The Friendly Young Ladies: A Novel

  “Us,” said Leo, “I expect.” She blew a puff of smoke up into the air.

  “What?”

  “With, on his part, such exquisite tact that she won’t have the remotest idea what he’s driving at. I saw it in his eye.”

  “Do you realize,” said Helen, “that he’ll probably come here again?”

  “I realized that within two minutes, thanks.”

  “So what?”

  “Your answer’s as good as mine.”

  “I don’t know. … Ask Joe what he’d do.”

  “For God’s sake. What do you imagine Joe and I talk about? He’d say ‘All you can give her is rope,’ I expect. He believes in using rope very extensively.”

  “That must save him a lot of trouble.”

  “It doesn’t, because he minds rather what’s going on at the other end. He pretends not to, but … What on earth are we wandering off about Joe for? Where were we?”

  “Deciding what line to take next time Peter called.”

  “We can always be out, I suppose.”

  Helen considered this. Her conclusion was to remark, thoughtfully, “Has something rather unusual struck you about us?”

  “Not for several years. Why?”

  “Only that I can’t remember an occasion when we’ve ever reacted to the same man.”

  “It’s a providence,” said Leo lazily, “that watches over us.”

  “My feeling is that it’s taken an afternoon off.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Sure?”

  “No. Well, at least … It’s all so damned ridiculous.”

  “I thought so. … Elsie’s our providence this time, I suppose. But honestly. If she weren’t there?”

  “Well, I think … No, it’s absurd.”

  “Taking that for granted, what?”

  “His temptation, as far as I’m concerned,” said Leo slowly, “would be his complete invulnerability. He’s pure gutta-percha. He’d come back from anything. When you’ve—hurt people who don’t deserve it, it’s rather inviting.”

  “I think it’s rather unkind.”

  “Oh, he’s not like that all through. In his job, for instance, it wouldn’t surprise me to find him deeply perceptive and a hundred per cent sincere. I could work with him and like it. But in a personal relationship, you’d never puncture that beautiful understanding. … However, don’t worry. I’m not proposing to try. Are you?”

  “Not while Elsie’s here, anyhow. You’re right; one couldn’t. It’s a form of selfishness, I suppose.”

  “Very likely. I wish we could get her out of it some other way.”

  “We’ll have to think. We make that remark rather a lot lately, don’t we. … We’ve never thought, have we, what we’d do if we both did react the same way, really, some time.”

  “Just act natural, I suppose, and let it evolve. What else could one do?”

  “Nothing, of course. It wouldn’t be important, anyway.”

  “Well, this has all done Elsie a lot of good, hasn’t it? What a long time we’ve been getting nowhere. Let’s clear the tea. She won’t feel like anything as sordid as washing-up when she comes in.”

  With the sinking sun throwing her long shadow stealthily before her, Elsie crept down the ladder from her room, hugging under her arm the little bundle she had made. There was no one in sight. She crossed the plank bridge into the garden, and, taking from the border a large stone, thrust it carefully into the centre of the package. The water below the bridge looked deep; but it would be deeper, no doubt, on the other side. She went down to the floating deck, and, leaning far over, dropped the bundle in.

  “Whatever on earth,” said Leo behind her, “do you think you’re doing?”

  Elsie gave one of those internal jumps which are so slight to look at, so horrible to feel. She spun round, gasped, and said, “Nothing, really. It’s quite all right.”

  “Sorry,” said Leo. “I didn’t mean to startle you. But people do look odd, dropping their clothes into the river. I mean, it seems a bit drastic. If you’d had the lace collar off and put on a plain one, and taken in some darts here and there, that frock would have been quite wearable, you know. Maybe with the hat it was the only thing. Well, it’s your business, of course.”

  “It wasn’t that. I—I thought I’d better.”

  I suppose, Leo reflected, he has expressed a dislike of nigger brown. I must have spoiled the flavour of a beau geste. One shouldn’t do that. It leaves her, as far as I remember, with one jumper and skirt and a cotton frock. I wonder how it feels to immolate the third part of one’s wardrobe to love. Very beautiful, I shouldn’t wonder.

  “Never mind,” she said. “I’ve got a green one you can have instead, if you like. I hardly ever wear it. It’ll only want the hem letting down. Come up and I’ll show it you.”

