The Major works in a void, on a completely empty polished surface, writing away with his elaborately mannered script on a piece of paper placed exactly on the middle of a leather blotter, which in turn is placed exactly in the middle of the desk. The blotter is a favorite one with a picture of a galleon on it in color. Propped up before his eyes is an autograph or a letter, something rare and expensive out of his collection, in Portuguese or seventeenth-century English or perhaps old Dutch, or, now and then, just for a change, Japanese. This arrangement of autograph or letter has little or nothing to do, usually, with what the Major is writing. He just likes to have it there. In the pigeonholes of the desk are bank statements for the past seven years, all duly checked, one stamp book, envelopes in assorted sizes, and materials for sealing registered letters (the seal is a rather special affair in crystal, kept in a red leather box). There are no unanswered letters. The Major always answers his letters immediately and then tears them up, and then spends days afterward being sorry he forgot to make a note of the address. Judged merely by his desk, the Major might possibly appear inhuman, but I know his weaknesses. For example, he refuses to buy enough stamps. That stamp book is a snare and a delusion; there are never more than two halfpenny stamps in it. The Major cannot bring himself to spend ten shillings on two five-shilling stamp books, even when he knows that five shillings’ worth will never see him through the next week of answering letters promptly. He always hopes that somehow it will be enough this time.
Now, my desk— But it might be easier just to describe what is on it at this moment. Four notebooks full of scribbles, collected and used while doing my latest book. Two volumes from the six-volume Journal of Madame d’Arblay. A pink book and a blue book dealing with the same period, which I borrowed and simply must return one of these days. A large pile of empty New Yorker manila envelopes, which I intend to use over again for sending foolscap paper of the same size, when I have come to the end of the new envelopes I have already got. A silver pen tray without a pen, but with an empty silver-topped ink bottle, obviously never yet used, and never destined for use. A sixpenny glass bottle of ink, very much used. Another silver pen tray, and a separate silver inkwell which I used to use, but it dried up. (All this silver stuff seems to have been presented to members of the family for shooting, or golf, or riding, or something.) A green plastic day-by-day calendar, presented to me by Nellie on Christmas and kept up to date by same. A red leather engagement pad with paper neatly marked out in days of the week; I found it here when I arrived, and like everyone else who has ever owned it I haven’t begun to use it. A brown leather, gold-tooled, empty address book, much too splendid to spoil. A shabby blue well-filled address book. A little green book called “Useful Household Hints”; I can’t imagine where I got that. A great double pile of unanswered letters. A glass lamp, balanced perilously near the edge of the desk.
All of this is rather a load for one normal-sized desk. I admit it. I admit I am messy, and that I never throw anything away. Moreover, any flat-topped article of furniture near my desk is apt to be equally loaded down with the overflow—boxes of stationery, books I may want to consult, typescript copy. I am messy and I like being messy. I expect to be allowed to be messy on my own desk. Why, I demanded in a rage during those disastrous first days, why should the Major object to my messiness? I didn’t object to his neatness. I didn’t go over and muss up his desk, or untidy his papers, as he was always tidying mine.
The Major had the most exasperating attitude toward all this. He seemed to think that his way was right, and mine wrong; he felt that everybody ought to be neat. He was astonished that I put up any fight at all. But I did, oh, I did. Every time I found my papers disturbed and put into neat little piles I raised hell, and then one day I found he had thrown away a valuable scrap of an old envelope. It had a most important telephone number on it, and he had thrown it away. I raised the roof.
Next day, very meekly, he brought me an old used postage stamp. “Do you want this, or may I throw it away?” he asked.
After that I tried to be better-tempered, but the attempt may not have come to much. Fortunately, his own library was ready, and he moved down to it. Now he lives downstairs in chilly, impeccable neatness, and I throw things around upstairs as much as I like. It is his nightmare that someday we may again have to share a study. I wouldn’t like it so much myself.
