Friends and Relations

by Elizabeth Bowen

  “I offered him a drink,” said Theodora.

  “Quite right.”

  “But he wouldn’t.”

  “Oh?” said Rodney. And they had all felt, the two young women delightedly, as though they were hurrying in before a storm. But in this case the storm lay ahead.

  “Poor Anna won’t be here for the Nursing Fête. She had bagged the bran dip,” said Hermione.

  “I daresay he’ll change his mind,” said Rodney, but not quite confidently.

  “I suppose I’ll have to look after the bran dip now. But I shall be raffling the goat and selling buttonholes.”

  “Don’t chatter, Hermione.”

  “But it will be awkward, won’t it, Father; it will be awkward, won’t it be? Unless I do the goat with the dip and give up the buttonholes. It’s a milch one.”

  “Yes, it will be awkward.”

  “Has Anna been doing something perfectly awful? He was in a state.”

  Edward’s possible state in mind, Rodney had approached the library door with some apprehension. But no doubt it would be all right: one could rely on anyone, up to a point. Edward would be unlikely to refuse a drink for the second time. Or failing that, there would soon be tea. (Now what had fussed him? He had been sitting on all this for a week.) Janet with unfailing tact would have ordered tea early. And Rodney, having heartily shaken hands, should be able to say, “Ah, tea! Good…”

  Actually, on coming into the library he found Edward in what seemed his usual state of quite equable nervousness, failing to light a cigarette; Janet, ever so little preoccupied, one hand full of paper, was searching for the waste-paper basket on the wrong side of her table. “To your left,” said Rodney, surprised. Then she shook in her handful of fine blue scraps, household notepaper. Rodney thought she and Edward must have been composing a difficult letter to someone together, then given up.

  “And how is Laurel?” said Rodney.

  “Oh, feeling the heat rather.”

  “Pity she didn’t come down with you.”

  “Well, the fact is, Rodney, as I’ve been explaining to Janet, Laurel is anxious for various reasons to have the children back with us…”

  “Taking them back?” said Rodney. “That seems a pity…”

  “Oh, it is a pity,” agreed Edward warmly. “You’ve given them a marvellous time.”

  Rodney’s eyes sought Janet’s, but she refused to confer. She went to the window. Directly Considine tried to come in she must send him out again with a message. Or would this have already occurred to Elfrida? At all events, one was alert for the car. Should she send Hermione out to intercept them? She stooped to the writing-table, hesitated, jotted a message, tore the sheet from her block. For a moment more Rodney’s eyes implored her back; then, as though she had said “Go away,” he returned his attention to Edward without resentment.

  “Hermione’ll be disappointed,” he said. “They’ve got so many things on for next week—Look here, why not spare Laurel a few days to come and join them?”

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible,” said Edward regretfully.

  Janet implied by the slightest possible movement: “Don’t make things difficult.”

  “Just how you feel, of course,” said Rodney to Edward; and: “Then what about tea, Janet?”

  “I forgot,” said Janet surprisingly, and moved to the door. Rodney could not fail to detect, someone had been a victim. “You look tired,” he said, forgetting Edward, following her a step or two.

  “No—Then half-past six for the car, Edward?”

  “She does look tired,” said Edward quickly. He sat down himself, when she left the room, overpowered by the very idea of her tiredness, and, as though he could at least do this for her, even relaxed a little. But he felt as though he had screamed and might scream again. To have screamed, in fact—he thought as he sat relaxed—would be a simplification. And better anything than to consider this new question of his and her relations; now printed out so neatly, confidently for his attention like a clause in an agenda. The question posed itself with an unbearable simplicity. At present, here they were; it was four o’clock and there seemed little to say to his brother-in-law. Here was Rodney indoors because of him at an extraordinary hour—this and Edward’s dark suit projected a kind of Sabbath abnormality, a full stop grateful to neither. Naturally, nothing could be discussed. Rodney, recrossing his legs, remained very solid and impermeable; passive, he put up a strong suggestion that nothing was sudden, nothing a pity, that it was unlikely anything had occurred. He grumbled gently to Edward about their visitors. It did not matter, but Lady Elfrida tore pieces out of The Times before it reached one—had Edward suffered? And Theodora played the piano at half-past one.

