters that they swallowed anything. I remember telling a woman I was working very hard in S.H.I.T. and she believed me.”
Celia got up and began to pat the cushions, and tidy the papers. If she did not do it, nobody else would. And Charles hated an untidy room. Maria never seemed to notice, not at Farthings, anyway. Her own flat in London was always spotless, but perhaps that was because it was her own possession. And Farthings belonged to Charles.
“You know, Niall,” said Celia, “I believe it’s your lack of respect for tradition that has always made Charles a little wary of you.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Niall. “I have an immense respect for tradition.”
“Yes,” said Celia, “but a different sort. When you talk about tradition you think of Queen Elizabeth on horseback making a speech at Greenwich, and then wondering whether to send for Essex, or whoever was her person at the time. When Charles speaks of tradition he means the world of today. He means citizenship, doing one’s duty, right versus wrong, what this country stands for, all those things.”
“How tedious,” said Niall.
“There you are,” said Celia. “That’s just the attitude that Charles detests. No wonder that he calls you a parasite.”
“It’s not that at all,” said Maria, getting up and looking into the mirror over the fireplace. “The whole thing is personal. It’s a secret grudge, deep inside Charles. I’ve always known it and pretended to myself it was not there. Since we are all being so frank this evening, let’s admit it.”
“Let’s admit what?” said Niall.
“Let’s admit that Charles has always been jealous of you,” said Maria. There was a long silence. The three of us had never faced up to making this admission before; not in so many words.
“Don’t let’s start playing the truth game. I hate it,” said Celia hastily. Maria was usually so reserved. If Maria’s reserve broke down anything might happen. The fat would be in the fire. And directly she thought of this she wondered what she meant. What fat and what fire? It was all too complicated. The day was getting out of hand.
“When did it start?” asked Niall.
“When did what start?”
“The jealousy,” said Niall.
Maria had pulled out the lipstick she kept hidden behind the candlestick on the mantelpiece, and was making up her mouth.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Very early on, I think—probably when I went back to the stage again, after Caroline was born. He put it down to you. He thought you influenced me.”
“No one has influenced you, ever,” said Niall, “and me least of all.”
“I know, but he didn’t understand that.”
“Did he ever say anything about it?” asked Celia.
“No. I just felt it. There was a kind of tension.”
“But surely,” objected Celia, “he must always have known it was bound to happen. You wanting to act, I mean. He can’t have expected you to settle down in the country like an ordinary person.”
“I think he did,” said Maria. “I think he got my character all wrong right from the start. I told you before, it was playing Mary Rose that did it. Mary Rose was a country girl. Always hiding up apple trees, and then disappearing on the island. She was a ghost, and Charles fell in love with the ghost.”
“What did you fall in love with?” asked Niall.
“As I was being Mary Rose, I fell in love with Simon,” said Maria. “And Charles was my idea of Simon. Quiet, dependable, devoted. Besides, at that particular time there was no one much around. And all those flowers.”
“Charles was not the only one to send you flowers,” said Celia. “People were doing it all the time. There was a rich American who sent you orchids twice a week. What was his name?”
“Hiram something,” said Maria. “He chartered a plane once to take me to Le Touquet and I was sick all over his coat. He was awfully nice about it.”
“Was the weekend a success?” asked Niall.
“No. I kept wondering what had happened to the coat. So difficult to clean. And when we flew back on the Sunday night he did not have it with him.”
“Perhaps he gave it to the waiter,” said Niall, “or to the valet de chambre. The valet de chambre, I should think. He would be able to smuggle it away with no questions asked.”
“Yes,” said Celia. “And being a valet de chambre he would know the right stuff to get to clean the coat. But anyway, a weekend at Le Touquet with Hiram was not the reason why Maria decided to marry Charles. It was not the flowers, nor was it the safe dependability. Nor was it because of Simon and Mary Rose. Maria could have had all those things without marrying. There must have been something very special about Charles, to induce her to throw up the theater for two years and go to live in the country.”
“Don’t goad the girl,” said Niall. “We know perfectly well why she did it. I don’t know why you’re both being so cagey about it.”
Maria put her powder-puff back into the vase where it had been hidden since last weekend.