  Elsie dropped her eyes. “You are good to me, Leo,” she said to the planking.

  “Oh, rubbish. You probably won’t like it. Come and try it on.”

  “I ought to have told you. It was awful of me not to, when I’m staying with you and everything. I meant to tell you really. You see—I’m Wanted.”

  “Oh,” said Leo. There was a short pause, while she took counsel of herself. At last she said, diffidently, “Don’t think me terribly interfering. But just what way does he want you, if you don’t mind my putting it like that? He’s very nice, of course. Great fun and all that. But you haven’t known him awfully long, have you?”

  “I didn’t mean that.” Elsie’s stress of mind was such that she did not even blush. “I mean I’m wanted by the police.”

  “By who? Are you feeling all right?”

  “Really. Peter told me. I’ve been broadcast for by the B.B.C., Scotland Yard. My hat, and my frock, and the gold cross and everything. I’ve hidden the cross in a crack in the floor, I didn’t like to throw it away. …Suppose they had a clue, they could come here and search, couldn’t they? Only this morning I wore everything to church.”

  Leo sat down on the wooden rail. She looked down at the water, then up at Elsie with straight troubled eyes.

  “The family must have been pretty well wrought up,” she said, “to do that.”

  “Perhaps the police did it on their own. Can they?”

  “No. I don’t think so. … Mother always used to talk about having one’s name in the papers as if it were the last infamy. It won’t do Father any good in his job, either, unless local society’s changed a good bit since my time.”

  “If they find me, can they send me to prison?”

  “Oh, pull yourself together. Of course not. … They must have been going through hell. And each blaming the other, I suppose. Don’t you ever think about it at all?”

  Elsie’s conscience had worked overtime that day already. She put her hand up to her head; it seemed to her that something would break there, that one should be able to call out “Enough,” and make it stop. The sun had melted Leo’s make-up on her face, and the sticky remains of it made her sunburn feel worse than before. The skin burned on her arms and forehead; she felt as if she had fever. She was beyond tears.

  “Of course I think about it. I wake up in the middle of the night, and can’t go to sleep again for hours. Sometimes I feel as if I were the wickedest person in the world.” The words trickled away from her, without pressure, like the overflow from something that can hold no more. “When I was at church this morning I couldn’t go up to Communion, I felt too bad. I kept thinking perhaps I’d go to hell if I didn’t go home, and then that I’d go to hell if I did. I feel wicked at home too, you see, nearly every day. And then it was such a lovely morning I felt better; and in the afternoon. …” She looked down at the water, and shut her eyes. “And now it’s worse than ever.” She faced round to Leo and said with slow, dull horror, “You think I ought to go back. I know you do.”

  “Don’t,” said Leo. “Please.”

  Elsie looked up. The shell of her egoism was pierced by the voice. Leo had spoken as if to a grow
n-up person. She too was unhappy, and, more remarkable, was allowing it to be seen. Elsie had not guessed before; but Peter had known. Peter knew everything. He had shaken his head and said “Poor Leo!” as if he expected her to know what he meant, so that she had not liked to confess her ignorance by asking. Perhaps Leo was going to tell her now. Curiosity, and the thought of Peter’s omniscience, eased a little the tension in her head. She waited.

  “How can I think you ought to do anything? My God, just how smug do you think I am? Surely you realize that a good half of any guilt you’re feeling really belongs to me?”

  “I don’t see that.” To have had her emotion taken seriously by Leo was giving her, already, a dim feeling of importance. “Just because you let me be here. … You didn’t ask me to come. I did it of my own free will.”

  “And what did I do? I went off with my own life and left you holding the baby. There wasn’t any way out of it, and I couldn’t take you with me. Still, the fact remains. You could have afforded to go away, couldn’t you, with a good elder sister living at home. Never mind, I used to say to myself, they’ve always got Elsie. Why shouldn’t you have been able to say, Never mind, they’ve always got Leo? Guilt isn’t just sin. That would be simple. Guilt is being responsible for the consequences. Orestes found that out. You’re my Eumenides, I suppose.”

  Elsie had not read of Orestes, and did not know what Eumenides were, but the ringing mysterious words gave a kind of grandeur to her trouble, and she registered it for future use. Her brain relaxed, she was even interested.

