What Harry Sinclair’s contribution—apart from the necessary background—had been to that happiness it would, perhaps, be difficult to determine. There could be no one in the world less sympathetic to the small emotional things—so important in married life—than Harry: homesickness, imagined slights when one was tired, fears that one’s son aged three summers might some twenty years ahead fall in love with little Angela Webb, and there was consumption in the family—he viewed them with the impatience of a young lady before the furniture of a drawing-room that she wants to clear for a dance, the dance, in his case, being the sweeps, pirouettes, glides, of endless clever and abstract talk through the clear, wide spaces of an intellectual universe.
However, emotionally, Pepa had never quite grown up, so perhaps she had missed nothing.
All the same, when he had broken down at her death, there had been something touching and magnificent in his fine pity—not for himself, but for Pepa, so ruthlessly, foolishly, struck down in the hey-day of her splendid vigour. “It’s devilish! devilish!” he had sobbed.
During the last days of her life, Pepa had talked to Teresa a good deal about Anna and Jasper. “Make them want to be nice people,” she had said; and Teresa remembered that, even through her misery, she had wondered that Pepa had not used a favourite Cambridge cliché and said, “Make them want to be splendid people”; perhaps it was she, Teresa, who was undeveloped emotionally.
She had tried hard to do what Pepa had asked her; but in these latter days, when the outlines of the virtues have lost their firmness, it is difficult to give children that concrete sense of Goodness that had made the Victorian mothers’ simple homilies, in after years, glow in the memory of their children with the radiance of a Platonic Myth.
Well, anyhow, she must go up to the nursery now.
She walked into the house. In the hall, as if in illustration of her views on memory, the light was falling on, and beautifying a medley of objects, incongruous as the contents of one’s dreams: the engraving of Frith’s Margate that had hung in Mr. Lane’s nursery in the old Kensington house where he had been born; a large red and blue india-rubber ball dropt by Anna or Jasper; the old Triana pottery, running in a frieze round the walls, among which an occasional Hispano-Mauresque plate yielded up to the touch of the sun the store of fire hidden in its lustre; a heap of dusty calling-cards in a flat dish on the table; Arnold’s old Rugby blazer, hanging, a brave patch of colour, among the sombre greatcoats.... Through the half-opened door of the drawing-room came a scent of roses; and through the green baize door that led to the kitchen the strange, lewd sounds of servants making merry over their tea. Probably Gladys, the under-housemaid, was reading cups.
Teresa mounted the wide, easy stairs, and, passing through another green baize door, entered the children’s quarters, and then the nursery itself. There, tea finished and cleared away, a feeling of vague dissatisfaction had fallen on the two children. Every minute bed-time was drawing nearer, and anxious eyes kept turning towards the door; would any one come before it was too late, and Jasper was already plunging and “being silly” in the bath, while Anna, clad in a pink flannel dressing-gown, her hair in two tight little plaits, was putting tidy her books and toys, and—so as to perform the daily good deed enjoined by the Girl Guides—Jasper’s too?
Their craving for the society of “grown-ups” was as touching and inexplicable, it seemed to Teresa, as that of dogs. She had noticed that they longed for it most between tea and bed-time—it was as if they needed, then, a viaticum against the tedium of going to bed and the terrors of the night. Nor, she had noticed, was Nanny, dearly though they loved her, capable of giving this viaticum, nor could any man provide it: it had to be given by a grandmother, or mother, or aunt.
So Teresa’s advent was very warmly welcomed; and sitting down in the rocking-chair she tried to perform the difficult task of amusing Anna and Jasper at the same time. For between Anna of nine and Jasper of six there was very little in common.