The Friendly Young Ladies: A Novel

  She rarely received letters, and in these her mother took a kindly interest, saying, as she handed them over, “Look, here’s one for you, Elsie, isn’t that nice? Isn’t it from Pamela? How is she getting on with her elocution now?” Marjorie was the elocutionist, and Pamela was at a secretarial college; but Elsie had good reason to know that Peter’s hand was alarmingly different from either; she wore, pinned to her liberty bodice by day and the inside of her pyjamas by night, a prescription for ferrous sulphate tablets, which she had found in the waste-paper basket.

  Her day pivoted, now, round her casual-seeming shifts to intercept the mail, or, for variety, the postman. By the second week she had developed a good deal of skill in both. In the third week, she ceased to encounter the postman personally, feeling ashamed to do so; in the fourth, she pretended even to herself that she happened to be in the hall only by chance. In the fifth week, the phrases of her own letter hid in the back of her mind, and came out at odd, sudden moments, running out and across like darting mice when she was in church or sitting at tea, and making her tighten her fingers, or twist her leg painfully round the leg of her chair.

  In the sixth week, in the middle of a scene at breakfast, while she was staring about her in vacant, almost unseeing misery, she saw it lying on the table a foot away from her, at the top of the morning pile. Because the scene had started before the letters came in, she was able to pick it up and put it in her pocket.

  She took it to the only safe place she knew of; the outdoor lavatory half-way down the garden. It had walls whitewashed over raw stone, with cobwebs in the corners; last year’s parish calendar, fixed in the mortar with rusty nails, showed a Christmas crib with very clean shepherds, and angels who looked as if they had all been to the same public school. A number of earwigs lived behind this. The place had been an old potting shed, and was big enough to hold, besides the wide, scrubbed wooden seat, the garden roller, mower and hose, and a wooden box full of dead-looking bulbs. Through the open window a wild fuchsia dripped with crimson and imperial purple, the small firm flowers and shiny dark-red stems shining half transparently between her and the light of a bright-grey morning sky.

  Elsie sat down on the dirty garden roller; it would have been sacrilegious to use the edge of the seat, and its presence shamed her. She wished there had been somewhere else to go; but it would be time, in a few minutes, to help her mother make the beds. She did not open the letter at once, though there was so little time. Perhaps it was the residual wretchedness from breakfast, or the cold, cloudy light, or those barren posts and slowly cooling expectations, that made her pause with her finger hooked in the envelope, feeling chilly and damp in the palms. But she interpreted her dread as the turmoil of ecstasy, and, ripping the fold, took out the letter, two sides of one sheet and one and a half of the next.

  Dear Little Elsie,

  It was good to hear from you and to know that you still think kindly of me and that our talks together helped, maybe, to give you a fresh slant on things and make life seem less on top of you. I am glad that I was there, though no doubt if I hadn’t been someone else would; you were due for a new impetus of some sort, and the Zeitgeist has a way of producing such things at the appropriate moment from one source or another. It has been my luck to assist at such moments once or twice in my life and each time it has made me very happy, as happy as when I delivered my first solo baby, which I did in a back kitchen assisted by a girl of fifteen and four canaries in a cage over the bed, who shouted encouragement at suitable intervals. I wondered then what the baby would make of its job of living, as I wonder now about you; it’s an awesome business launching people off and watching them make towards the horizon out of your ken. But something tells me you will get there and come back with the Golden Fleece, for I saw a Jasonish look in your eye. Sometime we will meet and you shall tell me travellers’ tales.

  I have been very busy of late. …

  Elsie ranged through it, as a hungry bird will range through straw, seeking a stray ear of corn. A novel Peter had read and thought well of; a hospital dance about which he hinted, without actually specifying, doings both broad and deep; and the fact that Peter must now be on his way to the wards, as he had a bunch of case-histories to get for his chief.

  Think of me sometimes [it finished] for I shall often think of you and wonder how you’re making out.

