Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  He had not expected to inherit The Grove and had spent most of his life in London working quietly and efficiently as a Civil servant, in the Treasury.

  Cecilia attracted him from the moment he first met her at a local garden-party. Her good looks were of the type that settle early into a middle-aged comeliness and vary scarcely at all, after that, until old age is reached. She was a wealthy woman, and Charlecombe could not have afforded to live in his newly-acquired home unless he married money, and she was not young and so would not expect a romantic devotion.

  Charlecombe was sure that he was as incapable of experiencing romantic devotion as of inspiring it. Most of all was he incapable of expressing it.

  He judged, quite rightly, that Cecilia was bored and lonely when her sons were at school, and that she had found very few congenial friends in the neighbourhood.

  He saw that she was possessive, unprincipled in the sense that she would never recognize any law above her own will, and incapable of exerting her mind to take in any question in which she had not a personal interest.

  But she was physically attractive, good-tempered and generous with money, he admired her singing and her piano-playing and thought her devotion to her boys a beautiful and womanly thing. Charlecombe felt that he could be very happy if Cecilia would become his wife and bring herself, her fortune and her children to The Grove.

  He set about his courtship in a leisurely but thorough-going fashion, riding over to the small house on the hill outside Chepstow two or three times a week, bringing, frequently, bouquets of hothouse flowers or offerings of fruit from the glasshouses at The Grove. From time to time he gave small dinner-parties, and turned over the pages of Cecilia’s music when she sang, always distributing his guests in such a manner that her place at the dinner-table should be on his right hand.

  In the summer holidays he gave a series of cricket lunches to the neighbourhood. Fred and Lucy Lempriére were both of them members of a cricket team captained by Joe Newton and called The Newton Players, and there were matches every Saturday.

  The Newton Players were considered to be on their home ground at The Grove, where Charlecombe had a cricket-pitch and pavilion in the park, and they and the visiting teams were entertained there whenever the match was not an away-match.

  On a very hot Saturday morning towards the end of July in eighteen hundred and eighty, Cecilia’s carriage dashed up the drive that led to The Grove.

  Cecilia leant back under her parasol on the front seat, and Fred and Lucy, in white flannels and striped blazers and caps, sat on the back seat facing her.

  They were already enormously tall, although neither had come to his full growth — Fred heavier and broader-shouldered than his brother, his Creole ancestry unmistakably shown in his dark colouring, the whites of his heavy-lidded black eyes already faintly tinged with yellow and the indolence displayed in every movement when he was not actually exerting himself at sport.

  Lucy had the same slowness and grace of movement, but the sallow colouring that lay beneath his youthful tan was less apparent, his hazel eyes were astonishingly light set in thick black lashes, and with whites as clear as Cecilia’s own.

  Both had beautiful teeth, but Fred’s were the more frequently visible in a smile that hinted at more sophistication than a further knowledge of Fred would have justified, for he was actually a rather dull boy, and devoid of subtlety.

  The lads were devoted to one another, and both adored Cecilia.

  Fanny and her Mademoiselle had been left at home. Only Lucy had suggested that his sister should come, and he had not pressed the point when Cecilia had replied that, if she did, Mademoiselle must be taken too.

  Lorimer Charlecombe stood at his front door to greet his guests.

  He spoke pleasantly to the boys, whom to himself he secretly termed “dagoes,” but had eyes only for their mother. Some inexplicable magic in the beauty of the day, the elegance of Cecilia’s appearance and the touch of her gloved hand as he helped her out of the carriage, kindled a sudden spark in Charlecombe’s imagination, and at that moment he fell in love with Cecilia.

  He sat beside her in the midst of the people whom he had invited, and watched the slight rise and fall of her breast, accentuated when Fred was at the wicket, and the involuntary gesture of excitement that brought her hands together as his score was sent rocketing up by one spectacular boundary hit after another.

  “He’ll send up a catch, if he’s not careful,” someone said.

