Читать книгу Time and the Hour - Howard Spring - Страница 13

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Anthony would have been even more perplexed had he known what contrasts and contradictions inhabited Mrs. Wayland. He knew only the rather foolish exterior of that iron woman; Aunt Jessie’s taunts and innuendoes helped to build a screen that hid the widow next door. Mrs. Wayland may have pretended, always, to be more than she was; but she did really and passionately desire to be more than she was. She was born in Nottingham, where her mother kept a fly-blown corner shop, and when she was sixteen years old she was working in a factory: hard, dirty work, rough on the fingers. It was slave labour, and she knew she was a slave, but she wouldn’t accept all the conditions. She insisted on taking time off from slavery. When she was out of the factory she was not the girl who worked in the factory. Out of doors, her hands were always hidden in gloves. Indoors, they were busy making her own clothes, which she wore on Sundays to the Wesleyan chapel. There were plenty of Wesleyan chapels to choose from. Edna chose the one that the richest people attended. The gallery was free, but she didn’t sit in the gallery. She rented a pew downstairs—that was what all the toffs did—and she found the money somehow. She didn’t get on well with her mother, who called her a stuck-up little bitch: sometimes they came to blows. But Edna held to her way. She liked to be early in her pew, for both morning and evening service, and to listen to the organ playing its preliminary music, and to watch the toffs coming in. Almost all the men wore silk hats and kid gloves. The women, in large flowing hats and rustling skirts, smelled of exciting scents.

Edna didn’t rent a whole pew. There were four or five seats in a pew, and she had the one on the gangway. She had chosen that one with a general’s eye to the needs of battle. If you were first in your seat, then those who came later couldn’t help noticing you as you rose to let them pass, and they would say good evening to you and might even smile at you. Mr. and Mrs. Wayland and Tom Wayland occupied the seats inside hers, and Tom Wayland, as he passed in, could not help now and then brushing her knees. He would blush and say “Pardon” before kneeling in prayer on his hassock. She liked this so much that occasionally she would forget her hymn-book, and Tom Wayland would share his with her. Hymn-singing was what she liked best. She had a clear soprano voice, as good, she was sure, as that of anybody in the choir, including Lottie Wayland, Tom’s sister. She sang lustily because she was madly anxious to be invited to join the choir. The young people in it were all from the best families of the congregation. There was a cachet to it, and, for another thing, she would save the money she was paying for her pew.

Fine Sunday evenings in the summer were her especial delight. When the service was over, the sun would still be shining, and she would join the parade up and down the paths of a public garden near the chapel. She was eighteen now, and could lift a silken skirt with one hand and sport a parasol with the other as well as anybody. She had bought the wreck of a parasol for sixpence and beautifully re-covered it. She had learned to walk with a fine negligence, and, if she was no beauty, she was not bad to look at.

One autumn evening, she knew that the four Waylands were trailing behind her. She dropped her furled parasol, and in an instant Tom Wayland had picked it up and presented it to her, raising his hat. Lottie Wayland said good evening, and Mr. Wayland, too, raised his hat. Mrs. Wayland merely looked at her in the way in which a camel looks at most things. Then she found herself walking with the two youngsters behind the elders. She kept her head, but that night she walked home on clouds. She knew that Tom Wayland was taken with her. He talked to his sister about her voice, and said they should make room for her in the choir, and he invited her to come to the opening meeting of the Wesley Guild next week. He was to read a paper on the missionary work of David Livingstone.

Edna’s mother, wearing the sack-cloth apron that was her favourite négligé, was sitting in the kitchen. “Well, your Royal Highness,” she said. “Pick anybody up?” It was the sort of remark that was intended to lead to a quarrel, but that night Edna did not want to quarrel. She went straight to bed.

Thinking it over, she learned how easy it was not to quarrel, and how satisfyingly victorious one might feel over a person who was trying to quarrel all day long and whom one would not engage: victorious and virtuous. She needed the strength this gave her when she married Tom Wayland.

