'Wednesday' - a short story by Dorothy Whipple

Mrs Bulford, as she still called herself, kept passing and re-passing the double wooden doors, standing wide open to make a gap in the garden wall. Every time she passed she glanced in at the house. She did no more than glance, but with every glance she saw a little more. She saw something else; a hoop lying on the lawn; Elsie as she stood at the kitchen window examining her nails in the pause between the courses in the dining-room. Mrs Bulford, Elsie's former mistress, knew how particular Elsie was about her nails, how she brooded over every little break or blemish, blaming her work, threatening to leave, insisting on the best soap if ever she had to wash anything. Passing again, Mrs Bulford saw Elsie going past the passage window with a tray. She must be taking the pudding in now. Perhaps it was the children's favourite: Queen's Pudding with meringue on the top. Pat used to bang his spoon on the table with joy when this pudding came in; but probably he was too old for that now. Mrs Bulford hoped it wasn't Queen's Pudding today because the children ate it so slowly, making it last. They wouldn't hurry, she feared, even though they knew their mother was waiting outside the gate. Preoccupied with the innocent cruelty of her children, Mrs Bulford walked quite a long way beyond the house before she turned back. The trees hung over the garden walls, making a pleasant irregular shade. There were the familiar drowsy summer sounds; the doves cooing from the Watsons’ roof, the faint sound of someone's wireless, far away from the hum of the city. The road was empty. The families living in the pleasant houses were all within, having lunch. Parents and children sitting round the table, the subdued clatter of spoons and forks, intimate small talk. ‘Don’t spill, darling.’ ‘I got all my sums right this morning, Mummy.’ ‘I saw Mrs Parsons in town. I haven’t seen her for ages.’ ‘Please may I have some more?’ Mrs Bulford laid her hand on the wall as she walked. Behind this it was all going on as before. She alone was shut out. She was shut out of the house, waiting for her children to finish their pudding at a table presided over by Cecil’s new wife. Another woman sat in her place, did her hair at her dressing-table, slept in her bed, bought clothes for her children. She was shut out of the town too, because she shrank from being seen in it. She had taken rooms in a village on the outskirts, just far enough away not to be known, she had fancied. But by this time, everyone in the village knew all about her; she saw it in their eyes. Half the time, she couldn’t believe that such a thing had happened to her. She would lie in bed, her arms behind her head, looking round at the cottage bedroom, at the pink-washed walls, the yellow furniture with white china knobs on the drawers, and think ‘It can’t be. How have I got here?’

She had the wholly unwarranted feeling that she might be able to go home sometime. She was like an exile waiting all the time to go home, devouring news of the place she longed to be in. She bought the Beddingworth papers, morning and evening, and read every word, even the advertisements. She knew who was born and who died or was married, she knew who wanted domestic help or houses. Every train that passed through to Beddingworth, she felt she ought to be on it. If anyone so much as mentioned the name of the city, a pang went through her. Though when she lived there, she had taken little interest. She had other things to do, she had so much . . . Now she had nothing. She did nothing but wait for the first Wednesday of the month; the first Wednesday, fixed by Cecil’s lawyers as the day when she, not a fit and proper person to have custody of her children, could, as a concession on Cecil’s part, nevertheless see them for a few hours in the afternoon.

The children were quite used to these Wednesdays now, that was why they didn’t hurry out. After all, it had been going on for almost eighteen months. The separation had grown less painful for them; more painful for her. But it was better that way. Anything was better than that first terrible Wednesday when they hadn’t been able to understand, at the end of the afternoon, why she couldn’t go back into the house with them. They had tried to pull her inside the gate, crying: ‘Why don’t you come in, Mummy? You must come in. Don’t go away again. Don’t go, Mummy. Come in…’ She had seen the alarmed faces of Elsie, the daily woman, and Cecil’s new wife at the windows. Then Elsie came out to get the children in, and she had to tear her skirt from their hands and go away, weeping. She could hear them calling after her as she went.

She thought she could never face another Wednesday after that. It would be better to go right away, never try to see them again, she decided. But on the first Wednesday of the next month, she could not help herself. She was at the gates, walking up and down, waiting for them as she waited now.

Passing the house again, she saw that the nursery windows were thrown wide; she was glad of that. She saw there were new curtains at her bedroom windows. Perhaps everything was new there now. When she had come to sort out the things that were hers, to take away, they made such a pitiful collection that she had left them. Keepthem, keep them, she had cried to Cecil. He had kept them and presumably his new wife had them now.

He had married the very week the decree was pronounced absolute, and she didn’t know who his wife was. That was what was so extraordinary; she didn’t know where he had got her from. During her life with Cecil, she had never heard of anybody called Sheila. Yet he must have known her all the time he was getting the divorce. He had always been secretive. He had always known how to hide things, even the most trivial, and she herself never had, or she would not have been walking up and down outside the wall now. He must have been watching all the time. He must have seen the affair with Jack dawning, developing and giving him his opportunity. He edged her into adultery, set the trap and watched her fall into it. He could not afford misconduct himself; he was a lawyer and his practice would have been ruined. Her idiotic infatuation for Jack was the chance he must almost have despaired of, because she had never given way to, or even felt, such a temptation before.