“I’m not being cagey,” she said. “And if you mean I started Caroline before the wedding, it isn’t true. Charles was far too respectable for anything like that. Caroline was born nine months to the day after the marriage. I was just one of those fashionable brides. Getting married was very romantic. Like being unveiled.”
“Surely you felt a bit of a hypocrite?” said Celia.
“A hypocrite?” said Maria, turning round from the mirror, indignant. “Not in the slightest. Why on earth should I feel a hypocrite? I had never been married before.”
“No, but still…”
“It was one of the most exciting moments in my life. That, and then the wedding at St. Margaret’s, and going up the aisle on Pappy’s arm, white from head to foot. In fact, there was only one bad moment. My shoes were new. I’d ordered them in a fearful hurry, for some reason or other, and the price was on the back. When I knelt down to pray I suddenly remembered that, and I never heard the blessing. I kept thinking:‘Oh God! Charles’s mother will see the price on the back of my shoes.’ ”
“Would it have mattered if she had?” asked Niall.
“Yes. She would have known where I got them from and they cost only thirty bob. I could not have borne it.”
“Snob,” said Niall.
“No,” said Celia. “It isn’t snob at all. I see Maria’s point. Girls are awfully sensitive about things like that. I still am, and I’m no longer a girl, heaven knows. If I buy a dress at Harvey Nichols or somewhere I always cut out the label and leave the back plain. People might think then that the dress came from some special dressmaker, and not a store at all.”
“But who the hell cares?”
“We care. Women care. It’s our personal rather foolish pride. And, anyway, Maria has not told us yet why it was she married Charles.”
“She wanted to be the Hon. Mrs. Charles Wyndham,” said Niall. “And if you think there was ever any other reason you have never really known Maria, although Pappy bred the pair of you.”
He lit a cigarette and threw the blown match onto the mantelpiece beside Maria’s lipstick.
“Is it true?” said Celia, doubtfully. “Was that really the reason? I mean, truthfully. As we seem to be taking down our back hair?”
Maria’s eyes went blank and misty, as they invariably did on the few occasions in her life when she was trapped.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it’s true. But I was in love with him as well.”
She looked shamefaced, apologetic, like a little girl caught out in a misdeed.
“After all,” she said, “Charles was very good-looking. He still is, in spite of getting rather fat.”
“Funny,” said Celia, “how one can be related to someone, and brought up with them, and yet one never tumbles to a thing like that. That you should want to be an Honorable. It does not really go with your character.”
“Nothing has ever gone with Maria’s character,” said Niall. “That’s what Charles has always found so difficult. She’s a chameleon. She changes her personality to suit her mood. That’s why she’s never bored. It must be lots of fun being somebody different every day. You and I, Celia, have to go on being the same people all the time, for the whole of our lives.”
“But the Honorable,” Celia persisted, not listening to Niall. “I mean, it’s not so very much after all. Had it been a viscount or an earl there would have been something to it.”
“It looked very nice written,” said Maria wistfully. “The Hon. Mrs. Charles Wyndham. I used to try it out on the back page of my engagement book. And, anyway, I did not know any earls or viscounts.”
“You could have waited,” said Celia. “In your position, they would have come along, sooner or later.”
“I did not want to wait,” said Maria. “I wanted to marry Charles.”
And she thought of Charles and how he had looked in those days. Slim and straight, without the tendency to stoop that he had now, and without the hint of tummy. His hair fair and crisp. Not pepper-and-salt. The very English texture of skin, rather red, but youthfully red. The skin that went with riding well, and playing polo. And always twice a week in that stall in the fourth row, leaning forward, his hand on his knee, holding his chin, and coming round afterwards and tapping on the door of her dressing room, and going out to supper. Being driven in his car. An Alvis. It had red leather seats, and a gray rug that he used to wrap most carefully round her legs in case she should be cold.
The first time he took her out to supper he told her that his bedside book was Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.
“And why can’t they make a play out of that?” he had said to her. “Why can’t some author write the love story of Lancelot and Elaine? You could play Elaine.”
“Yes,” she had said, “I should love to play Elaine.”
And while he retold all the stories in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur—it took nearly the whole of supper—and she listened and nodded, she was thinking of the wedding she had been to the week before, not at St. Margaret’s, but at St. George’s, Hanover Square, and the choirboys wore red gowns under their white frilly surplices, and the church was filled with lilies. There was “The Voice that breathed O’er Eden” and “O Perfect Love.”
