Friends and Lovers

by Helen Macinnes

  Penny was speaking, and he had been right. She was saying, “I had a letter from Mother yesterday. She is coming to London, and she will probably be here next week-end. So no Oxford next Sunday, David!”

  “Are the family coming too?” David asked. I’ll have to meet Penny’s father soon, he was thinking. But it would have been better to wait until he had gone down from Oxford with a job all nicely landed. Three hundred a year, sir, with extras on the side to bring it to four hundred. And prospects. Yes, we are young, sir, but—after all, David admitted to himself at this moment, there weren’t so very many young men in Britain who earned four hundred a year to start with.

  Penny had been saying that her mother was coming alone, which was strange, and so very suddenly, which was even stranger.

  “Probably she has become exhausted or exasperated by those Bonnier Bairns and Restored Ruins and wants to get away from them all. If she is in London during next week-end, why not bring her up to Oxford? I’ll be the very perfect, gentle guide.”

  Penny’s frown disappeared. “That’s a wonderful idea. We could give her a marvellous day, and she could get to know you properly, and—” she broke off, her eyes excited, her whole face alive with her delight in such a chance to show David as host.

  “Yes,” David said, reading her thoughts. “We could use an ally in your family camp. How much have you written to them? About us, I mean?”

  “Only sideways, darling. You see, it is sort of difficult in my family to mention the word ‘love.’ Everyone would get embarrassed. But my letters weren’t very successful. I thought that if I mentioned your name here and there, sort of slipped it in, as it were, that would be their cue. They would start asking questions about you. But they didn’t.” Penny wrinkled her brow thoughtfully. “I tried at Christmas too, to let them know how matters stood. But I found that awfully difficult. Somehow, every time I got the conversation around to you it would be snatched out of my mouth.”

  “Never mind,” he said consolingly, “your mother will know as soon as she sees us together. What’s that thing women are supposed to have? Intuition?”

  “Grandfather MacIntyre has it too,” Penny said. “I am quite sure he has guessed about us from my letters. He doesn’t say much, either, of course. He just slips in a little sentence like ‘Give my regards to David when you see him.’ But that’s enough.”

  David laughed this time. So that was enough, was it, to let Penny know that her grandfather knew? “Does that mean he approves or not?” he asked.

  “Of course he does. He wouldn’t mention you otherwise.” Then she stared at him as her light-hearted remark led to a less pleasant idea.

  David was following her train of thought. “Perhaps your mother doesn’t approve,” he said gently, watching the worry on Penny’s face. “That would make things rather difficult, wouldn’t it?”

  Penny didn’t answer.

  “Impossible?” David asked.

  “No,” she said quickly, and tightened her hand in his. Then she seemed surprised at her own intensity. “No,” she repeated, more quietly. She looked up at his expressionless face, watching her so intently. “No, David,” she said, with a warm smile, and the worry had left her eyes. “You see, I am in love.”

  David said, “I don’t hear that often enough.” He had kept his voice light, and his reward was a laugh from Penny. Oh, hell, he thought, in sudden anger with himself. The English are as bad as the Scots, who won’t even mention the word “love,” because it is embarrassing; they’ve always got to twist the word “love” into a half-joke, for if they can laugh about it they won’t be in so much danger of being laughed at. “What’s wrong with us, anyway? Who is going to laugh at anyone except the spiteful, and who cares about them?”

  His voice became serious. “Anyone looking at you, Penny, could tell why I love you. But why you love me is something hard to understand. So keep telling me, Penny, that you do love me. I need a lot of convincing about that. And why do you love me, anyway? Why, Penny?” He put his arms round her and kissed her violently. “And I bet that old boy over there, studying the box hedge, has been wondering how long it would take me to do that.” Hell, retreating into the fatuous remark again. He glanced over his shoulder. “Hello! He’s gone. Good Lord, imagine that! We’re alone!” He kissed her again. He felt her body relax against his, and then he heard the rush and scramble of many pairs of flat-heeled sensible shoes as a cohort of schoolgirls swept into the garden.

  “Hell’s bells,” David said under his breath. He took Penny’s arm, and they left the little garden, now a mass of green-and-white hat-bands, all volunteering different information in their high-pitched voices to a thoroughly bewildered schoolmistress. “All we want,” he said savagely, “is to be left alone. It doesn’t seem much to ask, but there must be a conspiracy against it. Lord, perhaps that is why people have to marry...to be allowed to be left alone.”

  * * *

  Outside the Maze, a park-keeper looked at them gloomily from under his peaked cap, and reminded them in the voice of doom that it would soon be closed. Everyone, he said pointedly, was leaving.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” David said encouragingly. “If we get lost we’ll wait until you come to fetch us.” The keeper did not seem at all cheered by such co-operation.

