Late and Soon (21 page)

Jess was looking at her aunt with candid and evident appraisement of her dark, swinging furs, her double row of pearls, the R.A.F. diamond and platinum badge pinned onto her slim-lined black coat, her sheer, palest grey silk stockings, and squared, low-heeled suède shoes.

Hughie Spurway, his black brows knotted into a frown of distress, stooped to pat the spaniel. Sally immediately bared her teeth and growled.

“Shut up, Sally,” said the General, pushing her with his foot.

“She's frightfully old,” Jess explained, “but she isn't bad-tempered as a rule. Do you like dogs?”

“Yes. Yes. Very much,” said the young man uncon-vincingly. “At least, I don't really know frightfully much about them. I know more about cats.”

“Cats are all right,” said Jess encouragingly, if without much enthusiasm.

The General said that cats were selfish, sneaking, unfriendly creatures — you never knew where to have them — and that the stupidest dog on earth had more brains than any cat that ever walked the tiles.

At this, Hughie Spurway looked more distressed than ever, as though convicted of having said the wrong thing.

Valentine smiled at him, asked him to sit down, and said that she, too, was very fond of cats and didn't at all agree with her brother's estimate of them.

Relaxing very slightly, the young man took his seat beside her and, clinging to the topic as to a spar in a tempestuous sea, talked about cats.

Valentine felt that any attempt to start a fresh theme would at once throw him off his balance again and she continued the interchange long after it seemed to her that the last possible word about cats had been said.

Part of her attention was free to focus itself on Venetia, giving General Levallois an account of the afternoon's meeting in Bristol, of which all the implications served to prove that it would have been of a wholly disastrous tepidity but for the galvanizing effect of Venetia's own speech.

“What did you talk about?” Jess enquired.

Venetia said that she had talked about the progress of the war.

“Oh,” said Jess. “When's it going to end?” She seemed to be making the enquiry quite without irony.

“Rubbish,” said the General.

“Darling, if one knew that, one would be the most popular speaker on any platform in England, not excepting Winston,” declared Lady Rockingham. “Instead of having to address three old ladies and a couple of centenarians in a draughty parish hall, as too, too often happens to one. Charlie simply can't bear it, when I tell him about some of my meetings, but I feel these provincial places simply
must
have speakers, and it's the
one
thing I can do, don't you know what I mean?”

“You sit on millions of committees,” Jess pointed out — but with a coldness in her voice that Valentine recognized. “How are Michael and Nicky, aunt Venetia?”

At the mention of the two young Service men, Venetia's
sons, the tenuous thread of composure that the conversation about cats had spun round Valentine and Hughie Spurway seemed to quiver and then break altogether.

He looked round, faltered in the midst of his halting eulogy of Siamese kittens, and the look of misery in his haunted dark eyes deepened.

Valentine had to remind herself, from sheer compassion, that he probably, and fortunately, had no idea of the far too great expressiveness of his own face.

“Michael is still at Windsor, one's thankful to say, and gets up to London quite often, don't you know what I mean. Nicky can't tell us exactly where he is but one's sure it's Palestine. He dropped some terribly broad hint in a letter to Charlie about being able to see the Mount of Olives from where he was writing. He and Charlie's cousin, the Eric Camerons' boy, met the other day, and we all think it was in Jerusalem.”

“What's Eric Cameron doing nowadays?” enquired the General, interested.

This was the kind of conversation, Valentine remembered, that he liked and understood, and to which he had once been accustomed. Conversation into which entered names that he knew, and references that he could identify without having to think about it. The slang, elliptical interchange of assertion and counter-assertion between the young irritated and puzzled him, and he only cared to speak of politics, either national or international, with men whose views coincided with his own. Nowadays, he seldom indeed met with such men.

Venetia, with Debrett at her fingers' ends and in-innumerable pieces of inside information to impart about the conduct of the war, the state of Germany and the opinions of President Roosevelt, was suiting him exactly.

