Company in the Evening Read online

  Ursula Orange

  Company in the Evening

  Of all the unhappiness my divorce has brought upon me, loneliness has never been in the least a part. Lack of company in the evening is to me an absolute luxury.

  Thus does Vicky, a young divorcée in London with a small daughter to support, reassure herself.

  But as the plucky courage of the early days of World War II gives way to the fatigue and deprivations of its middle, company in the evening is just what she gets. To the chagrin of her housekeeper, Vicky agrees to take in a pregnant, widowed sister-in-law (“Talking to her is like walking through a bog—squash, squash, squash—never, just never do you really crunch on to anything solid”). As she is adapting to this change and the tensions it creates, and dealing with an impossible client at work at a literary agency, she happens to meet ex-husband Raymond one night …

  Told in a first-person confessional style ahead of its time, and featuring Ursula Orange’s trademark humour, Company in the Evening is a charming evocation of wartime life, snobbishness in many forms, and the difficulties of being a woman on her own.

  “Delightfully entertaining … good portraits add considerably to its attractiveness. Light reading of the most enjoyable kind.” Sunday Times

  “Brilliant portraiture. Crisp writing. Human understanding. Really excellent light reading.” Sunday Graphic

  FM12

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Contents

  Introduction by Stacy Marking

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  About the Author

  Titles by Ursula Orange

  Furrowed Middlebrow Titles

  Tom Tiddler’s Ground – Title Page

  Tom Tiddler’s Ground – Chapter I

  Copyright

  Introduction

  On the first page of a notebook filled with carefully pasted press cuttings, Ursula Orange has inscribed, in touchingly school girlish handwriting: Begin Again, Published February 13th 1936. Later she adds: American Publication Aug 7th 1936, and then a pencilled note: Total sales 1221.

  She was 26, a young married woman, and this was her first novel. There are plentiful reviews from major publications in Britain, Australia and America. Begin Again by Ursula Orange is included in the Washington Herald’s Bestsellers’ list for August 1936, where it comes higher than Whither France? by Leon Trotsky. The Daily Telegraph praises her insight into “the strange ways of the New Young, their loves, their standards, their shibboleths, and their manners … An unusually good first novel, in a decade of good first novels.”

  To be greeted as the voice of the new generation must have been thrilling for a young writer, and a year later her second novel was published. To Sea in a Sieve opens with the heroine Sandra being sent down from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, the college which Ursula herself had so recently left. Rebellious and in pursuit of freedom, Sandra rejects convention, marries an ‘advanced’ and penniless lover, and the novel lightheartedly recounts the consequences of her contrariness.

  But despite her light tone, Ursula Orange takes on serious themes in all her work. She explores the conflicts between generations, between classes, between men and women. Her characters embrace new and modern attitudes to morality, sex and marriage, and take adultery and divorce with surprising frivolity. She understands young women’s yearning for independence, their need to express themselves and to escape the limitations of domesticity – though she often mocks the results.

  In 1938 she had her first child, Gillian, and by 1941 when her third and most successful novel, Tom Tiddler’s Ground, was published, the chaos of war had overshadowed the brittle ‘modern’ world of her generation. With her husband now away in the army, Ursula and her small daughter left London to take refuge in the country, where she could observe firsthand the impact of evacuation on a small English village (just as her heroine Caroline does in the novel).

  Tom Tiddler’s Ground is set in 1939-40, the months later known as the “phoney war.” The evacuation of London is under way, but the horrors of the Blitz have not yet begun. The clash between rustic villagers and London evacuees, the misunderstandings between upper and lower classes, differing approaches to love and children, the strains of war and separation on relationships and marriage: all these indirect effects of war provide great material for the novel. The Sunday Times describes it as “taking a delectably unusual course of its own, and for all the gas-masks hiding in the background, [it] is the gayest of comedies.” It’s a delightful read to this day, and includes an astonishing number of elements, ingeniously interwoven – bigamy, adultery, seduction, fraud, theft, embezzlement, the agonies of a childless marriage and the guilt of a frivolously undertaken love affair.

