Mr Skeffington

Book 396: Virago Modern Classics

by Elizabeth von Arnim

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction; Classics; Family Life; Marriage & Divorce; Romance

Synopsis

Beauty; beauty. What was the good of beauty, once it was over? It left nothing behind it but acid regrets, and no heart at all to start fresh.' Approaching the watershed of her fiftieth birthday, Fanny, having long ago divorced Mr Skeffington and dismissed him from her thoughts for many years, is surprised to find herself thinking of him often. While attempting to understand this invasion, she meets, through a series of coincidences and deliberate actions, all those other men whose hearts she broke. But their lives have irrevocably changed and Fanny is no longer the exquisite beauty with whom they were all once enchanted. If she is to survive, Fanny discovers, she must confront a greatly altered perception of her self. With the delicate piquancy for which she is renowned, Elizabeth von Arnim here reveals the complexities involved in the process of ageing and in re-evaluating self-worth.

Release date: March 6, 2014

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 236

Sample

§

FANNY, who had married a Mr. Skeffington, and long ago, for reasons she considered compelling, divorced him, after not having given
him a thought for years, began, to her surprise, to think of him a great deal. If she shut her eyes, she could see him behind
the fish-dish at breakfast; and presently, even if she didn’t shut her eyes, she could see him behind almost anything.


What particularly disturbed her was that there was no fish. Only during Mr. Skeffington’s not very long reign as a husband
had there been any at breakfast, he having been a man tenacious of tradition, and liking to see what he had seen in his youth
still continuing on his table. With his disappearance, the fish-dish, of solid silver, kept hot by electricity, disappeared
too—not that he took it with him, for he was much too miserable to think of dishes, but because Fanny’s breakfast, from the
date of his departure to the time she had got to now, was half a grapefruit.


Naturally she was a good deal worried by seeing him and the dish so distinctly, while knowing that neither he nor it were
really there. She very nearly went to a doctor about it; but never having been much disposed to go to doctors she thought
she would wait a little first. For after all, reasoned Fanny, who considered herself a very sensible woman, she was soon going
to have a fiftieth birthday, and on reaching so conspicuous, so sobering a landmark in one’s life, what more natural than
to hark back and rummage, and what more inevitable, directly one rummaged, than to come across Mr. Skeffington? He had played,
for a time, a leading part in her life. He had been, she recognized, the keystone of her career. It was thanks to the settlements
he had made on her, which were the settlements of an extremely rich and extremely loving man, that she was so well off, and
it was thanks to his infidelities—but ought one to thank infidelities? Well, never mind—that she was free.


She had adored being free. Twenty-two years of enchanting freedom she had had, and adoring every minute of them—except the
minutes at the end of a love affair, when things suddenly seemed unable to avoid being distressing, and except the minutes
quite lately, when she was recovering from a terrible illness, and had nothing to do but think, and began thinking about Mr.
Skeffington. Perhaps it was the highly unpleasant birthday looming so close that set her off in these serious directions. Perhaps it was
being so wretchedly weak after diphtheria. Perhaps it was the way her lovely hair had fallen out in handfuls. But set off
she did, and he who had once been her husband appeared to respond to the treatment with an alacrity which startled her, and
gradually became quite upsettingly vivid and real.


This, though, had only happened in the last few months, and she was sure would soon, when she was quite strong again, pass.
Up to her illness, how unclouded her life had been! Really a quite radiant life, full of every sort of amusing and exciting
things like would-be lovers—at one time the whole world appeared to want to be Fanny’s lover—and all because Mr. Skeffington
was never able to resist his younger typists.


How angry those typists had made her, till it dawned on her that what they really were were gates to freedom. When at last
she saw them in their true light, as so many bolts shot back and doors flung open, she left off being angry, and began instead—strictly
speaking, she didn’t suppose she ought to have—to rejoice. No, she oughtn’t to have rejoiced; but how difficult it was not
to like being without Mr. Skeffington. At no time had she enjoyed her marriage. She was very sorry, but really she hadn’t.
Among other things, he was a Jew, and she wasn’t. Not that that would have mattered, since she was without prejudices, if
he hadn’t happened to look so exactly like a Jew. It wasn’t a bit necessary that he should. Lots of people she knew had married
Jews, and none of them looked so exactly like one as Job (Mr. Skeffington’s name was Job, a name, everybody agreed, impossible
to regard as other than unfortunate). Still, he couldn’t help that, and certainly he had been very kind. Being an upright
girl, who believed in sticking to her vows and giving as good as she got, she too had been very kind. Her heart, however,
hadn’t been in it. A marriage, she found, with someone of a different breed is fruitful of small rubs; and she had had to
change her religion too, which annoyed her, in spite of her not really having any. So that when he offered her those repeated
chances of honourably getting rid of him, though she began by being outraged she ended by being pleased.