The affair of the hairdresser, I must admit, was more my fault than his. She was a nice girl, always neat and pretty, and more than ready to tell me her troubles of an afternoon while she did my hair. One day when I met the Major at the train, going home, I said blithely, “I’ve invited the hairdresser at the Ritz to come down to Conygar for her holiday.”
He looked rather glum at this. Conygar was not yet ready for guests, and he said so.
“She just wants a quiet place to go to, to Forget,” I explained. “She’s had a row with her boy friend. His wife is making trouble.”
“Well, really, darling, we’re not running an Advice to the Lovelorn. We can’t accommodate all the unhappy couples in England. Just look at today’s paper—three hundred and seventy-one decrees nisi granted today; just suppose you had to take care of all those broken hearts.… What’s the woman’s name?”
“I don’t think I ever heard it,” I said. “But she’s an awfully nice girl, and I do think this man seems to be treating her rather shabbily. He’s an Italian, and—”
“Will she want to be entertained?”
“Oh no, though she did look rather blank when I said we had no radio or anything. She simply wants a place where she can hide away from him, and Forget.”
He grunted and said no more for the time being. But when he found out later that I was planning to go away myself, during her visit, he grew agitated.
“I don’t really know why you should make such a fuss over a trifle like that,” I said, admirably patient. “The girl doesn’t want to be entertained, I tell you; why must I stay home to entertain her? She’ll be perfectly happy all by herself. She—”
“But she won’t be all by herself, damn it! I’ll be here. I tell you, I think it’s outrageous, filling up this house with people I don’t know, and then running off yourself.” He paused, drew a deep breath, and then spoke these unforgivable words: “It’s my house, after all.”
Well, I mean to say. I never think quickly enough under these circumstances, but I hope I withered him with a look, and after a minute I managed to say, “Thank you, I’ll remember that hereafter.” Then, still very ladylike, I called Louise and asked her to take a letter, and I put in an application to go to Hollywood. A very weighty silence hung over the sitting room.…
When Louise had gone, the Major said, “Look here, are you crying?” in hopeful tones.
“Certainly I’m not crying,” I said truthfully. “Why should I be crying?”
“Now look here, don’t you think you’re being rather unreasonable? Merely because I don’t want your hairdresser here, you’re going off to Hollywood. I confess I can’t see the connection.”
“I don’t care to stay here, that’s all. It’s your house, after all.”
“I still don’t see what—”
The telephone rang, and I went to answer it. “It was the hairdresser,” I said, when I came back. Secretly I felt very much relieved. “She doesn’t want to come away and Forget, after all. She’s made up with her boy friend.”
“Thank God. Now look here, darling—”
“Well, how would you have liked it in New York if I’d said, It’s my house, after all’?”
“No doubt I’d have been very angry. But I still don’t see what Hollywood—”
“Did I make a fuss in New York when you moved in and used my desk—my desk—and cleaned up all my papers?”
“Yes,” said the Major, “you did. You were very loud and emphatic about it. But I admit I shouldn’t have said this is my house. It’s our house, of course. Now will you stop talking about Hollywood?”
“Well, sh
e isn’t such a very good hairdresser, at that.”
The Battle of the Eiderdown was the latest and the biggest, and began with Carola getting the flu while I was in London. The whole school was down with it at one time or another, but Carola had an annoying way of waiting with her community diseases until everyone else was up and about and we were telling each other she had resisted it. Then down she always came with a flop and a soaring temperature. She would get up in the morning very aggressive, and suddenly melt in tears, and have to go back to bed. This time all went according to formula, and Lorraine told me on the telephone that there was nothing to worry about. The doctor had been. Everything was all right.
“I wonder if I should go home,” I said. “But I can’t,” I said. “I am making that BBC recording tomorrow and I can’t break the contract.”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” said the Major. “Lorraine would have told you to come if it were serious. She can call in the Coopers if she needs advice, and the doctor’s already seen Carola, hasn’t he?”
