Elizabeth, back into her comfortable blue jeans and one of Oliver’s old shirts, had taken the two salmon trout from the larder and laid them on the vast kitchen table. Her assignment was to patch up one of the fish for supper, so that the colonel need never know of Claude’s depredations. Alice, before she had left, had begged both Elizabeth and May to look after him; of course they had both promised, and Alice was scarcely out of sight before May discovered the larder crime.
Taking pieces from one fish and transposing them to another was like a frightful jigsaw with none of the pieces ready made. On top of this, the fish had been overcooked so that the flakes broke whenever she tried to wedge them into position. ‘I’ll have to cover the whole lot with mayonnaise,’ she thought despairingly. Well – at least she knew how to make good mayonnaise: at least she knew that.
‘Isn’t it nasty having the whole house to ourselves?’
It was only Oliver.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean that anywhere as large and hideous and otherwise undistinguished as this is only bearable when it’s heavily populated.’ He sat on the kitchen table. ‘It must have been built by someone who made a packet out of shells or gas masks in the First World War. Do you know what the first gas masks were made of?’
‘Of course I don’t. What?’
‘Pieces of Harris tweed soaked in something or other, with bits of tape to tie round the back of the head. What fascinates me about that is that it should have been Harris tweed: so hairy – a kind of counter-irritant.’
A minute later, he said,
‘Listen, ducks, what are you going to do?’
Elizabeth had been separating two eggs into pudding basins.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Don’t be so stupid, Liz.’
‘I’m not being stupid – I just don’t know what you mean.’ She seized a gin bottle filled with olive oil.
‘I said: what are you going to do?’
‘Make mayonnaise.’ She selected a fork and began to beat the eggs: her eyes were pricking. ‘That’s one thing I can do.’ The feeling that she was dull, and that Oliver, whom she loved, was brilliant and would therefore suddenly realize this one day and abandon her, recurred for what seemed like the millionth time. How did he know about First-World-War gas masks? she thought. Why didn’t she know anything surprising like that?
‘I’ll pour – you beat.’ She wasn’t very bright, but from her first moments, May had, so to speak, let him in on looking after her. She wasn’t very bright, and needed him.
‘You’re not stupid,’ he said, taking the oil bottle. ‘Goodness me, how weddings make women cry. Cheer up: think of spending a fortnight in Cornwall with Leslie.’
She smiled: she would have giggled if she’d felt better.
‘A pink chiffon nightdress and all the lights out and twin beds.’
‘He’s taken his golf clubs,’ she said, entering the game.
‘They can’t talk about what they did last week, because they didn’t have one.’
‘They can discuss the wedding. To tide them over.’
‘He can tell her about his future: and how he can’t stand dishonesty – he’s funny that way – but he’s all for plain speaking. That cuts down nearly anyone’s conversation.’
‘But on honeymoons,’ said Elizabeth hesitantly, ‘don’t you spend a lot of time making love to the person?’
‘That’s a frightfully old-fashioned way of putting it. Besides, golf takes much longer: if he plays two rounds a day, he won’t have all that time.’
‘Steady: don’t put any more in till I tell you.’
‘What happens if I put in too much?’
‘It separates and I have to start all over again with another yolk.’
‘Listen: what I meant just now was, you don’t want to just stay here, do you?
‘I mean, there’s a serious danger that Daddo will just push you into being another Alice,’ he went on when she didn’t reply.
‘I know.’
‘We can’t have you escaping to Southport or Ostend in five years’ time for a gay fortnight with a girl friend and meeting someone like Leslie: if you had to choose between dog kennels and Daddo or the equivalent of Leslie you might easily choose Leslie. Seriously, Liz, you’d be better off in London.’
‘Where?’
‘With me.’
She flushed with delight. ‘Oh – Oliver!’
‘We’ll live on our wits – Edwardian for sharp practice.’
‘How would we?’
‘My wits then,’ he said with careless affection. ‘Awful people are always offering me jobs.’
‘Aren’t you in a job?’
‘The accountants’ office? Honestly, Liz, I couldn’t stand it. I left last week.’
‘Does May know?’
