MARGARET KENNEDY WITH A FOREWORD BY LUCY MANGAN
Lucy Carmichael
THE MERMAID COLLECTION
Lucy Carmichael
First published in 1951, Margaret Kennedy’s Lucy Carmichael was her tenth novel. It is being reissued as one of Penguin Michael Joseph’s Mermaids series – a collection of unjustly neglected works of popular mid-to-late-twentieth-century literature. Each Mermaid is introduced by a modern writer, reflecting on the author and book’s importance to the world in which it was published and its continued relevance today.
This Mermaid is introduced by Lucy Mangan, journalist, author and obsessive reader whose addiction is chronicled in the memoirs Bookworm and Bookish.
To hear more about The Mermaid Collection, visit www.penguin.co.uk/TheMermaidCollection
Lucy Carmichael MARGARET KENNEDY
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First published by Macmillan & Co. Ltd 1951
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Copyright © The Estate of Margaret Kennedy, 1951 Foreword copyright © Lucy Mangan, 2025
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To Julia Davies
Foreword
There is something for everyone in Margaret Kennedy’s tenth novel, Lucy Carmichael. There is romance (an impeccably austere, interwar sort that thrills so much more than anything set in our own hopelessly expressive age) of various kinds. First we see thwarted love, for when we meet Lucy she is jilted at the altar by her semi-celebrity fiancé Patrick Reilly (his ‘career’ then, as now, the reddest of flags to all except the sweet young thing whose heart he has captured). Then a possible alternative candidate – though can a man who sports the nickname ‘Terrific Charles’ ever really be The One? – before that One finally arrives on the scene and shows the others up for the pallid imitations of men and soulmates that they always were. Tremendously satisfying stuff. There is a wonderful limning of female friendship and solidarity between the eponymous heroine and her best friend Melissa, whose faith in Lucy we see gradually proved to be absolutely justified over the year we follow her as she recovers from Patrick’s betrayal. Melissa is one of those secondary characters who, free of the weight of carrying the narrative, can almost
threaten to overshadow the protagonist. It is not just the devil but often the sidekick who gets the best lines, and Melissa has plenty. How can you not love and long instantly to know better a woman who describes herself to her slightly baffled fiancé, John, as ‘an emotional ascetic . . . you’ll find me uncommonly easy to live with. I hardly ever have moods. I don’t approve of them. I dote on equanimity. But, if a mood should overtake me, I expect that lapse to be pardoned and overlooked, like the hiccups.’ Emotional incontinents everywhere, please take note. There are finely wrought – frequently exquisitely devastating – sentences everywhere, as befits an author devoted to (and writer of a critical volume on) Jane Austen (‘ “Why?” asked Melissa, permitting herself a fleeting glance of astonishment at Joan’s ankles”) and a constant, though never obtrusive, anatomisation of class. Lady Frances, the widow of a self-made millionaire who founded an arts institute so that his fellow working man need never be deprived of the culture that he hungered for in his youth, is a kind of Lady Catherine de Bourgh with heart – for she loved and continues after his death to love her husband dearly. ‘All her principles were founded upon an unshaken belief that earls are superior to commoners.’ The next generation cannot be so sure, ‘though they wished to [be] so. The spirit of the age had got at them and they could not be perfectly certainly that they were better than anyone else.’ But it is Lady Frances’ certainty and the sense of noblesse oblige that comes with it that keeps the institute going, until figures with less sense of responsibility and duty succeed in their machinations. To move the poor man from his gate to the castle may be the right thing for society eventually, Kennedy suggests (particularly once talented working-class actor Owen enters the story), but this does not mean nothing is risked or lost along the way.
Austen also lives in the acute psychological insight that characterises all Kennedy’s work. In Lucy Carmichael it perhaps finds its greatest expression when Lucy takes a job at the arts institute, a liminal place full of the potential for transformations of all kinds, looking out over both the rural village of Ravonsbridge and the new town that is filling the valley with workers as the area industrialises. Kennedy places her heroine amidst a large cast of wildly differing characters, from the kindly director to its scheming administrator, via various eccentric creatives, and sets her to navigating the hidden agendas, covert manoeuvrings and overt conflicts, driven by major and minor ambitions, clashing temperaments and goals, and some people’s simple love of Drama of the pettiest, nontheatrical kind. The unassuming ‘Lump’, as the arts centre is known, is a cross between a seventeenth century court at Versailles, a David Lodge university and Peyton Place. Throw in the histrionic likes of the (brilliant) actress Ianthe – as cold at her core as all histrionics are, thanks to their nigh-perfect synonymy with ‘narcissists’ – and you have a recipe for chaos, which duly ensues.
It’s a wonder Lucy survives it. But survive it she does, and that is because Lucy Carmichael is the epitome of an increasingly rare and undervalued virtue – the combination of emotional strength, mental stoicism, pragmatism and courage that is known as resilience. She is its embodiment and a study in its power. We see it in her from the very beginning, when she digs deep within herself to reassure her mother mere hours after her shock in the church that ‘I shall be all right . . . I shall get over it. People seem to get over things, don’t they? I don’t know how, but they do. Ordinary people . . . I’m very ordinary, so I expect I shall do what they do.’ Again, emotional incontinents take note. Please.
Through Lucy’s saddened but always clear eyes we are invited to consider such thorny yet endlessly fascinating questions as whether or not it can be sensible to settle for a contentment in life that is less than the happiness you once dreamed of, but has the undeniable advantage of being real. Or is that always a betrayal of ideals, or of the self? Is it possible to let your head rule your heart too much? Or did those emotional incontinents, narcissists and histrionics have it right all along?
Lucy’s year at Ravonsbridge – spent tending her wounds, sifting through her priorities, deepening her understanding of people, learning much more about life and a little more about love – puts such issues before us, the readers. Lucy is a delight to meet and the book a delight to know. And its ending, I hazard, will move even the most abidingly continent amongst us. Enjoy.
