“You mean, when your father dies?” said Maria.
“He may live for many years. That’s not quite the point,” said Charles. “The point is that he’s going to depend on me, more and more, every year. However much I enjoy fooling around up in London—and to be perfectly candid I think it’s a waste of time, and I despise myself when I do it—I know in my heart that I ought to be at Coldhammer. Not necessarily in the house, but somewhere handy. That house that Lutyens designed—Farthings—on the edge of the estate, would suit us well. I could get hold of it anytime. Don’t you remember you admired it the other day?”
“Did I?” said Maria vaguely.
And then she had turned away and started talking about something else. The conversation savored too much of crisis. Crisis was always something to avoid. But sitting alone, this morning, she was reminded of the conversation once again. Richmond was the right distance out of London. Half an hour and she could be at any theater. Charles picking her up every evening, and they would be home soon after half-past eleven. It was nothing.
Coldhammer was nearly eighty miles from London. To motor up and down from Coldhammer would be out of the question. The train service was rotten. Charles must surely see that once she started acting again, she would have to be near London. Was it possible that Charles hoped, in his secret heart, that she would not want to act again? Did he picture her enthroned in Farthings, or some other place handy to the estate, doing the things that other wives did, the wives of his friends? Content to order meals, potter about a house, take Caroline for walks when the nurse was out, give little dinners, talk about gardens? Did he expect her, in point of fact, to settle down? That was the word for it. There was no other word. Settle down. Charles hoped to lure her down to Coldhammer to settle down. The house at Richmond was nothing but a bribe, a sop to quieten her. The house at Richmond was part of the process of breaking her in. Right from the start, Charles had never intended the Richmond house to be anything else. She remembered how vague he had always been about the future. She had been vague too. But purposely. Had she been vague because she was afraid? Had she been vague because in her heart she feared that had she said to Charles when they became engaged, “There is no question of my giving up my life for yours,” he might have said, “Well, in that case…”
Anyway, better not think about it. Better put it out of her mind. These things, if left alone, would sort themselves out. Charles loved her. She loved Charles. Nothing could go wrong. Besides, she had always got her own way. People, and events, had a fashion of shaping themselves to suit her. She put away the Dorothy Wilding photographs and picked up the morning paper. There was a paragraph about Niall: “This brilliant young man…” and going on to say that everyone would be humming the songs he had written for the new revue, due to open in London in two weeks’ time. The revue had been a wild success in Paris. “Delaney’s stepson, who is half French, has helped to adapt the revue for the English stage. He speaks French like a native.” Quite untrue, thought Maria. Niall could jabber very fluently for five minutes with a perfect accent, and then his mind would go blank and he forgot everything. Niall had probably done very little work on the revue, if any. Freada would have done it all.
Niall would have thought of the tunes. Somebody else would have written them down. There was a rehearsal going on probably at this minute. A quarter to twelve. Niall would be playing the piano, making jokes, preventing everybody from doing any work. When the producer got annoyed, Niall would become bored and leave them to it, and go upstairs to that funny room at the top and play another piano, all by himself. If the producer telephoned to him to come down, he would say that he was not interested, or he was much too busy thinking out another song for the finale, a better one.
“You may get away with that sort of thing in Paris,” Maria told him, “but I don’t think you will over here. People will say you’re insufferable. That you’re terribly conceited.”
“What if they do?” said Niall. “It doesn’t worry me. I don’t care a damn about writing songs, anyway. I can always go and live in a hut on a cliff.”
Because they wanted his songs so badly, he was allowed to get away with it. They had given him this room at the top of the theater and he lived there. He did as he pleased. Even Freada was not with him. Freada had stayed behind in Paris…
“It’s fun,” Niall had told Maria. “I like it. If I want anyone here to supper I ask them. If I don’t, I don’t. I go out when I please. I come back when I please. Don’t you envy me?” And he looked at her with those queer, penetrating eyes of his that saw too much, and she had turned away pretending to yawn.