‘She knows, but he doesn’t. We’ve agreed not to tell him. He’d think I was going to the dogs more than ever. It’s funny how keen he is on girls going to his blasted dogs, when he can’t stand young whipper-snappers like me going to them.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know: that’s what’s so nice. After all those years of educational regimentation I want a breather. I shall probably marry an heiress,’ he added carelessly.
‘You mightn’t love her. I mean – you couldn’t just marry her because of that.’
‘Oh, couldn’t I! Well – until we find her – we could always advertise as an unmarried couple willing to wash up, or something like that.’
There was a pause while she beat industriously (the sauce was now the colour of Devonshire cream) and wondered what she ought to do. Then she said, ‘It’s all right now: pour a thin, steady stream.’
He said, ‘I know what’s the trouble. You’re worrying about May.’
She hadn’t been, she’d started to imagine life in London with Oliver: concerts, cinemas, cooking up delicious suppers for his friends, all charming, funny, brilliant people like Oliver – people he’d met at Oxford . . . ‘Don’t go: Elizabeth will you knock up something to eat?’ ‘I say, Elizabeth, is this what you call knocking something up? It’s fabulous!’ (no, wrong word – a bit cheap and unintellectual) ‘It’s the best pasta I’ve ever eaten in my life’ . . .
But she’d been going to end up thinking about May: May stuck here for the rest of her life, in this awful red-brick fumed-oak stained-glass barracks – every room looking like a Hall on Speech Day – even the garden filled with the worst things like rhododendrons, laurels, standard roses with grotesque flowers, hedges of cupressus, a copper beech and a monkey puzzle, cotoneaster and an art nouveau sundial; all this instead of the cosy little house in Lincoln Street where they had lived the moment Great-Aunt Edith had kicked the bucket in Montreal . . . Aloud, she said, ‘It’s not just the house: it’s him.’
‘Daddo?’
She nodded. ‘He gives me the creeps. He ought just to be poor and funny, but he isn’t.’
‘Well he is funny: he’s a pompous old fool.’
‘You’re not a woman: you wouldn’t understand.’
There was enough mayonnaise; she seasoned it and began spreading it over the fish with a palette knife.
‘If she’s lonely enough, she might leave him. If you stay here, she never will.’
‘I could come back for week-ends,’ she said anxiously.
He pushed his hand through her silky brown hair.
‘I’m not my sister’s keeper.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Getting the oil off my hands.’
The next conversation about Elizabeth’s future was at dinner.
The dining-room was, of course, large; a rectangular room whose ceiling was too high for its other dimensions. A red-and-blue Turkey carpet very nearly reached the caramel-coloured parquet surround. The colonel had bought the carpet, together with a gigantic Victorian sideboard, a stained oak pseudo-Jacobean table and eight supremely uncomfortable and rickety chairs, in a local sale. The windows were also large, but so heavily leaded that they gave the room the air of a rather liberal prison: the top of the centre one was embellished in a key pattern of blue and red stained glass. There were four immense pictures (also bought by the colonel in another sale): one of a dead hare bleeding beside a bunch of grapes on a table; a huge upright of a Highland stag standing on some heather; a brace of moony spaniels with pheasants in their mouths; and a rather ambitious one of a salmon leaping a weir. These were hung upon panelling of highly varnished pitch pine: they were not glazed, and so, as Oliver said, wherever you sat at table there was no way of escaping at least one of them. It was twenty-five to eight, and the colonel was doling out sparse portions of the salmon trout. ‘What’s all this?’ he said when he saw the mayonnaise.
Oliver answered immediately, ‘It is a sauce made of egg yolks and olive oil and flavoured with black pepper and vinegar called mayonnaise. It was invented by a French general’s chef at the siege of Mahon – hence its name; how interesting that you should never have encountered it before.’
The colonel put down his servers and glared steadily at his stepson.
May said, ‘Herbert didn’t mean that, did you dear? He meant –’
‘What’s it doing here?’ finished Oliver. ‘Ah, well Liz made it, with a bit of help from me. We thought you’d like a sauce with a military background.’
There was an incompatible silence while the colonel served the fish and handed plates to May for new potatoes and peas. Then he said, ‘I’m all for plain English cooking, myself.’
