The Last September (29 page)

The child, having seen, went upstairs to describe his behaviour to Marda. Her unreticence was immoderate, though she was sensitive for him. She wrote scrupulously with an effect of hardness.

He is terrible, and, as the end of everything, they are to build a bungalow.
She
has it all her own way now; I don’t know if he still even brushes her hair. Since you went, it has been the same time all day: three o’clock, after a long lunch. We all talk about my future (by common consent I am about nine now, very distracting and sunny; they like to have me about). It is to be a school of art, certainly—why did you never tell them I couldn’t draw?—but we can’t decide where. London, in view of my age, is supposed to be too large. In Dublin, a man who came to tea yesterday said there might be high explosives inside all the casts with capacious figures. In Cork I might pick up
an accent,
and
Paris
they will not
hear
of
—
my wretched virtue. But as a matter of fact, I have no future, in their sense. I have promised to marry Gerald.

Here she paused, for from now on it was all obscure ahead of her. Reading back, she was surprised by the woman she was. She took this merciless penetration for maturity’s. But when she looked for Gerald there 
seemed too much of him. He was a wood in which she counted from tree to tree—all hers—and knew the boundary wall right round. But how to measure this unaccountable darkness between the trees, this living silence? So she turned back to Mr. Montmorency, adding a paragraph. He had, this morning, snubbed her.

She would have been surprised to have seen him, at this same moment, step across to the island and stand there so rootedly. And he, his whereabouts even so much as suspected, would have been quite at her mercy. For to have followed the stream to this loneliest reach, beyond the plantation wall, where the meadow’s hedge showered unknown blackberries over the water, was not to have walked, to have strolled even, but to have betrayed oneself in an emotional kind of straying. Further down, stepping-stones had been displaced by last winter’s flood, there was a ruined cottage; nobody came here. Even Lois had given up, since her eighteenth birthday, coming to lie on her stomach along the bank, weep out a bottomless despair at nothing and look at herself in the stream. And this wildness within the demesne boundaries, within sound of the farmyard bell, had a particular desolation.

Hugo was pleased with the place; here he seemed to have stepped through into some kind of non-existence. And here, divorced equally from fact and from probability, he set up a stage for himself: the hall’s half-light. Marda’s hand is on the wide scrolled curve of the baluster-rail: he touches her hand, electric and quiet, with the deliberation of certainty, all his senses running into the touch. She stares recognition fixedly, darkly back … For though in actuality she had had only one mood for him—cool and equivocal—he, frantic with this power disconnected from life, could now command her whole range imaginatively: her very features became his actors. And if this were not love… .

He was pleased with the place. They must all, he expected, be looking for him: it produced the faintest vibration behind the solitude.
This
morning, Myra was driving into Clonmore to lunch with the Boatleys; she had asked him to come, he had said he would see. He had intended by this “Good God, no,” and if she were fool enough to interpret it otherwise, there was a rightness about her delay in starting. Francie would certainly go; she was painfully fascinated by military society. She would now be standing out on the steps, grey net veil strained elegantly over the tip of her nose, looking at her gloves in despair, persisting: “He must be
somewhere!”

“How many of us do they really expect?” said Francie at last, getting into the car disconsolate.

Lady Naylor had not the slightest idea. “But they are accustomed to Ireland. She was a Vere Scott. And they know that I usually fill the car.”

“You’re not taking Lois?”

“Lois goes into Clonmore quite enough,” replied Lady Naylor.

For Lady Naylor had further reasons for going into Clonmore.
She
had an assignation
with
Gerald at half-past three, in Mrs. Fogarty’s drawing-room. Fridays were club days, Mrs. Fogarty would be “up at the tennis” and her drawing-room, disembarrassed for once of her large personality, remained at the disposition of friends. Lady Naylor, though she deplored Mrs. Fogarty’s taste in beads, her husband, her stays—which stuck out half way up her back in a frill—and her too overflowing maternity, had fallen into the 
general habit of using her house as a kind of Ladies’ Club, dropping in there at all times to leave parcels, wash her hands or meet friends. And she had the impression, always, that the maid who admitted her ran upstairs at once to put Mr. Fogarty under lock and key. Still, one knew that one’s coming gave pleasure and gratification: she would enter the little drawing-room, even when empty, with her queenliness at its full.

