Jacky S - Suburban Souls, Book II

I arrive. The servant tells me that Madame has gone to Paris early, and Mademoiselle will receive me. Not a soul to be seen, which was most impolite in a villa when you are expected as the only guest. When the garden gate shuts to, somebody should run out to meet you, I think. At least, such was always the case with me, but not this time. I am ushered into the house and am left to wait five minutes alone. A cool reception. Papa comes downstairs at last and we go out for a walk to meet his wife at the station. We return, all three of us, and he talks of his “Calvary” joke, while I see Lilian, peering at me from the summer-house workshop.

“That was your invention,” I reply, “because she is between two thieves?”

“No. She mentioned it first. Where is she? Lilian! Lilian!” And he bawls out her name. She will not answer. She does not appear until lunch, fully an hour and a half after my arrival, and greets me coldly. I am, I am pleased to say, perfectly indifferent and quite self-possessed. She does not excite me as she used to do. She has on an old dress, and no powder, or red on her lips. The beauty spot on her cheek is gone.

We lunch. During the meal, she has to get up and pass behind my chair. She puts one hand heavily on my shoulder, near my neck, boldly in front of her two parents. The lunch is a poor one, compared to what they used generally to put on the table for me. They are all dull. The duller they get, the gayer I am. I actually go so far as to imitate Sarah Bernhardt!!

“You do well in mentioning the name of the actress,” says Lilian.

“I always do when I give an imitation. It avoids all discussion.” Then I add: “Today is an anniversary! Four years ago, in May, I forget the day exactly, I brought the little fox-terrier, Lili, here. That was the first time I ever came into this house. How time flies, and what changes take place in four years!”

This with a little emotion, half real, half feigned, but I felt I had acted it well. I don't think they liked the little speech. There was no response, except from Lilian, who saucily but angrily, sniffing, snorting, replies:

“I thought you meant her birthday, when you said anniversary!”

I notice that Papa treats Lilian with mock gravity, and calls her Madame, all through the meal. Ever since the return from Brussels there has never been any romping between the pair as in olden days, but they treat each other with great seriousness. They have no need to play with each other in the daytime now. Perhaps too, Mamma's susceptibilities have to be reckoned with.

When the coffee comes on, the beautiful porcelain cups and saucers, which Papa brought from China, are no longer put on the table, as they used to be for me. Lilian asks me how I will have my coffee-in a cup or in a glass. I see no cups on the table, so I reply that I will have it in the same way as Mr. Arvel. She says that Papa takes it in a glass, and she pours it in his, on top of the dregs of his white wine, and serves me in the same way.

It is impossible that Pa and Ma did not notice these little shades indicating my disgrace in their house, and they must also see the way Lilian treated me. Their collusion was glaring.

While we are drinking the coffee, Mamma goes and has an awful row in the kitchen, and kicks out one of her two female servants. The same thing occurred on April 5.

Papa and Lilian remain at table with me unmoved, and I feel dreadfully ill at ease to hear Adèle shrieking in the kitchen and the vulgar howling of the domestic replying to her. My interesting pair tell me that Madame Arvel is mad and can't keep a servant. They are like husband and wife, and Mamma is the housekeeper: Lilian sneers at the muffled sounds of the dispute, and Papa swears and growls.

Mamma returns, very red in the face, and apologizes to me for her outburst of passion. She must tell servants all she thinks of them, and give them a bit of her mind. This one had been talking against her in the village.

“Dear Madam,” I say, “why get in a passion with hired menials, and expect devotion from them, when you see so often in families that even blood relations betray each other. You expect too much of servants.”

Of course, Adèle never answered, and the guilty couple was silent too.

Lilian stuck with Papa and me. I followed Papa about all day: like a little dog and would not be left alone with Lilian. She now began to look wistfully at me. She could not make me out, and was waiting for some advance on my part. I noticed her in the glass.

She talked about a new photographic lens and said to her Papa:

“Papa, you must photograph me as a Japanese girl and in all sorts of costumes.”

And she looked at him with her sweetest smile, and her nostrils quivered nervously.

“Papa, I am going up to Paris at 2:37.”

But she did not go. She never left us hardly a minute.

“Here's the postman,” says Lilian, and she rushes down to the gate. She returns with a letter for Pa, and cries out: “One from him!”

As she ran back into the house, Pa tapped her posteriors, where her pocket was, and said to me:

“She has got it in her pocket!”

I made no remark.

“Lilian is not going to London in September to live with her brother,” he suddenly broke out. “She has found out that she would probably have to keep him.”

“What is she going to do then?” I say. This is the first and last time that I ever asked him anything about her.

“She will stop here with me.”

Afterwards, he speaks very affectionately to her in front of me, as he has never done before, and while he is talking, I wink facetiously at Lilian. I am certain that he is trying to tease me on behalf of his stepdaughter and secret wife, even as a mother might do, who would be the procuress of her own girl.

Finally, she manages to get me alone and chaffs me about being too thin. I retort that I look after myself, as the doctors advise me that if I get too fat, I shall be in bed again with rheumatism.

“I do not spare myself,” I say quietly. “You find fault with my personal appearance, because you have no longer any feeling of desire for me. Qu'importe le flacon, pourvu qu'on ait l'ivresse!”

She throws up her head and snorts, but says: “No! No!” as I stroll away from her, back to the side of Papa.

She makes us two men take her out for a walk. She does not try to go out alone with me and never does again. Surely Pa and Ma can see the change?

She chatters about a certain fashionable actor, and turns very red; crimson are her cheeks, as I tell her tales of his amours. She says she does not like him any more, as although he looked beautiful on the stage, she would prefer him to be less of a rake. Lilian declares that actors and actresses have strange ideas, but she adds with a sigh that lots of other people have strange ideas, too. Papa smokes in silence. I play the clown, and they are both obliged to laugh at my foolish antics.

I ask her if she is rich-if she has not a few hundred francs saved up in a corner of her wardrobe, under her clean drawers. She cannot help smiling as she wonders at my astuteness in feminine matters; that is exactly how her Mamma hides her money. Lilian's pocket money is limited. She got one hundred francs for a pair of puppies, thanks to my advertisement. In spite of my advice, they did not advertise again, but the other three pups were given away-one to the officer; one to a friend of mine, the jeweler, who made the ring; and the last to a brother-journalist, a friend of Papa's.

Lilian wore no rings that day. I never saw my poor ring on her hand again.

We return to tea. Then Lilian stands in a doorway, waiting for me to speak to her. I repeat my movement of retreat, walking away in the garden, after Papa, and she looks so wild; frowning and black under the eyes, that I turn round, and thoroughly happy to feel myself so free in front of her-for perhaps I feared I might weaken-actually laugh outright at her. She goes in, but not at once. Then later, she complains of a headache. Alone with me, for I continually find her at my heels, I gravely advise castor-oil.