  “Don’t worry about him,” David told Penny, as he took her arm and led her into a narrow lane of grass bordered by tall clipped hedges. “All he wants is to get home to his tea or to have a pint of bitter at the Barge Aground. And he couldn’t leave here, in any case, until it is time to knock off duty. What’s more, this is the best part of the day in here; no pack of schoolgirls baying at our heels. And it is warmer too. Even the wind finds it difficult to reach the centre of the Maze.”

  “Yes, it is warmer,” Penny agreed, with some surprise. Somehow she hadn’t noticed how cold it had been in the more open gardens until she had felt the contrast in here. When she was with David she never seemed to notice anything very much, except what he said or how he looked.

  “Temperature rising steadily.” He halted as they came to a block of hedge. “Well, this couldn’t have been the right path after all. Now, either we can start all over again or we can stay here. If we were very astute and walked a couple of miles we probably would reach the centre of the Maze. Or we could quite possibly walk a couple of miles and find ourselves back here. What do you think?”

  “I think we ought to save ourselves the trouble,” Penny said. “After all, I suppose one path looks exactly like another, so that I’ve really seen all the Maze in the first few minutes.”

  “Or we could be very coy, and you could run away and we’d both get lost—you running away, and I giving chase. That used to be one of the chief sports here in earlier days. Maids-in-waiting or the Windsor Beauties all around, gay girlish laughter, manly oaths.”

  “A complicated way of arranging your pleasures. And it would be so very unkind to the old keeper: we’d get lost separately instead of together, and then he would have twice the work to do. He’d be late for that pint of bitter. We couldn’t do that, could we?”

  “No, we couldn’t do that to him,” David agreed, and they both began to laugh. “We’ll get out easily enough, so that we can stay as long as possible in here. We took the first turn to the left, then to the right, and again to the left. Reverse that, and we’ll come out in time to let the old boy have his tea at a nice warm fire. I’m all against cruelty to park-keepers.” And then David, watching her face, put aside all pretence of joking. His voice became serious. “Penny, darling.” He took her in his arms, and kissed her as he had wanted to kiss her since the first minute they had met that day.

  The long kiss was over, and he drew back just for a moment to see her face again. She met his eyes, her arms tightened round his shoulders.

  She said, in a low voice, intense in its honesty, “Oh, David, I am so happy.”

  “I love you,” he answered. He kissed her again. At this moment, holding her, knowing that
she loved him, he was happy too: the only moment, he thought, that one is completely, really, truly, safely happy. Could happiness only be measured in moments? That was the difference of being a man and being a woman in love. A woman in love would say, “I am happy.” Being in love was enough. But when could a man say it and not measure it in moments? When he had possessed her and was sure of her? When she was safely married to him? Or was he ever sure?

  “I love you,” he repeated. He pretended to smile, but Penny, looking up at him quickly as she heard the strained note in his voice, saw the lines above his mouth deepen, not with laughter, but with some emotion nearer pain. For a moment his unhappiness in love reached out to draw her into his unsatisfied longing. I don’t want to hurt him, ever, ever, she thought. I only want to make him happy as I am happy, yet all I have done is to torture. I am cheating somehow: I am being dishonest somehow, and yet...

  “I do love you, David,” she said. “I do.”

  “I know,” he said gently. He smiled now, and ruffled her hair—any piece of foolishness to chase the worry out of her eyes. He cursed himself for having let the disguise slip from his face, so she had seen too deeply into his real feelings. He thought, I’m damned if I’ll blackmail her with pity. I cannot go on like this; I cannot bear seeing you and yet not seeing you, loving you and yet not having proof of your love. That was the easy way to win a girl: blackmail with pity, playing on her desire to have you happy as you want to be happy. And I’m damned if I’ll force her into anything before she makes up her own mind. That was another easy way to win, and then, ultimately, to lose her. When she comes to me, he thought, she will come because she wants me. As I want her. And then I’ll have her forever, not just for a year or two years. I’ll be sure.

  “Forever,” he said aloud.

  She astounded him by throwing her arms round him and kissing him with passion as intense as his own.

  “Penny,” he said unsteadily. “Penny.”

  And then the bell sounded the closing of the Maze, breaking the moment with its harsh voice.

  “A sense of humour,” David said, as they retraced their steps, “is obviously a necessity in love. Otherwise you’d become a solid chunk of frustration.”

  Penny nodded, busy with the technique of combing her hair, powdering her nose, and looking into the small mirror of her handbag. She was thinking that the short distance to the entrance was considerably longer than they had imagined.

  “Or was it to the left, and then the right, and then the left? Or to the right, and then the left, and then the left?” David asked. Yes, definitely, one needed a constant sense of humour.

  “We ought to have brought a logarithm table with us,” Penny said. “We could have worked it out by sin and cos. If one can find non-existent lightships by sin and cos one surely could find a gate which does exist.”

  In the end the keeper had to come and fetch them. He was quite philosophic about it, as if he had expected any young man with good sense and a pretty girl to lose his way. And that little practical extra, slipped into his hand as the young man thanked him, would buy him an extra pint or two this evening: that was always a help to being philosophical.

