Britannia Mews Page 29

  “No,” said Treff shortly; and a moment later, with the malice of wretchedness and bad temper, added that of course he could always send one to Adelaide.

  3

  Alice closed her lips as firmly as possible. With age her front teeth had become more prominent, giving her a rather rabbity look. Treff continued to annoy.

  “I dare say she’d find a robin or two very gratifying. On the other hand, being Adelaide, she might not.”

  “I’m quite sure she wouldn’t.”

  Dodo, bored as usual by her elders’ conversation, swung round on the piano-stool and asked idly:—

  “Who’s Adelaide?”

  Alice at once dropped her defences and shot Treff an imploring look, which unfortunately irritated him. He said happily:—

  “Adelaide is my sister, dear child. Your mother’s cousin, and the family skeleton.”

  “I didn’t know we had one,” said Dodo. “How perfectly priceless!”

  “It wasn’t priceless at all,” said Alice angrily, “and I don’t wish it talked about. I shall send one of these cards to the curate.”

  “But I must know what she did! Uncle Treff, what did she do?” Treff put on a melodramatic air.

  “Horrible as it is to relate, poor Adelaide eloped with a drawing-master—”

  “How priceless!”

  “Whereupon Culvers and Hambros alike cast her off—”

  “They did nothing of the sort!” snapped Alice.

  “And never mentioned her name again. It was quite barbarous.”

  “I hope you remember how relieved you were,” cried Alice, “when Mr. Lambert didn’t come to Uncle’s funeral!”

  “Naturally. In those days I was a barbarian, a prig, myself.”

  “Well, what happened to her?” asked Dodo, beginning to lose interest.

  “Nothing, my dear. They simply lived in squalor. I hope they’re not living in squalor still, Alice?”

  “How should I know?”

  “It seems unnatural that you do not. I can’t believe that you’ve never taken a basket of goodies to Britannia Mews.”

  Dodo, her hands on the piano keys, struck a violent chord and swung round to stare.

  “Britannia Mews! They live in Britannia Mews?”

  “Or some such slum. Poor Adelaide—”

  “Britannia Mews isn’t a slum! It’s one of the smartest places in town! It’s where the Puppet Theatre is! Mother, what did you say was her married name?”

  “Lambert,” supplied Treff maliciously.

  “Mrs. Lambert! It’s their theatre! Mother, why on earth didn’t you tell me?”

  “My dear, I didn’t know it would interest you,” protested poor Alice. “I didn’t even know they still lived there—or that they had a theatre. I must say it sounds most unlikely.”

  “Not interest me!” Dodo pounced across the room and stood over her parent accusingly. “The one relation who is interesting—Mrs. Lambert! I’ve seen her! She’s the most wonderful-looking person—”

  “Dodo, when did you see her?”

  “At the Theatre. And last month, after I stayed the night with Sonia. If only I’d known she was my aunt—”

  “She is not your aunt. She’s a second cousin.”

  “If Uncle Treff is Uncle Treff his sister must be Aunt Adelaide. My aunt.” Dodo turned on Treff and stood over him in turn. “Tell me everything about her!” she ordered. “When did they elope? What was he like then?”

  “Dear child, I never even saw him. I was away at school.”

  “At school!” Dodo stared, making an obvious effort to grasp so great a passage of time. “Good God, it must have been crinolines!”

  “Nonsense,” said Alice sharply. “It was in 1886.”

  “Then they’ve been married over thirty-five—nearly forty years. I think that’s wonderful.”

  Alice put down the Christmas cards and with a certain dignity rose from her seat.

  “Your father and I have also been married nearly forty years: I have never thought of myself as wonderful. Adelaide persisted in the course she had chosen, though she was given every opportunity to return to her proper life—”

  “You mean her family wanted her to leave him?”

  “And I cannot see that the mere passage of time makes her into a heroine. If they have become the successful proprietors of a Punch and Judy show, I’m glad to hear it; but you’re throwing yourself into a great state of excitement over nothing.”

