To the North (8 page)

In the drawing-room at Farraways, where they were waiting for dinner, a distinct gloom was lightened by the appearance of Emmeline. Gilbert Bligh had forgotten his black tie and been obliged to borrow one from Tim Farquharson, whom he disliked; he did not dare reproach Gerda who would have replied that she was not a valet; that they had not enough servants was one of her tragedies. Tim Farquharson, unable to post his letters, had reopened several and come to the conclusion that he had not done himself justice. Sir Robert, leaning on the piano, was showing a book of drawings to Gerda Bligh, who would have preferred to stay in her room for a good weep. Lady Waters, arranging a fur on her spangled shoulders, looked magnetically at her visitors. Emmeline had, in fact, entered a web where the prey still fluttered… . But the drawing-room with wide-open windows, bowls of white lilac and young fire seemed to be full of friendly people. She smiled, and said she hoped she was not late.

“Emmeline’s looking well this evening,” Sir Robert could not help saying proudly to Gerda Bligh.

“As though,” Gerda said, sighing—for her time for all this was over—”she’d been reading a love-letter.”

Sir Robert, who knew his Emmeline, smiled politely and put the drawings away.

GERDA BLIGH WAS NOT REALLY A FOOL, she was an honest girl of about Emmeline’s age, with a tendency to hysteria. Having read a good many novels about marriage, not to speak of some scientific books, she now knew not only why she was unhappy but exactly how unhappy she could still be. She was in spirit one with those many young wives whose mortifications are aired in the evening Press. Gilbert bought evening papers to read the murders, but Gerda went straight to the Woman’s Page. It is true, she was more fortunate than Mrs. A. (Mill Hill), Mrs. B. (Sydenham) and “Discouraged.” Her husband did not, for instance, bring home friends from the office who smoked their pipes round the gas fire, ignoring her while she got the tea. Gilbert’s friends, when they came to dinner, made quite a fuss about Gerda and bored him. Advice to run upstairs between the cooking and serving of supper to put on a smile and a fetching crepe-de-chine frock did not concern her; if she suffered from lack of sympathy it was not at the end of a day’s ironing. Her difficulties, however, were in the main the same; husbands can be as unresponsive over a sole from Harrods as over the sardine tin. She rearranged the drawing-room: Gilbert took no notice or said he liked it as it had been before. He complained that she lost things when she had simply put them away. When they mislaid the corkscrew at sherry-time she could only say, tremulous: “Well, I am not a butler.” He would reply: “But we buy new corkscrews every week.”

Gerda was lonely; she was the daughter of a retired admiral, marriage had isolated her from her relations in Hampshire, from whom she had been divided before marriage by intellectual discontent. Gilbert’s friends said he had picked her up at a dance near Portsmouth from which he had better have stayed away. She lacked sympathy: only Lady Waters was needed to unsettle Gerda completely, and Lady Waters she met at some lectures on Adler they both attended. It turned out, Lady Waters had known and had deeply distrusted Gilbert’s mother, so that she took a particular interest in the young pair. After some talks, Gerda could not imagine how she had ever stayed married so long. The Blighs as a couple dined fairly often at Rutland Gate, but it had been a shock to Gerda to find, when they came to Farraways, that her friend had a lien on Gilbert also, and must have asked them to lunch alone in alternate weeks. Gilbert remarked with complacency, taking oif Tim Farquharson’s black tie late that Saturday night, that Lady Waters thoroughly understood him: it had shocked Gerda to feel that their marriage had been discussed. That with Gerda herself Lady Waters had now superseded the evening papers did not make it more pleasant when she saw Gilbert pacing the borders behind the beech hedge with Lady Waters, thoroughly talking things out.

Emmeline quite liked Gerda but wished she were not here. After breakfast on Sunday morning Gerda waylaid her in the garden.

“Where are you going?” said Gerda, pathetic.

“Nowhere particular.”

“What an awfully pretty dress,” said Gerda, herself looking remarkable in lime-green. She had ash-blonde hair brushed sideways over her forehead and rolled at the nape of her neck, and large over-expressive eyes in a pretty expressionless face that lengthened at least an inch when she felt doleful. She knitted her brows when she spoke but had a threateningly calm manner. “Did I hear you say,” she went on, “you were going to church?”

“Later,” said Emmeline, who had arranged this with Sir Robert.