It had all been very short-lived. It was over in three days. She had pretended to go to Aunt Julia’s, had gone to London with Jack instead, and after three days, the private detective got them.

It had been a temporary madness, induced by loneliness, the cold withdrawal of Cecil, the approach of middle-age. She felt her looks were going, she made a last grab at the romance she had missed. She felt that if she didn’t get it then, she would have missed it for ever, and how sad to die without having loved or been loved. As it stood on the horizon like the sun about to go down into night, love seemed the most important thing in life and Jack, to her almost incredulous happiness, seemed to love her as Cecil had never done.

He was good-looking, several years younger than she was, weak and frightened of life. She felt she made him strong by her love, but it had all been an illusion. When they were found out, his horrified family came and bore him away to safety; the safety of not having to marry her. As if she would ever have married him! She was deeply hurt that he should have thought she would try to make him marry her.

Anyway, he had gone abroad. The suit was undefended. The whole affair rebounded to her shame and hers alone. It was all heaped on her and she accepted it. She was so overwhelmed by it that she never looked up to see what Cecil was doing. She accepted the proceedings as her due; she told herself that she deserved the worst and made no protest.

For several months she felt this. But afterwards she had seen more clearly. She saw that Cecil had calculated everything; and sometimes as she brooded in the cottage bedroom, she felt that if there was fairness anywhere, not in this world, but in what she vaguely thought of as ‘after-wards’, she felt he would be faced with a meaner sin than hers. As she reached the gates again, she saw the children passing the staircase window, going up to put on their outdoor things. Cecil and his wife were standing together in the garden, admiring the sweet peas. She saw the sun shining on the girl’s fair hair. She was young.

The whole thing was oriental really, thought Mrs Bulford. Ageing wife got rid of, young one put in her place. But since nature discriminates against women, why should men do otherwise?

When she found herself on the verge of middle-age, she should have dug herself in, she thought grimly, and kept her children, kept her place in the house and in the world. Instead, she had gone gallivanting after Jack and lost everything. What a spectacle she had made of herself! What an ugly, exposed thing to do! It was like one of those bad dreams where you find yourself in a public place with nothing on but your vest. Only from this dream there was no waking.

She was still walking in the opposite direction when the children came out of the gate, Pat, aged six, examining with absorbed interest a toy aeroplane in his hand. She turned and saw them and came hurrying, a stout figure in a tight coat and skirt; in spite of her suffering, she grew steadily fatter.

‘Darlings,’ she said breathlessly. What happiness to kiss their round, smooth cheeks. They let her, and she kissed them over and over again, greedily, until Pat drew off, frowning a little, and gave his attention to his plane again.

‘Mumsie’s going to buy me a Comet when she goes out this afternoon,’ he announced. ‘Is she, darling?’ said Mrs Bulford brightly. ‘How nice of her.’

That was how it had been arranged. She was ‘Mummy’ and her supplanter was ‘Mumsie’. The children had jibbed at it at first. They wouldn’t say it. But they said it now without a thought, she could see.

Mrs Bulford took Susan’s hand and drew Catherine’s arm through hers. She blinked back the tears of happiness and emotion that had come into her eyes, and saw Susan looking up at her with curiosity. Nine-year-old Susan wondered why anybody grown-up should cry. Surely when you were grown-up and could do as you liked, you had no need to cry? Mrs Bulford squeezed Catherine’s arm against her side and smiled lovingly at her tall daughter. Catherine smiled in a constrained way and looked across the road. She let her arm lie in her mother’s for several minutes. Then she withdrew it.

‘Now what would you like to do this afternoon?’ asked Mrs Bulford brightly. ‘Where would you like to go?’

‘The Little Park,’ said Pat. ‘I want to fly my plane on the grass so if it makes a crash landing it won’t matter.’

They walked on, Mrs Bulford in the midst of them. For the next few hours they were hers. ‘Now tell me all you’ve been doing since last month,’ she said, drawing Catherine’s arm within hers again. It might have been her fancy that Catherine withdrew it last time. Perhaps there was nothing wrong really. She knew how apt she was to look for slights and coldness now.

Catherine, her arm lying inertly along her mother’s, shrugged her shoulders and said she didn’t think she’d been doing anything. Pat was too absorbed to answer. What did he care about last month when he had this plane in his hand today? Susan remembered she had lost a tooth and showed her mother the gap.

‘Oh, did it hurt?’ asked Mrs Bulford with concern.

‘No. Mumsie pulled it out. I only felt a little tweak. Mumsie gave me sixpence for being brave.’

Mrs Bulford felt a sharp pang of jealousy, which she tried to suppress. She knew she ought to feel glad that Cecil’s new wife was kind to her children. And it wasn’t the girl’s fault that Cecil had married her. If it hadn’t been her, it would have been someone else. Mrs Bulford told herself these things; but remained jealous.

