Free To the North by Elizabeth Bowen Page A

late.
    “Emmeline’s looking well this evening,” Sir Robert could not help saying proudly to Gerda Bligh.
    “As though,” Gerda said, sighing—for her time for all this was over—”she’d been reading a love-letter.”
    Sir Robert, who knew his Emmeline, smiled politely and put the drawings away.

Chapter Seven

    GERDA BLIGH WAS NOT REALLY A FOOL, she was an honest girl of about Emmeline’s age, with a tendency to hysteria. Having read a good many novels about marriage, not to speak of some scientific books, she now knew not only why she was unhappy but exactly how unhappy she could still be. She was in spirit one with those many young wives whose mortifications are aired in the evening Press. Gilbert bought evening papers to read the murders, but Gerda went straight to the Woman’s Page. It is true, she was more fortunate than Mrs. A. (Mill Hill), Mrs. B. (Sydenham) and “Discouraged.” Her husband did not, for instance, bring home friends from the office who smoked their pipes round the gas fire, ignoring her while she got the tea. Gilbert’s friends, when they came to dinner, made quite a fuss about Gerda and bored him. Advice to run upstairs between the cooking and serving of supper to put on a smile and a fetching crepe-de-chine frock did not concern her; if she suffered from lack of sympathy it was not at the end of a day’s ironing. Her difficulties, however, were in the main the same; husbands can be as unresponsive over a sole from Harrods as over the sardine tin. She rearranged the drawing-room: Gilbert took no notice or said he liked it as it had been before. He complained that she lost things when she had simply put them away. When they mislaid the corkscrew at sherry-time she could only say, tremulous: “Well, I am not a butler.” He would reply: “But we buy new corkscrews every week.”
    Gerda was lonely; she was the daughter of a retired admiral, marriage had isolated her from her relations in Hampshire, from whom she had been divided before marriage by intellectual discontent. Gilbert’s friends said he had picked her up at a dance near Portsmouth from which he had better have stayed away. She lacked sympathy: only Lady Waters was needed to unsettle Gerda completely, and Lady Waters she met at some lectures on Adler they both attended. It turned out, Lady Waters had known and had deeply distrusted Gilbert’s mother, so that she took a particular interest in the young pair. After some talks, Gerda could not imagine how she had ever stayed married so long. The Blighs as a couple dined fairly often at Rutland Gate, but it had been a shock to Gerda to find, when they came to Farraways, that her friend had a lien on Gilbert also, and must have asked them to lunch alone in alternate weeks. Gilbert remarked with complacency, taking oif Tim Farquharson’s black tie late that Saturday night, that Lady Waters thoroughly understood him: it had shocked Gerda to feel that their marriage had been discussed. That with Gerda herself Lady Waters had now superseded the evening papers did not make it more pleasant when she saw Gilbert pacing the borders behind the beech hedge with Lady Waters, thoroughly talking things out.
    Emmeline quite liked Gerda but wished she were not here. After breakfast on Sunday morning Gerda waylaid her in the garden.
    “Where are you going?” said Gerda, pathetic.
    “Nowhere particular.”
    “What an awfully pretty dress,” said Gerda, herself looking remarkable in lime-green. She had ash-blonde hair brushed sideways over her forehead and rolled at the nape of her neck, and large over-expressive eyes in a pretty expressionless face that lengthened at least an inch when she felt doleful. She knitted her brows when she spoke but had a threateningly calm manner. “Did I hear you say,” she went on, “you were going to church?”
    “Later,” said Emmeline, who had arranged this with Sir Robert.
    “I wish I were; I love dear old village churches.”
    “Do come.”
    “I