Lonergan bent his black head in silent assent.
After a moment he said:
“Val, you’re right. It’s a great thing I’m asking of you, in asking you to accept it. I’ve had many loves, God forgive me, and some of them have been lively and happy, and good relationships — and most of them have been false and ephemeral — ending in pain and disappointment and humiliation for others besides myself. But my relationship with Laurence was — cast-iron. It had integrity. If ever I denied that, or forgot it, I believe I’d damn my own soul for all eternity.”
The words, and the force with which Lonergan spoke them, carried inescapable conviction to Valentine.
She knew that she could never reply to them, and never forget them. They must be part of her acceptance of the new life for evermore. She must bear the pain of them always, but she might hope that one day, if they both lived, she would be enabled to accept it less blindly, with a braver, because more realistic, understanding through her love of Rory Lonergan.
As though in reply to her thought he said softly:
“We’ve found one another late, Val. It makes it hard, for both of us.”
“The first time,” she said, “was too soon.”
Lonergan’s smile — so expressive of all his kindness, intelligence and profound penetration — answered her.
“Too soon, perhaps. Not, thank God, too late.”
Valentine, last to seek her own room at Coombe, was also the first to come down into the pervasive chill of the dining-room the following morning.
Lonergan’s servant informed her that the Colonel, accompanied by Captain Sedgewick, had gone out and that neither would be back before evening.
Venetia Rockingham always breakfasted upstairs, and Madeleine had already told Valentine that the General — d’une humeur de chien, madame, je me permets de vous le dire — had said that he would not be coming down until later in the morning.
The temperature had fallen and through the long windows Valentine could see a grey, leaden sky and the intricate pattern of the bare, bleak branches of the elms and the chestnut trees interlaced against it. Over the fields, from which thin spirals of mist were still curling upwards, sea-gulls were circling and swooping wildly.
Valentine made the coffee.
She tried to brace herself against the nervous, devitalizing shivering that always assailed her in very cold weather, but her hands were almost numb and she fumbled and clattered with the cups and saucers. It was a trick that had always exasperated Humphrey.
Jess, very pink and fresh, came in and said at once: “It’s as cold as hell, isn’t it? Morning, mummie. What was all the row last night?”
“Hughie Spurway knocked over a lot of books out of the bookcase on the landing. Some of them fell half-way downstairs.”
“But who spilt what?” demanded Jess. “There are damp patches all over the carpet. Aunt Sophy tried to lick some of them up.”
“It was unlucky, and very silly. He — Hughie Spurway — took too much to drink and didn’t quite know what he was doing. He made all this noise on the landing, and disturbed everybody and then he had a scene with Primrose.”
“Gosh! I do think some people are lucky. I wish I’d been there. But I’d just got into bed and begun to get warm, and I hadn’t the courage to get out. I would of, though, if I’d known there was all that excitement going on. Were you there, mummie?”
“I came up soon afterwards.”
“What happened to Hughie?”
“He went to his own room.”
“I bet he feels a fool this morning. D’you think he’ll turn up for breakfast?”
“I’ve been wondering myself,” Valentine admitted.
“Shall I go and see?” Jess volunteered, ladling oat-meal porridge into her old and battered silver christening-bowl.
“I don’t think so, thank you, darling. He’ll probably turn up presently. You can stay and pour out some coffee for him, if you will. I think he’d much rather see you than see me, probably.”
“Or Primrose,” Jess suggested shrewdly. “I think she was pretty foul to him, yesterday. I must say Primrose has a terrific nerve, really. She treats all her men as if she didn’t care whether they walked out on her on not. I suppose really she doesn’t, because she can always get others. I bet I’m never like that. If anyone ever does fall for me, I shall hold on to him like grim death and absolutely make him marry me.”
Valentine laughed.
“I don’t suppose it’ll be as difficult as all that, Jess. And you’ve still got plenty of time ahead of you.”
“Seventeen and a half,” said Jess gloomily. “About eight years, at the very outside, I should think.”
