Before the Fact Read online

  “Hullo,” said Lina, trying not to laugh and feeling that her visitor must have escaped from the pages of Mr. P. G. Wodehouse.

  “So you’re old Johnnie’s wife?” accused Mr. Thwaite, shaking hands.

  “I am, yes.”

  “Poor old bird, what?” said Mr. Thwaite surprisingly, and then laughed with much amusement. “Didn’t mean that. Putting my foot in it as usual, what? I mean – well, how is the old bean?”

  Lina rang for tea and with some difficulty induced her visitor to seat himself. She replied that Johnnie’s health was excellent. He was not in at the moment, but she expected him back for tea.

  “Still mugging it in that estate office, eh? Hates it as much as ever, I suppose. What?”

  “Yes, he still works there. Do you live near here, Mr. Thwaite?” Lina asked politely.

  For some reason Mr. Thwaite seemed to consider this an admirable joke. He laughed heartily. “Good God, no! What? I mean ... Near here? My goodness, no. My place is in Yorkshire. Oh, I see what you mean. No, I was at school with Johnnie. Shared a study. Bosom pals and all that sort of rot. Only seen him about twice since we left. Ran into him at Newbury last year. He’d dropped a packet. Still following the gees, I expect?”

  “Johnnie?” said Lina. “No, I don’t think he ever goes racing now.” She thought idly that it was odd that she should not have heard of this visit to Newbury.

  “What? Oh, rot. Fact? Good God, poor old bean. Must have changed a bit, what? Marriage, I expect, eh? Told me he was married last time I saw him. ‘Oh, rot,’ I said. ‘Not come down to that, old bean, have you?’ ‘Don’t you worry,’ he said. ‘She’ll be worth a packet one day.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘that’s different.’ Hullo! P’raps I ought not to have said that. What? Putting my foot in it, was I?”

  “Not in the least,” Lina said, concealing her surprise. “Johnnie and I quite understand one another.” But she did not think it very nice that Johnnie should have boasted of the money that would come to her.

  “That’s the scheme,” Mr. Thwaite said with enthusiasm. “Makes marriage almost bearable if you can do that, what? I remember Johnnie said what a topper you were, too. What ho! Well, how is the old bean, anyhow? Estate agent, or something equally ghastly, isn’t he? Good God! What?”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Lina said faintly.

  “No, of course you didn’t. Expect I said ‘what,’ what? Always saying ‘what.’ God knows why. Silly habit, really. Well, anyhow, how is the old bean? Fit and hearty? I haven’t seen him for ages. Oh, I told you that. Yes, I was passing through, or as near as dash it, so thought I’d get off and give the old bean a call. I say, I’m not butting in or anything, am I? You haven’t got a tea fight on, or a bazaar to open, or what not, what? What?”

  “Of course not,” Lina said, as brightly as she could manage. “I’m always delighted to see any of Johnnie’s old friends. Tea will be coming in a minute. Of course you must stop and see him. I know he’ll be back for it to-day.”

  “Will he, by Jove! Same old slacker, I’ll bet. What?”

  Ethel, entering with the tea tray, saved Lina from replying. The interruption did not, however, disconcert Mr. Thwaite. He boomed away through the clatter as merrily as any bittern.

  Lina had hardly poured out the tea when she heard Johnnie’s key in the front door. Excusing herself, she ran out to intercept him.

  “Johnnie, I thought I’d better warn you. There’s a most extraordinary man here called Thwaite, who says he was at school with you.”

  “What, old Beaky Thwaite? Whatever brought him here?”

  “He says he was passing, so got off to see you,” Lina explained. “Is he quite mad?”

  “Not quite,” Johnnie grinned. “Pretty nearly, perhaps. Won’t say a word, eh?”

  “Won’t say a word? Won’t he! Come and listen to him.”

  “That’s funny. He used to be painfully shy, as a boy. He stayed with us once or twice in the holidays, and my people used to say he never uttered a word from the moment he entered the house to the moment he left it.”

  “Well, he’s making up for lost time now,” Lina giggled. “Hurry up and wash, darling, and help me out. I can’t bear it any longer alone.”

  Johnnie looked back at her over his shoulder as he mounted the stairs. “Be kind to him, monkeyface, anyhow.”