May shot a reproachful glance at Oliver which he did not miss, and said, ‘Anyway, these are the first of our own peas.’
The colonel stabbed one with his fork. ‘Far too small: Hoggett is always premature. If I’ve told him once, I’ve told him a hundred times –’
‘They taste delicious,’ said Elizabeth. (I can’t bear this: meal after meal of trying to make things right – of keeping them dull so that they won’t go wrong.)
‘Are these our own potatoes?’ asked Oliver politely.
‘We don’t grow enough potatoes to have new ones,’ said Elizabeth quickly. Oliver knew perfectly well that one of the colonel’s petty tyrannies was to force an arthritic old gardener to go through the motions of keeping up an enormous kitchen garden. This meant that the colonel resented bought vegetables and prohibited the use of their own until they were so old as to be almost uneatable. He knew that, so why didn’t he shut up? She glared at him, and his grey eyes immediately fixed upon hers with an empty innocent stare.
‘. . hope Alice was pleased, anyway,’ May was saying to her husband.
‘Tremendous palaver – just to get a girl married: still it all went off quite smoothly. The Mounts seemed impressed with the house.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Oliver.
The colonel took his napkin out of a cracked and yellowing ivory ring, wiped a moustache of much the same colour and turned to Oliver.
‘Oh. And why, may I ask, are you not surprised?’
‘I only meant that as they are in the building business, they would, so to speak, look at it with a professional eye. It must have cost a packet to build – even in nineteen-twenty.’
Elizabeth was stacking the plates which she then carried to the sideboard, where waited a trifle, left by the caterers. She brought this, placed it doubtfully in front of her mother, and went for clean plates. The colonel had decided to accept Oliver’s speech about the house at face value, and so he had merely grunted. Now he said, ‘Ah! Trifle!’
There was a silence while they all looked at the trifle. ‘Caterers’ Revenge,’ thought Elizabeth, as her mother began gingerly spooning it on to the plates. She knew what it would be like. Sponge cake made of dried egg smeared with the kind of raspberry jam where the very pips seem to be made of wood, smothered in packet custard laced with sherry flavouring. The top was embellished with angelica, mock cream and crystallized violets whose dye was bleeding carbon-paper mauve on to the cream.
‘A classic example of plain English cooking,’ said Oliver smoothly.
‘When is he going to leave?’ thought the colonel, ‘Insufferable beggar.’
‘What time is your train, Oliver?’
He looked at his mother and felt reproved. ‘The last one is ten thirty-eight.’ He cleared his throat, feeling suddenly nervous – something of a traitor. ‘Liz and I thought – I wondered whether it might not be a good thing for her to come up with me for a bit. Look around, and perhaps get herself a job.’
May was clearly taken aback, but she managed to look calmly at her daughter, and asked – really wanting to know, ‘What do you think, darling? Would you like to go to London?’
‘I think I might quite like to.’ Her eyes were on her mother’s face; she frightfully wanted to find out what May really felt, but now, with Oliver doing it all so treacherously in front of him, she was afraid she wouldn’t find out. May might awfully mind her going away, and not be able to say so. ‘It would be leaving you with rather a lot.’
‘Nonsense.’ Even the colonel had found the trifle heavy going, and was again wiping his moustache. ‘You must stop treating your mother as though she is a chronic invalid: she’s perfectly capable of looking after herself. And on those few occasions when she is not, what am I for? Eh?’ He glared round the table, looking, Oliver thought, about as jocular and useless as the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion.
‘Is there room in the flat at Lincoln Street?’ May, who had given herself hardly any trifle, now stopped pretending to eat it.
‘She can have the second-best bedroom and a fair share of all mod. cons. She can look after me when I get home exhausted from work: very good practice for both of us.’
May opened her mouth and shut it again.
The colonel took a tin of Dutch cigars from one of his capacious pockets, opened it, and offered one to Oliver, There were – as usual – two in the tin. Oliver refused. The colonel, pleased about this, lit one for himself, and said, ‘Ah – the office. And how is the job, Oliver? Going well, I trust?’
Oliver said, ‘As well as can be expected.’
‘I could come home for week-ends.’ Elizabeth was the kind of girl who blushed if other people told lies, and deflection was her form of apology.
