The trouble was that when Mrs Bridgetower was talking about any subject less portentous than the Oriental plottings in the Kremlin, she was apt to be heavily ironical, and Solly did not like to expose anything in which he was truly interested to her ill-nature. However, he must say something now, or she would hint that he did not care for her company, and stage a long and humiliating scene in which he would have to protest his affection, his concern about her weak heart, and end by making it clear that so long as she lived, the outside world held no comparable charm for him. He plunged.
“I think the play may be rather good. We’ve got together quite a strong cast.”
“Didn’t you say that Professor Vambrace was playing a leading part?”
“Yes. Prospero.”
“Hmph. He’s thin enough. Who are your women?”
“Well, there’s Pearl Vambrace, she will probably play Miranda, and Cora Fielding, who will be one of the goddesses.”
Mrs Bridgetower pounced. “But that leaves only the part of Ariel free; you don’t mean to tell me that you have cast Griselda Webster for that? You are confident, I must say.”
“I did not cast the play, mother; a tentative list of the cast has been drawn up, but Mrs Forrester did that before I was asked to have anything to do with it.”
“I suppose Mrs Forrester cast her because of her looks. Well, I for one have never thought much of them; she looks a regular Dolly Varden, in my view.” Just what Mrs Bridgetower meant by this condemnation was not clear. But Solly knew it of old, as a phrase used by his mother to describe any girl to whom she thought he might be attracted.
Aha, so that was it? Mother thought he admired Griselda? No wonder she was being so ugly.
At this point the tenderloin gave place to a Floating Island. Gobbets of meringue sat motionless upon a chocolate sea.
He must be cautious. He must reveal no hint of feeling for Griselda, to whom, in fact, he was reasonably indifferent, nor must he hasten to agree with his mother. She would at once suspect agreement as a form of duplicity and be more than ever convinced of this attachment.
“There are not many girls available at present who would do at all,” he said. “I don’t suppose you would prefer to see Ariel played by Pearl Vambrace?”
This was an astute move. His mother’s contempt for the Vambraces was one of her lesser intellectual amusements.
“It will be six of one and half-dozen of the other, I should say. Though the Vambrace girl would probably be a little more hesitant about showing her legs. And with good reason.”
Once again Solly was compelled to admire the fire which his mother could rouse in herself by the mention of young women’s legs. They were an iniquity which she attacked with the violence and vituperative strength of a Puritan divine. Not that she lacked reason in the present case; Griselda’s legs were not a matter upon which anyone remained indifferent; those who did not condemn them as incitements to worldliness were lost in admiration. In her latest speech she had scored a double; she had condemned Griselda’s legs because they were beautiful, and sneered at poor Pearl Vambrace’s because they were not. Mrs Bridgetower had indeed benefited from higher education.
“When do you begin rehearsals?”
“At once, mother.”
“I suppose you have been busy preparing the play? A good many of your cast will find it coming quite freshly to them, I am sure.”
“I’ve done a good deal of work. But I shan’t really be directing.”
“Oh? And why not?”
“Miss Valentine Rich has come back to Salterton for the summer, and Mrs Forrester has asked her to do it. When they asked me to step down I was glad enough to do so. After all, she’s a professional. I shall work with her, and I hope to learn a good deal.”
“Valentine Rich? That granddaughter of old Professor Savage who went on the stage?”
“She has made quite a reputation.”
“So she ought. There was brains in the family. I see. And is she here now?”
“She arrived this afternoon. I think she has come home to settle up the old man’s affairs.”
“I presume she was his heir. Well, she might have come back sooner. He was entirely alone at the end.”
“Not entirely, mother. He had many friends, and I heard that they were very good during his last years and his illness.”
They were no kin. I hope I shall not have to die with only strangers at hand. However, one must take whatever Fate has in store for one.”
Solly recognized danger. When under stress of emotion it was his mother’s habit to speak of herself as “one”; somehow it made her self-pity appear more truly pathetic. But by this time the Floating Island had been consumed, and prunes wrapped in fried bacon had also come and gone. His mother rose.
“Shall we have coffee now, or will you join me later?”
This was a survival from the days when, for a few months, the late Professor Bridgetower had sat at table for precisely five minutes after his wife, drinking a glass of invalid port which had been ordered as a tonic. The notion that men lingered over their wine had taken hold, and Mrs Bridgetower still pretended that Solly might take it into his head to do so. There was no wine in the house, only the brandy kept against Mrs Bridgetower’s “spells” and Solly’s own private bottle which he kept in his sitting-room cupboard. He did not trouble to answer his mother, but rose and followed her to the gloomy drawing-room, where a great many books lived in glass and leaden prisons, like the china in the dining-room. There, in the gloom, they took coffee ceremoniously and joylessly, as though it were for their health. And thus concluded what they would have been surprised to learn was the most ceremonious and ample dinner eaten that night in Salterton. It was Mrs Bridgetower’s notion that everyone lived as she did, except people like the Websters, who ate much more, and took longer to do it.
“Well,” she said, as she put down her cup, “it will be a pleasure to see The Tempest once again. I have seen the Ben Greet Players perform it, and also Beerbohm Tree when I was a girl. Your father and I saw it at Stratford on our memorable trip of 1934. Whatever Miss Rich and Griselda Webster concoct between them, I shall have my rich memories.”
As soon as he decently could, Solly composed his mother with a book about geopolitics, and retired to his own room in the attic, saying that he had work to do. His mother’s enmity toward Griselda had produced the effect that anyone but Mrs Bridgetower could have predicted; by nine o’clock, as Griselda was reheating her bath for the third time, and wishing vaguely that she had something more interesting to do than pursue the placid love of Mary Lawther, Solly was sitting in his attic, drinking rye and tap water, and wishing that he had the courage to call her, and suggest that they meet for—what? He could not have his mother’s car; he knew of no place to go. His impotence and his fear of his mother saddened him, and he poured some more rye into his glass, and put a melancholy piece of Mozart on his gramophone.
It was at this time, also, that Valentine Rich, who had escaped from the Forresters’, stood in her grandfather’s deserted house, holding in her hand a bundle of letters which she had written to the old man during the past twelve years. Each was dated on its envelope; all were neatly bound together with a piece of ribbon. They were the first things which she found when she had opened his old-fashioned domestic safe. She had loved and honoured him, and although she did not wish him alive again, she missed him sorely. Before she continued her search she sat in his revolving desk chair, and wept for the passing of time, and the necessary death of the well-loved, wise old man.
Two
Having decided that he would ask for a part in the play, Hector Mackilwraith acted quickly, within the limits imposed by his temperament. He did nothing that Friday night. He returned to his room at the YMCA and passed a pleasant evening marking a batch of algebra tests. To this work he brought a kind of mathematical elegance, and even a degree of wit. He was not the kind of schoolmaster who scribbles on exercise papers; with a red pencil as sharp as a needle he would put a little mark at the point where a problem had gone wrong, not in such a way as to assist the erring student, but merely in order to show him where he had fallen into mathematical sin. His assessment of marks was a miracle of even-handed justice; there were pupils, of course, who brought their papers back to him with complaints that they had not been given proper credit for their work, but they did it in a perfunctory manner, as a necessary ceremonial rather than with a hope of squeezing an extra mark out of Hector.