Life and Death of Harriett Frean, May Sinclair [different ereaders .TXT] 📗

it true that this idea had been all wrong? That she might have

married Robin and been happy and been right?

 

“I don’t care. If it was to be done again to-morrow I’d do it.”

 

But the beauty of that unique act no longer appeared to her as it once

was, uplifting, consoling, incorruptible.

 

The years passed. They went with an incredible rapidity, and Harriett was

now fifty.

 

The feeling of insecurity had grown on her. It had something to do with

Mona, with Maggie and Maggie’s baby. She had no clear illumination, only a

mournful acquiescence in her own futility, an almost physical sense of

shrinkage, the crumbling away, bit by bit, of her beautiful and honorable

self, dying with the objects of its three profound affections: her father,

her mother, Robin. Gradually the image of the middle-aged Robin had

effaced his youth.

 

She read more and more novels from the circulating libraries, of a kind

demanding less and less effort of attention. And always her inability to

concentrate appeared to her as a just demand for clarity: “The man has no

business to write so that I can’t understand him.”

 

She laid in a weekly stock of opinions from The Spectator, and by

this means contrived a semblance of intellectual life.

 

She was appeased more and more by the rhythm of the seasons, of the weeks,

of day and night, by the first coming up of the pink and wine-brown velvet

primulas, by the pungent, burnt smell of her morning coffee, the smell of

a midday stew, of hot cakes baking for tea time; by the lighting of the

lamp, the lighting of autumn fires, the round of her visits. She waited

with a strained, expectant desire for the moment when it would be time to

see Lizzie or Sarah or Connie Pennefather again.

 

Seeing them was a habit she couldn’t get over. But it no longer gave her

keen pleasure. She told herself that her three friends were deteriorating

in their middle age. Lizzie’s sharp face darted malice; her tongue was

whipcord; she knew where to flick; the small gleam of her eyes, the snap

of her nutcracker jaws irritated Harriett. Sarah was slow; slow. She took

no care of her face and figure. As Lizzie put it, Sarah’s appearance was

an outrage on her contemporaries. “She makes us feel so old.”

 

And Connie—the very rucking of Connie’s coat about her broad hips

irritated Harriett. She had a way of staring over her fat cheeks at

Harriett’s old suits, mistaking them for new ones, and saying the same

exasperating thing. “You’re lucky to be able to afford it. I

can’t.”

 

Harriett’s irritation mounted up and up.

 

And one day she quarreled with Connie.

 

Connie had been telling one of her stories; leaning a little sideways, her

skirt stretched tight between her fat, parted knees, the broad roll of her

smile sliding greasily. She had “grown out of it” in her young womanhood,

and now in her middle age she had come back to it again. She was just like

her father.

 

“Connie, how can you be so coarse?”

 

“I beg pardon. I forgot you were always better than everybody else.”

 

“I’m not better than everybody else. I’ve only been brought up better than

some people. My father would have died rather than have told a story like

that.”

 

“I suppose that’s a dig at my parents.”

 

“I never said anything about your parents.”

 

“I know the things you think about my father.”

 

“Well—I daresay he thinks things about me.”

 

“He thinks you were always an incurable old maid, my dear.”

 

“Did he think my father was an old maid?”

 

“I never heard him say one unkind word about your father.”

 

“I should hope not, indeed.”

 

“Unkind things were said. Not by him. Though he might have been

forgiven–-”

 

“I don’t know what you mean. But all my father’s creditors were paid in

full. You know that.”

 

“I didn’t know it.”

 

“You know it now. Was your father one of them?”

 

“No. It was as bad for him as if he had been, though.”

 

“How do you make that out?”

 

“Well, my dear, if he hadn’t taken your father’s advice he might have been

a rich man now instead of a poor one…. He invested all his money as he

told him.”

 

“In my father’s things?”

 

“In things he was interested in. And he lost it.”

 

“It shows how he must have trusted him.”

 

“He wasn’t the only one who was ruined by his trust.”

 

Harriett blinked. Her mind swerved from the blow. “I think you must be

mistaken,” she said.

 

“I’m less likely to be mistaken than you, my dear, though he was

your father.”

 

Harriett sat up, straight and stiff. “Well, your father’s alive,

and he’s dead.”

 

“I don’t see what that has to do with it.”

 

“Don’t you? If it had happened the other way about, your father wouldn’t

have died.”

 

Connie stared stupidly at Harriett, not taking it in. Presently she got up

and left her. She moved clumsily, her broad hips shaking.

 

Harriett put on her hat and went round to Lizzie and Sarah in turn. They

would know whether it were true or not. They would know whether Mr.

Hancock had been ruined by his own fault or Papa’s.

 

Sarah was sorry. She picked up a fold of her skirt and crumpled it in her

fingers, and said over and over again, “She oughtn’t to have told you.”

But she didn’t say it wasn’t true. Neither did Lizzie, though her tongue

was a whip for Connie.

 

“Because you can’t stand her dirty stories she goes and tells you this. It

shows what Connie is.”