‘There comes a time,’ the colonel said, ‘when all young people have to leave the nest and try their wings.’
‘Well, that’s settled, then.’ Oliver got up from the table. ‘Liz joins the chicks in Chelsea. If you’ll excuse me, I must go and pack. What about you, Liz?’
‘Are you going tonight darling?’
Elizabeth halted in her tracks: if only Oliver hadn’t done all this at dinner; if only she could have talked to her mother; if only she didn’t feel so guilty about wanting to go so badly . . . But May got briskly to her feet and said.
‘In that case, I had better come and help you pack.’
The colonel was left in the dining-room alone. He took a second tin of cigars from another pocket, extracted one, and put it in the first tin. It would be a relief to get rid of both young Seymours: have May to himself: with Alice gone, it was better to have May to himself.
Barely three hours later, Elizabeth sat opposite Oliver in the train. Most of the reading lights in the compartment did not work, but in any case, she did not want to read. Oliver had gone to sleep: she stared without seeing anything out of the dirty window and tried to think, but she was feeling so much that it was very difficult. Escape was the first thing she felt: a sense of freedom, but funnily, of safety as well; as though she had been locked up or ill-used – like girls in ordinary Victorian novels, and detective or spy stories since. Why? Nobody had ever been unkind to her; it was her fault that she could not feel at ease with her stepfather who had only ever been dull, pompous, and obvious really with her. Too like himself to be true – something like that. Before she had met him, she had thought that what people said about Colonel Blimp and ex-army men, particularly those who had served in India, was a sort of coarse shorthand to save them having to know or describe anybody. She couldn’t think that now. It was almost as though he was a jolly good character actor toeing the popular line. Perhaps it was the house that was so ugly and nasty as to be sinister. May had said when she married him, ‘He’s not meant to be your father, darling, because you had a perfectly good one; he’s just meant to be my husband: it would be stupid of me to try and provide you with a new father at your age. Of course I hope you like him, but you needn’t feel you’ve got to.’ But how could she – how could she ever have thought that she would be happy with him? And in that house? She had bought it because he wanted it. The moment she had married, Elizabeth had realized how much she was meant to be married to somebody; she wasn’t at all the kind of woman to manage life on her own. And just when Oliver and she might have started looking after her for a change, she’d made it impossible for them. Their family life had become a kind of conspiracy; jokes, habits, any kind of fun or thinking things awful had become furtive and uncomfortable. Apart from the blissful feeling of escape (and as she was so selfish she couldn’t help feeling that), she felt really worried about May. While Alice had been there, she had provided a kind of buffer for all of them. Alice was used to her father; she had become devoted to May, she had never stopped doing things for other people, or at least for her father, which stopped other people having to do them for him.
She had never got to know Alice: they had always been so anxiously, fumblingly nice to each other, had early set such a high standard of you-through-the-swing-doors-first courtesy that neither had never found out what the other really liked or wanted. Alice had once shown her some poetry – short, rhyming verses about nature going on whatever she was feeling: they were very dull, imbued with a kind of sugary discontent; nature-was-pretty-and-Alice-was-sad stuff. She had read them very slowly to look as though she cared, and said they were jolly good in a hushed voice to show that words were inadequate to express her feelings. And Alice had said how bad they were very fast a good many times, laughing casually and getting very pink. But really the poems, which Elizabeth could see had been meant to be a confidence, had simply put another barrier of nervous dishonesty between them. Practically their only point of contact had been Claude. She had found Alice, changed into her new pale-blue going-away suit, with Claude overflowing in her arms: Alice was crying and Claude was licking his lips and staring hopefully at the floor so perhaps they were both minding. Elizabeth had promised to be nice to him, and now, except for concealing the larder crime, here she was escaping. At least if I’m not famous for being intelligent, I ought to concentrate on being reliable and nice. But she had a feeling that people’s natures just went on regardless of their talents; you weren’t any nicer because you were stupid. Oliver, except for his dastardly behaviour to Herbert (she called him Herbert to herself and nothing to his face), was just as nice as she was, and although she didn’t always agree with him he was far more interesting because he knew so much and could talk about it. She had tried reading books about things, like soil erosion and monotremes