  “Fred is never careful,” Cecilia murmured to Charlecombe. “I never know if he’s going to carry his bat or be run out for a duck’s egg. Lucy is steadier.”

  Presently Fred and Lucy were facing one another at the wickets.

  A fast bowler was put on.

  Lucy played a stone-wall game and left the scoring to Fred.

  “He’s set. He’ll go on all day,” said Charlecombe of Fred, wishing to please her.

  Cecilia shook her head.

  “If he doesn’t do anything foolish.”

  In the next over, Fred faced the bowling. A fast ball with a break on it tore down the pitch. Fred caught it on the edge of his bat, cutting it round to leg — a short, choppy hit.

  “No!” called Lucy, a fraction of a second before Fred roared “Come on!” and raced for the wicket.

  Lucy dashed forward, passed his brother little more than half-way down the pitch and was run out just as Fred’s long reach flung his bat at the crease.

  “Bad luck,” said Charlecombe.

  Cecilia’s eyes were fixed on Fred, and she said nothing.

  Lucy, with a score of five, came back to the pavilion.

  Fred made his century just before the luncheon interval.

  Charlecombe had a cold luncheon spread on long trestle tables under the beech-trees that stood behind the pavilion.

  For the first time, he asked Cecilia to preside at the foot of his own table where sat the ladies and children who had come with the cricketers. He paid attention to his guests, went to speak to the teams, who sat at a separate table, and congratulated Fred on his batting and the visiting team on the quality of their fast bowler. But his thoughts were preoccupied with a growing resolve to ask Cecilia, at once, whether she would marry him.

  His opportunity came in the evening.

  The match was over, with a victory for the Newton Players to which Fred’s score had contributed the major part, and the visiting team had climbed into their brake and been driven away.

  The trees were throwing their long shadows across the trampled grass, and the sky was a pale green above the dying sunset.

  Charlecombe slowly followed Cecilia up the flight of stone steps that led from the field below to the terraces of the garden.

  On the terrace she paused and he caught up with her.

  Charlecombe felt that she must know what he was going to say. It seemed to him that the air round them vibrated with his still unspoken question.

  Although hitherto he had felt that he might reasonably and without fatuity expect Cecilia to accept him, he was now torn with suspense and misery.

  He loved her, and he wanted to believe that she loved him, and he dared not do so.

  Cecilia turned, smiling.

  “Who are the new people who have come to live at Plas Newydd?” she asked conversationally. “I heard someone talking about them at lunch.”

  So she had suspected nothing — had felt nothing, thought Charlecombe as he mechanically gave her the information for which she had asked.

  And he remembered that he himself had experienced no real emotional disturbance in Cecilia’s presence until that very morning.

  It seemed to him a very long while ago.

  “It has been such a delightful day. The boys have enjoyed themselves so much. May I ask for the carriage?”

  “Of course,” said Charlecombe, utterly confused. “I mean — won’t you come in and rest in the drawing-room for a little while?”

  “I think not, thank you. If the boys are ready�
��”

  “I think they’ve gone to the stables. They’ll come round with the carriage.”

  He pushed open the French window of the drawing-room as he spoke, and Cecilia stepped into that long, cool room of rosewood, gilding, marble, bric-a-brac and yellow satin. Charlecombe, without the slightest consciousness of so doing, closed the window behind him and, as if the gesture had held some definite meaning in it, turned resolutely to face her.

  “There is something I very much want to say to you.”

  Cecilia looked at him, her eyes meeting his fully and freely, with nothing in her face beyond a faint air of enquiry.

  Charlecombe put out his hand to lay it on her waist, and then took her hand instead. She neither resisted nor responded.

  “Will you be my wife?” he asked desperately.

  Cecilia’s hazel eyes continued to gaze into his, this time with a reflective look.

  “May I give you an answer a little later?” she murmured, with a deprecating gesture. “You’ve taken me very much by surprise — I had no idea — I do feel very much startled, Mr. Charlecombe, but it’s a great honour — —”

  A violent impatience, born of disappointment, assailed him at the artificiality of her reply.

