Thank Heaven Fasting (11 page)

When they reached home, Monica, still apprehensive, attempted to go straight upstairs.

“Just wait a minute, dear. I want to speak to you.”

It was a formula that, coming from either of her parents, never failed to cause Monica's heart to sink.

She meekly followed Mrs. Ingram into the library.

“Were you with that Captain Lane all the afternoon?”

“Well—only part of it. Part of the time I was with you and father.”

“Naturally, I know you were. But I mean, of course, when you went off like that.”

“Well, I was—we just—Alice Ashe was there, quite a lot.”

“That has nothing to do with what I'm asking you. I'm not at all angry with you, Monica, but I want you to give me a straightforward answer to my question at once. Were you, or were you not, with Captain Lane all that time?”

Monica debated the advantages and disadvantages of telling a lie, and decided immediately that she was not likely to be able to tell a convincing one. So she looked down at her white kid gloves, twisted them into a ball between her hands, and said, with a mixture of sullenness and defiance:

“Yes. I was.”

“Very well, darling. Quite right to tell mother the truth, and I'm not in the least vexed with you. But I want to talk to you a little, about this Captain Lane.”

Monica's heart, already in her buckled shoes, seemed, at this, ready to sink through the floor.

“Sit down, my pet.”

“I'd rather stand.”

“Mother said Sit down, Monica.”

Monica sat.

“Now listen to me, my darling. I've been hearing something about this Captain Lane, and he hasn't got a very good reputation. There may be no real harm in him—I dare say there isn't—but he's not a friend I very much care about for you. I suppose you met him at Lady Margaret Miller's house last night?”

“Yes.”

“‘Yes, mother.' Well, if you've only met him once before, there's no special need to go out of your way to have anything more to do with him. Be polite, of course, but don't go off by yourself with him as you did this afternoon, and don't dance with him.”

“But mother——” Monica felt that her face was scarlet, and her voice full of consternation.

“Well?” Mrs. Ingram sounded slightly amused, but also slightly impatient.

“Why isn't he—why mayn't I——Has he done anything wrong?”

“Not that I know of,” Mrs. Ingram replied serenely. “But I don't very much care for what I hear about him, and, in any case, he's not anybody at all. 'Lane' means absolutely nothing. He might be anybody or nobody—and he certainly isn't anybody. Tell me, what did he talk to you about this afternoon?”

“Nothing, mother.”

“My dear child, don't answer me like that. It's not only childish, it's almost impertinent. How could you and Captain Lane have spent over two hours talking about nothing?”

How indeed?

Monica, confused, guilty, helpless, and terribly afraid of bursting into tears if she spoke at all, remained silent.

Her mother made a short, vexed sound that was not quite a laugh.

“I'm afraid I've made a great mistake in letting you have all this modern freedom. If I'd been as strict with you as Lady Marlowe is with Frederica and Cecily, this would never have happened. Now, no more nonsense, Monica. I'm only too glad that you should enjoy yourself and make friends, but they must be friends that mother likes. The Ashes, now … I'm afraid poor Claude Ashe didn't have a very amusing evening at the Exhibition.”

Monica understood that Lady Margaret, probably quite good-naturedly, had been talking.

“It doesn't do a young man any harm to see that a girl isn't running after him, and can have other friends if she wants them—but at the same time, it's very bad form to drop an old friend for the sake of a new one—especially in the case of a young girl. I don't say there's any great harm done, where Claude Ashe is concerned—he wouldn't ever be any
real
use, anyway. Now that's all, Monica. I'm not angry with you—it's natural you should make mistakes at your age, and who's to tell you about them, if not your own mother?”

There was, as Monica and Mrs. Ingram both knew well, no answer to this enquiry.

“Run along and change your shoes,” Mrs. Ingram brightly admonished her daughter. “And your stockings too, if they're damp. In fact, you'd better dress for dinner at once, it's not really much too early.”

