The Last September (28 page)

Francie was glad Mr. Lesworth was coming to tea. For the day strained with ominousness, as though it were going to burst. Hugo, pacing about on the avenues with
The Conquest of Mexico
under his arm, disparaged repose. “By the way,” he said once, coming up, “if you should be happening to write to Marda Norton …”

“Oh, but I shan’t be; not till I send her our little present. Besides, I have nothing to say.”

“She might write to you about the eau-de-Cologne.”

“Oh no, she thanked me.”

“There was a point I wanted to clear, about Metternich—you remember that argument? I’ve just come on a book—I suppose I had better write myself.”

“But no one knows her address; Myra lost the letter.”

“Ah yes, of course … That settles it.” He smiled -—one would have said with relief. Francie, looking down in despair at her blouse as he walked away, saw that the jabot was crumpled. She could not understand how a woman who travelled with suitcases could look as smooth as Marda. But then, she was all outlines: detail seemed to collect and obtrude in the middle of Francie. She went up to change, glad that Gerald was coming, sounding with some attention the silence under the avenue trees. For the fact was, life attenuated to the snapping point; in Gerald’s continuity, in Lois’s, she must invest her own.

Gerald propped up his motor bicycle, looked up carefully at the closed windows—in one, from behind a blot of light, Francie was nodding—and said that he should not really have come. Troops had been fired on coming back into Clonmore, near that level crossing. The situation was tightening; there was a lot to do.

“Oh. Then it is a pity you came,” said Lois.

Gerald said nothing, his ears faintly coloured.

“Clonmore
” said Lois with indignation, and thought of the little friendly town with its tennis club.

“So it happened,” said Gerald, looking at her. “It might have been anywhere else.” He whistled and greeted the dogs, her dogs.

“Then … it was dangerous coming?”

“Oh no. Not to speak of.”

The house so loomed, and stared so darkly and oddly that he showed a disposition—respectful rather than timorous—to move away from the front of it. They walked to the tennis courts and round one court in a circle. “
Lois
…” She veered off quickly; Laurence was working up there in his window. Gerald waved but had no response. “Doesn’t he concentrate!” he said wistfully.

“I suppose so … Does Laurence matter?”

“You know
you …”

“Gerald, you are the frightfully concentrated person, really.”

“But I can’t read … Where can I … where could we … ?”

“—Here comes Mr. Montmorency.”

Hugo, coming up to shake hands with Gerald, said it seemed a long time since they had met. The young man, by his way of standing and looking clearly and being positive, strongly connected himself with Marda. With an unexpected and crooked stab of nostalgia, he thought of the trees, the morning mountains, the tinkling and knocking stream. Of all of her he had kept, and had never had, and must try to regain, appeared most sharply the moment of that encounter: irrelevant moment, when, outside something, he had watched light run down her hair as she stooped for Gerald to light her cigarette. The quality of their silence, their separation after Gerald had left them— pressing on up to the house to look for Lois—now seemed the very ground of his closest approach to her. But he knew how the scene was perishable, how having drawn up into itself for life, like a plant, any reality that there was in him, it would die of his barrenness. Until finally, by even the same conjunction of mountains and light and trees, it would not be evoked again.

“No shaving under a hedge this morning?” he said genially.

“Oh no,” said Gerald, surprised. Why should there be?

Lois, encouraged to find that by some growth of womanhood in herself her attitude was already a wife’s, at once proud and deprecating, stood there watching Gerald, most grateful for the repose of this interposition and willing that Mr. Montmorency should be detained. She knew from a glance they both gave her that she must have been startled by some sort of consciousness into beauty, and a particular placidness, a sense of being located, warmed her surroundings: the smooth lawn and heavy trees. Balancing foot behind foot on a line of the court faint from rain, she constructed a life in China—most regimental, alert and pleasantly surfaced—from Japanese prints she had ignored in shops, an idea of odd, angular archways and some strips of vertical writing. He must no doubt be a captain, and “captain’s lady” had a ballad-like cadence. She almost took Gerald’s arm.

