Faster! Faster! (5 page)

“Did you know that I'm trying to get a job, in a publishing house? Freeman & Forest. I'm going up to see them on Tuesday.”

“Are you hoping to get it?” Quarrendon asked, in his odd, intent way.

It somehow caused her to reply rather carefully.

“Theoretically, of course I am. I'd like to do something to help Mother—you know she earns everything for all of us? At least, she's got a tiny income my grandfather left her, but it isn't much. And I know I ought to work. But I'm afraid really, I'd have liked to live at home and do nothing. The kind of life girls were expected to lead when Mother was young would have suited me beautifully.”

“Arranging the flowers?”

“Yes, and doing things in the village, and gardening, and sometimes going to London for a few parties and theatres and things, and having people to stay.”

“The leisured life, in fact?”

“Yes,” said Sylvia. “I don't think I've ever told anyone that before. I'm definitely ashamed of it.”

Quarrendon smiled.

His ugliness became negligible when he did so.

“Don't be ashamed of it. So long as you're honest with yourself, and know what you really want and why you want it, there's never anything to be ashamed of.”

“Is honesty the most important thing?”

“Yes,” said Quarrendon.

“I'm not always honest. I say things, quite often, to make myself sound nicer and more interesting than I really am.”

“So do most people. Besides, you're confusing honesty with truthfulness. You
know
when you're pretending, don't you? You don't pretend to yourself. So it doesn't matter so very much.”

They had reached the house. The old black cat
crawled from under the syringa bush near the library window and again Sylvia saved her companion from a disastrous false step.

“Don't walk on His Lordship. He's nearly blind and he gets under everybody's feet.”

“In that case he has more excuse than I have for not noticing where he's going,” said Quarrendon.

He bent and stroked the cat. The aged creature rubbed its head against him, purring.

“I'm glad you like cats,” said Sylvia, pleased. “We've got a dog too—an Airedale called Betsy—but she's in the workshop with Father. You'll see her at dinner-time.”

“Do you change for dinner?” said Quarrendon.

“Yes. But don't, if you don't want to. It won't matter.”

He put down the cat gently.

“I don't want to in the least, and I shall do so. And you know you'd all be slightly ashamed of me if I didn't. You see how I try to live up to my own theories about honesty.”

They both burst out laughing.

How nice he is, thought Sylvia, running up to her room. Quarrendon had been much more easy to talk to than any of the young men whom she knew. Sylvia was always rather frightened of young men, ever since one—whom she hadn't liked at all—had tried, without a word of warning, to kiss her at a dance when she was seventeen. No one had ever heard about that episode. Sylvia was
deeply ashamed of it. Not because the young man had wanted to kiss her, but because she hadn't liked it. Her contemporaries, she knew well, took such things in their stride. It was Experience, they said—and Experience was more important than anything else. Sometimes they carried Experience very much further than being kissed. So they said.

Sylvia had gabbled with other girls herself, about sex-appeal and the dangers of repression, or—alternatively—about the importance of work and the relative unimportance of sex.

She felt inwardly sure that she herself had no sex-appeal at all. Looks had nothing to do with it—everybody was agreed about that. Sylvia's own mother, who was no longer young, still attracted men.

It was funny that one never talked to one's mother about this terribly important question of sex. She had been very modern and splendid about it all—told one every possible thing at the earliest possible age—was prepared to discuss anything freely—and had always encouraged her children to read everything they wanted to read.

Perhaps it was because she was so much cleverer than one was oneself, and of course so much more attractive. It seemed almost impossible that she should understand the awful diffidence that overwhelmed Sylvia whenever she thought about the young man at the dance.

Their brief and graceless dialogue was hideously clear in her memory.

“What on earth's the matter? D'you think I'm tight or something?”

“I'm frightfully sorry, I don't like that sort of thing.”

“My God, are you one of
them?
You don't look it.”