  The door closed behind her. In the silence that followed Dodo stood for a moment so completely lost in thought that her uncle’s voice made her start.

  “What are you thinking about, child?”

  “I’m thinking,” said Dodo slowly, “about something that’s lasted nearly forty years.”

  “A good many things have lasted forty years. I myself have lasted over fifty.”

  “Oh, you,” said Dodo absently.

  “And as your mother pointed out, such duration of a marriage isn’t uncommon.”

  “But against opposition!” flashed Dodo. “Her family wanted her to leave him. And you said yourself, they lived in squalor. And out of all that they’ve built up the marvellous Puppet Theatre and—and she heard him come out on the balcony … I saw her. I think it’s wonderful.”

  Mr. Culver hunched himself in his chair and closed his eyes. His spurt of malicious energy was dead; its only result had been to kill in him all desire to meet his sister Adelaide, who was evidently still the vigorous and overbearing character he remembered, and to make his situation with the Bakers extremely uncomfortable.

  4

  “Dodo, my dear,” said Mr. Hitchcock, “I’m drinking your health!”

  Dodo smiled automatically. He was a nice old duck, and very fond of her. At the other end of the Christmas dinner-table Mrs. Hitchcock looked a little sour; she thought Dodo had had too much sherry before dinner. (And so Dodo had; there weren’t any cocktails.) Tommy beamed, and Aunt Ellen—for Aunt Ellen was there too, the Hitchcocks were making a great fuss of her—observed, without false modesty, that Dodo was a very lucky girl. “They’re coming to-morrow,” she told Mrs. Hitchcock, “to go over the whole house from top to bottom; it’s the first time Tommy’s really seen it.” Tommy turned his beaming eye on her in a grateful look. (“He’s had too much sherry too,” thought Dodo unkindly.) It became obvious that everyone was waiting for her to say something, but Dodo successfully pretended to be overcome by shyness. She was pretending so much, these days, that it made her quite tired.

  At the Cedars, on Boxing Day, she had to pretend for three solid hours.

  Tommy called for her immediately after lunch, and to every one’s surprise Mr. Culver volunteered to join the expedition. “Now, Treff, you know they won’t want you,” said Alice briskly; but Dodo, still vaguely hopeful of her uncle’s support, said that they did. “The more the merrier,” said Dodo glumly. Tommy, on the other hand, obviously if silently agreed with Alice, and in the end it was decided that the young people should set out first, and Mr. Culver follow them in an hour’s time. “I dare say we shan’t have got farther than the basement,” said Dodo.

  If she was being thoroughly perverse, it was because she was thoroughly troubled; and all through the afternoon her trouble grew. For Tommy, going eagerly round the big house, was really rather sweet, and the sweeter and more enthusiastic he became, the more Dodo’s heart sank. What stairs, what corridors, pantries, cupboards! Tommy leapt up, along, into them with indefatigable energy, as though he were a house-agent. How can he, wondered Dodo, when he knows I hate it? When he knows I don’t want to live here? … As for Aunt Ellen, she was simply unprincipled. She didn’t want the Cedars, she wanted a flat; she was unloading the Cedars—on to Dodo. Dodo was to wrestle with eleven grates and a boiler, while Aunt Ellen luxuriated in electric heat.…

  Aunt Ellen was being brave about it.

  “You mustn’t feel you’re turning me out,” she explained. “You can think of me quite cosy and snug in my two room
s and a kitchenette!”

  “And a bath-room,” put in Dodo, who had seen the apartment contemplated.

  “Well, of course, dear.”

  “And isn’t there a maid’s room?”

  “There’s a cubby-hole which my old Martha says she can make do.” Miss Hambro laughed. “Martha and I are really too old to be separated.”

  “I suppose this had got rather beyond her.”

  Tommy said quickly:—

  “Dodo’s unnaturally modest about her housekeeping. Aren’t you, old thing?”