Her expression altered.
“Good Gosh, you’ve got engaged yourself, haven’t you? I forgot all about that. You know, mummie, I definitely think it’s a good thing. I didn’t really take it in yesterday, but the more I think of it, the more okay I think it is.”
“I’m glad.”
“You won’t have to go and live in Ireland or anything, will you?”
“Certainly not as long as the war lasts.”
“Oh, the war. I can’t imagine that’s ever coming to an end. I think it’ll go on for ever and ever. Sit, aunt Sophy. Sit!”
Jess tried to balance pieces of bread on her dog’s nose, held her up by the fore-paws, and laughed at her own want of success.
Then she took Valentine aback by suddenly returning to a former topic.
“You never told me what was spilt on the landing. Hughie wasn’t sick or anything awful, was he?”
“No, no, he wasn’t.”
Hughie Spurway came in.
He looked neither sallower nor more unhappy than he had looked on the previous day, and his morning greetings were no more nervously uttered.
Valentine reflected that he had probably failed to realize that she knew anything about what had happened.
She expected him to say that he couldn’t stay on but must leave Coombe that day, and purposely left the room when she saw the postman bicycling up the drive, so that he could make a decent pretence of having received a summons by post.
She had opened her own letters and was answering them at her desk in the hall when Venetia Rockingham appeared, wearing her smartly-tailored thick tweeds and a pale-blue angora-wool jumper against which gleamed her pearl necklace.
“Well, my sweet,” she said to Valentine. “Isn’t this cold too filthy? What about another log or two? So lovely to be able to burn wood, don’t you know what I mean. They say next winter we shall have no coal, no electricity, no gas, no nothing, if the war goes on. Are you most terribly busy?”
“Not specially.”
Valentine laid down her pen.
“Don’t look so alarmed, darling,” Venetia’s soft, artificial-sounding laugh bridged the pause between her words and her installation of herself in the armchair nearest to the fire.
She began quickly and competently to knit, the khaki-coloured wool slipping swiftly between her slim white fingers.
Valentine noticed, as often before, that whatever the temperature Venetia’s lovely hands never turned red or mottled from the cold.
“I want, if I may, to talk to you quite, quite frankly, darling Val.”
To her own surprise Valentine replied:
“But I’d so much rather that you didn’t, Venetia.”
Lady Rockingham, seeming also surprised, for an instant stopped the rapid wielding of her knitting-needles.
Then she said lightly:
“Val, don’t be unkind to me or I shall burst into floods of tears. I do so want you to feel I’m a real friend, darling, and able to enter into it all, don’t you know what I mean. After all, nobody realises better than I do that Humphrey, poor pet, wasn’t one of the great romantic lovers of the world, whatever else he may have been. I’ve often said why on earth didn’t you marry again, and when dear old Reggie came and planted himself down here I remember telling Charlie at the time, you migh
t marry any day and Reggie couldn’t possibly count on staying at Coombe for ever.”
“We can none of us count on staying at Coombe for ever now, Venetia.”
“Darling, Primrose wouldn’t live down here in the wilds if you paid her to do it. I doubt whether even Jess would. They’ll make their own lives, like all these young things. And poor old Reggie won’t really mind where he is, will he, so long as Madeleine is there too, to give him his little hot drinks and darn his socks. I’m much more interested in you than in all of them put together and I do really think I can help, perhaps, if you’ll tell me your plans, and trust me.”
Her lovely eyes were turned pleadingly on Valentine. Her smile was of the quality that is sometimes called disarming.
But Valentine was not disarmed.
“She’s false,” she thought. “Unreal and unkind.”
Aloud, she said:
“You know all that I have to tell, Venetia. I don’t think that you can possibly help me, in any way.”
“But my sweet, you do realize that all the family is going to be startled out of its senses if you suddenly announce that you mean to marry this Irishman, Lonergan?”
