A World of Love (23 page)

So was the van. Satisfaction yet disappointment (for something else might have happened at the last moment) spread slowly over the watching faces, announcing that it was out of view. So that was that. Fred, who’d already looked at his watch, must now be off to get on with something: he vanished forthwith into the house, taking a cut through the hall to the yard door. Lilia began: ‘Well, I may as well…’ sighed, and alternately smoothed her forearms, drawing out the action as long as possible. ‘What were
you
intending to do, Antonia?’ she asked, as though for aid.

‘I don’t know.—Or do you mean now?’

‘Well, this afternoon.—Oh, I didn’t mean in the future!’

‘And why not?’ asked Antonia, absently scanning the face of Montefort.

‘Look,’ said Lilia, pointing, ‘you’ve left your cup on the grass!’

Antonia went back and picked up the cup. ‘But for the future,’ she said, ‘we’d have nothing left.’

The van bounded along smoothly, at a rate appropriate to its size—the obelisk dropped from view, leaving the skyline to be one continuous flowing change, and the road after the early miles began to untrammel itself from hedges, so that space pastorally widened on either hand. Banks were innocent-blue with scabious, whole fields chalky with moon-daisies, and trees, hiding one knew not what, made islands. Arched stone bridges swooped with the van across rivers as unexpected as they were small—and though for some way yet to the girls’ eyes nothing intrinsically was new or failed to resemble something they’d seen before, the unmistakable breath of the unknown came to meet them ever more strongly, and pure strangeness lay over the opening country. Glimpses, snatched from them half-seen, caused them this way or that way to duck their heads: they were, as they could not help showing, unused to touring—or, in Jane’s case, at any rate in Ireland: when in favour, she’d been to the sea with Antonia, but that, from Montefort, had been almost all. Today, their course lay inland: Harris was singlemindedly heading north-west, towards a defile through the range of mountains dividing this corner of County Cork from the large lush lakelike County Limerick plain.

Nor, enlarged by the clarity of today, did the mountains hesitate to come closer: before one knew they were crowding around the van, which traced its nonchalant course between them. At the outset, Harris’s attitude had been uncertain. The order along the front seat was as follows: himself, Maud, the non-dimensional Gay David, and Jane with an elbow out of a window. Something in the set-up was clearly more than he’d bargained for: consequently, all to be said of Harris for some time was that he drove. Not till they were into the scenery did he volunteer that nothing was like Switzerland.

‘No,’ agreed Jane, ‘I suppose not.’

‘Or where this Mr Richard’s coming from—Colorado.’ ‘Oh?’

‘So I understand.’

‘You understand he’s coming from Colorado, or that Colorado is as unlike as Switzerland?’

‘Never said anything of that sort,’ said Harris, vexedly braking to avoid a goat. ‘For one thing, Switzerland’s full of snow.’

‘I could have told you that,’ said Maud, who had been remarkably silent so far. ‘What on earth’s he doing in Colorado?’

Jane, also interested, lent ear; but Harris no more than gave out: ‘Ranching, they principally do there; but I couldn’t tell you.’

‘Or why isn’t he staying in Colorado?’ pursued Maud.

‘Ask me another,’ said Harris sternly. ‘And what have you got there with you—a pixie, eh?’

For Maud’s duality as a passenger became oppressive—sidelong communication, other than with her sister, had been going on, off and on and more on than off, ever since the van had turned out of Montefort. Each time the child slid down on the seat she’d seemed to be dragging with her another entity, whom she kept down with her in a grapple; and each time she’d reared herself up again she’d done so with an oblique bullying hoist, forcing whatever it might be to sit still more erect, take still more furious notice than she had decided to do herself. She and her familiar would have been matched but that Maud just always came out on top. This preoccupation with Gay David, whose chastening if mind-broadening outing the afternoon evidently was, had relieved the others of much of Maud, at least up to now; but it rattled Harris, particularly up here in the mountains. He had scented something fishy about this trip when the diversion to Montefort had been ordered, though what her ladyship might be up to this time was of little interest to him. But unnatural occupancy of his van he had not forseen, nor would he stand for it. ‘Who said you were to, anyway?’ he said nastily.

