Complete Short Stories (VMC) (50 page)

‘Has Master Hilary gone to bed?’ he asked, feeling rather foolish and confused.

The only scent in the air was a distinct smell – even a haze – of cigarette smoke.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And Miss Chasty – where is she?’

‘She went to bed, too, sir.’

‘Is she unwell?’

‘She spoke of a chronic head, sir.’

The maid stacked the cups and saucers in the cupboard and went out. Nothing was wrong with the room apart from the smell of smoke and Mr Wilson went downstairs. His wife was waiting in the hall. She looked up expectantly, in some relief at seeing him so soon.

‘Nothing,’ he said dramatically. ‘She has gone to bed with a headache. No wonder she looked feverish.’

‘You noticed the scent.’

‘There was none,’ he said. ‘No trace. Nothing. Just imagination, dear Louise. I thought that it must be so.’

He went to the library and took up his magazine again, but he was too disturbed to read and thought with impatience of the following day.

Florence could not sleep. She had gone to her room, not with a headache but to escape conversations until she had faced the predicament alone. This she was doing, lying on the honeycomb quilt which, since maids do not wait on governesses, had not been turned down.

The schoolroom this evening seemed to have been wreathed about with a strange miasma; the innocent nature of the place polluted in a way that she could not understand or have explained. Something new, it seemed, had entered the room – the scent had clung about her clothes; the stained cup was her own cup, and her handkerchief with which she had rubbed it clean was still reddened; and finally, as she stared in the mirror, trying to re-establish her personality, the affected little laugh which startled her had come from herself. It had driven her from the room.

‘I cannot explain the inexplicable,’ she thought wearily and began to prepare herself for bed. Homesickness hit her like a blow on the head. ‘Whatever they do to me, I have always my home,’ she promised herself. But she could not think who ‘they’ might be; for no one in this house had threatened her. Mrs Wilson had done no more than irritate her with her commonplace fussing over Hilary and her dog, and Florence was prepared to overcome much more than irritation. Mr Wilson’s pomposity, his constant watch on her works, intimidated her, but she knew that all who must earn their living must have fears lest their work should not seem worth the wages. Hilary was easy to manage; she had quickly seen that she could always deflect him from rebelliousness by opening a new subject for conversation; any idea would be a counter-attraction to naughtiness; he wanted her to sharpen his wits upon. ‘And is that all that teaching is, or should be?’ she had wondered. The servants had been good to her, realising that she would demand nothing of them. She had suffered great loneliness, but had foreseen it as part of her position. Now she felt fear nudging it away. ‘I am not lonely any more,’ she thought. ‘I am not alone any more. And I have lost something.’ She said her prayers; then, sitting
up in bed, kept the candle alight while she brushed her hair and read the Bible.

‘Perhaps I have lost my reason,’ she suddenly thought, resting her finger on her place in the Psalms. She lifted her head and saw her shadow stretch up the powdery, rose-sprinkled wall. ‘How can I keep that secret?’ she wondered. ‘When there is no one to help me do it? Only those who are watching to see it happen.’

She was not afraid in her bedroom as she had been in the schoolroom, but her perplexed mind found no replies to its questions. She blew out the candle and tried to fall asleep, but lay and cried for a long time, and yearned to be at home again and comforted in her mother’s arms.

In the morning she met kind enquiries. Nurse was so full of solicitude that Florence felt guilty. ‘I came up with a warm drink and put my head round the door but you were in the land of Nod so I drank it myself. I should take a grey powder; or I could mix you a gargle. There are a lot of throats about.’

‘I am quite better this morning,’ said Florence and she felt calmer as she sat down at the schoolroom-table with Hilary. ‘Yet, it was all true,’ her reason whispered. ‘The morning hasn’t altered that.’

‘You have been crying,’ said Hilary. ‘Your eyes are red.’

‘Sometimes people’s eyes are red from other causes – headaches and colds.’ She smiled brightly.

‘And sometimes from crying, as I said. I should think usually from crying.’

‘Page fifty-one,’ she said, locking her hands together in her lap.

‘Very well.’ He opened the book, pressed down the pages and lowered his nose to them, breathing the smell of print. ‘He is utterly sensuous,’ she thought. ‘He extracts every pleasure, every sensation, down to the most trivial.’