Lucy Mangan, 2025
She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself . . . Even to her friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought. If she made herself miserable the livelong night and day it was only this much to them – ‘Ah, she makes herself unhappy’. If she tried to be cheerful, to dismiss all care, to take pleasure in the daylight . . . she could only be this idea to them – ‘Ah, she bears it very well’.
thomas hardy
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
PART one Lucy’s Wedding
Chapter One
On a fine evening in September Melissa Hallam sat in Kensington Gardens with a young man to whom she had been engaged for three days. They had begun to think of the future and she was trying to explain her reasons for keeping the engagement a secret as long as possible.
‘If my mother knows of it first,’ she said, ‘my father will be wounded to the quick.’
John Beauclerc had only just learnt that he was to have a father-in-law. He had always supposed that Mr Hallam, whose name was never mentioned, must be dead. But it appeared that he had merely left his family and was living by himself in a hotel at Budleigh Salterton.
‘Can’t you,’ he suggested, ‘write and tell him first?’
‘That would wound my mother to the quick.’
‘You could tell her next morning, just when he was reading your letter. Then they’d know simultaneously.’
‘Ah, but the morning is a bad time with my mother. She is at leisure and able to listen to one. Fatal! She will instantly discover all the objections.’
‘But are there so many objections? I don’t see . . .’
‘Of course there aren’t. None. But that is so dull. My mother believes that life ought to be tense and dramatic. She would prefer one’s choice to be disastrous. If you had been born in the gutter, or were tubercular and couldn’t support one, she would be most sympathetic. As it is, I must choose a moment when she is involved in some other drama, late for an appointment, too frantic to listen. Then she’ll say: Marry anybody you like but don’t keep me now! You don’t know my mother.’
He agreed that he did not. He had only met Mrs Hallam once and she had frightened him. He had fallen in love with Melissa during the summer holidays, at a country-house party, and their courtship, after their return to London, had been carried on outside her home. He had called for her in Campden Hill Square, where she lived, and taken her out to dine and dance, but she generally ran down the steps as his taxi drew up at the door. On the first occasion, however, she had not been quite ready, and he had been shown into a large dim room, full of flowers and engraved glass and Hallams, to wait until she came down. They were a formidable family. He was daunted by the suavity with which little Julius, who was at Eton, offered him sherry. He was chilled by the languid sophistication of Valentine, a schoolgirl sister. And the tense, haggard gaze of Mrs Hallam terrified him out of his wits until he realised that she was not looking at him at all and that her thoughts were elsewhere. They were not, as he had at first supposed, scrutinising and condemning him. He was merely one of the procession which called nightly for Melissa. They were vague about his name and he was still disentangling himself from another John, a John Hobbes, when Melissa tripped in, wearing the flowers he had sent her. Mrs Hallam’s
enormous eyes rested on these for less than a second, but in that instant he realised that pink carnations were a mistake. The odious Hobbes would, he supposed, have sent orchids. He was soon to know better. During that first outing he picked up a great deal of useful information. Orchids would have been a worse mistake. She disliked conventional flowers. She had a friend who kept a flower-shop and would make up an amusing corsage of sweet-williams or nasturtiums, or would send something arranged for the hair, which Melissa preferred that summer. Yellow, orange, red or white blossoms would be welcome; blue and pink should be avoided. She did not tell him that her friend was inexpensive, but he soon discovered this, with considerable relief. All his discoveries, indeed, were of a kind to raise his spirits, for he had been wondering how often he could afford to take Melissa out, and how he was to press his suit if he did not take her out. But it seemed that her tastes were unexpectedly simple. She drank very little. She would enjoy a country walk, a Promenade Concert or an afternoon at Kew. By some miracle everything was made easy for him, since she had decided to marry him while still down in Hampshire and intended him to save up his money for their honeymoon. When John Hobbes took her out she cost him a pretty penny.
She had never talked very much about her family, with the exception of her elder brother, Humphrey, whom she adored. When she spoke of him her whole aspect changed: her eyes sparkled and she would begin to laugh. He was in Africa, among the French Dandawa, behaving very badly, said Melissa, with fond pride, earning no money and wounding both his parents to the quick. Having qualified as a doctor he had turned himself into a vet and was studying cattle diseases, simply for love of a black man called Kolo, king of a
poor small tribe, to whom he had attached himself in Paris. In Kolo’s country the cattle pined and died, and nobody knew why. The people were desperately poor, but the tribe was isolated, the disease did not spread to richer territories, and the French Government was apathetic. Kolo, however, was not. By some means or other he had managed to educate himself and had scraped up the money to get to Paris and plead his cause. Official ears were deaf but he had made some valuable friends. A coloured American singer, struck by the force and heroism of Kolo’s character, had offered money for research and Humphrey Hallam had undertaken the work. Melissa pretended to laugh at the whole enterprise, and called Dandawaland ‘Humptopia’, but John saw very clearly that she was consumed with anxiety lest the money should run out before any positive success had been achieved.
‘If only Hump were at home,’ she now said, ‘the whole problem would be easier. There wouldn’t be a problem. When he is at home everybody behaves sensibly. I don’t think my parents would have parted company if Hump had been here.’
‘Why did they . . . what did they . . . I mean what was the trouble?’
‘Oh, a magnolia tree.’
‘A magnolia tree?’
‘Yes. My mother wanted it in the back garden and my father in the front garden. He was out when it arrived, and my mother put it in the back garden. So, when he came in, he said it was the last straw and went to live at Budleigh Salterton.’
‘You can’t be serious.’
‘I am. That was exactly what happened. It isn’t a legal separation. They are emotional gluttons, both of them. They gobbled up every sensation they could extract from marriage,
and now they are seeing if separation won’t provide them with a few more. I think they miss each other dreadfully. They have nobody to make scenes with.’
Melissa broke off and mused for a while, her pretty eyebrows slightly lifted in distaste.
‘Personally,’ she remarked, ‘I am an emotional ascetic. But if Hump had been at home he would have done something. He would have gone to Budleigh Salterton and been so intolerable that my father would have been obliged to come home to get away from him.’
‘But why Budleigh Salterton?’
‘Oh, my father has a sort of romance about that place. He believes that the happiest years of his life were spent there as a child. Actually it was only three weeks, when he was recovering from measles. But, as he has never been happy anywhere else for longer than three days, I daresay he does feel attached to it. He gets rather bored there and loves an excuse for coming home and setting us all by the ears. He did that when my sister Cressida got married. And I suppose we must expect him at our wedding.’
