The Last September (18 page)

“Listen,” said Livvy, clutching Lois’s elbow. “Ah, listen, Lois: what is the matter? That is a natty jumper she’s got. I wonder has she the pattern? Of course, it’s partly her figure. I wonder now that she didn’t marry—Lois, will we go up to your room?”

Lois did not believe the bed was made. Livvy blushed in her little defined way and said she wished to be confidential. So they went into the drawing-room— where Gerald’s kiss was hanging: all the doubts of the night could not disperse it—and leaned on the grand piano. Lois was surprised to notice Livvy breathing on to her breast bone and drawing something up on a long blue ribbon from intimate depths. A ring dangled. “No one could be more surprised than myself,” said Livvy modestly, averting her eyes from a finger on which the ring had flowered.

“Oh, well
done!”
 
Lois could have exclaimed with spontaneity. Checking this, she said doubtfully— “Oh, my dear… .”

“Who do you guess?”

“Mr… . Mr. Armstrong.”

“Aren’t you quick! Listen—swear that you won’t tell. For my father doesn’t know and I think he’d kill me.”

“How did you … how did he? …”

“Well, it was like this. You see, he asked me at Mrs. Fogarty’s when would he see me again, and I said I might be going to Cork to the dentist Thursday, and he said he might be going to Cork too. So I thought no more of it. Think what I felt when, I getting out at the station, I saw him there standing as large as life and watching the train like a dog. So he asked me where was I going for tea, so I said if I wasn’t alone I might have dropped in at the Imperial because of the band but that my father didn’t like me to go there alone because of the officers. He said would I go with him, and it was raining and my appointment wasn’t till half-past five, so I said that we ought not to be seen together, but I turned my hat right down and we went in and heard the band. He seemed very much confused, so I asked him was there anything on his mind and he said there wasn’t and I said there must be. So he went very scarlet and pulled his belt and looked up at the ceiling and said he did love me. Then the waiter came with the tea and I only hope he will not recognise me again. When the waiter had gone I said he might speak lower, and he said he couldn’t because of the band. Then I said that of course a thing like this came as a shock to a girl, and he said did it, and I said indeed it did. I said I was not sure if I could get accustomed to the idea of marriage at all, and he looked very much surprised. I said when would he wish it to be? And he said the worst of it was he had no prospects. I said we Irish were not mercenary, and that anyway I knew he had an uncle— It was a great disadvantage to me, Lois, having to keep down so low under my hat all the time—for I could see the Hartigans’ aunt, Mrs. Foxe-O’Connor, the other side of a palm tree, and a man my father buys cattle from kept rising up and staring round the room. And what with this and my being naturally very much confused, and David creaking about in his chair, and the band, I don’t know how much he heard of what I said at all.

“However, we thought it might be well to buy a ring, though I can’t wear it. David looked quite wandering and I had to get him across the traffic. And I felt pretty curious myself. You see, we have neither of us been engaged before, though I have had two offers. Then he said he must go to the barracks, so he put me into a tram to go to the dentist’s. Presently I noticed it was the wrong tram but I hadn’t the heart to get out till it was round the corner after the trouble he’d taken, the poor boy. But the tram kind of bolted and I got out near the Cathedral and had to take a very expensive car. I was late at the dentist’s—he had out two of my teeth.”

All in a dream, it appeared, Livvy had wandered through wet residential Cork. All in a dream she had sat and bled from the gums in a train. She opened her mouth to show the two holes the dentist had made as though they were wounds of love, and Lois looked into them solemnly. Had they kissed at all? No, they had not had the opportunity. They could have taken a cab, but Livvy did not think it moral to drive in a cab with a man, for it roused his passions. Lois said she thought the smell inside of a cab would put anyone off, and Livvy said that in that case a cab would be waste of money.

“But can he marry?
Can
a second lieutenant?”

“Oh, I can wait some years. But I shall go and stay with his relations and wear a ring and all, so that there need not be any uncertainty.”

