While she was speaking, she watched them sitting there, a little trinity of their own, doing a modest trade in social destinies. She felt she knew them well, having memorised each the way one would memorise an important telephone number that might be useful some day. Mrs Cartwright was the most obtrusive, as blatant about her money as if she had been dressed in hand-stitched fivers. One of her more memorable remarks had been: ‘I find food always catches in these gold fillings. Don’t you?’ Mrs Anderson was much more bearable. Her husband was a coal-merchant who had built up his own business, and her bad grammar, which antedated her wealth, she bore around with her like a cheerful mark of Cain. The most influential of the three was Mrs Gilchrist. She never touched upon anything connected with money, just as other people seldom point out that they have blood. She spoke very little altogether, but was eloquent with diamonds.
‘Perhaps the best way to appreciate how these people can benefit from our visits is to think of someone near to you being in their position.’ She decided she had better shut up soon, because she had reached the stage where she couldn’t see any connection herself between the ends of her sentences and their beginnings. ‘Myself, I have a sister who knows what it is to have been in this situation. To depend on the charity of other people for company. And it has made me determined to try to comfort other people in the same predicament. In tribute to her, as it were.’ She was hunting desperately for a way to finish. She felt they might just have to pull her into her seat. ‘Anyway, I hope I haven’t bored you too much in telling you about this. Because, really, if there is one thing this activity is not, it is ‘boring”. She paused, sensing that she had devised an unintentional conundrum. Write your answers on a postcard and send them to. . . . ‘And those young wives who are at the moment completely involved in seeing their children past their first few years might like to bear this in mind. As something they might like to do once their children begin school. Thank you.’
There was a smatter of genteel applause before Mrs McKendrick, the minister’s wife, stood up.
‘I’m sure we’re all very grateful to Mrs Cameron for her most interesting little talk. I feel certain that her words have not fallen on stony gound. And I want to express my personal thanks for the way she bravely stepped in at short notice to fill the gap. Thank you, Mrs Cameron. By the way, Mrs Gilchrist has very kindly agreed to help in the running of our Daffodil Tea. And any ladies wishing to be of assistance, either with baking or labour, should roll up their sleeves and give their names to Mrs Gilchrist. Now, tea will be served.’
Mrs Dawson re-entered, armed with an enormous tea-pot.
‘Thanks, Allison. You saved a life,’ Mrs McKendrick said.
The Christian name was a concession. Mrs McKendrick only used it on special occasions as a sign of favour. Pleased at their temporary intimacy, Allison left her and went straight to where Mrs Gilchrist was sitting. She expressed her willingness to help with the Daffodil Tea and gave her name to Mrs Gilchrist, who took it as if she had been the angel who appeared to Abou Ben Adam.
‘Won’t you join us, dear?’ she said. ‘I must say I found your talk very interesting.’
‘Thank you very much,’ Allison said, making it serve for the compliment and the chair proffered by Mrs Anderson.
She felt slightly overwhelmed for a moment among their upholstered effigies. When you got close to Mrs Cartwright, she became a concerto of subterranean sounds. Stays creaked, cloth sighed, breath fluted faintly in her throat – all clamouring minutely against the injustice of the demands made upon her corpulence by her vanity. She had drawn up the final lines beyond which there was no surrender. Her makeup was a death-mask, her corset a catafalque.
She epitomised the impression that all three of them made on Allison. They were initiated into a coldness, a finality that excluded others. Even the way they stirred the tea given to them by Mrs Dawson and her assistants was ritual, as the first sip was ritual. They enclosed the simplest actions in a kind of stateliness, like canonical brocade. Allison thought with a shiver that she would one day be one of them, a high-priestess of the menopause.
‘Thank you, Mrs Dawson,’ said Mrs Anderson.
‘Pleasure, Mrs Anderson,’ said Mrs Dawson. ‘Try a butterfly cake. They’re lovely.’
Then Mrs Dawson lumbered off among the talking ladies, a pleasant pack-horse harnessed to her own willingness.
‘That woman always takes the full honours of making the tea upon herself,’ Mrs Anderson observed obscurely.
‘She’s a very willing worker,’ Mrs Gilchrist agreed.
‘Ah well. Martha and Mary,’ said Mrs Cartwright. ‘Some of us are talkers. Some of us are doers.’
They all did neither for a little while. Mrs Cartwright levered herself down in a series of compromises with her scaffolding, and gently rubbed a puffy ankle.
‘My ankle’s so sore,’ she said. ‘Tripped going into the Directors’ Box on Saturday afternoon.’
Allison was trying to think of how to convey her impressed condolences when Mrs Gilchrist saved her the trouble.
‘I didn’t know you had a sister,’ she said to Allison.
‘Well, yes.’
‘Does she live in Glasgow?’
‘No. Not exactly.’
‘Near?’
‘Fairly near.’
‘You must bring her along some time.’
‘Perhaps I will.’
Allison drank off her tea and decided to leave before they could ask her any more questions. The entrance of Mr McKendrick gave her an opportunity. He was a handsome man and because his even features were safely framed in a clerical collar, his female parishioners enjoyed engaging in a sort of bowdlerised coquetry with him.
‘I’ll really have to go,’ Allison said. ‘We’re eating at the ‘Regent’ tonight. And I’ll have to get the children attended to early.’
‘Of course,’ Mrs Gilchrist said. ‘I must have you and your husband over some evening.’
The remark made Allison wish she could stay and consolidate the promise. But she had committed her self to departure and Mrs Gilchrist left it at that. As she took her leave, pausing to talk to Mrs McKendrick, as she travelled home on the bus, and as she gave Alice and Helen an early tea, she continued to build imaginatively on Mrs Gilchrist’s remark.
By the time Cameron came in after seven o’clock she had convinced herself that they were as good as invited to Mrs Gilchrist’s. It seemed to her a definite achievement. It wasn’t easy to penetrate that social fortress, round which circulated stories of luxury, hints of flunkeys. She felt that an otherwise futile afternoon had been given point, that she had been somehow vindicated in giving up her visit to Elmpark to speak to the Young Wives.
Cameron was aware that she was preoccupied as soon as he entered. Round the siege Helen immediately laid to his attention, Cameron exchanged a few meaningless phrases with Allison, while she washed up the children’s dishes. Having prepared himself to endure her reprimands for his lateness, he found that he was depressed that her objections should be so perfunctory. They weren’t talking to each other at all, merely sending out habitual words like sentries that guarded their thoughts and feelings, keeping them from coming into contact with each other.
‘Had a good day?’ Allison asked, having gone through the drill of the annoyed wife.
‘All right.’
But he suddenly revolted against the nonsense they were talking. Why should everything they said to each other