‘You don’t sound very . . .’ John checked himself and put it in another way. ‘Which of your parents,’ he asked, ‘are you fondest of?’
The answer to this question was of some importance to him. Melissa had just described herself as an emotional ascetic and he feared that this might be perfectly true. There had been moments during their courtship when, in spite of his attachment to her, he had found himself wondering if she was capable of any strong feeling. She had revealed very little of her heart to him, and, though she had said that she loved him, she had made the avowal in so cool a manner that he doubted if she knew what she was saying. He put his question
therefore a little anxiously, and was rewarded by a smile of approval.
‘I’m so glad,’ she said, ‘that you don’t mind putting the preposition last. Jane Austen frequently did.’
‘Melissa! I asked a question. Of which are you fondest?’
‘Now don’t alter it just when I’ve said I like it. Which am I fondest of? Really, I don’t know. For years I’ve been so perfectly exasperated with both of them that I might say I’m usually fondest of the one I’m not with.’
This was not very reassuring. He watched her unhappily as she picked up a large straw hat which lay on the grass beside her. Her expression was pleasant but her voice had been chilly.
‘I must go,’ she said, getting up. ‘Cressida is coming to supper.’
‘You’re very fond of her, I expect,’ he pleaded as he scrambled to his feet.
She turned to him with an amused stare.
‘How anxious you are that I should be fond of people!’
‘I want to believe that you have a very sweet nature.’
‘Oh, but I have a very sweet nature. I like most people. I’d like everyone if I could. Dislike is so fatiguing.’
‘But do you really love anybody, Melissa?’
‘You should know.’
She gave him a glance, soft and ardent, which made him feel quite dizzy. When he had recovered, she was walking quickly away across the thick summer grass. He rushed after her, aware of people everywhere – people with dogs, people with perambulators, strolling couples, recumbent couples, and children playing organised games. He was obliged to walk sedately by her side through the alternate patches of sun and shadow, towards Notting Hill Gate.
‘I wish . . .’ he murmured.
‘I know. But my mother is going to Italy soon, and I shall have the house to myself, because Julius and Valentine will be back at school. You can come to supper every evening, and we shan’t have the whole of London looking on.’
‘Oh, Melissa! How did you know what I was thinking?’
‘Ha! Ha! I’m Madame Leonore, the celebrated clairvoyante. My crystal tells me that you still hanker for a list of the people I love.’
‘Yes I do. I want to know all about you.’
‘How dangerous!’
‘I want to love them too.’
‘How ambitious! Well . . . there are three. But you only have to love two, because Narcissus came to a bad end.’
‘Hump?’
‘Yes. And for years Hump was the only one. Till I was eighteen I could count the people I loved upon my thumb. But then I met . . .’ Melissa paused and smiled to herself before she finished: ‘Then I met Lucy Carmichael.’
‘Oh! A girl! This girl who is going to be married . . . that you’re going to be bridesmaid to?’
‘Keep it up! Your prepositions beat Jane Austen’s.’
‘She’s no relation, is she? Just a friend.’
‘Umhm. Just an old College chum.’
‘What is she like? Is she pretty? Is she at all like you, I mean?’
‘Not a bit. She is tall and slender, while I am short and dumpy.’
‘You are not. You aren’t dumpy.’
‘I would be, if I wasn’t as light as a bird. She has short, light-brown, curly hair. Very attractive.’
‘So have you. I mean your hair is dark but it curls.’
‘I’m glad you think so. Lucy’s nose is aquiline, not retroussé, and her eyes are grey. She has a very delicate skin, too pale, but that’s easily remedied. I wouldn’t call her pretty. When she is well and happy she is extremely beautiful. When she is out of sorts or depressed she is all nose, and dashes about like an intelligent greyhound after an electric hare. She has a natural tendency to vehemence which is unbecoming to one so tall, but under my influence she occasionally restrains it. She believes me to be very sophisticated – a perfect woman of the world. She admires my taste beyond anything and does her best to imitate me. She is incautious and intrepid. She will go to several wrong places, and arrive at the right one, while I am still making up my mind to cross the road. She is my opposite in character. She is cheerful and confident and expects to be happy. She taught me how to enjoy myself. Until I knew her I had always been convinced that I must be destined for misery. I thought it safest to expect the worst. I suppose it was because everything in my home has always been so stormy and insecure; I was brought up never to expect anything to go right. Lucy forced me to believe that I might be happy. I don’t expect I’d have had the courage to marry you, to marry anybody, if it hadn’t been for Lucy.’
‘In that case,’ said John, ‘I shall have no difficulty in loving her.’
‘You will oblige me by trying to do so. She’s not everybody’s cup of tea. My mother is very supercilious about her, simply because her father, who is dead, was only a chartered accountant, and her mother is a woman doctor in Surrey. In my mother’s idiom, Lucy is “a very ordinary girl”. And in some ways she is still rather childish. It is her ambition to be suave and mondaine, which she will never be. When she remembers this she undulates about with a remote smile.
When she forgets, which is pretty nearly all the time, she prances along and roars with laughter.’
‘Did you know her before you went to Oxford?’
‘No. We were freshers together and took to each other the first night, at dinner in Hall. I thought she was the only female in sight who didn’t remind me of an earwig. She thought the same thing about me. So we went and sat in my room, and agreed how awful everything seemed to be, and I impressed her with my mulberry house-coat.’
John also was immediately impressed by the mulberry house-coat, though he had never seen it. But he could and did imagine how it would become her.
‘So after that,’ said Melissa, ‘we always went about together. We never accepted an invitation unless it was for both, and we made a very good team. When we arrived at a party everybody said: “Here’s Lucy and Melissa!” Or, if they did not, we would just look round the room, and at each other, and laugh a little, and go away, as if we had a much better party waiting round the corner. One girl by herself can’t do that. There is nothing more humiliating than having to edge out of a crowded room when nobody has noticed one is there. Are you listening?’
‘Oh . . . yes . . . yes . . .’ said John, who was still musing on the mulberry house-coat. ‘Er . . . is she clever?’
