Mary Olivier: a Life Part 106

In the cramped room where the big bed stuck out from the wall to within a yard of the window, Mamma went about, small and weak, in her wadded lavender j.a.panese dressing-gown, like a child that can't sit still, looking for something it wants that n.o.body can find. You couldn't think because of the soft pad-pad of the dreaming, sleepwalking feet in the lamb's-wool slippers.

When you weren't looking she would slip out of the room on to the landing to the head of the stairs, and stand there, vexed and bewildered when you caught her.

IX.

Mamma was not well enough now to get up and be dressed. They had moved her into Papa's room. It was bright all morning with the sun. She was happy there. She remembered the yellow furniture. She was back in the old bedroom at Five Elms.

Mamma lay in the big bed, waiting for you to brush her hair. She was playing with her white flannel dressing jacket, spread out before her on the counterpane, ready. She talked to herself.

"Lindley Vickers--Vickers Lindley."

But she was not thinking of Lindley Vickers; she was thinking of Dan, trying to get back to Dan.

"Is Jenny there? Tell her to go and see what Master Roddy's doing." She thought Catty was Jenny.... "Has Dan come in?"

Sometimes it would be Papa; but not often; she soon left him for Dan and Roddy.

Always Dan and Roddy. And never Mark.

Never Mark and never Mary. Had she forgotten Mark or did she remember him too well? Or was she afraid to remember? Supposing there was a black hole in her mind where Mark's death was, and another black hole where Mary had been? Had she always held you together in her mind so that you went down together? Did she hold you together now, in some time and place safer than memory?

She was still playing with the dressing-jacket. She smoothed it, and patted it, and folded it up and laid it beside her on the bed. She took up her pocket-handkerchief and shook it out and folded it and put it on the top of the dressing-jacket.

"What are you doing, you darling?"

"Going to bed."

She looked at you with a half-happy, half-frightened smile, because you had found her out. She was putting out the baby clothes, ready. Serious and pleased and frightened.

"Who will take care of my little children when I'm laid aside?"

She knew what she was lying in the big bed for.

X.

It was really bedtime. She was sitting up in the armchair while Catty who was Jenny made her bed. The long white sheet lay smooth and flat on the high mattress; it hung down on the floor.

Mamma was afraid of the white sheet. She wouldn't go back to bed.

"There's a coffin on the bed. Somebody's died of cholera," she said.

Cholera? That was what she thought Mark had died of.

She knows who I am now.

XI.

Richard had written to say he was married. On the twenty-fifth of February. That was just ten days after Mamma died.

"We've known each other the best part of our lives. So you see it's a very sober middle-aged affair."

He had married the woman who loved him when he was young. "A very sober middle-aged affair." Not what it would have been if you and he--He didn't want you to think that _that_ would ever happen again. He wanted you to see that with him and you it had been different, that you had loved him and lived with him in that other time he had made for you where you were always young.

He had only made it for you. She, poor thing, would have to put up with other people's time, time that made them middle-aged, made them old.

You had got to write and tell him you were glad. You had got to tell him Mamma died ten days ago. And he would say to himself, "If I'd waited another ten days--" There was nothing he could say to you.

That was why he didn't write again. There was nothing to say.

x.x.xV

I.

She would never get used to the house.

She couldn't think why she had been such a fool as to take it. On a seven years' lease, too; it would feel like being in prison for seven years.

That was the worst of moving about for a whole year in boats and trains, and staying at hotels; it gave you an unnatural longing to settle down, in a place of your own.

Your own--Undying l.u.s.t of possession. If you _had_ to have things, why a house? Why six rooms when two would have done as well and left you your freedom? After all that ecstasy of s.p.a.ce, that succession of heavenly places with singing names: Carca.s.sone and Vezelay; Rome and Florence and San Gimignano; Ma.r.s.eilles and Arles and Avignon; filling up time, stretching it out, making a long life out of one year.

If you could go moving on and on while time stood still.

Oh this d.a.m.ned house. It would be you sitting still while time tore by, as it used to tear by at Morfe before Richard came, and in the three years after he had gone, when Mamma--

II.

It was rather attractive, when you turned the corner and came on it suddenly, flat-roofed and small, clean white and innocent. The spring twilight gave it that look of being somewhere in Italy, the look that made you fall in love with it at first sight.

As for not getting used to it, that was precisely the effect she wanted: rooms that wouldn't look like anything in the house at Morfe, things that she would always come on with a faint, exquisite surprise: the worn magentaish rug on the dark polished floor, the oak table, the gentian blue chair, the thin magenta curtains letting the light through: the things Richard had given her because in their beginning they had been meant for her. Richard knew that you were safe from unhappiness, that you had never once "gone back on it," if you could be happy with his things.

He had thought, too, that if you had a house you would settle down and work.

You would have to; you would have to work like blazes, after spending all the money Aunt Charlotte left you on rus.h.i.+ng about, and half the money Aunt Lavvy left you on settling down. It was horrible this living on other people's deaths.

III.