Thank Heaven Fasting (7 page)

“These women who are making a fuss about getting a vote are simply hysterical old maids, or women who can't get on with their husbands. They only want to make themselves conspicuous. As if any woman who knew her job
couldn't influence at least
one
man to vote the way she wants him to!”

Then she looked at the two dreary young faces staring back at hers—Frederica's tense and sullen with suppressed rebellion, and Cecily's secret and withdrawn, and shrugged her shoulders.

“I only wish you had a man to influence, my poor child. If one of you doesn't get married soon, I really think you'd better go into a convent, both of you. Though even then, people would only say it was because you couldn't find anyone to marry you.”

Frederica, goaded beyond endurance, suddenly exclaimed:

“I don't want to get married. I hate men. I wouldn't marry anyone—whoever it was.”

Lady Marlowe gazed at her in astonishment for a moment, and then laughed again.

“So you've got to that stage, have you?” was all she said.

Frederica, turning aside—she would not have dared to leave the room without an excuse, and was unable to speak—sank her teeth into the soft flesh of her thin wrist until tiny purple marks sprang into view.

Lady Marlowe, although she often said cruel things, was not a cruel woman, but only an almost entirely unfeeling one.

By some curious effort on the part of Nature to redress the balance, she had attracted to herself in the person of her second husband a gentle, serious-minded, and intensely sensitive man, many years older than herself, who had mistaken her liveliness for mirth, her hardness for courage, and her coarseness of fibre for a protective armour, donned to conceal a passionate spirit that should reveal itself to his tenderness. He was himself wholly vulnerable where his affections were concerned, and without the resilience of youth.

Very soon after his marriage he allowed his natural lethargy—from which the timid dawnings of a belated love had temporarily roused him—to take possession of him altogether.

Although he was a man to whom physical relations with a woman whom he no longer loved imaginatively soon became entirely repugnant, he felt sure that it was his duty to beget children. Moreover, he lacked the moral courage to risk offending his wife.

First Frederica, and then Cecily, were brought into the world, to inherit a quadrupled share of their father's timidity, his fastidiousness, his morbid unwillingness to face unpleasant facts, his eager desire for affection, and his utter inability to compel it.

He, like his wife, felt slightly ashamed that both the children should be girls, and during their early childhood he found the physical side of their existence, so inevitably stressed in nursery days, unpleasantly obtrusive.

Just before Cecily's sixth birthday her father fell ill with influenza. He was not very ill—nevertheless he died. He left everything to his wife—his money, the house in Belgrave Square, and the place in Yorkshire. There was no mention of his children in the will since neither was a boy.

Lady Marlowe let the place in Yorkshire and lived in the Belgrave Square house. Frederica and Cecily had a French mademoiselle, who taught them to speak and write French, and with whom they read and reread the stories of Mme. de Ségur and Mlle. Zenaide Fleuriot, because Mademoiselle said that nothing else was proper for young girls—and a children's maid, who brushed their hair, bathed them, and dressed and undressed them, exactly as she had done in their childhood, until both were well on in their teens.

Their mother's authority was supreme. No one in the house was allowed to question it, but Frederica and Cecily least of all. If Frederica sometimes, in what her mother referred to as “the difficult age,” made occasional clumsy and defiant attempts at self-assertion, they were met with such open ridicule that she could not persist in them. She was both too hyper-sensitive and too ill-adjusted to find any means of retaliation. Her violent and unformulated resentment of her mother's tyranny reacted upon Cecily, who had
thus a double yoke to bear: that of Lady Marlowe's cheerful bullying, and that of Frederica's morbid and possessive love.

Cecily was, however, the less unhappy of the two. The vitality that in Frederica was suppressed and distorted, in Cecily was reduced to a minimum, so that her life was almost entirely mental. Where Frederica yearned fiercely for normal contacts with humanity and life, Cecily longed for the education that had been almost wholly denied to her, and sought refuge from all that was unendurable in her life in abstract speculation and pathetic, surreptitious delvings into such sources of learning as she could attain to in secret.