‘Lucy? Clever? You do ask the strangest questions. Why, yes, I suppose so. As clever as she needs to be.’
‘What class did she get in Schools?’
‘A second. She ought to have got a first, but she must needs go and fall in love during our last term, which made hay of her work. It was too bad of her, and entirely against our principles. We had decided not to fall in love till we had left College.’
‘But can people always decide whether . . .’
‘Of course they can. There is no excuse for falling in love with an undergraduate. What sensible man wants to tie himself up so young? And where’s the attraction of a silly man? Our men were all of them very superior men; ambitious men, who meant to get somewhere in the world. We danced and dined with all the future Prime Ministers and AttorneyGenerals. We had a glorious time. But, at the end, Lucy had to go and spoil it all. She went to a party without me. I had a headache and cried off, but she had promised to go. It was a cocktail party, and she said she’d just look in for half an hour. She wasn’t back at dinner-time. She wasn’t back at lock-out. She had to climb into College over the garden wall at half-past two in the morning, and I never did find out what she’d been doing all that time. I don’t believe she knew herself. She’d met this man . . . at least he wasn’t an undergraduate . . . he was staying in Oxford and came to the party; Patrick Reilly. You’ve heard of him?’
‘You mean the explorer?’
Melissa looked doubtful.
‘I wouldn’t call him that. What has he explored?’
‘Doesn’t he go to places and write books about them?’
‘M’yes. Have you read any?’
‘I read the war one – about working with the French Resistance. I thought it pretty good. He must be a remarkable man.’
‘Oh? In what way?’
‘He seems to have so many adventures.’
‘Quite. So then Lucy met Remarkable Reilly at this party and so then it was all over with Lucy.’
Melissa led the way off the grass into the shaded avenue of the Broad Walk.
‘That’s all,’ she said flatly.
‘But what kind of a man is he?’
‘Haven’t you seen his photographs?’
‘What is he like to meet, I mean?’
‘Oh, irresistible. One can’t blame Lucy for a moment. A most elegant brogue, with just a touch of swagger and impudence . . . not offensive, you know . . . endearing! He rushes round having adventures just for the love of it. He’s only got to be told: “You can’t do that there ’ere” and he goes and does it, and gets away with it, and nobody minds, because he’s the eternal boy. He’s Mister Peter Pan.’
‘But is he nice ?’ persisted the patient John, plodding beside her along the Bayswater Road.
‘Can you ask? No woman could ever resist a man like that.’
A pneumatic drill in the road made further conversation impossible for several minutes. John stole glances at Melissa and when the racket had died away behind them he asked why she was looking so sad.
‘That,’ she said coldly, ‘is not the sort of question I care to hear.’
‘But you are looking sad.’
‘So what? I don’t look sad in order to be asked what is the matter.’
‘I want to understand you.’
‘That’s quite easy. I’m a very simple, obvious person.’
‘But if we are to live together . . .’
‘Darling, you’ll find me uncommonly easy to live with. I hardly ever have moods. I don’t approve of them. I dote on equanimity. But, if a mood should overtake me, I expect that lapse to be pardoned and overlooked, like the hiccups. And if you want to understand it, think of the most obvious explanation.’
An obvious explanation for Melissa’s depression was
already tormenting John. He could not quite allow himself to entertain it and stalked along beside her, keeping it at bay, until she suddenly began to laugh.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, no, no! I was not in love with Remarkable Reilly myself, and I am not marrying you on the rebound.’
‘Melissa!’
‘How dare you think such a thing, after the description I gave of him?’
‘I didn’t know . . . I thought . . . you said he’s irresistible. You said no woman could . . . then you really think he’s a stinker?’ cried John, brightening up.
‘I’ve only met him twice, but I think he’s bogus. He can climb the foothills of the Himalaya, and write about it as if he’d been up Everest. If he went up the Eiffel Tower I believe he’d write a book about it called Parisian Escapade, and there would be a waiting list for it at the libraries. No real adventurer has half so much façade. His talent is for blowing his own trumpet. We’ve all had adventures. I was machinegunned myself, at the seaside, when I was a little girl. And you fought from Normandy to the Rhine. If our adventures had happened to Reilly, people would be paying fifteen shillings to read about them.’
Melissa’s eyes flashed during this tirade, which was music in John’s ears. But he felt obliged, in fairness, to point out that Reilly was talented as a writer.
‘I suppose so,’ she agreed crossly. ‘But if I breathe a word in his favour it appears to cause you pain.’
‘Why . . . I could see you were very sad about something.’
‘Use your loaf. Consider what else I’ve told you.’
He used his loaf, and by the time they reached Kensington Church Street he suggested that she had wanted Lucy to marry Hump.
‘That’s better. Always look for the obvious, when you’re dealing with me. There is nothing subtle or mysterious about my nature. What else would a simple, natural girl like me want, when she has a brother and a friend?’
‘Do they know each other?’
‘No. They’ve never met. Hump has been in France and Africa ever since I knew Lucy. But they would have met sometime, and they’re born for each other. If Lucy wants adventures she couldn’t do better than go to Humptopia.’
‘I see.’
But he did not see. Melissa might be disappointed at the collapse of a favourite scheme, but he had caught a glimpse of something deeper than disappointment in her face. She was profoundly miserable.
‘Here is the tube station,’ she said, ‘and I think you had better go home, because we might run into my mother at any moment, on her way back from a tea-party, and she might get ideas into her head if she knew how often I am meeting you.’
‘Come with me and help me to buy my ticket.’
She laughed, and crossed the road with him and stood beside him while he bought a ticket for Lancaster Gate. They then waited for a lift to appear. It took some time to do so, after the manner of lifts at Notting Hill.
‘You’re quite right,’ she said, interpreting his silence. ‘The disappointment over Hump is only a side issue. Go on chasing the obvious.’
‘You’re sad . . . on Lucy’s account?’
‘Wretched.’
‘Because . . . because you think Reilly’s a stinker? You think it’s a frightful mistake?’
The hum of the rising lift ceased and the gates opened.
Melissa nodded and turned away without a word. He saw that she was crying.
All that he had learnt of her forbade him to attempt any consolation. He stepped into the lift and sank downwards, deeply moved by her tears, painfully content – sure, at last, that his beloved had a very warm heart.