“It’s been dead too long, the age of chivalry,” said Charles. “If the flower of my generation had not been blown to bits in the war they would have brought it back again. Now it’s too late. So few of us are left.”
The bride at St. George’s had worn white and silver. When she came down the steps afterwards her veil was thrown back, and people threw confetti. At the reception in Portland Place there were long tables filled with wedding presents. Great solid silver teapots. And trays. And lampshades. The bride and bridegroom stood at the end of a long drawing room to receive their guests. When the bride drove away to her honeymoon she had changed into a blue frock and she had a silver fox fur thrown round her shoulders. “That’s a wedding present too,” somebody had said to Maria. And the bride waved from the window of the car. She wore very new long white gauntlet gloves. Maria thought of the maid stretching them upstairs and giving them to the bride, with the suède bag, also a present, and she thought of all the tissue paper on the floor. And the bride smiling, not thinking of anything but driving away with the bridegroom in the car.
“The trouble is,” Charles had said, “I always think Lancelot was a bit second-rate. The way he carried on with Guinevere. No doubt she led him on… But Parsifal was the best of the bunch. He was the chap who found the Holy Grail.”
Maria Delaney… Maria Wyndham… The Hon. Mrs. Charles Wyndham…
Twelve years ago. Twelve years was a long time. And the trouble was that she, Maria, was second-rate like Guinevere, and Charles was still Parsifal, looking for the Holy Grail. Parsifal was upstairs in the bathroom letting the water run away.
“I don’t see,” said Maria unhappily, twisting Niall’s ring, “what I could have done to make it different, if we had the years again. At least I have been honest with Charles. Up to a point.”
“What point?” said Niall.
Maria did not answer. There was really nothing she could say.
“You say I’m a chameleon,” she said at last. “Perhaps you’re right. It’s difficult to judge oneself. At least I’ve never pretended to be a good person. Really good, I mean, like Charles. I’ve pretended lots of other things, but never that. I’m bad, I’m shallow, I’m immoral, I cheat, I’m selfish, I’m often very stingy and frequently unkind. But I know it all. I don’t kid myself that I possess one single quality worth a damn. Isn’t that one thing in my favor? If I die tomorrow and there really is a God and I go and stand before Him and I say, ‘Sir,’ or whatever one does say to God, ‘here I am, Maria, and I am the lowest form of life,’ that would be honest. And honesty counts for something, doesn’t it?”
“One doesn’t know,” said Niall. “That’s the frightful thing. One just does not know what goes down well with God. He may think honesty is a form of bragging.”
“In that case I’m sunk,” said Maria.
“I think you’re sunk, anyway,” said Niall.
“I always hope,” said Celia, “that one’s sins may be forgiven one because of something one did years ago that was kind, and one has forgotten. Like the bit in the Bible: ‘Anyone who gives a child a cup of cold water in My Name will be forgiven.’ ”
“I see what you mean,” said Maria, doubtfully, “but isn’t that allegorical? We must all have given the equivalent of cups of water to people. It’s just common politeness. If that’s all we have to do to be saved, why worry?”
“Think of the unkind things we have forgotten,” said Niall. “Those are the ones that will be totted up against us. I sometimes wake up in the early morning and go quite cold thinking of all the things I must have done and can’t remember.”
“Pappy must have taught you that,” said Celia. “Pappy had a fearful theory that when we die we go to a theater, and we sit down and see the whole of our lives re-acted before us. And nothing is omitted. Not one single, sordid detail. We have to watch it all.”
“Really?” said Maria. “But how just like Pappy.”
“It might be rather fun,” said Niall. “There are certain things I should like to see all over again.”
“Certain things,” said Maria, “but not all. How dreadful when the play began to get near to something shaming, and one knew that in a few minutes or so one would see something absolutely—well…”
“It depends who one was with,” said Niall. “Does one have to go to the theater alone, or didn’t Pappy say?”
“He never said,” answered Celia. “Alone, I should imagine. Or perhaps with a few saints and angels. If there are angels.”
