21

Celia shut the door of the children’s bedroom behind her. It is true, she said to herself, what we were saying this afternoon; they are different from what we used to be. Our world was one of fantasy. Theirs is reality. They don’t pretend. An armchair is always an armchair, to the modern child, never a ship, never a desert island. The patterns on the wall are patterns; not characters whose faces change at dusk. Games like draughts, or ludo, are games of skill and chance; even as bridge or poker are to an adult. Draughts to us were soldiers, ruthless and malignant; and the crowned king on the back line a puffed-up potentate, jumping with horrible power, backwards and forwards, from square to square. The trouble is, the children have no imagination. They are sweet, and have carefree, honest eyes; but they have not any magic in their day. The magic has all gone…

“Children tucked up, Miss Celia?”

“Yes, Polly. I am so sorry I did not come up to give you a hand with the baths.”

“Oh, that’s quite all right; I heard you talking in the drawing room, and I thought you must have plenty to discuss. Mrs. Wyndham’s looking tired, don’t you think?”

“It’s only London, Polly. And the rainy weather. And being in a play that is not doing very well.”

“I suppose so. Such a pity she doesn’t take a long rest, and stay down here with Mr. Wyndham and the children.”

“It’s not easy for an actress to do that, Polly. Besides, it would not suit her.”

“The children see so little of her. Caroline writes to Daddy twice a week from school, never to Mummy. I can’t help thinking sometimes…”

“Yes, well, I must go and tidy, Polly. I shall see you at supper.”

No confidences from Polly about Maria. No confidences about Charles, about the children. Too many love affairs she had to straighten and settle, too many private pangs and woes. The Irish night-nurse who had lived with them during the final months before Pappy died, she had been the worst. Her endless letters from a married man. Always the flow of someone else’s tears.

To live vicariously meant, decided Celia, not to live for other people; but to see life only through their eyes and never through your own. By doing this, of course, she had been spared much pain. At least, she supposed she had. Celia washed her hands in the washbasin in Caroline’s bedroom, which had been allotted to her for the weekend, and sponged her face. The water was cool. Someone, Maria no doubt, had drained away the hot to fill her bath, the water was running still… Take love affairs, for instance. If she, Celia, had ever had a love affair no doubt it would have turned to gall and wormwood, or it would have proved abortive from the start. She would have been one of the sort of women whom men left. “Have you heard about poor Celia? That brute of a man.” He would have gone off and deserted her, for somebody else’s wife. Or else he would have been married himself, like the young man and the Irish nurse, and a Catholic, and unable to be divorced. He and Celia would have met, miserably, week after week, year after year, sitting on a bench in Regent’s Park.

“But what are we to do?”

“There is nothing we can do. Maud won’t hear of separation.” Maud would live forever. Maud would never die. Celia and the man would sit in Regent’s Park, talking about Maud’s children. She had been spared all that. It was a great relief. Nor, looking back, would there have been time for it. There had been so much to do for Pappy during those helpless years. There had been no time for her drawings and her stories. Much to the exasperation of Mr. Harrison and his firm.

“If you don’t do them now, you know, you never will,” he said.

“I promise you I shall. Next week, next month, next year.”

They became tired of her, after a while. She did not keep her promises. She was only a half-fledged artist, after all. The quality that had excited Mr. Harrison and the rest, the quality that had been Mama’s, must dwindle away and die. Surely it was more important to make a person happy. It was more important for Pappy, lying helpless in his bed, to watch her with his eyes and say, “My darling, my darling,” and to give to him the little comfort that she could, than to sit alone, writing, drawing, creating people who had never lived at all. It was not possible to do both. That was the heart of the matter. She had known it, when she had taken Pappy home from hospital. Either she must give her time to him, for his remaining years, or she must let him go, and turn upon herself and feed her talent.

It was a choice. A simple issue. And she had chosen Pappy.

The thing that people like Mr. Harrison had never understood was that to do this was no sacrifice. It was not unselfishness. She had made her choice of her own free will, because she wished to do it. However demanding Pappy may have been, however tiring, however petulant, he was, in the true and deepest sense, her refuge. He shielded her from action. His was the cloak that covered her. She need not go out into the world, she need not struggle, need not face the things that other people face—because she looked after Pappy.

