‘All the same, it’s out of the question. Nell and I could never come together again – Oh! I don’t suppose there’s any question of that. She’s probably only come to ask me to forgive her, to make her feel comfortable in case I get killed in this bloody war. The sort of thing a girl would do. Anyway, I don’t believe I care any more.’
Another voice, deep down, said ironically, ‘Oh, no, not at all. Then why is your heart beating and your hand shaking? You bloody ass, of course you care!’
He was ready. He went outside – rang the bell. A mean subterfuge – unworthy – he felt ashamed. Jane opened the door. She said, rather like a parlour-maid, ‘In here,’ and waved him towards the sitting-room. He went in, closing the door behind him.
Nell had risen at his entrance. She stood with her hands clasped in front of her.
Her voice came faint and weak, like a guilty child.
‘Oh, Vernon …’
Time swept backwards. He was in the boat at Cambridge … on the bridge at Ranelagh. He forgot Jane, he forgot everything. He and Nell were the only people in the world.
‘Nell.’
They were clinging together, breathless as though they had been running. Words tumbled from Nell’s lips.
‘Vernon – if you want – I do love you – Oh! I do … I’ll marry you any time – at once – today. I don’t mind about being poor or anything!’
He lifted her off her feet, kissed her eyes, her hair, her lips.
‘Darling – oh! darling. Don’t let’s waste a minute – not a minute. I don’t know how you get married. I’ve never thought about it. But let’s go out and see. We’ll go to the Archbishop of Canterbury – isn’t that what you do – and get a special licence? How the devil do you get married?’
‘We might ask a clergyman?’
‘Or there’s a Registry Office. That’s the thing.’
‘I don’t think I want to be married at a Registry Office. I’d feel rather like a cook or a house parlourmaid being engaged.’
‘I don’t think it’s that kind, darling. But if you’d rather be married in a church, let’s be married in a church. There are thousands of churches in London, all with nothing to do. I’m sure one of them will love to marry us.’
They went out together, laughing happily. Vernon had forgotten everything – remorse – conscience – Jane …
At half-past two that afternoon Vernon Deyre and Eleanor Vereker were married in the church of St Ethelred’s, Chelsea.
Book Four
War
Chapter One
1
It was six months later that Sebastian Levinne had a letter from Joe.
‘St George’s Hotel, Soho.
Dear Sebastian, – I’m over in England for a few days. I should love to see you. – Yours, Joe.’
Sebastian read and re-read the brief note. He was at his mother’s house on a few days’ leave, so it had reached him with no delay. Across the breakfast table he was conscious of his mother’s eyes watching him, and he marvelled, as he had often done before, at the quickness of her maternal apprehension. She read his face, which most people found so inscrutable, as easily as he read the note in his hand.
When she spoke it was in ordinary commonplace tones.
‘Thome more marmalade, dear?’ she said.
‘No, thanks, Mother.’ He answered the spoken question first, then went on to the unspoken one of which he was so keenly conscious. ‘It’s from Joe.’
‘Joe,’ said Mrs Levinne. Her voice expressed nothing.
‘She’s in London.’
There was a pause.
‘I see,’ said Mrs Levinne.
Still her voice expressed nothing. But Sebastian was aware of a whole tumult of feeling. It was the same to him as though his mother had burst out, ‘My son, my son! And you were just beginning to forget her! Why does she come back like this? Why can’t she leave you alone? This girl who has nothing to do with us or our race? This girl who was never the right wife for you and never will be.’
Sebastian rose.
‘I think I must go round and see her.’
His mother answered in the same voice, ‘I suppose so.’
They said no more. They understood each other. Each respected the other’s point of view.
As he swung along the street, it suddenly occurred to Sebastian that Joe had given him no clue as to what name she was staying under at the hotel. Did she call herself Miss Waite or Madame La Marre? Unimportant, of course, but one of those silly conventional absurdities that made one feel awkward. He must ask for her under one or the other. How like Joe it was to have completely overlooked the point!