Chapter Two
Melissa had by no means told John the whole story. She had not said a word about Jane Lucas. This legendary siren had for years provided a topic for conversation in Campden Hill Square. Melissa had never seen her, but for a short time, long ago, Jane Lucas had been married to the brother of Lady Skinner, Mrs Hallam’s closest friend. She had deserted him almost immediately, but her subsequent career had been followed in wrathful indignation by all the Skinner circle. As Melissa said, when discussing the matter with her married sister Cressida, they had been hearing of Jane Lucas, man and boy, ever since they could remember: how ugly she was, how wicked she was, how old she must be getting, and how slowly the mills of God seemed to be grinding, in her case.
Her existence had been sharply impressed upon Melissa because she had been the indirect cause of a forfeited pantomime. Mrs Hallam and some other ladies, wishing to tell Lucas stories in the presence of the nine-year-old Melissa, had taken refuge in the French language. Et pourtant elle a
du chien, somebody had said. Melissa had been struck by the phrase. She lost no time in applying it to the Vicar’s sister who bred Airedales; her father, overhearing, made a fine Hallam hullabaloo, and she was sent to bed instead of to Cinderella.
That Jane Lucas had been Patrick Reilly’s mistress was scarcely a surprising piece of news; she had, in her time, been everybody’s mistress. Mrs Hallam disinterred and mourned over it as soon as the engagement was announced. She quite liked Lucy but she had never favoured the very close intimacy of the two girls and she was irritated that Lucy should marry first and marry so well. She could not repress certain little digs and passed on to Melissa all that she had gathered from Mrs Knight, the wife of Patrick’s publisher, who belonged to the Skinner circle. Poor Reilly had been infatuated with the woman, though she was old enough to be his mother. She had very nearly driven him mad. All his friends had been in despair. And then she had run off with a jockey to Brazil, which was why he was marrying Lucy. Only a very green, simple girl would take a man after Lucas had finished with him. Poor Catherine Skinner’s brother had done the same, and had married a nice fresh girl, just like Lucy, on the rebound, six months before they had to put him away in an inebriates’ home.
Melissa heard all this without much dismay. Her mother was bound to take a sour view of Lucy’s marriage and something would certainly have been discovered to Reilly’s discredit. If there were any truth in the story, he would have had the sense to tell Lucy the facts. She refused to mourn over the probable shocks in store for her poor friend, and flippantly asserted that a past in Brazil could barely be rated as a past at all.
But she found it hard to retain her composure when she
learned that the past had come back from Brazil, and had been seen, a week before the wedding, with Reilly in a night club. It was a fact. A certain Mrs Otway had seen them there with her own eyes. The whole Skinner circle was agog with pleasurable indignation. Great fun for them all, Melissa had said, when her mother brought the story home to Campden Hill Square. But she had been obliged to run out of the room, immediately afterwards, in order to conceal her distress. She felt so miserable that she was driven to confide in Cressida, with whom she had not much in common save an alliance against the emotional onslaughts of their mother. She wanted Cressida to say that it was a great fuss about nothing. But Cressida put on matronly airs and looked grave.
‘If she’s all we hear,’ said Cressida, ‘and wants him back, she’ll get him back. I don’t think there’s anything to be done.’
‘Mother evidently thinks I ought to warn Lucy; tell her she’d better refuse to marry him unless he promises never to see Lucas again. But how can I? Besides, don’t you think it might all be one of mother’s bogeys? Just think how often she’s managed to frighten one!’
Cressida agreed. In Campden Hill Square an earache was always a probable mastoid and a small overdraft was described as bankruptcy. She had only escaped from this precarious atmosphere very recently, but her placid young husband had already done a great deal for her nerves.
‘I’ll ask Alan what he thinks,’ she suggested.
Melissa demurred at this. She liked her fat brother-inlaw well enough, though she shuddered when he referred to Cressida as Cress and to his unborn child as Little Buttinski. But she could not imagine that he would have anything useful to say about Lucy’s affairs, and he might say something very coarse.
Cressida, however, did consult him and insisted upon retailing his verdict to Melissa.
‘He says he can’t see there’s anything you can do, except watch how things go. When they come back to London, after their honeymoon, you’ll be seeing a lot of them and if Lucas seems to be around you might drop a hint to Lucy. But he says, if you say anything now, it’ll only cause a fearful stink and you’ll quarrel with Lucy, and won’t be able to be a good friend to her, later, when she might need it.’
This was unexpectedly sensible and sensitive. Alan was a nice man in spite of his tap-room limericks. Melissa took it to heart and travelled down to Surrey, the day before the wedding, in a tolerably composed frame of mind. But she was in no way reconciled to the marriage, Jane Lucas or no Jane Lucas. Reilly might be a celebrity, and he might be making a great deal of money, but he was not good enough for Lucy. Her own John was worth a hundred of him. Her own future, as the wife of an obscure chemist at a research station in Lincolnshire, was far more secure than Lucy’s.
Chapter Three
As the train drew in at Gorling station she caught sight of Lucy rushing up and down the platform as though she expected her bridesmaid to fall out of the train and was preparing to catch her.
Half demented, mused Melissa, making a leisurely descent. A soldier, who had travelled in the same compartment, handed down her suitcase and hat-box. Melissa had never lifted a heavy suitcase in her life. Somebody was always at hand to do this for her. Composedly she stood upon the platform awaiting Lucy’s return charge. Up from the extreme rear of the train rushed the distracted Lucy, but when she caught sight of her friend she slowed down and adopted her undulating walk, hoping that all this unseemly galloping might not have been observed.
‘Why?’ enquired Melissa, ‘were you looking for me in the luggage van?’
‘I couldn’t see you anywhere. You weren’t here when I was.’
‘I should have been if you’d stayed here.’
‘Oh, Melissa!’
‘Yes?’
Lucy blinked and confessed she had forgotten what she meant to say.
‘You seem to be agitated.’
‘I’m fearfully agitated.’
‘Why?’
‘I can’t think why. I ought to be sending some telegrams and I can’t remember what they’re about.’
‘My dear Lucy. Let me take you home and give you aspirin.’