Both girls bore an immense and unacknowledged sense of guilt always with them, since both practised continual deceptions, ranging from direct lies to subtle reservations and implications, in regard to one another and to their parent. They were never, indeed, frank with anyone—Cecily because she unconsciously sought to safeguard herself against life by avoiding personal contacts, and Frederica because bitterness so distorted her vision that she could scarcely distinguish the false from the true.

They had never been friendly with other girls, but Mrs. Ingram's gentle insistence in forcing Monica upon them had led to a certain degree of familiarity between the three.

They talked more or less freely, in the Belgrave Square schoolroom or in the back half of Mrs. Ingram's drawing-room, which Monica was allowed to use as a sitting-room in the mornings.

Towards the end of Monica's first season she began, almost imperceptibly, to adopt an air of faint superiority towards Frederica. Not towards Cecily, for Cecily was too meek to provoke one to superiority. She would have taken the superiority of almost anybody for granted.

“Fancy, that Mr. Pelham that I met here, asks me to dance at every single ball I see him at. I danced with him twice on Tuesday, at the Corrys'.”

“He's very dull though, isn't he?” said Frederica.

“Oh, I don't think so. Of course he's rather old, but I don't mind that a bit. I rather like elderly men; they're easier to talk to, I think.”

“Mr. Pelham is supposed to have proposed to five different girls, and they all refused him. He's dying to find a wife.”

“Is he? I should have thought he'd be miles better than no one,” said Monica, surprised. “He's quite rich, isn't he?”

“I think so. But deadly. I've practically given up dancing with him,” said Frederica, looking straight at Monica.

She, too, had been at the Corrys' ball, and Monica had seen her, with a white, stiffening face, sitting out dance after dance.

“Why?”

“I just don't care about dancing, except with my particular friends. I'd really rather sit and watch.”

Monica felt something that was half-way between pity for Frederica and anger at having it supposed that she would be stupid enough to believe such nonsense.

Cecily interposed.

“Monica, did you go to Kew Gardens with the Ashes?”

“Yes, on Saturday. Alice Ashe arranged a party. It was rather fun.”

“Was Claude there?”

They always spoke of all the young men whom they knew by their Christian names, and scrupulously addressed them as Mr.

“Of course he was,” said Frederica, laughing. “Monica thinks that he arranged the whole thing for her.”

“As a matter of fact, he did. He practically said so. Considering he was the only person there I really knew—he'd introduced me and his sister, Alice, the day before, so that she could invite me.”

“I think he looks very nice,” said Cecily.

“He's quite nice,” Monica threw out, with elaborate casualness.

“Boys are no use except to play about with, though.”

“He's twenty-six.”

“Is he? Oh well, that's different. I didn't realize he was as old as that,” said Frederica, more respectfully.

“Would he be any good, Monica?” Cecily enquired wistfully.

They all knew what she meant. A man was “any good” or “no good” according to whether he could, or could not, ask one to marry him.

“I don't know. I don't suppose he has any money. His people don't sound at all rich, from what Alice Ashe said about their house. They live somewhere in Wales.”

“And he's a barrister, or something. Like Mr. Pelham.”

“Yes. That would mean living in London if——”

“Would you mind that?”

“Oh no. One can always pay visits,” said Monica cheerfully.

“It would be awfully exciting if one of us got engaged,” said Cecily.

“Yes, wouldn't it. The other two would have to be bridesmaids, of course.”

“How, exactly, would you have your bridesmaids dressed, and what colour would you choose for your going-away frock?” said Frederica thoughtfully. “Let's all say in turns.”

It was an imaginative exercise of which they were never tired—discussing the details of a wedding, each one visualizing herself as its central figure. Even Mrs. Ingram, Monica's mother, would sometimes indulge in the same pastime, alone with her daughter.

It was not very long before Claude Ashe, calling on Mrs. Ingram only a very few days after the expedition to Kew, was smilingly told to go and find Monica in the back drawing-room. Monica, pleased, but rather nervous, jumped up. As she came forward through the looped-back blue satin curtains that divided the big room, she saw, behind Claude Ashe, her mother's quick frown and shake of the head.