  Love from

  PETER.

  P.S. Give my respects to your sister when you see her.

  She turned the letter over; perhaps this was not, after all, the last page, people sometimes skipped one and then came back. But no, there was nothing more. She put it down in her lap, and looked at the small square of the window. Years afterwards she remembered the cracked green paint showing the wood, a chrysalis, brown and glossy, gummed to one corner, and the little hanging flowers like clear drops of blood.

  It was her sense of inferiority, the arrested child in her, that saved her faith. It kept from the death of her dreams the sense of outrage; so that it differed not in kind, but only in degree, from the times when she had had to come back from reading Beau Brocade on the cliffs at sunset, to a quarrelsome supper of tepid cocoa and cold brawn. It was cruel indeed, but natural and explicable; striking the present from under her, it did not destroy the future, only made it recede to the old and familiar distances. The style of the letter, set against those of aunts and school friends whose eloquence was the point of exclamation and the word twice underlined, dazzled her so much that its substance became, after all, inevitable, and even its patronage a compliment. When, having shed a few tears, she tucked the envelope inside her knicker-elastic and got up to go, a new mirage was taking shape already in the haze of her horizon.

  “Give my respects to your sister when you see her.” It broke the emptiness, giving imagination a point to rest on. It was not a new idea, it had only increased its urgency. Second only to Peter, Leonora had become a symbol. During the weeks of post-watching, Elsie had often found vicarious compensation in thinking about her and picturing, in the light of Peter’s instruction, what she had become. The rouge and the maroon hair were long forgotten. Intense sombre eyes, and a heavy dark knot worn low on the nape, took their place; for Elsie had decided that it could only have been an artist with whom Leonora had accepted life. Artists were the only romantic strangers with whose appearance she was familiar; she often passed them, at a shy distance, on the cliffs or in the more presentable parts of the village, tanned, absorbed and interestingly shabby, and had longed to edge up, like the children, for a nearer look at the canvases which transmuted the daily scene into something rich and strange. One or two of them had been quite young, and by agglomerating the most attractive features and clothing of these, she had arrived at a satisfying image of Leonora’s. That, of course, would have been eight years ago; by this time he would be famous, probably an R.A. (it happened that Peter had never given her the benefit of his views on art), and Leonora, dressed in a Chinese shawl or (for one must not run away) naked on silk cushions, posed for him, arranged fruit and flowers in his studio, and entertained his gifted friends. Trilby, which had rather shocked her at the time of reading, came in very usefully now. She had read somewhere of the Café Royal, and saw it in her mind’s eye buzzing with excitement as Leonora (she had dropped Leo, which did not go) floated in on the arm of her lover, who, since his rise to eminence, wore a cloak and a pointed beard. The lesser artists would point them out to one another: “Yes,” they would say, “he met her in a little village in the wilds of Cornwall, and ran away with her. It caused a terrible scandal, and her family have quite cast her off. But he worships the ground she treads on, so I don’t suppose she cares.” Or perhaps she was in her own right a celebrated model, living beautifully and passionately, not with just one R.A. but with two or three.

  She must, of course, have changed a good deal. Recalling the ample nudes in the Senior School library book on Modern French Art, and comparing them with her dimming memories of Leo, thin and brown and
dressed in the out-at-elbows ruin of good tweeds, Elsie could not help feeling that this was very likely. But that would only make their meeting more touching and dramatic.

  As she lay in bed that night, she got out the letter again. She had read somewhere, she remembered now, that people often put the most important thing in the postcript. Perhaps it had all been leading up to that. Perhaps it was a test. “When you see her”; not “if.” She sat up in bed, her brain too restless to let her body be still, and, going to the window, stood staring at the strip of moonlit sea which showed beyond the tamarisks and firs.

