something about men.’
‘I’ve been married before too,’ he remarked sombrely.
‘I should think the least said about that the better! What I’m trying to say is, if you wanted to play the bachelor, why didn’t you stay one? You’re still much too married to your radio, I suppose that’s it. All this success has gone to your head. You can’t treat Marjorie like that and expect to get away with it. She doesn’t look like a girl, but at heart she is one. Treat her like one.’ She stared across at him.
He was large and he was certainly getting rather plump. His shoulders were extremely large. When he wandered to the piano and played some Chopin his backview looked massive and pompous. But he looked distinguished. His greying hair did.
‘I know you always pretend to think I’m a bore,’ she called through the music. ‘But you do listen to me, even if you pretend you don’t. Why don’t you buy her a dog?’
The music stopped.
His large head turned slowly and he was grinning.
‘Buy her a dog?’ he exclaimed, amused.
She had the strange notion that now he was in profile he looked sleek and slim. The shadows, of course. He would make a magnificent cat burglar!
A quaint litle shudder ran down her spine. Imagine a scandal like that! Their family! And an important man like Ernest!
‘You’re getting inhuman and pompous,’ she heard herself exclaiming. ‘We all are, perhaps. We’re so stuck up in our little world here. There’s danger in it and it’s time we grew out of it. So many important things are happening everywhere.’ She heard herself talking about China and Russia, and the new world after the war, and saying how could it be a better world unless individuals, actual individuals, started to improve themselves, and to rid themselves of their own little weaknesses? She said she was just as guilty as anybody else.
But he was walking up and down with his cup and a piece of ginger cake and roaring with laughter about the idea of buying his wife a dog.
‘I meant a puppy, of course,’ she said crossly.
He suddenly put down his cup and his cake.
‘She knows she can have everything she likes,’ he said a little sharply, and left the room. He didn’t bang the door. He seemed to slide through doors.
His movements were oddly stealthy, weren’t they, for so large a man. Yet, for instance, you heard of huge men who could dance delightfully, whereas little men fell upon you like a ton of bricks. She supposed he had learned it in the studios. He would often talk about how you could leave the studio while somebody else was still on the air. He was often interesting about it at dinner. He would speak about ‘suspended microphones’ instead of ‘table’ ones. It was most interesting.
And then, one Saturday, he did buy Marjorie a puppy.
THE moment reminded Marjorie of an occasion when she was very little. Her father had bought her a puppy in almost identical circumstances. Here was new proof that the history of our lives repeated itself. She hadn’t got on with her father, whose rather new title had gone to his head, and somebody had told him that the only way to win her love back was to buy her a pony or a puppy. As she already had two ponies, he bought her a puppy, and she felt at once that if he was capable of buying a little girl a puppy—somebody else had given her the ponies—he couldn’t be as bad as the neighbours said his title indicated. And it was only a knighthood anyway. She hugged him and pretended to herself that she didn’t a bit mind his full lips, and she pretended it was merely childish to think that love had anything to do with the shape of the mouth. She forced herself to kiss his mouth, and when his lips felt dry and hot and full against hers, she pretended it was only because he was old now that she didn’t like the feel of him. He dribbled, but that didn’t matter at all, he had bought her a Cocker spaniel, black. It was sweet. It writhed round, and yards of red tongue hung out, and shining white teeth flashed in the firelight. And although quite soon it was dead, and its donor too—they both met with a fatal accident in the farmyard via a new bull—the thought of them both returned, as such thoughts would.
Marjorie had been brought up in the country kind of way, with plenty of money—or, rather, no awareness of it at all as a subject—and with all the familiar country attributes such as hunting, or following the hunt in cars, and shooting pheasants and hares, and playing tennis with drearies, and motoring out to some glamorous country hotel in the hopes of meeting a rich man—Daddy said always marry someone who was rich—who hadn’t got full, dry lips. Nearly all of them had, with tedious habits to match. There was something so dull about most men. You didn’t seem to meet one in ten who was worth talking to, and there was said to be a statistical shortage of men in any case, due to the Great War. So as for meeting one in a hundred who was worth real consideration? Their conversation was one long drawl, or else it was hearty and alcoholic fatuity. Was it because they were English? Suddenly it dawned on her that she was already bitter. Yet her function as a woman had somehow to be fulfilled. She was aware that she wanted to have children. She had never known her mother, who had died of Bright’s Disease when she was a very small child, and any supplementary guidance seemed persistently lacking. She was taught by strange governesses, none seeming to have the maternal touch, and she lived through one or two little country schools in a lost and dreamlike fashion. She needed individual attention, and somehow never got it. It was probably her own fault, she often thought. As for her father, he was a queerly impersonal man, busy at the life of village squire, without managing to impress very much. When the new bull trod on the spaniel and got her father against the wall, he was ill for quite a long time with his fractured pelvis. Then, certainly, he did seem to become aware of his daughter, and he died wondering why he hadn’t married again, if only to give her some brothers and sisters, and a set of uncles and aunts.
Not a month after his funeral, Marjorie rather desperately lost her head and married the only possible man within range. He was called, ridiculously, Captain Bud. To her secret shame, she was to be called Mrs Bud. But she expected to lose herself in motherhood. Captain Bud hadn’t a penny, but he proceeded to get through most of hers in no time. He was a dreadful little man, and she knew it, but she was terrified of being homeless after being so safe. Her home had had to go to some unknown cousin under the entailed will, and to escape to London with Captain Bud, and to be secretly married there, seemed the only reasonable solution to her problem, and it passed for romance.
Captain Bud had lived down the lane in a council cottage. He had a certain way with him, and he had dandruff on his coat collar. He was short, and people cattily said he would need a pair of stilts to marry Marjorie in. He was in an insurance house and didn’t say much about his title of captain. He was fifty-two. Marjorie had the notion that young men were bores, lots of girls didn’t like men of their own age, and she met Captain Bud at a hunt ball in Maidstone. Captain Bud, though quite properly introduced through suitable friends, had arrived without his white gloves, if, indeed, he possessed any, and she often felt that she married him solely because of this and the crumpled look of his tails. Everyone present treated him like dirt, and pointed to his dandruff in a Countyish manner, and although she wanted to treat him like dirt, something seemingly pathetic in his pasty face made her feel fatally sorry for him. She defied everybody by dancing with him, and afterwards lost her party and let him motor her to Tonbridge to a teabarn, where there was cream and night dancing. To her astonishment she noticed herself seeing him to his council cottage, which was an inverted procedure for a man and a woman, surely, and she heard herself agreeing to do it again on the morrow. When he kissed her, she was quite surprised to find he was good at it and his lips were quite intriguing. In about a fortnight she was telling herself she could ‘change him’, and at any rate she could brush his coat collar for him and stop people talking about his dandruff. He was decidedly a bit short for her, but it was all right, and she suddenly thought they were made for each other, it was perfect nonsense saying you had to marry somebody of your own age and your own class. She asked many of her Kent