She didn’t know what a fool he was, and tried to make herself worthy of him. It would have surprised her to know that he wasn’t fit to lick her boots. They were never engaged to be married, but they began to go about together, and the first of Tom’s attempts to quarrel with her came when she didn’t want to go about so much. She was attending evening classes, and found to her surprise that she enjoyed learning. “You’re good enough for me as you are,” Tom said. She wouldn’t fight about it, but neither would she give up her classes. For one thing, she knew that Tom’s parents didn’t approve of all this, and she wanted to do something that would make her seem better in their eyes. This was hopeless, for there is no class division so sharp as that between those who have a little and those who have nothing. In the pew Mr. Wayland, not Tom, now sat next to Edna, and he never offered to share his hymn-book; and presently the Waylands changed their pew for one nearer the pulpit: a clear enough hint. After all, you owe it to the mercy seat to approach it in reasonably respectable company.

It was a dreary and unsatisfactory time for Edna. She changed from the factory to serving in a milliner’s shop, which was better for her hands. She went on with her classes in the winter and was about a good deal with Tom Wayland in the summer. On the whole, she was happier in the winter than in the summer, but she never reflected on what that might mean. She knew now that the Waylands would not accept her if they could help it, and a dull determination to make them accept her anyway obsessed her mind. But she would not have won her disastrous victory if Mr. Wayland had not himself handed it to her.

He was an accountant, and the treasurer of several funds. Odd thoughts must now and then have been turning in his mind as he knelt on his hassock and bowed his head. Could a thousand pounds from Fund A be transferred to Fund B in time for the annual audit; and, if so, what were the chances of covering that up with a thousand from C to B? That is simplifying it. There were complications more profound, and they had gone on for so long that even Mr. Wayland’s accounting brain saw that soon there would be no accounting for them. A footpath went over the railway line at a level crossing; and perhaps this, too, entered into his thoughts as he moved softly from pew to pew passing the plate that was lined with felt lest the chink of lucre should defile the holy places. “The offertory will now be taken. The stewards will wait upon you.” Oh, never, never, could a steward furtively abstract a solid and tangible half-crown, so different from figures in a book, little inky marks that could be taught to do such agreeable and profitable tricks. But only for a time, and then there was the foggy night when a man, going over the level crossing, might be held, by a stretch of the imagination, not to have heard the on-coming train. “The jury,” said the newspaper, “returned a verdict of accidental death, and the coroner expressed his sympathy with the widow and her children.”

And then another accountant looked into the little inky marks and it all came out. A lot of money had gone down the drain and no one knew whither. Perhaps the strange woman who turned up at the funeral could have said something. At all events, plenty was said about her. There was hardly a penny left for the Waylands, and Tom was now certainly no cop. But Edna had made up her mind to marry him, and she did so because she liked doing what she had made up her mind to do. She felt a grim pleasure in Mrs. Wayland’s collapse, in seeing Lottie Wayland working, as she had done, in a milliner’s shop, in saying nothing to her own mother. When the time came, she simply walked out with her things in a cheap suitcase and went to France with Tom Wayland. They were married at the British Consulate in Paris.

Not many people were kind to the Waylands in those days, but one of Mr. Wayland’s old friends, a hosiery manufacturer, offered Tom a job in his Paris office, for it was a big firm with an international trade. Tom jumped at it. “You will be able to help your mother,” his benefactor said. But Tom had no intention of helping his mother who had twitted him on his “low tastes” for years past. He hadn’t a word of French, and one reason why he now clung to Edna was that she would see him over that hurdle. In her evening classes, French was her love. Her teacher for the last two years had been a Frenchman whose method was little more than conversation. Edna could now prattle tolerably, and though she had long ceased to think of making herself worthy of Tom, she was glad that this would be of use to him. She knew how he was longing to get out of a town where all his acquaintances knew the Wayland story, and where many of them thought they knew more than, in fact, had ever happened.

She was twenty-one.

