A Voice Like Velvet

Marjorie Bisham knew quite well what it was that Bess wanted to know. Bess had the forgivable curiosity possessed by some spinsters of her age. And if she sometimes felt a small irritation over Bess, she didn’t remember it for long and had developed quite a deep affection for her. She often felt sorry that Bess had never married, and now never would, and she once told Ernest she thought Bess was happier in her present state; Bess made a sort of profession of being a snob. ‘She enjoys the reflected glory you bring her, Ernest! You must never let her down,’ she teased him. But it didn’t matter being a snob if you enjoyed it and were one for a particular reason. She and Ernest both had to be rather snobbish now and then, even if they were only pretending. At times perhaps they did really feel above other people. Then, it was awful to catch yourself at it. Everyone lived in a particular little world—didn’t they?—within the outer world, and they had to live according to those particular standards. The alternative was to get out and live in another one. Mrs Bisham now knew that this particular world was one which she had chosen deliberately—having got out of another which hadn’t fitted her at all. She had confided the details to Bess just before she’d decided to marry Ernest. And perhaps because Ernest, too, had been living in a world which hadn’t suited him at all, the new world he found with Marjorie succeeded instantly—in the outward and practical sense.

In the emotional sense, however, as Bess suspected, it had not succeeded at all. Ernest and Marjorie had married without really being in love with each other at all. It was one of those practical and smiling marriages and there evidently weren’t going to be any children. Marjorie got sad-eyed and went for long walks in a large white mackintosh, returning to have tea by herself in her room. Bess had to have tea with Ernest in the drawing-room, when she would be at leisure to demand what on earth was the matter with him. Sometimes, even, guests would arrive, having been invited by Marjorie herself, but who now genuinely pleaded a headache. The elderly Wintles might come, bringing their brownish son called Jonas, who was said to have already had a tragic life, though not yet twenty-one, and, with his dead brothers, had been amongst the First of the Few. Poor Jonas seemed to admire Ernest, in a distant sort of way, and was always saying he was ‘browned off’ about this or that. He seemed to admire Marjorie, in a poodle-like way, and when she wasn’t on view he would declare to Bess he was ‘utterly browned off to hear it. Can I do anything, Miss Bisham?’ But there seemed to be nothing he could do, or anyone else.

There was one shadowy evening over muffins, when just such a situation caught her once more. Marjorie had pleaded a headache, though refusing a doctor, and the guests this time were a bunch of rather nice people called the de Freeces, three rather tall cousins, or some such relationship, who spent the days nodding their greying heads and saying that the war would first of all be over by the spring, and then by the summer, and then by the coming Christmas. Then they would have to start all over again from scratch. They came on this occasion because Marjorie wanted to go and do some local part-time work in a new factory. And they rang the rusty bell sharp at four, all ready to nod their heads and say it was all arranged about the factory, it was nuts, and it was two shillings an hour if it was Sundays. But of course Mrs Ernest Bisham wouldn’t want to do it for the money, they knew that, dear. Famous announcers must be very rich, and hadn’t Mrs Bisham a little money of her own, didn’t they say? And no doubt he had? Anyhow, they had such a charming house, all wandery and sort of part of the scenery, like a gingerbread cake. They arrived full of everything, and were ‘mortified’ to hear that Mrs Bisham was ‘indisposed’, making her sound like a famous actress who has really had a row with the leading man, except, of course, that in this case the leading man was far too charming. His manners were enchanting and it was such a thrill seeing the actual person who read the news over your wireless. It was fascinating.

But Bess wasn’t at all fascinated; at least, not when the de Freeces had twittered away again.

She said, about Marjorie:

‘I’m beginning to wonder why you married her! It surely wasn’t because I suggested it?’ Though if it had been a glaring success, she would have claimed this at once. ‘Much better if you’d stayed as you were, Ernest. Much better.’ She sat with a leg thrown over a bony knee balancing a Coalport teacup. Her stockings never fitted her thin legs very tightly, and her spoon never fitted the Coalport saucer very well, because of the depth of curve there.

Ernest, looking rather fat in a blue pin-stripe, stood by the high brick mantelpiece, staring with some embarrassment down at the log fire. He told her he wished she’d mind her own business and concentrate on a marriage of her own. He didn’t intend to hurt her; it was just a brotherly remark. She replied quite brightly that he couldn’t hurt her feelings like that; he knew quite well who she would have married if she’d had the chance, but men had never looked at her ‘like that’, least of all him, and so that was that. Then she said she really liked Marjorie, and she declared that Marjorie was not the ‘type’ to shut herself up in her room like this, she was too kindly. It meant that Marjorie was really becoming ill. You could be emotionally ill as well as merely having the measles. ‘But I suppose men can’t be expected to realize that! I like Marjorie much better than I thought I did. She’s all right. And you started off all right—what’s gone wrong? The first gloss has worn off, I suppose! Well, you’re very stupid. I hope you’re not behaving as if either of you is young? She is just right for you if only you give her a chance, Ernest, and handle her properly. It’s your fault if you’re pulling in different ways. Remember, she’s been married before. She knows 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.

