Homing (14 page)

“The what?” He stood still, dripping with bags.

“I’ve got two Bank secretaries left over—Anne Phillips and Claudia Merton. You’re just the thing.”

“I’ll take Claudia,” said Roger, starting for the car.

“She’s spoken for, by somebody named Harold, who is somewhere in the North. And the other one is nicer.”

“I say, that reminds me! Mona is getting married tomorrow!”

“That’s wonderful!” said Virginia.

“She finally talked him into it,” Roger said lightly. “He’s only got a few days, and it’s the last leave he’ll have for ages, and almost nobody will be at the wedding, and it’s only a Registry Office do, and they’ll have to honeymoon at some hotel. None of that matters to Mona, she’s determined to have him anyhow.”

“She’s in love with him!” said Virginia.

“She must be,” said Roger, piling the bags into the car. “Dinah and Bracken will see them married, so it will be legal, and nobody is to send them wedding presents till later because they’ve no place to put them. May I drive?”

“If you’ll try to keep it on the ground,” said Virginia, getting in beside him.

Roger’s nonsense had smothered other, more intimate greetings. Soon they were all gathered round the fire in the drawing room inside the blackout, having tea with Mab. Virginia looked round at them with a rather tremulous smile—so many other Christmases, good and bad—and now they came to this one. And here again was Phoebe, with her firm dimpled chin and the white streak in her hair, who had come out of Williamsburg so long ago for the coronation summer—there had been two coronations since then, not counting Edward VIII—and had fallen in love with Archie’s brother Oliver, and yet had married her Williamsburg cousin and borne his child, which was Jeff. Phoebe’s life was far more improbable than any of the two dozen novels she had written, Virginia was thinking, not for the first time. And not for the first time she entertained a secret speculation about Jeff’s part in it.

To let Bracken raise Jeff as his heir to the newspaper made perfectly good sense in the closely knit family tradition, to be sure. Handicapped with a rheumatic heart from childhood, Jeff could not have followed Oliver into the Army in any circumstances. But it meant that Jeff’s daily life was lived in Bracken’s spacious household and not in the small Westminster flat near the War Office which Phoebe and Oliver established when they finally married at the end of the other war. It meant that Jeff travelled abroad with Bracken and a tutor instead of receiving the English public school education he would have had as Oliver’s stepson. It meant that Jeff and his mother met like this, as fellow guests and relations, not as a family unit. And it occurred to Virginia to wonder, not for the first time, about Oliver, whose only child by his first marriage had become an acid spinster shirking the war by living with some rather doubtful friends in the Lake District, where there was absolutely nothing to bomb.

It was conceivable that Oliver had been robbed of a companionship he might have valued, as Jeff grew up. But to look at him now, the soul of contentment, sitting as he always chose
to do within reach of Phoebe, his brilliant, caressing gaze often on her face, anticipating the moment she finished her tea so that he could take the empty cup away, or the moment she was ready for a cigarette so that he could supply and light it—Oliver was still after all these years a man devotedly in love.

And Phoebe? Not the maternal type, certainly, and honest enough to admit it—true granddaughter of Louise Day, whose children always recognized without surprise or resentment that nothing ever mattered to her, really mattered, to her dying day, but their father. Once more, Virginia gave it up, baffled again by the obvious satisfaction of all concerned with the arrangement as it stood. It worked. It didn’t deserve to, but it did. Jeff had a job, Bracken had an heir, Dinah had a son, and Phoebe and Oliver had each other.

Just then, as though on cue, Jeff and Sylvia appeared, driving their little two-seater on petrol kept for the trip so they could leave it at Farthingale for the duration, going back by train. And soon it was time for drinks, and the two remainders of the Bank were brought in and introduced and given sherry in which to drink the healths of Mona and Michael, and the six o’clock news was allowed to go by unheard—because, Virginia argued, there was never anything you could call news anyway, outside of Finland—and an almost pre-war relaxation briefly prevailed.

“How well I remember the 1918 Christmas,” Phoebe was saying dreamily through the smoke from her cigarette, looking like a very modern oracle. And the Bank regarded her with interest and respect, for it had barely been born in 1918, and yet she seemed almost as young as anybody. “Just think, Virginia—you and I can remember the first Peace Christmas from the old war.”