“I wish I were; I love dear old village churches.”

“Do come.”

“I couldn’t,” said Gerda, “you see, my ideas are upset.” Sitting down on a step of the sundial she looked up at Emmeline so appealingly that Emmeline had to sit down also. Tufts of aubretia hung over the stones; the frank tawny faces of pansies surrounded them; a dewy fresh exhalation came up from the matted roots of the plants. The sun streamed over the rock-garden. Gerda glanced at her small feet in high-heeled green sandals, at Emmeline’s, longer and narrower in snake-skin shoes. “I used to love church,” she said, sighing. “Still, you could join in the hymns.”

“They upset me frightfully. Fine weather makes me feel awful, too.”

“Perhaps we shall have a wet summer,” said Emmeline.

“You look so happy,” said Gerda, fixing on Emmeline her dark, morbid eyes.

“I ate such a large breakfast,” said Emmeline.

“Still, you are happy, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” said Emmeline. She was so happy that she could have kissed the sundial; everything seemed to be painted on glass with a light behind. She smiled at the glint of sun on poor Gerda’s hair: grief was a language she did not know. “Something smells nice,” she said, “is it thyme or rosemary?”

“Catmint,” said Gerda, whose mother was a keen gardener. “Do you think one’s relations with men are always impossible? I sometimes think women were born solitary.”

“My sister-in-law thinks that.”

“How I should like to meet your sister-in-law! You know, Emmeline, I should really never have married. One cannot abide by an emotional decision one’s whole life.”

“Does Georgina say so?”

“It’s what I’ve always felt.”

“Still, it might be dull not to marry.”

“Oh, Emmeline, if you only knew!”

“I don’t,” said Emmeline, placidly shredding a leaf. Flowers grew, and on this fine morning chorused with scent and colour: she thought idly, free will was a mistake, but did not know what this meant. Gerda went on to say it would have been sad to have missed motherhood. Emmeline could not remember how many children she had, and asked her: Gerda said she had two.

“How nice. Do you want any more?”

“Not now,” Gerda said gloomily.

“One of each?” said Emmeline, the excellence of the arrangement making her smile.

“Not one of each: two daughters. Emmeline, what shall I
tell
them? Am I to watch them grow up and make the same frightful mistakes? Suppose they come to me and say they wish they had never been born?”

“I don’t expect they would mean it: people so often say that.”

“But one never knows.”

“How old are they?”

“Four and two. But they won’t be that always.”

“No— But what is the matter, Gerda? Are you wanting to run away with somebody else?”

“I don’t think I could,” said Gerda—this was her great subject. “I seem to be quite used up; I seem to have no energy. Besides, it may sound extraordinary, Emmeline, but I’m not
interested
in men any more. You and I are the same age, and you have so much before you; it seems extraordinary. Perhaps I don’t meet anyone who appeals to my mind. Besides, I really am fond of Gilbert, and there would be such a fuss. Besides, no one has asked me to.”

At this point Tim Farquharson appeared in the rock-garden, picking his way down the curly paths. He was in better spirits this morning and would have liked a chat. He stood still and stroked the top of his head nervously, as though the sun were too hot, for he had put himself wrong with Gerda the night before. Too much preoccupied to be aware how things went with the Blighs, he had remarked to Gerda that unhappy couples were boring… . Gerda and Emmeline with their two pretty bare heads, sitting shoulder to shoulder under the sundial were just what Tim wanted, but he did not know how to approach.

“So that’s where you are,” he said.

“Yes,” replied Emmeline—but Gerda, still smouldering, lowered her eyelashes.

“Did I hear you say. you were going to church?”

“I am,” said Emmeline, “later.”

“Shall I come? I can’t make up my mind.”

The church bells had begun in the valley beyond the house, so Emmeline left Tim Farquharson, unhappy and undecided, stork-like among the aubretia. A woman could have done much for him in these ways; he began to regret his engagement, especially as Lady Waters, beyond remarking that he had now to rebuild his life, had not taken much interest in him this weekend, and Sir Robert, forgetful and never quite up to date, kept asking the date of his wedding and sending his love to Jane.

“What is that?” he asked, sniffing.

“Catmint,” said Gerda. “I don’t like it.” She turned away from him moodily.