§

Fanny well knew that her reactions to Mr. Skeffington’s infidelities weren’t at all the proper ones, but she couldn’t help that. She was perfectly aware she ought to have gone on growing angrier
and angrier, and more and more miserable; and instead, things happened this way: Obliged to forgive the first typist, such
was his penitence and such his shame, the second one, though humiliating, didn’t distress her quite so acutely. Over the third
she was almost calm. The fourth made her merely wonder there should be so many young persons liking him enough for that sort
of thing, but she supposed it must be his money. The fifth she called on, earnestly inquiring of the alarmed and shrinking
creature what she saw in him. At the sixth, she went out and bought some new hats; and after the seventh, she left.


Left, and never came back. Left, and beheld him no more till they faced each other in the Divorce Court. Since then she hadn’t
set eyes on Mr. Skeffington, except once, not long after the final kicking free, when her car—his car, really, if you looked
at it dispassionately—was held up in Pall Mall at the very moment when he, walking to his club, chanced to be passing. There
she sat, such a lovely thing, delicately fair in the dark frame of the car, obviously someone everybody would long to be allowed
to love, the enormous hat of the early summer of 1914 perched on hair whose soft abundance he had often, in happier days,
uxoriously stroked, and was so completely already uninterested in him that she hardly bothered to turn her head. Wasn’t this
hard? Now, wasn’t this terribly hard? Mr. Skeffington asked himself, his whole being one impassioned protest. Hadn’t he worshipped
her, lived for her, thought only of her—even, somehow, when he was thinking of the pretty little girl in the office as well?
And what, in the long run, were the pretty little girls in the office to a man? Nothing; nothing; less than nothing, compared
to a darling, exquisite, and, as he had supposed, permanent wife.


But Fanny, sideways through her eyelashes, did see him, saw how he hesitated and half stopped, saw how red he grew, thought:
Poor Job, I believe he’s still in love with me, and idly mused, as she was driven on up St. James’s Street in the direction
of her attractive house—his attractive house really, if you looked at it dispassionately—on the evident capacity of men to
be in love with several women at once. For she was sure there were several women in Job’s background at the very moment he
was hesitating on the pavement, and turning red for love of her. He couldn’t do, she now thoroughly well knew, without several—one in his home, and one in his office, and one God knew
where else; perhaps at Brighton, whither he was so fond of going for a breath, he used to explain, of sea air.


Yet here he was half stopping when he saw her, and gazing at her with those opaque dog’s eyes of his as though she were the
single love of his life. And she, who was a believer in one thing at a time, fell to considering her patience, her positively
angelic patience, over his lapses. Seven lapses, before she did anything about them. Why, she might have divorced him, completely
justified even in her mother’s eyes, who was all for wives sticking to their husbands, after the second lapse, and started
on her delicious career of independence at twenty-three instead of twenty-eight. Then she would have had five whole years
more of it, with everybody bent on making up for his shameful treatment of her, and for what it was imagined she must have
suffered. Five years her patience had cost her; five years of happiness.


And she asked herself, as she went into her flower-filled library—the quantity of flowers that arrived for Fanny every day
at this period had to be seen to be believed—and found Lord Conderley of Upswich, an elderly (she thought him old, but he
was, in fact, under fifty) and impassioned admirer, waiting to take her out to lunch—she asked herself what other woman would
have been such an angel of forbearance. Or was it, really, not so much forbearance as that she didn’t care?


Yes, thought Fanny, who was an honest girl, and liked to see things straight, it wasn’t being an angel; it was because, after
the third lapse, she simply hadn’t cared.


§

But that was a long while ago. It didn’t seem long, but it was. Then she was twenty-eight. Now she would soon be fifty. A
generation had passed, indeed had flashed by, since she saw Mr. Skeffington that morning on the pavement of Pall Mall, and
the plovers’ eggs with which, at the Berkeley, Conderley had afterwards ardently fed her—solid enough the hard-boiled things
had seemed, as she cracked their shells—where were they now? Reappeared as flowers, perhaps, or grass and been eaten by sheep,
and once more, in the form of mutton, eaten perhaps by her. Everything, looking back, had dispersed and vanished, to reappear as something else. Life was certainly a queer business—so brief, yet such a lot of it; so substantial, yet in a few
years, which behaved like minutes, all scattered and anyhow. If she and Job had had children they too, by this time, would
be all scattered and anyhow. Grown up. Married. And of course making a grandmother of her. Incredible, the things one could
be made by other people. Fancy being forced to be a grandmother, whether you liked it or not!