  The book reveals a real talent for dialogue and structure. As Caroline arrives for the first time at her new home in a Kentish village, the scene, the plots and sub-plots, the major characters and the themes are all established on a single page, almost entirely in dialogue.

  “Red car,” said Marguerite ecstatically as Lavinia’s Hulton sports model, with Alfred in the driving seat, drew up alongside.

  “Excuse me,” said Caroline, leaning out, “but can you tell me where a house called The Larches is?”

  “The Larches!” Alfred was out of his seat in a minute, and advancing with outstretched hand: “Have I the pleasure of addressing Mrs. Cameron?”

  “Good God!” said Caroline, taken aback. “So you’re – are you Constance’s husband by any chance, or what?” (It might be. About forty. Not bad-looking, I will say that for Constance. That slick, smart, take-me-for-an-ex-public-schoolboy type. Eyes a bit close together.)

  “Yes, I’m Captain Smith.” (Caroline found her hand firmly taken and shaken.) “And Constance and I are very very pleased to welcome you to Chesterford.”

  “But that isn’t Constance,” said Caroline, feebly indicating Lavinia. Alfred gave an easy laugh.

  “Oh no! Constance is home waiting for you.” (Or I hope she is and not hanging round after that slum-mother and her brat, curse them.) “This is Miss Lavinia Conway,” he said, taking her in a proprietary way by the elbow to help her out of the car.

  “How do you do?” said Caroline, recovering herself. (.... Who is this girl? Good God even I didn’t put it on quite so thick at her age. Can’t be Alfred’s little bit, surely?)

  Part of the entertainment throughout the novel is the contrast between the perfect politeness of everything expressed aloud, and the bracketed thoughts that are left unsaid. Ursula Orange uses the device not to convey complex interior monologue, in the way of Virginia Woolf or Joyce, but as a comic, sometimes cynical, commentary on her characters’ evasions and self-deception.

  The notices and sales for Tom Tiddler’s Ground were good, but Ursula must have been disconcerted to receive a personal letter from her new publisher, Michael Joseph himself. He had been away at the wars, he explains, and has been reading the novel in hospital. He writes that he was “immensely entertained” and predicts “that it is only a question of time – and the always necessary slice of good luck – before you become a really big seller …” But then he adds: “The only criticism that I venture to offer is that Caroline’s unorthodox behaviour … may have prevented the book from having a bigger
sale. I think it is still true, even in these days, that the public likes its heroines pure.”

  Whether influenced by Michael Joseph’s strictures or no, in her next novel, Have Your Cake, the clashes of moral values, of hidden motives, of snobbery and class distinction, are not taken so lightly. Published in August 1942, it features an ex-Communist writer who (in the words of The Times) “is one of those devastating people who go through life pursuing laudable ends but breaking hearts and ruining lives at almost every turn.” But lives and hearts are not ultimately broken: the notices are good; sales figures top 2500 – evidently “the Boots Family Public”, and her publisher, were pleased.

  By 1944 when Company In the Evening was published, Ursula Orange’s crisp dialogue-driven style has altered. Told in the first person, with greater awareness and self-analysis, it is the story of Vicky, a divorcee whose marriage had been abandoned almost carelessly (and somehow without her ex-husband discovering that she’s having their child). Vicky finds herself coping single handedly in a household of disparate and incompatible characters thrown together by war. Less engaging than Ursula Orange’s earlier heroines, Vicky seems particularly hard on her very young and widowed sister-in-law, who is “just so hopelessly not my sort of person”, in other words what her mother would have called common.

  The novel is full of the taken-for-granted snobbery of the era – hard for the modern reader to stomach. In fact Vicky raises the issue, though somewhat equivocally, herself.

  “When I was about 19 and suffering from a terrific anti-snob complex (one had to make some protest against the extraordinary smugness and arrogance of the wealthy retired inhabitants … ) I practically forbade Mother to use the word ‘common’ … “Don’t you see, Mother, it isn’t a question of phraseology, it’s your whole attitude I object to.”