  “At lunch?” said Edward stupidly.

  “No, at night. I suppose it comes from living so much abroad. The piano’s just under our room.”

  “Can’t you thump on the floor?”

  “Yes, I do thump on the floor. But one can’t help liking her.”

  “I can,” said Edward.

  “Of course, she has no sense of time—Look here, must you really go up by this train?”

  “The seven-five? Yes—thanks very much, Rodney—we must, Laurel will be expecting us.”

  It was clear, thought Edward, Janet thought Edward infantile; enemy to love because he had not loved herself. Conviction with or without resentment had been her note in their interview. Turning from this, he foresaw the hot return journey and, from this distance of a hundred or so miles, Laurel. They had seldom been, spatially, so divided. Proximity was their support; like walls after an earthquake they could fall no further for they had fallen against each other.

  But apart from this necessity of never being divided, Laurel remained delicious. She made of every failure in peace, every break in their confidence a small burlesque. She despised balance, but her very wildness of thought, behind the propriety of her manner, seemed to insure them against catastrophe. There was nothing she could not bring to harmless light by exaggeration. When her accounts did not balance she said: “You must marry Janet.” She reproached him for not going into business when he reproached her with wearing artificial pearls, wished that he had a mistress when love was not mutual, scrapped with Anna when she should have controlled her, exclaiming: “I cannot think who can have had this impossible child!” She woke him at three in the morning to assure her her hair was not fading. Still, she would not condone his mother’s infidelity to his childhood; they went to sleep hand-in-hand, she made up arrears of nonsense right back to his infancy and, though she frequently wept or was difficult, never turned an obdurate face away. If she was not serene she was gay and professed to find in Edward the spring of her comfort. Her solicitude reached him almost before he suffered, fostering sensibility. “And life after all,” thought Edward, hearing tea approach, the gay dance of china on the silver tray, “is an affair of charm, not an affair of passion.”

  “Here they come!” said Rodney, relieved. They both heard the car turn with the drive and come up through the beeches. “I expect they’ll be glad…”

  But Edward, who must be on wires, shot up and said he would go for a turn. Should Rodney have kept him? Edward was gone already, away down the drive. He must have gone to meet them. Rodney looked out at the dark-and-light damasky stripes of the lawn. Tomorrow they would be wanting one of his men for the motor lawn mower—the polite side of life was a constant tax. Rodney sighed: there went Edward again. One had done all one could.

  But Lady Elfrida and the children, hopefully waving, saw Edward swerve off through the trees, like wild life away from the camera; one shadow more in the shadowy net.

  “Dear me,” said Anna, “he thinks we are callers.”

  Lady Elfrida, as the car took the last turn of the drive, looked up anxiously at the house. Had it all been shocking? She braced herself to dash in and e
xtricate Janet and Rodney from the wreckage of habit. “It’s all right,” she told Considine; the untruth was mechanical. She brought out her powder-puff, turned her face this way and that in the small mirror’s compass. “Let the children get out,” she added, “here comes Hermione.”

  Considine’s niece came rushing, the very spirit of an alarm. “Mother says to take this to the village,” she shouted, mounting the running-board. And to Lady Elfrida: “Please, Father says come: Mr. Gibson is on the telephone!” Considine pulled up a moment to let them all out, then whirled round the sweep and was off again. The party dispersed all ways, to meet the emergency. In the dark hall, Lady Elfrida pulled off her gloves to telephone. But Theodora was there before her.

  “But what do you want?” she kept saying.

  “Oh, you, Theodora?” said Lewis, depressed.

  “I’m afraid you can’t speak to Janet.”

