Kissing Kin (8 page)

To Camilla, Sosthène’s contented early departure from the drawing-room was the last devastation of a bludgeoning day, and she was left alone with Jenny in front of the fire under a weight of depression too crushing for tears, her gnawing anxiety about Calvert complicated by a guilty preoccupation with the absorbing stranger whose mere presence had seemed to hold her together and ward off a childish collapse into
premature
grief and panic. While Sosthène was there she had to behave well. Now that he was gone, disappointment descended on top of apprehension, until it seemed she could not breathe, and the long night was still to be got through. But how wicked, thought Camilla, how heartless and depraved, to allow the sharp edge of her fear for Calvert’s life to be gummed up with thoughts about anyone else, about a person Calvert had never even seen, a person who was nothing to her, nor ever could be….

“You don’t feel like going up to bed yet, do you,” Jenny was saying, and Camilla shook her head gratefully though she had had a long day herself and would have known, if she had stopped to think, that Jenny must have been up before six that morning. “Shall we turn on the gramophone? Or would you rather play cards? I know just how you feel, but you’ll get your second wind pretty soon, I can promise. The thing is just to keep going till that happens, and then you can bear it.”

“Jenny—” Camilla reached for her blindly, and Jenny’s warm hands closed over hers.

“Yes, darling—Jenny’s here to sit it out with you, however long it takes. Want to cry on my shoulder?”

But Camilla straightened, her jaw set. It was Calvert coming on top of this strange new confusion about Sosthène that made one so desperate, but one couldn’t talk about that to Jenny. It was needing Calvert more than ever because of Sosthène that made his wounding so much worse. It was the necessity to put Sosthène out of one’s mind that left those echoing empty spaces for fear to take root in and made one such a snivelling coward about Calvert….

Camilla stood up abruptly and walked away from the sofa where Jenny sat.

“I’ll be all right,” she said tightly. “It’s—a bit sudden—and I was tired to begin with—I’m sorry to be such a baby, I’ll get used to it pretty soon—”

“We may get good news from Bracken sooner than you think,” said Jenny, and went to the gramophone in the corner
and dropped the needle on the record that lay there, without looking to see what it was, and the sparkle of a Chopin waltz danced out into the quiet room. Camilla listened, statue-still, staring at the fire, her face between her hands. And when the record ended, “More,” she said without moving, and heard Jenny turn the record. By the time the B Flat Mazurka dripped away into silence Camilla was able to look round at Jenny and smile.

“That was my first grown-up piece,” she said. “There was a while when I was sick to death of it. Now I’ve come full circle and dearly love it again. It brings back all the old-time family parties at Williamsburg, when we each had to perform and show what we had learned since the last time. I remember how proud I was the first time I played that and got through it without tripping, and they all clapped and Cousin Sedgwick said ‘Bravo!’ and Mother mopped her eyes, I can’t think why, and Calvert winked at me because he’d said all along I could do it—”

The brave, bright words faltered, and Jenny said quickly, “You don’t know how I envy you growing up in a big family like that, and how wonderful it seems to somebody like me that there can be a whole party, enough for dancing and music and applause, without ever going outside the family! Of course with us there is Uncle Ralph, that’s Father’s brother, and his wife, and their son Godfrey, he’s at Harrow now, but they live up in Leicestershire and we hardly ever see them—most of the time there’s only Father and me, and while we’re awfully good pals it’s not very many, is it! I mean, when I play to Father it sort of echoes, and he’d never dream of saying Bravo!”

“Do you play Chopin?” Camilla asked with interest.

“Oh, yes. The first one
I
learned was the one he did for the little dog, remember?”

“The D Flat Waltz. Is there a record of that there?”

“Don’t think so. But I’ll never forget how it goes.” Jenny snapped on a light over the grand piano and her fingers
scampered into the gay little tune, imparting an impudent stress and exaggeration all their own, which drew Camilla to the bench beside her and they finished together in a dead run, with Camilla’s right hand an octave higher than Jenny’s, and broke into schoolgirl laughter.