  CHAPTER VI

  ELSIE STOOD AT THE door of her mother’s bedroom, with her hand on the knob. Before she turned it, she looked again at her watch. It was half an hour since Mrs. Lane had started; long enough to be fairly sure that she would not come back for something she had forgotten, which happened two or three times every week. There could hardly be less than a couple of clear hours. Gladys was ironing, and her father did not count, for, though he would have been affronted if a paper-weight on his own desk had been displaced, he took for granted that the women of the house lived on top of one another in a conspiratorial huddle. She opened the door.

  With the door still open, she stood still inside the fresh, neat, cologne-scented room, with its Edwardian display of silver-topped glass and photographs in fancy frames. She had done nothing yet. She might be here for anything; to see if it had been dusted, or if the flowers on the table wanted fresh water. She could look and see, and go away again.

  Perhaps, if she committed this wickedness, it would be for nothing. There might be several reasons, if one could think, for putting a birthday present, unopened, quickly away among the wrappings of the rest, and saying nothing about it. Perhaps her mother had had a girlhood sweetheart, who had remained faithful for thirty years. Perhaps. … But after every theory was exhausted, Elsie was still sure. She simply knew.

  She went over to the little glass vase of primroses. The water was quite clear, but one of the flowers was drooping. She lifted it out, then put it guiltily back again. Perhaps she had been mistaken about the whole thing, after four months. She ran her mind over it, seeing it all as clearly as yesterday; her father saying “Many happy returns, Maude” with the ceremony that belongs to a military armistice, and handing the invariable envelope with the cheque; the dry ritual kiss thankfully got over; her mother turning to the presents, opening Elsie’s first, as she always did. She always had, ever since Elsie knew what birthdays were, when she and Leo had both been children. Elsie remembered reflecting once that before she was born, Leo’s must have been first; but, as her mother used to say sometimes, Elsie was the baby now. Leo had always got on with her breakfast, and seemed not to notice. Elsie’s present had always been “just exactly what I was wanting,” and Leo’s “How very nice.” It had seemed to Elsie that Leo spent a lot of money on odd, plain-looking things. She had felt rather superior about it. It was queer to think of this today.

  Last year’s birthday had been just like all the others back to the beginning of time. Leo’s absence had never showed very much. There had only been the small unopened parcel, and the fact that when she had been about to say, “Look, Mother, you’ve forgotten one,” something or other had prevented her.

  Elsie went over to the window, and looked out. Leo had suddenly become confusingly vivid, an intruding presence before which Leonora began to grow somewhat cloudy and to dislimn in her mind’s eye. She pushed the memories away. It was Leonora who would prove her to Peter, whom she had promised him to find. Until she had found her, she would be ashamed to write to him again. Decision stiffened her. She walked straight back across the room to the dressing-table, and opened the china box with the Morris rose pattern on the lid. From among the gilt safety-pins and dress-clips inside it she took the little key, bright with much handling, of her mother’s locked, left-hand drawer.

  The worn lock opened smoothly. The drawer exhaled its familiar smell, the same since her earliest years, of mystery and romance; a mixture of violet, sandalwood, feathers, eau-de-cologne, and paper, mixed with an indefinable smell that was simply the smell of time. In front of it were the things she had always seen quickly as it opened and shut; the blue leather jewel-case and the two velvet jewellers’ boxes, an oval one for a necklace, an oblong one for a brooch; behind them a tissue parcel, with a torn place in it through which a cluster of pink silk rosebuds showed. Beside this was a fan of flat pink ostrich feathers with mother-of-pearl sticks and, here and there amid the soft down, little scattered silver sequins. Elsie could not resist opening it and watching it wave and glitter; this at any rate could not be very wrong, for she had been allowed to take it out sometimes for a treat. The fan and the rosebuds had always been tangible proof of the glamour with which Mrs. Lane invested the nostalgic stories of her girlhood; the very sight of it evoked kid gloves above the elbow, programmes with gilt edges and tiny silk-tasselled pencils, ruched flounces swaying to the “Merry Widow” waltz.