She guessed that she had shown too much eagerness in her rapid movement to greet the young man, and felt more self-conscious than ever. However after a few moments it
wore off, and she was talking almost naturally about the little drawings that strewed the table.

They were bad little drawings, copied, as Monica had been taught to copy, from picture-books, or Christmas cards, or an occasional magazine illustration. Children in Dutch peasant costumes, thatched cottages crouching behind rampant herbaceous borders—even ducks, carrying umbrellas, or emerging from improbable-looking eggs.

These copies, carefully and brightly painted with watercolour paint by Monica, adorned her mother's menucards.

“I don't mean her to be
idle,
just because she's 'out,'” Mrs. Ingram always said. “At least one hour at some little job, every day, is one of my rules.”

“I say, did you do those? How awfully clever of you,” cried Mr. Ashe. He was most appreciative and Monica felt, with complete satisfaction, that it wasn't really the painting he was admiring—he said at once that he knew nothing whatever about Art—but herself.

They were talking very happily—from Art they had passed on to politics, and Monica had admitted that she often felt inclined to read up Socialism, although it would shock her parents most
dreadfully
if they ever guessed it—when Mrs. Ingram summoned Monica to the other room.

“You must tell me some more another time,” said Claude Ashe earnestly, as he rose to his feet.

“I expect I've been boring you most frightfully, really,” Monica murmured insincerely.

“I've simply loved it. You know I have. I only hope
you
haven't been bored.”

“Oh no. I've loved it too.”

Avoiding the young man's eye, and blushing a good deal, Monica preceded him into the further room.

There were several other callers there now, and she had no more conversation with Claude, although she was all the time acutely aware of his presence in the room. She could tell by the quick way her mother looked at her, and
then away again, that she was eager to know exactly how the
tête-à-tête
had progressed.

Sure enough, as soon as the last visitor had gone—Claude went away quite soon, and at a moment when Monica, helping an elderly lady on with her feather boa, could only smile and bow—Mrs. Ingram turned to her daughter.

“How did you and young Ashe get on, darling?”

“Quite nicely, thank you, mother.”

“I couldn't leave you chatting alone with him in the back drawing-room any longer. It would have been much too marked.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Besides——”

Mrs. Ingram paused so long that Monica, rather anxiously, ventured to ask:

“Besides what, mother?”

“Besides, though he may be a very nice young man, we've got to remember that he isn't, really, very much use. He's too young, for one thing, and there's no money at all, even if he hadn't got an elder brother.”

Monica, disconcerted and disappointed, did not quite know how to reply. She was afraid that her mother was going to say that she would not be allowed to be friends with Claude Ashe any more.

“It's quite all right, darling,” said Mrs. Ingram very kindly. “I like you to make friends of your own age, and one wants people to see that—well, that there's someone running after you, more or less. Only I want you to realize that you mustn't take anything at all seriously, just yet.”

“Oh, I won't, mother,” said Monica, quite relieved.

“It's only your first season, after all, and you're very young. Though I wasn't much older than you are now when I married.”

Monica had very often been told that Mrs. Ingram had married at eighteen, and the information always vaguely annoyed her.

“I suppose you must have been very pretty when you
were young,” she said politely, trying not to know too consciously that she was saying something very nasty indeed.

Imogen Ingram laughed curtly.

She was not yet forty, and although her complexion had faded, her hair, eyes, and teeth were still beautiful. It was, of course, natural and suitable that she should display ample curves both above and below her tightly corseted waist. Men always preferred a full figure to a skinny one.

“You're a little goose, Monica,” she said kindly. “I had the freshness of youth, of course, as a girl, but I don't suppose otherwise I've altered so very much. And prettiness isn't really very important, darling. A great many very pretty girls never get a chance of marrying at all, and some quite plain ones turn out attractive to men. One never can tell. Father always said that he first fell in love with me because he thought I was natural, and unaffected, and didn't think about myself all the time. No really nice man ever cares about a girl who's affected, or self-conscious.”