To the North (11 page)

When the fish was finished, he pushed the dishes into the lift; soon the cook whistled again and Markie took out a duckling, the sweet and a coffee-machine with a glass dome. The arrangement, rapidly growing on Emmeline, was delicious; she longed to get up and whistle back to the cook. Markie, feeling he had said too much far too early, calmed down, anticipated the spacious evening ahead and, refilling their glasses, asked what she had been doing. She spoke of Woburn Place, parties with and without Cecilia, her weekend at Farraways. “A nice house?” he said, “how old?” She considered: “Seventy.” She said it had been very fine and she liked the country.

“I must say I
don’t
” said Markie. “What do you do all day?”

“Nothing particular. I played tennis.” Looking at him with compunction—for she had now no more to tell—she recalled that extraordinary happiness of which he had been the author. How could she speak of the hedge, the Vicar, the print of ruins, Sir Robert, the bells? Suddenly very shy, perplexed by this paradox of intimacy and isolation, she sat looking at Markie a moment as though he were not there.

In that moment, he felt her go distant: he got up and restlessly stood by the fire, darkening inwardly with dissatisfaction and ennui. Wonderingly why he had wanted her, why she had come, he looked at her lovely long neck, her hair pale with lamplight, her face that obediently turned at his movement, but turned unseeing.

“Did you read my letter?” he asked.

“Of course, or I shouldn’t be here.”

“Then is all that all right?”

Consciousness of him and tenderness flooded her look: nodding, she put out her hand to show she could say nothing. Taking the hand but impatiently letting it go he objected: “But then shall you always—”

“—I don’t know,” she said, her voice trembling. Standing up to see him more clearly—for his face had appeared from the table an angry blur—she once more looked at him fixedly, in rather a wild kind of enquiry, as though this were for him to answer. In her ignorance, her open-mindedness, her docility she appeared to Markie adorably funny and young. Collecting himself, a hand on each of her shoulders, he kissed Emmeline: firmly, lightly and cheerfully. “There …” he said, letting her go.

At the kiss so sagely administered Emmeline’s eyelids fluttered, as though someone were tickling her under the chin with a buttercup: she thought of the sailor. When she looked at Markie who, standing there solid, said nothing more, she could not help laughing: that had been only that… . That distorting horrible fear of the other night and the other kiss was undone: she felt as happy as though it were last Sunday morning, beside the hedge. While she stood laughing at him in her yellow dress the coffee machine bubbled and Markie pushed up two armchairs. Something became entirely satisfactory: Markie made coffee and Emmeline watched him; smoothing out the long folds of her dress she relaxed in the armchair. Nursing one foot, tipping brandy about in his glass, Markie began to talk very quickly, as though she had been a whole roomful. As he had told her, she was so dazzlingly beautiful he did not care, really, if she were amused or not. This equable evening over, there would be others ahead.

CECILIA HAD NOT ASKED Pauline to tea in april: the more she was with Julian the more the child stuck in her conscience. The idea of that sad young creature moping in Julian’s flat while he and she had pursued their own selfish pleasures became increasingly painful: by June her susceptibilities festered about it, as round a thorn. While asking herself if this enraged sense of obligation on Julian’s behalf denoted increasing affection, Cecilia became quite unable to let the matter alone. Whenever things for a moment hung heavy between them, Cecilia would ask reproachfully: “How is poor little Pauline?”

When Cecilia asked after Pauline—signalising, as he had learnt too soon, a distinct drop in the atmosphere—Julian became depressed and could only say she seemed to be happy at school. It was unwise of Cecilia to dig at his conscience: each time, he retreated into an introspection from which her vivacity could not retrieve him. Watching her charm and prettiness through a dark glass, he would ask himself if she were worth the constant effort she seemed to expect. This was unfair, for he found in her something flowering, effortless, innocently exotic, apart from his anxious ineffectual conscience as from his life.

So that when Cecilia, on their way home in his car from a play they had not enjoyed, pursued for the third time since April: “But how do you
know
she is happy at school?” Julian lost his temper, flushed like a woman and asked, with a good deal less point than violence, how she supposed one knew anything? Cecilia, impressed, said she supposed she had now ruined their evening. She turned his way eyes misty, enormous, dark as they crawled through bright blocked Piccadilly.