“Dreary for the angels,” said Maria. “Worse than being a dramatic critic. Sitting through somebody’s interminable life.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Niall. “They probably quite enjoy it. And the word goes round if something very special is on. ‘I say, old boy, it ought to be pretty lurid tonight. Maria Delaney is on at eight-fifteen.’ ”
“What nonsense,” said Celia. “As if saints and angels are like a lot of beady old men in a club. They would sit quite impassive. Above it all.”
“In that case one wouldn’t mind them going,” said Maria. “They’d be just a row of dummies.”
The door opened and we all three looked self-conscious, as we used to do as children when the grown-ups came into the room.
It was Polly. She poked her head round the door. It was one of the habits that infuriated Niall. She never came right into the room.
“The children look such ducks,” she said. “They’re in bed having their supper. They want you to go up, and say good night.”
We felt this was fabrication. The children were perfectly happy by themselves. But Polly wanted us to go and see them. See their well-brushed, glossy hair, their shining faces, the red and blue dressing gowns that she had bought at Daniel Neal’s.
“All right,” said Maria. “We’re going up to change, anyway.”
“I meant to bath them for you, Polly,” said Celia, “but we’ve all been talking. I forgot it was so late.”
“They wondered why you hadn’t come,” said Polly, “and I told them they mustn’t always expect Auntie Celia to run round after them. Auntie Celia likes to talk to Mummy and Uncle Niall.”
The head vanished. The door closed. The cheerful footsteps pattered up the stairs.
“That was a nasty crack,” said Niall. “A whole world of condemnation in her voice. I believe she has been listening at the door.”
“I do feel guilty,” said Celia. “It is my thing at weekends to bath the children. Polly has so much to do.”
“I think Polly would be the worst person to have in the stalls at the theater,” said Maria. “After one was dead, I mean. She would stare with stark disapproval at everything I have ever done from the cradle onwards. I can hear her gasp: ‘Oh, Mummy. Whatever is Mummy doing now?’ ”
“It would be an education,” said Niall. “It would open new vistas.”
“I don’t think she would understand half of it,” said Celia. “Like taking someone tone-deaf to hear Brahms.”
“Nonsense,” said Niall. “Polly would have her eyes on sticks.”
“Why Brahms?” said Maria.
There was another footstep on the stairs. A heavy one this time. The footsteps paused outside the door of the drawing room, and then moved away to the dining room. There was the sound of a bottle being uncorked. Charles was decanting the wine.
“He’s still in a bad mood,” said Maria. “If he was all right he would have come into the room.”
“Not necessarily,” whispered Niall. “He always makes such a thing about the wine, and having the right temperature. I hope it’s some more of that Château Latour.”
“Don’t whisper,” said Celia; “it makes us look so guilty. After all, nothing has happened. He’s only been for a walk.”
She glanced hastily round the room. Yes, it was tidy. Niall had dropped the ash on the floor. She rubbed it in the carpet with her foot.
“Come on, let’s go and change,” she said. “We can’t crouch here like criminals.”
“I feel rather ill,” said Niall. “I have a chill coming on. Maria, can I have a tray in my room?”
“No,” said Maria. “If anyone is going to have a tray upstairs it will be me.”
“You neither of you need trays,” said Celia. “You’re both behaving like a couple of children. Maria, surely you are used to coping with a domestic crisis if Niall is not?”
“I’m not used to coping with anything,” said Maria. “My path has always been made sweet for me.”
“Then it’s time you trod on a few thorns,” said Celia. She opened the door and listened. There was silence in the dining room. Then the soft, gurgling sound of liquid being poured from a bottle into a glass decanter.
“It’s Captain Hook,” whispered Niall, “poisoning the medicine.”
“No, it’s my inside,” whispered Maria. “It always does that at rehearsals. At about half-past twelve, when I’m getting hungry.”
“It reminds me of that awful time we all went down to Coldhammer to stay with Charles’s parents,” said Celia, “just after Maria came back from the honeymoon. And Pappy told Lord Wyndham the wine was corked.”
“Lady Wyndham thought Freada was my mother,” said Niall. “The whole thing was disaster from start to finish. Freada left the bath-room tap running. The water came through the ceiling to the room below.”
“But of course I remember now,” said Maria. “That’s when it must have started. That’s when it first began.”
“When what started?” asked Celia.
“Why, Charles being jealous of Niall,” said Maria.