Children of No Man's Land

by G. B. Stern

If the Phillips were being particularly exasperating, then Deb’s fancy would carry on the drama through the subsequent stages of her sudden casual pronouncement of the impending doom: “I think it only right to tell you all—forgive me for interrupting you, Grandma—that the curry was poisoned, and you’ve none of you more than a quarter of an hour to live.”

Oh, it was a childish game! Deb, aged twenty-six, wife of Samson Phillips, prospective mother of a Phillips’ heir, mistress of a fair-sized house and garden and two well-trained servants and the gardener three times a week, Deb, anchored in harbour at last, ought to have known better than to divert herself thus idiotically. But—those Phillipses!

It was not as though they disapproved of her. That would have been quite stimulating—to have been the object of violent disapproval, perpetual scoldings and perpetual defiance, hers the slightly supercilious attitude of the bomb which explodes sensationally in a cabbage field ... after all, under such conditions, the bomb is the centre of attention!

But the Phillipses took it so heartily for granted that Deb was one of them; that their cheerful intelligent interests were her interests; their alert and wholesome outlook, her outlook. They were so unaware that other interests or outlook existed; or, existing, that it could possibly claim a Phillips. For they had taken her to the Phillips’ bosom—no, worse, they had absorbed her into the Phillips’ bosom; wrapt her densely round with warm affection and inquisitive solicitude; what Deb did was right; and if it were not quite right yet, that did not matter either, because Deb was doing her best. Inconceivable to them that she should not be doing her best, trying hard, where Samson and the family and the household and the future heir were concerned. Even as they would believe to the end of all time that chocolate pudding was her favourite pudding, so not a doubt existed but that Deb was all right—except when it was natural she should not be all right—and that would be all right in December....

Therefore Deb poisoned them, one by one, and was not even sorry. It was a pity only that there was no one in whom to confide these illicit prancings of her imagination. Samson would certainly not have seen the joke. Besides, she was rather afraid of Samson. He read the Faerie Queene aloud to her on Sunday afternoons, sitting in the garden, with a rug over her knees and cushions at her back; and sometimes he paused to interpret the more difficult parts of the allegory; and often, playfully, he called her Una—yes, he could do so now, because she was a pure girl, though he still did not understand why....

There was compensation in her life when Ferdie came round towards six o’clock on dry evenings; exultantly dragged out the hose; and solemnly, but with a kind of red beam shining behind the solemnity, watered the two long flower-beds and the one short one which bounded their half-acre of garden; which was not at all unlike their old garden at Daisybanks, with its one shady tree over the tea-table, and the earwiggy arbour; only the Virginia creeper over the back of the house was lacking; the mat of dark polished ivy was not one-quarter as lovable as the clinging tendrils and late crimson she tenderly remembered.

“Richard is so happy nowadays,“ Ferdie would confide in his daughter, perhaps with a wistful plea for reassurance that he had not been the cause of Richard’s year of wretchedness. “He reads of military history and air tactics all day long.... I believe he thinks himself already a captain in the R.F.C.”

And this also was good to hear.

Of her previous gang of friends, Deb saw only Antonia. Cliffe was forbidden; Zoe—obviously one could never be quite sure what Zoe would say! Her blend of Palais Royale adventure and eighteenth-century interpretation thereof, was perilous, in the presence of Samson or Mrs Phillips or Martha.

And they had all heard of Gillian and her achievements in science, and had heard a vague report, too, that there was something “not quite nice” about her. Celebrities were often like that, of course, and one did not mind a bit; but then—one did not come in social contact with celebrities. They were both too good and not good enough for the Phillips’ standard. Perhaps anyway for the moment it was better that little Deb—“What do you think, Samson?” “I don’t want her to be lonely, but you see a lot of her, don’t you, Beattie? you and the girls and mother? I don’t want her to mope!”