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THE FIRST WEEK OF DECEMBER

The approach of Christmas brought more perplexities than promise of pleasure to those who lived at Ten Pollitt Place.

Justin wished he could hibernate throughout the festive season. His club would be closed. An old friend who usually asked him to stay for two or three of those dreaded and difficult days, had died during the year, and most of Justin’s other old friends were either too busy struggling through their dotage to remember him or were being entertained by younger members of their own families. Lady Victoria had already gone to a niece in Bournemouth. Lady Beatrice had cadged an invitation from some Americans to spend Christmas with them on the Riviera. Lady Farless was giving an ambitious house-party in Cumberland, and even had Justin been asked, he couldn’t have faced it, let alone the long journey. If he didn’t bestir himself he would be reduced to nibbling biscuits alone in his room. Perhaps the Fawleys would be free on Christmas Eve? He had only a nodding acquaintance with either of them and had never sought to enlarge it, but surely the spirit of Christmas would excuse a belated outburst of friendliness. He might rake up, from among his less cherished acquaintances, half a dozen guests to meet them. It could be a kind of cocktail-party, from seven to nine, with those slender but insidiously filling things to eat that Garrows supplied ready­-made at their delicatessen counter. Mrs Muller would know what to get. On Christmas Day, Miss Tredennick was certain to be at home to him and a few of her friends for an old-fashioned tea, followed fairly soon by drinks. He needn’t bother about dinner that night. As for Boxing Day and that diabolical invention the super-Boxing Day which followed it—for Christmas that year fell on a Sunday—if nobody asked him out, he’d just have to ring the changes between some of those goodish, semi-residential hotels in which South Kensington seems to specialise. But what a bore,—what a depressing bore the whole thing was! He reminded himself of a sentence he had used in one of his own novels. In the winter one can always cheer oneself up by imagining that one will be happier in the summer: but in the summer one has no such consolation. But the epigram didn’t make him any happier.

Miss Tredennick, to whom the passing of every day was a problem, felt no special apprehension over Christmas. She would have her usual little tea-party on Christmas Day,—the descendants of various uncles and aunts of hers, who would come from a sense of duty or, to put it less kindly, for mer­cenary reasons,—after all, the old lady must leave her money to somebody—one or two half-forgotten friends and of course Mr Bray. She had considered asking Mrs Fawley but had decided that it wouldn’t be wise to become too friendly with her. Besides, her husband, though no doubt a most excellent man, was hardly suitable for a drawing-room. But the success or failure of her party didn’t weigh very much with Miss Tredennick. Whether she enjoyed her Christmas or not would depend on events outside the house,—particularly those which occurred at Number Seven across the way.

Since the glorious morning when she had seen Hugo’s handiwork on the yellow door, very little had rewarded her vigilance, and her Journal would have been miserably dull if she hadn’t taken to interlarding the lean narrative with more and more daring scraps of poetry.

‘Where are you going, my pretty maid?’

‘To buy something useful, Sir,’ she said.

‘The strongest incentives require preventives,

And a maid is quickly betrayed,’ she said.

She wished she could remember her father’s spicy continua­tion of the ditty. Originally she had hated Y.V. for her wanton behaviour. Now she hated her twice as much because her behaviour was not wanton enough.

Mrs Muller’s problems were for the most part domestic. Like Magda (and unlike any of the other five people in the house), she was not without some feeling for the religious aspect of the Festival, but her chief preoccupation was the need to do the shopping for so many days in advance and to plan her time so that she could cope with the extra work which the season would thrust upon her. Miss Tredennick would be sure to give her usual party and Mr Bray had already announced that he didn’t expect to be going away for Christmas this year. Even though he had no claim on her for extra service, it would not be right to let the old gentleman fend for himself. And she couldn’t rely on Magda as fully as she had done the year before. However, at all costs, she must plan a treat for Hugo. He should have his little Christmas-tree of course, but he ought to have a little party as well. Perhaps she could manage one on Boxing Day. But whom should she ask to it? He wouldn’t care for such few friends as she had, and he didn’t seem to have any of his own.

She needn’t have worried about him. On that very morning, the dustman had asked him what he was doing over Christmas, and Hugo had said, in a pathetic voice, ‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’ ‘Why, aren’t they taking you to the pantomime, or letting you ask some of your pals into tea?’ Hugo shook his head and said, ‘I haven’t any friends. You see, I can’t play games like other boys, and I don’t enjoy being with them.’ The dustman frowned thoughtfully and then said, ‘Well, the wife and I are having some of her nephews and nieces to tea at six on Christ­mas Day. You’ll be most welcome if you’d care to come,—that’s to say if your mother would let you, which I don’t suppose she would.’ Hugo beamed with pleasure. ‘What, come to tea with you? Oh, I should love to. But you will talk to me, won’t you?’ ‘Oh yes, I’ll do that, all right. But be sure to ask your mother. Otherwise I might get into trouble.’ Hugo was saying, ‘Oh, I can manage Mother all right,’ when he looked up and saw Magda scrubbing the front-door step, which some dog had fouled for the second time that morning. Though she was on her knees and had her back turned to the area, he was sure she had been listening. He whispered, ‘Yes, I’ll ask Mother. Magda might try to stop me, but Mother wouldn’t.’ So for Hugo, Christmas already held the promise of a treat such as his mother could never provide for him. He was already filled with happiest anticipations, not only of the party itself, but of its aftermath—the glowing memories it would leave behind, and the chance it might give him of playing the host in his turn, though he hoped his party would be a party for two.