“Why not tell your father now and have it announced?” said Lois hopefully. She watched her own face looking up from the mottled piano-top and felt very singular, distant and destined, like Melisande. “I don’t think,” she said, “that I should be afraid of your father.”

For Livvy’s father seemed really a very despondent, mild man with a yellow drooping moustache that he had always to lift up over the rim of his tea-cup. It was hard to picture him chasing around after Livvy with a blackthorn, or smiting his fist on the dinner-table so that (as Livvy declared) the plates leaped, or going down with the half of a tart in his hand to destroy the cook. The worst she had seen him do, when Livvy was late, was to take his watch out and stand with his thumb on the lid—not looking at it, as though he could not abide the thought of Time—-while two or three bubbles ran up his throat. He was a widower: Livvy declared her mother had died of him. He was a teetotaller: half a decanter of whisky was in his tantalus but he had lost the key. Lois now assured Livvy her father would be the ideal father-in-law; she was sure that David would like him. He would come and stay and be so absolutely unobtrusive.

“He has a prejudice against Army officers,” said Livvy despondently. “He wouldn’t mind if it was the Navy—but what chance have I, living so far inland? If David was a general with gold all down his front and spoke of marriage, I think he’d still kill him. He says I’ll get the house burnt over his head with my goings on.”

“But if he heard you’d been compromised at the Imperial.”

“A girl can’t be compromised in the afternoon,” said Livvy gloomily.

Mr. Thompson did not entertain very much, but Lois remembered once staying to supper there, early that summer, with David and Gerald. That was before times got so bad and the officers had to be back early in barracks. Mr. Thompson’s dining-room looked on to trees that fanned little gusts of light over the table then closed again in green darkness; it smelt of meat and there was an enormous pilastered mahogany sideboard like the front of a temple, inside which they could hear mice running about. Mr. Thompson was silent—from fear, she thought, rather than disapproval—he kept drawing long black horsehairs from the seat of his chair and laying them out on the cloth. At each hair, David and Gerald leaned forward and opened their mouths to speak. But Mr. Thompson went down in his collar so that they could not: they spoke to each other. And Lois, looking under her lids, had marvelled at this fortress of many opinions. His sister Miss Thompson was present, but she was deaf. The dining-room was dark red, with a smoky ceiling, and Gerald said afterwards he had felt like a disease in a liver. When the blancmange came in it lay down with a sob and Miss Thompson frowned at it. “Death of the cow,” thought Lois, and saved this up. Livvy kept looking warningly at her friends, but they were all polite. Some ducks filed in at the French window; the guests flapped with their napkins but Mr. Thompson said: “Oh let them be,” and sure enough the ducks went round the table with their usual urgent look and out by the window again. Mr. Thompson got up and shut out the May air. “Times change for the worse,” he said to Gerald, who agreed with him so emphatically that David had to repeat the interchange to the anxious Miss Thompson. No wonder Livvy found home dull.

But the happiness of the evening, the closeness-up of the four to each other, the tremors they all transmitted, the cramp of inside laughter, remained with Lois as though they had held hands tightly under some large oppression. And—under that pressure of laughter compact to bursting point—a particular stored excitement of pride and pleasure, a jump of intimacy at each other’s voices and movements. And the awareness stayed when, afterwards, they had laughed themselves out and were empty and solemn, tingeing their interchanges with unusual shyness. That supper marked a degree in her appreciation of Gerald—his crystalline niceness.

For Mr. Thompson, still with a little blancmange hanging off his moustache, got up and left them. And later Miss Thompson stood pulling down her skirt on her hips, when Gerald opened the door so beautifully that she had to go out through it, to perfect an experience. Then Livvy, to show what she thought of her family, got up and waltzed round the table, tugged open the window, ran on to the lawn and with unabated gentility jumped over all the croquet hoops, David following. And Gerald turned for the first time to look at Lois, who looked away. They poured out more barley-water and, in an ecstasy of bad manners, bubbled into their glasses. They went out and sat on the seat by the croquet lawn, under a bush of syringa. Waxy petals touched Lois’s arm stretched out along the back of the seat, the air smelt of almonds, moths came slanting out of the bush, and glittered away on the dusk.