Emmeline walked away through the tulips brimming with light. “So long,” she thought, “as Georgina is pleased with them all and they do not depress Cousin Robert …” She was bewildered by confidences; she may have lacked some faculty, key to the maze, or been on some plane or another a kind of idiot. Till now, a face not approaching or some fixed object had delayed her drifting fancy an instant, till it trailed on like a vapoury shadowless thin cloud over a tree. She laid hold on nothing. Now, like a cumulus mounting in dazzling soft rocky whiteness, one pleasure in an identity, Markie’s, reigned in her perfectly clear sky.

She did not immediately turn to the house, but went down the garden. Looking out through an arch in the beech hedge, down the shining country at the low stone walls’ broken shadows and trees in the blue bloom of morning powdered with light, while the church bells struck on the air their invisible pattern, she less thought of Markie than had an intimate sense of his presence, quickening with confidence and delight: last week’s shock fell away.

Sky crowded the arch with light, the hedge with its ardent young leaves was the burning green of May. She bent from the hedge one leaf, serrated, with delicate sappy veins, and looked through it at the sun. Her fingertips went transparent: here and in the veins of the leaf ran the whole of spring… . The bells changed, Sir Robert was waiting: the leaf sprang back to the hedge.

Markie had told her a story about beech trees.

Last November, he said, he spent a weekend in the country, impure country where London’s genteelest fingertip touches the beechwoods. He had not enjoyed himself; his friend’s wife, like most wives, was specious, doors opened with arty latches, the house stank of cold steam from imperfect heating: he had a touch of liver.

“Was he a great friend?” asked Emmeline.

“No, just a man I knew.”

Markie, for the good of his liver, went for a walk by himself after Sunday lunch, uphill into the woods. No birds sang: it had been worse than that day in Keats. Leaves, rotting and rusty, deadened his steps; the afternoon had been sodden and quite toneless; it began to be dark early. Down there, between the dreary trunks of the beeches, houses lay like a sediment in the cup of the misty valley: great gabled carcases, villas apeing the manor, belfried garages where you could feel the cars get cold. There were no lights, not a thread of smoke from a chimney. Afternoon stupor reigned; there was nothing more that they wanted; down there they all sat in the dark. Gardens extensive and cultured, with paved paths and pergolas, ran up the sides of the valley, some had lakes where a punt could measure its length, not turn, some bird-baths for sparrows to drown in. To Markie the foreshortened villas appeared enormous, bloated as though by corruption… . Then someone’s wife opened a cold piano: she tinkled, she tippetted, she struck false chords and tried them again. God knew what she thought she was doing. The notes fell on his nerves like the drops of condensed mist all round on the clammy beech-branches. Markie’s left shoulder-blade had begun to itch violently: he ground it against a tree. Penetrated by all these kinds of discomfort he had raged in the bare meek woods… . The piano stopped, he went downhill again to tea.

The fire, as he had foreseen, was dead out; the room was, however, stale enough to be warm. Flustered by his return, his hostess had dabbed at her face with an impotent powder-puff. He had said: “How nicely you play!” She said, “But I wasn’t playing. I don’t know what I was doing: what was I doing?” Her husband did not know either: he knocked ashes about in the fire and said it was out. “Did you have a nice walk?” they had asked him.

“Where did you go?” Markie could not remember. “Oh well,” they said, “all the walks are the same round here. But it’s pretty country, isn’t it?” No one else came in: they said they lived very quietly. “Still,” Markie’s friend had said, “it does grow on one.”

Emmeline, considering this when he angrily came to an end, had enquired: “Is it a ghost story?”

Markie had simply looked at her.

“But why did it make you so angry?”

Though the story seemed to have no point, it had saddened her in the hearing. Retrospective anguish had made quite a poet of Markie. She was not clear, however, whether he meant people should not marry, or should not live in Buckinghamshire. His contempt for such placid pools in the life-stream surprised Emmeline.

Hurrying downhill beside Sir Robert, she took a short cut over slippery grass. Emmeline wondered what Markie would do at Farraways.

“Your aunt talks of taking tea out this afternoon,” said Sir Robert, who could never be clear that though his wife was Cecilia’s aunt she was Emmeline’s cousin. “She thinks you might all like to look at the Roman villa.”

“Do
you
want to?”

“It always looks to me more like a rockery; they have discovered some pavement but that is locked up on Sundays. However—”