The idea of living in Paris was exciting to Tom Wayland. Brought up in a stupid home, he had stupid ideas about most things, Paris among them. It wasn’t what he had expected. His work was hard and uninteresting; his wages were contemptible; and he hadn’t the resolution to take himself in hand as his wife had done. His temper was not improved by his knowledge of her contempt, never expressed in words. They lived in a meagre apartment, and Edna learned to extract value from every sou. She went to the markets and could soon chaffer over a ha’penny with the best. She read the French newspapers and French books and tried to bring Tom on by talking to him in French. He told her to stop that monkey-chatter. He was an Englishman, wasn’t he?—and a Nottingham man at that, he added, as though that clinched it—and he didn’t want any bloody foreign lingo.

“But, Tom, we’re living in France.”

“Let France learn English, then.”

“Fortunately, some Frenchmen do.”

That touched him on the raw, for they would have been near starvation on his wages, and Edna had begun to take in pupils. She taught by the simple method of talking to them and reading to them from books, and she was good at it. She soon had as many pupils as she could deal with; and there would be times when some would be in the apartment when Tom returned from the office. He could hardly wait for the door to be shut behind them before demanding if the place had to be littered with frogs. He hated them because he knew that his own inefficiency made them necessary.

She was twenty-three when Lottie was born. Lessons were abandoned during her pregnancy and for six months afterwards. That was a hard time. Tom quarrelled with her for giving him a child, and she replied that the child would be all right: it would be her responsibility not his. He said: “Some frog’s responsibility, I shouldn’t wonder,” and all that had arisen from the titillation of knees brushing in the Wesleyan pew ended with those words. Edna did not answer them; she did not even look daggers, as they say; but if Tom wanted a woman after that he had to go elsewhere. She never knew, and never cared, whether he did or not.

Henri Hamel was among her pupils when she began again to teach. They had been youngsters till now, but Henri was twenty-one. He was from Provence, he had a small allowance from his father and a small apartment, and he was studying painting at Julian’s. It did not take Edna long to perceive that she was a greater attraction than her lessons. It was difficult to make Henri talk English. He babbled away in French about painting, about books, about music. He wanted her to visit galleries with him, to go to concerts, to dine with him, and to visit his apartment. She put him off by asking what they could do with Lottie.

“Why,” he cried, “we would carry her in turns. I have carried babies for many girls, and,” he said, smiling hardily, “many girls have carried babies for me.”

She liked him. He was impudent and amusing, and he knew what he was talking about. He brought books of reproductions and talked to her about pictures, and he was for ever sketching her and the baby. Soon all pretence that he came for lessons was over. She would make coffee, and Henri would produce a hip-flask and pour in cognac.

One afternoon he said: “Now there is one thing where this so terribly obstructive baby can be a help, not a hindrance.”

A check cloth of red and black was on the table. He left the coffee things on it, took a baton of bread from the sideboard, broke it in two, and put that there, also. “A simple meal,” he said, “coffee and bread, for this woman is poor. You remember, Edna, the picture I show you by Chardin? Well, this will be better.”

He had brought a canvas and paints, and he now produced a handful of dandelion flowers and stuck them into a gay mug from Quimper. “You see, this woman is so poor she has used the leaves for salad, but she loves flowers and cannot afford to buy any, so she uses the simple pissenlits. Till now we have sketched. Now we paint.”

He arranged and rearranged the things on the table; then finally put a kitchen chair where he wanted her to sit. He said: “The woman has finished eating. She is now feeding her child.”

Edna said: “Oh, no, Henri. No.”

He propped the canvas against the back of a chair, put another ready for work in front of it, squeezed a few colours on to the palette. “An art student sees many women, but he does not know them. I shall not know you. I shall be seeing only the poor woman with her child.”

She bared her breasts, took up the child, and sat down. He came and took hold of her naked shoulders, and turned her about the way he wanted her. Then he arranged the stuff of her clothes, and as he did that his hands brushed her breasts. She trembled to the marrow.