When we came back two days later Carola was nearly well. Lorraine called downstairs to say so when we came in. She kept saying so while I saw Carola, until I began to think Carola must have had quite a siege, after all. “I took care of her by myself,” she said. “I didn’t want Mary to catch it and the doctor said it was terribly infectious.”
“But why should you have caught it rather than Mary?” I asked. Lorraine is apt to do everything herself, even when I don’t think she should. “You mean you fetched and carried everything? Sponge baths? All that? That was ridiculous, Lorraine.”
“Well, as Mary is always with the babies upstairs—”
“Damn it all, she doesn’t have to be with the babies upstairs. Her job is Carola, not the babies upstairs.” I know I should have been more enthusiastic about Lorraine’s kindness, but she was looking thin and tired, and I suppose I sounded ungracious just because I did feel grateful. I was crossly grateful, the way one is when faced with exaggerated sacrifice. “Mary’s paid to do that work; you’re not,” I said. “If Carola was so bad, I should have been called back, and if she wasn’t bad, then you should have let Mary do it.”
“Don’t be so silly. Mary keeps forgetting when it’s time for medicine,” said Lorraine. She had an embattled expression which I ought to have recognized. Carola sat there smirking. “I was only ninety-eight this morning,” she said. “Rose was a hundred. I wouldn’t be a hundred. Rose is much worse than me, isn’t she, Mummy? Before I’d have a hundred every morning!”
“Well, Lorraine, it was awfully sweet of you, but awfully silly too. It was sweet of you …”
I suppose if Lorraine had kicked me in the shins then and there, she would have felt better. I see it now. There was all her week of loving service dismissed with a careless scolding and what sounded like careless thanks. Still, she rallied; next morning she was back at the post, taking care of Carola in spite of hell and high water, or me. “Mickey!” she called urgently. “Carola’s temperature is up again. She’s ninety-nine!”
I went in and glanced quickly at Carola, who was looking unpleasantly proud of herself. I don’t like talking about temperatures and things in front of her; it feeds her ego too much.
“Ninety-nine’s nothing,” I said, deliberately offhand.
“It shouldn’t be that high in the morning,” insisted Lorraine.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Carola, you’re practically well. Now, Lorraine, I do want you to let Mary take care of her today.”
Lorraine took a heroic stance. “And who is going to see that she gets her medicine every two hours? Who’s going to—”
Still obtuse, I ignored signs of a rapidly approaching storm. I really didn’t think. “She’s practically well; it’s no matter if she misses her medicine,” I said, and went off down the hall. The thing was, I really didn’t think it was worth fussing about. If it had been worth fussing about I should still have tried not to fuss. When I was little and people got agitated about my health it scared me to death. When you are little you want people agitated about you, but not for any real reason, not so that you get hurt by a doctor. You want to count in the lives of the grownups, you want them to be worried about you, but you want it to be roses all the way just the same. Besides, I was disinclined to be agitated; agitation would have made me feel guilty. Still, it would have been much more satisfactory for Lorraine if I had been a bit upset over the situation. It was her case of flu. She had had Carola on her mind and on her shoulders all week; she had vanquished the flu with careful, intelligent nursing; it was her triumph and I was spoiling it, first by lack of appreciation and then by belittling real danger.
Unfortunately for my spiritual good and for Lorraine’s ego, but fortunately for Carola, she really wasn’t ill.…
We had guests that weekend and I didn’t notice that Lorraine was in a state until lunch time. Then I realized something was wrong when she said, “This ham is too salty. Shouldn’t it have been soaked before it was cooked?”
The cooking of American ham is an old discussion at Conygar, and I made the old answer. “It was already cooked when we got it; it was a tinned ham from America, already cooked.”
“Why, it’s delicious. Such a novelty, getting ham!” said the guests, eating it heartily. It wasn’t really too salt, and when I saw Lorraine had shoved all her ham to the edge of the plate and was eating bread and butter instead, and that her eyes were red and swollen, I left the room and called her outside. We made it up and went back to lunch and I thought it was over. Hah.