CHAPTER III

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 friends what they thought, but when they seemed rather quiet she put it down to envy. Captain Bud moved out of his council cottage and they rented a thin, tall house in Belgrave Square. The captain declared it was the grandest day of his pretty variable life, and he proceeded to hit the high spots in no uncertain manner.

Thinking of him now, when she had to—for memories chose the queerest times to thrust themselves upon one—she often thought what a contrast there was between Mr Bisham and Captain Bud.

Ernest always inspired her and made her feel conscious of her increasing position in society. Bud had always made her feel conscious of having married beneath her, which was a horrible thing to think, let alone feel. She would think: ‘Now I know I’m a born snob,’ and she would turn from Bud in disgust. He was called Fred.

Fred Bud liked pubs. He liked to totter out of one and into another, and he liked to know the Christian names of the owners. He liked to know the Christian names of most of the customers too, and he liked saying, ‘What’ll y’have?’ to all and sundry, though, if any of them failed to return in kind he was singularly quick on the uptake.

In a few short months Marjorie was filled with a kind of horror at herself for having even contemplated him.

And she fled.

And she very soon found that the position of a young girl who is stupid enough to flee even from Satan himself, unless it is legal, is a very acute one. As her solicitor told her, she should have come to him first. She should have come to him on the quiet, and together they would have set a trap to catch Captain Bud when he was up to one of his larks, which were inevitably a neat fusion of alcohol and other women. As things were, the captain, now on the alert, was also now the innocent party, in the eyes of the world, and he could rush round to all his friends and say his wife had run out on him after only a few months, and that he could but conclude there was a man involved somewhere. This he did, adding that he had spoilt her from the word Go, and been sorry for her, but that now he had no option but to divorce her for desertion whether he managed to catch the co-respondent or not. He proceeded to write her two carefully worded letters asking her to return to him. But, as she knew, and her solicitor friend knew, Bud knew quite well she would be too proud to do this even if she wanted to. Marjorie made another mistake in being too thoroughly embarrassed to tell her solicitor everything, but she just couldn’t, he was an old family friend of her father’s. Had she done so, she might have got a divorce from Bud, with a bit of luck and a bit of added scandal. But she dodged this and the next proceeding was to wait three years until Bud brought his desertion case. As she heard from various sources, Bud spent the interim using such of her money as he controlled, and in telling his friends: ‘Damn nuisance this three years wait, old man, but it’s useless to expect any new evidence. I thought there was a man, but I doubt it now. Dear old Marjorie had absolutely no sex appeal, absolutely none at all.’

Marjorie’s solicitor had side whiskers. He was of the old school of thought, as the saying went, and although his stern countenance had been shocked out of its composure by one or two tasty cases, his mind had never really entered the wild arena which made up the present decade. Even when the blitz shattered his famous office chandelier, under which, it was said, Oscar Wilde had once passed—though on his way to a more go-ahead solicitor—the dignity of the premises remained. Pictures of other side-whiskered solicitors still lined the cracked walls, and the frosted glass on the doors still bore the names of the titled partners. Marjorie’s solicitor still sat in his accustomed swivel chair with the grey stuffing coming out of it, surrounded by the dust of centuries, jewels from the chandelier, bits of glass and a shattered book-shelf. And he sounded very pained to have to tell Marjorie that her case was ‘over yesterday. You’re a divorced woman, my dear,’ he said throatily. He still thought it was a dreadful thing to be, even though she was entirely innocent and had never done anything in her life more abandoned than have three brown sherries. To Marjorie, however, the news came like the announcement of a school whole holiday. She thought at once and, in fact, exclaimed: ‘I’m a free woman again, then! It’s all over and I’m free! It’s all been a sordid and dreadful dream!’ Her strange and immediate impulse was to dash to the nearest Lyons and have a cup of tea in the friendly din there. But she had to be polite and stay until her solicitor had made a pained and stately speech.

‘My dear child, you mustn’t mind my offering you a little advice. I’m sure this unhappy business will be an object lesson to you. Men are very unscrupulous, and this little … amateur gentleman belongs to a very common kind. I do most sincerely hope you will treat me as a friend, more of a friend, after this … distressing incident—if you can call a thing that has gone on for four years an incident? Please don’t go hotheadedly into a marriage again without asking my advice, my dear! I’m old enough to be your grandfather, and I was a friend of your father’s. And remember, you must marry some money next time. This man Bud has cost you most of your inheritance.’

This part of the sorry business pained him even more than the other part, and Marjorie noticed he could hardly bring himself to speak of it. But in the end it was just no good speaking of it, he said; they must speak of the present, and of course the future, not the past. The past was dead. When she thought of the past, she must think only of the happier memories, as we all had to. It was awful thinking about our mistakes. There was her father to think of, he pointed out, even though it was not very nice to think of that bull; he had always distrusted Shorthorns. She must not remember her tears. After that, he rang for some coffee, only to be told that all the firm’s cups had been broken by blast, and that the firemen had sprayed their specially imported coffee with some eighty odd gallons of dirty river water. It was still all over the general office floor. His elderly clerk looked rather like a Walt Disney spaniel which had just picked itself up after falling nine hundred feet down a lift shaft. He was permanently pale and panting. Marjorie’s solicitor dismissed him courteously and said it was no fault of his about the cups or the coffee.