  Dodo gave him a long look, and for the first time read in his face something obtuse, almost relentless: the bland assurance of the male. In a gust of panic she thought, We’ve both changed! Tommy’s changed too! He—he’s dug himself in! She thought, I must talk to him at once, we must talk things out! And then a third thought struck her, so simple and obvious that only an hour or two earlier it would have made her hoot with laughter. She thought, I must talk to Mother.…

  When Treff arrived they were all, even Tommy, glad to see him, for he ignored altogether the immediate purpose of the visit and plunged into a vein of reminiscence which Miss Hambro at least found very agreeable. Treff had a good memory for bric-à-brac, and easily identified, for example, the Chinese vase cracked by Jimmy on a Guy Fawkes Day in the previous century. “That’s Rex,” he announced confidently, before an aged rocking-horse. (For the work of inspection continued; they reached the box-rooms.) “The one before was called Roy. And that—great heavens, that’s the Redan! My dear Ellen, do you remember Redanning?” “We all used to slide on it,” explained Aunt Ellen to Dodo, “when we were all children together”; and she looked at her cousin kindly. Hitherto Miss Hambro had shown rather a dislike for Treff, considering him selfish and affected, but the charm of these shared memories was irresistible. “The twins went down head-first,” mused Treff. “I wouldn’t. I remember I much preferred playing with you girls.” “You used to cut out paper dolls for us,” said Miss Hambro, “before we were allowed to use the scissors.” “My dear Ellen, when were you Hambros not allowed to do anything?” “That was Alice,” said Miss Hambro. “Alice all over,” agreed Treff.

  The young people listened to this conversation with natural indifference. Dodo was very tired—too tired even to recollect that one of the children sliding on the Redan had been, in all probability, her Aunt Adelaide; and genuinely too tired, that night, to go to the Tennis Club dance. She persuaded Tommy to take a sister instead, which regained her the ground lost with Mrs. Hitchcock, and herself went to bed at nine. She was still awake, however, when Alice came up an hour later—and called softly to her mother to come in.

  5

  Alice did so very willingly; there was nothing she liked better than to sit on her daughter’s bed and have a nice chat, and only regretted that Dodo offered her so few opportunities. She switched on the fire, to be cosier, and settled herself plumply by Dodo’s feet. “Now, isn’t this nice?” said Alice. “You were so sensible not to go out, my darling, and by to-morrow you’ll be quite rested!”

  Dodo said:—

  “Mother, I don’t want to marry Tommy!”

  To her utter amazement, Alice received this announcement with complete calm.

  “Don’t you, dear? That’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Nothing to worry about!” repeated Dodo indignantly. “When I’m engaged to him! When we’re supposed to get married in April—”

  “I mean,” explained Alice comfortably, “all girls have moments when they want to cry off. I had myself. It’s the idea of leaving home.”

  “It’s nothing of the sort. I want to leave home. I want to go and stay with Sonia in the Mews. I don’t want to go and live at the Cedars—and marry Tommy.”

  “That’s nonsense, dear. I know it’s a big place, but you’ll always have me to run to. And I must say, Ellen really surprised me: I’d no idea she could be so generous.”

  “Why is it generous to give me something she doesn’t want when I don’t want it either?”

  At last Alice began to look disturbed.

  “Dodo, don’t be so unreasonable. Of course you want it, really—just as you really want to get married. Every girl wants a house and a husband and a home of her own—”

  “I don’t,” said Dodo.

  “You make me wish I’d let you get married two years ago!”

  “Well, it would have been better, in a way. I mean, we were still in love then. Now Tommy just takes me for granted.”

  Alice brightened. For here was something she could understand—and with the greatest kindness and sympathy she reassured her daughter. No young man, explained Alice, could be expected to keep up for more than a month or two the first ardours of courtship. She drew examples from her own experience: Freddy, who began by being really wonderful with the twins, lost interest in boat-sailing almost as soon as Alice accepted him; quite often, in Somerset, he went fishing for the whole day without her. Girls just had to learn, said Alice wisely, not to think too much of themselves; there had to be give-and-take on both sides …

  Dodo listened for five minutes, her cheeks scarlet, her eyes very bright; then threw her pillow across the room, buried her face in the bolster, and burst into tears. Alice’s reassurance was complete; she knew what this was too, it was a plain attack of nerves, such as she had had herself—only much later, actually the night before her wedding. With soothing little words and gestures she put Dodo’s bed straight, and brought her a glass of water, and Eau-de-Cologne on a clean handkerchief. “There, my darling!” murmured Alice tenderly. “Mother understands!” Dodo’s lips moved against the pillow. “Good night, mother’s precious,” said Alice—and turned off the light.

