Before the Fact (8 page)

Lina wondered if this were the public-school code of honour about which she had heard so much.

Johnnie laughed too. “Yes, I put it across you all that time.” He caught Lina’s pained gaze and added quickly: “Don’t look so tragic, monkeyface. The Isaiah exam wasn’t taken very seriously.”

“Not that it would have mattered to you, old bean, if it had been,” retorted Mr. Thwaite. “Old Johnnie was supposed to be the finest cribber ever known at the place, Lina. He never did a stroke of work all the time he was there; but he got a prize every year, and ended up in the Sixth. I’ll bet he’d have cribbed his way to a schol. at Oxford, wouldn’t you, old bean, if they hadn’t cut your career a trifle short by—”

“Look here, Beaky, aren’t you being a bit tactless? You ought to know that women don’t understand the what-d’you-call-’ems – what’s the word, monkeyface?”

“Ethics?”

“I expect so. Well, the ethics of cribbing. You’ll be giving Lina all sorts of funny ideas about her poor husband.”

“What?” said Mr. Thwaite. “Oh, I see what you mean. Sorry, old bean. Putting my foot in it again, what? All rot, Lina, anyhow. Cribbing as a fine art, and all that sort of thing. Everyone does it. No good at it myself, but a trier. Sorry, old bean, what?”

“Well, anyhow, what are you doing with yourself in these days, Beaky?”

“Me, eh? Oh, tooling around, you know. Nothing much.”

“Lucky old cad, aren’t you, with so much money?”

“Oh, come. Here, I say. Not so much as all that, you know. Draw it mild. Just enough, that’s all.”

“It would certainly be enough for me,” Johnnie grinned.

Johnnie did not ask Mr. Thwaite to dinner.

Lina was so relieved that she quite forgot to pursue some inquiries she had intended into the art of cribbing.

She did not see Mr. Thwaite again for four years.

By the time she had lived in Upcottery three years, Lina was able to congratulate herself on two things.

The first was that Johnnie, who before he met her had never done a stroke of work in his life and apparently had never contemplated doing one, should have really settled down to his job. More, he was now taking it for granted that he should have a job.

Every morning still, with perhaps rather less punctuality but now without any resignation at all, Johnnie went forth to deal with estimates for repairs to labourers’ cottages, quotations for slates, and all the multifarious petty bargaining that his work entailed; and every morning Lina, having got up early in order to breakfast with him, kissed him good-bye on the doorstep just like any suburban wife.

Johnnie, in fact, was altogether a reformed rake. Even General McLaidlaw acknowledged that Lina had turned him from whatever he had been into a useful member of society. It was a revolution of which Lina was quite aware, and for which she took full credit.

She was still not sure how she had done it.

She looked back on that evening when the revolution had been effected, with a kind of wonder. Something had seemed to take possession of her then: something which had given her a strength of character which she normally imagined she lacked, and which had certainly been greater for the moment than Johnnie’s. The odd thing was that, so far as Johnnie was concerned, its effects remained. On that evening Lina had established a moral superiority to which, as she realized vaguely, Johnnie still paid tribute. It was absurd, of course, for after that one effort Lina had quite reverted to her former perfectly contented moral dependence upon Johnnie; and it irked her to find Johnnie at times trying to placate or cajole her, instead of giving her the peremptory orders that she would much have preferred; though she did understand, in an indefinite way, that this was not Johnnie’s method of gaining his ends. She still adored Johnnie for the grown-up schoolboy he was; but she did not like being considered his schoolmistress.

The other matter on which she was able to congratulate herself was that after three years’ residence in an English rural district, she was not yet a member of the Women’s Institutes, had never had a fête in the grounds of Dellfield, and had allowed herself to be persuaded into joining no body, secular or lay, for the dragooning of people into doing things they did not want for the benefit of institutions in which they had no interest.

That is not to say that Lina did not admire those whose bent lay in such directions. Her closest friend in Upcottery, Janet Caldwell, actually ran the village branch of the Women’s Institutes; but Lina did not for a moment allow this fact to interfere with their friendship.

On the contrary, she envied Janet her power of enjoying her duties.

