Kissing Kin (29 page)

“Don’t you ever—” She broke off, and felt her eyes fill
foolishly, and looked down, tracing the oaken carving of the sideboard with her fingertip, tongue-tied and insurgent as always in the face of his imperturbability.

“You will feel better if you say it,” said Sosthène, and her head came up defiantly, to find his brooding face very near. For a moment she stared back at him, very much on the defensive, and without knowing it utterly defenceless and pathetic. If he had moved, if even his eyes had showed what he was thinking, she would have been in his arms. There was a moment when they both knew that, and his continued immobility stung her pride like a slap.

“I was going to say, don’t you ever feel an impulse?” she demanded, hurt and ashamed. “Don’t you ever feel
anything?
” And then, because he would not be goaded or drawn, but an almost invisible tightening of his lips betrayed him, quick tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks. “Oh, Sosthène, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to be rude—” She could not meet his eyes now. “I wish I could take it the way you do, but I’m not like you, I never will be I’m not patient and philosophical and detached and decorous like you, I wish—”

“My Camille—” His hand came down, firm and warm, on her faltering fingers on the oaken grooves, his words were barely audible. “Do not make any mistake about this, I feel the same as you do. But don’t wish—don’t revolutionize—and don’t cry. At least not now, it is nearly nine. Just wait—as I do.” And when she lifted a rather blurry but dazzled face to him, he drew his forefinger lightly across her lips, like a kiss. “Wait,” he said, and turned away, carrying his plate to the table.

C
AMILLA SAT
in the deepening twilight by Calvert’s bed, her head against the back of the chair, her hands lying listless on its arms, her eyes half closed. She was so placed that she could watch his sleeping face, and he could see her without moving his head when he woke.

For days now, since she had brought him back from the hospital in Richmond to Sue’s house, she had sat like that, watching, and at last, only this afternoon, her reluctant
intelligence
had forced her to accept the fact that he was not going to get well. It was a family legend how Cousin Fitz had got well after Cuba, and everyone had given him up too. But Fitz had had Gwen to get well for, and a wife, it seemed, was worth more to a man than a sister, and had a stronger hold. Calvert’s leg had got worse instead of better since they left England more than three years ago, and the Richmond doctor had finally insisted on amputation. But that needn’t kill a man, Grandfather Dabney had lost a leg in ’64, and apparently been none the worse for it. Grandfather Dabney got well to marry Grandmother Charlotte. Perhaps if Calvert could have married Jenny Keane….

Camilla turned her head restlessly against the back of the
chair. You couldn’t blame Jenny. Nobody blamed Jenny. But Raymond had not come back, nor been heard from. And it was hard not to wonder, had Raymond been positively reported killed, if Jenny might perhaps have seen things a little
differently
—so that Calvert might have had something besides his twin to live for—and never lost his leg at all….

The house was very still, she realized gradually—almost as though Calvert were already dead. Until recently Fitz’s children used to come to tea and make a cheerful babble, but now even Calvert admitted that family parties exhausted him. Rhoda, fourteen, Stephen, twelve, and Sylvia, ten—nice children Fitz had, well-behaved but spirited, a little inclined to dramatize. Gwen, who came of theatrical people, said
ruefully
that it was the ham in them, and worried about it. Fitz, who wrote musical comedies at a safe distance from Broadway and never went there except when he had a new show coming on, said he prayed every night that he had not begot a couple of soubrettes and a tenor, but Fitz never worried about
anything
. Camilla, who had helped the children get up their Christmas amateur show for two years now, suspected that Fitz and Gwen had something on their hands ahead, but was secretly on the other side. Her own music was still neglected, except as family entertainment and to amuse Calvert. Her voice, she supposed, was rusty and getting old by now. You had to start young or you never got any place. So the music was gone, along with Calvert. Sosthène was gone too, back to Cannes with Sally.

Even now, Camilla could smile at the memory of Sally’s impact on Williamsburg. Sally had arrived there rather in the Bernhardt tradition, in a cyclone of trunks, furs, Parisian scent, jewel-cases, Pekinese, French maids, carriage rugs, and the mysterious, tranquil Sosthene, attentive, smiling, interested, untalkative, immediately adored by the young, who had never seen a live Frenchman before, or a Pekinese.

