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‘I had to tell him! I couldn’t let him waste his life on me, could I? The might-have-been! Oh, dear, my head feels as though it would split!’
Mary moistened the handkerchief again, and laid it across Ermyntrude’s brow. ‘If you don’t mean to divorce Wally, what are you going to do?’ she inquired.
‘God knows!’ responded Ermyntrude, letting her voice sink a tone. She added, more prosaically, but with quite as much feeling: ‘I’m not going to spend my poor first husband’s money buying that creature off, and that’s flat!’
‘It certainly seems most unfair that you should have to,’ Mary agreed. ‘At the same time, won’t there be rather a nasty scandal if she isn’t provided for?’
‘Let him do the providing!’ said Ermyntrude, her bosom heaving. ‘The idea of his expecting his wife to pay off his mistress! Oh, I can’t bear it, Mary! I can’t go on! What – what, I ask you, does the future hold for me? Neglect and scandal, and me still in my prime, tied hand and foot to a man like Wally! I can see it all! He’ll go from bad to worse, drinking himself into his grave, and behaving so that I won’t be able to have a housemaid in the place that isn’t over sixty and hare-lipped, just like that nasty old Williams, who led his poor wife such a dance when I first came to live here – before your time, that was, dearie, and personally I always did say and I always shall say that she drove him to it, going about with a face a mile long, and her hair scratched up on the top of her head, and her nose always shiny, and red at the tip, like she did!’ She broke off, realising that this reminiscence was not entirely felicitous, and retrieved the situation with a magnificent gesture indicating her own charms. ‘You can’t say Wally’s goings-on are my fault!’ she said. ‘Look at me! Thrown away, Mary! Thrown away!’
‘I don’t want to sound unsympathetic, Aunt Ermy, but after all, you’ve known what Wally is for ages. Let me bring you up some tea, and some thin toast, and you’ll feel better.’
‘I couldn’t touch a morsel!’ said Ermyntrude. ‘You know what I get like when Wally’s upset me. Feel how burning hot I am! I shall probably be ill for a week. That’s the worst of having an artist’s temperament: one suffers for it.’
If Ermyntrude contemplated extending a nerve-crisis over a week, Mary could not help feeling that the other inmates of the house would suffer to an almost equal extent. She agreed that Ermyntrude was certainly in a high fever, and refrained from pointing out that the day was bidding fair to be a very hot one, and that a fat, satin-covered eiderdown might well be expected to make anyone burning hot. She offered to ring up Dr Chester’s house, and to ask him to call.
This suggestion found favour. ‘Tell him to bring me a sedative,’ said Ermyntrude in a fading voice. ‘I couldn’t bear anyone else near me, but Maurice always understands. He’s the kind of man I can talk to.’
Mary went away to perform this mission. While she would naturally have preferred Ermyntrude not to talk of her present difficulties to anybody, she was not a girl who expected impossibilities, and she considered that if Ermyntrude wished to unburden herself further it had better be to Maurice Chester, who had known her for many years, than to the Prince, or to Robert Steel.
She found Vicky hanging up the receiver of the telephone in the hall. Vicky had enlivened the Sabbath by coming down to breakfast in abbreviated tennis-shorts, and a sleeveless shirt. She said, when she saw Mary: ‘Oh, hallo! That was that corrosive Harold White. I do think he’s getting awfully redundant, don’t you?’
‘What does he want this time?’
‘Wally. It’s getting to be a habit with him. I say, would it be heartless, or anything, if I went and played tennis? Because I’ve told White to send Alan over. I quite meant to be a Comfort-to-Mother, in pale-blue organdie, but she rather turned her face to the wall.’
‘No, much better leave her alone. I’m going to ask Maurice to come and see her. You might have invited Janet, too. Then you could have had a four, with the Prince.’
‘Yes, I might, but I thought not. She’s got such fuzzy edges. I think she’s out of focus. Besides, she’s going to church. I’ve asked Alexis to come and play, though, which is definitely a Sundayish sort of thing for me to have done, because as a matter of fact I’ve got frightfully tired of him.’
‘Oh, so have I!’ said Mary involuntarily. ‘But he’ll leave tomorrow, won’t he?’
‘Well, I’m not sure, but I’ve got a crushing suspicion that he means to linger. So I told him in the most utterly tactful way that Ermyntrude’s one of those rather obsolete people who reckon nuts to divorce. It may shift him, but, of course, now that Wally’s started this imbroglio, I do see that the stage is practically set for Alexis to do his big act. I suppose you wouldn’t like to come and play tennis?’
‘No, I can’t. I must look after Aunt Ermy. What on earth are we going to do with the Prince this afternoon? We ought to have fixed up a proper tennis-party, of course. Well, it’s too late now, and in any
case, if Aunt Ermy doesn’t pull herself together—’ She left the sentence unfinished, and picked up the telephone.
Dr Chester answered the call himself. He asked what was the matter with Ermyntrude, and when Mary replied guardedly that she was suffering from one of her nervous attacks, he said: ‘I see. All right, I’ll come along at once,’ in his unemotional but reassuring way.
He had been on the point of setting out on his round, and he arrived at Palings ten minutes later, encountering in the hall Prince Varasashvili, who had changed into tennis-flannels, and was going out to join Vicky and Alan on the court.
Prostrate Ermyntrude might be, but she was not the woman to receive any gentleman (even her doctor) in a tumbled wrapper, with her hair in disorder, and her face not made-up. A message was brought down to Dr Chester that she would see him in ten minutes’ time if he would be good enough to wait; and the Prince at once took it upon himself to conduct him into the morning-room, and to beguile the time for him with conversation. When Mary came, not ten, but twenty minutes later, to summon the doctor, she found that he had been cajoled into talking about prehistoric remains, the study of which was one of his hobbies. He had collected a certain amount of pottery and a number of flint weapons in the Dordogne, and in East Anglia, but the Prince claimed to have visited Anau, in South Turkistan, and was describing some fragments of pottery of geometric pattern in a way that made it seem probable that he really had seen these treasures.
Dr Chester remained with Ermyntrude for quite half an hour. When he at last left her, he found Mary waiting for him, in a large window embrasure half-way up the broad staircase. He smiled at her look of inquiry, and sat down beside her on the window-seat. ‘All right,’ he said briefly.
‘I suppose she told you the whole sordid story?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘It’s about the limit of Wally,’ Mary said. ‘I don’t wonder Aunt Ermy’s upset. I only wish I knew what I could do to help.’
‘There’s nothing that you can do,’ he responded.
‘I know, and I feel futile. I did suggest divorce to her, but it didn’t go down very well.’
‘No, she wouldn’t like that.’
‘Well, what have you advised her to do? You may just as well tell me, for she will.’