“So can I,” said Jeff unexpectedly, and his eyes went to his stepfather and found his eyes waiting, and they smiled at each other. “It was the first time I saw Oliver.”

“I never heard about that.” Mab’s interest in the family history roused at once, and she went to stand beside Jeff.

“What happened?”

“I was tickled to death,” said Jeff simply.

“So was I,” said Oliver.

Well,
thought Virginia in intense surprise. And here I was under the impression that everybody but me had forgotten…. Right here in this very room, twenty-one years ago, she thought….
Phoebe dropping to her knees to greet the self-possessed little boy she had left in Dinah’s care—and Jeff when he had kissed his mother, advancing confidently to her new husband without an introduction, his face alight with something like recognition, giving the tall man in the red-tabbed uniform both his hands, smiling, somehow
proud
—“It’s Oliver,” little Jeff said, as though the rest of them might not know. “My mother’s married to him.” And amid the general astonishment it was Oliver who gave them all the cue, casually accepting without any fuss that he was somehow already known to the child Phoebe had borne to another man while rebelliously loving himself in spite of everything.

But nothing came of it, Virginia was protesting silently to herself. We all noticed, but we all tried not to create hurdles in Jeff’s mind by noticing out loud. Jeff already belonged to Bracken and Dinah, it never made any difference in their plans that he knew Oliver by a kind of instinct. Oliver taught him to ride, like a favourite uncle—gave him a dog—they were often together when Jeff was small, they must have talked about the bond between them as Jeff grew older, and about the newspaper, and Jeff’s strange divorce of the blood. That year Jeff was so ill—Oliver often sat with him, brought him presents, read to him. What did they say to each other then, Jeff lying in bed, Oliver sitting beside it in a big chair—talking and laughing together—they must have discussed Jeff’s destiny then, and faced it together. It was
Oliver,
Virginia discovered now in a blinding light—it was Oliver who stood behind Jeff, and somehow kept him straight on it! Dear old dark horse Oliver, Archie’s favourite brother—Archie would have known—Archie would have told me. But Archie wasn’t there in 1918….

“All sorts of things happened,” Jeff was saying easily to Mab. “I learned how not to fall off a horse—much. I got my first dog. I had a lot of fun.”

“You see, he’d been living in New York with Dinah during the war,” Phoebe explained to Mab. “And that’s no place to have dogs and horses. It wasn’t Dinah’s fault.”

“I always had a good time with Dinah,” Jeff said instantly, and so he had, as far as it went.

Melchett came in to say that dinner was served.

Nigel, occupying what had been his father’s chair at the end of the table opposite Virginia, felt once again the subtle
enchantment of her company, and the love and contentment which was like a fragrance in the house she cherished as though it was one of her children. How very fortunate it was for them all, thought Nigel, that the commodiousness and location of Farthingale had earmarked it for the lesser evil of the Bank billeting, and allowed it to escape the devastation which sometimes accompanied the less desirable evacuees like the Birmingham children and mothers who were lodged roundabout the village. She had given freely of her time and energy and resources to the almost insoluble problems of the evacuees. It was only fair that she should have a little peace at the end of the day, of course, but it seemed that fairness had ceased to operate for the duration, and so one could only call it luck.

Erect in her chair, smiling and serene, she looked nevertheless very fine-drawn and weary—as who didn’t, he reminded himself severely, curbing again his lifelong tendency to sentimentalize his mother, when she herself would have been the last to encourage or even passively to endure it. But he wondered once more, while carrying on a comfortable conversation with Phoebe on his right, why no one had ever contrived to marry Virginia during the long widowhood which had begun before she turned forty. Doubtless the man who might have won that privilege had died on the Somme, or at Passchendaele. She was not the only woman of her generation to be wasted and lonely in the years between the wars. And now it was beginning all over again, and the cream would be skimmed off the new generation, just as things had begun to right themselves again a little, in England. And this time, even with American money to help out, the kind of life his mother had maintained at Farthingale would be finished, perhaps forever….