  CHAPTER VII

  1

  How deceitful appearances could be! What pains, as well as pleasures, a double life can produce! What a lucky girl Dodo was, and how unhappy! She had kept up appearances so successfully that now she was the victim of them. Her mother couldn’t believe she didn’t really want to marry Tommy, just as Tommy couldn’t believe she didn’t really want the house: Dodo was honest enough to admit that both had reason. With one foot in Sonia’s camp she had kept the other firmly planted in Surbiton—consciously enjoying, for example, the contrast between the gin-parties in Britannia Mews and the dances at the Town Hall, encouraging Tommy in Surbiton, because there it was the thing to be engaged, and suppressing him in the Mews, because there it wasn’t. Now life had so to speak caught up with her, offering a definite and final alternative; but when Dodo made her choice, and the honest one—life wouldn’t accept it.…

  After meditating earnestly for several days, she perceived, however, a ray of hope. Her mother couldn’t understand, nor her uncle—but what of Tommy himself? Was it possible that he too had been victimized? That he didn’t really want the house either? (The obvious corollary, that he didn’t really want to marry herself, Dodo simply put out of court.) But was it possible, even, that he didn’t really want to be a chartered accountant? Suppose that he too had secret ambitions, longed to be a writer, or a painter, instead? This idea put a totally different complexion on him: Dodo quite jumped at the notion of sharing penury, cooking meals, darning his socks. Had not Mrs. Lambert done the same for her husband? And now look at the Puppet Theatre! The bright confusion of these ideas made Dodo happier than she had been for some months, and naturally impatient to put her unsuspecting fiancé to the test.

  About a week later, when Tommy was dining in Oakley Road, Alice and Freddy went out afterwards to play bridge with the Ambroses. Treff was at the Cedars. Dodo waited to be sure her mother wasn’t coming back for anything—Alice often forgot her handkerchief, or her money, or a last message—and let Tommy kiss her once or twice, and then thrust him resolutely down at one end of the sofa while she faced him from the other.

  “Tommy, let’s talk,” said Dodo. “I don’t know why it is, but we never seem to talk to each other.”

  Tommy grinned affectionately.

&n
bsp; “My dear old thing, considering we see each other nearly every day—”

  “I know we do, but we don’t talk. We just chatter. I sometimes feel you’ve no idea what I’m really like. Perhaps I don’t know what you’re like.” Dodo looked at her fiancé with great earnestness. “Tommy, if you told me for instance you really hated being a chartered accountant, and wanted to chuck it and start something else—even if it meant being poor and having to struggle—I shouldn’t mind a bit. Truly I shouldn’t! I’d understand. I don’t need a big house or a car—”

  “Darling, you must have gone bats. I like being a chartered accountant.”

  “Oh, God!”

  “I do wish you wouldn’t swear. And even if I weren’t particularly keen, after all the money it’s cost my people, I certainly wouldn’t be such a cad as to chuck it. I don’t see what the deuce you’re driving at.”

  “We’ve got such frightfully different outlooks.”

  “Well, you don’t seem to have much sense of obligation.”

  “I think one’s obligation is to oneself, you think it’s to other people.”

  “And I should be a pretty poor specimen if I didn’t.” Tommy frowned. “Look here, Dodo, you know I never interfere, but I think some of your clever unconventional friends in town are having a pretty rotten influence on you. Incidentally, I notice you never ask me to meet them.”

  “You’d hate them …”

  “Very probably.”

  “At least they’re not smug. In fact, they drink a lot,” said Dodo recklessly, “and sleep together, but they aren’t stuffy and Victorian, and I like them very much.”