But what was to be done about Chickover?
When she saw herself in the glass in the mornings before dressing,
Catherine felt she had better not go. The exclamations of the Fanshawes
had confirmed her worst fears, and she knew for certain she was looking
worn out. How could she go down there with Christopher, looking worn
out? Virginia would notice it at once, and think she wasn’t happy and
blame Christopher. Stephen would notice it too, and be sure she wasn’t
happy, and triumph. While as for Mrs. Colquhoun----
She put Chickover out of her thoughts, and went and bought a lip-stick.
The Fanshawes were giving a dance that night, and had invited them, and
Christopher insisted on going. Useless for her to say she couldn’t
dance; he said she wouldn’t be able to help herself with him. It
appeared that he loved dancing, and only hadn’t danced much before his
marriage because, as he explained, he couldn’t stick the fool-girls one
met at dances. After all, it wasn’t possible to dance in absolutely
stony silence, and what to say to these girls positively beat him. If
one could have made love to them, now--Catherine winced--but one
couldn’t even do that, because then one would have got tangled up and
have to marry them. Marry them! Good God.
Now came this invitation, and he jumped at it, and all she could do was
to make the best of herself. So, as a first step, she went out and
bought a lip-stick; and such had been the innocence of her life in these
matters that she blushed when she asked for one. But she wasn’t pleased
with the effect, and, anxiously examining herself before Christopher
came in to dinner, was inclined to think it only made her look older and
certainly made her look less good.
He, however, noticed nothing, for by this time George’s electric lights
had been heavily shaded, and he kissed her with his usual delight at
getting back to her, and the stuff all came off, and she wondered what
other women did to keep it on, or whether one either had a lip-stick or
a lover, but never both.
She didn’t enjoy the dance. He couldn’t make her dance, however much he
tried and she tried; and after struggling round the room with her and
treading lamentably on each other’s toes, he gave up and let her sit
down. But it wasn’t possible for him, hearing that throbbing music, not
to dance, and Catherine, looking on at him going round with one girl
after the other, all of whom seemed miracles of youth and prettiness,
didn’t enjoy herself.
The girls appeared to languish at him. No wonder. He was far the most
attractive young man there, she thought with an ache both of pride and
pain. She didn’t enjoy herself at all.
The Fanshawes were very kind--almost too kind, as though they were eager
to hide the facts of her own situation from her--and kept on bringing up
elderly men who weren’t dancing and introducing them. But the elderly
men thought the small lady with the wandering eyes and inattentive ears
and reddened mouth rather tiresome, and soon melted away; besides, they
preferred girls. So that whenever the Fanshawes looked her way they saw
her, in spite of their efforts, sitting alone.
At last, after Ned Fanshawe had sat with her a long time, his mother
came up with an elderly woman instead of an elderly man, and introduced
her, and she did stick. Like Catherine, she appeared to know nobody
there. They sat together the rest of the evening.
‘That’s my daughter,’ said the elderly woman, pointing out a very pretty
girl dancing at that moment with Christopher. ‘Which is yours?’
No, Catherine didn’t enjoy herself.
For the life of her she couldn’t help being rather quiet in the taxi
going home. Christopher had seemed to enjoy himself so much. All those
girls....
‘I loved that,’ he said, lighting a cigarette, and then drawing her to
him.
‘I thought you said you were bored by girls.’
‘Not if you’re there too. It makes all the difference.’
‘But I wasn’t much good to you.’
‘Why, just to know you were there, with me, in the room, made me happy.’
‘Do I make a good background?’ she asked, trying to sound amused.
He threw away his cigarette and took her in his arms. ‘Darling, were you
horribly fed up, sitting there? I tell you what--we’ll get a gramophone,
and I’ll teach you to dance. You’ll learn in no time, and then we’ll
dance together at these shows every night.’
‘Wouldn’t I be <i>tired</i>,’ said Catherine, making an effort to laugh; and,
instead of laughing, crying.
Crying. The worst thing possible for her eyes. She would be a real,
unmistakable hag in the morning.
‘Why, what is it, my precious little thing?’ exclaimed Christopher,
feeling her face suddenly wet, and greatly surprised and distressed.
‘It’s nothing--I’m just tired,’ she said, hurriedly wiping her eyes and
determined no more tears should screw themselves out.
‘I was a selfish idiot not to think how bored you must be,’ he said,
anxiously kissing and loving her. ‘I saw you talking to Fanshawe, and
thought you looked quite happy----’
‘Oh yes--so I was.’