‘Oh, Harris,’ Jane interposed, bored, ‘don’t go on like that! That’s only Maud’s elemental.’

‘Elemental what?’ said the chauffeur.

‘To keep her happy,’ the elder sister said. ‘Anyone must have somebody, don’t you find?’

I never found it necessary,’ said Harris.

‘Happy!’ said Maud bitterly. ‘With this fat foul fiend?
Grrrrr!’

‘Well, leave him alone,’ said Jane; then gave herself to the last of the mountain landscape, for they now were winding downhill towards the flat; then yawned, like Peregrine or her father, then observed: ‘It does seem thousands of miles to come.’

Harris remarked: ‘And brought here for nothing.’

Jane considered Harris went too far, till he surprised her very much by explaining: ‘His mother was to have been at the castle; that was to have been the idea. But now she’s cancelled.’

‘But I didn’ t know that he had a mother.’

Harris nodded. ‘Lifelong friend of her ladyship’s, until recently. Mrs Priam, her name was.’

‘Isn’t it now?’

‘Shan’t be seeing much more of
her
, I suppose. Anyway, whatever it was, she’s cancelled. So now what’s he going to do?’

Jane, though uncertainly, said she could not imagine.

‘Not much for him to do at the castle, is there,’ Harris continued. ‘Stuck it out last time he and his mother was here because of the fishing; but look what the fishing’s like this year. No, you can be a good son once too often.’

‘But her ladyship—’ Jane broke off, confused.

‘I should know,’ Harris went on, ‘I was a good son, up to any reasonable point. Well, they won’t get
him
off another plane again in a hurry, when you think how he could have gone through to London.’

‘What’s he like?’ said Jane.

‘He’s all right.’

Jane felt all at sea. ‘Well, Harris, this should at least be a lucky day
 f
or
you,’
she at length said, with a deferential glance at the omen wilting in his buttonhole. Harris cleared his throat and said: ‘Well, you might have thought so.’

The van broached the Limerick plain: bowling along the straight, straight road it grew smaller under so much sky. For the girls there was little to look at other than much that was much the same—this, some of the richest land in Ireland, was showing the same anxiety as their land at home; but the climax of the expectation seemed to be over, the obdurate cloud-ceiling still saying nothing. There was, though still there were daisies, a smell of dust. The air, of which the flatness allowed for much, seemed if anything harder than the land—birds as though labouring flew through it, under the influence of the hush, and one could imagine with what effort anything larger than a bird must have to continue to forge its way; though at the altitude out of sight at which the airliner anxiously must be hastening in order to converge upon the van at the given time, at the given spot, all might be otherwise—one could not say. The passengers, unable to see down, might all the same be looking down, just as Jane, unable to see up, was looking up—her forehead out of the window. Maud might not have been beside her; and as for Harris he drove on, on, on, in what seemed a stern sleep.

There was an ebb of the senses, during the plain.

But here came Limerick city, which was something; indeed—as the suburbs gave place to Georgian extensive streets, shops and infatuated shoppers—much. ‘Oh, look,’ cried Jane, ‘there’s even an officer in uniform!’

‘Irish army,’ said Harris, able to see anything without looking.

‘And what’s the matter with that?’ Maud wanted to know, rightly incensed.

‘Not when you’ve been in the
Army,’
said Harris, ‘see?’ He pulled up at lights, which gave them a moment: Jane studied the reflection of the van in the sufficient window of an emporium
— herself, in it, in town, in an impotent jam of halted traffic, caught; and she saw why she could not go back to London, to the girls’ residential club where Antonia put her when at a loss, to the room-mate who was the sort of bore who was not a virgin. Wonder what more’s been happening to
her,
she thought, hoping never to have to know. The lights changed; the van slid forward across the main street towards the open river ahead; the closure on Jane lightened and was gone—having been due probably to the businesslike darkness of the Limerick houses at that point.
‘We’re
a military family,’ she told Harris, who restricted himself to crossing the river bridge among many and reckless bicycles; while Maud, impressed, stared up then down the Shannon. ‘Or rather, we were.’