Monica swallowed a hard lump in her throat, went to the door, opened it, and then turned round.

“Do you want me to—to
cut
Captain Lane?” she asked, in a loud, unnatural voice.

“Monica! Haven't you listened to a
word
I've been saying? Of course you're to be polite. Only if he asks you to dance or anything, just say you're engaged. Never mind whether you are or not. He'll understand.”

“Mayn't I even know why?”

“Why? Because he's a young man whom it won't do you
any good to be seen about with. I've asked one or two people about him, and they all agree that he's much too apt to make young girls conspicuous by attentions that mean nothing at all. In any case, he hasn't any money, and couldn't possibly think of marrying. He's no use whatever.”

Monica, after looking dumbly at her mother for another moment, went out of the room.

Upstairs in her bedroom, she locked her door—although not allowed to do so—and broke into a violent fit of crying, prolonging it until long after her tears had ceased to be a relief, and had almost become an effort.

Alternately, she rebelled and despaired.

She made up speeches—defiant, courageous, and yet reasonable speeches—that would force her parents to see once and for all that she had no intention of giving up Christopher whatever
anybody
might say—and evolved a confused, fantastic story, of which she was herself the heroine, about an elopement and secret marriage.

Every now and then, as a sob shook her, she realized afresh that in less than a week she was to be taken away from London, and that before she came back again, Christopher would have sailed for India.

(This final contingency sounded so romantic that Monica adopted it as a probability, although Christopher had said that most likely the Regiment would not sail before November.)

There was still the ball at the Ritz. If only one had been going there with a party! But Mrs. Ingram was taking Monica on, after a reception, and would herself chaperon her daughter.

“I must write to him,” thought Monica.

The decision comforted her a little. Moreover it was now quite impossible to cry any more, and she must dress for dinner.

With some reluctance she got up from the bed, saw with a certain satisfaction that her tears had made an enormous wet patch on the pillow, and called “Come in!” to Mary with the hot water.

Careful sponging removed most of the traces of weeping from Monica's face. She did her hair again, changed into the high-necked white frock that she wore on the evenings when the Ingrams were alone, and went downstairs.

Both her parents were already in the drawing-room. In less than five minutes Monica had realized with surprise that her mother must have been talking to her father, that both of them were feeling rather sorry for her, and were endeavouring, by extra kindliness of manner, to console her for what—she supposed bitterly—they doubtless viewed as her childish disappointment and mortification.

They talked of things that were supposed to interest her during dinner, and afterwards her father did not suggest a Bridge-lesson, but said that he would go to the Club for a rubber, and patted her on the shoulder as he kissed her good-night.

“I should read a book on the sofa, darling, if I were you,” said Mrs. Ingram. “And go up to bed early. All these late nights have made you look a little bit washed out.”

Monica obeyed, feeling grateful in a dim, exhausted way.

At half-past nine her mother sent her upstairs.

“I'll come and tuck you up in a quarter of an hour,” said Mrs. Ingram—which meant that in a quarter of an hour Monica's light would be extinguished, with a tacit prohibition against turning it on again that night.

She undressed, and brushed and plaited her hair as quickly as possible, then knelt to say her prayers.

A rush of confused petitions was succeeded by a kind of tangled explanation, addressed rather to Monica's conscience than to her God, concerning the letter that she intended to write, in order that Christopher might know at once what had happened. This might, in a way, seem wrong, unmaidenly, disobedient, and even deceitful—but God must understand, and help her, and, above all, must not allow her mother to guess anything at all. Monica then added her usual nightly formula and got into bed.

“Good-night, my pet,” said her mother.

“Good-night, mother,” Monica made her voice sound as sleepy as possible.

But Mrs. Ingram lingered.

“Don't let your little self worry over what I said to you this afternoon. It's quite natural you should make mistakes at your age, and there's no harm done. I dare say we shall meet some quite worthwhile people this summer and autumn, and you've got one or two friends already, haven't you?”

“Yes, mother.”