  * * *

  They walked slowly back from Marinelli’s to the green door in Gower Street.

  “It won’t be so long now,” David was saying. “Not so long before we do not need to say goodbye any more.” And stop worrying whether you will see her again, he thought, next week, or the week after, or ever.

  “Do you really think I should bring Mother to Oxford next Sunday? She could come some other time, when you are less busy.”

  “I think it would be a good idea. And, quite apart from that, I want to see you. I can work like a stoat all week if I think I can see you on Sunday. I’ll invite Chaundler to lunch that day too. He will assure your mother that I am perfectly respectable, really.”

  Penny smiled and pressed his arm. She knew, as he had guessed, her mother’s weakness for respectability. Some day, she thought, she was going to ask her mother what it was about people that she called “nice.” As a standard it did seem to vary. Take the Fanes, for instance. Mrs. Lorrimer called them a nice family. They had nice accents, nice clothes, a nice house, and a nice income. Yet, as a family, they were a mockery, and as individuals they were selfish and cheap. They had a very pretty façade of niceness, like a mean building camouflaged from the front to look broader and bigger than it was. Mr. Fane was the only one who had made any claim to reality for himself: if any of the others were to die in their sleep there would be absolutely no loss to the world.

  “I’m sorry for Mr. Fane,” Penny said suddenly.

  “Because he is the only one of the family whom you don’t know? Perhaps if you met him you’d feel less sorry.”

  “Well, if I were a man, and did the providing and got very little in return for my trouble—well...”

  “Well, what?” David was watching her with amusement.

  “I don’t know.” She shook her head in bewilderment. “You see, I never thought of that before. Frankly, David, I don’t believe many women have thought about it. Either they learn it instinctively, and their husbands are happy, or they don’t learn.”

  “I think you chose a pretty good example to generalise over,” David said. “But how on earth did the conversation take this turn? Have we just passed the Fanes’ house?”

  Penny looked in surprise at the number over the fanlight of the nearest house. “Why, yes, we must have passed it. And I could swear that I never noticed it. Didn’t even know we were almost at the end of the street. How short it seems when I’m walking with you, David. Last night Marston and I went to see the new René Clair film; and, coming back, we walked up this street and we both agreed it was far too long. No street should be this length and look so much the same all the way. Yet, tonight...”

  “It’s too short. Just as the hours are too short when we are together.” He glanced at his watch. “We’ve been eight solid hours together today. They seem less than two. Look, when we get married I’ll have the days arranged into thirty-six hours, so that we’ll have enough time to do all the things we want to do together. That would be pleasant.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Wonderful, too.”

  They looked at each other. Then, holding arms more tightly, with hands clasped and fingers interlocked, they walked towards the green door. David watched her walk up the steps which bridged the basement area, waved back to her, waited until the door had closed. He crossed to the lamp-post, looked down the length of the long street, long and dreary. It was a lonely street now. He paused to light a cigarette and waited. His eyes were on the top floor of the house. That was her window. He had waited like this every time after saying goodbye. But tonight when the light had been switched on, and she had come over to the window to draw the curtains, she stood there looking down into the street. He knew by the stillness of her body that she had seen him. And then she waved, and he waved back, and it was she who now stood watching him as he turned to enter the narrow, dark side-street which would take him to Tottenham Court Road.

  The dark street was silent and desolate. The wind was colder. It came from the east, a hard sharp wind that needed the Atlantic to soften its bite.

  Christ, he thought, always walking away from her, always leaving her. Would there ever be an end to this? Ever an end to the loneliness that was more searching than any east wind? He threw his half-finished cigarette into the gutter. “Christ,” he said, listening to his footsteps’ empty echo in the silent street. Then he thought of the lines he had found last night when he had been searching through the Oxford Book of English Verse for a quotation that had baffled him. He had opened the book casually, and there they were. He began to repeat them as he passed the last stretch of unlighted shops and dark dead houses.

  O western wind, when wilt thou blow

  That the small rain down can rain?

  Christ, that my love were in my arms

  And I in my bed
again!

  He thought of the man who had written them. Poor beggar, whoever he had been four hundred years ago.

  And then the lights and noise of Tottenham Court Road brought him back to the twentieth century and a train to be caught. He glanced at his watch and began to hurry.

  25

  PUNITIVE EXPEDITION

  Mrs. Lorrimer sat in Penelope’s bedroom, watched her daughter arranging two teacups on an improvised tea-table, and felt still more unhappy.

  In Edinburgh it had been simple to work up a mood of righteous indignation: her daughter living in luxury in London; her daughter taking a frivolous life for granted; her daughter, as return for such pampering, behaving with a ridiculous lack of common sense, perhaps even ruining her whole future. But now a good deal of Mrs. Lorrimer’s indignation was turned against the room. It was not worth a third of the money spent on it. Penelope, accustomed to the Crescent and its comfort, must have been miserable here.