Lina knew herself to be lazy.

At home this laziness of hers had been actually encouraged. “Oh,” they said, when it was a question of something practical, “it’s no good relying on Lina to do
that.
She couldn’t. Lina’s always up in the clouds.” And as Lina invariably did not at all want to do whatever it was that required doing, she took good care to foster the idea that she always was up in the clouds. It had been a quite mistaken idea, but nobody except Lina ever knew that.

At home that had been all very well. In her own house it was impossible for Lina to shelter in the clouds. Joyce was always most surprised that Lina’s house should be as efficiently run as her own.

But Lina’s mental laziness remained.

It was not a good, hearty laziness, which was proud of itself and informed the rest of the world that it could go hang. It was the nagging kind. Lina felt all the time that really she ought to be getting up and doing something useful, but that, on the other hand, she simply could not bear, just for the moment, to be mixed up in all these horrible village activities. And the moment when she might feel she could bear it never seemed to arrive.

So that she very much admired Janet, who was always getting up and doing useful things.

For Janet Caldwell was a serious soul. So, in her way, was Lina, though it was a different way. There was, however, an intellectual bond between them which was quite strong enough to allow such deviations without weakening. Lina had not been in Upcottery two months before she realized that Janet Caldwell was the only person in the place with any real intelligence whatsoever – not excepting Johnnie.

Lina still did not know whether to be disappointed with Johnnie in that respect or not. While they were still engaged she had persuaded herself that Johnnie had a Mind, undeveloped though it might be, which under her ministrations would bud and flower after marriage into as capable a blossom as any in Joyce’s own set. It appeared that she had been wrong. If Johnnie had a Mind, he did not encourage it. Lina felt that it was a pity. She had seen herself in the rôle of mental horticulturist, and she had liked it.

It did, she felt, leave a gap not to be able to discuss passionately with Johnnie the new books or get pleasantly excited over completely academic topics; for Johnnie did not even read the new books, unless they happened to be detective stories, and would have seen nothing to get passionate about in them if he had; while as for academic topics, Johnnie simply could not understand his wife’s interest in them – and where Johnnie did not understand, he laughed. But then Lina got so much from Johnnie, so much that was red-blooded and vital, that a pallid intellectualism super-imposed might have seemed positively out of place: for contrasted with the things for which Johnnie stood to her, intellectualism did look pallid.

In the passionately protective love with which she now surrounded everything that was Johnnie and Johnnie’s, Lina not only sympathized with, but at times even envied, his simple philistinism. Johnnie was her child; and what have children to do with abstractions? Food and drink and love and bodies, the raw meat of life, those are their concerns; not its civilized complexities.

But since Lina herself did not happen to be constituted that way, Janet Caldwell adequately filled the gap, which might otherwise have become a serious one.

Janet was a graduate of St. Hugh’s, Oxford.

She had taken a third in Honour Mods. and a second in History. Contrary to the practice of so many otherwise intelligent women, she did not consider it necessary to impair her appearance in order to prove her intellectual capacity. This was the more fortunate since she was something rather more than good-looking: her broad white forehead, black hair parted in the middle, and large gray eyes gave her a classical appearance which her rather large, full-lipped mouth could not spoil. Her voice was so gentle as to be often almost inaudible. She was half-a-dozen years younger than Lina, unmarried, and lived with her widowed mother in an extremely red, square little house on the top of a small hill, which she herself called The Doll’s House.

Lina’s early experiences in friendship had left her diffident. She was always a little surprised, and a little grateful too, when anyone seemed to like her. Janet had shown her preference from the first, and Lina had reciprocated it at once. Each of the two had recognized in the other the only person in the neighbourhood with whom she could become really intimate; and their intimacy had shot up in the extremely rapid growth which women are so often able to induce in a friendship between themselves.

And it had lasted.

A great deal of tea had been drunk, and an immense amount of talk poured out, in Lina’s long, airy drawing room while Johnnie wrestled with his farm accounts twenty miles away.

On an afternoon in early November the two were sitting in front of the log fire, waiting for tea to be brought in. The conversation had been desultory, until Janet pulled it up with a jerk.