and the Moorish influence in Spain, but none of these subjects ever seemed to fit into day-to-day conversation. She had tried asking May what she ought to do about this (just after she failed Oxford and before the domestic science school), but May had said most unhelpfully that hardly anybody she knew thought. Oliver did, she retorted; he was brilliantly clever – a Second and he hardly seemed to work at all! But May had just said, ‘Yes darling, I expect he is’ rather absently, like someone agreeing with a boring question so that they could stop talking about it. Much though she adored her mother, Elizabeth had wondered then whether it was because she was a bit old-fashioned and a woman (a pretty hopeless combination when you came to consider it) that made her not set the store by intelligence that she should. She wouldn’t have married Herbert if she’d cared about an intellectual life. She certainly hadn’t married him for money, and at her age sex appeal was out of the question – so what was it? It was like being stuck with someone for ever who said at least one awful, obvious thing a day, like a calendar where you tore off Tuesday but couldn’t help reading what it said. The most outstanding feature of her mother was how nice she was to absolutely everybody, so possibly she regarded Herbert as a challenge; perhaps, also, she was the only person who could see that secretly, deep down, Herbert was a very good man. Dull people often were, unless that was what their friends said about them to make up for their dullness. I do hope I get less dull, she thought. Living with Oliver ought to help that. She looked at him. He lay, or lounged, opposite her, legs crossed so that she could see a blue vein between his socks and his trousers. His head was thrown back, his eyes shut, a lock of his pale-brown hair was lying over his bulging forehead. Even asleep, he managed to look plunged in thought. He was wearing a very old but nice tweed suit that had belonged to their father: his only civvy suit, May had said, so he had got a good one – to last. He had lovely eyelashes that curled upwards very thickly: he said girls always remarked on them. She supposed she would be meeting his girls at Lincoln Street. I can always go home at week-ends to keep out of his way, she thought; I’ll be terrifically tactful and not surprised at anything. Anyway, I should go home: I would hate her to feel abandoned. She started to think of her mother carrying the heavy supper trays from the dining-room all along the passage – two baize doors that were meant to stay open but never did – to the kitchen. And then doing all the things that had to be done before anybody could have an evening there, let alone go to bed. Usually Alice and she had done a good deal of it; mostly Alice, she admitted honestly. Putting all the horrible food away so that they were certain to be faced with the left-overs next day, feeding Claude, turning out lights and getting more coal for the fire in the colonel’s den (wouldn’t you know he’d call it that) where they sat in the evening. There was only one really comfortable chair, and you bet, he took it. Filling hot-water bottles, turning down the beds, drawing bedroom curtains: Herbert liked everything to go on as though there was a large resident staff: oh lord, and now it was just May to be that . . . She shouldn’t have come or gone or whatever she’d done . . .
Oliver opened his eyes.
‘Dearest Liz. You look as though you’ve got indigestion; remorse, I bet. Cheer up. It was all my fault: that’s why I did it at dinner. If we’d given them too much notice, I was afraid of Daddo working on May to stop you: he’s going to wake up tomorrow and kick himself for letting all that free labour go. Cheer up: think of spending two weeks in Cornwall with Leslie.’
‘I have. I am.’
They smiled at each other; then she laughed.
Leslie had just said, ‘Excuse me, dear’, and gone to the magnificent peach-tiled bathroom that was part of their suite. A bedroom and the sitting-room – where they were now sitting – was the rest of it. They had arrived at the hotel rather late for dinner in the dining-room, and so Leslie had ordered supper in their suite. The head waiter had been able to let them have consommé – hot or cold – cold chicken and mixed salad, pêche melba and cheese. Leslie had ordered a bottle of sparkling burgundy with this repast, and brandy and crème-de-menthe afterwards. (Alice had had hot consommé and crème-de-menthe, Leslie had had three brandies – he had told the waiter to leave the bottle when he had brought the weak but bitter coffee.) Hours seemed to have gone by since then, and they were still sitting at the small round table with the pink-silk-shaded lamp on it. At the beginning of the meal they had not said much: each of them had made a few desultory remarks about the wedding which the other had instantly agreed with. But when his second brandy was inside him, Leslie had become more expansive. He thought the time had come for a little plain speaking. He was funny that way, but he couldn’t stand dishonesty. He looked at her for approbation of this curious and unusual trait. Alice looked seriously back.
