Читать книгу The Willow Cabin - Pamela Frankau - Страница 6

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Coming into the dark-panelled hall from the gloomy February afternoon, Margaret Radcliffe-Preston found two letters on the table. One was for Caroline; she glanced at the envelope; it was light brown in colour, an expensive and slightly affected type of stationery, addressed in small, intelligent handwriting; a man’s handwriting. She carried it upstairs with her and Caroline came out of the drawing-room as she reached the first floor.

Until this moment, Margaret had been feeling charitably towards her daughter. Three days had passed since the play’s opening. The problem of Caroline looked as though it would presently solve itself. The press-notices and the personal congratulations were making it clear to Margaret that there might be a future wherein the girl would cease to be an agonising liability and emerge, in contradiction to all previous theories, as an asset.

There was nobody to whom her mother could confide the sudden relief. There never had been anybody. Leonard hated to talk about Caroline; he had made his gesture long ago and he blinked at the size of it; he had settled in his mind for the fact that in taking on Margaret, he had taken on also a stepdaughter, who might have been the child of a previous marriage. Being a man, she thought, it was easy for him to assume that if a problem were not discussed, it did not exist. He was too simple a creature to know the dark ways that she had walked for twenty years; he never guessed that she drank off a mixture of guilty responsibility and self-justification every morning of her life. This was the secret place; nobody shared it. Her sentimental younger sister might have understood. But Margaret had never found it possible to talk to Evelyn, who was liable to burst into tears about it all, and make wet, flowery protestations until her sister stepped with disgust into a mood of cold sarcasm.

She was as lonely now in the beginning of peace as she had been for years in guilt and anxiety.

Yet, as always, the sight of Caroline put peace away. Margaret would not face the truth, that they were antipathetic to each other; that their personalities in contact made for discord; that they were two people who had no meeting-ground. That was not to be borne; that was an additional weight thrown into the scale on the side of guilt. Mothers must love their daughters; daughters must love their mothers. And loving, for Margaret, meant liking. Yet here she was, jarred by the sight of Caroline and receiving an atmospheric retort of cheeky hostility before either had spoken a word.

The girl must have been sitting in the drawing-room; but she had not turned up the lights and stood now on a background of shadowy gloom. For some reason known to herself, she was dressed in a green sweater and a pair of brown corduroy trousers. Peering at her, Margaret saw that she wore no make-up and that she had a glass in her hand. It was early to be drinking, not yet five o’clock.

“Wotcher,” said Caroline, “I want to talk to you.”

“Come up to my room, then. I must change. We are going to a cocktail-party.”

“Okay,” said Caroline, “I’ll just get myself a refill.”

“Isn’t it rather early for that?”

The girl stared at her. “Is it? I don’t know what the time is.”

“Not five o’clock yet. Here is a letter for you.”

Caroline took it, examined it for a moment, then put it unopened in the pocket of her corduroys. The gesture was annoying. Margaret went up to her room, the Louis Quinze room that always reassured her and made her feel safe. She was comfortably swaddled in her satin dressing-gown and sitting before her mirror when Caroline returned. Caroline sat down on the bed.

“Please, Caro—how many times must I tell you? Not on my bedspread.”

“Oh, sorry.” She slithered off and threw herself into the chair beside the electric fire, sprawling, long-legged, with the glass in her hand. She took a drink from the glass, put it on the floor, sat up and crouched forward, with her hands on her knees.

“Look——” she said and stopped. In the glass Margaret saw her frown. “I have a thing on my mind....” She hesitated again. “I do wish I knew why it was so hard for us to talk to each other.”

“Is it hard?”

“You know it is.”

“I wasn’t aware of it.”

“There you are,” said Caroline. “Nothing I say ever gets through.”

Margaret sighed. “You haven’t said very much yet, have you?”

Caroline cocked her head on one side. “I wonder just how much you dislike me,” she said thoughtfully.

“Are you drunk?”

“No, Mamma. I can absorb three of these without becoming at all drunk; and this is only my second.”

“Dislike you....” Margaret repeated.

“Look,” said Caroline again. “This is it. I must go away.”

Margaret stared at the reflected face; it was pale.

“That’s all,” Caroline said. “Except that it won’t be all; we shall start arguing.”

“What on earth are you talking about? How can you go away? You’re in work; this play will run for months.”

“I know. I don’t mean that. Oh dear, oh dear, oh bloody dear, how difficult this is. And it oughtn’t to be. I’ve got myself into such a private mood about it that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to talk.”

(A private mood; a secret place that nobody shares; yes, Margaret thought, I know about that. But why should you have this thing?)

“I want to go away from this house and live somewhere else,” Caroline said; she was shivering so much that her teeth chattered on the words. She raised the glass to her lips. “I’m sorry. Don’t be hurt; don’t be cross. I just can’t stand it any more.” She put down her glass and began to pace across the room and back; one of her most irritating tricks, Margaret thought mechanically.

“It isn’t your fault. And I think you’ll probably like the idea once you get used to it.”

Margaret said, “How very thoughtful of you to take my views into consideration at all.”

Caroline halted by the window and stood looking out. She said, “Oh, hell.”

“Why have you got yourself into such a state? What is the matter with you?”

Caroline said, “I can’t explain. It’s been going on for ages. You could say, if you liked, that my integrity has been taking a wallop.”

“Now you’re talking Double Dutch.”

“Well, the plainest way I can put it is that I’ve taken a room in an hotel and I propose to move there on Sunday.”

“Caroline, will you please turn round and look at me; don’t go on talking to the window.”

The girl turned slowly; she looked ill and ugly now, narrowing her slanted eyes, pursing her lips together.

“All I propose to say for the moment,” said Margaret, “is that when you make a decision of this kind, it is better to face the issues involved. And you are not facing them.”

“I don’t think I know about Issues,” said Caroline. “People are always talking about them and they seem to me a lot of——.”

“That is a filthy word.”

“Yes, well....”

“The issue in this case is your own future. Putting aside questions of gratitude and family-feeling, you must realise that it is very important for you to have a home and a background; more important for you, perhaps, than for most people.”

“Why? Because I’m a bastard?”

Margaret said, “You gain nothing by this language, my dear. I wasn’t thinking of your birth. I was thinking of your character, of the sort of person you are.”

“Do you know what sort of person I am?”

“Unfortunately, I do.” This was not the answer that she had meant to make; the baffling demon was at work, giving her the lines.

“Then you’d better tell me,” said Caroline roughly.

“I don’t think we’ll talk about it any more now.”

Caroline’s voice cracked. “Don’t you see, if we don’t talk about it now, we never will? I’ll go to-night and that’ll be the end of us.”

Margaret shivered. She despised herself for asking the question that had been in her mind since the beginning:

“This idea of yours, is it because of some man?”

Caroline hesitated. She took two paces and said, “No; not in the way you mean. Would that matter?”

“Of course.” (How small my voice sounds; and now she is looking at me as though she were sorry for me; I never saw her look like that before.)

“It wouldn’t be the first time, for me,” Caroline said.

Absurd to think that she was going to cry. She took a cigarette quickly from the box on her dressing-table. The flame of the match blurred, broke into small pointed rays of light. She could not speak.

“You do mind,” Caroline said slowly and thoughtfully. “But you knew, didn’t you? You must have known. It isn’t a thing one talks about. I thought you——”

“Stop,” Margaret said. “All I want is for you to go out of this room and leave me alone.”

The blurred figure before her eyes lifted its hands once, then dropped them. It shrugged its shoulders and went.