 

It showed her father as he was, too. Not wise. Not wise all the time.

Courageous, always, loving danger, intolerant of security, wild under all

his quietness and gentleness, taking madder and madder risks, playing his

game with an awful, cool recklessness. Then letting other people in;

ruining Mr. Hancock, the little man he used to laugh at. And it had killed

him. He hadn’t been sorry for Mamma, because he knew she was glad the mad

game was over; but he had thought and thought about him, the little dirty

man, until he had died of thinking.

XIII

New people had come to the house next door. Harriett saw a pretty girl

going in and out. She had not called; she was not going to call. Their cat

came over the garden wall and bit off the blades of the irises. When he

sat down on the mignonette Harriett sent a note round by Maggie: “Miss

Frean presents her compliments to the lady next door and would be glad if

she would restrain her cat.”

 

Five minutes later the pretty girl appeared with the cat in her arms.

 

“I’ve brought Mimi,” she said. “I want you to see what a darling he is.”

 

Mimi, a Persian, all orange on the top and snow white underneath, climbed

her breast to hang flattened out against her shoulder, long, the great

plume of his tail fanning her. She swung round to show the innocence of

his amber eyes and the pink arch of his mouth supporting his pink nose.

 

“I want you to see my mignonette,” said Harriett. They stood together by

the crushed ring where Mimi had made his bed.

 

The pretty girl said she was sorry. “But, you see, we can’t

restrain him. I don’t know what’s to be done…. Unless you kept a cat

yourself; then you won’t mind.”

 

“But,” Harriett said, “I don’t like cats.”

 

“Oh, why not?”

 

Harriett knew why. A cat was a compromise, a substitute, a subterfuge. Her

pride couldn’t stoop. She was afraid of Mimi, of his enchanting play, and

the soft white fur of his stomach. Maggie’s baby. So she said, “Because

they destroy the beds. And they kill birds.”

 

The pretty girl’s chin burrowed in Mimi’s neck. “You won’t throw

stones at him?” she said.

 

“No, I wouldn’t hurt him…. What did you say his name was?”

 

“Mimi.”

 

Harriett softened. She remembered. “When I was a little girl I had a cat

called Mimi. White Angora. Very handsome. And your name is–-”

 

“Brailsford. I’m Dorothy.”

 

Next time, when Mimi jumped on the lupins and broke them down, Dorothy

came again and said she was sorry. And she stayed to tea. Harriett

revealed herself.

 

“My father was Hilton Frean.” She had noticed for the last fifteen years

that people showed no interest when she told them that. They even stared

as though she had said something that had no sense in it. Dorothy said,

“How nice.”

 

“Nice?”

 

“I mean it must have been nice to have him for your father…. You don’t

mind my coming into your garden last thing to catch Mimi?”

 

Harriett felt a sudden yearning for Dorothy. She saw a pleasure, a

happiness, in her coming. She wasn’t going to call, but she sent little

notes in to Dorothy asking her to come to tea.

 

Dorothy declined.

 

But every evening, towards bedtime, she came into the garden to catch

Mimi. Through the window Harriett could hear her calling: “Mimi! Mimi!”

She could see her in her white frock, moving about, hovering, ready to

pounce as Mimi dashed from the bushes. She thought: “She walks into my

garden as if it was her own. But she won’t make a friend of me. She’s

young, and I’m old.”

 

She had a piece of wire netting put up along the wall to keep Mimi out.

 

“That’s the end of it,” she said. She could never think of the young girl

without a pang of sadness and resentment.

 

Fifty-five. Sixty.

 

In her sixty-second year Harriett had her first bad illness.

 

It was so like Sarah Barmby. Sarah got influenza and regarded it as a

common cold and gave it to Harriett who regarded it as a common cold and

got pleurisy.

 

When the pain was over she enjoyed her illness, the peace and rest of

lying there, supported by the bed, holding out her lean arms to be washed

by Maggie; closing her eyes in bliss while Maggie combed and brushed and

plaited her fine gray hair. She liked having the same food at the same

hours. She would look up, smiling weakly, when Maggie came at bedtime with

the little tray. “What have you brought me now, Maggie?”

 

“Benger’s Food, ma’am.”

 

She wanted it to be always Benger’s Food at bedtime. She lived by habit,

by the punctual fulfillment of her expectation. She loved the doctor’s

visits at twelve o’clock, his air of brooding absorption in her case, his

consultations with Maggie, the seriousness and sanctity he attached to the

humblest details of her existence.

 

Above all she loved the comfort and protection of Maggie, the sight of

Maggie’s broad, tender face as it bent over her, the feeling of Maggie’s

strong arms as they supported her, the hovering pressure of the firm,

broad body in the clean white apron and the cap. Her eyes rested on it

with affection; she found shelter in Maggie as she had found it in her

mother.

 

One day she said, “Why did you come to me, Maggie? Couldn’t you have found

a better place?”

 

“There was many wanted me. But I came to you, ma’am, because you seemed to

sort of need me most. I dearly love looking after people. Old ladies and

children. And gentlemen, if