Valentine wondered, as she had wondered all day at intervals, what Rory would feel about Venetia and Venetia's fluency, that took so much for granted in her listeners.

She presently heard Jess announce, as though in extension of her thought:

“You know we've got two officers billeted here? A Colonel and a Captain. The Colonel is Irish, his name is Lonergan, and he's an absolute smasher. Quite old, but terribly glamorous still. You'll simply adore him. He says ‘will' instead of 'shall' every single time. I've noticed it particularly, and it's definitely rather wizard.”

Valentine and Lady Rockingham both laughed, and the General said: “He's not a bad chap, except for being Irish. I hope I'm not a man who's in any way prejudiced, but I'm bound to say I've very little use for the Irish. You never know where to have them.”

“Is the other one Irish too?”

“Oh no,” said Jess. “He's frightfully good value, too. We're really awfully lucky. His name is Charles and he's got red hair, which I loathe personally, but I must say he gets away with it.”

Valentine waited for her sister-in-law to ask:

“Charles
who?”

She did so.

“Sedgewick, but no link anywhere so far as I know,” said the General rather gloomily. “It's a North Country name, but this lad is a Londoner pure and simple.”

“When are we going to see them?” Lady Rockingham asked lightly. “And where's darling Primrose?”

“Primrose has been in a most filthy temper all day, I don't know why, and she's been soaking in the bath ever since tea because the water happens to be boiling hot, and I suppose,” Jess said, “there won't be a drop left for anybody else.”

“Good God,” said General Levallois.

Valentine stood up.

“Wouldn't you like to see your room, Venetia? Mr. Spurway, I hope you won't mind rather cramped quarters, but, with Colonel Lonergan and Captain Sedge
wick here and Primrose at home, we've only got two spare rooms available.”

“I'm afraid I'm a frightful nuisance,” said Hughie Spurway resentfully.

“Indeed you're not.”

She led the way upstairs.

They met Primrose coming down, wearing her long periwinkle-blue house-coat.

Valentine was immediately conscious that a violent psychic disturbance had assailed Hughie Spurway, and she hoped that Primrose would greet him with some kindness.

Venetia exclaimed: “Darling, it's simply ages since I saw you! What an amusing way of doing your hair! New, isn't it?”

Primrose averted her face as far as possible from the contact imposed upon her by her aunt's embrace and said something indistinct.

She looked neither at Venetia nor at her mother, but her eyes rested for an instant coldly and appraisingly on Hughie Spurway.

“Look who's here,” she drawled.

He put out his hand, but she seemed not to see it.

He said, “Hallo, my dear, how are you?” very faintly.

Primrose had already turned aside and was walking downstairs.

Valentine opened the door of the Red Room and said:

“You know where you are, Venetia. I'll show Mr. Spurway his room, and then come and see if you've got everything you need.”

In the spring of nineteen hundred and forty-one — nearly a year earlier — Hughie Spurway had for a few weeks been Primrose's lover. Time out of mind he had asked himself, as he was asking himself now, why he could not forget her, or hate her for her cruelty, and fall in love with someone who might be kind and gentle and might even love him in return.

Then he reminded himself, with a savage pleasure in self-torture, that it was scarcely probable that any woman would ever love him. The thought had been familiar to him ever since the terrifying day in his twelfth year when he had seen his mother's white, sick face turned towards him after reading a letter from his headmaster. She had told him, then, why she had left his father.

She had two other boys, to make up to her for Hughie. He had sought refuge in that thought even at twelve years old, and even in the blind despair and self-disgust that had driven him into lying continuously to her and to the grave, compassionate priests and doctors to whom she had sent him. None of them had, it seemed to him, done much to help him. None of them had given any real answer to his question: Why,
why
should it be me? My brothers are not like this. Why am I different?