But—grandchildren. She turned the word over on her tongue cautiously, as if to see what it really tasted like. A woman might
hide for years from people who didn’t look her up in Debrett that she had had a fiftieth birthday, but she couldn’t hide grandchildren,
they would certainly insist on cropping up. Just as well, then, that there weren’t any. Who wanted to be dated?


Yet—didn’t they fill a gap? Didn’t they come into one’s life when it was beginning, like one’s hair, to thin out? Since she
had had that awful illness in the autumn, with her temperature up in the skies for days on end, her hair, she knew and deeply
deplored, wasn’t what it was. Nothing, since then, seemed quite what it was. She had stayed in the country for several months,
slowly recovering, and when she got back London and the people in it might almost have been a different place and race—so
apathetic; so dull. While as for the way one’s friends had lately taken to dying …


§

Fanny was reflecting on these things in bed. It was an icy, foggy February morning outside, but inside, in her bedroom, all
was rosy and warm. Wrapped in a rose-coloured bedgown—when she was younger her bed arrangements had been sea-green, but it
is curious, she herself noticed, how regularly the beds of older women turn pink,—the shaded, rose-coloured lights doing their
best for her, and a most beautiful wood fire bathing the room in a rosy glow, she ate, or tried to eat, her breakfast of half
a grapefruit.


Cold, sour stuff to begin a winter day on, she thought, giving up and pushing the tray aside. The idea was to keep slender;
but suppose you did keep slender—and nobody, since her illness, could possibly be more slender—what was the good of it if
you had no hair? One went to Antoine’s, of course, and bought some, but to buy hair, to buy hair, when one had had such heaps of it till only a few months ago, did seem most dreadful. And it put a stop to so many
things, too, once one had got something on one’s head that didn’t really belong. For instance, poor Dwight, the latest, and
also the youngest of her adorers—for some time now they had kept on getting younger,—a Rhodes scholar fresh from Harvard,
and worshipping her with transatlantic headlongness, wouldn’t be able to touch it reverently any more, as she used sometimes
to allow him when he had been extra sweet and patient. If he did, the most awful things might happen; the most awful things
must happen, when a woman lets herself have adorers, while at the same time easily coming to bits.


The ghost of a giggle, the faintest little sound of rather wry mirth, rose to her lips at the pictures that flashed into her
mind; though indeed all this was very serious for her. Adorers had played a highly important part in her life; the most important
part by far, really, giving it colour, and warmth and poetry. How very arid it would be without them. True, they had also
caused her a good deal of distress when, after a bit, they accused her of having led them on. Each time one of them said that,
and each in his turn did say it, she was freshly astonished. Led them on? It seemed to her that, far from having to be led,
they came; and came impetuously, while she, for her part, simply sat still and did nothing.


§

Apparently snug and enviable in her rosy, cosy cave, she lay thinking about those adorers, so as not to think of Mr. Skeffington.
Outside the fog was thick yellow, and it was bitter cold; inside was the warm Fanny, so apparently enviable. But in fact she
wasn’t enviable. She was warm, and as carefully lit up as an Old Master, but far from being enviable she was a mass of twinging
nerves after a wakeful and peculiarly unpleasant night, which the grapefruit, sour and comfortless inside her, did nothing
to soothe. Perhaps, she said to herself, eyeing its remains with distaste, in winter, and while she still hadn’t quite picked
up after her illness, she ought to have something hot for breakfast, something more nourishing, like a little fish …


And instantly, at the word, there he was again: Mr. Skeffington. She had been fending him off so carefully, and now, at a
single word, there he was; and she seemed no longer to be in her bedroom, but with him downstairs in the dining-room, he behind
the silver fish-dish, she opposite him behind the coffeepot; just as they had sat through so many boring breakfasts during
the precious years of her lovely, very first youth. And he was looking at her adoringly between his mouthfuls, and saying,
with the brimming possessive pride she used to find so trying, “And how is my little Fanny-Wanny this fine morning?”—even
if it wasn’t a fine morning, but pouring cats and dogs; even if, a few hours before, on his proposing to join her in her bedroom,
she had vehemently assured him she would never, never be his little Fanny-Wanny again, because of those typists.


For he was of an undefeatably optimistic disposition when it came to women, and very affectionate.

§

Overcome, she lay back on her pillows, shut her eyes, and gave herself up to gloom. She had had a dreadful night; she had
been doing her best to forget it; and this was the last straw.