Over the bridge, they were into the County of Clare which, due to end in a mad void utter rocky declivity to the West, had nothing to show so far but substantial villas. ‘What, died out, have you?’ asked Harris idly, overshooting a bus.

Maud said: ‘Good gracious, no!’

‘There are no more men, Maud,’Jane admitted, letting her eye be caught by a profusion of roses in one of the gardens.

‘What d’you call your father?’ asked Harris, shocked.

‘No more to come, I mean.’

‘Well, never say die,’ he said, though not with the matter deeply at heart. Sucking in a cheek on the sisters’ side he conveyed his wish to be bothered by them no more, his exclusive purpose from now on being to reach the airport; and Jane, as though to aid him by concentration, sat for some time leaning a little forward, brow to the road like a beautiful figurehead’s. Out petered the villas with their stories. Straight was the road again, with wooded green hills engraved along at a distance to its right, giving there a niche for a nameless mansion, there a backdrop to a ruinous tower: patches of rushes in the fields proclaimed that this was a marshy watershed, across which ran the highway bare as a dyke. What was amazing was that the world could change so fast—where they had been, where was it now? And still more, what was to come? Air as it tore by the open windows entered and lifted the speeding van, and this was in a sort of crescendo, making Jane’s hands clasp and reclasp.

Maud stirred. ‘Are we late for the aeroplane?’

‘
I
don’t know,’ said her sister, with an uncaring laugh. ‘Are we, or aren’t we?’ she put it to Harris.

‘You
don’t have to worry,’ was all he elected to let them know.

‘But I want,’ said Maud, ‘to see it come down.’

‘I should rather like to,’ said Jane also.

‘Well, you will,’ he said, ‘if that’s all you want. That plane’s got to come over the Atlantic—what d’you expect it to be, then: before time? Also I’ve known them go round and round.’

‘Round and round what?’

‘Till they get the come-on from the control.’

‘Then why are we hurrying?’ asked Maud, still not altogether easy in mind.

‘Because
I
like to be on time, see?’ said Harris, showing a dangerous eye.

‘Oh, shut up, Maud,’ interceded Jane.

Water skeined the landscape. The Shannon river, lost since Limerick city, was drawing nearer to name the airport, and a tributary quickened its way towards it. Over the tributary, a humpbacked bridge, over which on guard stood up a castle like Shalott—willows whitened, aspens quivered; and how far did the top turrets see? The van whisked over the bridge, into a shaded swastika-angled section of the road due soon to go on without them to Galway, for soon would be coming the Turn Off. Subdued by the trees and by the narrowed intensity of this all-but-last phase, both girls said nothing—when the Turn Off did come, it was a vast taut cemented causeway, special, polished-looking like solidified water: all else stood back from it in awe, for it looked like the future and for some was. Yet this the Latterly van was now travelling in an accustomed way. ‘How do you beware of low-flying aircraft?’ Maud asked, 
reading a warning notice.

‘Time enough to see when the time comes.’

Miles of runway were sunk in this coarse grass. The magnetic little buildings of the great airport, sky-flattened, were appearing to circle, shifting from point to point like a hard mirage as the causeway turned—they were all but there, and now here they were. Harris parked the van. The sisters, one on each side of him, walked past the introductory flowerbeds and flagpoles, instinctively trying to hold their heads as though they had often been here before. Knowledgeably pulling at a succession of glassy doors he caused the party to enter: here was a place of indoor settees, ashtrays and low tables, not like a room but like nothing else. One whole wall however was a window, outside which an airliner was to be seen sitting upon its tail—the sight of that hit them in the eye, causing Maud to say, ‘
Well
…?’ to Harris, with bitter and unutterable reproach.