But as it happened there was no awkwardness, for the first person he saw as he passed through the swing doors was Joe herself. She greeted him with a glad cry of surprise.
‘Sebastian! I’d no idea you could possibly have got my letter so soon!’
She led the way to a retired corner of the lounge and he followed her.
His first feeling was that she had changed – she had gone so far away that she was almost a stranger. It was partly, he thought, her clothes. They were ultra French clothes. Very quiet and dark and discreet, but utterly un-English. Her face, too, was very much made up. Its creamy pallor was enhanced by art, her lips were impossibly red and she had done something to the corners of her eyes.
He thought, ‘She’s a stranger – and yet she’s Joe! She’s the same Joe but she’s gone a long way away – so far away that one can only just get in touch with her.’
But they talked together easily enough, each, as it were, putting out little feelers, as though sounding the distance that separated them. And suddenly the distance itself lessened, and the elegant Parisian stranger melted into Joe.
They talked of Vernon. Where was he? He never wrote or told one anything.
‘He’s on Salisbury Plain – near Wiltsbury. He may be going out to France any minute.’
‘And Nell married him after all! Sebastian, I feel I was rather a beast about Nell. I didn’t think she had it in her. I don’t think she would have had it in her if it hadn’t been for the war. Sebastian, isn’t the war wonderful? What it’s doing for people, I mean.’
Sebastian said drily that he supposed it was very much like any other war. Joe flew out at him vehemently.
‘It isn’t. It isn’t. That’s just where you’re wrong. There’s going to be a new world after it. People are beginning to see things – things they never saw before. All the cruelty and the wickedness and the waste of war. And they’ll stand together so that such a thing shall never happen again.’
Her face was flushed and exalted. Sebastian perceived that the war had, as he phrased it, ‘got’ Joe. The war did get people. He had discussed it and deplored it with Jane. It made him sick to read the things that were printed and said about the war. ‘A world fit for heroes’, ‘The war to end war’, ‘The fight for democracy’. And really all the time, it was the same old bloody business it always had been. Why couldn’t people speak the truth about it?
Jane had disagreed with him. She maintained that the clap-trap (for she agreed it was clap-trap) which was written about war was inevitable, a kind of accompanying phenomenon inseparable from it. It was Nature’s way of providing a way of escape – you had to have that wall of illusion and lies to help you to endure the solid facts. It was, to her, pitiable and almost beautiful – these things that we wanted to believe and told ourselves so speciously.
Sebastian had said, ‘I dare say, but it’s going to play Hell with the nation afterwards.’
He was saddened and a little depressed by Joe’s fiery enthusiasm. And yet, after all, it was typical of Joe. Her enthusiasm always was red hot. It was a toss up which camp he found her in, that was all. She might just as easily have been a white hot pacifist, embracing martyrdom with fervour.
She said now accusingly to Sebastian:
‘You don’t agree! You think everything’s going to be just the same.’
‘There have always
been wars, and they have never made any great difference.’
‘Yes, but this is a different kind of war altogether.’
He smiled. He could not help it.
‘My dear Joe, the things that happen to us personally are always different.’
‘Oh! I’ve no patience with you. It’s people like you –’
She stopped.
‘Yes,’ said Sebastian encouragingly. ‘People like me –’
‘You usen’t to be like that. You used to have ideas. Now –’
‘Now,’ said Sebastian gravely, ‘I am sunk in money. I’m a capitalist. Everyone knows what a hoggish creature the capitalist is.’
‘Don’t be absurd. But I do think that money is rather – well, stifling.’
‘Yes,’ said Sebastian, ‘that’s true enough. But that’s a question of effect on an individual. I will quite agree with you that poverty is a blessed state. Talking in terms of art, it’s probably as valuable as manure in a garden. But it’s nonsense to say that because I’ve got money, I’m unfit to make prognostications as to the future, and especially as to the state obtaining after the war. Just because I’ve got money I’m all the more likely to be a good judge. Money has got a lot to do with war.’