  “I loved a woman, a long time ago, when I was a young man. I never expected to love again. Indeed, I hardly knew — —”

  He stopped, unable in the face of her unresponsiveness to pay her the supreme tribute of the truth as to the newness of his awakened feeling for her.

  “At my age,” said Cecilia, “and having, as you know, been happily married for nearly ten years, I realize that romance is past. I have no wish for anything of that kind. I have my two boys, and they come, and will always come, first.”

  Charlecombe bowed his head. There was a long silence.

  Cecilia broke it, speaking in a reasonable voice.

  “There would be much to be considered, don’t you think? I believe we should understand one another very well, and I would do all I could to make you happy of course — but have you reflected that I have two children — three, if you count Fanny — and that you could very well find a younger woman, without encumbrances?”

  Every measured word fell like a drop of cold water, extinguishing the brief, sudden flare of romantic fancy.

  Charlecombe was neither a young man nor a passionate one. His dream was so new as to be easily buried and all but forgotten. It was with a pang that was regretful rather than acute that he made the necessary readjustment.

  “Take all the time you want, Cecilia,” he said gently. “Yes, I understand about the children. They’re fine boys, and if you will trust yourself, and them, to me I will do my best to see that you never regret it.”

  He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it gently. It was a soft, satin-smooth hand that yielded itself without tremor or responsive pressure.

  She smiled, and murmured “Thank you,” and then moved across the room and turned the handle of yellow cut-crystal of the double doors that opened into the hall.

  Charlecombe followed reflectively.

  5

  The Grove, at the time when Lorimer Charlecombe brought Cecilia Lemprière there as his wife, fully justified its romantic name. It was a large, stone-built, gabled house typical of South Wales, extravagantly draped in creepers, jasmine, wistaria, clematis and ivy. Enormous rhododendrons bordered the drive, which lay between a larch plantation on one hand and a high bank on the other, covered with flowering shrubs and tall, drooping laburnums.

  The house stood well above the valley, in which lay a tiny hamlet and through which the river Wye wound its rapid silver course. Every night swirls and wreaths of white mist rose up from the river-banks and drifted slowly over the terrace and across the windows of The Grove.

  The gardens were carefully and elaborately laid out, with ribbon borders and patty-pans of brilliant flowers. A small fountain played into a stone basin at one end of the terrace, at the other was a clustering group of silver birches, and a weeping ash that overhung the flight of stone steps that led down into the park.

  Everything grew with lush abundance in the mild, wet climate and rich soil, and the wood of the rustic summer-house with the coloured glass panes and tile-mosaic floor, was swelled and rotted with damp.

  Cecilia and the children, to whom South Wales brought faint reminiscences of the wet warmth of the West Indies, soon grew to love The Grove and view it as home.

  When the incessant, pouring rain of the autumn and winter set in, and the wayside waterfalls were swelled into leaping brown torrents flecked with cream, Cecilia remained indoors, revelling in the gigantic coal fires that blazed from morning till night in every room.

  She had an excellent reason in the first year of her second marriage for doing so when, contrary to any expectation that she or Charlecombe had ever entertained, she discovered herself to be pregnant.

  In the autumn of eighteen eighty-one she gave birth to another daughter, to whom was given the name of Kate.

  Kate’s arrival again postponed a visit to Barbados, but two years later Cecilia went out to Bridgetown with her husband.

  The plantations were flourishing, Johnny Newton confident that they would continue so, and anxious to know whether one of Frederic Lemprière’s sons would not soon be coming out to take his father’s place.

  “I’m getting older,” said Johnny. “You’ll have to put somebody in my place one of these days, ma’am.”

  Charlecombe agreed with him, and thought it would be an excellent opportunity for starting one of the boys in life.

  “Lucy could go, I suppose,” said Cecilia doubtfully.