Sue, who had been a little prepared by letters, treated him as though she was an indulgent older sister and was not at all
shy of him, and he regarded her with respectful delight. Not perhaps as well preserved as Sally, certainly not dressed nor made up with any such art, Sue was still quite irresistible, with her gay smile, her pretty voice, and her neat, slender figure. Sue and Sally kissed and cried a little, on that first meeting, and for days afterwards found endless absorbing things to talk about. Their conversation, which must have been mostly Greek to Sosthène, never appeared to bore him in the least.

Sally’s brother Sedgwick, an irrepressible man, called his wife’s attention to the fact that the wages of Sally’s sins were obviously the shining exception which proved the dull old rule, and Melicent laughed and said who
was
Sosthène, but nobody knew. Somehow, without being put into words by anybody, certainly not aided in any way by the family, the impression had seeped through Williamsburg that Sosthène was Sally’s son under the rose, which was the one thing the family was sure he was not, but as everybody else seemed to like it that way and went out of their way to be kind to him in that belief, there was no point in taking any notice of it. And Sosthène, taking Mimi for her daily walks in the quiet side-streets of the little town, was greeted with a sort of tactful tenderness by the elders, gazed at with friendly curiosity by the young ladies, and followed by the children, who were
permitted
by Mimi in a disdainful sort of way to pat her.

But Sally had found Williamsburg more ravaged by time than were the faces she had known when they were young, and when she had once viewed the ugly paved main street with its gaunt telephone poles, dirty garages and filling stations, the corrugated iron buildings and tawdry shops which the
war-time
population of the works at Penniman nearby had brought into being, she took refuge in Sue’s big house and well-tended garden, which were still unchanged, and refused to go out again, and told Sosthène not to look, for it wasn’t the same.

She stayed on through the summer of 1919, and they tried to coax her to stay for Christmas. But she had heard from friends in Cannes that everything was much as she had left it
there, and from her lawyers that her fortune had not suffered as much as might have been feared—and a longing for her own possessions of a lifetime and for intimates who spoke French and thought in the French way and remembered the things she remembered which had happened since she was a girl, grew upon her. “It is no use,” she said to Sue, rather sadly but with a Gallic lift of her shoulders. “I do not belong here, really. I am only playing at coming home. My home is there in France, where I lived so long. Here I have been dead for forty years. I feel like a ghost.” She shivered. “I haunt myself. We will go back to Cannes.”

And a week later she was gone, and with her went all the trunks, and Mimi, and Elvire, and Sosthène.

Camilla had been in Richmond with Calvert, seeing doctors, when the decision was taken, and they hurried back to
Williamsburg
at the week-end to say goodbye. Sally gave her a diamond ring, and said she must come to Cannes as soon as Calvert was well enough to travel with her, and make a long visit, for the climate might do wonders for him. Camilla, who at that time thought such a thing might be possible, promised to come. The invitation, so sincerely meant, was about all that gave her courage to see Sosthène go from her like that, for they had had very little time in each other’s vicinity after all, owing to Calvert’s continuing bad health. None of the
situations
which she had dreaded had arisen, therefore, which could only be regarded as a blessing, even though at the same time it meant that she hardly ever saw him. And they could not make an opportunity during those last few days for a dozen words alone together without becoming obvious. Their
goodbye
was said publicly in the flurry of departure, and she had to avoid Calvert for the rest of the day for fear his unspoken sympathy would break down her precarious self-control.

And now she knew that only too soon she would be quite free to go to Cannes—alone. For what? To hang about, waiting for a look, a few words from him, while Sally’s friends looked on with perhaps too knowing eyes? That wouldn’t do. What
was there, then, when Calvert didn’t need her any more? Nothing in Williamsburg, nothing in Richmond. Their mother had got used to doing without them, and had her own social set and gave dull little luncheons and card parties. All the girls Camilla’s age had married the boys they grew up with and had babies, or, accepting spinsterhood prematurely, bad dried up. She was twenty-eight. An awkward, in-between sort of age, especially if you weren’t married. Thirty-ish women weren’t very exciting to the average man who encountered them for the first time at dinner parties or dances, unless they were like Phoebe at that age and had accomplished something outstanding. The nursing Camilla had done and her war experience didn’t count. Everybody had forgotten the war. Nobody wanted to think about it any more.