Let Mr. Harrison and his colleagues go on thinking her a genius hiding from the light of day. By lying hidden, she could not be proven otherwise. She could have done this, she might have done the other, but she could not do either, because of Pappy. Let Maria stand out upon the stage, with the glare upon her. The applause came, but she risked stony silence too; she risked failure. Let Niall write his tunes, and wait for criticism; the tunes might be praised, but they could be damned as well.

Once a person gave his talent to the world, the world put a stamp upon it. The talent was not a personal possession anymore. It was something to be traded, bought, and sold. It fetched a high price, or a low one. It was kicked in the common market. Always, forever after, the possessor of the talent must keep a wary eye upon the purchaser. Therefore, if you were sensitive, if you were proud, you turned your back upon the market. You made excuses. Like Celia.

And that is the real reason I looked after Pappy, she thought, as she changed her shoes and stockings, because I was afraid of criticism, afraid of failure. Charles was all wrong when he attacked the others. I am the parasite, not they. I preyed on Pappy, while they went into the world. Pappy was dead, but still she made excuses. The war… She could not be expected to draw pictures in the war. There were many more important things to do. Cleaning floors in hospitals. Serving in canteens. Helping in training centers for the blind. There had been so many things that a single person, unattached, could do. A single woman, unattached, like Celia. And I did them all, she thought, I never stopped, I was busy all the time, few women worked as hard as I did. But why am I talking to myself like this? What am I trying to prove? The war is over, the war is dead, like Pappy. What, then, do I live for now?

She sat down upon the bed, one stocking in her hand. The wall in front of her was blank. Caroline had no pictures hanging on it. She had taken them with her to boarding school. Why send a little girl to school? She wished to go, said Maria, she was bored at home. Celia could not ask the thing that she wanted. She could not turn to Maria and say, “If Caroline is bored, why not let her come to live with me?” Someone to love, to cherish. A reason for existence. The moment had come, and gone, and now of course it was too late. Caroline was happy at her school, and here was Celia, sitting on Caroline’s bed, staring at the blank wall. A blank wall.

It had been a foolish sort of day. That, really, was the trouble. Too much rain. Not going out, not taking exercise. Charles moody and depressed. She pulled on her stocking. Then she turned down her bed, and folded the cover. It would save somebody else doing it later. She laid her nightgown on the pillow, and the woolly bed-jacket, and the bed-socks, and the rabbit with the torn ear. The rabbit was one of the many things she had salvaged when the furniture went into store, after Pappy died.

“There is so much junk,” said Maria. “You can’t possibly want a quarter of it. I’d like that desk for the flat, and the round table from the drawing room, and there is a little old rocking-chair I’ve always loved. But don’t burden yourself with a mass of stuff. It will only be bombed.”

Niall wanted nothing, except some books and Sargent’s drawing of Mama. Celia wanted everything. But how could she keep everything, where could she put it? Living as she must, from day to day, until the war was over. It hurt so much to throw away familiar things. Even old calendars and Christmas cards. One calendar had hung in the downstairs lavatory the year Maria was married. And Celia had never changed it afterwards, because the picture of apple-blossom in the spring had seemed so right. She had bought little tags in the New Year, and stuck them on the bottom. The picture never failed to cheer her, even in moments of depression. And so, when the house was sold, things like the calendar had to be thrown away. Into the wastepaper basket went the apple-blossom. But there were still trunk-loads of things that had not been thrown away. Trunk-loads of useless objects. Cups and saucers, plates and coffee urns. Pappy always liked his coffee from that urn. The green vase must be kept. Truda chipped the edge once, when she was filling it, because Niall ran into her, wanting a drink of orange from the pantry. The green vase was a symbol of Niall, aged sixteen. Keep the paper knives, the trays, the old coal-scuttle with the brass bands. They were in use once, every day. They served their purpose. They spelled a moment, and a time.

And now the maisonette at Hampstead, where she had lived for the past year, was filled to overflowing with the things she did not need. But she was glad to have them by her all the same. Like the rabbit with one ear, upon her pillow now.

That was another reason, of course, why she had neglected her drawing and her stories. She had been busy moving into the maisonette. “Don’t call it maisonette, it sounds so common,” said Maria. But what else could it be called? It was a maisonette.

She was only there during the week, because at weekends she always came to Farthings. At least, she had always come to Farthings up till now. She paused, as she buttoned up the Mandarin coat Maria had given her because it was much too big, and why is it, she wondered, that everything today seems so uncertain, as it does on a summer’s evening when a storm is brewing, or when one of the children gets a temperature and the mind jumps instantly to infantile paralysis?

