Patricia Wentworth - She Came Back

Milly Armitage crumbled her bread in a wasteful manner. Lord Woolton would not have approved, nor would Milly herself if she had noticed what she was doing, but she did not. She wanted to say something to Lilla, but she didn’t know how to set about it. She could be warm, generous, and endlessly kind, but she couldn’t be tactful. She sat there in her baggy mustard tweeds with her hair rather wild and her hat at a rollicking angle and crumbled her bread.

Lilla, in a yellow jumper and a short brown skirt, had that air of having just come out of a bandbox which seems to be the birthright of American women. Her dark curls shone. Everything about her was just right both for herself and the occasion. There was a perfect ordered elegance which appeared as natural as it is in a hummingbird or a flower. Through it all, like the scent of the flower and the song of the bird, there came that friendly warmth which was all her own. She laughed a little now.

“Why don’t you just say it, Aunt Milly, without bothering how?”

Milly Armitage’s frown relaxed. A wide rueful smile showed her excellent teeth.

“I might as well, mightn’t I? I can’t see any good in beating about the bush myself, but people seem to expect it somehow. My mother always said I just blurted things out, and so I do. If they’re pleasant, what’s the good of wrapping them up? And if they’re not, well, it’s a good thing to get them off your chest and out of the way. So there it is-Philip and Anne are coming up to town. It’s too much for him going up and down every day. He said so at dinner one evening, and Anne went up to town next day and took a flat. If you ask me, that wasn’t at all what he meant, but he couldn’t very well say anything. She did it in the most tactful way of course. Not being built that way myself, I don’t awfully admire people being tactful-there’s something soapy about it. You know- voice well kept down-gentle-hesitating. She hoped he’d be pleased. She’d been thinking what a bore that going up and down would be in the winter, and when she heard of this flat it seemed too good a chance to lose. They wouldn’t hold it open-someone else was after it-all that kind of thing.” She screwed up her face in an apologetic way. “There-I’ve no business to talk about her like that, have I? But I never did like her, and I never shall.”

Lilla sat with her chin in her hand looking across the table, her puzzled brown eyes just touched with a smile.

“Why don’t you like her, Aunt Milly?”

“I don’t know-I just don’t. She’s a disaster for Philip- she always was-but they might have shaken down together if there hadn’t been this break. But when a man has just begun to realize that he’s made the wrong marriage, and then for three and a half years he thinks he’s got free of it, what do you imagine he’s going to feel like when he finds he’s up to his neck in it again. Even without his having got so fond of Lyn.”

“Is he fond of Lyn?” The brown eyes were very deeply troubled.

Milly Armitage nodded.

“I suppose that’s one of the things I oughtn’t to say. But it’s true. And there wasn’t anything wrong about it until Anne turned up. Lyn is just right for him, and he is just right for her. What do you suppose he is feeling like? I tell you I’m glad to be getting away to Cotty, and I can’t put it stronger than that. You see, the worst part of it is that they’re both trying quite desperately hard-I’ve never seen people trying harder. Anne is trying to get him back by being all the things she was never meant to be. It gives me pins and needles all over to watch her being gentle, and considerate, and tactful, and Philip being controlled and polite. He feels he’s got to make up for not having recognized her at first, but it’s all against the grain. If they’d snap at each other, or have a good red-hot, tearing row, it would be a relief-but they just go on trying.”

“It sounds horrid,” said Lilla in a distressed voice.

Milly Armitage made the face which she had been forbidden to make when she was ten years old. It made her look quite extraordinarily like a frog, and conveyed better than any number of words the discomfort of the Jocelyn ménage. Then she said,

“It’s going to be very hard on Lyn having them in town. She is devoted to Anne-at least she was. I don’t know how much of it’s left now, but she’ll think she ought to be, and it will tear her to pieces. They’re bound to meet. I don’t think Anne knows anything-I don’t think it would occur to her. She thinks about Lyn as she was before the war-just a little school-girl who had a crush on her. And Lyn won’t give anything away. She’ll make herself go and see Anne and be friends with her because she’ll think that’s the right thing to do, and if she feels a thing is right she’ll do it. She’s got no armour-she’ll get horribly hurt. And I can’t bear her to be hurt-that’s why I’m saying all this.”

“Yes?”

Milly Armitage put out her hand impulsively.

“That’s why I was so glad to hear about Pelham Trent. I don’t mean that I want anything serious to come of it-he’s a bit old for her.”

“He doesn’t seem old.”

“About thirty-seven, I should say. But that doesn’t matter. It’s a perfect godsend to have someone to admire her, to take her about, to take up her time. I don’t suppose anything will come of it, but she likes him, and he’ll help to tide her over a bit of bad going.”

The conversation ended as it had begun, with Pelham Trent.

Miss Nellie Collins settled herself in the corner of an empty third-class carriage…She hoped someone else would get in- someone nice. She never really cared about travelling in an empty carriage, because of course there was always the chance of someone getting in who was not really nice. When she was a little girl she had heard a story about a lunatic who got into a train with a friend of her Aunt Chrissie and made her eat carrots and turnips all the way from Swindon to Bristol. Her Aunt Chrissie’s friend had a very severe nervous breakdown after this experience, and though it had happened at least fifty years ago, and this local train from Blackheath to Waterloo stopped much too frequently to give a lunatic any real scope, Miss Nellie preferred to be on the safe side. She sat up very straight in her best coat and skirt, her Sunday hat, and the fur necktie which she kept for great occasions because it was beginning to shed a little, and you couldn’t tell how long it would have to last with fur the dreadful price it was now. The coat and skirt was of rather a bright shade of blue, because when Nellie Collins was young someone had told her that she ought to dress to match her eyes. He had married somebody else, but she remained perseveringly attached to the colour. Her hat, it was true, was black. She had been brought up to consider a black hat ladylike, but it boasted a blue ribbon which didn’t quite match the coat and skirt, and a little bunch of flowers which did. Under the rather wide brim her hair stuck out in a faded frizz which had once been the colour of corn, but was now as old and dusty-looking as August stubble. When she was a girl she had had one of those apple-blossom complexions, but there was nothing left of it now. Only her eyes were still astonishingly blue.

Just as she was beginning to think that no one was going to get in, some half dozen people came past the porter who was inspecting tickets. Two of them were men. They walked straight across the platform and into the nearest compartment. Miss Collins heaved a sigh of relief. She thought they had a jovial appearance, and that one of them was not quite steady upon his feet. There remained a heavily built woman with two children, and a small upright figure in a black cloth jacket with a fur collar which had seen better days.