‘Wait till you see home,’ cried Lucy, seizing the suitcase. ‘It’s a loony bin . . . full of packing-cases and relatives.’
‘Don’t do that! We’ll get a porter.’
‘There never are any porters at this station.’
‘There will be if we wait. Are we in a hurry?’
‘Well . . . actually I’m expecting a telephone call . . . at home.’
A sudden glow infused Lucy. This call was clearly the only important event of the day. Melissa threw a glance at a porter, who had emerged from the lamp-room, and led the way into the station yard where a taxi obligingly appeared.
‘It’s odd how porters will always come to you,’ commented Lucy.
‘They are like children and dogs, they know,’ said Melissa. As they drove off Lucy remembered what she wanted to say.
‘Oh, Melissa, I’m dreadfully sorry, but we’ve had to put you in Stephen’s room. My uncle and aunt have the spare room and my cousin the dressing-room. I wanted to put her in Stephen’s room, but he kicked up such a fuss . . . he doesn’t mind you having it, he likes you, but he won’t have Joan in it. He has a black hatred of her because she used to bully him when we were little.’
‘I shan’t mind Stephen’s room.’
‘But it’s revolting. He’s picked a great hole in the wall above the bed and plaster falls out on your face in the night. You can’t move it because it’s a divan fixture; Mother did it out of a magazine . . . a design for a schoolboy’s room.’
‘But where is he going to sleep then?’
‘In the garden. Unless it rains. But he could always use the marquee. He will not have his hair cut and he looks so awful. He’s an impossible child. I can’t think why mother had him home; I can’t think why the school let him come.’
‘Never mind. Tell me about the wedding presents.’
‘Oh, I don’t remember. Thousands. Mostly salad-servers. I had no idea getting married was so wearing. It’s all very well for Patrick to say a conventional wedding is amusing. He’ll only have to stand it for a couple of hours tomorrow.’
‘I should have thought he’d hate even that.’
Lucy, anticipating, as she always did, some criticism of her lover, explained airily that it was just one of his poses. He liked to take people by surprise and his appearance in the rôle of a conventional bridegroom would astonish all his friends. His speech was to be a model of inarticulate ineptitude. He had been rehearsing it for a week.
Melissa thought this in vile taste and Lucy knew that she thought so, but was determined to brave it out, declaring that in some ways Patrick was a case of arrested development.
‘Who,’ asked Melissa, ‘is responsible for seeing that he has the ring?’
‘Gerald Clay. The best man. They’re driving down from London tomorrow morning and they’re going to lunch at the White Hart and leave Patrick’s luggage there. Then, when I go to change, they’ll nip back and Patrick will change at the White Hart. It’s the only way, when our house is so full. Oh, Melissa! I am so sorry you’ve got to be a bridesmaid with
Joan. Mother insisted. There’s nobody to give me away but Uncle Bob, and she said it would be a slight if we didn’t . . . but she will look such a lump. Oh, it’s all hell.’
The taxi turned into a suburban road and drew up at a house which Mrs Hallam would have called very ordinary. Its name was Hill View and Dr Gwendolen Carmichael’s name was displayed on a brass plate above the door-bell. Signs of the disorder prevalent inside were visible in the garden, which was littered with shavings and wisps of straw. Lucy explained that a good many wedding presents had been unpacked outside. She dived into the house, shouting for Stephen. When Melissa had paid the taxi and joined her, she was storming.
‘I told Stephen . . . he promised me . . . he was to sit right by the telephone just in case my call came through while I was . . . Stephen! Where is that wretched boy? Steee-vun!’
Mrs Carmichael came out of the kitchen, carrying an armful of long-stemmed roses. She was a short dark woman and there was no resemblance between her and Lucy. Everything about her suggested competency and common sense, from her neat cropped head to her neat black shoes. Her manner was ideal in a surgery, but in the home it was a little too detached.
‘Stop yelling,’ she said to Lucy. ‘I’ve been listening for the telephone. Nobody has rung. I sent Stephen out with a message. Well, Melissa! How nice to see you again! How are you?’
‘If a bride mayn’t yell,’ complained Lucy, ‘who may?’
‘Nobody may. Take Melissa into the garden and give her some tea. No . . . the telephone will not ring unanswered if you do. I’ll be in the kitchen.’
Lucy ushered Melissa through a living-room, full of halfunpacked presents, to a French window which led out onto a small lawn at the back of the house. Most of this was already
covered by a marquee, put up for the morrow’s festivities. Upon the remaining section Lucy’s uncle, aunt and cousin were sitting round a tea-table. Melissa had looked forward to meeting them, for Lucy’s accounts of them had stirred her curiosity, and a first glance told her that these accounts had not been exaggerated.
Robert Rawlings was a swarthy, bilious man who lived in the Midlands and had inherited a brickfield. He liked his women to be ignorant, inferior and dependent. In the masculine world he could not command much respect, for he managed his brickfield vilely. If he might not despise women there was no refuge for his starved vanity. He had opposed his sister Gwennie when she decided to become a doctor, prophesying that she would never get a husband. When she married her chartered accountant he deplored the money which had been wasted over her medical training. When the chartered accountant died, and she bought the practice at Gorling with her insurance money, he would almost have preferred to support her and her children himself to perceiving that she could manage perfectly well without him.
He had married a sly, ferrety-looking woman who came up to his standards in the matter of ignorance and inferiority. Their daughter had been taught nothing which might lead her to despise her father. Neither woman ever had sixpence to spend unless he was in a benevolent mood. But Joan, though occasionally sulky, really believed herself to be superior and fortunate because she lived at home and had nothing to do. She was a heavy girl and had inherited the Rawlings’ tendency to bile.
Social decency ordained that they should be present at Lucy’s wedding, for there had never been any kind of quarrel, although the two families had nothing in common. Birthday
and Christmas presents had always been punctually and conscientiously exchanged, the cousins had been exhorted to play with one another, and Robert had sent Lucy a very handsome cheque as a wedding present. In his way he was fond of Gwennie. But the invasion was a sore trial to Lucy, who had been floundering for twenty-four hours in a morass of unspoken disapproval.
