“Not quite all — though nearly,” said Lonergan. “What are you going to drink?”
“Gin and vermouth.”
He ordered the drinks.
“Why have you got such an obsession about manners?” Primrose enquired out of a long silence, after her second drink.
“It’s just another middle-class characteristic.”
“It isn’t. My aristocratic parent is the same.”
“Is she now. Diplomatic circles and all. Why didn’t she succeed in bringing you up better?”
“Because what makes sense in one generation doesn’t in the next, obviously.”
“Well,” said Lonergan, “of course she and I belong to one generation and you to another. That’s clear as crystal. Have another drink?”
“Okay. Same again.”
The third round was consumed in silence, but Primrose, sprawling in her chair, pushed out one long slim leg and pressed it hard against Lonergan’s thigh.
It was he who eventually moved, suggesting that they had better be going on.
“Okay,” said Primrose indifferently.
She got up and threaded her way past the tables and chairs, moving with her characteristic effect of ruthless, effortless poise. But when they were in the hall Lonergan saw that her eyes were glazed and she remarked in her most indistinct drawl:
“You all right for driving? I’m slightly — very slightly — tight.”
“Well, I’m not. Come on.”
He took her by the elbow and steered her out into the darkness.
“God, I can’t see a thing in this damned black-out.”
“You’ll be all right in a second. Stand still on the step and don’t move while I get the car round.”
When they were on the road again Lonergan said:
“You can’t possibly be tight on three small drinks. I suppose you haven’t had anything to eat all day.”
“Not a thing, except one cup of utterly filthy coffee for breakfast. I’ll be all right, directly.”
She slumped down in her seat, leaning her head against his shoulder.
Lonergan, driving slowly, partly because he was careful in the black-out and partly because he wanted to give her time to recover herself before they arrived, thought that, so long as she remained silent and rather movingly helpless, he could almost make himself imagine that he loved her a little.
The car was turning into the lane that led to Coombe before Primrose spoke.
“I wish we were staying at The Two Throstles to-night.”
“So do I,” Lonergan answered automatically, and wishing nothing of the kind since he was perfectly well-known at The Two Throstles and so, certainly, was she.
“When you get to the gate, which you’ll have to get out and open, I’ll tidy up a bit.”
“Right.”
A moment later he stopped the car and, before getting out, pulled her towards him and kissed her.
Primrose returned the kiss fiercely and he felt her hands clutching at him.
She was both exciting and easily excited, but already he wished that he had never embarked on the affair.
The idea of carrying it on in the girl’s own home was idiotic, tasteless, and repellent to him. He was angry and disgusted with himself for having lacked the courage to tell her so when she had first suggested the plan.
As usual, he had been afraid of hurting her. As though a girl like that, whose affairs were as numerous as they were short-lived, was ever going to be hurt by any man! Least of all, he unsparingly added, a man twenty-four years older than herself at whom she had only made a pass on a meaningless impulse, at a dull party.
Instinctively, he released his hold of her.
“What’s the matter?” asked Primrose.
“Nothing. Hadn’t we better go on?”
Primrose gave her short, unamused laugh.
“I suppose so.”
She had taken his words in a sense far other than that in which he had meant them.
Lonergan got out and opened the gate, drove through and then got out to shut it again.
When he returned Primrose had switched on the light in the roof and was making up her face. Her gummed-looking curls were perfectly in place.
“Ready, Primrose?”
“Not yet.”
He sat without moving, his eyes fixed upon her, but neither seeing her nor thinking of her.
In a few minutes now they would reach the house.
Had Primrose Arbell’s mother, more than a quarter of a century ago, been that touching child to whom he had made most innocent and idyllic love for a few breathless afternoons in a Roman garden, before — like the catastrophe in a Victorian novel — her parents had sent him to the right-about?
If so, she might well have forgotten the whole episode, his name included. Perhaps he’d have forgotten, too, if it hadn’t been for that startlingly unforeseen interview — again, like the Victorian novel — with her parents, and for the odd, rather charming artificiality of such a name as Valentine Levallois. Yet some romantic certainty in him repudiated that idea, even as he formulated it. At all events, he wouldn’t now recognize her, any more than she him. And it would be for her to decide whether or no she remembered his name. Whatever Primrose might say of her mother’s incompetence Lonergan felt quite convinced that, socially, she was not likely to be anything less than wholly competent.
“Okay now, darling.”
“Right.”
He drove on.
The house, like all houses now, stood in utter darkness.
He drew up in front of the stone pillars with the lead-roofed portico above the door.
“Ring,” directed Primrose. “There’s a chain affair, to the left of the door.”
Lonergan, leaving her seated in the car, got out and after some trouble found the chain, which seemed unduly high above his head. When he grasped it, he could tell that it had been broken off and not repaired. His vigorous pull resulted in a prolonged mournful, jangling sound, a long way off, that reminded him of country houses in Ireland where there lived, for years and years, elderly and impoverished people.
An outburst of barking followed from within the house, and he could hear someone approaching.
“They’re coming, Primrose.”
Lonergan stepped back to the car and put out a hand to help her out. He had no intention of walking into the house without her.