  “It isn’t either of our faults” (she had often revolved this problem at home) “that they married each other, is it? I’ve often wondered why they did.”

  “We were born because of it. And whether we like it or not, they gave us the power to make them suffer.”

  “We didn’t ask them to. We didn’t even ask to be born.”

  “Well. Here we are.”

  Elsie shook her head. “I don’t know. I seem to have been wondering all my life.”

  “There’s no answer,” Leo said. She sat down, as Joe had sat once, on the broad painted rail, and there came into her face and the set of her body a certainty different from his, which yet somehow recalled it. She looked ahead of her, and seemed to be speaking chiefly to herself. “Innocent or guilty, one can’t get away from having caused someone to suffer. It’s a thing which is. One pays for it, somehow, in the end. We shall both pay, I suppose. We have to face that.” Her face had an inward look, as if much more than the present had gone into its decision. “Never make it inevitable for someone to hurt you. It’s a terrible wrong to do another person. Or if it happens, and you can’t prevent it, never let them know.”

  Elsie found this doctrine strange and unpalatable. Suffering was, in her imagination, a noble condition, a pageant of the spirit, an Elizabethan progress of black velvet and plumes; the necessary panoply of a distinguished emotional life. Such actual suffering as she had experienced at home she would have defined as “being miserable,” a different thing in a class with acute toothache or mumps, but worse. The thought of associating such a state with Love would have horrified her, if her mind had been capable of grasping it. The pride and splendour of adolescent dream-sorrow invested her with a kind of dignity as she answered, “If one can’t feel the great things of life without suffering, one must be prepared to suffer.”

  Twenty-seven looked at seventeen, across a gulf as unbridgeable as interstellar space.

  “Oh, well,” said Leo, “never mind.”

  Elsie stared down at her hands. She held something in them which she was turning over and over, secretly, as one might a charm. Averting her face, she said, “I know I ought to be looking out for a job, or something. I ought to start on a career. I want to do something important with my life, and be a credit to—to you and Helen. But if you wouldn’t frightfully mind having me, Leo, I would like to go on staying here, just for a bit. Well, for about two weeks, anyway. It’s—it’s rather important.”

  “Of course you can stay. You know that. Why are the next two weeks so special—something about the boy-friend?” Leo spoke with exaggerated flippancy, as people do in uncertainty of mind. Elsie winced, but it was too late now, and the matter too urgent, not to continue.

  “It is about Peter, actually.” Desperately she tried to make her voice sound light, matter-of-fact and sophisticated, like the voices of Helen’s friends. It was impossible to make anyone understand. “He was telling me at the station, while we were waiting for the train. He has this post for a year, so you see he gets a fortnight’s holiday. He’s taking half of it this month. He’s thinking of putting up at a hotel near here; it’s a good centre, he says, and we could see a bit more of each other. It would be rather fun. I mean, now he’s made these plans, it would seem rather rude and unkind to leave, wouldn’t it?” Leo’s face, she saw, had not changed at all. She was looking ahead of her, hard, shut in, incalculable. How was it possible, Elsie thought, that one could feel so much, and someone a couple of yards away be so untouched by it? Eagerly, like one who offers a bribe of inestimable value, she added, “He likes you and Helen very much. He told me so. He thinks you’re two very complex and unusual people. He wants to see more of you as well.”

  “That’s very nice of him.” Leo got down from the rail, and threw her cigarette down into the water, where it went out with a little hiss. “We wouldn’t turn you out anyhow, I told you that. I think we shall have to rely on you, though, to do most of the entertaining. Helen has a lot of jobs on in town, and I’m getting well into the new book now.”

  “Oh, thank you,” said Elsie. “Thank you ever so.” She went away, to be alone with her happiness. Leo was kind—very kind for someone who had, by her own confession, never properly been in love. Elsie pardoned her incomprehension, with a charity which, after the walk to the station by the evening Thames, she felt she could well afford; besides, she felt that Peter would approve it. But it was better to be alone. She opened her hands, hot and sticky with emotion and the sun, and looked at the trophy they contained. It was a cardboard packet which had held ten Gold Flake; Peter had thrown it aside on the way to the train, and on the way back she had gathered it up. In the safety of her room she raised it reverently to her lips, before slipping it under her pillow.