“Why should I envy you? I love living at Richmond.”
“Do you?”
“Of course I do. It’s wonderful being married. You ought to try it.”
He had laughed at her and had gone on playing the piano.
The paper was right about one thing, anyway. The tunes he had written for this tiresome revue were maddening, insistent, you could not forget them for one single moment. Once you had heard them, you went on humming them all the time, throughout the day, until they nearly drove you crazy. The trouble was, thought Maria, that when the time came to dance to them, she would be dancing with Charles. And Charles was a stolid, safe dancer, steering you rather as he might steer a little ship through shoal water, an anxious eye to the bumps of other dancers. Whereas Niall… Dancing with Niall had always been like dancing with yourself. You moved, and he followed. Or rather, he moved and you followed. Or was it that you both thought of the same moves at precisely the same moment? And, anyway, why think about Niall? Maria sat down at her desk and wrote her letters. There were some bills, which she paid with the money Charles allowed her. Then a duty letter to her mother-in-law. Another duty letter to some dull people who had asked Charles and her to stay if they were ever in Norfolk. Why should they ever be in Norfolk? A third letter accepting the invitation to open a bazaar at a village three miles from Coldhammer in the spring.
She did not mind opening a bazaar. It was right for the Hon. Mrs. Charles Wyndham to open bazaars. The only thing was that in a way it would be more fun, and she could get more amusing people to attend, and certainly more money, if she opened the bazaar as Maria Delaney. Perhaps it was rather disloyal to think that. Perhaps it would be better not to think of it at all. “Dear Vicar,” she began, “I shall be delighted to open your bazaar on April fifteenth…”
And then it happened. The first wail from the pram.
For a moment or two Maria took no notice. Perhaps it would stop. Perhaps it was only wind. She went on writing, pretending she had not heard. The wail grew louder. And it was not a windy wail. It was the angry, roaring wail of a baby very much awake. Maria heard footsteps on the stairs, followed by a tap on the door.
“Come in,” she said. She put on her busy, preoccupied face.
“Please, m’m,” said the young housemaid, “baby is awake.”
“That’s all right, thank you,” said Maria. “I was just going down to her.”
She got up from the desk and went downstairs, hoping the housemaid would hear and think to herself: “Mrs. Wyndham knows how to manage baby.”
She went to the pram and peered down into the depths.
“Now, now, what is all this about?” she said sternly.
Caroline was red in the face with anger, and struggling to raise herself from her pillow. She was a strong child. The nurse said proudly it was most unusual for so young a child to try to raise herself in this way. Why be proud? wondered Maria. Surely it would be more restful for the nurse if Caroline had been a little quiet baby, content and placid on her back.
“Now, now,” said Maria. “I can’t have this, you know.” She lifted up Caroline and patted her back, in case she had wind. The usual hiccough followed. Ah, then it was wind. What a relief. Maria put her back again in the pram, and tucked in the rug. Then she went back again into the house. But even as she walked upstairs she could hear that the crying had be
gun again. She resolved to take no notice. She sat down again to her letters. But it was difficult to concentrate. The crying became louder and louder, with a strange, high-pitched violence to the note.
The housemaid tapped once more upon the door. “Baby’s off again, m’m,” she said.
“I know,” said Maria. “There’s nothing the matter with her. It’s good for her to cry.” The housemaid left the room, and Maria could hear her say something to the parlormaid downstairs.
What was she saying? “Poor little mite,” in all probability. Or “She had no right to have a baby if she don’t know how to look after it.” Which was very unfair. She did know how to look after the baby. If the housemaid had a baby it would probably be left to cry and cry for hours and nobody would go near it. The crying suddenly stopped…
Caroline was asleep. All was well. But was it? What if Caroline had succeeded in turning herself over, and was now lying face downwards in her pillow, suffocated. Headlines. “Actress’s Baby Smothered.” “Peer’s granddaughter dies in pram.” There would have to be an inquest, and a coroner asking questions: “Do you mean to say you deliberately left your baby to cry, and took no action?” Charles, white-lipped and tense. And the pathetic little coffin with all those daffodils from Coldhammer…
Maria left her desk and went downstairs into the garden. The silence from the pram was ominous, terrible. She looked into the pram.