‘Yes, but because you think of everything in terms of money, you say that there always will be wars.’
‘I didn’t say anything of the kind. I think war will eventually be abolished – I’d give it roughly another two hundred years.’
‘Ah! you do admit that by then we may have purer ideals.’
‘I don’t think it’s got anything to do with ideals. It’s probably a question of transport. Once you get flying going on a commercial scale and you fuse countries together. Air charabancs to the Sahara, Wednesdays and Saturdays. That kind of thing. Countries getting mixed up and matey. Trade revolutionized. For all practical purposes, you make the world smaller. You reduce it in time to the level of a nation with counties in it. I don’t think what’s always alluded to as the Brotherhood of Man will ever develop from fine ideas – it will be a simple matter of common sense.’
‘Oh, Sebastian!’
‘I’m annoying you. I’m sorry, Joe dear.’
‘You don’t believe in anything.’
‘Well, it’s you who are the atheist, you know. Though, as a matter of fact, that word has gone out of fashion. We say nowadays that we believe in Something! Personally I’m quite satisfied with Jehovah. But I know what you meant when you said that, and you’re wrong. I believe in beauty, in creation, in things like Vernon’s music. I can’t see any real defence for them economically, and yet I’m perfectly sure that they matter more than anything else in the world. I’m even prepared (sometimes) to drop money over them. That’s a lot for a Jew!’
Joe laughed in spite of herself. Then she asked:
‘What was the Princess in the Tower really like? Honestly, Sebastian?’
‘Oh, rather like a giant toddling – an unconvincing performance and yet a performance on a different scale from anything else.’
‘You think that some day –’
‘I’m sure of it. There’s nothing I’m so sure of as that. If only he isn’t killed in this bloody war.’
Joe shivered.
‘It’s so awful,’ she murmured. ‘I’ve been working in the hospitals in Paris. Some of the things one sees!’
‘I know. If he’s only maimed it doesn’t matter – not like a violinist who is finished if he loses his right hand. No, they can mess up his body any way they like – so long as his brain is left untouched. That sounds brutal, but you know what I mean –’
‘I know. But sometimes – even then –’ She broke off and then went on, speaking in a new tone of voice. ‘Sebastian, I’m married.’
If something in him winced he didn’t show it.
‘Are you, my dear? Did La Marre get a divorce?’
‘No. I left him. He was a beast – a beast, Sebastian.’
‘I can imagine he might be.’
‘Not that I regret anything. One has to live one’s life – to gain experience. Anything is better than shrinking from life. That’s just what people like Aunt Myra can’t understand. I’m not going near them at Birmingham. I’m not ashamed or repentant of anything I’ve done.’
She gazed at him defiantly and his mind went back to Joe in the woods at Abbots Puissants. He thought, ‘She’s just the same. Wrong-headed, rebellious, adorable. One might have known then that she’d do these sort of things.’
He said gently, ‘I’m only sorry that you’ve been unhappy. Because you have been unhappy, haven’t you?’
‘Horribly. But I’ve found my real life now. There was a boy in hospital – terribly badly wounded. They gave him morphia. He’s been discharged now – cured, though of course he isn’t fit for service. But the morphia – it’s got hold of him. That’s why – we were married. A fortnight ago. We’re going to fight it together.’
Sebastian did not trust himself to speak. Joe all over. But why, in the name of fortune, couldn’t she have been content with physical disabilities? Morphia. A ghastly business.
And suddenly a pang shot through him. It was as though he resigned his last hope of her. Their ways led in opposite directions – Joe amongst her lost causes and her lame dogs, and he on an upward route. He might, of course, be killed in the war, but somehow he didn’t think he would be. He was almost certain that he wouldn’t even be picturesquely wounded. He felt a kind of certitude that he would come through safely, probably with moderate distinction, that he would come back to his enterprises, reorganizing and revitalizing them, that he would be successful – notably successful – in a world that did not tolerate failures. And the higher he climbed the further he would be separated from Joe.