He painted for an hour, chattering to keep her relaxed. Then he said: “To-morrow, at the same hour—yes?”

“Yes.”

The picture was finished, and a month later Henri asked her to go with him to an exhibition where it was being shown. This time he did not wait for her to object that Lottie would be in the way. “There is the woman who cooks my dinner. She has nine children, and the youngest is now twenty years old. Between them, they weigh many tons. They are whales. She will make nothing of this sardine. She expects us at half past two.”

It was a beautiful day of early spring. Henri carried the child. The flower-woman’s baskets were piled with daffodils and mimosa. Edna had never been so happy in her life. She felt like a convict who has slipped his chains and got out on to the moor. They left Lottie with a huge complacent woman who asked when the child would be called for. Henri said: “A dix heures—même onze.” That seemed all right to the woman, and Edna laughed. “Plutôt à cinq heures, madame,” she said. The woman smiled broadly at Henri, whom she seemed to comprehend, and said: “Nous verrons. En tout cas, restez tranquille.”

But that was the last thing Edna could do. She felt as tranquille as champagne effervescing in crystal. Of her own accord, when they were in the street, she tucked her arm through Henri’s. He patted her hand and said simply: “Ça va mieux.” He was in no hurry to get to the gallery. He trotted her along the quays and the boulevards. It was all new to her: she had never had time for this sort of thing. The barges on the water, the fishermen, the mist of opening leaves trembling against the blue sky, the jewels and dresses in the shops: she was so happy that she possessed it all while wanting none of it. “Tu es contente?” He had not given her a tu before. She nodded, too exalted to answer.

It was five o’clock when they came to the gallery: not much of a gallery, but a gallery flaming with glory, for Henri’s painting was marked “Sold.” They did not stay long. They hardly stayed at all, but she would always remember the picture she never saw again: the child’s mouth at her breast, her own recognisable face, the dandelions shining in brave gold over the poverty of the broken loaf. She had hardly taken this in when Henri seized her arm and abruptly whisked her outside. She saw that he was crying, and said nothing.

But he was soon recovered: he was shot up, indeed, to an exaltation that matched her own. He laughed and chattered, but he did not speak about the picture. They drank a glass of wine at a table on the pavement, and then they walked again till the dusk came down: a purple dusk in which lights began to bloom and the pulse of the day merged slowly into the pulse of the night. They ate dinner in a restaurant noisy with youngsters whom Edna took to be students. Some of them passed the time of day with Henri, and one of them came up and slapped him on the shoulder and investigated Edna with frank eyes. She didn’t know how she was looking, but she felt beautiful. The youngster said: “Alors, Henri. Vous faites du progrès. Félicitations!”

They went to a music-hall where the jokes were broad and the girls bare, and then they took another glass of wine. It was eleven o’clock when Edna reclaimed Lottie. The woman looked at them as though her eyes could divine and judge their day’s doings. “Ça marche?” she asked with a smile, and Edna said simply: “A ravir, madame.”

“Bon, alors!”

Henri found a cab, and they drove to Edna’s apartment with the sleeping baby cradled in his arm. On the doorstep he handed her to Edna, and then, as she stood there clutching that bundle, they had for a long moment nothing to say. The cabby whom Henri had told to wait shouted impatiently, and Henri said: “Demain? A la même heure?” She said: “Oui. Et pour toujours si tu veux.”

He kissed her rather hastily and said: “Si tu savais comme je suis heureux!” and hurried off.

She stood watching till the cab disappeared round a corner, then opened the door and climbed the stairs, almost unable to use her limbs for joy. Tom was in the small shabby sitting-room, which suddenly looked intolerable. “This is a nice thing,” he cried—“out till nearly midnight, and with the child, too! Where have you been?”

She said: “In heaven,” and wearily carried Lottie through to the bedroom.