When she arrived down yesterday, the place was the same, as always. She had caught the usual train, on Saturday. Maria had come down in the evening, of course, after the play, with Niall. Celia and Charles and Polly and the children lunched together, as they always lunched on Saturdays. Charles had gone off somewhere in the afternoon, and Celia had walked with Polly and the children. Dinner with Charles was not more quiet than usual. They had switched on the wireless, listened to Music-hall, listened to the News. Celia had mended a cushion cover that Maria had torn the weekend before. Then she had seen about getting the supper for Maria and Niall, who would arrive hungry. It saved Polly if she did this, and it saved Mrs. Banks, it meant that they need not wait up, but could go to bed. Besides, Celia liked doing it. It had become routine. She cooked better than Mrs. Banks. Made things more tasty, so the others said. Perhaps she had taken too much upon herself, by doing these things? Perhaps Charles resented it, and was offended?

And suddenly, the things she had taken for granted through the years, like staying at Farthings, like mending cushions for Maria, like darning the socks for the children, became unstable; they were no longer part of her life, and permanent. They would cease to be, like the war, like Pappy. She buttoned the Mandarin’s coat to the chin, and powdered her nose. As she looked into the glass she saw the old telltale frown between her brows, and she powdered on top of it, but it would not go.

“Will you stop frowning?” Truda used to say. “It’s not right for children of your age to frown.”

“Smile, my darling, smile,” said Pappy. “You look as though you have the cares of the world upon your shoulders.”

But the frown had become ingrained. It would never go. Not now… Like the pain in the solar plexus. So often, on and off, during the war, though it had started really during the time she was nursing Pappy, she had had the little nagging pain. Nothing intense. Nothing severe. But nagging. It meant indigestion if she ate certain foods. Anyway, those X-ray photographs would prove if there was anything wrong. She would have them next week. But the pain would probably continue like the frown. Once a woman was over thirty, and she was not married, she was sure to have something wrong, some sort of pain, somewhere.

If she went downstairs now, to the drawing room, and made up the fire before the gong sounded, would Charles be there? Would he look at her, thinking, “Why must she treat the house as though it belonged to her?” Yet the fire would need seeing to, and Polly would be in the kitchen dishing up, with Mrs. Banks. Whatever I do now, thought Celia, will seem like interference. Mixing the salad, I’ve always mixed the salad, nobody else knows how, they will forget the sugar—but Maria ought to do it herself, Maria or Charles. Whatever I do now will seem presumptuous, in my own eyes, if not in anybody else’s; the serenity is gone; and Farthings is not a home any longer, it’s a house where I am staying as a guest for the weekend.

She left her room, and went down the back stairs, in case she should meet Charles by the front. In this fashion she could go into the dining room by the other door, and be waiting there, anonymously, with Polly when the gong rang. But the plan was frustrated, because Charles himself was standing in the pantry, with the door open, talking on the telephone. The extension to his study had gone wrong, he had been complaining about it the day before.

Celia drew back into the shadow of the stairs to wait until he had finished. Many times she had herself gone into the pantry to telephone, to the station, perhaps, about trains, or to the garage in the village, for a car, and when she lifted the receiver she would hear a voice on the bedroom extension, Maria’s voice, talking long-distance, to somebody in London, and she would know by the sound of that voice whether the call was business—or something else. Quite often it was something else. Celia would put down the receiver in the pantry, and wait, leaning against the sink, until the click in the telephone system on the wall warned her that the call was over. She was reminded of this tonight.

“It’s quite definite,” Charles was saying. “I made up my mind this afternoon. It’s hopeless to go on like this any longer. I shall say so, tonight.” There was a pause, and then he said, “Yes. The whole outfit. All three of them.” Another pause, and then: “Pretty bad all day. But better now. Things are always better when one has the courage to come to a decision.”

Turning round, he saw the open pantry door. He lunged at it with his foot. The door swung to and crashed. His voice became a murmur, soft and blurred.

And Celia, crouching against the wall on the back stairs, felt suddenly cold. Something is going to happen. Something none of us has known about is going to happen. The anxiety about her own status as intruder did not matter anymore. It swung now to a larger, wider apprehension. She slipped past the pantry into the dining room, and, with the color ebbing from her cheeks, began to mix the salad.

The sound of the gong echoed through the house like a summons.