“What have I
done
, Julian?”

“You organise me,” said Julian, already, however, ashamed. He stooped to pick up her little gold bag that had slipped to the floor of the car.

“I have enough to do,” flashed Cecilia, “organising myself. I wish you had never told me about that child!”

“Oh
really
, Cecilia… .” After all (as she said herself) it was quite usual to have nieces: Cecilia sometimes went on as though Pauline were his illegitimate daughter. This was no doubt his fault.

He added: “I’m going down there next week: you had better see for yourself.”

“Going where?”

“To the school.”

“Do you mean, come too? … I should love to: I’ve never seen a girls’ school.”

“You didn’t go to one?”

“Good heavens, no! I think that will be very nice. Let’s take down something for the poor little creature to eat: they say girls are always hungry.
Do
you mind being organised?”

When she turned like this, impulsively, lights catching her dark eyes and spangling her pale face and furs, Julian did not mind anything. Cecilia glanced down with some complacency at her spray of orchids: peace was once more restored. Julian suggested that they should take the whole day out and lunch in the country. But Cecilia said no: Buckinghamshire was too small, not many times the length of his car; they would soon overshoot the school and run out of the county; they must not overshoot the school. The fact was, to lunch at a country inn one must be in love (she thought). The musty red entrance, hat-racks, long solid menu, short wine-list were bare of charm for her nowadays. She could not attempt this with Julian… . So they agreed to go down on Saturday, lunching first at her house.

On Saturday (the day after Emmeline dined with Markie) Cecilia and Julian set out in good spirits. It had been impossible, from Pauline’s polite letter, to tell if their visit would be acceptable, but they both felt they must be doing the right thing. The sun shone: Cecilia—leaning back in the big open Bentley as they slid out through the traffic passing car after car—reflected that, while with discretion she had always enough money, it must be nice sometimes to have a little too much. She looked amiably into other cars, watched Saturday couples pushing perambulators along the pavements and wondered if she should like children, and kept pointing out to Julian houses in which she was glad she did not live, always a little too late.

She said suddenly: “
Shall
I go to America?”

Julian, forced to change gear by a block in the traffic, said: “No—why?”

“Mother’s always asking me to, but she may not mean it. But I know I should like New England. My mother’s adorable nowadays, just like an elegant old American: she and I always do take colour quickly. Every room she comes into seems to have been just given her as an expensive present, and she looks as if she’d been unwrapped from tissue paper. I don’t know why she and I don’t have more to say. Her husband’s so nice. However, I daresay they will be coming to Europe again.”

“Do you think seriously of going?”

“It is just an idea,” said Cecilia frankly. She had not meant to send up her own value at quite this rate. “It seems foolish to have an American mother and not see her.”

“It’s foolish not to do so much that one doesn’t,” said Julian, glancing sombrely at the speedometer. “But what about Emmeline? Could you leave her alone?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t stay there for ever. I expect I miss Emmeline more than she misses me.”

“I suppose she’ll marry,” said Julian, somehow saddened by the idea.

“I don’t see how she couldn’t, and yet I don’t see how she could. No one is nice enough for her: any marriage of hers would be a mistake. Besides, she is so detached— What a heavenly day, Julian: how well you arrange things!”

They cleared London and ran out into the country. Cecilia blinked; they were doing seventy on a straight stretch of road. Julian drove in silence; she raised her face happily to the sun.

Chilly cloudy yesterday (when she had a little dreaded this expedition) was quite forgotten. The chestnuts were all in flower, sunshine enamelled the buttercups, beeches glittered over their emerald shadows, cows stood knee-deep under the hawthorns. The Chilterns ran up over the snug red-brick farms: it was all as pretty and gay as a calendar. The countryside flashed as they drove, as though someone were waving a bright-coloured handkerchief at Cecilia. “Oh dear, are we here?” she exclaimed, as Julian drew up at a white gate in a wall.