Gerald, questioning but elated, turned up a little before time, much braced-in and polished about the belt. He had never been given an assignation so directly. For she had said (this now divinely probable aunt of his): “I may be at the Fogartys’, resting, about half-past three. If you should be passing—though of course you may not be and I do not want to keep you away from the tennis—you might look in and have a chat. For it has been too bad today, I have hardly seen you. I have missed our usual talk. There is still so much … But I daresay you won’t be passing.” Her look, a special point to its wide-pupilled eagerness, transposed this to the imperative. The vigorous arch of her eyebrows insisted strongly. He, feeling himself ordered like a taxi—better still, like a nephew— had flushed with pleasure.
Rath-
e
r; he’d make a point—(Would she then call him Gerald?) “Of course I may not be there; we may not even come in; it is all quite uncertain,” said Lady Naylor.

Riding home, the intoxication of Gerald had mounted. He guessed that she never rested, rarely leaned back in a chair, never pushed up her hat with a sigh or stretched tender feet out, unbuttoning shoes. She would remain imperious, even in Oxford Street. So she was contriving for him; a special tribute.

Lady Naylor, coming in to the Fogartys’ soon after four, was annoyed to find Gerald before her. She had now, instead of being discovered, to manoeuvre more or less openly for position. Disregarding the chair Gerald trundled up with its load of cushions, she placed herself (unaccountably, it would have to appear) on the narrow window-seat. Thus, she conceded no more to the room than an imposing silhouette of hat and boa, while Gerald, glancing round pessimistically at the chairs and remaining with elbow planted among photo frames on the mantelpiece, was exposed to her full in the strained green light coming over the bushes.

“Such a day,” she sighed briskly. “We have lunched with the Boatleys. What a delightful colonel he must be. S
he,
you know, is Irish; a Vere Scott. We must seem ridiculous to you, over here, the way we are all related.”

“Topping, I think,” said Gerald.

“Oh, I don’t know! Now you lucky people seem to have no relations at all; that must feel so independent.”

“I have dozens.”

“Indeed? All in Surrey?”

“Scattered about.”

“That sounds to me, of course,” remarked Lady Naylor, pulling her gloves off brightly, “exceedingly restless. But you all
came
from Surrey, didn’t you?”

“More or less,” said Gerald, who was not sure. The Boatleys had not been sure where he came from, either; her day so far had been unsatisfactory.

“Now I do hope I’m not keeping you from smoking?”

She was. He smiled and lighted a cigarette. “You don’t … ?”

“Oh dear me no, I am quite old-fashioned. Now tell me—you know how I hate all this gossip in a garrison neighbourhood, but there is something I must 
set right. What is this nonsense I hear about Livvy Thompson? You know she’s a friend of my niece’s and comes a good deal to our house, and I do feel I ought to refute these stories about her.”

“Oh?” said Gerald, alarmed. “I had no idea.” “Hadn’t you?” said Lady Naylor. “Well, you are a friend of the young man Mr. Armstrong’s, so I felt I’d come straight to you. It appears they were seen in Cork having tea rather intimately and in consequence there are all sorts of rumours. Now it doesn’t seem fair to a young girl, at the beginning of life, having her name coupled.”

“I should have thought,” said Gerald rather stiffly, “anyone could see Miss Thompson was entirely straight. And as for Armstrong— They are engaged, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, nonsense,” said Lady Naylor pleasantly. “Oh yes,” he nodded; then with his rather engaging childishness looked at her under his lashes. “But they don’t want—”

“To begin with, the Thompsons would never hear of it. And they would be quite right. Of course, poor Livvy is motherless—”

“But many people are,” said Gerald, faintly aggressive. “Lois is.”