  “I have been. Why particularly?”

  “He’s got more money than he knows what to do with. I always feel one should be kind to people like that.”

  “He might get you a better job,” Lina said, promptly and hopefully.

  Johnnie shrugged his shoulders and went on upstairs.

  Three minutes later Lina was witnessing the hearty meeting of two old school friends. An American film producer would have been disappointed. Instead of putting an arm round each other’s necks and massaging the middle of each other’s backs, they merely hit each other violently in the chest.

  “Well, Beaky, you old sinner, this is great. How the devil are you, and all that kind of thing?”

  “You’re getting fat, old bean,” pronounced Mr. Thwaite in return. “Deuced fat. What? You’ll have to knock his oats off a bit, Mrs. Aysgarth. Here, what’s your wife’s name, old bean? Can’t go on calling her ‘Mrs. Aysgarth,’ I mean. Sounds too damned formal, and all that sort of rot. What?”

  Lina stifled an insane request to be called Mrs. Old Bean.

  “Her name’s Lina.”

  “Lina, what? Damned good name, too,” adjudged Mr. Thwaite loudly. “Call you ‘Lina’ then, may I?”

  “Of course,” Lina said, producing a rather forced smile. She had ideas about whom she permitted to use her Christian name and how long they must have known her first.

  She dispensed tea and listened, with wandering interest, to the reminiscences of the two men.

  For some time these were confined to old This and old That, and what had happened to old Thing. Then Mr. Thwaite’s memories took a more personal turn.

  “Remember how you won the Isaiah prize, what? Good God, I shan’t forget that in a hurry. I’ll bet he hasn’t told you about that, Lina, what?”

  “No.” Lina roused herself from the worried consideration of a possible menu should unexpected Mr. Thwaite stay to dinner, as Johnnie, most hospitable of men and untroubled by a larder outlook, would certainly invite him to do. “No, I don’t believe he has. What was that?”

  “Why, the Chief was deuced keen on Isaiah, and all that sort of rot, and he offered a special prize one term when the Sixth were mugging it up. This old bean, being a school-pre., was in his study one day and saw the paper on the Chief’s desk. So he took a copy of it. Never done a stroke of work, of course. Never did. But he got the prize all right. What about that?”

  “Really, Johnnie.” Lina laughed, but her strict code made her amusement sound forced. The incident reminded her dimly of something that had happened in Paris, on their honeymoon: something to do with a waiter and wrong change, and not by any means creditable to Johnnie. “But of course he didn’t keep the prize, Mr. Thwaite?”

  “Didn’t he just! I see you don’t know Johnnie yet. And the dirty old dog never told me till afterwards that he knew what the questions were going to be.” Mr. Thwaite laughed hugely.

  Lina wondered if this were the public-school code of honour about which she had heard so much.

  Johnnie laughed too. “Yes, I put it across you all that time.” He caught Lina’s pained gaze and added quickly: “Don’t look so tragic, monkeyface. The Isaiah exam wasn’t taken very seriously.”

  “Not that it would have mattered to you, old bean, if it had been,” retorted Mr. Thwaite. “Old Johnnie was supposed to be the finest cribber ever known at the place, Lina. He never did a stroke of work all the time he was there; but he got a prize every year, and ended up in the Sixth. I’ll bet he’d have cribbed his way to a schol. at Oxford, wouldn’t you, old bean, if they hadn’t cut your career a trifle short by—”

  “Look here, Beaky, aren’t y
ou being a bit tactless? You ought to know that women don’t understand the what-d’you-call-’ems – what’s the word, monkeyface?”

  “Ethics?”

  “I expect so. Well, the ethics of cribbing. You’ll be giving Lina all sorts of funny ideas about her poor husband.”

  “What?” said Mr. Thwaite. “Oh, I see what you mean. Sorry, old bean. Putting my foot in it again, what? All rot, Lina, anyhow. Cribbing as a fine art, and all that sort of thing. Everyone does it. No good at it myself, but a trier. Sorry, old bean, what?”

  “Well, anyhow, what are you doing with yourself in these days, Beaky?”

  “Me, eh? Oh, tooling around, you know. Nothing much.”

