Acting on Impulse Read online

  Heyer herself attended dances and parties of the kind that bored Cicely, and her four later contemporary novels would also depict heroines who struggled with aspects of the post-War London social scene. As a young woman Heyer enjoyed dances, although she disdained studio parties and had no time for bohemians. Cicely is bored with town life, dances and society, and has decided to go “into seclusion.” For an upper-middleclass girl enjoying all the delights of 1920’s London, this meant an escape to the country. She and a friend take a cottage in a “quaint village” where they will escape from city life.

  From here Heyer uses class difference as a driver for the rest of the story. Despite the destruction of so many mainstays of British life wrought by the Great War, England remained a strongly hierarchical society. Class still mattered and “A Proposal to Cicely” is the first of Heyer’s stories to reveal some of the attitudes prevalent at the time. These, initially subtle, class differences are first made known during Cicely’s exchange with a local farmer, Fred Talbot. In the secure knowledge that she is Talbot’s “better,” Cicely makes assumptions: “Come in to tea this afternoon, We’re fearfully bored. An’ then you can take us over the farm”. She receives “a shock” when he tells her he’s busy. Later in the story Heyer expresses the class differences more overtly: “Had he but known it, she was treating him as her inferior in that she still called him Mr. Talbot, and confined her conversation to farming.” He is simply a “diversion” from life in a small village where there “was no tennis and no society.”

  But there were dogs. “A Proposal to Cicely” is the first time that Heyer brought dogs into a story and Cicely’s “Pekinese” [sic], Chu-Chu San, may have been modelled on the Pekingese Heyer herself had owned in her teens. Richard’s bull-terrier, Bill, is also a breed Heyer would own, though several years later. Though neither dog is as developed as Heyer’s later canine characters, and serve rather as props, Bill does have a small dramatic role towards the end of the story. In this first short story, Heyer had not yet realised the full potential of the canine character, but it would not be many months before she did.

  A PROPOSAL TO CICELY

  CICELY hurled a cushion across the room.

  “That’s how I feel!” she said, and glared at her first-cousin once removed, Richard Spalding.

  “Good Lord!” he remarked, with a proper amount of sympathy in his lazy voice.

  “And you sit there—idling about in my room—laughing at me! I quite hate you, Richard!”

  “Oh, I say!” he expostulated, “I wasn’t laughing—honour bright!”

  Cicely looked scornful.

  “I’m absolutely sick of it all. Dead sick of it.” Cicely nodded so vigorously that her brown, bobbed curls seemed to jump. “I never want to go to another dance as long as I live.”

  “That’s bad,” said Spalding. “What’s brought on this sense of repletion?”

  “Everything. I've been trotted ’round till I want to scream! I feel like doing something desperate.”

  At that Spalding dragged himself upright and threw away his half-smoked cigarette.

  “Oh, splendid, Cis! I hoped that if I waited long enough, you’d melt. When shall it be? Be a sport, now, and—”

  Cicely covered her ears with her hands.

  “No, no, no! I don’t want to do anything as desperate as that!”

  Richard sank back again.

  “Thought it was too good to be true.” He pulled a leather diary from his waistcoat pocket and proceeded, gloomily, to make an entry.

  “What's that?” asked Cicely.

  “Diary.”

  “But what are you writing?”

  “‘Friday. Proposed to Cicely. Refused.’”

  In spite of herself, Cicely giggled.

  “Dicky, you are idiotic! When will you give it up?”

  “When we're married.”

  “We’re not going to be!” Cicely’s chin went up defiantly.

  “You can’t possibly tell. You never know what you may come to,” said Spalding cheerfully.

  “I’ll never come to that! And now we’ve got on to that subject I may as well tell you, Richard, that that’s another of the things I am fed up with. You ask me to marry you every day of the week, and I’m—”

  “No, I don’t!” Spalding was righteously indignant. “I’ve only asked you three times this week and three and a half last week. It’s down in the book, if you want to verify it.”

  “Can’t you be serious for one moment? That’s one of the things I hate about you. You're too beastly flippant! You don’t do anything. My husband’ll have to be a worker!”

  “He will be,” murmured Richard.

  Cicely disregarded him.

  “I know you think you do a lot—standing for Parliament, and—and all that sort of thing—but you’re just—flabby!”

  Richard, an athlete and an amateur boxer, blew another cloud of smoke.

  “Have you ever done a day’s work—hard, manual work—in your life?” demanded Cicely.

  “The complete park-orator? Four years in the trenches, that’s all.”

  Cicely was slightly mollified.

  “I don’t count that,” she said.

  “No, I didn’t think you would. What next?”

  “You’re too civilised. Too drawing-roomified. I’d want to feel that I could rely on my husband—not just that he’d be a great success at any party I took him to. All you think about is clothes and racing and whether your tie’s on straight. It’s not good enough for me.”

  “In five minutes’ time I think I shall propose to you again,” he said. “I’m sorry you’re so sick of everything.”

  “I’ve found a remedy,” said Cicely. “I am going into seclusion.”

  “What? Into a convent?”

  “No, silly. I am going into the country. I’ve taken a cottage.”

  “Cottage? You? D’you mean to say Uncle Jim's mad enough to let you go off on your own?”

  “Daddy knows that I am perfectly capable of looking after myself, thank you.”

  “Where is he?” demanded Richard, preparing to get up.

  “He's out. Besides, it’s nothing to do with you. As a matter of fact, I'm not going by myself.”

  Spalding looked slightly relieved.

  “I’m going with a great friend of mine, Maisie Duncannon.”

  “What, that fat, stolid girl who’s been hanging round here lately?”

  “Y–es. That’s one way of describing her. Are you satisfied?

  “No, I’m not!”

  Cicely reached out her hand to stroke her diminutive Pekinese. “Chu-Chu San is going, of course.”

  “That puts quite a different complexion on it,” he said. “He’ll look nice in the country. Stir the villagers up a bit.”

  “He’s a lot pluckier than your rotten bull-terrier!” said Cicely fiercely.

  Spalding brightened.

  “I say, will you take Bill? Do, Cis! I’d feel a lot happier about you if you’d got a decent sort of guard.”

  “Chu-Chu is a good guard!”

  “Oh, rather!” said Richard hastily. “But you must admit, he’s a bit small, what? Take old Bill—please! I’ve been wanting to get him out of town for some time.”

  Cicely hesitated. She knew that the last statement was entirely without truth, but she reflected that Bill would bring with him a certain sense of security.

  “He’d miss you,” she said, uncertainly.

  “Not a bit of it. Besides—” Richard checked himself. “Do take him, old girl!”

  “It’s awfully nice of you,” Cicely thanked him. “If you think it ’ud do him good—”

  “I do, most decidedly. By the way, where is this cottage?

  “Bly—I’m not going to tell you! No one’s going to know ’cept Daddy, and he’s promised not to tell a soul.”

  “Bly. I’ll remember that.”

  “You’ll never find it!”

  Richard recognised the challenging note.

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