  Underneath it was another tissue parcel. This, Elsie knew, contained the real lace from her mother’s wedding dress. Just beside it lay the wedding prayer book, ivory with a gold cross. It did not seem strange to her to find these objects cherished. Her mother loved weddings, and had often described her own with undimmed delight, as a thing in itself, detached from causes and consequences, like presentation at court. However bitterly she might be lamenting her lot at the time, she never pronounced the words “old maid” without pity and patronage. Elsie thought all this quite natural; she had for years planned her own wedding in minute detail, down to the bridesmaids’ gifts.

  She pulled the drawer open a little wider, and saw that the whole back third of it was filled with papers. Her heart quailed. Every one of these dozens of envelopes must contain something very private—or why keep them here?—and to go through them all would not only be a dreadful and shocking thing to do; it would take the rest of the day. The thought of it made her look at her watch in panic, to find that only five minutes had gone since she entered the room. She stared, helplessly, at the neat piles. At least she could rule out the ones on the right. She had often been shown them; they were her mother’s shares. They brought in about fifteen pounds a year, but once they had brought in twenty, and her mother had bought her a silver brush set. She could hardly bear to think of this now. When she had begun to have a career, she decided, she would give her mother a diamond watch.

  The next bundle was immensely thick, and tied with pink satin ribbon. The writing at the top looked somehow familiar, like a neater and more flowing version of one she knew. Suddenly she realized that it was her father’s. A prickling sensation, like fear but not quite like, came at the back of her neck. She had sometimes meditated, in a vague bewilderment, that the ivory prayer book and the Maltese lace must have been preceded by some relationship rather different from the one which had conditioned her life since she could remember; but to see, within reach of her hand, this wad of concrete evidence was different. The tidy packet was like a door leading into darkness which both drew and repelled her. The topmost envelope, she saw, had been slit along the edge; it would be possible to peep inside without doing more than slide the ribbon. Even while the thought appalled her, she found herself with the packet in her hand, separating the edges. In the fair, elegant script which, she remembered, her father still used on his professional drawings, she could just see the words, “My own little darling.”

  She pushed the packet back into its place, as if it had scorched her. Without being clearly aware of any thought or emotion, she felt tears rushing into her eyes. Scarcely knowing what she did, she straightened the ribbon, wanting nothing in the world but to get the drawer shut, the key back in its box, and herself away. She had already begun to slide the drawer inward when, with eyes almost too blurred to see it, she noticed a little packet, loosely wrapped in brown paper, which had slipped down between the pink silk rosebuds and the shares. She knew with instant certainty that it was what she had
come for. Now she had it, she only cared for it as a kind of partial justification.

  The packet contained a silk-covered box which came open as she unwrapped it, revealing a little carved button of white and green jade made into a brooch. She would certainly have noticed that if her mother had ever worn it, it was so unlike all her other things. But where was the letter? Perhaps it had been destroyed; perhaps, even, there had never been one. Then she saw that it had come away with the wrapper, like a white lining.

  It was quite short, only a sentence. She could have read it in one glance, but, keeping the promise she had made to herself, folded it so that it showed only the signature and the heading. The writing was not as she had imagined it, flowing and delicate, but awkward and firm, with the carelessness that comes of having held a pen too long to treat it tenderly. With a sudden contraction of fear, she knew that her dreams had changed into something real. Over a date which was that of the day before her mother’s birthday, she read, at last, the strange unexpected address.

  CHAPTER VII

  SITTING, AS SHE HAD been taught, in a corner with her back to the engine, Elsie watched the big rounded trees and smooth hills of the Home Counties hump and swell and recede, listening to the wheels of the train playing the “Soldiers’ Chorus” from Faust. “Ta ra-ta-ta-ta, ta ra-ta-ta-ta, ta ra-ta-ta-ta.” Her watch told her that she was within half an hour of her station. She told herself, firmly and frequently, that she was eager to arrive.