To the North (34 page)

“Yes, I do think mountains. You’re certain to have to meet him sometime and somewhere: why not happily here? Parties do seem so often to put things right: there’s nothing like looking pretty and being social. We always enjoy our parties— they’ve always been good parties, haven’t they, Emmeline?”

“Always, yes.”

“And this may be one of the last— So you don’t mind?” said Cecilia, pressing on her advantage. For a moment she thought she saw in Emmeline’s eyes a wandering icy gentleness like insanity’s, gentleness with no object. But this was as in a dream. “You don’t really mind?” she said.

“I don’t mind,” agreed Emmeline. And before Wednesday this had become nearly true.

Benito lay curled up on Emmeline’s dressing-gown. Looking into her wardrobe, crossing her bare arms up which the first chill of evening began to shiver, Emmeline found only two dresses pretty enough for Cecilia’s party tonight: the yellow in which she had dined with Markie, the silver in which she had first met Julian. Since Markie’s coming she had been out less often: very happy or unhappy one disappears equally. The yellow, unworn for so long, still showed a faint splash of sherry across the front: she had started so violently when the cook whistled. So she put on the silver, slipped her string of crystals over her neck, smoothed her hair and went down: it was early, not eight o’clock.

Julian waited about rather anxiously at the foot of the stairs. He disliked this idea of Cecilia’s, suspecting behind it some shadow of Lady Waters, and had opposed it. “But it is arranged,” she had said with smooth little intonation and raised eyebrows. “If you don’t mind …” she added. He did mind. All the same, here he was, pledged to assist at this ghastly farce, trying for all of them, martyrising perhaps to one: a farce only Markie’s bravado, Emmeline’s frozen passivity and his fiancee’s rooted distaste for fact in the rough could have ever made possible. Here they all were, the table set, Markie soon to arrive: somehow things had to be carried off. Standing about in the hall, he heard—with a start that showed plainly where his anxiety lay—Emmeline’s door shut and Emmeline’s foot on the stairs. Julian looked up to smile.

Her beauty surprised him. Very tall, silver and shining, her hair tonight at its brightest, face at its most translucent, her unnatural serenity caught at his heart like a cry. Were she dead, she could not have come from farther away. But from this distance, her silver dress sweeping the stairs, all the more Emmeline seemed to arrive at a party, one of those parties from which one is always absent, which heroes and one’s friends’ friends attend in some kind of heaven; the eternal Party to which Cinderella drove up, upon whose light the doors close. “Here you are …” Julian said, holding out a hand— that, though smiling his way, Emmeline did not see—as her shadow came down the white wall.

A little angry with Julian, who she felt did not wholly support her, Cecilia, afloat on big flame-pink transparent sleeves, was everywhere: touching the flowers, lighting the tall table candles that made a pale ring in daylight, moving the glasses for sherry from place to place. Tonight was the first of her very last parties: no phase of her life had gone out in such festivity. She said to herself, only Markie was coming; but always that charming flutter was at her heart. The drawing-room, heavy and cool in late light with white Chinese peonies, the dining-room, pointed expectant glitter on lakes of polish, reflected her animation. Rooms put off their recent veiled air of being already left and forgotten. Quite pink with endeavour, her two little maids ran about below: claret warmed, salad chilled, the service-lift hummed up and down. Like the fountain-play of all nervous pleasure, tonight had a flexible delicate perpetuity. The doom of the house seemed a rumour and Julian, now going with Emmeline into the drawing-room, as innocent of it as any guest.

Julian thought how much he should miss these evenings at Oudenarde Road. Watching Emmeline watch the fire, he opened some cigarettes and advanced a match-box—already a little the host. Emmeline watched Julian opening the cigarettes: the pretty and smiling occasion was terrible. He unstoppered the sherry, moved a glass vaguely and looked about.

Cecilia swept in; disturbing their grown-up silence, in which she had no part, she stood like an eager child, at a loss, and did not know what to say. The clock-hands crept round: though Markie did not arrive he was still not late.

“Do I look nice?” said Cecilia. They were assuring her she looked lovely when the bell rang.

It was possible that bravado brought Markie to dinner. He unwound his white scarf in the hall and followed the maid in, smiling: delighted to see himself. Shaking hands with Cecilia —from their handshake her fluffy pink sleeve fell away—he agreed that this was very nice. “I hope I’m not late,” he said; “I came up from Baldock.”