Her maid slid silently into the room, observed her attitude, removed the tray without disturbing her, and slid silently out
again. “So that’s how we are this morning, is it,” thought her maid, whose name was Manby.


“Not even,” Fanny was saying to herself, her eyes tight shut, her head thrown back in the pillows, her face blindly upturned
to the ceiling, “not even to be able to mention fish, in an entirely separate connection, without his at once thrusting himself
forward I”


It did begin to look as if she would have to go to a doctor, who of course, the first thing, would ask her how old she was;
and when she told him truthfully, for it was no use not being truthful with doctors, would start talking—odious phrase—of
her time of life. Really, though, Job was getting past a joke. Its being February, the month she married him in, oughtn’t
to have stirred him up like this, for there had been many Februaries since she left him, and in none of them had he so much
as crossed her mind. Tucked away he had lain, good and quiet, in what she had supposed was the finality of the past. Now,
here he was at every turn.


He must, somehow, be put a stop to. She knew he was nothing but a figment of her brain, but it was precisely this that made his appearances so shattering. To go off one’s head at fifty seemed a poor finish to a glorious career. And it wasn’t
as if she hadn’t done what she could, and reasoned with herself, and tried to be sensible and detached. Everything she could
think of she had done, even to ordering his chair in the dining-room to be removed, even to taking cold baths. She had soon
found out, though, that these measures were no good. The cold baths made her shiver for the rest of the day, and as for the
chair, being only a figment, not having one didn’t stop Mr. Skeffington’s sitting down. Figments were like that, she had to
acknowledge. They could sit on anything, even if it wasn’t there.


Well, something would have to be done about it. She couldn’t go on much longer, without having a real breakdown. After the
night she had just been through, which she was trying so hard to forget by thinking of Dwight, by thinking of the way her
hair had practically all gone, by thinking of anything that came into her head that wasn’t Mr. Skeffington, however much she
disliked the idea of messing about with doctors she would certainly have to see one. For Mr. Skeffington, that night, had
been quite unbearably lively. He might be nothing but a figment, but she must say he did her imagination great credit, so
vivid he was, so actual, so much on the spot. Up to then, he had only molested her in the day-time, sat at meals with her,
met her in the library, attended her in the drawing-room; but the evening before, the evening, that is, of the anniversary
of the day thirty years ago on which she had married him, when she came in late from a party—not in very good spirits because
everybody had been so dull—he was waiting for her in the hall, and had taken her hand, or she felt as if he had taken it,
and gone upstairs with her just as he had gone thirty years ago, and stayed in the room the whole time while she undressed,
and insisted on kneeling down and putting her slippers on for her, and had actually kissed her feet. Dreadful to have a figment
kissing one’s feet, thought Fanny, opening her eyes with a shudder, and jerking herself upright in the bed.


§

She stared into the glowing, reassuring fire. Such a lovely fire. Everything so lovely round her. Nothing in the world, really,
to worry about. She must hold on to herself. And if she did feel rather cold inside, it was only the grapefruit.


Manby, who seemed able to see through walls, knew she had opened her eyes, and slid in. She came in sideways, taking up as
little space as possible in the doorway, so as not to cause draughts, and carrying the morning letters on a tray.


“Will you wear your grey or your brown this morning m’lady? Or should I put out your black?” she inquired.

Fanny didn’t answer. She turned her head and looked at the tray, her hands clasped round her drawn-up knees. A lot of letters,
but they all looked dull. Queer how uninteresting her letters and telephone messages had been since she came back. What had
happened to everybody? Hardly ever did a nice man’s voice come through on the telephone now. Relations rang up, and women
friends, but the men, like her hair, seemed to have dropped off. She oughtn’t to have stayed away so long. One’s tracks got
very quickly covered up, if one did. In the general scramble, it appeared one easily was forgotten, though it was too fantastic
to suppose that she, of all people——


“Will you wear your grey or your brown, m’lady? Or should I——”

Odd, though, thought Fanny, putting out her hand and picking up the letters, what a lot of dull people there seemed to be
about lately. Dull men. Uninterested men. Uninterested, and therefore uninteresting. When first she began going out again
after being in the country, she was struck by it. London suddenly seemed full of them. She couldn’t think where they all came
from. Wherever she went, there they were too. In fact, there was no doubt London had quite changed. People, even her own particular
men friends, weren’t nearly so much alive as they used to be, and not half as interesting. They were very kind to her, and
solicitous about draughts and all that, but beyond patting her hand affectionately, and remarking, “Poor little Fanny—you
must pick up, you know. Beef tea and that, eh?” they hadn’t much to say. They seemed to be getting old, and there were no
young ones to take their place, because of the breathless rush people lived in now—except, of course, Dwight; but he was sitting,
or standing, or whatever it was they did, for examinations, and had only been able to get away from Oxford once to see her.
Serious, everybody had become; absorbed. Instead of being eager, they were absent-minded. Instead of seizing every opportunity
to whisper amusing things in her ear about—oh well, very silly things, really—they talked out loud of the European situation.
Everyone might have heard what they said. It wasn’t in the least her idea of a really interesting conversation, that everyone might hear what one said.


