days’ wonder in Easton Colborough and it had caused a great deal of talk; but it was not really very rare or extraordinary and if Mrs Temple had not been a clergyman’s widow she would have been quietly shut up with very little of the noise that in fact occurred. Briefly, when she reached her critical years she took to drunkenness, and from drunkenness to promiscuity: her mind, her nature, even her heart became estranged.
Everything had been against poor Mrs Temple; everything, her frustrated married years and her restless widowhood; and she had retired from life too young. The cottage that her brother-in-law had found for her was dark, poky and damp, and it did not have a single one of the amenities of civilised life – but Canon Harler had not been concerned with her convenience: only with getting her firmly anchored at such a distance from his own home that she could not be a burden nor her poverty a reproach to him. (On the same reasoning he had refused to let her touch the capital of her little trustfund to send Richard to a better school: besides, he had never approved of her marriage and would lend its results no countenance.) It is ludicrous to cite earth-closets, well-water and paraffin-lamps; but they were not without their effect, particularly as Mrs Temple was a pretty woman. She felt that this incessant, ineffectual charring (for however she worked the place could never be anything but a rural slum) was adding, as indeed it was, to the irreparable insults of time; and this caused one resentment more.
And she was unfortunate in her neighbours. She and Richard now lived on the other side of Easton Colborough, nearly twenty miles from Plimpton, and in a sparsely inhabited region. The big house belonged to a man who only came down for the shooting, with expensive parties of City friends; and the distant parsonage contained a hard-faced celibate who trailed incense and the smell of candles and required her to call him Father. Otherwise, there was only the one very large farm, run by a sharp, efficient businessman, and the labourers’ cottages, in the immediate vicinity. The hearse-like Daimler from Plimpton Hall came winding through the narrow lanes from time to time, and a few women came to see her from Easton Colborough, but on the whole she was very lonely and when Richard began to spend all his free time at the studio she felt that she was giving away her last beautiful years for nothing. She suffered much from his preoccupation with Mr Atherton, and in her moments of depression Richard seemed to her a selfish boy, taking with both hands and giving nothing.
He had of course no conception of the extent or even the nature of her sacrifices: but equally she had no idea of the degree to which she was the centre of his universe. You do not praise the daily sun nor say thank you for your daily bread, unless they seem precarious. She did not know how he regarded her as a fixed principle (although in fact she was changing almost as much as himself, even before the disaster occurred), nor that almost his whole way of life was an attempt to come over so firmly, so recognisably on to her side that she could never throw him off as she had thrown off his father.
Laura Temple was a woman who really needed a husband, a proper husband; and when the people of Easton Colborough had said she would marry again it was their way of saying that she was an eminently feminine woman, that in no bad sense she was particularly fitted for marriage (being incomplete alone), and that she was likely to attract a husband. The most censorious mind could not at that time have accused her of the least impropriety, but a naturally warm temperament is clearly different from a flaccid indifference, and they said, ‘Mrs Temple will marry again.’
Later it was, ‘It would be nice if she were to marry again and settle down,’ or even, ‘Somebody ought to find a husband for Mrs Temple.’ Then there was a silence about her, the significant silence of the high-principled, which was soon broken, however, by whisperings, at first indignant and incredulous, then stern and angry and more and more medical in their nature.
She was terribly open to her body’s betrayal: she suffered very much from headaches and turmoil of spirits whose nature she could not determine, and once casting about for some relief from her migraine and depression she tried a glass of cooking-sherry. It was not very good to taste, but it worked. She had no head for alcohol, and she never acquired much of a tolerance, so that even on her income she was able to become an alcoholic – rows and rows of South African sherry (it was two shillings a bottle then) hidden in cupboards, behind bushes, clanking on the outhouse shelves. Her progress was unbelievably rapid, and the dissolution of her personality was a matter of weeks, not of years. Sometimes it was replaced by an extraordinary ‘modern’ substitute, hard, brassy and confident; sometimes it was replaced by nothing but a fog with no one behind it, an impersonal body of suffering; and sometimes, though rarely, she would reappear, herself whole and gentle, and it was inexpressibly painful.
The disease ran fast; yet although he did not see or know the half of it, this period seemed to Richard a boundless everlasting state, in which anxious misery became the normal condition – grey apprehension at the best, in the intervals between crises. It went on and on, from the time when he first found her incapable, her words a slurred mixture of incoherent dignity, lachrymose precepts and weird jollity, until the last day when they took her off in a terrible drugged-sober state, quite withdrawn, yellow-faced, huddled in an old black dress with her peroxide hair straggling its dead colour over the dusty lightless cloth.
The course was rapid indeed; but not so break-neck that each gradation did not prepare him for the next. In some ways the very beginning was the most difficult time, for then he could not tell how remote from normality this was – was his feeling that everything was hideously astray quite justified? The bald policeman, shining on the cottage step without his helmet and standing there to tell him that ‘she was taken poorly at the bus stop’ said it with an appearance of normality. Everybody was still polite: the world continued, apparently unmoved.
But there is external and internal normality, and here too it was the beginning that was the most difficult: his inner world cracked irreparably when first he heard her singing a dirty song. It was more destructive than many of the later stages; more wounding, for example, than the lewd accusation about Mr Atherton, which came to him prepared. Besides, they were shouted out by an enemy, a queer rakish manifestation of another self that seemed to possess her, invade her, from time to time, an intruder from another, later generation and another, unknown, class: the same which caused her to dye her hair. This being was openly hostile: shrieked ‘Prig’ at him and smashed things: but it lacked authority and even its most evilly calculated words – dirty little Welshman or Liverpool guttersnipe – caused no more than a dull wound; and some of the time it was afraid of him.
Later he realised that he had not seen or understood many aspects: the odd bookie or bookie’s clerk, the vague men hanging about the shadows, they never meant anything. He was protected by his own ignorance (forty-five was old age for him) and by people’s kindness – a kindness which had at one time puzzled him. Very early he had noticed that the occasional invitations to proper Easton Colborough houses had stopped, invitations that had always been very irksome to him, by the way; but in the town he still sometimes met the people, and they would speak to him with a particular earnestness, trying to inject an unusual degree of sympathy or benevolence into words that of course remained utterly commonplace.
It was a very difficult case for interference – no family doctor, no near relatives who could be spoken to and no one with the authority to write to them. Mrs Temple had no close friends in the town, and those of her acquaintances who might have come forward in any other circumstances could not in these. There were eccentrics by the dozen in Easton Colborough and certifiable lunatics like Miss Hodson, who sometimes ran about in her nightgown with her long hair trailing down her back, and they were all very kindly treated – perfectly acceptable. But the good women would not tolerate the least unchastity: a hint of riggishness with labourers wiped Mrs Temple’s name out of the list of human beings. The nightmare ran on, therefore, a longer time than would be thought credible: yet it had its end – ignominious and violent, but still an end, as far as anything can have an end.
By the kindness of his friends, Richard was sent almost directly away to France, to live as a resident pupil in the house of a Monsieur Durand, a respectable and conscientious person long known to Mr Atherton. He was the only pupil; no one in the house spoke a word of English, and the change could hardly have been more complete. His window looked out not on to the lush green of Grimmond’s meadow, but on to a stark plain of vines: the light that surrounded him, the air he breathed,