‘What I want you to know,’ Leslie went on, ‘is – well it’s a bit difficult to put it in the right way. I’m forty-two as I think I told you –’
‘Yes.’
‘Well – it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect me to be completely inexperienced at my age – now would it?’
‘No.’
‘I’m not – you see. Not at all inexperienced: quite the reverse – you might say. I’ve been – intimate – with quite a number of women. I’ve never known them we,’ he added hastily, ‘you understand what I mean, don’t you Alice?’
‘Yes.’
‘I mean, naturally, they weren’t the sort of women you’d expect me to have known well. That wasn’t their function if you take me. But it does mean that I know a good deal about a certain side of life. That’s necessary for men. For women – of course – it’s different. I don’t suppose – well I wouldn’t expect you to know anything at all about that.’ He finished his brandy and looked at her expectantly.
‘No.’
‘Of course not.’ He seemed at once to be both uplifted and disheartened by this. ‘But naturally I’ve got about a good deal. The war – Belgium – you get all kinds of women there –’ He poured some more brandy: his forehead was gleaming. He started to tell her about Belgian women . . .
By the time May had cleared up the supper, wedged the larder door so that Claude could not possibly open it, opened him a tin of cat food that, naturally enough, he did not feel inclined to eat although he had made it plain that he was unable to be certain about this until the food was on his soup plate, put on a kettle for hot-water bottles (the house was never really warm and May felt that she got colder there week by week), turned off some passage lights that her children had left on, and conducted a tired and abortive hunt for her spectacles, all she wanted to do was to go to bed. But Herbert, she knew, would be waiting for her. Usually Alice had played backgammon with him after dinner while she pretended to do The Times crossword puzzle or got on with her patchwork, but from now on there was no Alice, and Herbert needed her company. Perhaps they could just have a cosy post mortem on the wedding, which now seemed an age away.
The colonel stood with his back to the small coal fire and was gazing reproachfully at the door through which she came.
‘What on earth have you been doing?’
‘Just clearing up supper.’
‘Why don’t you leave that sort of thing for Mrs what’s-her-name?’
May cast herself into the one comfortable chair. ‘She may not come tomorrow. Tomorrow isn’t her day.’
‘She didn’t come today, did she?’
‘No. Today was supposed to be her day, but she wouldn’t come because of the caterers. In any case there is far too much for her to do.’
The colonel grunted. ‘The woman’s getting above herself. Why don’t you fire her, and get somebody else?’
May kicked off her shoes. ‘Because there isn’t anybody else. Who would come, I mean. We’re not on a bus route, so it means nearly two miles walking or on a bicycle. People won’t do that nowadays. We’ve plenty of room: we ought to have somebody living in – a couple.’
The colonel looked wounded: then he stalked slowly over to his filing cabinet, took an immense bunch of keys from a pocket made shapeless by them and unlocked a drawer. He was going to mix his nightcap: a small whisky and soda. They both spoke at once. Then the colonel said, ‘I beg your pardon, my dear. What did you say?’
‘Just that I thought I’d like a whisky tonight: a small one.’
She knew that he had strong views about what women should, or should not, drink: he particularly disliked her drinking whisky.
‘Are you sure?’ He surveyed her with as broad-minded disapproval as he could muster.
‘Just tonight, darling. It’s been such a day.’
He mixed her a small weak drink in silence, handed it to her, made himself one, looked disparagingly at the bottle which was only about a quarter full, put it away and locked up the cabinet. All this seemed to take a very long time, and May resisted the impulse to gulp her drink. Then, when the colonel had made his way, as it were, blindly to her chair, discovered that she was in it, and remained standing (it was his chair she was lounging in, and nothing else would do), he said, ‘You must realize, my dear, that we cannot possibly afford a couple living in. The expenses of this house are – ah – stretched to their fullest extent; their fullest extent. A couple would land us with heavy expenses that with the best will in the world they could not justify.’