When faced by any sort of dilemma, the family always thought first of Aunt Sue and then of Bracken in New York. It seemed to Camilla that there was no sort of point of
burdening
Sue with belated revelations concerning Sosthène, since so far her state of mind had apparently gone unnoticed and could be covered over by the perpetual anxiety about Calvert. But Bracken might hold the solution this time. He and Dinah always spent the summer in England and then went on to the Continent, while he had a sniff round his European bureaux. Camilla seemed to remember something about a new
correspondent
on the Vienna post, which meant that Bracken would be going there. Vienna had the best music in the world—or used to have. Perhaps some time—perhaps next year—she might ask Bracken to take her with him to Vienna….

She may have dozed, in the big chair. She roused to
something
like a draught of cold air and sat up, glancing towards the window which stood open beyond the bed. The sun had gone down. Her eyes went back to Calvert’s face—she leaned forward, listening—she reached to lay her hand on his—and knew with a despair too deep for tears that he had slipped away in his sleep.

For another ten minutes she sat there alone, dry-eyed, numb,
and cold. It was too soon. She had not expected it quite so soon. She was not braced for it yet, she had not had time to find something to lay hold of beyond the day when she lost him. There would be nothing—nothing to
do
….

Sue’s light step had made no sound outside the door, but Camilla turned to see her standing there. When their eyes met, Sue knew, and came into the room, came straight to the chair, not to Calvert. Camilla laid her arms around Sue’s waist and hid her face against the soft blue dress.

“There, there,” Sue whispered in the foolish formula which had soothed so many griefs. “There, honey, there, I know, I know. But it’s easier for him like this.”

B
RACKEN HAD ALREADY
gone abroad to observe the Economic Conference at Genoa, and was expecting to join Dinah in London at its conclusion. The season there promised to be the gayest since the war, as most of the big houses which had been hospitals were by now restored to normal, and the first regular Courts were being resumed after a seven years’ gap. Virginia’s Irene, just eighteen, was being presented, and Winifred, who had no
girls of coming-out age, was giving her a ball at the St. James’s Square house.

Camilla sailed on the new
Berengaria
with Dinah, who was delighted to have her as a guest, and Sue gave her a generous cheque for spending money and new clothes. It was Camilla’s first experience of the fashionable world without the shadow of war across it, and was much the best tonic which could have been prescribed, for Calvert had long ago made her promise not to mope and mourn, if anything—the old pitiful euphemism—happened to him. Virginia had taken a house in London for the Season, and everything was in an uproar there with Irene’s fittings and Court curtseys and parties and beaux, so that Phoebe, remembering with nostalgia her own first arrival in
London from Williamsburg, said there might almost never have been a war.

Daphne had married Adrian Carteret in the summer of 1919, and the following year produced a son, and thought very highly of herself. Nigel was entering Eton next year, which made everyone feel very elderly, and Evadne at eight was still the beauty of the family, with Virginia’s dark eyes and Archie’s fair hair. Oliver and Phoebe were at their wits’ end about Hermione, who had been put into a good school and hated it and was being very difficult about everything. It had been decided that Jeff should receive at least part of his education in England, and he was doing well at Oliver’s old prep school and seemed to enjoy himself there, but he was such a silent, self-contained creature you couldn’t be sure. As he was Bracken’s adopted heir and destined for the newspaper business, it was secretly hoped that his admiration for Oliver would not breed in him Army ambitions, and his nine-year-old writings were surreptitiously searched by Phoebe and Bracken for signs of inherited literary talent. Letters, they would remind each other, were deceptive. Any fool could write a good letter, and remain incapable of any sustained effort.

Jenny was living with her father in what her letters to Camilla had described as a pokey flat in one of the dowdier squares south of the Park, and working at St. Dunstan’s Hostel where people learned to be blind. Overcreech House was let to a man with a very recent knighthood whom Camilla gathered one didn’t know, somebody who had made money out of the war, and Winifred, whose money came from coal and was therefore legitimate and safe, said that the Duke’s death duties when that time came would probably necessitate an outright sale of the estate.