She wondered, next day, what she should do about her pupils. Between three and six, she had appointments with four of them, and Henri would arrive à la même heure, which could be anything between two and half past. It was another day of magical weather, and she didn’t want to spend it indoors. They would go wherever Henri wanted to go, and they would do whatever Henri wanted to do. She wrote a notice and pinned it to the outside of her door. “Madame Wayland regrets that she has had to leave town on urgent business.” She fed Lottie, but she was too excited to eat anything herself. She put on the few bits of finery she had, and sat down to wait. But she could not sit for long. She was restlessly up and down, aware that soon many things would have to be considered, but unable to think, for Henri would be here at any moment.

He did not come—not on that day or any day. She left the notice on the door, and lay on her bed, overwhelmed, and heard callers come, and pause, and go. It was late in the afternoon when the thought struck her that perhaps Henri had been one of the callers, that he had read the notice, taken it for dismissal, and gone away. She went out then and tore down the notice, but she could not believe that he had come. He would not have stood there dumbly. Not Henri. He would have shouted and banged and rattled the handle; and anyway, she said to herself with sad insight, even if he had done none of these things, I should have known if Henri was there.

When Tom was due to return, she roused herself and cooked his meal. But Tom did not come, either. At breakfast that morning he had been morose and silent. She did not know that on the day which she had chosen for her joyous and revealing escapade with Henri, Tom had been given notice that in a week’s time his employers would do their best to keep their affairs going without his assistance. He had come home in a mood of self-pity, and, more creditably, with a realisation for the first time of his own shortcomings. He was ready to go on his knees, to ask for pardon, and to promise an unlikely amendment. He had found an empty flat and a wife who, when at last she returned, was oddly lit up and too aloof even to give him contempt. So, to hell with her, he thought the next night: he would find his consolations elsewhere. He came home stinking of drink at eleven o’clock and fell on to his bed without undressing. It was not until the following Monday, when his notice was up, and he dawdled intolerably over his breakfast, that he told her. She still persisted in trying to make him speak French, and said: “Depêches-toi, Tom. Tu seras en retard au bureau.” He grinned. “No more bureau for Tom. The bureau’s given Tom a nice long holiday. Little Edna’s the breadwinner now.” At ten o’clock he took his hat and said: “They say that springtime is the best for seeing Paris. I’m going to check on that.”

“Will you be in to lunch?”

“We’ll see. On the whole, old girl, it may be best if I don’t pry into your amours.”

He never worked again, and became a fearful liability. Till Lottie was ten Edna worked like a horse. The pupils began to arrive now at nine in the morning, and sometimes the last of them left at nine at night. She was in a state of mental and physical and spiritual exhaustion when Tom died of the tuberculosis that his erratic life engendered. She looked without pity on the man in the coffin—the man she had once striven to be worthy of. She had kept a home of a sort for him to come back to as long as he needed it; and she had done so at tremendous cost. In all those years she had hardly stirred out of her apartment. She knew little of Paris save her immediate neighbourhood and when she thought of her day out with Henri she might have been thinking of a day in paradise accorded, as a refinement of torture, to one of the damned. She never solved the mystery of Henri’s disappearance and never tried to. She would rather think that death had suddenly overtaken him than know that he was happily living, with her forgotten after a moment’s aberration regretted. She remembered how, that day, whatever she may have looked, she felt beautiful. When she looked into the mirror now she saw that the woman in her early thirties was gaunt, greying, and a little odd.

This was the woman who for the past two years had lived next door to Auntie Jessie in Megson Street, and who couldn’t bear the sight of dandelions. She left Paris as soon as she had put Tom, and so much else, underground. She came back to England with little more than a bi-lingual daughter ten years old and a not very good Sèvres tea-set. She didn’t want Nottingham again. For aught she knew, her mother was still alive. But she wanted the sort of town she had known, and Bradford was as good as any. She wanted pupils, too, or she could not live; but now she would have to teach English people French instead of French people English. But no more pupils in the house, she promised herself. During the last two years, she had established herself, in her indomitable fashion, as a “correspondence school.” It meant a lot of hard work, but she was making ends meet by that snowy March night when Dick Hudson rapped on her door, concerned about the future of his son Chris.