‘Perhaps we ought to sell the house then, and find something smaller.’ She had finished her whisky, and now wanted a cigarette, but as she only had ten a week and had already smoked two that day she knew there were none left.
‘My dear May! You surely cannot mean what you say!’
‘Well I did – actually.’
‘Part with our home!’
‘Only to get another one, dear.’
‘You speak as though homes are a mere matter of exchange and barter.’
‘Well they are really, aren’t they? I mean, we bought this one.’
The colonel sat suddenly down on quite an uncomfortable chair. He was speechless, absolutely speechless, he repeated to himself. To justify this situation, he said nothing, he simply stared at her.
‘Darling, don’t look so appalled! It just seemed to me that with Alice gone, and my two in London, perhaps we don’t need all these rooms’ – she pretended to count – ‘what is it? Nine bedrooms we aren’t using.’
As he still kept silent, she added, ‘Not counting all the other rooms.’
He perceptibly found his voice. ‘My dear May, this house was an absolute bargain – dirt cheap – an absolute bargain –’
‘Goodness,’ May thought as she stopped listening, ‘you couldn’t call it that. Or perhaps I’ve been poor too many years to think that spending eleven thousand pounds on anything would be a bargain. My eleven thousand pounds,’ she also thought, and then felt thoroughly ashamed of herself . . .
‘. . . simple chap,’ the colonel was saying, ‘can’t be said to have expensive tastes – moderation in all things – but all my life – serving my country and all that – all my life, I’ve looked forward to settling down – in a simple way – my one piece of land – a comfortable home – somewhere that I can call my own – chopping and changing difficult for a feller my age –’
The upshot of what, at their time of life, amounted to a scene was that she was forced to recognize what he said the house meant to him. Her private dream of a cottage in the country and the half of Lincoln Street that was now let being their homes vanished for ever that evening. If she would leave the management of the house to him – not upset her head about it – he would keep the whole thing within bounds of their income. She thought at one moment that he was trying to get her to sell the London house (because Oliver and now Elizabeth were to live in it rent free) but, strangely, he seemed most anxious that she should keep it. What it was necessary to review, he said, was their remaining free capital. Here she sensed danger: she did not want to have to discuss Elizabeth’s allowance or anything that she gave Oliver with him, or indeed with anyone. She was awfully tired, she said at this point. They would both be the better for a spot of Bedfordshire, he said. But the most incongruous aspect of the whole argument or discussion or whatever one could call it was that he had been really upset; eyes moist, stuttering slightly, repeating phrases more than usual: she honestly hadn’t realized that this house meant so much to him. He said, too, that he wanted to be alone with her – to have her to himself. She did not trust him enough about things: if she would leave it all to him everything would work out. He had blown his nose for a long time on one of the handkerchiefs she had given him for his birthday and this had touched her much more than anything he had actually said (which had left her not so much unmoved as indefinably depressed). It was the house that depressed her, but now she would just have to make the best of it.
Elizabeth lay in the dark in bed in the tiny top-floor back bedroom at Lincoln Street. The room had no curtains, because May had sent them to the cleaners and Oliver hadn’t bothered to put them up when they came back, so light from a street lamp patterned the ceiling and some of the walls. The bed was familiar and uncomfortable – she had had it as a child; indeed, for a short time – the blissful period after Aunt Edith died and before May married Herbert – this had been her room. Now the basement and ground floor were let and they only had the first and top floors. It was wonderful to be here – with Oliver. She wondered what sort of sharp practice he had in mind . . .
Alice lay very still on her back in the dark. The twin bed beside her was empty. Leslie had passed out (there was no other word for it) in the sitting-room. After a time, she had lifted his legs – unbelievably heavy – on to the other end of the sofa from his head: it hadn’t seemed to make any difference to him. He was clearly alive because his breathing was so noisy. She had stood looking down on him for a bit without thinking or feeling anything very much. Any fear or excitement that had lurked in wait for the end of this day had long since gone. By the time he had finished telling her how many women he had known, he had drunk nearly all the brandy. She had left the pink silk lamp lit in case he woke up and wondered where he was, and retired for the night. No problem about undressing, she had thought with bitter exhaustion. She wished one could stop being a virgin without noticing it . . .