  “But I hear Edward is with you; I wanted—”

  “I can’t tell you much,” went on Theodora, “but you can ask questions; I’ll say yes and no.”

  “But look here, I really just wanted to speak to Edward.”

  “—I don’t think I should—”

  “Look here, I’ve got a trunk call: I do wish you’d look for him.” Theodora looked guardedly round the hall. “You can imagine,” she said, “how things are here…”

  “But it struck me—”

  “—It what? I’m afraid it’s not much good your trying to speak to anyone, Lewis; your line’s so bad. I can hardly hear you myself.”

  “But I don’t want—”

  “Don’t shout, Lewis; don’t get so excited—I don’t know what’s the matter with Lewis,” she said to Lady Elfrida, who, in a state of unusual indecision, stood opposite herself in a dark looking-glass—Did a face launch ships?

  “What does he want, Theodora?”

  “He’s quite unable to say.”

  “How useless,” said Lady Elfrida, and took the receiver. Hearing Lewis continue from the inane, “It struck me that just conceivably—” she cut in with “My dear Lewis, you can’t: it’s useless; we none of us can,” and rang off. Through the house, up the stairs, the funny confined repetitions of crisis continued: she heard Anna quarrelling with Hermione. Then Janet called: “Oh, be quiet, be quiet!” and came through the swing door with the Tilney children’s overcoats on her arm. She was packing up.

  “Has anyone seen Edward?” she said at once. “Tea will be in in a moment.” Elfrida said she would find him, and went out.

  “Darling…?” said Theodora to Janet.

  “Well?”

  “You don’t look very pleased.”

  With unfriendly patience, Janet tried to get past Theodora to the stairs.

  “Janet: look at me!”

  “Please, Theodora…I’m packing up the children.”

  “My God, why won’t you look at me?”

  “I see you so much,” said Janet wearily.

  “I won’t let you pass!” exclaimed Theodora helpfully, blocking the stairs. “There must be some misunderstanding. Where can we talk?”

  “Tea is just coming in.”

  “Tea here is always just coming in. You make me perfectly wild—”

  “Evidently,” said Janet. She turned back through the door and went up the back stairs. She longed for kindness—anyone’s. Soundlessly weeping, she dropped a glove of Anna’s and groped for it. Someone began to come out through a door saying: “If you please—” She stumbled and went on up, quickly, brushing her shoulder against the lime-washed wall. “I could have borne anything—” she thought, pushing open a door.

  Meanwhile, “Tea, Edward, tea!” called Lady Elfrida, crossing the lawn in his direction. Edward halted, stared, and came out into the glare to meet her. His dark moving figure against the trees was hardly clear to her, but his contracted smile seemed very high up: she never took his height into full account.

  “Why did you run away?” she asked briskly.

  “There were so many of you,” he said, at his most disarming.

  “Well, as you know, a good many of us are staying here.”—She thought, “And all wicked.” They met, smiled—for they seldom kissed—and turned together back to the house. The bold, hard façade stared them out—the house remained Considine’s own. Edward perceived that his mother would not, after all, ask: “What is the matter?” Something retarded her manner, though she was not subdued.

  However, he took the defensive quickly, to crown the impossible afternoon. “I can’t really discuss—”

  “How are you?” she asked, irrelevant.

  “I don’t want to make things difficult—”

  “Then, my dear,” she exclaimed with one of her flashes, “you do set the most curious way about it!”

  “About what?”

  “Don’t let’s argue—this is all too wretched!”

  “Is it?” he asked. They halted.

  “Naturally—look at all this!” But her quick gesture was for the present only. Confusion: she embraced the whole and seemed for the moment to suffer it, solitary. “I must say,” she added, “I think it’s hard on the children.”

  “They’ve got to come away sometime; they can’t live here. What you mean really,” he said, “is, it’s hard on Janet.”

  “Yes, you are at all times, Edward, miserably hard.”

  “Do you think she thinks so?”

