Sir!' She Said (15 page)

“I'll let you know,” said Terance; but he had a very good idea that his answer would be a refusal as he walked that evening from his office to his club.

Most evenings John Terance called in for a rubber of bridge between tea and dinner. There was a satisfying anonymity about a club. You could leave your troubles in the hall with your hat and stick.

He arrived, owing to Carstairs' visit, a little later than usual. At each of the three tables a rubber had been just begun. It looked as though there would be no time for him to play that evening. He walked upstairs. In the dark, cool drawing-room that looked over the green park he found Raymond Humphries, one of his oldest friends, his original proposer for the club.

Humphries waved a hand at him. “It's years since we've had a chat,” he said.

Over a dark sherry they began to talk. Of their children to begin with. Humphries had two boys. One was in his second year at Cambridge. The other had been called to the Bar a few months back.

“He's going to do all right, I think. Both of them will, as far as I can see. I was pretty disappointed at the time that one of them was not a girl. But I'm glad now.”

“Glad?”

“Having daughters is a bit of a responsibility.”

“Hasn't it always been?”

“Not so much as it is to-day. Our parents, certainly our grandparents, had really only one responsibility towards their daughters, to find them husbands. They had to train their daughters so that they would be the kind of girls that men would want to marry, and then invite to the house a goodish number of the kind of men that would make reasonable sons-in-law. That's all there was to it.”

“I don't know that there's so very much more to it to-day.”

“Perhaps not, my dear John, but think of the conditions. They're completely different. Forty years ago a father had the running of his daughter's life. To-day she runs her own. You haven't got to find eligible young men for her. It's she who'll find ineligible ones for you. We used to talk about the latchkey as being the symbol of emancipation. It isn't now. Every girl has a latchkey. It's a chequebook that's the symbol. As soon as a girl's got a banking account she's free, and most of them have. It's the war that did it. The war telescoped events. A process that should have taken fifty years got compressed into a third of a decade. Parental authority had to go when girls were W.A.A.C.S. and W.R.E.N.S. working at canteens, in camps, driving lorries, keeping their own hours. You couldn't keep any control over their acquaintances then. You just didn't know what they were doing. When the war was over they weren't going to give up that freedom.”

“Does it matter?”

Humphries shrugged his shoulders.

“I don't know. Perhaps it doesn't. But I'm glad I've not the responsibility of daughters. It's happened too quickly. I don't believe that women were ready for this freedom. I don't believe the world was ready for it. I daresay it'll turn out all right. But it's all very well to say that a girl and a man can be friends just as easily as two men can. Nine times in ten they can. But the tenth they can't. Whom did we have our love affairs with when we were young? There were shop girls, and actresses, and married women. We never had affairs with the girls we met in our parents' houses. The young man of to-day does. We were discussing it the other night, and my boy said that the man was a fool who expected the girl he married to be inexperienced. It's not an atmosphere that one can be comfortable in about one's daughters.” He paused. “Everything's so uncertain,” he went on. “People have lost faith. There's nothing they believe in. They don't believe in religion; they don't believe in duty. There's nothing strong enough to stand in the way of personal inclination. People talk about their right to happiness and their duty to themselves. That's about the only religion they've got, I fancy. Everything's temporary and makeshift. There's nothing you can rely on: the modern woman even when she marries doesn't become a wife, she becomes a mistress. She drives a mistress's bargain with a man. She doesn't say: ‘We'll make the best of one another. This is for keeps.' She says: ‘As long as you amuse me, I'll stay. But the moment you bore me, or the moment some one turns up that 1 like better, I'll walk out.' One feels one's sitting on
a volcano all the time. Just compare Faith with one of these modern women.”

John Terance smiled. He and Humphries were such old friends that they could talk together without offence, almost impersonally of Faith.

“I shouldn't have thought she was too good an example,” Terance said. “She was a modern woman a decade ahead of her contemporaries.”

“Ah, but think of the way she was one. You knew where you were with her. You were on firm ground. However many men friends she had you were sure of her. Her men friends knew it, too. She was the loveliest thing that most of us have ever seen. Most people fell in love with her. She knew it. She was too much of a woman not to. And she let them know very quietly, very firmly, very affectionately, that there was nothing doing and kept them as her friends.”

His voice which had been harsh and truculent as he talked of the modern girl had softened and deepened as he spoke of Faith. John Terance looked curiously at him. Had Humphries been himself in love with her? Was he one of these men who had been shown friendlily that there was nothing doing and been kept as friends? Perhaps? He did not know. He never had known what had lain behind that long train of friendships that Faith had drawn across her life. It was that capacity for secrecy, indeed, that represented Faith's hold upon her friends; that knowledge that nothing they ever had said to her would be repeated or used against them. She was loyal to her friends. “Women like that give dignity to life,” Humphries
was saying. “They never let it become a squabble.” He paused. “If they were all like that? But. . . oh, well, they aren't. Let's go and have a rubber.”

Terance hesitated. It was a quarter-past six. His house was not ten minutes from the club. He had no engagement for the evening. He would not be dining until eight. There was no real reason why he should not cut in. At the same time, a rubber might well last an hour. Faith would be back from Ranelagh by seven; she liked to have some one there to welcome her when she came home.

“I'm sorry,” he said, “I'ld love to. But I must get back.”