  But just as one starts to feel sympathetic, she adds:

  “Goodness, what mothers of semi-intellectual daughters of nineteen have to put up with!”

  As the novel progresses, Vicky’s faults are acknowledged, her mistakes rectified, her marriage repaired. She returns contentedly “to ordinary married life in the middle of the worst war ever known to history.”

  Perhaps this context is the point. The New York Times praises Ursula for her admirably stiff upper lip: “Ursula Orange, calmly ignoring as negligible all that Hitler has done, … has written a novel that is a wet towel slapped nonchalantly across the face of the aggressor. ” Her light and entertaining novels were indeed helping the nation to carry on.

  At last in 1945 war came to an end. English life returned to a difficult peace of deprivation and scarcity. Tim Tindall, Ursula’s husband, had been almost entirely absent for 5 years, a total stranger to their young daughter. He had had – in that odd English phrase – a ‘good war’, seeing action in North Africa, Salerno and France. After his return, the family opted for country life; Tim picked up the reins of the family’s publishing firm, commuting daily to London and an independent existence, while Ursula passed her time in Sussex with Gillian and her new baby son. That year she published one more novel, Portrait of Adrian, which escapes to an earlier period and the happier existence of young girls sharing a flat together in London.

  Ursula’s horizons seem gradually to narrow. She had been the smart, modern voice of a young and careless generation that no longer existed, and she did not find a new place in the post-war world. Severe depression set in, leading to suicide attempts and hospital treatments. Her literary life had virtually come to an end. She undertook two projects but these were never realized, perhaps because they were well before their time: an illustrated anthology of poetry for teenagers, a category as yet unnamed; and a play about Shelley’s as yet unheralded wives.

  In Footprints in Paris, (2009) their daughter, the writer Gillian Tindall, describes her mother’s decline as she becomes “someone who has failed at the enterprise of living…. London now began to figure on her mental map as the place she might find again her true self.” But the hope of finding a fresh life when the family moved to a new house in Hampstead, proved illusory. “Six days later, having by the move severed further the ties that had held her to life … she made another suicide attempt which, this time, was fatal. She was not found for two days.”

  But we cannot let this sad ending define the whole of Ursula Orange. It should not detract from our enjoyment of her work, which at its entertaining best, gives us a picture of a sparkling generation, of intelligent and audacious women surviving against the odds, with wit as well as stoicism, with courage in the face of deprivation and loss.

  Stacy Marking

  Chapter 1

  *

  IN THE EVENT OF AN AIR-RAID PASSENGERS ARE ADVISED TO . . . etc.

  *

  I did not want to keep on idly reading and re-reading this notice, and yet, as I sat in my third-class railway carriage, travelling slowly and with frequent stops, not to mention two changes, towards my destination—Winterbury Green in Sussex—my eyes were constantly falling on it. There was, as always, a certain grim humour in the picture it conjured up. (“Excuse me if I lie on top of you, Madam.” “Not at all, I believe it’s safer underneath.”) I remembered the mixture of horror and amusement with which I had first read such a notice in the early days of the war. Fantastic that such instructions should actually appear in a railway carriage on a branch line of the Southern Railway, a line that, moreover, I had known all my life! Yes, the instinctive “It can’t happen here” reflex was pretty deeply-rooted in all of us, I suppose, even in those who, like myself, had been worrying about the impending war for a long time before it happened. Later, of course, during that first winter of the war, one had become so used to all the paraphernalia of A.R.P. and its faintly comic charade flavour (with jokes about ‘casualties’ due to falling over sandbags in the black-out) that one ceased to pay any attention to such notices.