He thought bitterly, ‘There’s always some woman to pull you out of a pit, but nobody will come and keep you company on a mountain peak, and yet you may be damned lonely there.’
He didn’t quite know what to say to Joe. No good depressing her, poor child. He said rather weakly:
‘What’s your name now?’
‘Valnière. You must meet François some time. I’ve just come over to settle up some legal bothers. Father died about a month ago, you know.’
Sebastian nodded. He remembered hearing of Colonel Waite’s death.
Joe went on.
‘I want to see Jane. And I want to see Vernon and Nell.’
It was settled that he should motor her down to Wiltsbury on the following day.
2
Nell and Vernon had rooms in a small prim house about a mile out of Wiltsbury. Vernon, looking well and brown, fell upon Joe and hugged her with enthusiasm.
They all went into a room full of antimacassars and lunched off boiled mutton and caper sauce.
‘Vernon, you look splendid – and almost good-looking, doesn’t he, Nell?’
‘That’s the uniform,’ said Nell demurely.
She had changed, Sebastian thought, looking at her. He had not seen her since her marriage, four months previously. To him she had always fallen into a class – a certain type of charming young girl. Now he saw her as an individual – the real Nell bursting out of her chrysalis.
There was a subdued radiance about her. She was quieter than she used to be – and yet she was more alive. They were happy together – no one who looked at them could doubt it. They seldom looked at each other, but when they did you felt it … something passed between them – delicate, evanescent, but unmistakable.
It was a happy meal. They talked of old days – of Abbots Puissants.
‘And here we are, all four of us together again,’ said Joe.
A warm feeling fastened round Nell’s heart. Joe had included her. All four of us, she had said. Nell remembered how once Vernon had said ‘We three –’ and the words had hurt her. But that was over now. She was one of them. That was her reward – one of her rewards. Life seemed full of rewards at the moment.
She was happy – so terribly happy, a
nd she might so easily not have been happy. She might have been actually married to George when the war broke out. How could she ever have been so incredibly foolish as to think that anything mattered except marrying Vernon? How extraordinarily happy they were and how right he had been to say poverty didn’t matter.
It wasn’t as though she were the only one. Lots of girls were doing it – flinging up everything – marrying the man they cared for no matter how poor he was. After the war, something would turn up. That was the attitude. And behind it lay that awful secret fear that you never took out and looked at properly. The nearest you ever got to it was saying defiantly, ‘And no matter what happens, we’ll have had something.’
She thought, ‘The world’s changing. Everything’s different now. It always will be. We’ll never go back …’
She looked across the table at Joe. Joe looked different somehow – very queer. What you would have called before the war – well, ‘not quite’. What had Joe been doing with herself? That nasty man, La Marre … Oh, well, better not think about it. Nothing mattered nowadays.
Joe was so nice to her – so different to what she used to be in the old days when Nell had always felt uncomfortably that Joe despised her. Perhaps she had cause. She had been a little coward.
The war was awful, of course, but it had simplified things. Her mother, for instance, had come round almost at once. She was disappointed naturally about George Chetwynd (poor George, he really was a dear and she’d been a beast to him) but Mrs Vereker proceeded to make the best of things with admirable common sense.
‘These war marriages!’ She used that phrase with a tiny shrug of the shoulders. ‘Poor children – you can’t blame them. Not wise, perhaps – but what is wisdom at a time like this?’ Mrs Vereker needed all her skill and all her wit to deal with her creditors and she had come off pretty well. Some of them even felt sympathy for her.
If she and Vernon didn’t really like each other, they concealed the fact quite creditably, and as a matter of fact, had only met once since the marriage. It had all been so easy.
Perhaps, if you had courage, things were always easy. Perhaps that was the great secret of life.
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