‘No, Sir Tom,’ the old man quivered, pleased, and he shambled out with his trousers hanging.

‘Well, I’ll go,’ Marjorie said, still thinking of the friendly din in Lyons teashops. ‘And I can’t thank you nearly enough for … well, everything.’ She really meant for not charging her very much, but it was difficult to say that.

On the way out, he asked her what her plans were. When she sounded vague, he suggested that she should put the little money remaining into a bit of property, such as a new house. He said she wasn’t getting any younger, if he might say so, and the great thing was to have a roof over her head. And she had to live somewhere. He said why didn’t she live where he did, amongst her own kind? He lived near Woking, in Surrey, and there was golf and the pine trees were very healthy. He and his wife would help her make some friends. ‘And it’s near to London. But you’re fond of London, perhaps, and want to live there?’

‘No,’ she hesitated. ‘There’s the club. And I like theatres. But I think I’m used to the country.’

Pleased, he said the country was the best idea. Why didn’t she come down for a weekend and have a look round? She thought, well, he can’t be too old fashioned, or he’d frown at a divorced woman! Perhaps people weren’t ever what they seemed? Perhaps they just had to pretend? And times really had changed, hadn’t they? It really wasn’t quite so monstrous for a woman to have been divorced—even if she was guilty? And she wasn’t guilty. She was just silly.

In any case, if people were still so stupid as to mind if somebody had played one or two bad cards in their day, well, good luck to them.

She suddenly saw herself as a kind of Woking Merry Widow!

Yes, it would be rather amusing to buy a house down there, and make people wonder about her. She would make a few intimate friends, no doubt, and the rest could wonder about her to their hearts’ content. She would do the garden with a sad expression in a brown, floppy hat. She would do any war work that cropped up. Nobody would guess her advanced age, and people would wonder why on earth she hadn’t been called up; they’d probably put it down to her kidneys. If life was to be fun, you had to make it so; you had to create some situation whereby Life was inclined to have a go at you. It could surprise you. If you felt secretly lonely and often miserable, nobody need guess it. And who knew what might not happen?

In a burst of excitement she bought Tredgarth, a white mackintosh, a lawn-mower—and a radio. Before the furniture arrived she turned on the radio in the empty hall and tuned in to the Overseas Service. A resonant and attractive masculine voice said, quite untruthfully, that she had just been listening to excerpts from ‘Peer Gynt’.

CHAPTER IV

BRIEF but repeated mental excursions into the past being the hobby and the habit of the many, Mr Bisham often forgave himself for indulging it. He was also of the variety who found singular fascination in revisiting scenes from his past, if circumstances made it reasonably easy and attractive. If he passed through Putney, his head always turned towards a particular road and a big house on the far corner. One day, he realized, he might be revisiting the house where he lived now, a solitary figure in a brown overcoat and long white beard, staring sadly at the past which was still safely Now. Mr Bisham liked to dream, and he was decidedly introspective. He never knew whether it was a good habit or a bad one. Perhaps, like most habits, it had its good and bad points. The subconscious mind made a fascinating study, didn’t it? The mind had such depths, you could explore and explore, and it didn’t matter much where you were or what you were doing. You could watch yourself. He was standing in his bedroom-cum-study upstairs at Tredgarth now, watching himself as he had been standing behind those strange velvet curtains in a strange house. There he had stood, with his heart thumping as it always did, and his senses aware of the exotic. As a matter of fact, under the tension, he had thought of quite ridiculous things, such as liking Saturday nights, and hating rugger, but liking soccer and his prep school. It was odd. And now, standing in his bedroom, and looking at the necklace in his hands, instead of concentrating on the rare beauty of it, and regretting that he dare not give it to Marjorie for their wedding anniversary, or for her birthday, or for Christmas, or for any other time, he suddenly started thinking about the two and sixpenny necklace he had given to Celia that time, and for just the same kind of reason. Locked up in their flat, he had had emeralds and turquoise brooches and sapphire pins by the dozen; but they were dynamite. He thought now, as he had often thought then: ‘She doesn’t know, and she must never know.’ And as he made no money out of it, he had regretted not being able to buy a safe. Yet, he thought now, was there any reason why he shouldn’t buy a safe now? He was Ernest Bisham, the famous announcer, and surely it would not be odd for Ernest Bisham to own a safe? One of his most distinguished colleagues owned a fruit farm! That was no more curious than a safe? Besides, he surely owed it to Marjorie? She must never be hurt. He owed it to Bess, and she must never be hurt. Poor old Bess, who believed in him so, but who didn’t really know him at all. Marjorie didn’t know him either. How could she? A woman had to know all about a man—or feel that she knew all about him. And he well knew that it was because she didn’t feel it that things were not quite right between them.