‘Catherine--little thing----’
He kissed her again and again, and she kissed him back, and managed to
laugh.
‘Darling Chris,’ she said, nestling close, ‘I don’t believe I’m any good
at dances.’
‘You will be when I’ve taught you. You’ll dance like a little angel.
We’ll get a gramophone to-morrow.’
‘Oh no--don’t get a gramophone. Please, Chris darling. I can’t learn to
dance. I don’t want to. I’m sure I never could. You must go to dances
without me.’
‘Without you! I like that. As though I’d ever go to anything, or budge
an inch, without you.’
At this time they had been married five weeks.
There came another letter from Virginia; not quite so warm, because
nobody can keep at the same temperature uninterruptedly for weeks, but
still continuing to invite.
‘<i>We hope you and Mr. Monckton are soon coming here, dearest mother</i>,’
she wrote in her round, childish handwriting. ‘<i>I have to lie up most of
the time now, because I’ve begun the seventh month, and mother says that
that is the one to be most careful in, so that if you were to come now
we could have some nice quiet talks. Stephen is visiting in the parish,
but I think if he were here he would ask me to give you his love.</i>’
How far away it sounded. Another life, dim and misty. Stephen had
evidently told her nothing of his monstrous suspicions. Virginia was
prepared, dutifully as always, to accept her mother’s new husband. She
had disliked him very obviously that day at Chickover, but now she was
going to do her duty by him, just as she did her duty by everybody who
had a claim on it.
Catherine sighed, holding the letter in her hand. It seemed like the
splashing of cool water, a distant, quiet freshness, compared to her
fevered, strange, rapturous--but was it really rapturous?--life now.
An ache of longing to see Virginia stole into her heart. One’s children
and new husbands--how difficult they were to mix comfortably. Mothers,
to be completely satisfactory, must be ready for sacrifice, and more
sacrifice, and nothing but sacrifice. They mustn’t want any happiness
but happiness through, by, and with their children. They must make no
attempt to be individuals, to be separate human beings, but only
mothers.
She sat staring at herself in the glass, thinking. When the letter
arrived she was at her dressing-table, going through the now long and
difficult process of doing her face. Mrs. Mitcham had brought the post
in on tiptoe--she always now approached Catherine on tiptoe--laid it on
the table, and stolen out again quickly, neither looking to the right
hand nor the left, for by this time experience had taught her that if
she did look what she saw was likely to be upsetting.
Catherine paused in what she was doing to open the letter, and then sat
idly twisting it round her finger. She had been told of a woman in
Sackville Street by Kitty Fanshawe who ‘did’ faces, and had gone at once
and had hers done, and had been enchanted by the result. No more
elementary lip-sticks and powder for her. In this elegant retreat, at
the back of the building away from all noise, soothing to the nerves
merely to go into, she had lain back in a deep delicious chair, and an
exquisite young woman, whose own face was a convincing proof of the
excellence of the treatment, did things with creams and oils and soft
finger-tips; and when at the end--it was so soothing that Catherine went
to sleep--a hand-glass was given her and she was told to look, she
couldn’t help an exclamation of pleasure.
Well; this was a miracle. She not only looked ten, fifteen years younger
and really, really pretty, but she looked so very fashionable. A little
adventurous, perhaps, the last vestiges of the quiet country lady that
still had survived the rubbings-off of Christopher all gone, but
how--well, how <i>pretty</i>.
The only thing left to do was to go at once and buy a hat worthy of so
distinguished a complexion. She went straight to Bond Street, and on the
short walk discovered that people looked at her, saw her, instead of her
being, as she had lately been, so completely uninteresting that it made
her practically invisible.
Both the hat and the treatment were expensive,--the treatment more so,
because it didn’t last, and the hat at least for a little while did.
Impossible to have the treatment more often than very occasionally, as
it cost so much, and she accordingly bought a box containing everything
belonging to it except the young woman’s finger-tips, and tried to give
it to herself at home.
The results were rather unfortunate. She didn’t look like anybody in the
very least good. Mrs. Mitcham was secretly much worried. But she
persisted, hoping by practice to become clever at it; and it was while
she was in the middle of her daily struggles one morning, that
Virginia’s second letter arrived.