Caroline was lying on her back staring at the hood. As soon as she saw Maria she began to cry again. Her small face puckered up with loathing. She hated Maria.
“This is mother-love,” thought Maria. “This is what Barrie wrote about. This is what I imagined when I took Harry on my knee in Mary Rose, and it’s all quite different.” She looked over her shoulder and saw that the parlormaid was staring at her from the dining room window
“Now, now,” said Maria, and, reaching down into the pram, she picked up Caroline and carried her into the house.
“Gladys,” she said to the parlormaid, “as Baby seems restless, I think I had better have my lunch a quarter of an hour earlier than usual. Then I can get it over, and attend to her feed.”
“Very well, m’m,” said Gladys.
But Maria knew Gladys was not deceived. Not for a moment. Gladys guessed that Maria had picked up Caroline and brought her indoors because she did not know what else to do. Maria took Caroline to the nursery. She changed her filthy napkins and put on the first batch of fresh ones. It took ages. Caroline started crying again as soon as she was stretched out on her back, and each time Maria tried to truss her up she kicked and wriggled. Maria jabbed the pin into her own thumb. Why could she not snap the pin with one deft gesture as the nurse did?
She went down for lunch carrying Caroline in her arms, and she sat eating lunch with Caroline balanced on her left arm, while she fed herself with her right hand and a fork. Caroline cried throughout the meal.
“They’re artful, aren’t they?” said Gladys. “They know when someone strange has the handling of them.” She stood watching in sympathy by the sideboard, her hands behind her back.
“She’s hungry, that’s all,” said Maria coldly. “She will settle directly she has had her two o’clock feed.”
The trouble was it was only a quarter past one. The whole of the timetable had been upset. Never mind. The bottle would do the trick. That blessed bottle in the nursery full of Cow and Gate.
Maria scraped through her lunch, swallowed down her coffee, and took Caroline up to the nursery once more and heated up the bottle that stood with its fellows on the white trolley. She felt like a bartender preparing a triple gin for some old drunk.
“Make her take it slowly,” the nurse had said. “She must work for it. She must not take it all in gulps.”
It was all very well for the nurse to talk. How did one make a baby feed slowly? The Cow and Gate squirted from the rubber teat into Caroline’s mouth like a fountain jet, and if Maria tried to edge the bottle away Caroline screamed and fought like some fearful man with D.Ts. The feed that should have taken twenty minutes was all over in five. And Caroline lay back on Maria’s lap, swollen, replete, her lips loose, her eyes closed. She reminded Maria of the old, vagrant woman who used to lie asleep after midnight in the alley-way outside the theater. Maria took her downstairs and put her back in the pram. Then she put on her own coat and walking shoes. “I’m taking Baby for her afternoon walk,” she called through to the kitchen. Nobody heard. The three of them were laughing and talking, and the gramophone was on, the gramophone that Charles had given them for Christmas. They were swilling cups of tea. They did not care about her at all. They were enjoying themselves, while she had to take the baby out in the pram.
The air was brisk and cold, but it was fine. And the pram was white with a black hood. It was nicer than other people’s prams. Maria walked firmly along the road towards Richmond Park, and it was a pity in a way, she thought, that nobody was there to matter, a friend, or a photographer. It was a waste that no one knew she was there, pushing her baby in a pram. She had just crossed the road and was entering the Park gates when it happened. Caroline started to cry again. The patting on the back, the ritual of the morning began again. It had no effect at all. Maria took the pram behind a tree, and went into the fearful performance of changing napkins. Caroline cried louder than ever before. Maria tucked her firmly in her rugs, and began to walk very rapidly, jerking the pram up and down as she walked. Smothered screams came from beneath the rugs. Because the afternoon was fine there were more people than usual walking in Richmond Park. There were people everywhere. And all of them could hear Caroline crying. As Maria went past them, pushing the pram almost at a run, they turned to look at her, they paused to listen, because of the fearful noise of a baby screaming in a pram. Girls exercising dogs smiled at Maria with pity, and youths on bicycles whizzed past her, laughing.