Miss Thompson declared it had been a pleasure, and had asked them to come again. Lois now said: “I should tell your aunt, she has so little to interest her; I am sure she would be wonderfully sympathetic.”

“I always find it difficult,” Livvy said, “to open the subject of marriage.” And as she looked down, looked significant, the word did flower over with implications, so that it was, to Lois, at once in a pit and upon a pinnacle that Livvy leaned and frowned and dangled her garnet ring.

“If only David were more determined!”

“But aren’t you certain he wants to marry you?”

“Yes, but he needs to have it all arranged for him. Just because I’m such a capable girl … Listen, Lois: if you were to be engaged to Gerald Lesworth it would in a kind of way set the ball rolling. Then I should say to my father—”

“Oh, but then I—”

“Of course he may not ask you. But that being so, I should say to my father—”

“Ssh!
”

Laurence was well into the drawing-room before he recognised Livvy’s shoulder-blades and saw her pink reflection nodding at him in a glass. He flushed with annoyance and bowed. There was ink on his forehead, between the eyebrows, where he had rubbed with the tip of his pen. “How d’you do?” he said and, to Lois: “Has Miss Norton started? Started—set out—gone to village? Eh?”

“Oh … yes.”

“Pity. Did she seem to be … waiting about at all?”

Livvy giggled. Lois said, oh no, she had not seemed to be waiting about. Why?

“Curiosity. I could have gone for her; I have nothing to do.”

“She hadn’t got anything to do either.”

“Naturally.” The two girls leaning shoulder to shoulder on the piano filled Laurence with an unutterable depression. He could not leave them. He went to a table of books, took up a book on Nigeria, looked intently into it and blew some dust from between the pages. He felt the only living thing had gone out of the house. He felt hungry, though it was not yet half-past eleven. He could not go upstairs and work, or in fact 
settle down to anything. He felt as though he were the weather: “Le
temps, c’est moi
”
He wished he were the sort of man who would go out to the yard and take the car to pieces. Marda was the only person who found him amusing—but perhaps he was not amusing, perhaps they were right. “Mrs. Montmorency did not sleep either,” he said. “Notice her eyes this morning?”

“Eh?” said Livvy.

“This is a dreadful house, Miss Thompson. I should not stay to lunch if I were you. Besides, it’s only mutton, I asked the cook. Lois, have you any foolscap? I thought I might write a novel.”

“Oh
do!
 
Oh, how lovely! But I have no foolscap, ask Uncle Richard. He has some paper over from when he was going to write his memoirs … Laurence,
are
you going to stay in here?”

“Well, I’d rather not.” It occurred to him that he might do worse than walk over to lunch with the Careys. There would be a freshness in their dullness and dampness after the dullness and dampness here, while his own would have a charm for them, a fertilising strangeness. The households had not seen anything of each other for three days. Both families had driven over to Castle Trent but had missed each other by half an hour. There would be the raid to discuss, and how the Trents were taking it: also, the Careys lived well—at the worst there could not be anything worse than mutton. “I am going to lunch at Mount Isabel— any message to Nona?”

“
Oh
,” said Lois. Her eyes went dark with vivid and deep disappointment at the thought of anybody doing anything without her. She missed everything, no one would ever care, she would never marry. She blinked as Laurence went out and shut the door.

“Funny thing,” said Livvy, “the way your cousin blushes whenever he sees me.” She looked at herself in the glass and settled her side hair. “Now, Lois, what I always feel: a girl is only young once—”

“I expect,” said Lois, “that that is all for the best.”

THOUGH to 
tell you the truth,” said Lady Naylor, circulating among the begonia beds at Mount Isabel, “though I am in a way sorry, I am not altogether sorry that she is going.”

She glanced closely at Mrs. Carey’s profile, to see that her exact shade of meaning had been taken. Mrs. Carey nodded and wrinkled up her forehead, very profoundly. She was thinking about something else. She stooped, pulled off three dead begonias and crumpled them into her pocket.