What was to be done about Chickover? How could she go there with
Christopher? Though he swore he would never go near the accursèd spot
again, she knew he would if she asked him to. But how painful, how
impossible it would be. Stephen was holding out olive-branches, for of
course Virginia would never have invited them without his approval; but
Stephen’s olive-branches were unpleasant things, she thought,
remembering him as she had seen him last, on the day of his horrible
accusations. To have met him last like that, and then find him on the
doorstep being the pleasant host to Christopher! And Virginia, kept
ignorant of everything except the fact of the marriage, bravely trying
to do her duty all round, and Mrs. Colquhoun profoundly hostile and
disapproving--why should her beloved Chris be exposed to such ordeals?
No, he shouldn’t be. But how could she go without him? Such were her
feelings for Christopher that the thought of being separated from him
even for the shortest possible visit was unbearable to her. Yet how not
go? Enmeshed though she was in her obsession, the natural longing of her
blood to see Virginia again yet tugged at her heart. If she could see
Virginia without the others! But that, she knew, was impossible.
Presently, when she had finished dressing, she went into the
drawing-room and looked up trains. Suppose she went on a Monday, and
came back on the Wednesday in time for dinner? No; she couldn’t endure
being away so long from Christopher. One night would be quite enough for
Chickover; there would be the whole afternoon and evening to talk in.
No; she couldn’t endure that either. What mightn’t happen to him while
she was away? The whole time her heart would be in her mouth. Why not do
it in a day? Go the first thing, and come back the last thing?
She looked up trains again. Chickover was so very far away; it took
hours to get there. But by leaving Waterloo soon after eight in the
morning she could be there by twelve, and the last train from there at
seven-twenty would get her back by midnight.
Yes; she would do that. No, she wouldn’t. There was another train at
eleven something, getting down at three. It was most important she
should look well and happy, and show those doubters and disapprovers
what a success her marriage was. She who was so well and happy--surely
there couldn’t be anybody in the world <i>more</i> well and happy, except for
sometimes being rather tired, which was nothing at all--must look it;
and if she had lines and hollows in her face the three would at once
jump to every sort of conclusion. The eleven o’clock train would give
her time to go to Maria Rome, the Sackville Street lady, for face
treatment first. There would still be four solid hours at Chickover. It
made the whole thing very expensive, of course, but it was well worth
it; for when they saw her so fresh and smooth they couldn’t but feel
that it was merely silly to think her marriage had been a mistake, or to
insist on measuring age and behaviour by years instead of by appearance.
How intensely she wanted to prove her happiness, to triumph in
Christopher!
She wrote to Virginia and told her she was coming down alone for the
afternoon the following Monday, just to be with her a little by herself;
Virginia wouldn’t want to see anybody she didn’t yet know very well in
her present state, and she and Christopher--she wrote of him as
Christopher, for all other ways of describing him were, she felt,
absurd--would come down together later on, after the baby was born and
Virginia was up and about again.
Then, at dinner, she told Christopher what she was going to do.
He didn’t like it. He hated the idea of her not being back till so late.
She was far too precious and tiny to go racketing off alone. What
mightn’t happen to her? He wouldn’t be able to do a stroke of work all
Monday for thinking of her. In fact, he took the news exactly in the way
Catherine would have wished him to, and she loved him, if possible, more
than ever. Naturally at the same time he made some extremely
disrespectful comments on Stephen’s personal appearance and general
character, though, as the old boy had been the means of making Catherine
marry him, he couldn’t help, he pointed out, liking him in spite of his
various and glaring defects; and as for Virginia, his opinion of that
girl was what it had always been, but he admitted that a mother might
probably see something in her, and that if Catherine felt herself
irresistibly impelled to go down and visit her, he supposed she had
better go and get it over.
‘She’s going to have a----’ began Catherine, but stopped. Really, she
couldn’t bring herself to tell him. She would have to sometime, but why
before it was absolutely necessary? Virginia’s baby would make her a
grandmother. Christopher would be married to a grandmother. If he hadn’t
up to now felt the difference in their ages this must inevitably wake
him up to it. To think of it made her feel raw, as if her skin had been
pulled off, and she left exposed, shrinking in an agonised apprehension
and sensitiveness.... Love, love--if only she didn’t love him so
much....
‘What is she going to have?’ he asked, as she stopped short, looking up
from the strawberries he was eating.
‘A happy afternoon, I hope,’ said Catherine quickly, turning red and
smiling nervously.
‘I should think so indeed--with you there,’ said Christopher. And added
under his breath, so that Catherine couldn’t hear and have her darling
little maternal affections hurt, ‘Young blighter.’