“No, no,” said Sylvia, distressed. “I—I just don't think that being kissed is any fun.”

“I suppose you're temperamentally frigid,” said the young man, gazing distastefully at her through horn-rimmed spectacles. He was a Bloomsbury Group young man.

“I suppose I am,” said Sylvia, nearly in tears.

The strange idea came to her now that she would like to relate this happening, of which she had never spoken to a soul, to Andrew Quarrendon. She felt that he would be impersonal, although interested, and that he might even make her mind less about it.

She was still thinking of Quarrendon as she changed her mauve cotton frock for an evening one of dark-blue chiffon. It was an old one, bought in the sales more than a year ago, but Sylvia had always liked it.

She was brushing up her shining aureole of wavy hair when Taffy came in.

She too had changed, and was wearing a rather ugly apple-green frock with a round neck and short puffed sleeves.

“Syl, what are we going to do with them all to-night? Has Mother said?”

“Play paper games.”

“Oh, that'll be all right. I thought it would be so awful if we just sat round and talked.”

“But that's rather fun, sometimes.”

“Not with Grandmother there. And I'm not sure about Frances. Is it all right for us to call her Frances?”

“Yes. She said we were to. Don't you like her? I do.”

“Oh, I quite like her. Only I'm not sure if she'd do for paper games—anyhow, not the more subtle ones. I feel she'd have qualms about being perfectly, perfectly kind when it came to personalities.”

“It mayn't be a bad thing for someone to have a few qualms,” said Sylvia. “You haven't, and Mother hasn't, and I don't think Quarrendon would have many.”

“Neither do I. I like him.”

“So do I.”

“Do you suppose he's in love with Mother?”

Sylvia felt slightly startled.

“Somehow I never thought of that. Of course, most of her men are, aren't they?”

“In a way, yes. A sort of intellectual way. It doesn't mean much. Could I have one of your handkerchiefs, Syl? I haven't one left.”

“Yes. Take one. Do I look all right?”

“You look rather nice. I like you with masses of lip-stick on. I hope Daddy'll be late; we can have the wireless on till he comes.”

Maurice had already turned on the wireless. His evening toilet had been shorn of everything that he could possibly omit without attracting
attention to the omission. He had rushed downstairs early in order to obtain possession of the newspaper. Only two came regularly to the house, and of these his father had one in the workshop.

The other, Maurice knew, would contain a full report of the summing-up in a revolting and notorious murder case. He was extremely anxious to read it.

“During the last generation or two,” roared a voice—for Maurice had wholly neglected the recommendations of the little book of instructions that lay on the radio regarding Peaceful Tuning— “during the last generation or two there has developed a school of composers and executive artists of great individuality——”

The voice roared on, and Maurice, impervious to its eloquence, devoured in compressed form the life-story of a young cinematograph-operator who had first shot, and then partially burned, an elderly prostitute by whom he had been kept. He had just reached the jury's verdict of Guilty when the door opened.

Maurice, drawing a deep breath as he relaxed, stood up politely.

It was Sal Oliver.

“Are you listening to that?” she enquired; obliged to raise her voice in order to be heard.

“Oh no,” said Maurice in surprise.

He abruptly silenced the informant.

“Why do you have it on, when you don't even listen?” Sal asked with friendly curiosity.

Maurice considered. He was a little boy who seldom spoke at random.

“I think the noise helps me to think,” he said at last. “Some people at school have the gramophone on when they're supposed to be studying. They say it's a help.”

“In my day it used to be just the other way round. It was supposed to be much more difficult to concentrate when there was a noise going on.”

“That's what Grandmother always says. But Mother doesn't. She can always concentrate, however much noise is going on. She doesn't mind being interrupted, whether she's writing or anything. She says it's only a matter of making up your mind to attend to what you're doing.”

“I see,” said Sal.