Jenny was a particular favourite with the sightless soldiers at St. Dunstan’s, for her sweet voice and patient ways, and she had a faculty for giving them self-confidence. She taught them music, and how to walk beside her through the streets without her hand as a guide, with only the brush of her elbow and
casual, interpolated directions about steps and turnings. Jenny did not approve of walking-sticks for the blind when they could be dispensed with. On their excursions with her, sticks were left behind, and when there was no mutilation her escorts were usually supposed by passers-by to be able to see as well as she could. Jenny knew how to chatter along about the things they encountered on
the way and the small happenings in the streets around them so that memory and imagination came into play and it was almost like seeing again. Jenny urged them to use logic and hearing and smell rather than touch alone, and the men she had had charge of learned not to betray their blindness in any of the usual ways—they located the seat of a chair with the calves of their legs, instead of stooping
pathetically
to find it with their hands; they kept their food in the middle of their plates without trying to rely on the raised edge, and they never set their water-glass on the blade of their knife and then upset it by picking up the knife. She insisted on their developing their sense of obstacle, located in the nerves of the face, instead of groping for walls and obstructions with
outstretched
hands. And her tactful advice to the families the men would return to was considered invaluable.

This was the Jenny Camilla found when she returned to London—busy, cheerful, useful—plainly dressed, her short, bright hair burnished with brushing, her face quite innocent of make-up, her eyes a little shadowed but very blue. They had tea that first afternoon together, filling in the gaps between their letters, linked by poignant memories, not shrinking from mention of Calvert and Raymond or Sosthène, not ashamed of the tears that stood in their eyes. And then Jenny said, with her usual directness, “What are you going to do now?”

Camilla confessed that she didn’t know.

“After you’ve had a rest, I mean,” Jenny pursued
matter-of-factly
. “Will you go back to your music?”

“It’s been so long,” Camilla sighed. “Compared to you, I feel very—incompetent. I’m not much good for anything.”

“You had Calvert to think of. But you should fill his place
now, as soon as possible, with something very exacting, for your own good. Go to the Conservatoire in Paris and study piano seriously, or something like that.”

“Yes, I know I should. Bracken wants to stay here for the tennis at Wimbledon—that’s for recreation, he says—and the Air Pageant at Hendon—that’s business. After that they’ve offered to take me to Paris with them, and we might all go down to see Sally at Cannes. I’m afraid it sounds very idle and expensive and selfish, except for Bracken, of course, he always has his ear to the ground. Jenny—what’s all this talk about another war?”

“It’s the Russians,” said Jenny simply. “They aren’t on our side any more. They’re hobnobbing with the Germans who naturally hate us because we won—or at least kept them from winning. It’s a sinister combination.”

“But I thought Germany had been disarmed by the
Versailles
Treaty.”

“Theoretically. But it’s difficult to enforce a thing like that, apparently. They’ve hidden stores of arms, and they’re
supposed
to be inventing new weapons—gas bombs, and germ warfare, and other mysterious horrors.”

“Oh, Jenny, not
again!
”

Jenny shook her head wearily.

“Doesn’t it seem futile, after all we went through to stop them a little while ago? I was hoping for a chance to ask Bracken what he thought.”

“Bracken will depress you like anything! Johnny Malone came to Genoa from Berlin for the Conference, and got him all worked up about German civil aviation. According to Johnny, they go right on building planes, and they’ve invented one without an engine, that
glides,
but they call it sport, because of Versailles.”

Camilla had thought the war was over, till Bracken came back from the Continent, where he and Johnny Malone, his Berlin correspondent, had witnessed together the débacle at Genoa. The Conference there was the first since the war at
which German delegates had been invited to sit as equals at the Allied Council table. Russian delegates were also invited, and had accepted with alacrity, but as the Bolshevik government was not recognized they had no political significance and were not to take part in the discussions, though a restoration of trade with Russia was one of the objects of the Conference. So the international poker game had begun—Lloyd George for England, Barthou for France, Rathenau and von Maltzan for Germany, Tchitcherin and Litvinoff representing Russia—who were expected to be grateful to be present at all, and who began by demanding double representation on the steering committee “because Russia had so much at stake.” Barthou then inquired if Russia wanted twice as many delegates as anybody else, and Tchitcherin replied acidly that he did not care how many anyone else had but he wanted two. At this point even Lloyd George had to take a stand.

From the first public session there was a poisonous
atmosphere
of national selfishness and fear, and things became steadily more acrimonious with each meeting, in an orgy of intrigue. No one was at the time quite clear, said Bracken, how one thing led to another, for the Press arrangements were atrocious, but Lloyd George apparently with some idea of playing
dens
ex
machina
attempted some sort of personal negotiations with the Bolshevik representatives at his own villa. The Germans got wind of it, imagined trickery, waited on the Russians’ doorstep ready to concede to them
everything
the Allies so far refused, and announced on Easter Sunday the conclusion of a two-power treaty with Russia behind the back, as it were, of the Conference itself.

