III
Jane sat at her dressing-table, brushing the long straight strands of her brown hair, looking critically at her reflection in the glass as she did so. For more than a year, now, Jane had been endeavouring to think of herself as “middle-aged.” On the momentous occasion of her thirty-fifth birthday she had said firmly to Stephen, “Middle-age is from thirty-five to fifty.” But curiously enough, in spite of that stoical statement, Jane had continued, incorrigibly, to think of herself as “young.” In this soft light, thought Jane dispassionately, in her new pink dressing-gown, she really did not look old. And she was prettier at thirty-six than she had been at twenty. No, not that, exactly. The freshness was gone. But prettier for thirty-six than she had been for twenty. At twenty everyone was pretty, and most girls had been, after all, much prettier than she. But at thirty-six—Jane smiled engagingly at her reflection—she held her own with her contemporaries.
At thirty-six the trick was not so much to look pretty as to look young. Beauty helped, of course, but not as much as youth. And she was still slim and agile and not grey and—but what difference did it make, anyway? It didn’t make any difference at all, thought Jane solemnly, unless, like Flora, you were still unmarried, or, like Muriel, though married, you went on collecting infatuated young men.
What use had Jane, in the Colonial cottage in the Chicago suburb, for youth or beauty or any other intriguing quality? Looking young didn’t help you to preside over the third-grade mothers’ meeting in the Lakewood Progressive School. Looking beautiful didn’t help you to keep your cook through a suburban winter. There was Stephen, of course. But wasn’t it Stephen’s most endearing quality—or was it his most irritating?—that for ten years or more Stephen had never really thought about how she looked at all? To Stephen Jane looked like Jane. That was enough for him.
The attitude was endearing, of course, when you looked a fright. When you were having a baby, or trying to get thin after nursing one, or hadn’t been able to afford a new evening gown, or suddenly realized that you looked a freak in the one you had afforded. In crises of that nature it was always very comforting to reflect that Stephen would never notice. But in other crises—when the baby was a year old and you weighed a hundred and thirty pounds again and you had bought a snappy little hat that—or even when you were sitting in front of your dressing-table in a soft light and a new pink dressing-gown, waiting for Stephen to stop gossiping with his mother and come up to join you—it was irritating to reflect that, no matter what you did, to Stephen you would always look exactly as you always had. That you would look like Jane.
Jane put down her hairbrush with a sigh of resignation and selected a new pink hair-ribbon from her dressing-table drawer. She tied it carefully in a bow above her pompadour and, picking up a hand glass, turned to admire the effect in the mirror. She wished her hair were curly. Suddenly the frivolity of that immemorial wish and the sight of the flat satin hair-ribbon and the long strands of straight hair made Jane think of André. Of André and of being fourteen. Of Flora’s red-gold tresses and Muriel’s seven dark finger curls. Of André’s resolute young face and the shy, unspoken admiration in his eloquent young eyes. Funny that just the sight of a hair-ribbon should make her feel his presence so vividly. Should so recall that funny little warm, happy feeling, deep down inside, that was so integral a part of being fourteen and loving André and never feeling quite sure of how he felt about her in return.
André. André was a bridegroom now. Four months a bridegroom. Jane wished she had written to him, as she almost had, that day last spring when she had found his picture in the May copy of Town and Country in Muriel’s living-room. But it had seemed absurd to break a silence of fifteen years’ duration just because she had seen a snapshot, from the camera of the Associated Press, of André, with averted head and raised silk hat, resplendent in bridal finery, hastening through the classic portico of the Madeleine with a vision in floating tulle on his arm. A vision reported to be, in the legend beneath the snapshot. Mademoiselle Cyprienne Pyramel-Gramont, daughter of the Comte et Comtesse Jean Pyramel-Gramont. “Noted Sculptor Weds” had been the caption.
André was a noted sculptor. One of France’s most distinguished sons. Eight years ago, on the occasion of her memorable trip abroad with Stephen, Jane had come suddenly on his Adam in the corridors of the Tate Gallery. Stephen had called her attention to it. He had noticed it because it was double-starred in Baedeker. “This can’t be your Duroy,” he had said.
Later his Eve had met Jane’s eye with an enigmatic smile over her yet untasted apple, in the entrance of the Luxembourg. An Eve still innocent, but subtly provocative. Jane had regarded her with wistful interest. What had André said in the postscript of his long explanatory letter—Jane had never forgotten—“There is something of you in all my nymphs and Eves and saints and Madonnas?” And what was Stephen saying at the moment? “Golly, she smiles like you, Jane! He never got over you!”
“Well, why should he?” she had retorted lightly. But her mind was still busy with the postscript. “Something you brought into my life. Romance, I guess. Nothing more tangible.”
She had brought romance into André’s life, as they walked up the Lake Shore Drive together, with their schoolbooks under their arms. He was achieving its fulfilment, now with this French Cyprienne, in exotic settings that Jane could not even imagine. André was thirty-eight. Yet André was a bridegroom, while she, Jane, was a settled suburban housewife and the middle-aged mother of a fourteen-year-old daughter and an eleven-year-old daughter and a nine-year-old son. Jane felt devoutly grateful that the Atlantic rolled between them. That André would never see her again. That he would think of her, always, as she looked in a hair-ribbon, while Cyprienne had babies and grew old and came to look only like Cyprienne. But Cyprienne wouldn’t grow so very old, thought Jane almost resentfully, while André lived to see her. Cyprienne, under the floating tulle, hadn’t looked a day over eighteen. Four years older than Cicily, perhaps, and bewitchingly pretty. Sixteen-year-old André, a middle-aged Frenchman with a child bride!