“I made up my mind when I was quite young,” Maurice said gravely, “to try and be like her. As far as I
could,
I mean,” he added rather apologetically, feeling that such an aspiration might well sound slightly presumptuous.

His admiration for his mother was enormous, and he saw no reason to suppose that he would ever be hard-working and brilliant, as she was. He knew himself, on the contrary, to be very slow.

But at least he could learn to concentrate, and the people at school always said that was half the battle. Then he might get a scholarship, and it wouldn't be so frightfully expensive for Mother, and she wouldn't have to work so hard all the time.

As he thought of it all, his small freckled face grew graver and graver and he unconsciously breathed a deep sigh.

Sal Oliver, looking at him, suddenly asked for a cigarette. “And please light it and
start
it for me,
Maurice,” she said in a quick, conspiratorial whisper.

Very occasionally Sal would invite him to a couple of illicit puffs.

Maurice flew joyfully to the cigarette-box.

Taffy had put on the apple-green frock from motives that were obscure to herself.

It was a very old frock indeed, descended to her from Sylvia—and Sylvia had worn it while she was still at school. It had shrunk badly in its last cleaning, and was now much too short. The sleeves were too tight.

And apple-green wasn't Taffy's colour.

Her mother had said so, and had given her a very pretty frock at Christmas—pale primrose, with tiny orange flowers embroidered all over it. Not a real evening dress, but just right. Taffy ought to have worn it to-night. She had, in fact, meant to wear it—and at the last minute had pulled out the ancient apple-green instead.

She had wondered if Sylvia would say anything—but Sylvia had apparently been thinking of her own appearance rather than of Taffy's.

On her way downstairs Taffy rapidly evolved the running commentary that so often accompanied her through her days.

“A tall girl of nearly seventeen was hastening down the stairs. There was a far-away look in her eyes, and it was evident that no thoughts of self troubled her. Yet the hastily donned, shabby frock,
faded to a soft pastel shade, served only to show off her slender grace and the deep, dark colour of her eyes. They were eyes of almost emerald green, a colour seldom seen in an English face—gipsy eyes——”

“Is that you, Sylvia?”

It was her mother's voice.

“It's Taffy, Mother.”

“Come in a minute, darling, and help me.”

Taffy went into her mother's bedroom. It was a large room, with two windows facing south. Between them stood a sort of combined writing-and dressing-table.

It was now being used as a writing-table. Papers strewed it, and half a dozen envelopes, already addressed, lay on the floor.

“If you'd stamp those for me while I finish—I shan't be a minute—it would save time. There are the stamps—under the looking-glass.”

Her mother spoke without raising her head, still writing rapidly.

“They won't go to-night.”

“I know they won't. But it gets them done.”

“But they won't go to-morrow either. At least they'll go, but they won't arrive till Monday.”

“I know. Be quick, please, darling. I'm going to be late for dinner.”

Oh no, you're not, Taffy silently apostrophized her parent as she picked up the stamps and began to stick them on.

Mother wouldn't be late. She'd get her letters finished, and herself dressed with quite incredible speed, and come downstairs at the last possible
minute looking beautifully finished, and with that air of poise that maturity gave to some people—the brilliant, vital ones, like Mother.

“There! That's done, thank Heaven. Why have you put on that frock, Taffy dear, instead of the yellow one?”

How like her! Apparently she'd never once raised her eyes, and yet she knew all the time what one had on and exactly what one looked like. Did she perhaps do it to show how clever she was? Taffy was so disgusted with herself for these thoughts—that another part of herself insisted were unjust and unkind—that her anger sounded in her voice as she answered.

“Isn't it all right?”

“The yellow one would really be better, wouldn't it? This one seems to have shrunk—or else you've grown a great deal.”

That was meant to sound as though it was quite a new idea that the green had shrunk. To gloss over the fact that Mother had pointed it out before, and one had deliberately ignored it.

“Honestly, Taffy, I think you'd look nicer in the other.”

“There isn't time to change now.”