Catherine, murmuring that there was something wrong with her belt, removed her arm from her mother’s, fiddled with her waist and did not replace the arm.

‘So there is something wrong,’ thought Mrs Bulford.

They reached the Little Park, a bright, new, open place with an artificial stream running over a cement bed, looped by hump-backed cement bridges. On the cement shores of a shallow lake, blue, red, green and yellow boats were drawn up. Everything was miniature, Walt Disneyish, except that in a caged enclosure sat one solitary monkey quite out of key, forlorn, flea-bitten and, in spite of the heat, shivering. The children were always sorry for this monkey. Catherine held out her hand and murmured tenderly.

‘Susan, how is that toe of yours?’ asked Mrs Bulford. ‘Is it better?’

‘It hurts sometimes,’ said Susan.

‘Take off your shoe and sock, darling, and let Mummy see,’ said Mrs Bulford.

‘Oh, you can’t,’ said Catherine. ‘Not here, what will people think?’

‘You mustn’t mind so much what people think,’ said her mother.

‘I think it’s better to,’ said Catherine in a low voice, turning her head away.

Mrs Bulford took Susan’s soft little foot into her hand. The feel of it moved her unbearably. What a loss – not to be able to touch her children every day, any time of night or day as she used to, not to know their limbs, their bodies any more. Once she had known them better than her own. She closed her fingers over Susan’s foot and could hardly see it for a moment.

But she repressed her tears. She knew how mystified and oppressed the children were by signs of adult grief. She spread Susan’s toes out, soothing the small pink mark that showed on one.

‘You must always be very careful about your shoes, Susan,’ she said. ‘You must ask – Mumsie – to see that this toe has plenty of room. You have feet like mine, the third toe is as long as the second. So many shoes don’t allow for that.’’

‘D’you remember how we used to play “This little pig went to market” when we came into your bed in the mornings?’ asked Susan, laughing up into her face. She said it without any sadness; she said it as if all that wasn’t over, but could be resumed at any time.

‘Yes, I remember,’ said Mrs Bulford. ‘Now, let’s put your sock on again. I think it must be time for tea.’

‘Hurray,’ said Pat, sliding off the bench at once. ‘I’m hungry.’

Tea was the crown of the afternoon, not only for the children but for Mrs Bulford. Sitting like any other mother with her children at the table, pouring out tea for them, spreading Pat’s bread-and-butter with jam, wiping his fingers, entering into indulgent co-operation with the waitress to give them all they wanted, Mrs Bulford almost had the illusion that she had never left them.

Pat, his aeroplane out of sight and mind under his chair, was able to give his mother his attention. He was getting what he wanted, she was giving him things. She was letting him have another cream bun, so, his chin only an inch or two above his plate, he beamed on her.

‘You are kind, Mummy,’ he said with sudden fervour. Then added, as if to explain this to himself: ‘But I are a little bit your boy, aren’t I?’

Mrs Bulford put the tea-pot down on the provided tile with a slight crash. Susan was disgusted with her brother.

‘Of course you’re Mummy’s boy. She borned you,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t live with us now, but she’s still our Mummy, aren’t you, Mummy? Can I have another cream bun, too?’ Mrs Bulford passed the plate of buns with a smile. They couldn’t help it. They didn’t understand. She didn’t know which hurt most, Pat’s confusion, Susan’s matter-of-fact acceptance, or Catherine’s judgement.

‘Are we going home now?’ asked Pat eagerly. ’P’raps my Comet is there now. P’raps it’s waiting. I think Mumsie will be back now.’

‘Yes, you’re going back now,’ said his mother.

The little party returned along the leafy road, Mrs Bulford setting a slow pace to keep them with her as long as possible. Then, turning the corner, walking towards them arm in arm, came Cecil and his new wife. Mrs Bulford, her eyes fixed upon them, came to a standstill. She could not face such an encounter. But Pat, breaking away from his mother, ran towards them shouting: ‘Mumsie! Did you get it? Did you get it, Mumsie?’ Susan raised her eyes to her mother. ‘May I go too?’ she asked. ‘Certainly, darling. But kiss Mummy goodbye first,’ said Mrs Bulford. Catherine stood awkwardly with her mother.

‘You’d better go too, dear,’ said Mrs Bulford. She kissed the girl’s smooth brow. ’Goodbye. I’ll see you on the fourth, won’t I ?’

Catherine nodded. ‘Goodbye,’ she said. The group had reached the gate. Cecil raised his hat to the woman he had lived with for fifteen years. Pat disappeared with his parcel; Susan waved vigorously, Catherine with restraint. Then they were gone. Mrs Bulford turned and walked back the way she had come. She could not bring herself to pass the house yet.

But later when the dusk was deeper, she passed it on her way to the bus. Elsie had just come out to pick up the hoop on the lawn. Upstairs someone was drawing the curtains, first at one window, then at another. They were all gathered in for the night. Everything was very quiet. Even from the gate she could smell the sweet peas. She walked away down the road.

From ‘Wednesday’ (1944) by Dorothy Whipple © The Estate of Dorothy Whipple

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