Magda had indeed overheard the conversation, but judged it wiser not to mention it to her mother there and then. Having plans of her own (or hoping she had), it would be risky for her to interfere with the plans of other people. All her hopes of a happy Christmas centred round two days,—the evening before Christmas Eve and Tuesday, the second Boxing Day. Robert had vowed that by some means or other—even if he had to invent an emergency-call to his office—he would break loose from Dorothy on one of those evenings, if not on both. Could Magda keep them both free? She promised she would, and was even then seeking for some excuse which would spare her telling too downright a lie. She had a girl­friend, who, if approached with tact, might give her an alibi without asking too many questions. The subterfuges to which intriguers are driven ill accorded with Magda’s true character, and at any other time would have sat heavily upon her con­science. But having already committed, as she thought, the awful sin against the Holy Ghost, for which there is no for­giveness, she could now think more lightly of what in the past would have seemed an enormity.

Meanwhile, Dorothy, on whose intentions and movements the happiness of two people was so closely hinged, was more at peace with herself than she had been for a very long time. It was true that her bolder plans had fallen through. She could not tear Susan away from the flat in Brighton, and Louise showed no sign of asking her and Robert to join them in Cambridgeshire. (That was Robert’s fault. He’d been so boorish the last time he had stayed there. One had to be his wife to understand him and make the necessary allowances.) But she wasn’t sorry to be back in London. She had found dear Susan difficult at times, and far too energetic. Besides, she still had a good deal of shopping to do for Miss Tredennick, not to mention her own.

It was with the best excuses that she had lunch at Garrows nearly every day. When she went up to the restaurant on the third floor, she looked with contemptuous pity at the people lolling in the big lounge which Garrows provided for their wearier customers. Little did Garrows know, she thought, what sort of people made so brazenly free of it. They looked like a collection of refugees harried from one end of Europe to the other. Here was an old man with big holes in the soles of his shoes, leaning back in a chair and munching sandwiches bought at a coffee-stall. There, a fat woman, with a nose so red that you’d think she was pickled in port, was snoring, stretched out at almost full length on a sofa. And as for those three young women sitting near her—Dorothy shuddered and turned away fastidiously, thanking God that she was in Garrows on genuine business, and was not yet reduced to such undignified shifts to get through the unwanted hours of the day. (To reassure any nervous shareholders, it may be said that Garrows are as well informed as Dorothy of what goes on in their rest-room, and know to a penny what contri­bution it makes towards their dividend.)

How blessed a thing it was to join legitimately the sisterhood of eager purchasers, whose gossip, at this season of the year, had an especially piquant quality. ‘I’m looking for a pair of gay but cosy bedroom-slippers for a gentleman. . . . Do you think this game will be quite noisy enough? Remember, the three Arbuthnot boys are coming! . . . But surely, blue is not a Christmassy colour? Green and red, perhaps, like holly and holly-berries, with silver splashes for the mistletoe. . . .’ Dorothy listened, not mockingly or censoriously as Aldous Huxley might have listened,—for such observations were always apt to remind her of his famous phrase about the children who never needed a laxative—but with a delight in which she felt no shame, almost persuading herself that she could discern a hidden beauty in this great annual parade of individualism, so blandly aloof from any kind of moral, social or economic theorising. Floreat Garrows! So she shopped and lunched and shopped again, and the short days passed by with a succession of thrills.

Of course, there were the evenings to get through, when the shops were shut,—long evenings with Robert. But the change in him, which she had begun to notice before she went to Brighton, had gone still further. She now detected a trace of something spiritual about him. His face seemed less coarsely drawn, his mind less wooden,—almost as if he had been refined by suffering, while she was away. Had he been pining for her? Had there been too much take and too little give on her side of the marriage? Henceforward, she would really make an effort to adapt her life to his. She would try to take an interest in broken watches and his irksome little hobbies. When he talked to her about what went on in the middle of the atom—though he hadn’t done so for a very long time—she wouldn’t change the subject at once and say, ‘I’ve just read such a good book about Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I do wish, for once, you’d read something like that. It’s so uncivilised to cut oneself off from everything that makes life worth while.’ (Oh the long wrangles that they used to have! ‘At any rate,’ he’d say, ‘the things I do and like are useful things.’ And she would try to explain that the cultivation of the mind was valuable for its own sake, and had a higher form of utility than any tinkering with material objects. ‘You’d say a bathroom is more useful than a drawing-room. I say it’s only use is to fit people for living in a drawing-room. It’s on a lower plane.’ But he wouldn’t or couldn’t see her point, and would walk away glumly while she was still talking.)

No, there must be no more silly quarrels like that. She was right in her views, of course, but she must accept it that he couldn’t share them. After all, he had many sweet qualities. He’d never caused her the slightest anxiety so far as other women were concerned—though, if it came to that, she’d kept her own side of the bargain no less faithfully. But men were more naturally promiscuous than women,—or so people said. Ought she to make it clear that if he wanted her to be what she had been to him in their early life together, she wouldn’t refuse?