Now that she had the reassurance of Melissa’s company she felt better. She introduced her modish friend and settled down to enjoy her tea, while the Rawlings family stared at Melissa and Melissa nibbled cress sandwiches. Their silence was gauche. Melissa’s was not; she was practised in the art of saying nothing without discourtesy.
‘Live in London?’ barked Mr Rawlings at last.
Melissa admitted that she did and said that it was nice to get into the country.
‘Hmph! D’you call this country? I don’t. Now we live in the depths of the country.’
‘Nicest of all,’ sighed Melissa.
‘We think so.’
Melissa turned courteously to her fellow bridesmaid and asked if she was not enchanted with the earrings which Patrick had sent them.
‘They will be just right with our little hats,’ she suggested.
‘If you ask me,’ said Joan with a scowl, ‘nothing can stop those hats from looking ridiculous. I think they’re awful. I’m sorry, but I do.’
‘Haven’t spent a night in London for twenty years,’ ruminated Mr Rawlings. ‘Can’t stick the place.’
‘I can’t say I’m keen on earrings myself,’ put in Mrs Rawlings. ‘I can’t think why ever he chose them.’
Lucy had chosen them, as everybody knew, but the shaft
was lost on her, as she had started up and was bounding into the house. She had heard the telephone ringing.
‘Let’s hope,’ tittered Mrs Rawlings, ‘that he’s vouchsafed at last. She’s been like a cat on hot bricks, waiting for him to ring all day. Not at all the devoted bridegroom! I always say . . .’
But Mr Rawlings, who had been noisily absorbing tea, interrupted her to demand whether Melissa knew this fellow Reilly.
‘He sounds a rum sort of customer to me. How did she meet him? That’s what we’ve never been able to discover.’
‘At Oxford,’ said Melissa. ‘He was staying with the President of St Stephen’s and met Lucy at a party.’
‘Now that,’ said Mrs Rawlings, ‘is what I don’t like about letting a girl go to one of these colleges. You never know what sort of men she may meet.’
‘His books are very well known,’ suggested Melissa.
‘Never read ’em,’ stated Mr Rawlings. ‘I don’t read much. I like a good yarn now and then, but I haven’t time to read much.’
‘I’ve read them,’ put in Joan. ‘And so has Mummy.’
‘Oh yes,’ agreed Mummy. ‘We aren’t such country cousins as all that, Miss Hallam. We got them from the library, before the engagement or anything, just to read, you know.’
‘And didn’t you think them very good?’
There was a pause. The Rawlings women did not like to praise anything belonging to Lucy. But neither did they wish to dispraise a famous writer. Their lord took up the cudgels for them. A good writer, he said, might be a shocking bounder. Was Reilly a gentleman? That was all he wanted to know.
‘Oh yes,’ said Melissa, who would have called Caliban a gentleman rather than let Lucy down.
Stephen appeared in the living-room window. He was tall for fifteen, taller than Lucy, and very like her, especially when his hair needed cutting. He brightened when he saw Melissa, whom he greatly admired, and called out a greeting to her. She returned it and asked if he wanted some tea. For a moment he did not reply, for he was torn between hunger and distaste for Rawlings’ company.
‘Not just now,’ he said at last, and vanished into the house.
Mr Rawlings asked if that boy was all there and if Melissa knew what Reilly’s income might be. Mrs Rawlings said, with a sigh, that authors make a great deal of money. Joan remarked that it was killingly funny to think of Lucy marrying one.
‘Why?’ asked Melissa, permitting herself a fleeting glance of astonishment at Joan’s ankles.
‘Well . . . I mean . . .’ giggled Joan. ‘Lucy marrying a famous man . . . Lucy!’
Joan was genuinely astonished. She had never expected Lucy to marry anybody; she had always believed that her cousin was a freak. She had heard a bad end predicted for Lucy as long as she could remember.
The telephone call had been the wrong one. Lucy appeared dejectedly in the window, and Melissa, to save her friend from spiteful enquiries, jumped up, exclaiming that she must unpack. She ran across the lawn to Lucy and asked to be taken to her room.
‘Hide me,’ she whispered. ‘Shelter me! I must recover my strength.’
Stephen, who was never wanting in proper attention to Melissa, had carried her luggage up to his attic at the top of the house. Melissa had not seen it before and exclaimed at
the view. Rank upon rank of hills stretched away, to a great distance, in the blue and golden evening.
‘Très Claude,’ she said, leaning out of the window. ‘A light that never was on sea or land.’
‘What do you think of my relations?’ asked Lucy.
‘Museum pieces. You should cherish them, for nowadays people like that are getting quite rare. Especially Joan.’
Lucy flung herself on the bed and picked some more plaster out of the wall while Melissa unpacked.
‘I can’t show you my trousseau,’ she said, ‘because it’s all packed. I wouldn’t anyway. It’s a mess, except my tribute silk dress which you’ve seen. To begin with, I hadn’t enough money and didn’t like to ask Mother for more. To go on with, I’ve been so flustered lately I’ve done everything wrong. To end up with, however rich and calm I was, I have no taste.’
‘You’ve avoided frills, I hope.’
‘I’ve avoided everything. That’s the trouble. I’ve avoided large patterns and niggly patterns and bright colours and a cut that will date. Everything is so perfectly inconspicuous you can’t see it at all, except for a scarf somebody sent me with: Lucy! Lucy! Lucy! written all over it. Such luck my name isn’t Maud. I mean: Birds in the High Hall garden . . . oh! one thing I have nice is an ankle-length moiré, raisin coloured. How exquisitely you do pack! All those shoe-bags! How is Hump?’
Melissa gave the latest news of Hump as she took her shoes out of their neat bags. It was, as usual, lively. He was trying to make up a match between Kolo and a young coloured American called Mary Lou, who had suddenly turned up in the Dandawa.
‘She isn’t exactly black,’ explained Melissa. ‘She’s high
yellow. And she was sent to Paris to be educated and got a bee in her bonnet about going to Africa and working for her own people. She’d heard about Kolo – what a splendid person he is, so she came to look him up. She’s got pots of money, but is rather fussy about bathrooms, Hump says. He likes her tremendously, though, and it would be such a thing for poor Kolo to get a really educated, idealistic wife; he’s so lonely, poor man. The only snag is that she’s a violent Christian Scientist and may not approve of Hump. I don’t know if they think cattle disease is error. Do you?’
