‘Come then,’ said Mamma; and then over her shoulder: ‘Go to sleep, Judith.’
She would have been annoyed if she had noticed the geranium. It was not real after all: it was made of pink velvet. Judith hid it under her pillow.
Mamma slipped her hand into the man’s arm and floated away.
That was the only vivid recollection of her left. The children next door came close on the heels of the geranium-frock in memory; and after that they, and not Mamma, absorbed her passion. Mamma was more and more away, or busy; and more and more obviously not interested in her daughter. All life that was not playing next door, or alone in the garden, was lessons and governesses. Mamma and Papa were relentless about education.
They had dual personalities in Judith’s mind. There were Mamma and Papa who loved each other, of course, and loved their only daughter; and sometimes took her to the seaside, and now and then to London for the pantomime. Once or twice she went abroad with them; but on the many occasions when they left her behind, they wrote her affectionate letters which she dutifully replied to in French, so that they might see how her French was progressing; and they brought her back beautiful presents. Often when they were at home they read aloud to her in the evenings.
The three were blent in a relationship of a romantic and consoling sort,—an ideal relationship; but then Fred and Mildred would take the place of Mamma and Papa, and shatter the illusion. For they, alas, seemed made of stronger and more enduring fibre: they were real: and they were not often together: and when they were, there was often coldness and now and then quarrelling. Life with Fred and Mildred was neither comforting nor secure. Fred was quite an elderly man, and terrifyingly silent and pre-occupied. He read and wrote books, and had a few elderly friends. Sometimes these would pause for a moment between their long spaces of ignoring her; and, searching her face, would tell her she was growing up like her father. And, each time, their voices, their faces, their words made an unknown past spring up in her for a moment, rich with undreamed-of vanished graces—and she would go away with an ache of sadness. People loved Fred; Mildred they admired and deferred to, but did not love. That was clear at an early age, when Judith went walking with one or other of them past the row of cottages at the top of the garden, and they stopped to speak to the cottage people over the fences. The cottage people had one sort of voice, look, reply for Fred; and quite another for Mildred.
Judith grew up with a faint obscure resentment against Mildred for the way she treated Fred, for her competence—her dry, unmerciful, cynical success in dealing with the world. Fred was not at home in the world: even less at home, thought Judith, than she herself; but Mildred was steeped in its wise unkindnesses. She did not seem to realize that Fred needed to be looked after.
Then he died; and they became Mamma and Papa again. Mamma had been gentle, tired-looking, and pale in her black clothes, and dependent for a little while on Judith. She had not spoken much of Papa; but she seemed engrossed in sad contemplations, and her replies to letters spoke of him with tenderness and pride.
But all that had not lasted long. After the first six months she had not appeared to want Judith much during vacations. She was always visiting, always travelling, always surrounded by flattering talkative men and bridge-playing scented women; and she came only once for a few hours to College during the whole three years. She had a flat in Paris, with a little room for Judith; but she expected Judith to lead her own life and to stay with her own friends, or with the one aunt, Papa’s sister, for a part, at least, of every vacation. Reading-parties, short visits to friends’ homes, long visits to the old literary maiden aunt in Yorkshire, had absorbed the time. There had been one rapturous summer month alone with Jennifer in a cottage in Cornwall; but there had never been a visit to Jennifer’s home. Her parents, she said, were too unpleasant to be inflicted upon anybody except herself; and then only for brief spaces and at rare intervals. Like Roddy, she appeared and vanished again, without a background, blazing mysteriously into and out of ordinary life.
The hoped-for letter from Mariella, asking her to stay, had never come. She had not seen Mariella since the summer of Papa’s death; and had had no sign from her save one little ill-expressed conventional letter of sympathy, sent, so the writer said, from them all “to tell you how dreadfully we simpathise.” (But Martin had written a note on his own account.)