“Are you all right, now?”
“I’m okay,” said Primrose.
Her voice sounded sullen as though she had dropped her words from one corner of her closed mouth, as she did when she was either out of temper or seeking to make an impression.
He guessed that both states of mind might be hers just then.
A young girl in a cap and apron opened the door, very gingerly so as to avoid showing any light, and Primrose — ignoring her — walked in.
Lonergan followed.
He said “Good evening” to the maid and she answered “Good evening, sir” in pert, cheerful tones. He wondered what she thought of Primrose.
They went through glass-panelled swing-doors and were met by a renewed outburst of barking.
“Hallo!” said a girl’s voice, and he saw the speaker scramble up from the floor in front of the fire, gathering against her the barking puppy, its awkward legs and large paws dangling.
“Hallo,” said Primrose, and she swung round to face Lonergan immediately behind her.
“Meet my sister Jess,” she muttered. “Colonel Lonergan — Jess.”
Jess shook hands.
He was surprised to see how young and school-girlish she looked.
“Sorry about all the noise,” she cried, slapping the head of the barking, wriggling pup. “Shut up, aunt Sophy. Look, Primrose, don’t you agree that she’s the exact image of aunt Sophy?”
“She is, a bit.”
“Aunt Sophy,” began Jess, turning to Lonergan, and then she broke off, and exclaimed: “Here’s mummie.”
He watched her comin
g through some further door, crossing the hall towards them.
Prepared as he was in advance for the meeting, it yet astonished him profoundly to see, in that first instant, that he could perfectly recognize in this woman of his own age the young nymph of the Pincio Gardens.
She wasn’t, of course, a young nymph now. Time had washed the colour from her brown hair — the wave in front was entirely silver — and from her face. Only the dense blue-green of her eyes remained. It flashed across his mind that he had never seen eyes of quite that colour since, and it did not occur to him until long afterwards that the eyes of Primrose were of exactly the same arresting, unusual shade.
The very shape of her face — a short oval, with the beautifully-defined line of the jaw still unmarred — brought back to him the sheer sensation of pleasure that, as a draughtsman, he had before experienced at the sight of its sharply cut purity of outline.
He moved towards her and she held out her hand, smiling.
“Colonel Lonergan? How do you do?”
Curiously taken aback, although for what reason he had no idea, Lonergan shook hands and repeated her conventional greeting.
“Oh! I remember your voice,” she most unexpectedly exclaimed — and he was not sure that the unexpectedness had not struck herself as well as him.
“And I remember your face,” he answered, and for an instant they seemed to stare at one another.
“Hallo, mummie,” said Primrose. She stood by the fire without moving, and her mother, after a tiny hesitation, went to her, and putting an arm round her shoulders, kissed her in greeting.
IV
The house, the large front bedroom assigned to Lonergan, even the water in the chipped white enamel water-can standing in the flowered china basin on the old-fashioned washstand, were all as cold as Primrose had foretold. He was glad to hurry downstairs but he felt that the evening was likely to prove a strange one.
That past and present should so overlap was disconcerting enough, but Rory Lonergan, who had regretfully and at the same time competently, deceived a great many people had never yet seriously deceived himself and he was already aware of a sense of tension, almost of foreboding, that came from within himself and threatened others as much as himself.
He was oddly relieved to find no one downstairs except Jessica, still playing with her dog.
It was easy to make friends with Jess, and for her, as for the elderly ladies in the cocktail-bar, he deliberately accentuated Irish tone and idiom, in order to amuse her.
He took notice of the puppy, and listened to the explanation of why she had been so oddly named.
“Ah, the little poor dog! Isn’t that a shame, now!”
“What a frightfully good point of view. Most people think it’s awful for old aunt Sophy — or would be, if she knew about it. Nobody has ever said it’s a shame for a poor darling little puppy to be called after a cross old lady.”
“Have they not?”
“Not they,” said Jess. “Actually, I shall probably change her name later on or perhaps just call her Sophy. Otherwise it’s a bit like those dim parents who give their children idiotic pet-names and will keep on with them for ever. I knew a person whose life at school was practically ruined because her mother came to see her and called her Tiddles. I ask you — Tiddles.”
Lonergan expressed appropriate disapproval. He thought of asking her about her school but decided that she had too recently ceased to be a schoolgirl and said instead:
“I hear you’re waiting to be called up for the WAAF?”
“That is correct. Did Primrose tell you?”
“She did.”
“I wouldn’t have thought she’d be enough interested. It’s funny, you knowing her first, and then coming down here.”
“Well, I was down here first, you know, for a few days and then I had to go to London for a special job and met her again,” said Lonergan, adding the last word as he remembered that Primrose had decided to credit them with an acquaintanceship of some months.
“And it’s much odder,” said Jess, “that you should have met mummie all those thousands of years ago. She said she wondered if you were the same person when Buster — Lieutenant Banks — told us your name. And that reminds me, where’s the other one?”
In spite of his preoccupation with the earlier part of her speech, Lonergan found that he understood to what she was so elliptically referring.
“Captain Sedgewick? He’ll arrive after dinner, I expect. He had to go to Plymouth. Did he not let you know?”