It was very hard to find any excuse for such behaviour, but the Germans were highly elated and felt that they had got even with the French. The news was like a bombshell in the diplomatic world, and the way in which it was released was provocative to the point of nose-thumbing, said Bracken. Germany had thus alienated all the sympathy which was beginning to be extended to her, and Russia had thrown
away her chance of being accepted into the civilized family of nations. After a few futile discussions, the Conference broke up in confusion and more hard feeling than when it began in gloom and a spirit of criticism. Everyone felt that Germany was up to her old tricks again, and Russia under the Bolsheviks had become an enigma and a menace. Whenever you picked up a newspaper now you found headlines like
Is
Germany
Planning
a
War
of
Revenge?
and
New
School
of
German
Aviators
Develops
Engineless
Aeroplane.

But London was full of dinner parties and dances, and
everyone
was going to the theatre to see Fay Compton in
Secrets
and Henry Ainley in
The
Dover
Road,
and lots of other cheerful or touching plays with not a word about war in them—and there was an amusing innovation called Cabaret. Ascot was very gala, though the weather was unkind; the new tennis court at Wimbledon was opened with ceremony by the King, and Mlle. Lenglen beat Mrs. Mallory; the Prince of Wales came home from India to a fervent welcome and was present at the third Court, when Irene made her curtsey. Virginia said it quite took one back, except that the dresses were nothing like so pretty now as they were when she came out, as nobody was allowed to have a waist-line any more and it didn’t really matter what sort of figure you had.

Bracken attended the glider competition of ex-war pilots on the South Downs with considerable interest—Fokker flew his own machine and stayed up something like three hours,
engineless
—and then Dinah said they had best think of something else for a bit, to which Bracken agreed and hired a big Daimler with a G.B. plate on it and they set out with Camilla under their wing for a motor tour of the Continent which would bring them eventually to Cannes.

Sally complained that whereas Cannes had once been considered a winter resort, nowadays one had outsiders there the year round, because of this new craze for getting sunburned.

She had changed so little, aged so little, that Camilla was reminded again of the inevitable comparison to Queen Alexandra, also perennially young. The house where Sally lived stood above the water on the Juan les Pins side of Cannes, snow white in a bower of bloom. Its gardens ran straight down to the gulf, edged with great brown rocks which had
mercifully
been left in their natural rugged state, alone in the surrounding elegance. You left the house in your bathing things, crossed the lawn and the rocks and bathed, and then sunned yourself on bright mats laid on
the rocks. The less you wore, the more fashionable you were.

It was said that no guest ever succeeded in mapping out in his own mind the complicated geography of the house, which burst out in balconies in all directions, and rambled off in wings, and had steps up or down between the rooms. It was the most any visitor ever accomplished to learn the way from his own room—complete with exotic coloured-tile bathroom and flower-hung balcony—to the main living-rooms and entrance hall of the establishment. Where his fellow guests
disappeared
to or came from—except in certain tactfully adjusted cases—to bed and breakfast remained a mystery, some said on purpose. Nobody—unless it was Sally—knew how many rooms there were, but six or eight guests of assorted sexes and intimacy were usually in residence. Fabrice and her American lion-tamer, who had set up housekeeping in a little chateau just outside Paris, made frequent visits, bringing with them their entire nursery—two babies, a nurse, and a maid. The children were never seen outside their own quarters, but Fabrice said it kept her mind at rest to know that they were there. The family were all fascinated by Fabrice’s evolution into an apparently perfect wife and mother without the loss of an ounce of her good looks and spirits and Phoebe had been heard to speculate more than once on whether Kendrick had actually carried out his threat to lay her across his knee. In any case not even Philadelphia could have found fault with her single-minded devotion to her husband and offspring—though her habit of
flirting outrageously with the man she had married might have made talk anywhere. Kendrick showed no desire to return home, prefering the home he had made for himself in post-war France, entertaining with unending hospitality and delight all itinerant pre-war and war-time friends who turned up in Paris, and all the more amusing members of the American colony there. Sally in turn extended the hospitality of Cannes to
anyone
the Kendricks chose to bring or send there, which meant that the place boiled with the pleasure-bent young international crowd carelessly superimposed on Sally’s own somewhat flamboyant coterie from before the war. As Bracken said, it all had to be seen to be believed, and even then Camilla often felt as though she had somehow got caught between the pages of a particularly lively French novel.