“Will you wear your grey or your——”

Certainly the European situation was enough to make anybody talk out loud, but ever since she could remember there had always
been something the matter with it, and it hadn’t in the slightest way interfered with amusing, silly things being whispered
in one’s ear. How long was it since someone had whispered in hers? Last night, at that boring dinner, there was a girl, a
rather too healthy, red girl, the daughter of the house, just out; and the elderly man next to her had whispered something
in her ear, and Fanny, chancing to look down the table, had seen him doing it, and it was this that had started her off wondering
how long it was since her own had been whispered in. The girl wasn’t even pretty, she was merely young and tight-skinned.
Tight-skinned youth; all, apparently, that was needed these days, Fanny had said to herself, turning to her host again, and
slightly and unpleasantly surprised by the acid edge to her thought. For never, yet, in her life had she been acid.


“Will you wear your——”

“Oh, bother,” snapped Fanny, finally exasperated by the persistent current of interruption—adding instantly with quick penitence, “I’m
sorry, Manby. I didn’t mean to be cross.”


“It’s the weather,” said Manby, placidly. “All these fogs.”

“Do you think I’m crosser than I used to be?” Fanny asked, looking at her anxiously and dropping the letters she was holding
on to the bed.


Manby had been with her so many years that she had witnessed all her stages, from the Really Young and Exquisite one, through
the Lovely as Ever one, to the one she was now in, which was called, by her friends, Wonderful. “Darling, you really are wonderful——” that’s what they said now, whenever she appeared; and she didn’t like it one little bit.


“I wouldn’t go as far as to say crosser, m’lady,” said Manby, cautiously.


Then it was true. She was crosser. Else Manby wouldn’t be so cautious. Ah, but how lamentable to get crosser as one got older! A person going to have
a fiftieth birthday should know better than that. Such a person ought at least by then have learned how to behave herself,
and not snap at servants. Serenity, not crossness, was what the years should bring—ripeness, sweetness, flavour. Like an apricot in the sun, one should hang on the afternoon wall of life; like a ripe and perfect plum.


Old age, serene, and calm, and bright,


And lovely as a Lapland night …


—that was the sort of finish-up poor Jim Conderley, who was fond of quoting and knew an immense lot of things to quote, had
prophesied hers would be, one day when she was saying how awful it must be to be old—he was the one who used to feed her with
plovers’ eggs when they were still worth their weight in gold.


Not that she had reached the Lapland night condition yet; it was only quite lately that she had got into the Wonderful class,
and in it, she supposed, she would stay some time. Unpleasant as it was to be called Wonderful, and dripping with horrid implications,
it was better than being a Lapland night, which, however serene and calm and even lovely it might be, would be sure to be
cold. Let her keep out of the cold as long as she could, she thought, shivering a little. On the whole, perhaps, she ought
to be thankful that her friends would probably go on saying for some time yet, though a little more stoutly, of course, each
year, “Darling, you’re a perfect marvel.”


A marvel. Imagine, thought Fanny, getting out of bed and putting her arms into the sleeves of the dressing-gown—also rose-coloured,—Manby
was holding ready, imagine having reached the consolation prizes of life.


She crossed to the dressing-table, and stared at herself in the same glass which only such a little while ago, so it seemed,
had shone with the triumphant reflection of her lovely youth. A marvel. Wonderful. What did such words mean except, Considering your age, my dear, or, In spite of everything, you poor darling?

Last week she had been to Windsor to see a godson of hers at Eton who had just got into Pop, and was secretly so proud of
it that she knew he would burst if he couldn’t let himself go to somebody who wasn’t another boy; and when she got back to
London, the afternoon being fine and dry, she walked most of the way, across the Park.


Well, why shouldn’t she? It was far, but not impossibly far. Her feet ached, but most feet ached on pavements. There was nothing
out of the way, she considered, in what she had done. Yet the various friends waiting for her in the drawing-room when she came in, with one accord exclaimed, on hearing of it,
. . .