“There’s no one to be startled, really, Venetia. Reggie and I are the only two left of our own generation, since the last war, and the aunts and uncle are much too old to care.”
“That’s the Levallois side of it, isn’t it? But the Arbells do exist, my dear, and we’ve all been so fond of you always, and so interested about the girls, wanting them to marry decently and so on, don’t you know what I mean. This is going to shatter Charlie, as well as me.”
“Why?”
Lady Rockingham looked down at her knitting and murmured with deliberation:
“Seventeen — eighteen — nineteen — do forgive me, darling — just one minute. And twenty. For one thing, he’s not at all one of us, is he? Not that I suppose it matters — I’m the most democratic woman in the world, as you know — but Charlie’s terribly old-fashioned. Then there’s his religion. One hates even the shadow of narrow-mindedness, and naturally, there are good people in every sect, and personally, I always say what does it matter whether we go to Church or not, so long as we all do our best? Still, the family’s always rather steered clear of Roman Catholics, don’t you know what I mean.”
“I’m not a young girl,” Valentine said. “Nothing that you’ve said can have any possible application to a woman of my age, even if those things were important in themselves.”
“Slip one ... Yes, darling, you’ve learnt it all off too beautifully — I can hear your Lonergan saying it, in that rather endearing brogue of his that always sounds too like something on the stage, don’t you know what I mean. Dear me, how I do dislike knitting! But I suppose one has to. Shall we come down to brass tacks, Val? Did I dream it last night, or did that little neurotic horror of a Hughie really start something, talking about Primrose, and did she own up to it without turning a hair?”
“I don’t know what he may have said to Primrose, or about her, before I came up. You and I both know what Primrose said afterwards. I don’t mean to discuss it.”
“That’s what’s so really silly of you, darling, if I may be quite frank. You’re like a dear little ostrich, just pushing your head in the sand and pretending the thing never happened. Now Val, you know I’m not in the least censorious or narrow — the boys always say there’s absolutely nothing they can’t talk over with me quite, quite freely — and I’m going to be absolutely straight with you. Primrose, whom I’m devoted to, has adopted this idiotic pose of having neither manners nor morals and saying every single thing that comes into her head. Is she going to stop at saying that she and her mother both fell for the same man, and that, after amusing himself with her, he decided to propose to you, and you, my poor lamb, immediately accepted him? I ask you, my dear....”
The low, clipped tones went on.
Valentine realized suddenly that, although she heard the words, she was not listening to them. Venetia’s words had become wholly unimportant.
They had less significance even than the staccato utterances of Hughie Spurway.
He had come into the hall, with Jessica and the dogs. “Good-morning, Hughie,” said Lady Rockingham, just glancing up from her murmured calculations over the knitting, and then immediately resuming them again.
“Ten — eleven — knit two together ... Jess, darling, are you a knitter?”
“No,” said Jess baldly. “Not if I can help it. I say, mummie, Hughie’s in a bit of a flat spin because he thinks he made a fool of himself last night and he wants to go away at once, but I said I thought that was rather a dim idea. You don’t mind, do you?”
Valentine smiled at her and at Hughie.
“We’ll forget about last night,” she suggested. “But you must do just what suits you best, about going or staying.”
“I can’t possibly stay,” said Hughie, his white face working. “It’s very kind of you, but I — I can’t possibly.”
“Why not?” Jess enquired amiably. “Because you had a row with Primrose?”
Hughie made an inarticulate sound.
“Really, Jess, aren’t you rather overdoing the enfant terrible pose?” Lady Rockingham enquired. “I know you weren’t there last night, but it was all very rude and unpleasant and uncle Reggie, I may add, was furious.”
She turned to Hughie.
“Personally, I agree that the best thing you can do is to disappear. It’d be so much comfier for you, wouldn’t it?”
“Aunt Venetia,” Jess remarked clearly and coldly. “I think you’re perfectly beastly. I do really. And anyway, it’s mummie’s house, isn’t it?”
Valentine stood up.