  Charlecombe, who would have preferred to see Fred take his departure for the West Indies, said nothing. Cecilia’s sons were still at school, spending all their holidays at The Grove, both of them good cricketers and good horsemen, but showing no inclination to exert themselves in any other direction.

  “There is no hurry to decide,” Cecilia said hastily.

  “We’ll send out one of them, Johnny, to pay you a visit and see for himself what the life is like.”

  “Does either of them remember this place at all?” asked Johnny rather wistfully.

  “Both of them,” Cecilia replied.

  It was true.

  Fred and Lucy both maintained that they had clear recollections of the house near Bridgetown, of individual negroes, of the boiler-house — said Lucy — and of Johnny Newton.

  It was Fred, to his stepfather’s surprise, who declared that he intended to go to Barbados and had never intended to do anything else.

  Cecilia did her best to jettison the idea instantly.

  “I shall send Lucy,” she said. “I think Fred would do well in the Army. Cavalry, of course.”

  Charlecombe made a non-committal sound for sole reply.

  Save for good horsemanship, he could see nothing in Fred to qualify him for soldiership. But he never questioned Cecilia’s right to control the destinies of her children — nor would she have tolerated it, where the boys were concerned.

  Fanny, whom her stepfather had honestly endeavoured to like, had succeeded in awakening in him nothing beyond a good-natured tolerance rooted in compassion for her lack of beauty and her mother’s apparent indifference to her.

  Little two-year-old Kate, Charlecombe’s own child, was fortunately quite unlike her half-sister.

  She was a gay, enterprising baby, with bobbing brown curls, the brilliant hazel eyes of Cecilia and Lucy, her features as yet indeterminate but her complexion so clear and roseate as to present a startling contrast with her mother’s three elder children.

  Charlecombe was a little shy of her, as he was of all primitive things or emotions, but he was very proud of her and secretly looked forward to the day when Kate would be a companion to him. He never admitted to himself that his marriage disappointed him in any way, and indeed the romantic hope that had gilded, for one moment, his imagination had died so quickly as to be almost at once forgotten.

>   Cecilia had been only four years married to him when Lorimer Charlecombe was fatally injured in a riding accident.

  He was carried back to The Grove and lay in his own bed, dying, for three days and nights.

  After the specialist — sent for from London by Cecilia, who distrusted, with ample reason, the local Dr. Williams — had gone away again, Charlecombe told his wife that he knew he was going to die.

  “While there’s life there’s hope,” said Cecilia automatically.

  He smiled feebly and moved his head.

  “Everything is in order. My will is at the Bank, and everything is left to you. Do what you like, my dear, but I should like little Kate to have this place one day.”

  Cecilia wept, decorously and without passion.

  Charlecombe asked to see a clergyman, and listened with gradually enfeebled attention to his reading of the Commendatory Prayers.

  A naturally devout man, his last distinct utterance was a murmured response before he passed into unconsciousness.

  Cecilia, now close on fifty years of age, had lived two lives after the colourless years of girlhood; one with Frederic Lemprière in Barbados, and the other in the green quietudes of South Wales, first as a widow arid then as Lorimer Charlecombe’s wife.

  Through both had run one single strand of reality, and one only: her love for her sons, of which Fred had incomparably the greater share.

  Part I. Nice Maritime

  (August 1939)

  “Nice,” announced one of them, reading out the name of the station as the train drew up, affording a view of stout men in black bérets and black alpaca coats, palm-trees that seemed to grow at odd angles, red rocks and red dust and, in distant flashes, a shimmering, sapphire-coloured sea.

  No one made any comment.

  The other members of the party were engaged in earnest discussion. The words “Stalin,” “Third International” “Capitalist system” and “Spanish War” emerged again and again, and the girl who had said “Nice” wished that she was politically-minded, like the others.

  But then three of them had been to the South of France before, and to her it was new and she was excited about her holiday and hoped they wouldn’t all have to come dashing home again because war had broken out, although that would be exciting too, and seemed extremely probable.