“You find us diminished,” said Hugo, “and a good deal quieter. Miss Norton has gone.”

“Oh?”

“Marda
,” she hastily prompted.

“She was awfully nice and amusing,” said Gerald, beaming out like the sun from behind a moment’s perplexity. “I’d have loved to have met her again.”

She explained to him afterwards, taking him off through the shrubberies, how things were at present with Mr. Montmorency: he was a ruined man. Gerald went rigid, something shut like a door on his sensibilities—the thing reeked of adultery. He produced an appalled silence. But about Lois’s mother, he brought out finally, hadn’t one heard he had once been … ?

“But a thing can’t be final,” said Lois “not while one’s alive.”

Was this what she read? “But there’s
Mrs.
Montmorency …” It seemed fixed here, the Montmorencys’ conjointness, among the stately furniture and long mild meals—earth to Lois’s roots.

“But one can’t arrange oneself; one doesn’t so altogether live from inside: Marda just happened.”

“Did
she
—?” began Gerald, appalled. Above this extraordinary undercurrent, it seemed to him his Lois was poised too perfectly.

Lois, in pink linen, perfectly sophisticated and cool, said: “No. She was just regretful. Also, she is engaged, you see.”

“Is
she? I should never have thought …”

“—Her engaged? Well, how ought she to look? Like a kind of hen bird, all dim?”

“She was all herself. Doesn’t love finish off people … with something that isn’t them, in a way you can feel?”

She understood him, but did not know how to agree. What must one be for him? She was shy of his uncomprehension of a particular notion of living she seemed only now to have formed. Did she give out an untrue ring to his touch? Where was the flaw? Or was Gerald, sublimely, the instrument of some large imposture?

“Complete—you mean, finished? … Perhaps she is not really in love.”

“But surely she isn’t
that
sort … she wouldn’t just marry?”

“I don’t think what Marda does matters; she simply
is.”

He looked desperate suddenly, as though she were behind bars. “Look here, no one matters. Don’t let’s talk … I mean … don’t let’s talk. Lois, there’s so little time now, I’m desperate. I don’t see when I am going to see you, ever. Lois, this miserable waiting; even happiness never lets one alone. When shall we be quiet?”

“But Gerald, we’re quite young.”

“I want nothing to happen but you. You are everything. I want so much of you.”

She stood, perplexed, at the edge of the path; he kissed her with frightened violence. The laurels creaked as, in his arms, she bent back into them. His singleness bore, confusing, upon her panic of thoughts her physical apprehension of him was confused by the slipping, cold leaves. Her little sighs elated then alarmed him.

“What’s the matter?” he said, lips close to her face.

“I don’t like the smell of laurels. Let’s come out of here.” They went back, she put up anxious hands and asked him about her hair. “Is it twiggy and awful?” “Lovely.” She wished that he were a woman. As they approached the steps where her aunt and uncle and Francie composed an abstracted group, she told him: “Aunt Myra wants me to go to a school of art.”

“Oh … Can you draw?”

“Gerald … !”

“Darling, I’ve never seen them. How could I know?”

Lady Naylor exclaimed how delightful it was that Gerald had come over. Now they would hear the real, real news, she said; they always relied on Gerald. Sir Richard, taking his pince-nez off in amazement, could hardly believe it was Gerald again; he still thought subalterns came in rotation. Surely, he said candidly, it was yesterday they had had that interesting talk about the Militia? Gerald was given a chair of such voluptuous depth that his chin came barely above the edge of the tea-table. They congratulated him on the Rolfes’ dance. In fact, they united to carry off the situation with such brilliance that Gerald might well have been a dun or a tax collector. Then, at a moment when talk seemed precarious, Marda obtrusively absent, and Lady Naylor eyed Lois’s hair, the Trents arrived unexpectedly. They brought over another friend, this time from County Clare, to whom still more had happened. Gerald went into joyous eclipse; the Danielstown party sat breathless—hardly a chair creaked—the Trents looked at their friend complacently while the Trents’ friend curdled the tea in one’s mouth with tales of assault and cattle-driving.