“And remember this one?” Jenny said then, slipping into a Nocturne, and Camilla said, “Yes, do go on,” and sat with her cheek against Jenny’s shoulder, listening till the end, when Jenny slid along the bench and said, “Now you play something new from America,” and Camilla played an Irving Berlin tune from
The
Century
Girl,
which she had seen with Dinah in New York before sailing. When that was finished Jenny said, “Have you seen the new show at Daly’s?” and played one of Miss José Collins’ songs from that and they sang it together, and Jenny said, “We’re pretty good, let’s give the boys at the Hall a concert some time.”

Camilla said she’d like very much to sing for them if they cared about that sort of thing.

“They’d love it,” Jenny assured her. “They’re the best audience in the world, and they’re sick of all my tricks, they’ve seen them so often, you must come and perform for them. We’re planning a lot of doings around Christmas-time, and we’ll need your help.”

Camilla said she’d be glad to be of some use.

“Good,” said Jenny. “Some of us are going to dress up and play the fool, they always love that, but they know good music when they hear it. You must brush up on all your Southern American songs because that would be a novelty for them—
My
Old
Kentucky
Home,
and all that. You don’t happen to play a banjo, do you?”

“Calvert does,” said Camilla wistfully.

“Well, who knows, we might have him here by then! Tell me, shan’t we skip down to the kitchen and make some cocoa and have it here in front of the fire before we go to bed?”

“Yes, let’s,” said Camilla, and set her teeth against a resurgent
tightness in her throat and a stinging in her eyelids, and
followed
Jenny through the dark, quiet house to the tidy kitchen, deserted for the night, where she set out cups and biscuits on a tray while Jenny dealt efficiently with the range and a saucepan and milk and cocoa.

“It’s a funny thing,” said Jenny, stirring briskly at the stove, “but cocoa always does more to restore one’s morale than any amount of brandy ever could. I suppose it’s the business of
making
it, and coping with a fire and raising a cheerful noise with the china and so forth. There was a time when I simply lived on cocoa, because the motions I went through to make it seemed to keep me from having to scream. I got quite bilious from it finally, but I never gave up and screamed.”

“Did it last long—your bad time?” Camilla asked, her head bent above the tray.

“Long enough,” Jenny answered frankly from the stove. “But finally I grew some sort of a scar tissue, apparently, because I’m all right now, I really am. I daresay Virginia’s told you about the man I was engaged to falling in love with somebody else,” she continued steadily. “You don’t have to be tactful about it, goodness knows it was no secret at the time! There was no point in my trying to hang on to him, of course, if that was the way he felt. But all the same, it wasn’t the sort of thing you expect to have happen to you, was it!” the slow, beautifully formed words went on. “It’s your pride that gets broken, I think, as much as your heart. You begin to wonder what’s wrong with you. If your man is killed, that’s clean and definite and can happen to anybody—you can still hold your head up. But if he just decides in cold blood that he prefers somebody else after all, you feel sort of—black and blue for a while, and you want to crawl away and hide. Not that I would rather Gerald had got killed, I don’t mean it to sound that way—” She took the saucepan off the stove and poured the cocoa carefully into the tall china pot on the tray and carried the saucepan to the sink. “You know, this is very funny, I’ve never been able to talk about it before to anyone, not
even Virginia—I suppose it’s because you’re in trouble too—and if my own experience can keep you from going to pieces—”

“H-how did you know I—” Camilla began and caught her breath.

Jenny turned at the sink, with the tap running, and gave her a long, surprised look.

“I meant your brother’s wound,” she said, and turned off the tap and came to Camilla at the table. “Is there something else?”

“No—nothing—I—”

Jenny laid a hand on Camilla’s arm.

“Darling, have I put my foot in it somehow? I never meant to say anything—”

“Jenny, do you think Sosthène is—was ever in love with Cousin Sally?”

There was a long silence in the kitchen. Jenny took her hand off Camilla’s arm and began to fiddle with the things on the tray beside them. Finally she said, “It’s hard to tell, isn’t it. Of course one can see he’s devoted to her—”

“But I meant—”

“I know.” Jenny dried the saucepan with care and hung it up, switched off the light over the sink and returned to the table where Camilla stood. She picked up the tray and paused with it in her hands between them, and Camilla’s eyes met hers honestly across it. “Darling,” said Jenny like a mother, “if I were you I wouldn’t—think about Sosthène. Just don’t
start
thinking about him, darling—there’s trouble enough to bear without that. Turn out the light, will you?” And she walked out of the kitchen, carrying the tray.