“Be quiet,” hissed Maria in desperation. “Please be quiet,” and in panic she turned the pram and went back again out of the Park and along the street, and stopped it outside a telephone kiosk at the corner.
She gave the number of the theater where Niall was rehearsing and after some delay the stage-door-keeper found him.
“What’s the matter?” said Niall.
“It’s Caroline,” said Maria. “The wretched nurse has left me with her, and Charles is away, and she keeps crying and crying. I don’t know what to do. I’m speaking from a call box.”
“I’ll come and fetch you,” said Niall at once. “I’ll get my car. We’ll drive somewhere. The noise of my driving will make her stop.”
“Aren’t you rehearsing?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t matter. Tell me where you are. Describe your call box. It won’t take more than twenty-five minutes if I come at once.”
“No, come to the end of the road,” said Maria. “Wait for me there. I’ll have to put the pram in the garden. And I’ll fetch another bottle for her. Perhaps the one after lunch wasn’t the right temperature.”
“Bring all the bottles you can find,” said Niall.
Maria stepped out of the telephone box. A policeman at the corner was watching her. Caroline was still crying. Maria turned and pushed the pram in the opposite direction from the policeman. You never knew. It might be against the law to leave a child to cry.
She went back to the house and hid the pram behind a bush in the garden near the garage. She went upstairs and came down again carrying two more bottles and another batch of napkins. She felt like a burglar in her own domain. Luckily she met no one. The servants were still downstairs. Immediately she lifted Caroline out of the pram Caroline stopped crying. Maria hid in the garage with the rugs and the bottles and the napkins until she heard the sound of a car at the end of the road brake violently with a screech. That would be Niall. Maria came out of the garage, carrying her belongings, and went down the road to the car.
Niall was dressed oddly. He wore a very old pair of evening trousers, and a polo sweater that had moth marks at the neck.
“I came just as I was,” he said. “I left them to it. I said I had to take somebody to hospital.”
“That’s not true,” said Maria, climbing into the car with Caroline.
“We can make it true,” said Niall. “We can take Caroline to a hospital and leave her in the children’s ward for the afternoon.”
“Oh, no,” said Maria, alarmed. “Charles might get to hear. We can’t do that. Think of the shame for me.”
“Well, what then?”
“I don’t know. Just drive.”
Niall started the car with a jerk. It was an old Morris that had once belonged to Freada. Niall drove very badly in a series of wild rushes. He either went much too fast, swerving round islands, or crept in the middle of the road like a snail. He never understood the signals of a policeman. “That man,” he said, “why did he wave me on? What does he mean?”
“I think you apologize,” said Maria. “I think you are on the wrong side of the road.”
The car zigzagged in and out of traffic. People shouted. And Caroline, who had stopped crying momentarily because of the new movement so different from her pram, began crying again.
“Do you like her?” said Niall.
“Not frightfully. But I shall later, when she can talk.”
“She’s like Lord Wyndham,” said Niall. “I shall give her a wristwatch every birthday, as other godfathers give pearls.”
Caroline went on crying, and Niall slowed down the car.
“It’s the pace,” he said. “She doesn’t like the pace. I tell you what. I think we ought to ask advice.”
“From whom?”
“From some nice, homely woman. There must be a nice homely woman who has had a lot of children, who would give us advice,” said Niall.
He peered anxiously to right and left, and then, forced onwards by the stream of traffic, he turned the car into a busy thoroughfare, with shops on either side, the pavements thronged with people.