The kitten

September came, then October. Laura was back at school, a different school. The kilts there were grey and blue rather than maroon and black; otherwise this school was much the same as the first, so far as I could see.

In November, just after she’d turned seventeen, Laura announced that Richard was wasting his money. She would continue to attend the school if he demanded it, she would place her body at a desk, but she wasn’t learning anything useful. She stated this calmly and without rancour, and surprisingly enough Richard gave in. “She doesn’t really need to go to school anyway,” he said. “It’s not as if she’ll ever have to work for a living.”

But Laura had to be busied with something, just as I did. She was enlisted in one of Winifred’s causes, a volunteer organization called The Abigails, which had to do with hospital visiting. The Abigails were a perky group: girls of good family, training to be future Winifreds. They dressed up in dairy-maid pinafores with tulips appliquéd on their bibs and traipsed around to hospital wards, where they were supposed to talk to the patients, read to them perhaps, and cheer them up—how, it was not specified.

Laura proved to be adept at this. She did not like the other Abigails, that goes without saying, but she took to the pinafore. Predictably, she gravitated to the poverty wards, which the other Abigails tended to avoid because of their stench and outrageousness. These wards were filled with derelicts: old women with dementia, impecunious veterans down on their luck, noseless men with tertiary syphilis and the like. Nurses were in short supply in these realms, and soon Laura was setting heir hand to tasks that were strictly speaking none of her business. Bedpans and vomit did riot throw her for a loop, it appeared, nor did the swearing and raving and general carryings-on. This was not the situation Winifred had intended, but pretty soon it was the one we were stuck with.

The nurses thought Laura was an angel (or some of them did; others simply thought she was in the way.) According to Winifred, who tried to keep an eye on things and had her spies, Laura was said to be especially good with the hopeless cases. It didn’t seem to register on her that they were dying, said Winifred. She treated their condition as ordinary, as normal even, which—Winifred supposed—they must have found calming after a fashion, although a sane person wouldn’t. To Winifred, this facility or talent of Laura’s was another sign of her fundamentally bizarre nature.

“She must have nerves of ice,” said Winifred. “I certainly couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bear it. Think of the squalor!”

Meanwhile, plans were afoot for Laura’s début. These plans had not yet been shared with Laura: I’d led Winifred to expect that the reaction from her would not be positive. In that case, said Winifred, the whole thing would have to be arranged, then presented as a fait accompli; or, even better, the début could be dispensed with altogether if its primary object had already been accomplished, the primary object being a strategic marriage.

We were having lunch at the Arcadian Court; Winifred had invited me there, just the two of us, to devise a stratagem for Laura, as she put it.

“Stratagem?” I said.

“You know what I mean,” said Winifred. “Not disastrous.” The best that could be hoped for Laura, all things considered—she continued—was that some nice rich man would bite the bullet and propose to her, and march her off to the altar. Better still, some nice, rich, stupid man, who wouldn’t even see there was a bullet to be bitten until it was too late.

“What bullet did you have in mind?” I asked. I wondered if this was the scheme Winifred herself had been following when she’d bagged the elusive Mr. Prior. Had she concealed her bullet-like nature until the honeymoon and then sprung it on him too suddenly? Is that why he was never seen, except in photographs?

“You have to admit,” said Winifred, “that Laura is more than a little odd.” She paused to smile at someone over my shoulder, and to waggle her fingers in greeting. Her silver bangles clanked; she was wearing too many of them.

“What do you mean?” I asked mildly. Collecting Winifred’s explanations of what she meant had become a reprehensible hobby of mine.

Winifred pursed her lips. Her lipstick was orange, her lips were beginning to pleat. Nowadays we would say it was too much sun, but people had not yet made that connection, and Winifred liked to be bronzed; she liked the metallic patina. “She’s not to every man’s taste. She comes out with some very odd things. She lacks—she lacks caution.”

Winifred was wearing her green alligator shoes, but I no longer judged them elegant; instead I judged them garish. Much about Winifred that I’d once found mysterious and alluring I now found obvious, merely because I knew too much. Her high gloss was chipped enamel, her sheen was varnish. I’d looked behind the curtain, I’d seen the strings and pulleys, I’d seen the wires and corsets. I’d developed tastes of my own.

“Such as what?” I asked. “What odd things?”

“Yesterday she told me that marriage wasn’t important, only love. She said Jesus agreed with her,” said Winifred.

“Well, that’s her attitude,” I said. “She doesn’t make any bones about it. But she doesn’t mean sex, you know. She doesn’t mean ems”

When there was something Winifred didn’t understand, she either laughed at it or ignored it. This she ignored. “They all mean sex, whether they know it or not,” she said. “An attitude like that could get a girl like her in a lot of trouble.”

“She’ll grow out of it in time,” I said, although I didn’t think so.

“None too soon. Girls with their head in the clouds are the worst by far—men take advantage. All we need is some greasy little Romeo. That would cook her goose.”

“What do you suggest, then?” I said, gazing at her blankly. I used this blank look of mine to conceal irritation or even anger, but it only encouraged Winifred.

“As I said, marry her off to some nice man who doesn’t know which end is up. Then she can fool around with the love stuff later, if that’s what she wants. As long as she does it on the Q.T., nobody will say boo.”

I dabbled around in the remains of my chicken pot pie. Winifred had picked up a good many slangy expressions lately. I suppose she thought they were up-to-date: she’d reached the age at which being up-to-date would have begun to concern her.

Obviously she didn’t know Laura. The idea of Laura doing anything like that on the Q.T. was difficult for me to grasp. Right out on the sidewalk in full daylight was more like it. She’d want to defy us, rub our noses in it. Elope, or something equally melodramatic. Show the rest of us what hypocrites we were.

“Laura will have money, when she’s twenty-one,” I said.

“Not enough,” said Winifred.

“Maybe it will be enough for Laura. Maybe she just wants to lead her own life,” I said.

“Her own life!” said Winifred. “Just think what she’d do with it!”

There was no point in trying to deflect Winifred. She was like a meat cleaver in mid-air. “Have you got any candidates?” I said.

“Nothing firm, but I’m working on it,” said Winifred briskly. “There’s a few people who wouldn’t mind having Richard’s connections.”

“Don’t go to too much trouble,” I murmured.

“Oh, but if I don’t,” said Winifred brightly, “what then?”

“I hear you’ve been rubbing Winifred the wrong way,” I said to Laura. “Getting her all stirred up. Teasing her about Free Love.”

“I never said Free Love,” said Laura. “I only said marriage was an outworn institution. I said it had nothing to do with love, that’s all. Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can’t put love into a contract. Then I said there was no marriage in Heaven.”