January 1945. Helen, back from New York, turns up unexpectedly at The Poplars. It is eight in the morning and there is snow on the ground. She presses a ten shilling note into Marjorie’s trembling hand, and presents Esther Songford with a tin of salmon. Esther has put on a good deal of weight – her ankles are puffy and she is short of breath – but she manages to gasp her thanks.
‘Is Esther all right?’ asks Helen, all solicitude, drawing Edwin to one side. ‘She looks dreadful!’ Helen has left the engine of her Baby Austin running. She can’t stay more than a minute. Her passenger, grey-faced and desperate, stands in the drive, stamping his feet to keep warm, refusing to enter. He is, Helen says, a Labour politician.
‘Esther’s just fat,’ says Edwin. ‘Too many potatoes. She’s let herself go.’
‘We must none of us let ourselves go,’ says Helen. ‘We must get ready to win the peace, as we are winning the war.’
Helen is elegant even at eight in the morning. She wears a thin spotted navy dress with padded shoulders and a pleated skirt, and a fur coat, and her stockings are made of nylon – the first pair even seen in Ulden. She has the new wedgie shoes. Her hair is piled up over her forehead and falls smoothly away behind until it reaches the nape of her neck, whence it rises again in a semi-circular half-curl, like a seawave on the verge of breaking. Such an effect is hard to come by: but in these times hair must look as unlike hair as possible, as must complexions. Orangy pancake make-up hides every blemish; scarlet lipstick transforms the lips into a cupid’s bow God never intended.
Helen looks lovely, and inhuman. Esther clutches her old dressing-gown round her, clasps the tin of salmon and sinks into a chair, taking the weight off her poor aching legs. She feels sick all the time.
‘I’ve only a minute, my dears,’ says Helen, as they cluster round her, like bees around the honey. ‘Marjorie, you must move back to London this weekend.’
‘But you can’t, the V-bombs—’ says Esther Songford, from her chair. Helen ignores her.
‘But I can’t leave now. What about my Higher Certificate—’ says Marjorie, ‘and my University Entrance—’ Edwin scowls at her.
‘You love your father more than school, surely,’ says Helen. ‘We have reason to believe he will soon be repatriated, on humanitarian grounds. He’ll want his family about him after all he’s been through. I must dash now. John’s on his way to a very important meeting. I promised to drive him; so much more cosy than the train, but I’m afraid if I stop the engine we never seem to get it started again. I tell him it doesn’t matter if he’s late, he’s so important they’ll be perfectly happy to wait all day for him, but I’m afraid he’s dreadfully agitated.’
And off she goes.
When Chloe tells Gwyneth that Marjorie’s going back to London, tears come into Gwyneth’s eyes.
‘What’s the matter?’ asks Chloe, surprised. ‘She’s going home, isn’t she?’
‘This war,’ says Gwyneth. ‘What it’s done to us all!’ She has an unsightly rash on her hands. The doctor says it’s due to washing-up water and vitamin deficiency, but what can she do about either?
‘After the war,’ asks Chloe, ‘what about us? Will we go back to London?’
But Gwyneth doesn’t want to go.
‘You must stay here and finish your schooling,’ she says.
Gwyneth is proud of Chloe; her neat, pretty, clever daughter is her one achievement. She thrills with pleasure at each success in school; she panics at the slightest headache. She is selfless in her concern for her daughter’s welfare, expecting nothing in return, forever soothing, patting, encouraging, moulding, preaching patience and endurance.
So long, that is, as Chloe’s interests and that of the Leacocks do not conflict. If this happens, the Leacocks win. Gwyneth loves Mr Leacock. Why else would she allow Chloe to get up at six on those winter mornings, risking health and energy, to do the guests’ shoes, and lay up breakfast, and waylay the milkman to get extra milk – and even, as she grows older and cleverer, to stay up late and make up the accounts after the Rose and Crown is closed? All for nothing, unless you count Mr Leacock’s smile.
‘What an honour,’ Gwyneth says. And believes it, and so does Chloe.
Gwyneth has nowhere to go. She is over forty now and has no savings. Her life at the Rose and Crown has settled into a tolerable pattern of exploitation and excitement mixed. She believes that Mr Leacock loves her. And indeed, on the rare occasions when he can contrive to be alone with Gwyneth, he certainly kisses her and tells her so. They were meant for each other, he says, but their love can never be, can never go beyond kisses. Gwyneth must not, no, she must not, leave his employment because he will be miserable if she does. And no, she must not ask for more money or a shorter working week or his wife will suspect him.
And Gwyneth, such is her guilt and such the excitement engendered by these secret meetings, is content to believe him. The years pass quickly: she is forever looking forward, forever watching for a sideways look, forever half fearing, half hoping that Mrs Leacock will see and suspect. And the more guilty Gwyneth feels about the husband, the more fond she becomes of the wife, that bright little bird-woman, pitying her for the drabness of a life which contains only an open and legal love.
Gwyneth believes she has only to speak the words and Mr Leacock will be hers; and forever procrastinates, and never quite speaks them. Thus, lonely women do live, making the best of what they cannot help: reading significance into casual words: seeing love in calculated lust: seeing lust in innocent words; hoping where there is no hope. And so they grow old in expectation and illusion, and perhaps it is preferable to growing old in the harsh glare of truth.