The Balliols (77 page)

She didn't, though.

He was twenty-five. He was just down from Oxford. He was reading for the Bar. He had taken a first in Law. But he was a person of no particular position. He would have, very definitely, his way to make.

During the spring and summer of 1929 Helen confided her perplexities to me. There was no issue in the entire situation on which she was not perplexed. She was not even certain whether she was in love with Kenneth.

“I enjoy his company. He's gay. He's exciting. I'm never so alive as I am when I'm with him. He's strong; he's straight, I admire him. At the same time … oh I don't know, but I can't help feeling that there ought somehow to be something more to it than this. I feel I ought to have been swept off my feet in a way I haven't been. Perhaps it's my own fault; perhaps I'm cold; perhaps I wasn't meant to feel that way. But there've been so many novels about girls marrying somebody they think that they're in love with, and then meeting some one else and realizing that that wasn't love at all. How's one to tell: how
can
one tell what one feels when one's nothing to compare it with? Kenneth wants us to have our engagement announced at once. But I don't believe in long engagements. I believe in getting engaged one day and married the next week. But marriage … it's so final. One's got to be so very sure.”

She accepted the finality of marriage; to the extent, anyhow, of ceasing to be Helen Balliol and becoming her husband's wife. Her position in the world would depend upon her husband; on his capacities and talents. She would be what he made her. She would have just so much prominence and importance as he could win for her. In that respect her views were surprisingly Victorian; but she had none of the Victorian's simple faith in a world well lost for love; of that love compensating for the loss of no matter how much worldliness. She had a very proper appreciation of the rewards that worldly success offers. Nor had she the Victorian view that you fall in love once and for all time. “They never loved who say that they loved once.” She knew that if she lost this man she would fall in love again. Nor had she the Victorian's capacity to believe that a man because she happened to be in love with him would be inspired by that love to enter into triumphant competition with his rivals. She was inclined to think that marriage was more likely to hinder him than help him.

“And if he does fail, I'll be committed to a grimmish future.
He's clever, of course; but so are a hundred others. He's not chosen an easy career. For one who really gets there, twenty don't. Why should he be that one? He may be, but how can one tell?”

I told her that was one of the risks one had to run. If she were going to make certain of marrying a success, she would have to marry a man who was already a success. That meant a man of forty, at the least; which might not be what she wanted.

“I know, I know,” she said. “Helen's a fool. She wants to have things both ways; but it isn't easy for her. She doesn't want to commit herself, and she doesn't want to let this go. It may not ever come again; not in the same way. Something else'll come. But not this. I don't like the look of the alternatives. It's all very well to talk about companionate marriage. But you can't picture two people like ourselves setting up house together. And an affair; that's so easy. Anybody can have affairs; there's no real point to it.”

It was an astonishing remark. The more astonishing since it was said so naturally. It was less than thirty years ago that acidulated persons like Miss Draft had been laughed at for demanding the same code of morals for women as for men. Then there had been Ruth to whom half the charm of an affair had been its devilment; the thrill of the forbidden. Then there had been Hugh's Joyce and Francis's girls accepting their new freedom with such careless lightheartedness, that to the next generation the whole business of affairs had become so casual, so matter-of-course, so glamourless, that when a girl like Helen really cared, an affair was not the ready solution that it had been to Ruth. An affair was so easy that there was no real point to it. She had returned for entirely different reasons to an almost Victorian standard of morality. It would have been possible to have thought her priggish, but she wasn't that. An affair seemed to her as much a spoiling or rather wasting of emotion as a complete denial of it.

All through that summer the debate in her mind continued. By the autumn it was beginning to leave its mark on her. A tired listlessness had displaced the bright-eyed happiness with which six months earlier she had welcomed love.

“We never have any fun together now. We just argue: whether we shall or whether we shan't. He says I don't love him. I say I do. At the rate we're going we shall be hating each other by Christmas.”

“You ought to take a holiday. You ought to get right away from him,” I told her. “Go alone somewhere. Give yourself a chance to think it out.”

“I might do that.”

“Go somewhere where you won't be worried: where there are games to play: new people to be amused by. Don't think about him for a fortnight: then set yourself the three alternatives: wash it out altogether; or make an affair of it, work it out of your system that way: or else marry him. Do one of the three. Mooning around won't get you anywhere.”

“Perhaps you're right.”

Two mornings later she rang up to tell me that she was taking my advice: that she was going to Devonshire: to the Eastpoint Hotel. That she had bought herself a vast Alsatian dog. To console herself for the loss of Kenneth, she explained. Helen will have made her mind up in a fortnight, she declared.

Ten days later I received a telegram “Helen in another mess. Do please come straight away.” I needed a holiday. I was fond of her. I am inquisitive. I went.

The Eastpoint Hotel is situated in West Devon on the edge of Dartmoor. A long, low Georgian building, set in parkland, for two centuries the country seat of an influential Wessex family, sold to liquidate death duties in the third year of the war, it has retained in its new guise some of the traditions of its past.

At certain times of the year, particularly in August and September, it is as near an approach to a country club as is to be found in England. Life there is communal. A golf course lies at its gates. Competitions of one kind or another are in daily progress. Most evenings there is dancing. Every Saturday there is a formal dance. Its atmosphere is not unlike that of a winter sports hotel in Switzerland to which the same people return year after year; where everyone knows or is in a position to know everybody else; where the days are devoted to games and the evenings to conviviality.

Helen was waiting the arrival of the station bus. She was breathless: dramatic; flurried: all in a rather imperious, self-important manner. She would not wait for me to check in at the reception desk.

“You needn't bother about that. I've arranged it all. And the porters won't lose your luggage. I want to talk to you. I can't wait.”