“Lina,” she said, in her gentle, almost complaining voice, “why don’t you have a baby?”

“You may well ask,” Lina answered, with a little laugh. “I assure you, it isn’t my fault.”

“Johnnie’s?”

“Nor Johnnie’s. Nature’s.”

“Do you want one?”

“I suppose so.” Lina was a little embarrassed. It was the first time she and Janet, in spite of their intimacy, had discussed such a personal matter. They prided themselves in differing in this respect from others of their sex, whose avid eagerness to pry into the secret lives of their friends, or, with a kind of psychological exhibitionism, reveal their own, disgusted both of them. “I suppose so. But Johnnie’s such a child himself that perhaps I don’t miss another as much as I might.”

Janet leaned back in her chair, her broad, white hands clasped over one knee. “If ever I married, it would only be to have children.”

“It’s quite nice to have a husband in any case,” Lina observed mildly.

“Yes?” said Janet.

Janet did not like Johnnie.

She was, so far as Lina knew, about the only woman who had never succumbed to Johnnie’s charm. Of course, Janet never said she did not like Johnnie, and she obviously tried not to hint it; but it was quite evident. Janet never stayed more than a perfunctory few minutes if Johnnie came back before she had gone, and it needed quite a lot of persuasion to get her to dinner. Lina thought it all rather unnecessary, as Johnnie was always quite charming to Janet and did not return her dislike in the least; though he did mimic her quiet voice and deliberate movements rather funnily when she was not there.

It had never entered Lina’s head that Janet might be jealous of Johnnie.

“And a house of one’s own,” she added now, thinking of Abbot Monckford. “I can quite understand a girl marrying a man she didn’t care two pins about, just to get a home of her own.”

“But you didn’t?”

“Me? Oh, no. In fact, I was rather frightened of it. Before I was married the idea of housekeeping was a positive nightmare. I felt I couldn’t
bear
it.”

“And now I suppose you’re about the most efficient housekeeper on this side of Dorsetshire,” Janet said, as if stating a simple fact. “I’m quite sure I’ve never had better dinners in any private house than I’ve had here.”

“It’s an easy secret,” Lina laughed. “I’ve told you hundreds of times. Keep a good cook – and know how to cook just a bit better yourself. That’s all.”

“Quite easy,” Janet smiled, as the tea arrived. Janet could not cook at all and would not let Lina teach her.

They talked on trivial subjects while the maid was in the room.

When she had gone Janet sat for some minutes staring at a crumpet on the plate on her lap, before beginning to nibble it absently.

“What I couldn’t stand about marriage,” she said at last, “would be the intimacy. I should hate a man to see me half-dressed.”

“One gets used to it. And when the man tells one that one looks quite nice ... Janet,
are
you thinking of getting married?”

“Oh, heavens, no. It just interests me. It’s funny we’ve never talked about the personal side of marriage before. – Does Johnnie tell you that?”

“Johnnie’s the perfect husband: he always notices what I’ve got on. As a matter of fact, he’s quite interested in women’s clothes. And he’s got very good taste.”

“So long as it’s only the clothes and not the women inside them,” Janet said drily. “Are you ever jealous of Johnnie, Lina?”

“No,” Lina said simply. “I’ve never thought about it. And, in any case, I’ve no cause to be. I should know at once if I had. Johnnie’s far too transparent to be able to hide anything like that.”

“Never underrate your opponent, my dear.”

“I suppose,” Lina mused, “that I should be upset if Johnnie ever were unfaithful to me. I try to persuade myself that I’m modern, and unfaithfulness doesn’t matter really, so long as it’s only an incident and nothing serious; but ... Yes, I should be upset. But I shouldn’t go off the deep end. In any case, Johnnie would always come back to me.”

“He’d be a fool if he didn’t,” said Janet with conviction.

“Mrs. Newsham,” said the parlourmaid, opening the door.

“Damn!” said Janet, under her breath, with gentle inaudibility.

Lina echoed her sentiment silently. Janet had shown signs of getting most interesting.

“Well, I suppose I’ve got to get along to my guides. Thanks for tea, Lina,” said Janet, who did not like Freda Newsham.