He had crawled, like something with a mortal wound, through the years of adolescence, its normal pains intensified, deprived of its normal joys. In the end, he had come to take a kind of pleasure in feeling himself an outcast, in deliberately permitting his loss of self-respect to encroach further and further into his life.

Later on, there had been brief unrelated periods of a feverish happiness that he now qualified as illusory. They had ended, all of them, with more or less of violence and, exaggerating his own inadequacies, he told himself that it was only his perpetual fears and jealousies and suspicions
that had brought about these ruptures.

He had fallen in love with Primrose at a party when he had taken too much to drink and found himself sufficiently released to talk with freedom about himself and his miseries, and she had listened and had seemed to him kind. He had found the courage to ask her if she would come back to his flat with him that night and she had, without demur, agreed.

The brief period that followed had seemed to Hughie like the opening of a new life, but when he asked Primrose if she would marry him she had unhesitatingly said no and he had passed almost at once into the old familiar region of nightmare jealousies and scenes of frenzied appeals and demands and reproaches.

It was always he who had forced them upon Primrose in the very teeth of his own agonized knowledge that they served only to antagonize her and cause her to despise him.

One day she told him, with a deliberate calm that carried instant conviction, that she had only listened to him and allowed him to take her home at their first meeting because she, too, had been drinking and had not really known what she was doing. It had meant nothing at all to her.

Hughie heard her with a sense of doom that found its only expression in hysterical threats of suicide that she, as well as he, knew to be theatrical and unreal.

Even his passion for Primrose was, he sometimes thought, unreal — although it dominated his days and his nights and throve insanely under the lash of her open contempt for his manifestations of it.

Yet she continued to see him, to make use of him and occasionally to throw him a word of mock tenderness.

He cursed himself now, because he had manœuvred for this way of seeing her again, knowing that Lady Rockingham was amused and would make a good story out of it, and that Primrose would despise him more than ever. Would she even give him a chance of talking to her
alone? She had been on her way downstairs when they met — perhaps he could find her by herself now, if he made haste.

Hughie tore the things out of his suitcase, scattering them about the room and cursing viciously below his breath, mechanically emitting schoolboy blasphemies and indecencies whenever his own nervous, frenzied fumblings impeded his movements.

It was characteristic of him that when he was ready and had dashed from the room, he came to a dead stop at the head of the stairs and then hesitated in an agony of indecision. Twice he turned back to his own room, fumbling with the door-handle as if to open it, and then moving away again.

At last, with the sweat shining on his forehead and upper lip, he went down the stairs and into the hall.

Primrose was slumped in a chair over the fire.

He was, as always, utterly disconcerted by her trick of neither moving nor looking round at him as he approached.

Striving to make his voice sound casual, Hughie said:

“You look terribly attractive in that colour, sweet. Have I seen it before?”

“No. It's warm, thank God, and one needs that in this dog-hole. See if you can do anything with the bellows, Hughie. My mama is the worst hand at running a house of any woman I've ever seen or heard of.”

He thankfully knelt down and began to work the bellows.

She didn't sound angry, and she'd called him by his name. Mostly, nowadays, Primrose didn't call him anything.

“How did you and aunt Venetia get on coming down in the car?”

“Frightfully well,” he lied.” She's quite amusing, isn't she?”

“D'you think so? I don't.”

“I mean, in a period way,” he amended hastily.

“You don't mind my turning up like this, do you?”

“It's okay by me,” Primrose answered indifferently. “If you like to sit through aunt Venetia's blatherings, on the platform and off it, why should
I
mind? By the way, what are the plans exactly? Are you driving her back to London or what?”

“I'm going on to Plymouth to-morrow, and she's going back to London by train on Wednesday. But I thought you and I could go back by car any day you say, after Wednesday. I could come and get you from here or meet you anywhere you like.”

Why not let's take aunt Venetia? She wouldn't mind staying on here an extra day.”

“My God, no. I
must
talk to you, Primrose. I simply can't go on like this.”