A few minutes later, sipping cocoa in front of the fire, Camilla said. “You’ve felt it too, then—that thing about Sosthène.”

“Yes, of course, everybody does, you know. In a woman it’s called charm, I don’t know what the word is for the masculine equivalent. But the difference with me is that I’m not in danger
of falling in love with it, and you might. That’s why I thought I’d better warn you. Don’t.”

“Oh, no!” said Camilla quickly, and felt her cheeks get hot. “He’s—I couldn’t!”

“If you take my advice, which of course you won’t,” said Jenny levelly, “you’ll be careful not to fall in love with anyone while the war is on. If you want to be any good for anything, I mean. Since I got over Gerald and nobody matters to me any more I’ve been much more useful, both to myself and the hospital. You can put your whole mind on your job, which at the moment is working ourselves into a coma every day to do as much as we can for any mother’s son who happens to be in our care. And there’s less wear and tear on your own nervous system too, because you get a sort of impersonal viewpoint like an old nursing Sister, on even the worst cases, and you don’t use yourself up with praying the same thing won’t happen to someone you love. That’s one reason I want to nurse in France—I haven’t got a brother or a lover at the Front, and there isn’t a soul in the world to divide my attention from the nameless cases as they come in. I’m emptied of all personal feeling about this war, I could become simply an efficient machine with a woman’s touch, and that’s what a good nurse ought to be. I’ll tell you something nobody else knows—they let me work in the operating-room now, at the Hall. One of the surgeons always asks for me because I can do anything he wants without getting sick—just like a real Sister with years of experience.”

“That’s wonderful. I couldn’t trust myself,” Camilla
confessed
. “I still dread going round with the dressing-tray. I never thought I would, but the very first time I did it I ran into a series of amputations and—well, I didn’t disgrace myself, but it shook me, I don’t mind telling you!”

“That’s because you’ve never had an amputation yourself,” said Jenny lightly. “Not literally, of course—but since that business with Gerald there’s part of me that just isn’t there any more. I don’t feel anything, except now and then a sort of ghost-pain, where it was.”

“But you will fall in love again, some time.”

“I hope not!”

“But after the war—”

“After the war I should like to go on nursing if they’ll let me. The wounded aren’t going to just get well overnight, you know, when peace comes. There will be years of work—my whole lifetime, perhaps—caring for the men who fought in this war.”

“But—that’s like being a nun—!”

“Oh, far from it, I shan’t renounce the world, or take any veils or vows or anything like that. But I’d much rather live the way I am now, it’s much more comfortable than ever again to see anyone have the power to make me feel the way I felt about Gerald. It was too naked and ashamed,” said Jenny, pouring out another cup of cocoa. “It’s too completely
terrifying
to discover that you have no defences against some other human being, and that he can do exactly as he likes with your life and all you can do is stand there and wring your hands.”

“But if he’s kind—”

“Oh, Gerald was
kind,
”
Jenny assured her unemotionally. “He’s no monster, he didn’t
want
to half-kill me, he just made a mistake, and he was no end sorry about it, but that didn’t keep me from nearly bleeding to death inside, for months. And even suppose he hadn’t made a mistake, suppose the man I loved had been killed instead—I could be proud, yes, instead of humiliated down to the ground, but that part of my life would be just as cut off as it is now.”

“But people fall in love more than once—”

“Not me,” said Jenny firmly. “Once is enough, thank you very much. I’m not going to walk the plank again, not for anybody!”

“Virginia is happy,” Camilla maintained obstinately.

“Virginia is pre-war. And I wouldn’t like to be in Virginia’s shoes if anything happened to Archie now. Darling, don’t think I’m laying down any laws on anything!” Jenny added anxiously. “It’s only myself I’m talking about. People are going
to go right on falling in love and letting themselves in for untold agony and doubtless untold happiness, no matter what I think or say. But all that’s not for me. I’ve thrown in my hand. I’m cured. Everybody else in the world can do exactly as they please, but from now on I’m just going to sit here and watch, I’d rather not play.”