“Oh, I expect so. I just hadn’t heard, that’s all. What’s he like?”
“About twenty-three, with red hair, comes from somewhere outside London. He’s said to be a very good dancer.”
“Gosh, that’s wizard,” thoughtfully returned Jess.
She gazed up at him with ingenuous admiration.
“You’re frightfully good at describing people, aren’t you?”
Lonergan laughed and was aware that her childlike praise had pleased his vanity.
Extraordinary, he reflected dispassionately, how he had never outgrown the desire to be liked. Sometimes he thought that this pressing need was so urgent within him that, on a final analysis, it provided the motive spring for his whole conduct of life.
Jess chattered on, cheerful and at ease.
The tap of the General’s crutches and his shuffling step sounded from behind Lonergan and he rose, and Jess reared herself to her feet in what seemed to be one supple, unbroken movement.
Valentine was with her brother.
She was in black and Lonergan noticed that the long fringes of the embroidered Chinese shawl round her shoulders became continually entangled in pieces of furniture as she moved. He saw the unhurried gestures with which she patiently disentangled them, again and again.
General Levallois, in whom Lonergan had immediately detected an emphatic but quite fundamental hostility directed against his nationality rather than against himself, made stilted conversation.
Jess said:
“Gosh, I’d better wash. Fancy, that makes poetry. Fancy me being a poet!”
As she dashed her way upstairs, the eyes of Rory Lonergan and Valentine Arbell met, and they both laughed.
He told himself that he had never seen any woman’s face alter so completely as hers did when she was really amused. Already, he felt, he knew that her pretty, not infrequent smile had nothing to do with amusement and was one of her many unconscious concessions to the traditions of her upbringing.
“I know that much about her,” thought Lonergan, assenting aloud to a proposition of the General’s. And immediately another thought followed.
“I know that, and how much more!”
The watcher in him, that was never off guard and could never be silenced, added the note that carried to him a familiar, never-to-be-mistaken warning, terrifying in its very brevity.
“I’m sunk.”
“... though mind you, I’m not denying that the feller had some reason on his side, up to a point,” said the General.
And Lonergan, unaware of having heard the beginning of the phrase, found that he knew it was de Valera of whom the General was talking.
He had heard far too many Englishmen launch themselves, with an ignorance almost sublime in its unconsciousness, upon the subject of Irish politics to feel any dismay.
He was quite prepared to let General Levallois have his head.
But Valentine, it seemed, was not.
“Where is your home, in Ireland?” she enquired, shelving de Valera and the General alike, by the directness of the enquiry and of the look that she turned on her guest.
“My home, for a good many years past, has been in Paris. I came over here two years before the war and lived in a flat in Fitzroy Square.”
“With a studio,” said Valentine, and he admired the deftness with which she was making his exact standing in the London world clear to General Levallois, to whom such classification would obviously be of relative, although in this
case not intrinsic, importance.
“How you must have hated leaving Paris. Though, two years before the war, one didn’t imagine what was going to happen to France.”
“It’s an extraordinary thing about the French — —” said the General.
The French, so gently introduced by Valentine, slid into the place of the Southern Irish.
Lonergan assented, dissented where it would obviously be easy for the General to prove that his dissent was founded on inadequate knowledge, and felt that he had known Coombe, and all that made up existence there, for years.
It actually gave him a sense of shock when Primrose came into the hall, at her most slouching pace, three minutes after dinner had been announced.
What had she to do, he almost asked himself, with these surroundings?
She belonged to a background of Bloomsbury flats, always untidy and generally dirty, hot and crowded bars — parties that reeked of smoke, intellect, blasphemy, love-making — and the dark interiors of rattling taxis and motor-cars.
Yet, except for her make-up, she did not really look out of place at Coombe, he had to acknowledge it.
She still wore her dark-blue travelling-dress and, divorced from the blue coat, it revealed itself as straight and simply-cut, with sleeves that stopped short above the elbows and a collar of which she had pulled down the zip fastener so as to show her long neck and small, delicate collar-bones.
She looked once at Lonergan — it was a look that revealed nothing at all beyond forcing him to observe that she never looked directly at anybody else — and did not speak until they were seated, cold, and apprehensive of further cold, in the dining-room.
“I thought there was a Captain Sedgewick,” she said.
“Captain Sedgewick telephoned to say he wouldn’t arrive much before nine o’clock,” Valentine said.
“He’s gone to Plymouth,” announced Jess. “Sorry I’m late.” She slid into her seat. “What were all those special exercises and things that all your men were doing yesterday?” she asked Lonergan.
He replied, with a number of reservations, and was surprised by the extent of her knowledge and understanding of the activities of some portion at least of the British Army in war-time.
He liked Jess, and was pleased that she presently subsided and left the conversation to her elders, with an absence of self-assertion that Lonergan thought well suited to her youth. General Levallois looked at the menu-card, — Good God, a menu-card, thought Lonergan whose views of the catering at Coombe were already of the lowest description — muttered something that was inaudible but clearly and deservedly uncomplimentary about the cooking — and talked, to himself rather than to anybody else, about the state of agriculture.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 517