  “Lucky old cad, aren’t you, with so much money?”

  “Oh, come. Here, I say. Not so much as all that, you know. Draw it mild. Just enough, that’s all.”

  “It would certainly be enough for me,” Johnnie grinned.

  Johnnie did not ask Mr. Thwaite to dinner.

  Lina was so relieved that she quite forgot to pursue some inquiries she had intended into the art of cribbing.

  She did not see Mr. Thwaite again for four years.

  2

  By the time she had lived in Upcottery three years, Lina was able to congratulate herself on two things.

  The first was that Johnnie, who before he met her had never done a stroke of work in his life and apparently had never contemplated doing one, should have really settled down to his job. More, he was now taking it for granted that he should have a job.

  Every morning still, with perhaps rather less punctuality but now without any resignation at all, Johnnie went forth to deal with estimates for repairs to labourers’ cottages, quotations for slates, and all the multifarious petty bargaining that his work entailed; and every morning Lina, having got up early in order to breakfast with him, kissed him good-bye on the doorstep just like any suburban wife.

  Johnnie, in fact, was altogether a reformed rake. Even General McLaidlaw acknowledged that Lina had turned him from whatever he had been into a useful member of society. It was a revolution of which Lina was quite aware, and for which she took full credit.

  She was still not sure how she had done it.

  She looked back on that evening when the revolution had been effected, with a kind of wonder. Something had seemed to take possession of her then: something which had given her a strength of character which she normally imagined she lacked, and which had certainly been greater for the moment than Johnnie’s. The odd thing was that, so far as Johnnie was concerned, its effects remained. On that evening Lina had established a moral superiority to which, as she realized vaguely, Johnnie still paid tribute. It was absurd, of course, for after that one effort Lina had quite reverted to her former perfectly contented moral dependence upon Johnnie; and it irked her to find Johnnie at times trying to placate or cajole her, instead of giving her the peremptory orders that she would much have preferred; though she did understand, in an indefinite way, that this was not Johnnie’s method of gaining his ends. She still adored Johnnie for the grown-up schoolboy he was; but she did not like being considered his schoolmistress.

  The other matter on which she was able to congratulate herself was that after three years’ residence in an English rural district, she was not yet a member of the Women’s Institutes, had never had a fête in the grounds of Dellfield, and had allowed herself to be persuaded into joining no body, secular or lay, for the dragooning of people into doing things they did not want for the benefit of institutions in which they had no interest.

  That is not to say that Lina did not admire those whose bent lay in such directions. Her closest friend in Upcottery, Janet Caldwell, actually ran the village branch of the Women’s Institutes; but Lina did not for a moment allow this fact to interfere with their friendship.

  On the contrary, she envied Janet her power of enjoying her duties.

  Lina knew herself to be lazy.

  At home this laziness of hers had been actually encouraged. “Oh,” they said, when it was a question of something practical, “it’s no good relying on Lina to do that. She couldn’t. Lina’s always up in the clouds.” And as Lina invariably did not at all want to do whatever it was that required doing, she took good care to foster the idea that she always was up in the clouds. It had been a quite mistaken idea, but nobody except Lina ever knew that.

  At home that had been all very well. In her own house it was impossible for Lina to shelter in the clouds. Joyce was always most surprised that Lina’s house should be as efficiently run as her own.

  But Lina’s mental laziness remained.

  It was not a good, hearty laziness, which was proud of itself and informed the rest of the world that it could go hang. It was the nagging kind. Lina felt all the time that really she ought to be getting up and doing something useful, but that, on the other hand, she simply could not bear, just for the moment, to be mixed up in all these horrible village activities. And the moment when she might feel she could bear it never seemed to arrive.

  So that she very much admired Janet, who was always getting up and doing useful things.

  For Janet Caldwell was a serious soul. So, in her way, was Lina, though it was a different way. There was, however, an intellectual bond between them which was quite strong enough to allow such deviations without weakening. Lina had not been in Upcottery two months before she realized that Janet Caldwell was the only person in the place with any real intelligence whatsoever – not excepting Johnnie.