Pensively John Terance walked northwards towards his home. It was not simply that he had been worried by Humphries' conversation, but that that conversation had come as the climax to a mood. He, too, had been telling himself that women had been given a freedom for which they were not ready; had been putting himself in the confessional, had asked himself whether he was fulfilling his duty to his daughters; whether he should have allowed Julia to leave her home; whether he should have allowed Melanie to treat hers as though it were an hotel; whether his treatment of them was not like the Spartan leaving of children in the snow to see if they would survive; though even as he had asked himself those questions he had recognised the impossibility of answering them. He was in the dark. There was nothing that he could do. You could not set yourself against the spirit of the time. You could not make your children unlike other people's children. You had to trust them.

As he turned his latchkey in the door the telephone bell began to ring.

“It's all right, Davis,” he called out. “I'll answer it.”

A languid, high-pitched but masculine voice answered him.

“Is Mrs. Terance in?” it asked.

“I'm afraid she's out.”

“Then I will ring up later.”

“Can I take any message for her?”

“I will ring up later.”

The line was disconnected.

Terance shrugged his shoulders. “I wonder who that was?” he thought.

Not that there was any particular point in wondering. Faith had so many friends, and he knew so few of them. They existed for him as Christian names: vague shapes afloat in the river of her conversation: vague silk-hatted figures waiting in the drawing-room while she finished dressing. They had no individual existence. They were the people that she went out to theatres with and dances, to Ranelagh and on the river. He made no attempt to keep any count of them. He glanced at the pad beside the telephone. It was covered with messages: would Mrs. Terance ring up Garrick 2530 between six and seven? Mr. Hastings had rung up to say he would ring up later. Mr. Coatfair would be in London over the week-end. The pad for Melanie was equally scrawled over. His own was blank. Fretfully he shrugged his shoulders. What could you expect your daughter to become when she had a mother who spent her whole
time rushing from one party to another, dining with this man and the other man? Naturally her daughters went one better. And it was all very well for Humphries to talk about a man being able to trust himself with Faith. That sort of talk might only mean that she had been discreet. A discreet woman always had her alibis. There would be nineteen men: every one of whom would be ready to knock on the floor the man who spoke lightly of her honour: every one of whom would swear an oath in a law court to that honour. And what did that amount to when there was the twentieth man who knew better and kept his mouth shut. What sort of a wife had Faith really been? Had she really been a faithful and devoted comrade or had she been simply fond and clever? What sort of a mother, anyway, was she making to her children?

During the next half-hour there were two more calls, and in neither case would the caller leave a name or message. When Faith returned it was to the telephone that she walked first. She had been spending the day, he knew, rushing from one appointment to another, lunch, Ranelagh, a cocktail party. Yet her effortless and languid grace gave the impression that only at that instant had she emerged from the hands of the hairdresser. Impatient with her though he was, Terance could not help marvelling at her unruffled beauty as she picked up the pad.

“Let me see now,” she murmured. “Who's rung me up? Johnny. . . he can wait. Garrick 2530; that'ld be Frank. I don't suppose it's anything important. These others, though. I wonder. . .”
She paused, her finger resting pensively against her lips. “You don't know if Bobby rang up, do you?”

Terance shook his head.

“A number of people have rung you up during the last half-hour, but whether one of them was Bobby. . .”

“You might have bothered to find out.”

“They said they hadn't any message to leave. They said they'ld ring up later.”

Faith Terance looked at him as though he were a refractory infant.

“Of course, that's what they would say. You frighten them. You're abrupt with them. You make them feel they aren't welcome. Of course, they won't leave any message when they hear it's you answering them. And now here I am not knowing whether Bobby's calling for me here or I'm meeting him at the Embassy.”

But that was more than Terance was prepared to stand. He had left his club an hour before he need have done: he had listened courteously and patiently to other men's enquiries about his wife: he had ruined his own evening to please her, and now he was being blamed because. . . because of what. . .?

“I had not realised,” he remarked acidly, “that it was part of my duty as a husband to arrange your dancing arrangements with other men.”

She turned slowly round from the telephone to fix him with a puzzled, enquiring look.

“What am I to take that to mean?” she asked.

He did not answer her directly.

“Do you realise,” he said, “that we haven't dined together for ten days?”

She raised her eyebrows.

“My dear,” she said, “why should we?”

“It's usual for married people. . .” he began.

She laughed him into silence.

“In this year of grace,” she quoted, “we're a modern couple. We don't want to live in each other's pockets. We've got to lead our own lives.”

“Which means,” he retorted, “your going out every night of the week with some other man.”

He was unable to ruffle her composure, however.

“I don't go out every night of the week. And if I were to, I don't see why you should make objections. I like theatres, and restaurants, and dance clubs. You ought to want me to be happy.”

“I don't know that I want you to be made happy by other men.”

She shook her head wearily.

“John, don't be ridiculous. You know quite well that it would bore you terribly to take me out evening after evening.”

“I don't know that it would.”

“But I know very well it would. Don't you remember when we were first married how tired you used to get of going out? You kept on suggesting that we should stay at home. You couldn't work at the office, you said, if you had been up till one o'clock the night before. That's why I started going out with other men. I didn't want to be a nuisance to you. I didn't want to spoil your career.”

It was challengingly that she looked at him. And
grudgingly he had to admit that she was right. That was the way that things had started.

“If you want to start out again,” she went on, “why, of course, I'll adore to go with you. But you won't like it. In a fortnight you'll be bored to death. One cabaret show is fearfully like another.”

‘You seem to find them amusing.”

“Because I'm taken out by different people. That makes each evening seem a little different. I wouldn't, for anything in the world, go out with the same person every evening. And, besides, think how much money I'm saving you. You ought to be very grateful to me.”

She laughed gaily, and, perching herself on the side of his chair, kissed him lightly and affectionately on the forehead. She was an impossible person to argue with. He had long known it. But he felt some retort was needed.