At this moment she caught his eyes down the table and indicated the silent girl on his left, momentarily stranded by Roger’s interest in something Oliver was saying. Obediently, Nigel turned to his left, and encountered the most enormous eyes he had ever seen—grey, black-fringed, with the lids deeply indented below the brows so that she looked as though she had just waked up, or had been crying. Anne. Well, she was young enough for last names not to matter now. Nigel had done no more in his turn to fill his life after his own loss than Virginia, and in his solitude in chambers and his inactive war job he had acquired a somewhat elderly state of mind for thirty-one.
While he was trying to think of something suitable to say to her, Anne relieved him of the necessity.

“It’s like a play,” she said.

“A play?” he repeated densely.

“All this.” Her small, embarrassed gesture embraced the whole house and its occupants. “Like—Noel Coward, almost.”

“
What?
” said Nigel, rather horrified.

“Well, I mean—” Her generous mouth spread into a rueful smile. “To you it’s an old story, you belong here. But to me, every day I live in this house is as though I had bought a ticket and the curtain had just gone up. You don’t see what I mean, do you? You don’t have any idea what it’s like to somebody who—who isn’t at home here.”

“I think I do,” he said slowly, giving it his undivided attention in his flattering barrister’s way. “As a matter of fact, I was thinking something like that myself a minute ago—even though I am at home here. You mean it’s a survival from another world—a museum piece.”

“You certainly can’t call your mother a museum piece,” she said sensibly. “There was never anybody less obsolete. It’s just as I told her the first day I came here—I’ve read about it, I’ve bought tickets to it, and now here I am living in it, only—I don’t know my lines.”

“And where did you live before you came here?” he asked, with the kindly interest he always showed to children and kittens and earnest young women he had never seen before.

“Wimbledon. With my cousins. It always sounds silly to say it, but I’m an orphan, and you needn’t say you’re sorry because I’ve been one most of my life and it’s not sad any more. I was brought up by my mother’s aunt, if you can follow that, and it’s been very dull and dreary at times, but now that I’m earning my way I felt I ought to go on living there at least long enough to pay them back a little money for keeping me all these years.”

“Surely not as many years as all that!” he protested, smiling.

“Well, it
seems
a long time,” Anne said. “To all of us, I fancy. It’s a small house, and rather crowded. You’re a lawyer, aren’t you. I suppose that’s why one instinctively tells you the story of one’s life, with some dim idea that you’ll see to it that everything comes out all right.”

“Is that your impression of the law?” He was amused.

“Well, yes—as soon as the innocent man puts himself in
the hands of the brilliant K.C. he’s as good as saved from the gallows.”

“And what gallows must I save you from?”

“From Wimbledon, maybe.” Her gaze faltered and dropped. “But you’ve already done that, without trying. It can never be as bad again, because once I was here.”

“That’s very charming of you,” said Nigel, a little at a loss, unaccountably touched.

“I didn’t intend to be charming,” she said briefly, and “I say,” said Roger on her other hand, “we’re organizing a Christmas party for the Observer’s Post on the hill tomorrow afternoon. There’s no petrol, so we’ll put the girls in the pony-cart with the food and the rest of us can go on bikes, and we’ll surprise them—”

“Surprise them too much and we’ll get shot at,” said Jeff.

“Well, it’s a very dull job up there with nothing to do,” Roger said. “Cold, too. We ought to ginger it up a bit for them. Virginia says we can have some sandwiches and mince pies, and tea in thermos bottles. You’ll go, won’t you, Anne?”

“Yes, of course,” she said quickly. “I’ve got some chocolate. I could give them that.”

What a nice little creature it is, Nigel thought. Giving up her chocolate to a bunch of strangers on a cold job. I’ll buy her the biggest box of Cadbury’s best that I can find, with a pink ribbon on it, for a Christmas present.

“You’ll have to carry out your errand of mercy in the morning tomorrow or get caught in the blackout,” Virginia reminded them. “Because in the afternoon we’re all going to the Parish Hall to see Miss Merton’s children do their Christmas play.”

And there was nothing to do, with Claudia sitting right there, but express polite enthusiasm and acceptance.

“Of course
if
we went afterwards and got caught in the blackout I could walk ahead of the cart with a torch and Jeff could follow behind with a torch—” Roger reflected wistfully.