She pulled impatiently at my arm.

“There's never any one on the terrace now. We can talk there.”

From its grass-grown, shadowed length she pointed to the tennis-court below.

“There he is,” she said; “that's my trouble.”

We stood watching: a mixed foursome was in progress. There was little doubt as to its outcome. The girls were evenly matched, but a young, loose-limbed, erratic, hard-hitting player was hopelessly outmanœuvred, outgeneralled, outpointed by his grey-haired, but tall and broadshouldered opponent.

Helen sighed.

“He really is a marvel. He must be nearing fifty: yet he's as fit as an undergraduate. If it wasn't for his grey hair, and I like his hair, he wouldn't look a day over thirty.”

“So it's the elder one then?”

“Why, of course. You wouldn't expect me to fall in love with a child, would you?”

I looked at “the child.” He didn't seem very much younger than her Kenneth. Then I looked back, more carefully, at the elder man. He was handsome certainly. A man of fifty, when he is physically as well as mentally attractive, is a rival of whom the most irresistible of young men have cause to be afraid. And I had always thought that it was with an older man that Helen would fall in love: she needed strength, guidance; to have her mind made up for her. I had a suspicion that Kenneth, against such a one, would not stand much chance. If the situation were a straightforward one, that was to say. Which apparently it was not. I looked closely at the man.

“There's something about him that seems to me familiar.”

“Of course there is. He remembers you all right, though you haven't seen him for ten years. He used to work in my father's firm. No, don't start telling me. I know. It couldn't be a bigger mess. I'm not only half-engaged, but he's married. He's got two daughters. His wife's got all the money; and what's more, she's charming. I couldn't have got in a worse mess if I had tried. If I had said to you a month ago ‘Of all the men you know, which would be the most likely and the least suitable for me to fall head over heels in love with?'—you'd probably have said ‘Roy Rickman.'”

When people say “I must ask you your advice,” that is not really what they mean at all. It is not advice but an audience that they need. Helen did not want me to tell her what to do, she wanted to tell me “all about it”; to clear her own thoughts by a recital of them: in the same way that certain writers read their stories out loud to friends and families “to see what they sound like.” They do not want criticism or advice. They want to make their own minds up for themselves. It was important for Helen that she should have someone
to “talk it over with”: but I recognized, and accepted my rôle as that of the spectator, not the mentor.

She told me everything; from the start.

“Even the beginning was dramatic.”

She was having trouble about her dog.

“If it hadn't been for Roy, I should never have been allowed to stay here.”

In the organization both of the games and the conviviality of the Eastpoint Hotel Roy Rickman had played for ten years in succession a prominent part. He had an easy manner. He was experienced in men and life. He could talk to most people on their own subject. He was able to mix on terms of equality both with his seniors and his juniors. His firm and tactful personality gave him the necessary position of authority. His skill as an athlete assured him a welcome among the young. While he was a guest at the Eastpoint Hotel few things were attempted without his advice or undertaken without his co-operation. He had become, indeed, so a part of the hotel's life that he felt very little regret when each autumn, to pay his income tax, he let the shooting of his place in Yorkshire to a transatlantic visitor.

“This place has become a second home to me,” he said.

He knew every member of the staff. He felt as much at home there as he did in his club in London.

It was, in fact, with very much of a clubman's feeling that within his club the necessity for introductions had been dispensed with, that on the day of Helen's arrival he had paused to pat the head of a vast Alsatian wolfhound that was standing at the reception desk by the side of a young, graceful, and well-dressed woman.

It was by the dog, not the woman, that Roy's interest had been struck.

“That's one of the finest dogs I've ever seen,” he said.

Its owner turned. She was not, he saw, a woman, after all. But a girl and an extremely pretty one.

“It certainly is. It's just too bad that I should have to leave this nice hotel because of him.”

He looked at her, more closely.

“How do you mean—leave the hotel because of him?”

“They say they won't let me keep him here.”

The assistant manager leant forward across the desk.

“If Miss Balliol had a chauffeur or someone who could look after the dog there would be no difficulty. But it would not be possible for her to look after the dog herself, not all the time, and she
could not, for instance, take it into the dining-room or into the lounge. Guests would object.”

“It's a perfectly quiet dog.”

“Madam, I am sure it is. But there have been many accidents caused through Alsatians. People are afraid of them. It is stupid of them, but there it is. In a hotel one has to make rules. One has to accept the prejudices of the majority.”

Roy Rickman appreciated the situation. The manager was right —indubitably so. People
were
nervous about Alsatians. At the same time, he both liked the dog and respected the courage of the girl who had brought it.

He turned to the manager.

“You'd make no objection if there was someone competent to look after the dog?”

“Of course not.”

“If you've no objection, that's to say,” he added, turning to the girl. “My man's experienced with dogs. He'll take care of it all right. There are some kennels round by the garage.”

“That's kind of you.”

She was looking at him intently, appraisingly; gratitude mixing with surprise and curiosity. Her look was so intent that it embarrassed him. He turned away to the manager.

“You might see that my man's sent for, will you? And,” he added to the girl, “you'll let me know, won't you, if there's anything you want?”

“You are very kind.”

Her look followed him as he walked towards the lounge, noting detail by detail the broad set of the shoulders, the firm stride, the well cut, comfortably-aged tweed coat, the high set of the head, the close-cut silvering grey hair with its crinkling wave above the temples, the lean fingers that swung half-closed against the clean well-creased flannel trousers. She drew a long, slow breath.

“Who is he?” she asked.

“Captain Roy Rickman. He comes here every summer.”

“He'll be here for a little while then?”

“A month at least. You see that lady he's talking to?”