“Oh, naturally we should never consider a marriage like that for Lois. The point would not even arise. But even for Livvy— And then think of the young man’s career: these early marriages ruin careers, and engagements are nearly as bad. I know Colonel Boatley feels— No, what you should do, I think, is: have a straight sensible talk with your friend Mr. Armstrong. I know how much you young men will take from each other. I think as a friend you should say to him—”

“But look here—” began Gerald and paused. “Look here, Lady Naylor—” He stopped dead and looked round the room which was darker since she had come in: the afternoon was clouding over. He was disengaging himself with some anguish of illusions he had brought here, which, during the first minute or so of their talk, had been fortified. When they came to Surrey, he had thought she was hoping to meet his mother. Crossing his legs, he rubbed the side of one shoe on the other with a slight creak at which she, betraying her tensity, started. Standing with lowered eyes, with an air of heaviness and confusion, he noted this movement, a tremor of light round the edge of her boa. With unusual calmness and virility he said:

“As a matter of fact, I love Lois.”

“Oh yes. But I’m afraid, you know, that she doesn’t love you,” said the aunt equably.

He overruled this without comment, simply by maintaining his attitude. For all his physical lightness and vigour there was a quality in him she would describe as stodginess. “Then I gather she’s told you we-“

“Oh, she’s naturally pleased that you like her. And at her age, with her temperament, of course it is nice to love anyone.”

“But you’ve just said she doesn’t—”

“Not as I understand love.”

“But so long,” said Gerald, with the particular urbanity of an approach to rudeness, “so long as she and I both mean the same thing—”

“But you don’t,” said his friend in her kind, social voice. “That is what I am trying to make you see. With her temperament—”

“I haven’t noticed her temperament,” said Gerald loyally, as if a temperament were a hump.

“Now that alone,” exclaimed Lady Naylor, waving her gloves in a rapid gesticulation, “would make a marriage quite fatal … Mr. Lesworth, I don’t want to have to imagine you miserable. I have no sons of my own, you know, and Laurence being so intellectual— And there is another thing …” She paused, and with unusual nervousness, with a movement almost of Francie’s, touched her boa, her jabot, two carnations pinned into the lace. She had now to tilt straight at indecency. There was this question of money—a subject the English made free with, as free with as what was below their diaphragms, but from which her whole modesty shrank. “You may think me dreadful,” she said, “but there are things in life one must face. After all, I am Lois’s aunt… .”

Gerald, blushing, stood agonised to attention.

“There is money,” she brought out at last. “I mean, you haven’t any, have you? Of course, I don’t see why you should have. But two people must live, though it’s all rather sordid. However, this need not arise. But I just want to show you—”

“I know she’s got a beautiful home,” he said glumly.

“However … You see it’s impossible every way. But first and last, she does not love you.”

He was forced into the position, which he would have described to a friend as bloody, of asserting she did. “Though I cannot think why.”

“Oh, but so many girls
would”
she cried earnestly. “But for Lois I do think—we all think—a school of art. She cares for her drawing intensely.”

“She never speaks of it.”

“Ah, that just shows … Lack of sympathy!” said the aunt with mournful complacency. “And it isn’t simply your age; it would be the same thing if you were a captain or even a major. Now I do think you ought to be sensible. It can all pass off so quietly. Nobody knows except me. Now what I suggest—”

“—She might have told me she’d told you!” He stared round the changed room bitterly.

“That was just what I didn’t encourage, to tell you the truth. Oh, the child was most honest. But I thought you and I should approach this quite fresh and unprejudiced.”

“Did we have to?”

“Oh, Mr. Lesworth!” she cried, disconcerted. She resumed, firmly but with inspiration, something between a hospital nurse and a prophetess: “The less talk, the less indirect discussion round and about things the better, I always think.”

While she considered her gloves and with gathering satisfaction prepared to put one of them on, he stood half turned away from her, stubborn but indecisive. An unusual pendulum swung in him, he was ruined— resolute—ruined. He was dark with perplexed anger, from which his invincible “niceness” stood, in deprecation, aside. She blasphemed, and yet he had to admire her four-square propriety, her sound sense, the price she set on his Lois. And love, meanwhile, did not so much lie bleeding as sit back stunned, bruised, a little craven from shock. Gerald drew in his chin, swallowed, put a finger inside his collar as though to loosen it.