“We must get Claude Ashe and Alice to come and do a theatre with us one night when we get back again after Scotland. I thought she seemed such a nice girl.”

“Yes. Thank you very much, mother.”

“Good-night then, darling. Go to sleep. God bless you.”

Mrs. Ingram kissed Monica, put out the light, and went away, softly closing the door behind her.

Monica, gritting her teeth, lay in the darkness.

Experience had taught her that it wasn't worth while to turn the light on again. Mrs. Ingram had a tendency to hear mysterious noises in the evening, and to make frequent expeditions both upstairs and down. A bar of light showing beneath Monica's bedroom door would attract her attention without fail, and probably bring her into the room again for an explanation.

It was not possible to cry any more—Monica had exhausted her capacity for tears earlier in the evening. She thought about Christopher Lane, recalling everything that she could of all he had said to her that afternoon, and gradually falling into a state between sleeping and waking, in which she evolved a series of fantastic situations, ending in an elopement and marriage, and her return home to break the news to her parents, wearing a wedding-ring and with Christopher beside her.

The next morning she wrote her letter.

It proved more difficult than she had expected. To begin with, she did not know what to call him. “Captain Lane” seemed unnatural to a degree, but she had never yet said
“Christopher” except to herself. Finally she decided to have no formal beginning at all.

“I am in great trouble,” she wrote. “I may not have a chance of dancing with you or even
speaking
to you, at the Ritz on Friday, and I do so want to explain what has happened. Nothing can make any real difference to our friendship, but things are being made very difficulty for me at home. I only wish I could see you, and tell you about it all, but I suppose there's no chance of that, unless you're going to any of the places I'm going to?”

Here Monica gave a detailed list of such engagements as she knew had been made for the coming week, omitting those to be undertaken with her mother only.

None of them, seen from her present point of view, appeared very hopeful, excepting an appointment with the dentist at eleven o'clock on Wednesday to which she would have to be escorted by one of the maids, since Mrs. Ingram had an engagement at the same hour, in the opposite direction, with her dressmaker. It would surely be possible for Christopher to be walking up. Brook Street at five minutes to eleven on Wednesday morning….

Monica did not make this suggestion, but she prayed fervently that Christopher might make it.

On the way to church she posted her letter, sandwiched discreetly between a letter addressed to her old governess and a picture-postcard to a small cousin who collected them. Actually, her mother had long ago given up any systematic supervision of Monica's correspondence, but occasionally, unexpectedly, she did scrutinize an envelope, or desire to be shown its contents.

Monica decided that she could not possibly get any reply from Christopher until Tuesday morning at the earliest. Nevertheless, she began to glance anxiously at the letters on the hall-table mid-day on Monday. She did not even know his handwriting by sight, but the postmark would be Woolwich.

No letter came on Monday, and she woke very early on
Tuesday morning, her heart already beating quickly in anticipation.

Letters were never brought up to her room, but laid in her place at the breakfast table.

She went down early.

Nothing—excepting a note from Frederica Marlowe concerning a tea-party, and an offer of a complimentary sitting from a fashionable photographer.

Monica felt herself turning very hot and then very cold. She sat silently through breakfast, sick and numbed with disappointment. She felt, now, that no letter from Christopher would ever come at all.

Nor did it.

The realization that he had not answered her appeal caused her far greater and more real suffering than the unhappiness she had felt at being told that she was to have nothing more to do with him.
That
unhappiness, she knew now, had been alleviated by the consciousness of persecution, and the sense of being the heroine of a romance.

Everything that she had ever been told of the contempt in which men held a girl who “made herself cheap” came back to her, hurting and humiliating her unbearably.

On Wednesday morning it rained, and Mary the housemaid, in her neat black, escorted Miss Monica in a four wheeled cab to Brook Street.

Monica glanced forlornly up and down the street, but there was no one to be seen except a policeman, and a couple of ladies under an umbrella, far down the wet pavement.