“From Baldock? What a long way!”

The merit of this long journey flourished about Markie: he did explain, however, that someone had run him up. He glanced down the room: at the end, in late light reflected in from the garden, he saw Emmeline standing with Julian, in a long silver dress that he did not know. She smiled at him like a stranger. Markie advanced, as they did not: the greeting became general.

Chatting over the sherry, Cecilia wondered why she had not asked Markie to dinner like this before. Though still not entirely what she liked, he was competent and had floated, within two minutes of his arrival, what had once looked like being a rather dead weight. Julian warmed up and came forward, leaving Emmeline standing by the white mantelpiece. With his handkerchief, Julian mopped some sherry from the base of Cecilia’s glass which was dripping a little: skirting these lovers, so taken up with each other, Markie strolled to the mantelpiece, where he put down his glass.

“Well, Emmeline,” he said quietly, “how are you?”

“Very well.”

“Very busy?”

“We’re sending a good many people to Palestine.”

“Won’t that be very hot?”

Possibly Emmeline did not know: she made no reply. Having finished his sherry, Markie looked at her sideways to say something more, but at this point Julian came their way with the decanter.

The maid appeared at the door; they went in to dinner.

Between Cecilia and Emmeline, across the round table from Juli’an, Markie, this evening, was at his best. He caught no flies on his tongue; he played gracefully up to Cecilia, gave Julian openings, kept inviting the silent Emmeline into the talk. Such a hum soon hung over the glasses that ten or twelve people might have sat down: his wit, more agreeable, lost its buffeting quality: later, Cecilia remembered nothing particular he had said, just that her spirits went up and she felt gay and successful. Ice encased Emmeline’s most vivid smile and her listening attitude, perpetuating her beauty: she was “behaving” as one would wish.

When just the tip of an angel’s wing brushed the table: “Well,” Markie said to Cecilia, lifting his glass an inch: “Here’s to Switzerland!”

“Why?” said Julian.

“Where Markie met me,” vouchsafed Cecilia, sparkling.

“Though in what part of Switzerland,” Markie said, “one cannot be certain. In fact, I didn’t know it was Switzerland till you told me.”

“Close to a lake.”

“And very nasty it looked— Did you finish that book?”

“Which book?” said Julian.

“A book she was travelling with.”

“No,” said Cecilia. “Somehow I never took to it. If we could remember what time it was when we met, Emmeline could tell us where, to the very rock. She knows what all trains are doing all over Europe.”

Julian looked at his wrist-watch. “Eight forty-eight. What is the Simplon-Orient doing now, Emmeline?”

Emmeline told them. Markie asked Julian where he and Cecilia had met:
he
seemed uncertain, she said it had been at Goodwood, the first and last time she had been; it had rained and she fancied no one. “i talked too much,” she said, “and sat too long on my foot at lunch: it didn’t uncramp for the rest of the afternoon. I never did know anything about horses.”

Markie said he had learnt all about horses he had ever forgotten from men in the bar of the Irish mail: he had asked why one should not have an electric fox: they had been able to give him no reason. Smiling, Cecilia paid tribute to Markie’s adaptability: in other company he would have been out with the Quorn… . Looking across the table Markie reminded Julian that
they
had first met during the Strike: Julian had given Markie a lift to the Courts. “Those two blondes,” he said, “that you had in the back flagged another car going west the moment you put them down and drove back up the Strand again. They were having quite a nice morning; I daresay they got their lunch— Whereas you and I,” he added, turning to Emmeline, “met at this very table. So this is an anniversary.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

Julian said: “The night I met Emmeline, at a party, we danced till she said, very nicely, should we sit down and talk? When we’d talked a little, she said she wished we were dancing.”

“Emmeline, is that true?”

The maid drew the curtains: on the shadows their faces in candlelight sprang out into new life; something contracted a little about the table. Julian said to Cecilia: “I wish I’d met you in a train.” Dropping her voice she said: “Why?”—one of those questions between happy lovers that are never answered but float into speculation. Their eyes meeting, each sought in the other’s a ghost of that first charming strangeness (a little blurred for these two by the rain at Goodwood) from which they had travelled far. They regretted that odd grace of love in its immaturity. Each tried to picture the other, unknown, balancing down a train corridor; unconscious, each veered round those inches that brought them full-face for a quick rush of words on her part, a rapt inattention on his. Delicious and intimate confidence, like a match struck between them, was hastily sheltered. So lovers in company step off the spinning disc of talk for their half-moment, to step on again smiling… . Markie, taking the hint—one inch more of Cecilia’s gauze-covered shoulder—turned quickly to Emmeline. They were almost but not quite alone: still with the light inflection of someone chatting at dinner he said: “You are looking lovely: is that dress new?”