They seemed imprisoned in the schoolroom, by the silence of the rest of the house and by the rain outside. Her calm began to break up into frustration and she put her hands behind her chair and pressed them against the hot mesh of the fireguard to steady herself. As she did so, she felt a curious derangement of both mind and body; of desire unsettling her once sluggish peaceful nature, desire horribly defined, though without direction.

‘I have soon finished those,’ said Hilary, bringing his sums and placing them before her. She glanced at her palms which were criss-crossed deep with crimson where she had pressed them against the fireguard, then she took up her pen and dipped it into the red ink.

‘Don’t lean against me, Hilary,’ she said.

‘I love the scent so much.’

It had returned, musky, enveloping, varying as she moved.

She ticked the sums quickly, thinking that she would set Hilary more work and escape for a moment to calm herself – change her clothes or cleanse herself in the rain. Hearing Mr Wilson’s footsteps along the passage, she knew that her escape was cut off and raised wild-looking eyes as he came in. He mistook panic for passion, thought that by opening the door suddenly he had caught her out and laid bare her secret, her pathetic adoration.

‘Good morning,’ he said musically and made his way to the window-seat. ‘Don’t let me disturb you.’ He said this without irony, although he thought: ‘So it is that way the wind blows! Poor creature!’ He had never found it difficult to imagine women were in love with him.

‘I will hear your verbs,’ Florence told Hilary, and opened the French Grammar as if she did not know them herself. Her eyes – from so much crying – were a pale and brilliant green, and as the scent drifted in Oliver’s direction and he turned to her, she looked fully at him.

‘Ah, the still waters!’ he thought and stood up suddenly, ‘Ils vont,’ he corrected Hilary and touched his shoulder as he passed. ‘Are you attending to Miss Chasty?’

‘Is she attending to me?’ Hilary murmured. The risk was worth taking, for neither heard. His father appeared to be sleep-walking and Florence deliberately closed her eyes, as if looking down were not enough to blur the outlines of her desire.

‘I find it difficult,’ Oliver said to his wife, ‘to reconcile your remarks about Miss Chasty with the young woman herself. I have just come from the schoolroom and she was engaged in nothing more immoral than teaching French verbs – that not very well incidentally.’

‘But can you explain what I have told you?’

‘I can’t do that,’ he said gaily. ‘For who can explain a jealous woman’s fancies?’ he implied.

He began to spend more time in the schoolroom; from surveillance, he said. Miss Chasty, though not outwardly of an amorous nature, was still not what he had at first supposed. A suppressed wantonness hovered beneath her primness. She was the ideal governess in his eye – irreproachable, yet not unapproachable. As she was so conveniently installed, he could take his time in divining the extent of her willingness; especially as he was growing older and the game was beginning to be worth more than the triumph of winning it. To his wife, he upheld Florence, saw nothing wrong save in her scholarship, which needed to be looked into – this, the explanation for his more frequent visits to the schoolroom. He laughed teasingly at Louise’s fancies.

The schoolroom indeed became a focal point of the house – the stronghold of Mr Wilson’s desire and his wife’s jealousy.

‘We are never alone,’ said Hilary. ‘Either Papa or Mamma is here. Perhaps they wonder if you are good enough for me.’

‘Hilary!’ His father had heard the last sentence as he opened the door and the first as he hovered outside listening. ‘I doubt if my ears deceived me. You will go to your room while you think of a suitable apology and I think of an ample punishment.’

‘Shall I take my history book with me or shall I just waste time?’

‘I have indicated how to spend your time.’

‘That won’t take long enough,’ said Hilary beneath his breath as he closed the door.

‘Meanwhile, I apologise for him,’ said his father. He did not go to his customary place by the window, but came to the hearth-rug where Florence stood behind her chair. ‘We have indulged him too much and he has been too much with adults. Have there been other occasions?’

‘No, indeed, sir.’

‘You find him tractable?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘And are you happy in your position?’

‘Yes.’

As the dreaded, the now so familiar scent began to wreath about the room, she stepped back from him and began to speak rapidly, as urgently as if she were dying and must make some explanation while she could. ‘Perhaps, after all, Hilary is right and you do wonder about my competence – and if I can give him all he should have. Perhaps a man would teach him more …’

She began to feel a curious infraction of the room and of her personality, seemed to lose the true Florence, and the room lightened as if the season had been changed.