Lucy had not been listening. She was wondering if the raisin-coloured moiré would be right for her first dinner, tomorrow night, with Patrick.
‘Fancy Hump marrying a Christian Scientist!’ was her comment when Melissa paused. ‘Is she pretty?’
‘He isn’t,’ said Melissa crossly, ‘and she’s black.’
‘Oh? I didn’t know they ever were.’
‘Who were what?’
‘Christian Scientists. Black.’
‘She’s American.’
‘Oh, I see. Of course they are.’
‘Black, or Christian Scientists?’
‘Both. I mean a lot of them. But who is Hump marrying? I didn’t gather.’
‘Nobody. You didn’t listen.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Melissa took off her dress, hung it up, and began to work on her face. After a while Lucy asked, a little anxiously, if it was better for the man or the woman to be most in love. What did Melissa think?
‘A woman who is rather selfish and bossy oughtn’t to marry a man who adores her,’ suggested Lucy, ‘or she might
get spoilt. She might have a lovely time at first, but at thirtyfive she might start thinking her life had been wasted. I think a woman like that should marry a man she adores, and devote herself to his career. Don’t you agree? An adoring man, who is always making a fuss of a woman and ringing her up, is very bad for a certain type of girl.’
Melissa, perceiving the drift of these remarks, agreed that a man who rings up too often can be a bore.
Feet thundered up the stairs. Stephen, forgetting that Melissa now occupied his room, burst in upon them and stood staring in helpless dismay until sent about his business by Lucy.
‘Go away,’ she stormed. ‘You horrible child! How dare you come in here? Get out!’
Apologising incoherently, he thundered off.
‘He ought to be certified,’ wailed Lucy. ‘Rushing in here when you’re naked.’
‘I didn’t mind. I’m not naked. Do calm down.’
‘I can’t calm down. I’ve tried. I can’t.’
‘This time tomorrow it will be all over.’
Lucy became very still, glowing with happiness until she looked almost incandescent. Then, without a word, she darted out of the room.
Melissa continued to unpack. She was still a little ruffled over Lucy’s lack of interest in Hump. No doubt Patrick Reilly would think Humptopia small beer. He would take no interest in the Dandawa unless they were cannibals who had so nearly eaten him that he could write a book about it.
Her next visitor was Mrs Carmichael, who came to ask, with her usual brisk efficiency, if Melissa had all she wanted.
‘Supper,’ she said, ‘is at half-past seven. I’ve sent Lucy to bed. She’s doing herself no good rushing about like this.’
‘My sister Cressida,’ said Melissa, ‘was just the same.’
‘I wish Patrick would ring her up,’ said Mrs Carmichael. ‘He promised he would and she’s upset that he hasn’t.’
She paused and looked at Melissa, who feared that yet another person was going to ask what she thought of Patrick Reilly. But she was spared this embarrassment. Mrs Carmichael had formed her own opinion of her future son-in-law. It was no higher than Melissa’s, but she was less anxious, because life had taught her that nothing turns out quite as we expect. Guessing Melissa’s concern, she felt an impulse to reassure the girl. She crossed the room and picked up some books which had fallen off a shelf.
‘I don’t let myself worry about Lucy,’ she said. ‘I think that, whatever happens to her, she’ll come through it all right. She’s very . . . very true to herself, if you know what I mean.’
Melissa nodded.
‘She doesn’t deceive herself. She is the more in love of the two. I think she knows it. I am not sure that she is going to be happy. But she will never deceive herself. And in the truth,’ declared Mrs Carmichael, ‘there is always something . . . something that upholds us, however bitter it is, if we can only face it. At least . . . I’ve found that to be so. She may be sorry she married him, but she will never be sorry that she loved.’
Chapter Four
The telephone rang at intervals all the evening, and Lucy kept peeping out of her room, expecting a summons. But no call came for her. At ten o’clock Melissa looked in to say good-night.
‘Has it been ghastly downstairs?’ asked Lucy. ‘I’m a beast to have deserted you.’
‘Not a bit. I’ve been having fun. I’ve been subduing your uncle.’
‘You couldn’t. Nobody could.’
‘Nothing easier, I assure you. Easy as robbing a blind baby. I’ve been listening with breathless wonder to his exploits.’
‘He never had any.’
‘Don’t you believe it. He’s got a clock in his house that has never lost a minute in fifty years. He’s had ptomaine poisoning from eating anchovy paste.’
‘Have they all gone to bed?’
‘They’re just going. I hope you’re as sleepy as I am.’
‘I’m horribly wide awake.’
‘Read a nice book. Read Emma.’
‘My books are all packed.’
Everything that Lucy possessed had been packed for transference to her new home. Her room looked forlorn and bare. The bookshelves were empty and her treasured collection of Worcester china was gone from the chimney-piece. Bright squares marked the walls where pictures had hung. The chests and cupboards were empty too, save for the wedding dress and the going-away suit and all the finery that was to accompany them.
Melissa went to the wardrobe and looked into it. The wedding dress hung there, solitary and ghostlike.
‘Dull, isn’t it?’ commented Lucy. ‘But one that tries not to be is worse. I’m going to dye it deep red at once, and turn it into a stately dinner dress. Brides at dances, whisking about in obvious wedding dresses, look so tatty.’
‘Deep red?’ questioned Melissa.
‘Patrick has given me some flat garnets. Haven’t you seen them? They’re on the dressing-table.’
‘Oh, lovely!’ said Melissa, inspecting them. ‘He has got taste!’
‘Not naturally,’ said Lucy. ‘But he can do anything well if he wants to, you know.’
Which exactly echoed Melissa’s thought at the moment. She snapped the garnet-case shut and waited for Lucy to speak again, aware that something important might be said.
‘He’s never fully given his mind to things,’ said Lucy finally. ‘He’s just played about, and been such a success he’s never really got down to anything. The one thing he’s in earnest about is flowers.’
‘Flowers?’
Melissa turned in astonishment.
‘Rare flowers, that take a lot of finding. He knew a man