  Lina still did not know whether to be disappointed with Johnnie in that respect or not. While they were still engaged she had persuaded herself that Johnnie had a Mind, undeveloped though it might be, which under her ministrations would bud and flower after marriage into as capable a blossom as any in Joyce’s own set. It appeared that she had been wrong. If Johnnie had a Mind, he did not encourage it. Lina felt that it was a pity. She had seen herself in the rôle of mental horticulturist, and she had liked it.

  It did, she felt, leave a gap not to be able to discuss passionately with Johnnie the new books or get pleasantly excited over completely academic topics; for Johnnie did not even read the new books, unless they happened to be detective stories, and would have seen nothing to get passionate about in them if he had; while as for academic topics, Johnnie simply could not understand his wife’s interest in them – and where Johnnie did not understand, he laughed. But then Lina got so much from Johnnie, so much that was red-blooded and vital, that a pallid intellectualism super-imposed might have seemed positively out of place: for contrasted with the things for which Johnnie stood to her, intellectualism did look pallid.

  In the passionately protective love with which she now surrounded everything that was Johnnie and Johnnie’s, Lina not only sympathized with, but at times even envied, his simple philistinism. Johnnie was her child; and what have children to do with abstractions? Food and drink and love and bodies, the raw meat of life, those are their concerns; not its civilized complexities.

  But since Lina herself did not happen to be constituted that way, Janet Caldwell adequately filled the gap, which might otherwise have become a serious one.

  Janet was a graduate of St. Hugh’s, Oxford.

  She had taken a third in Honour Mods. and a second in History. Contrary to the practice of so many otherwise intelligent women, she did not consider it necessary to impair her appearance in order to prove her intellectual capacity. This was the more fortunate since she was something rather more than good-looking: her broad white forehead, black hair parted in the middle, and large gray eyes gave her a classical appearance which her rather large, full-lipped mouth could not spoil. Her voice was so gentle as to be often almost inaudible. She was half-a-dozen years younger than Lina, unmarried, and lived with her widowed mother in an extremely red, square little house on the top of a small hill, which she herself called The Doll’s House.

  Lina’s early experiences in friendship had left her diffident. She was always a little surprised,
and a little grateful too, when anyone seemed to like her. Janet had shown her preference from the first, and Lina had reciprocated it at once. Each of the two had recognized in the other the only person in the neighbourhood with whom she could become really intimate; and their intimacy had shot up in the extremely rapid growth which women are so often able to induce in a friendship between themselves.

  And it had lasted.

  A great deal of tea had been drunk, and an immense amount of talk poured out, in Lina’s long, airy drawing room while Johnnie wrestled with his farm accounts twenty miles away.

  On an afternoon in early November the two were sitting in front of the log fire, waiting for tea to be brought in. The conversation had been desultory, until Janet pulled it up with a jerk.

  “Lina,” she said, in her gentle, almost complaining voice, “why don’t you have a baby?”

  “You may well ask,” Lina answered, with a little laugh. “I assure you, it isn’t my fault.”

  “Johnnie’s?”

  “Nor Johnnie’s. Nature’s.”

  “Do you want one?”

  “I suppose so.” Lina was a little embarrassed. It was the first time she and Janet, in spite of their intimacy, had discussed such a personal matter. They prided themselves in differing in this respect from others of their sex, whose avid eagerness to pry into the secret lives of their friends, or, with a kind of psychological exhibitionism, reveal their own, disgusted both of them. “I suppose so. But Johnnie’s such a child himself that perhaps I don’t miss another as much as I might.”

  Janet leaned back in her chair, her broad, white hands clasped over one knee. “If ever I married, it would only be to have children.”

  “It’s quite nice to have a husband in any case,” Lina observed mildly.

  “Yes?” said Janet.

  Janet did not like Johnnie.

  She was, so far as Lina knew, about the only woman who had never succumbed to Johnnie’s charm. Of course, Janet never said she did not like Johnnie, and she obviously tried not to hint it; but it was quite evident. Janet never stayed more than a perfunctory few minutes if Johnnie came back before she had gone, and it needed quite a lot of persuasion to get her to dinner. Lina thought it all rather unnecessary, as Johnnie was always quite charming to Janet and did not return her dislike in the least; though he did mimic her quiet voice and deliberate movements rather funnily when she was not there.