“I think we’ve all said enough. Jess is quite right — it is my house, and I’m going to ask Reggie, and everybody else, to forget what happened last night. It was quite silly and unimportant. Jess, will you go and let out the hens for me?”
Jess gave her mother a long, surprised stare. Then she said: “Come on, aunt Sophy. Come on, Sally. Come on, Hughie,” and sloped out to the double doors.
The dogs trotted off beside her, and after a moment’s hesitation, Hughie Spurway, with an odd, nervous gesture of waving his hands about uncertainly, followed them.
Venetia Rockingham looked at her sister-in-law with almost as much surprise as Jessica had shown.
“I must say, my dear, your Irish admirer has given your inferiority complex its death-blow, don’t you know what I mean. Too wonderful. But I don’t think it’s really going to help, to be so high-handed, when it comes to poor darling old Reggie and the relations.”
She gathered up her knitting and stood up, and Valentine, as always, noted her grace and the fluid competence of every movement.
“It’s too obvious that you don’t want any help from me, darling, at the moment. But when you do, I’ll be there, and really you might do worse. I’ve always been devoted to you, Val, and after all, one does know one’s world and can make allowances.”
Venetia bestowed her famous and lovely smile upon her sister-in-law as she went away, unhurried and self-assured.
Valentine thought: I shan’t ever be afraid of her again. Rory’s done that for me, too. He’s given me courage.
The sense of courage, still mingled with surprise, remained with her even while she told herself that it would, as Venetia had hinted, be more difficult to confront her brother than almost anybody else.
Reggie might be unreasonable, obtuse, violently prejudiced.
But his affection and solicitude for her were real in their degree and she knew that she must outrage them both.
XVII
It was nearly midday when General Levallois came downstairs. He was wearing a heavy shapeless old Burberry over his tweed suit, and carried, wedged under one arm, the battered green felt hat that he always used on week-days.
“Morning, Val.”
His friendly greeting seemed conciliatory, as she remembered the anger with which he ha
d left her on the night before.
“Good-morning, Reggie. Are you going out?”
“Thought I’d take a stroll. You wouldn’t care to come with me, would you, old girl? I daresay it’s not as cold outside as it is indoors.”
He glanced doubtfully out of the window at the iron-grey, lowering sky and the bare branches swaying to the north-east wind.
“Of course I will,” Valentine said. “We’ll take the dogs.”
She pulled on her heavy coat, hanging in the lobby amongst all the other ancient and shabby coats and mackintoshes and disused school blazers, and was thankful to find a pair of woollen gloves in a pocket and to put them on.
They moved slowly out into the wintry cold, obliged to accommodate their rate of progress to the General’s infirmity.
“The news wasn’t any too good this morning, Val.”
“I didn’t listen. I’ll hear it at one o’clock.”
“I wish we had a man like Kitchener, in these days. Or old Redvers Buller.”
He had often expressed the same wish before, but now he uttered it mechanically, his voice depressed and uneasy-sounding.
“The state the whole world’s in,” he muttered. “I hope I’m as progressive as anybody, but I must say, things are getting a bit beyond me. Look at the books people write nowadays!”
“The books?” echoed Valentine, surprised.
“Yes. I suppose a great many people take their ideas out of books, don’t they? All these modern books that crack up immorality and bad behaviour, and tell you that religion doesn’t matter a hoot and to hell with the Ten Commandments. And what’s it all led to, tell me that. The complete turning upside-down of — of every law of decency. I tell you, Val, I was awake half the night thinking about that girl of yours, and the utter shamelessness of the things she said. If poor Humphrey had been alive, he’d have sent her packing then and there, it’s my belief. But that’s been the trouble — no father to keep her in order. Mind you, I’m not blaming you, Val. You did the best you could, I’ve no doubt.”
“Let’s not talk about Primrose, Reggie. I’ve made mistakes with her — I don’t think I’ve helped her at all, or really understood her. And it’s too late now.”
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