  CHAPTER XVI

  “ARE YOU SURE,” ASKED Helen, pausing in final doubt in front of the Corner House, “that you’ll really be all right?”

  “Of course I will. Really.” Elsie spoke with convincing stoutness; if her plans for the rest of the afternoon had involved a traverse of Snowdon instead of central London she would have been hardly more terrified, but equally determined. Through the broad canyon of Oxford Street, London surged past her, full of its mysterious preoccupations, its compound smells fresh in her unaccustomed nose; dust and petrol, passing perfumes of women, green leaves in a drift of wind vanishing swiftly into the sickliness of warm gear-oil and overclothed humanity, a waft of beer from a crawling dray. Helen, her pencil-case and drawing-block under her arm, seemed already in anticipation to have vanished into it, merging as easily into this strange jungle as a bird into its tree, one more neat female figure among the dozens hurrying past.

  “The District Railway back,” Helen reminded her, “from Charing Cross to King’s Cross. I’ll meet you under the clock at five. And don’t worry about getting lost. If you do in London, it can’t mean anything more than wasting half an hour. Any bobby will put you right. Or almost anyone else, for the matter. I’ll have to take this bus. See you at five.” She vanished, in what seemed the clap of an eye, into a hot red monster which a traffic jam had slowed down beside them. Elsie was alone, with three hours, London, and the four pounds in her handbag, all to spend. She looked about her. Down the side-street on her left were large, quiet, rich houses, and a humble-looking barrow piled astonishingly with peaches and grapes and roses. Beside her, a shop window was full of complicated corsets, at which a fat woman was wistfully staring. A man in a p
urple suit and brown boots collided with her as she swayed indeterminately in midstream, said “Pardon me,” and was swallowed up almost before she knew he had been there. A perambulator was bearing down on her. Like a swimmer caught in a current, she began to move along.

  Had Peter, she wondered, ever passed over this pavement where her own feet fell? Almost anyone who lived in London must, she supposed, have done so at some time. She tried to imagine him, a yard or two ahead of her, outside this sweetshop window, for instance, where the mechanical chromium arms manipulated an endless rope of nougat. Perhaps he might, in reality, suddenly appear, emerging without warning like the man in the purple suit, and saying “Hullo, Elsie,” while she was confused and all unready; in a hurry, full, like all these other confident people, of concerns about which she knew nothing. The thought made her feel more than ever bewildered and lonely—Peter, herself, her love, her very consciousness, minute as light-motes in the endless powder of the Galaxy. She walked on, trying to look busy and purposeful and like other people, growing more desolate at every step.

  Like a beacon promising harbour, she saw in the middle of the street the reassuring mass of a policeman on point duty. He was directing someone, with the inexhaustable patient courtesy of his kind, and the apparent ease of a juggler who, keeping three balls in the air already, casually adds a fourth. She was already making towards him when she remembered. That rock of changeless security was for others, not for her. Probably her description was copied neatly into his notebook, along with the distinguishing marks of burglars and those whom Scotland Yard was anxious to interrogate. She was outside the law. Receding quickly into the crowd again, she walked on, eyeing the passing faces with nervous distrust, her mother’s stories recurring to her one after another. A comfortable-looking woman with three children in tow seemed, at last, a reasonable risk.

  “Excuse me. But can you tell me, please, how I could get to St. Jerome’s Hospital?”

  The woman could; her eldest boy, she explained, had had his tonsils out there. Elsie boarded the bus she had recommended, and, almost at once it seemed, was being carried away from the crowd and glitter into narrow, dingy streets. The wide polished shops, with windows like glasshouses of rare flowers, gave place to small tobacconists, fried fish emporia, and secondhand clothes dealers; the word “Noted” occurred with increasing frequency on their signs. The bus threaded a street-market, swarming and raucous; inside it grew hotter and hotter, and the close air began to make her feel sick. Another turning, and they ran between huge, black, sinister warehouses; round again and there were tenements, great houses foundered and rotting, where grey washing hung from the windows and dirty children played last across the road. She began to grow anxious; had she taken the wrong bus after all? But no, she had asked the conductor, when she got on. Perhaps she ought to have changed; in a moment or two she would ask again.