“I told Lorraine she had better take a holiday, and she agreed, in fact she said she would move out altogether, but it’s all right now,” I told the Major when we were alone for a minute after lunch. “Sometimes one really forgets the atom bomb, doesn’t one?”
“Are you sure it’s all right? You don’t want her to go away, surely, we couldn’t do without her,” said the Major.
“No, of course I don’t, but if Lorraine isn’t happy here I don’t see how we can keep her against her will. Only it’s all right now. I must have been thoughtless this morning, and you know how sensitive she is.”
“She was miserable,” he said accusingly. “She was crying. You know, darling, you can be—”
“I know, I’m sorry, but please do believe me; it’s all right now.”
He was still worried, but I thought it was only because of one of his fixed ideas. The Major invariably deals with people according to his fixed ideas of them. We all do to some extent, but he does more than most because he thus saves time on personal relationships, which bore him. Sometimes his method works out very well. This time, I thought, he is referring the matter to one of his fixed convictions about me; he is inclined too much toward pessimism, he believes, and I am inclined too much toward optimism.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
Actually, as I was to learn, nothing so generalized was bothering him. It was much more serious. “Because,” he continued, “Lorraine came in here this morning, crying. You know, darling, she’s up against an impossible situation here. You always let Carola have her head, and Mary’s no bloody use because you won’t back her up, so how can you expect Lorraine to deal with the child?”
“Why, damn it, I don’t expect Lorraine to deal with her, who ever said I did? Lorraine’s not the Nanny and doesn’t want to be. What else did you and Lorraine talk about, what other of my failings?”
Promptly he told me.…
Well, we had guests. There was no time to discuss it further just then. As soon as Lorraine could, she went back and asked the Major to forget her outburst of the morning. “Don’t bother Mickey; I was silly and said things I don’t usually mean. You won’t mention it to her, will you?”
“It’s too late,” said the Major blithely, for he had no idea of what was coming to him later; “I’ve already told her, but that’s all right.”
Hah again.
“It’s not a matter of Carola,” I said for the tenth time, about one o?
??clock in the morning. “What I’m talking about is the way you seem perfectly willing to discuss my failings with anybody who—”
“It is a matter of Carola. The child’s dreadful. You let her run to you as soon as anybody else tells her she can’t have her own way, and you always give in. It’s no use blaming Mary; it’s your fault; in about ten years Carola will be an outcast, and then what? She won’t have any money to make up for it; nobody will marry her; nobody—”
“Never mind about Carola, I’ll talk about her some other time. What I want to—”
“Listen to the disgusting row she makes every morning over what dress to put on, and you always back her up.”
“It’s not every morning! It happened once or twice. You don’t even look at her for weeks at a time, and then, when something happens, you pounce on that and say it happens every morning. I can’t make you out; six months ago you were bawling me out for not being nice enough to her—”
“You give her too many toys, you say ‘yes, darling,’ to everything, she can’t eat properly at table, and her manners are disgusting. She can’t speak up and say Hello to guests, or say Goodnight when she goes to bed.”
“What you want is an automaton. Carola’s not perfect and she’s not disgusting; she’s just an ordinary child with phases, and no six-year-old ought to have good manners, so there; no sensible man would notice if a child that age had manners or not. But you’re crazy, and anyway I don’t intend to talk about Carola; what I’m interested in is how you dare discuss me, Me, and my shortcomings with—”
“You quarrel with all these women. Has it never occurred to you that Emily Hahn might possibly be in the wrong?”
“Certainly; I’m in the wrong the usual number of times, but damn you, I do not quarrel with all these women. I never quarrel with them, there’s no reason to quarrel, we all get on all right, if only you’d either stay out of things completely or come in completely, but I can’t bear this once-in-a-while interference; how about the time I told Carola she didn’t have to eat her greens because she was sick?”