His life with Ismay was agreeable, but it had none of the old lustre. She was more beautiful than ever, and the carelessness with which she had always dressed now seemed a fine disdain for trivialities. Only a very sharp eye would have discerned that she was pregnant, but when she was naked she had a new opulence, and Francis drew her as often as was possible. A really beautiful woman should have a figure like a ‘cello, he said, running his hand appreciatively over her swelling belly. But though he loved her, he had ceased to worship her, and sometimes they snapped at one another, because Ismay’s broad speech, which he had once thought so delightful, grated on his nerves now.
“Well, if you didn’t like the way I talk, you shouldn’t have knocked me up.”
“I wish you wouldn’t use vulgar expressions like that, as if we were that sort of person. If you want to talk dirty, talk dirty, but for God’s sake don’t talk common.”
Irritatingly, Ismay would respond to this sort of thing by singing Ophelia’s song, quietly and reflectively, in a Cockney accent:
“That should be all right,” she murmured, apparently to the walls. “Shakespeare. Good old Shakers, the darling of the OUDS. Nothing common about him. You can’t get classier than Shakers.”
Francis could not linger in Montreux. He had to return to Oxford, and he did so with no time to spare before the beginning of the Michaelmas Term. He had made a mess of things with Ismay, he told himself. Not that he was sorry to have married her, but that should have come later. Now he had to leave her when surely she needed him with her—though she had been calm enough when he went. After all, Aunt Prudence was going to her in a few weeks. He knew nothing about the matter, but he had a vague impression that a pregnant woman needed her husband close by, to run out and get her pickles and ice cream if she should have a sick fancy for them in the middle of the night, and to gloat romantically over the new life that was gathering within her. The doctor in Montreux had taken it philosophically when he explained that he must return to England, and assured him that everything would be quite all right. Well—it had to be all right. He was determined to get his degree, and get the best class he could manage. This sudden bump in the road should not rob him of that. So he settled to work, and worked very hard, almost entirely giving up drawing and painting, and refusing a tempting offer to assist a distinguished designer in preparing a garden performance of The Tempest for the OUDS.
He was able to spend Christmas with Ismay, and found her, now obviously pregnant, and even more obviously a European student, accustomed to speak French more often than English, and deep in Spanish studies. She had enjoyed herself, once she had persuaded her mother to return to England and stop fussing over her. This sort of student life suited her as the formality of Oxford had never done. They spent, on the whole, a very amicable Christmas holiday, much of it in Ismay’s living-room, smoking countless stinking French cigarettes and pursuing their university work. They conversed entirely in French and Ismay liked his lingering French-Canadian accent. It was “of the people” she said and she approved of anything that was of the people.
He was with her in February, when the child was born. Pensions are not accommodated to childbirth, and Ismay was in a small private hospital, which cost a lot of money. Aunt Prudence was there, too, and she and Francis had an uneasy time of it in the pension rooms. Francis hauled the couch out of the bedroom into the sitting-room for himself, and Aunt Prudence, though well aware that the bed was due to her sex and seniority, nevertheless accused herself daily of being a nuisance.
The child was born without incident, but surrounded by the usual grandmotherly and fatherly anxiety. Indeed, Francis was nervously wretched until he had seen the little girl and been assured by the doctor that she was perfect in every way. Had he expected anything else? Francis did not say what he had feared.
“She’s the absolute image of her father,” said Aunt Prudence, smiling at Francis.
“Yes, she’s the image of her father,” Ismay agreed, smiling at no one.
To Francis the child looked like every baby he had ever seen, but he did not say so.
The question of a name for the child arose almost at once. Francis had no ideas, but Ismay was perhaps more maternal than she liked to admit. The child was sucking at her breast when she made a suggestion.
“Let’s call her Charlotte.”
“All right. But why?”
“After her father.”
Francis looked blank.
“Frank, I’ve been trying to get around to this for quite a while, but the time never seemed just right. But this is it. You know, of course, that this is Charlie’s child?”
Francis still looked blank.
“Well, it is. I know for a certainty. We were very close before he scarpered.”
“And you sucked me in to give cover for Charlie’s child?”
“I suppose I did. But don’t think I liked doing it. You’re a dear, and you’ve behaved beautifully. But there’s a basic difference between you and Charlie: he’s the kind that makes things happen, and you’re the kind things happen to, and for me there’s no question of choice. Don’t forget that before the wedding I gave you a chance to get away, and you decided not to take it. This is Charlie’s child.”
“Does Charlie know?”
“I don’t suppose he knows or cares. I’ve had some indirect news of him, and you know how things are hotting up in Spain, so I suppose that if he did know he couldn’t do anything about it. He’s got bigger fish to fry.”
“Ismay, this puts the lid on it.”
“I didn’t expect you to be pleased, and I honestly meant to say something earlier, but you see how it is. I wanted to be square with you, and now I have.”
“Oh, so that’s what you’ve been, is it? Square? Ismay, I’d hate to be near when you were being crooked.”
Back to Oxford, miserable and beaten so far as his marriage was concerned, but with a compensating fierce ambition to distinguish himself in his Final Schools, which he faced in June. It is impossible to prepare for Final Schools by extreme exertions during the last ten weeks; preparation should have been well begun two years before. That was when Francis had started to work, and thus his last ten weeks was free for finishing touches, rather than the acquirement of basic knowledge. His tutor was pleased with him—or as pleased as a tutor ever admits to being—and polished him up to a fine gloss. The consequence was that when he had written his papers and waited out the obligatory period during which they were read and marked, he had the satisfaction of seeing his name posted in the First Class. He telegraphed to Canada, and the next day received an answer: “Congratulations. Love to Ismay and Charlotte.” Did his parents, then, see them as a happy trio, a Holy Family, with Baby Bunting prettily innocent of Daddy’s distinction?
Ismay and the child were at St. Columb’s; Aunt Prudence had insisted that a summer in the country, with country food and air, was just what Ismay and Baby needed. It was to St. Columb’s, therefore, that Francis sent his second telegram about his academic success. He was surprised to receive a telephone call on the following day. The telephone was not a favourite agent of the Glassons, nor was Oxford, with its great population of students and its paucity of telephones, an easy place with which to communicate. But Uncle Roderick called, and Francis was found by the Porter of Corpus, and there, in the Porter’s lodge, while one undergraduate bought a stamp and another inquired about the whereabouts of his bicycle, he heard his uncle, distant and mouse-like of voice, saying that Ismay was not at St. Columb’s but had said she was going up to Oxford for a couple of days to see Francis. That had been a week ago. Was she not with him?