“No,” she said, surprised by the question.

His eyebrows went up at her manner; he said quickly: “Aren’t we friends?”

Her wide-apart eyes looked his way with unseeing intentness. “I didn’t think so,” she said.

“Then why am I here?”

She could have said: “You are not,” for his presence remained unreal. She said at last: “I don’t know.”

“Then why get Cecilia to ask me?”

Emmeline’s eyes dilated and darkened suddenly with amazement in her white oval of face. She turned away and sat twisting her glass, looking thoughtfully at her hand, as so often when they had been dining together. Once, by some reflex to his attention, her eyelids fluttered, she opened her lips to speak, as though some strange partner at dinner, dependent on her politeness, were by her side. Markie’s quick look, sidelong, examined her fingers’ movement about the stem of the wineglass, ran up her bare arm to the shoulder, the throat, then down the long string of crystals hanging over her dress. The look left its track of fire: Emmeline’s fingers tightened about the glass.

“Idiot,” he said, still lightly. “When can we meet?”

She said something inaudible.

“What did you say?”

“Never.”

“—Jane,” Cecilia said suddenly, recollecting herself, looking round. “Mr. Linkwater’s glass… . Julian says he has heard of a house,” she went on, to Markie, “but then we hear of so many. Where would you live? I don’t think the house we both want has ever been built.”

“Why not build it?”

“I don’t think we know what we want.”

“It would be devastating,” said Markie, “to have to make up one’s mind.”

Cecilia explained that nothing was light enough for her: she wanted something all windows; her distaste for dark walls, she feared sometimes, must be almost morbid. Whereas Julian must have wall-space, to hang his pictures. Chatting to her of Corbusier—still with an eye for Emmeline listening to Julian, cheek on her hand—Markie profoundly regretted coming tonight. Here, tonight, the incalculable had flared out—on his side again, at least—between him and Emmeline, on account of her unforeseen beauty, her distance and her renewed unconsciousness of himself. He was alarmed and unnerved by the violent resurgence of his desire.

So far he had come out lightly: if he had missed her, relief had room to predominate. He had kept a cold sense of her worth: consideration was owed her—was he not here tonight? —with the end in sight always he had the decent obsequies well in hand. It had been high time they parted: a woman who rang up Daisy would stop at nothing; things began to be dangerous, for there is no doubt that angels rush in before fools. He loathed suffering, out of place in the rational scheme: since Devizes, his major feeling had been resentment. The measure of her unhappiness he could have gathered, but did not dare gather fully, from one wild letter. Some idea of disaster, injurious scandal, of her life taken, her brain going, had smoked out at him like a djinn from the cashier’s envelope: for a day when alarm and compunction had had their full way with him he avenged himself on her by silence. She had undone herself; she was her own victim; he was unhappy in having touched her; she would not ever be warned. Justice, inscrutable under the bandage, remained Markie’s cold ally.

They had parted: no doubt for the best. But, having come just into ear-shot to leave her in better order, he found himself ambushed and did not know how to get free. A confused struggle against this renewed domination, with self-contempt and a maddening resentment of his desire, sharpened his manner and—though throughout the rest of dinner he did not again look at Emmeline—added a bitter edge to his talk: Cecilia found him less pleasant.

In the drawing-room Cecilia added a log to the fire, while Julian pushed up the chairs. Emmeline thought it must be very late: it was half past nine. Ten minutes with Julian of rather guarded banality had quite restored Markie’s morale: coolly standing by Emmeline’s chair he was ready for anything… . Cecilia unfolded an
Evening Standard
with inch-high headings: the case of the moment was striking and she asked Markie to give them his inside view. This he did, with what seemed the most likeable indiscretion: two of his best friends were briefed for the case, he had met the lady concerned and he did not mind telling them… . He stood with his back to the fire, very good company. A little wine and the evening had gone to Cecilia’s head; she sat encouraging Markie: nothing remained unpalatable. Julian chuckled; Emmeline glanced once again at her wrist-watch: a quarter to ten.