‘You are mistaken,’ he was saying. ‘Have I ever given you any hint that we were not satisfied?’

Her timidity had quite dissolved and he was shocked by the sudden boldness of her glance.

‘I should rather give you a hint of how well pleased I am.’

‘Then why don’t you?’ she asked.

She leaned back against the chimney-piece and looped about her fingers a long necklace of glittering green beads. ‘Where did these come from?’ she wondered. She could not remember ever having seen them before, but she could not pursue her bewilderment, for the necklace felt familiar to her hands, much more familiar than the rest of the room.

‘When shall I?’ he was insisting. ‘This evening, perhaps, when Hilary is in bed?’

‘Then who is
he
, if Hilary is to be in bed?’ she wondered. She glanced
at him and smiled again. ‘You are extraordinarily alike,’ she said. ‘You and Hilary.’ ‘But Hilary is a little boy,’ she reminded herself. ‘It is silly to confuse the two.’

‘We must discuss Hilary’s progress,’ he said, his voice so burdened with meaning that she began to laugh at him.

‘Indeed we must,’ she agreed.

‘Your necklace is the colour of your eyes.’ He took it from her fingers and leant forward, as if to kiss her. Hearing footsteps in the passage, she moved sharply aside, the necklace broke and the beads scattered over the floor.

‘Why is Hilary in the garden at this hour?’ Mrs Wilson asked. Her husband and the governess were on their knees, gathering up the beads.

‘Miss Chasty’s necklace broke,’ her husband said. She had heard that submissive tone before: his voice lacked authority only when he was caught out in some infidelity.

‘I was asking about Hilary. I have just seen him running in the shrubbery without a coat.’

‘He was sent to his room for being impertinent to Miss Chasty.’

‘Please fetch him at once,’ Mrs Wilson told Florence. Her voice always gained in authority what her husband’s lacked.

Florence hurried from the room, still holding a handful of beads. She felt badly shaken – as if she had been brought to the edge of some experience which had then retreated beyond her grasp.

‘He was told to stay in his room,’ Mr Wilson said feebly.

‘Why did her beads break?’

‘She was fidgeting with them. I think she was nervous. I was making it rather apparent to her that I regarded Hilary’s insubordination as proof of too much leniency on her part.’

‘I didn’t know that she had such a necklace. It is the showiest trash I have ever seen.’

‘We cannot blame her for the cheapness of her trinkets. It is rather pathetic.’

‘There is nothing pathetic about her. We will continue this in the morning-room and they can continue their lessons, which are, after all, her reason for being here.’

‘Oh, they are gone,’ said Hilary. His cheeks were pink from the cold outside.

‘Why did you not stay in your bedroom as you were told?’

‘I had nothing to do. I thought of my apology before I got there. It was: “I am sorry, dear girl, that I spoke too near the point.”’

‘You could have spent longer and thought of a real apology.’

‘Look how long Papa spent and he did not even think of a punishment, which is a much easier thing.’

Several times during the evening Mr Wilson said: ‘But you cannot dismiss a girl because her beads break.’

‘There have been other things and will be more,’ his wife replied.

So that there should not be more that evening, he did not move from the drawing-room where he sat watching her doing her wool-work. For the same reason, Florence left the schoolroom early. She went out and walked rather nervously in the park, feeling remorseful, astonished and upset.

‘Did you mend your necklace?’ Hilary asked her in the morning.

‘I lost the beads.’

‘But my poor girl, they must be somewhere.’

She thought: ‘There is no reason to suppose that I shall get back what I never had in the first place.’

‘Have you got a headache?’

‘Yes. Go on with your work, Hilary.’

‘Is it from losing the beads?’

‘No.’

‘Have you a great deal of jewellery I have not seen yet?’

She did not answer and he went on: ‘You still have your brooch with your grandmother’s plaited hair in it. Was it cut off her head when she was dead?’

‘Your work, Hilary.’

‘I shudder to think of chopping it off a corpse. You could have some of my hair, now, while I am living.’ He fingered it with admiration, regarded a sum aloofly and jotted down his answer. ‘Could I cut some of yours?’ he asked, bringing his book to be corrected. He whistled softly, close to her, and the tendrils of hair round her ears were gently blown about.