  “How can I tell; why ask me? She may never think of it,” she exclaimed, impatient for herself and her sex. She implied: “It’s impossible to be anything but indifferent.” She put a hand through his arm, they moved on towards the house. She leaned on his arm, walking slowly and even dragging a little. As much as to say: “One is always glad of this, all the same,” with a tenderness she could not express more happily. Or perhaps, in a little burlesque like Laurel’s, trying on old age, parodying the future, hinting “This is how I should like us to be,” rehearsing the impossible. The banks were steep: “Pull me up, Edward.”

  “Must we go in at once?”

  “Oh, yes; tea’s waiting.”

  Rodney, watching the Tilneys come up the slope together, thought: “It will be all right now, I expect.” But Lady Elfrida looked tired. For the first time, Rodney indicted Considine.

  8

  Considine had foretold a change of weather. By the time the empty car returned from the station, as they all sat down to dinner—diminished by quite a large number though Edward had not been thought of this time yesterday and the children were never with them at this hour—he was glad to be able to point out a film coming over the sky. The day would be shortened by quite an hour. Trees gave out a perceptible chill, the burnished landscape held an effect of after-glow from a week, a season, a finished eternity, more than a day. Rodney said one could do with some rain now, to which Lady Elfrida gave quite a meek assent.

  The whole party was in disgrace with Theodora, who did not speak throughout dinner. Considine, with his annoying dry innocence, observed: Surely this had been sudden? Surely a cloud of dust? Later, he and Theodora went off to play billiards. Janet had had the drawing-room fire lit, so Rodney who perfectly amiably did not wish for a fire sat in the library. The party had certainly broken up.

  In the drawing-room, Elfrida drew up her gold shawl round her shoulders, gratefully approaching hands and person to the pink, delinquent summer firelight.

  “Cold?” said Janet, with whom she was now alone.

  “It will soon be very cold.”

  “But you’re shivering now.”

  Mortality; a little autumn. “Edward, you know,” said his mother, laconic.

  Janet looked round the drawing-room; she could have wished they were not alone. She recalled that afternoon ten years ago when, in Trevor Square, Lady Elfrida had picked up in singular speculation the hand wearing Rodney’s
ring—which Janet still wore: an ageless diamond.

  “They will soon be home now,” said Janet, looking up at the clock. “That’s the best train in the day.”

  “He doesn’t deserve it.”

  In her deep chair, Janet sat upright, her hand spread out on the arm, as though expecting at any time to be called away. Though Elfrida looked at the fire Janet was aware of her close observation, a kind of violence. She said quickly, to interpose something: “I hear Lewis rang up?”

  “Oh yes, poor Lewis; no one would let him speak.”

  “Perhaps he’ll ring up again.”

  “—My dear, you’ve let me make you a great deal of trouble.”

  “It’s not really so frightful.”

  “Isn’t it? This is a fiasco.”

  Elfrida’s “this,” though moulded by her long ring-laden fingers into a very small kernel of, as it were, intensive action, or pain, remained so comprehensive that Janet could not tell how far she ought to look back. With impassive docility she lent herself to the retrospect. She looked back to her very first sight of Edward, to what had been a false dawn for her, then at his wedding half in the rain. She looked beyond him steadily at the old branching sin that like the fatal apple-tree in a stained-glass window had in its shadow, at each side, the man and woman, Considine and Elfrida, related only in balance for the design. And in her confused thought this one painted tree associated itself, changed to another, the tree of Jesse; that springing—not, you would think, without pain somewhere—from a human side, went on up florescent with faces, perplexed similar faces, to some bright crest or climax or final flowering to which they all looked up, which was out of Janet’s view. If you felled the tree, or made even a vital incision, as Elfrida impatient of all this burden now seemed to desire (for if her heart were the root, it had contracted, if hers were the side, it ached), down they all came from the branches and scattered, still green at the core like July apples, having no more part in each other at all: strangers.