Here they really were, at the school gates, and here had a slight argument. It looked pleasant enough, with limes drooping over the wall, but though Julian reminded Cecilia how much she had wanted to see a girls’ school, Cecilia would not go in: she said he had better fetch Pauline out. She was sleepy, and had to do up her face; she could not meet a headmistress or talk, she said, just at present to young girls. She made Julian run the car up a lane, where he left Cecilia, eyes shut beatifically, under an elder-tree. Considerably exasperated, he walked up alone to the house.

The school was a pleasant brick country house, with wings added. Pauline, speechless with apprehension, awaited him in the hall. Her hair was plaited so tight that her eyes popped out of her head; she wore the butcher-blue school tunic and gave him a muted kiss.

“Where is your car?” she said anxiously.

“I left it backed up a lane.”

“Oh, but it’s such a nice car. You could have driven it up… . Where is your friend?” she added, blushing, avoiding his eye.

“She’s in the car.”

“Oh,” said Pauline, obviously relieved. It became clear to Julian he should not have brought Cecilia; in fact Pauline seemed to feel he was on the brink, every moment, of an enormity. Pauline said the headmistress was sorry to be in London: Julian bore up. She added that she, Pauline, had a friend, Dorothea, who had been excused cricket to come and talk to them. At these words Dorothea, punctual as a conjuror’s rabbit, appeared through an archway. Very affable, Dorothea had the situation at once in hand, covering Pauline’s blushes with a smooth stream of talk.

“I feel so sorry for men,” she said, “coming down to a girls’ school— Where did you say your friend was?”

“Up a lane, in a car.”

“Dear me,” exclaimed Dorothea, “she
will
think us inhospitable!” She hurried away to look for Cecilia. Pauline, looking after her friend with affection, explained: “She is in the orchestra.”

Cecilia, opening her eyes, was surprised to find Dorothea looking kindly into the car. Dorothea, explaining that she was not Pauline, told Cecilia to get out and come with her: she collected the dazed Cecilia’s gloves, fur and handbag and hurried her up through the garden into the hall. “Here we are,” she said, beaming. Forming her little party up into twos, Dorothea marched them out through a side door, across a lawn, round some trees in the direction of the playing-fields: they were to watch cricket.

Cecilia found herself with Pauline: quite dazed by the violence with which the real succeeds the imagined she found Pauline less childish than she expected, taller and—she could only express it as more unmarried. Dorothea, who had thick legs, bustled ahead with Julian; she was very much in demand when her friends’ families came down, and with her jolly, direct manner had a great line in fathers and uncles.

“I’ve heard so much about you,” Cecilia said charmingly to Pauline, but the child appeared suffocated. Hearing a bat strike a ball Cecilia added: “Do you play cricket?”

“Yes,” said Pauline, “but I hate it… . We had an overhand bowler once, but she ricked her arm… . There’s a girl here called Summers, but she says she is no relation of yours and does not know you.”

They approached the cricket ground and a small pavilion backed by a wood. “That’s our games captain,” said Dorothea, pointing out a solid girl fielding point, in a panama hat. “That girl eating grass at longstop is called Summers: she says she must be a cousin of yours and thinks she has met you.”

Pauline preserved a horrified silence. One girl, run out by another, carried her bat back to the pavilion with an obvious air of relief. “It is not a match,” explained Dorothea, “or feeling would run higher.” The field, rigidly self-conscious, appeared to ignore the visitors, though one or two girls glanced sympathetically at Pauline, and Cecilia’s clothes came in for some sidelong attention. Julian remained unnoticed. The party watched two overs, then they were moved on by Dorothea to look at the school gardens.

The gardens were planted like rows of neat little graves, someone had a cement rabbit, someone had built a sea. Pauline, looking drearily at some sprouting annuals, said that Dorothea and she had a garden but never won the prize. They turned in by a side door to the gymnasium, where Dorothea, with a flash of blue knickers, turned a dignified but degage somersault on the bar, let down and swung the ropes, displayed the vaulting-horse and said they must see the studio.

“The work here,” said Dorothea, as they stood wilting under the skylights, “doesn’t amount to much: there are one or two little things of mine… .” “She draws divinely,” breathed Pauline. Cecilia paused to admire a spray of painted azaleas, but Dorothea hurried her on. “These are some things of mine,” she said modestly, opening a portfolio.