XXXVI
I used to make the coffee for breakfast myself; Walter liked it better when I made it and that pleased me, for I had never made coffee before and I felt proud now, that I should do it well. It had to stand for fifteen minutes after it was made, so I had to be downstairs earlier than Walter; that too was fun, I thought. It gave me a sense of competence to be down in the dining-room with the coffee all ready before he came.
Now, sometimes, I felt very ill in the mornings, and it was an effort to get up. Once when I got downstairs I turned faint and sick and had to sit down in the chair, and Mrs. Simms, the charwoman, came in and brought me a cup of tea. I can’t remember why she came there so early, or why it was she who brought the tea, but it was.
‘Poor dear,’ she said. ‘I know how you feels. Take a cup o’ tea, mum, that’ll do you good.’
I drank the tea and she talked to me and told me how many children she had had; eight, I think it was, and five of them dead and how ill she had been with every one of them; but Simms had been good to her, she said,—Simms was her husband, of course. He would bring her a cup of tea in the mornings before she got up. ‘It’s the putting your feet to the ground that does it. I know that,’ she said.
And I thought:
‘How funny it is that Mrs. Simms should know what I feel like, and Walter doesn’t.’
And I thought:
‘How funny it would be if Walter brought me up cups of tea.’
At home we had had tea in the mornings even when we felt quite well, and I had supposed that we would still here, but Maud had stopped that. She said it was an unnecessary expense.
‘Especially,’ she said, ‘if it is China tea.’
I did not like Indian tea.
Mrs. Simms made the coffee that morning. It was not so good as when I made it; I noticed the difference, but Walter did not. I was sorry he did not; I wondered if he had only said he liked mine best, to please me, if he had really never noticed it different at all.
I felt very ill, those next months, and although I was so happy, I cried quite often at silly things. It was very odd to me to feel like this, for I had never been ill in my life except when I was seven and had measles. Ordinarily I felt so well and full of life. I did not expect to be tired at the end of the day; now I felt very tired, and as though the life had gone out of me.
Maud said:
‘You must not let Helen become invalidish, Walter. She ought to realize that having a child is not an illness at all.’
Walter said:
‘That depends, I suppose, on whether she feels ill.’
Maud said:
‘Not in the least; that is merely subjective; a great many women give way in these things, especially women of Helen’s type. It is most important that she should lead a normal and active life.’
Walter said:
‘My dear Maud, you know nothing about it.’
I was not there, but he told me about it afterwards, and I loved him for being rude to Maud.
She seemed to come and visit us very often, but I suppose it was not very often really.
Mrs. Sebright came every Wednesday to dinner, and every Sunday we went to lunch with Grandmother in Campden Hill Square.
Hugo had gone abroad, he had gone as private secretary or attaché on a Royal Commission in India, and would be away nearly a year. He had gone already before we came back to London, and I had not seen him since the wedding.
It surprised me rather to find how little I missed him; he seemed to belong to another life, a different kind of existence that was quite past now. That had been playing at life; I was living now. Yet sometimes I thought:
‘I should like to tell Hugo about it. I should like to tell him how wonderful this is.’
He would understand, I was sure of that.
Guy came to dinner with us once or twice, but it was not a success. He and Walter did not get on at all, and somehow each showed his worst side to the other; I was sorry about it.
‘We had better leave it alone for the present,’ I thought, ‘later on they will fit in better.’
The Addingtons came oftener to see us. George and Mollie could, I think, get on with anybody. Walter could not dislike them and they quite liked him. I was glad to see them always, but it was different even with them; they seemed much further off than they used to be, like pleasant strangers, outside one’s life, instead of inside. I did not want to talk to Mollie intimately as we used to talk. ‘She is not married,’ I thought. ‘She is not going to have a child. I cannot talk to her about the vital things’; and outside things seemed unimportant to me at this time.
Sophia Lane Watson came to lunch. She talked to Walter about Babylon, and he said she was ‘an intelligent girl,’ and liked her. I wondered how she knew about Babylon; she seemed to know a good deal, but one never did know with Sophia what she knew, and what she didn’t; it was all in streaks.
I wondered if she missed Hugo, and why he had gone away. You could not tell anything from her; she looked just the same as always, white, and non-committal, and self-possessed; at least not exactly self-possessed; you could never be sure with Sophia whether she was hiding her feelings or just not there in her mind at all; sometimes it seemed like that, as though she was mentally and emotionally a long way off, and only her lips speaking to you.
I felt her more interesting now. I did not feel hostile to her, as I had when Hugo was there. I did not think now, somehow, that he would marry her.
Her play was finished now. It was going to be acted. The Drama Society were going to do it. She did not seem excited about it at all. She did not want to talk about it.
I thought:
‘I must see more of Sophia.’
I felt sorry for her somehow, and attracted by her as I had been at school, but I did not see much of her. She came once more to lunch, and I went to tea with her, and then I think she went away for a time; I can’t remember quite, and after that it was the War.