“Well, I suppose
we’ve
a certain amount to be thankful for,” smiled Mrs. Archie Trent as their friend, having been put through his hoops, settled down to tea. And she told Lois that she was looking remarkably well, and they hoped they would see her out with the Ballymoyles this winter. And meanwhile, what about cubbing?

“Lois is going to a school of art,” said Lady Naylor.

“That seems a pity,” said Mrs. Trent.

The friend, finishing his tea, said all the Irish art schools ought to be searched. He wouldn’t say for certain, but he had a pretty shrewd suspicion what you would find there. If it came to that, he said, casts were hollow and you could
keep
a good deal inside the Venus of Milo. Sir Richard looked vaguely offended.

“I should go to the Slade,” said Lois.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Archie Trent, “not Rome, I suppose? Well, I shouldn’t do anything of that sort in a hurry.”

“Art is long,” said Laurence, who liked conversation of this sort. The Trents’ friend asked him how he liked Cambridge; he himself had a nephew who hoped soon to be going up. Laurence said he had heard that Cambridge was very nice.

The Trents’ friend took Gerald aside after tea, to explain to him where the Army was going wrong. Mrs. Trent at once drew closer up to the teapot and said in a loud voice of confidence, she had heard Livvy Thompson was really engaged to that young Armstrong. “Nonsense,” said Lady Naylor.

“But they were seen in Cork having tea, and the aunt denies it too vigorously. After all, it would be something for the Thompsons.”

Lois, who was unfortunate, blushed; both ladies looked hard at her. “To begin with,” declared Lady Naylor, “these young men are not at all marriageable. Besides, to tell you the truth—”

“But I don’t see what else the girls are to do. I mean, look at the Hartigans.”

“There’s a future for girls nowadays outside marriage,” said Lady Naylor inspiringly. “Careers—how I should have loved one. One reads so much about …” She was an advanced woman: Mrs. Trent, who did not read, paused in respect but preserved an honest, bright pink expression of incredulity. She pictured those indoor women with clutched little bags getting hurriedly into the Dublin trams. It was no life. Her friend seemed, moreover, unwisely persistent in encouraging art for Lois; this, for young girls, often resulted in worse than spinsterhood. “All the same,” she said, returning, “Livvy seems set on the young man. And she has a great deal of character.”

“Well, if I were her aunt and her father, I’d never hear of it.”

“Dear me,” cried Mrs. Trent, kicking the table cheerfully, “we’ve made Lois blush at the very idea.”

“Lois knows better,” said Lady Naylor. And she gave Lois one of her rarest, most charming, direct and personal glances.

And indeed what a friend, thought Lois, going out to the steps to escape them all, if one had only just met, might Aunt Myra be.

A CLOUD 
slid over the sun; the stream went opaque as tortoiseshell. Then, startling Hugo, the water suddenly flushed with light as the cloud moved east. Minnows, disturbed like thoughts, darted shadowy over the clear yellow stare of the stones. He dipped his stick in the water; then, drawing it out, thoughtfully looked at the shining end. At this point: eighteen inches; the stream, divided in two deep channels by the island of turf where he stood, went hurrying to the Darra. In its fold of the Darra valley the high white mill must remain sardonic. He was swept by an irresistible anger back to that affair of the pistol. For Marda had written: her hand had healed; no one had asked any questions or wondered, she said.

She had written to Lois, sending Hugo this message. It had pleased both the girls to underline his exclusion. She wrote also, Leslie had given her a dog—a correct dog, Lois expected, like all that was best in English country house life. Marda could not think what to do with the dog till she married; she would have to leave it in Kent … And what else did Marda say, Francie had wanted to know. But Lois, who seemed to have swallowed the letter, postmark and all, could not remember. Later, she did seek out Hugo and offer to show him … But he had put up surprise. Oh? Was there any particular—? No, he did not think on the whole he would trouble her … Would the child see, he wondered, that the little oblique snub was not intended to stop at
her,
but to go past? His look now fell empty, reflective, on the tawny glass sliding water.