Jane shivered as she thought of it. Men should marry when they were young. André should have married when he loved her. But if he had he would never have become one of France’s most distinguished sons. Chicago would have stifled him. André might have been a banker by this time, thought Jane, if he had taken her on at nineteen. And he had had the sense to foresee it. His abrupt departure from her life had been much in the romantic tradition established by Romeo in the balcony window. His alternatives had been the same. “I must be gone and live, or stay and die!”
But she had married young. And Stephen had been young when she married him. They had had together those ridiculous, unthinking, heartbreaking years of almost adolescent domesticity, with two babies in the sand pile and another in the perambulator and a contagious disease sign often on the front door and a didy always on the clothesline! They’d had all that. But had they really had romance? Romance, such as she’d known with André? Stephen had had it, perhaps, in the first years of their marriage. But—had she? Hadn’t she always been rather afraid of romance, all those young years when it might have been hers for the taking? Did a woman ever really value romance until she felt it slipping away from her? Wasn’t that the surest sign of all of being middle-aged? You might be still slim and agile and not grey, but when you felt that wistful, almost desperate impulse to live your life to the full before it was over, didn’t it really mean that it was over, that youth, at any rate, was over, that it was too late to recapture the glamour that you saw only in retrospect—
But this was ridiculous, thought Jane. Life wasn’t over at thirty-six. She loved Stephen and Stephen loved her. He had never looked at another woman. Anything they wanted was theirs for the taking. Their personal relationship was only what they made it. She must say to Stephen, “Look at me, Stephen! Really look at me! You haven’t for ten years!” And he would laugh—of course he always laughed at her—
That was Stephen’s step on the stair.
Jane looked quickly about the bedroom. Yes, it was very neat. Mrs. Carver was an excellent housekeeper and Jane herself was always tidy. Her underclothes were meticulously folded on a chair by the dressing-table and the linen sheets of the twin four-poster mahogany beds were turned smoothly down over the rose-coloured comforters. Stephen’s clean blue pajamas were folded on his pillow.
As he opened the door, Jane rose from her mirror to meet him. He stood a moment on the threshold, smiling contentedly around the lamplit room. Dear old Stephen—even in the soft light he still looked white and jaded. Jane walked slowly over to him.
“Glad to be here?” she smiled up into his eyes.
“You bet!” said Stephen fervently.
“I’m glad you’ve come,” said Jane.
Stephen closed the door.
“How’s it been?” said Stephen. “Family been bothering you?”
“Oh, no,” said Jane.
Stephen slipped off his grey sack coat and hung it carefully over the back of a chair.
“It’s a pretty good old place,” said Stephen. He walked over to the window in his shirtsleeves and peered out into the darkness beyond the screen.
“Smell that sea-breeze,” said Stephen. He snuffed the briny air luxuriously for a moment in silence.
“Put out the lamp,” said Stephen. “The moon’s just rising over the bay.”
Smiling a little, Jane pushed the button and walked blindly over to him in the darkness. She slipped her arm though his. The brown film of screen had grown suddenly transparent. The lawn and beach and harbour were flooded with silver light. The waning moon swung low in the eastern sky. Jane gazed in silence as small objects on the lawn slowly took form and substance in the unearthly radiance. The outcrops of granite rock cast clear-cut shadows on the greyish grass. The weather beaten outline of a clump of stunted cedars at the foot of the pier stood out in black silhouette against the silver waters of the harbour. The slender mast of the catboat rocked uneasily at its moorings. A lighthouse winked, deliberately, far out in the bay. One white flash and two red. Jane could hear the little harbour waves, quite distinctly, as they rippled on the shingle. Then the faint moaning of the bell-buoy that marked the hidden reef beyond the point. Jane pressed her cheek gently against Stephen’s arm.
“I’m very glad you’ve come,” she said.
Stephen turned his head abruptly. Her voice seemed to rouse him from revery.
“I guess it was time,” he said cheerfully. “Mother seems a bit on edge.”
Jane dropped his arm. She moved away from him in the square of moonlight that fell through the casement.
“What about?” she asked.
“Oh—nothing much,” said Stephen still cheerfully. Then, after a moment, “Don’t you think, Jane, you could persuade Miss Parrot to use the back stairs?”
Jane moved in silence back to her dressing-table. She switched on the light abruptly and sat down on her chair.
“I’ve said all I could,” said Jane. “You know how Miss Parrot is. She’s an awfully good heart nurse. I don’t want to rock the boat.”
Stephen untied his necktie and removed his collar in silence. He walked slowly across the room to place them on top of his chest of drawers. Jane watched him in her mirror. Suddenly she caught the gleam of irritation in her own eyes. She gazed steadily at her reflection until it faded into a twinkle of amusement.
“Stephen,” she said resolutely, wheeling round in her chair, “don’t talk about Miss Parrot.”
“All right,” said Stephen, “I won’t.” He was unbuttoning his waistcoat a trifle absentmindedly. “How’s the weather been? Good sailing breeze, all month?” As he spoke he turned to smile at her. Jane regarded him steadily. Poor old Stephen—he looked very tired. As for herself, from the nature of his smile Jane knew what she looked like. There was absolutely nothing to be done about it. She looked like Jane.