  But now it was August, 1940, and I did not need the newspaper that lay beside me on the seat of the railway carriage to remind me that the instructions to passengers in the event of an air-raid were no longer entirely a joking matter. Not, of course, that I had the slightest intention of taking the advice given. Like everybody élse, I hung out of the window and saw and heard all I could. Already there had been three or four alerts, and, from my carriage window, I had seen patches of sky strangely patterned with wreaths and puffs of smoke. Now and again, when the train was stationary, I had heard the rattle of machine guns in the clouds above, and once I had caught a glimpse of a plane heeling over and diving drunkenly downwards, smoke pouring from it, plunging into the sunlit August woods beyond Redhill—whether one of Ours or one of Theirs I had no idea.

  War in the air over a countryside I had known all my life! (Yes, the nerve of shocked incredulity was evidently not quite dead.) I could not help remembering, with a further shiver at the sheer incongruity of it, that it was along part of this same pleasant meandering railway line that the troops rescued from Dunkirk had travelled back from Dover. At every little stop the inhabitants of the villages had gathered to cheer, to cry, to press cups of tea, glasses of beer, packets of chocolate on the returning soldiers. I had never been able to make up my mind whether it was a fine outburst of spontaneous emotion or a rather regrettable display of mass hysteria. Perhaps the latter possibility only occurred to me because my brother Philip was one of the ones who didn’t come back from Dunkirk.

  Philip’s death was really the reason why I was now travelling, only in the opposite direction, through these same villages that might once have welcomed him back as a returning hero. I was going to spend the week-end with my mother at Winterbury Green, and the object of my visit was to discuss the problem of Rene, Philip’s widow. Mother had written me a long letter about it.

  The letter was not entirely a cry for help, and yet I naturally interpreted it as such. It was, I felt, my turn to help Mother out now. Four years ago, at the time of my divorce, Mother had been a tower of strength to me. I had more or less collapsed on her should
er and allowed her to take charge of me. Mother, being Mother, was, of course, only too ready to do so. And I, being I, had used her as a refuge while I was in need of a refuge, drawn strength and encouragement from her, and then, when I was restored again, had slipped back into being my old independent self. Not that Mother would ever hold this against me. Not that she would consider for a moment that I ‘owed’ her anything. Not that I would tell her, in so many words, that I thought I did. Nevertheless I felt that, if only to get the sensation for my own satisfaction of a sum coming out right, I ought now to relieve Mother of the responsibility of Rene.

  Mother was sixty-six—just twice my age. It was only quite recently that I had begun to notice that she might strike one possibly as an ‘old lady’ rather than as a ‘middle-aged woman.’ I think the double shock of Father’s death and my divorce, following close on each other, had aged her more than I, selfishly wrapped up in my own unhappiness, had noticed at the time.

  Her letter to me was more of an appeal for help than I had ever received from her before. Was it (bless her!) meant to be a model of tactful suggestion? I did not have much difficulty in reading between the lines:

  FOURWAYS,

  WINTERBURY GREEN,

  August 20th,

  DARLING VICKY,

  Such an extraordinary thing has happened—two things really. I have got a very good offer for the house, and I must say I do feel very tempted. It has been so much too big for me since Daddy died and the young maid I have working for me now is a perfect rabbit about air-raids and I seem to spend all my time escorting her to the shelter and back—such nonsense, but of course I did promise her mother I’d send her to it (not that she needs sending, she simply scuttles), and then I do feel I ought to make Rene go too because of the baby, so the result is we pop in and out all day, and it’s exactly like playing that idiotic game of rabbits that you and Philip used to love so when you were small, only really now I’m too old for that sort of thing. Well, the other thing is (and it’s really extraordinary how it’s happened at the same time!) I have had a long letter from Aunt Maud urging me to join forces with her in her cottage at Chipping Campden. Poor darling, she’s very lonely since Uncle Hubert died, and although I know people always pretend sisters don’t get on if they live together, she and I have always been the greatest friends, and we would prevent each other from being lonely. Not that I mean I’m lonely, darling, because, of course, I’m luckier than poor Aunt Maud with no children, because I’ve still got you and your visits to look forward to and my darling grand-daughter to brag about, although it does make me furious that you can’t bring her here any more, because of the raids, and that’s another reason why it seems pointless keeping on the house.