Doves of Venus

by Olivia Manning

  As soon as the sun slid below the horizon, darkness fell. When they arrived, they stepped out into a cold sharper than mid-winter. Above the station, with its two little oil lamps, rose the deep, surprising blue of the country sky. A shadow on the platform approached the girls and touched a cap.

  Nancy at once took on the manner of the employing class. She smiled down on the little chauffeur and said with polished cordiality: ‘Good evening, Partridge. Very nice to see you again.’

  ‘Very nice to see you, Miss,’ said Partridge.

  Under the first lamp, Nancy winked at Ellie. As they sat on the broad, pneumatic back seat of Tom Claypole’s car, she whispered: ‘You wait till dinner. I bet there’ll be at least grouse.’

  Clopals, when the headlamps picked it out of the darkness, showed white, a low-built, weather-boarded house in colonial style, over the front of which a climbing-rose ran like a plan of the nervous system. The door opened as they arrived. From the hall came a red-golden glow as from the heart of a fire. Ellie, passing from the night cold into warmth, as into safety, was touched suddenly as though by a memory of some past happiness, acutely sweet. She groped in her mind to account for it but could find nothing. She was distracted by the appearance of Tom Claypole, who came from a room to greet them.

  He took Ellie’s hand and looked intently into her face: ‘How kind of you to visit an old man!’

  ‘How kind of you to let me come.’ After a moment she thought to add: ‘Besides, you’re not old.’

  His face broke into a smile. He patted her hand approvingly.

  The girls had been given adjoining rooms that shared a balcony. The housekeeper, Mrs Fitton, moved between the rooms, simpering, giving Ellie inquisitive and critical glances that sent her at last out on to the balcony to await the woman’s departure. There was silence like cosmic silence. She held her breath and felt the silence, filled with tenderness for the countryside lying about her like a dark-furred creature, asleep, wild but gentle.

  Suddenly she burst in through Nancy’s door and said: ‘How wonderful it is, the country!’

  ‘But you can’t see it.’

  ‘I mean the silence. The smell and the silence.’

  The drawing-room at Clopals was curtained against the night. The area around the fire, to which three arm-chairs had been drawn, was screened into a small stronghold of comfort. A butler’s table, put down among the chairs, held decanters and glasses. When the girls came down, Tom poured them sherry, then, sitting back with his cigar, he said to Ellie:

  ‘I hope, my dear, you will find it tolerable here. We are not at all grand. It is a small household. I’ve only the Fittons and Partridge to look after me: but they manage, they manage. Food simple but good; that sort of thing.’

  Ellie replied that the house and everything about it seemed to her wonderful. While Tom questioned Nancy about her work in the studio, Ellie, with some caution, looked about her. She was willing to admire these surroundings, but not to seem unused to them. Beside her, where she sat on one side of the fireplace, the firelight glanced over the brass and tortoise-shell framework of a glass cabinet. It held a collection of figures that minced and gesticulated like the figures Bertie drew – valuable, no doubt, but they meant nothing to her. On the lowest shelf, leaping like spray in the moving light, was a cluster of white coral. It saddened her, set there, so far from its own sea. She felt the pang of the deserter.

  ‘And you also work in this studio?’ Tom asked Ellie.

  ‘They only let me do “antiquing”.’

  ‘“Antiquing”! Dear me! No deception intended? Is it hard work?’

  ‘No, it’s fun. I enjoy it.’ Ellie started to laugh. ‘One day I was “antiquing” a wardrobe: I was working inside it. The paint was new, of course, and the smell was so strong that everything went black and I fell out on to the floor.’

  ‘Bless my soul! That doesn’t seem to me work for a young lady.’

  ‘But I love it.’ Ellie was suddenly afraid that Tom might protest to Mrs Primrose. ‘We’re lucky to be doing our own work,’ she said. ‘We’re lucky to be there.’

  Ellie looked at Nancy. Nancy, sitting with her feet under her, smiled and was complacently silent, watching her uncle and friend as though conscious of being the begetter of all that passed between them.

  When they went in to dinner, Ellie noticed the fire at the other end of the drawing-room. It burnt there all by itself, picking out the gilt on picture frames and the spines of books, forming a genial little world that no one troubled to inhabit. There was a log fire in the hall and another in the dining-room. There had been fires in each of the girls’ bedrooms. Ellie contemplated this extravagance with wonder. At first she was disturbed by it, then it seemed as it should be: ‘For goodness sake,’ she told herself, ‘let us have fires everywhere.’ For a moment she exulted over the cheeseparing life of Eastsea; she felt angry with her mother, who had never secured for herself the warmth of wealth: then her anger collapsed, leaving her silent and guilty as Fitton took away the soup-plates and cut up two roast chickens.

  Nancy grumbled skittishly: ‘And I betted Ellie it would be grouse.’

  Tom turned on her with unexpected irritation: ‘My dear girl, grouse! At this time of the year?’

  Nancy made a comical face, but Tom was not appeased: ‘If you wish to be accepted among civilised people, my dear, you must learn not to make these ridiculous mistakes.’

  ‘Won’t do it again.’

  ‘I hope not.’

  Tom looked at Ellie and, meeting her worried gaze, smiled, relaxing, and ordered Fitton to open another bottle of Meursault-Perrières.

  He said to Ellie: ‘A rather nice burgundy, don’t you think? Unfortunately I’ve come to the end of the ’47.’

  ‘I think myself,’ said Ellie, quoting Quintin with an air, ‘that the ’50 is just as good.’

  Tom leant towards her: ‘You may be right,’ he nodded gravely, his small black eyes bright with amusement.

  Ellie drank off her glass and let it be refilled, but already there was a division between herself and the material world. She was beginning to float on that sea of exalted benevolence she had almost forgotten since Quintin had ceased to take her out to dinner. An old sense of luxury and ease pervaded her, but she refused a third glass.

  Slowly, with the intent appreciation of a man used to dining alone, Tom drank most of the second bottle himself. The conversation was still restrained. Ellie, when Tom looked in her direction, smiled but had little to say.

  With a hint of aggression in her tone, Nancy asked: ‘Has Maxine been down lately?’

  Tom replied in an off-hand way: ‘Yes, a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Very well. Very well indeed.’ He fidgeted with his glass.

  When the girls withdrew to the main room, Ellie asked: ‘Who is Maxine?’

  ‘Ah!’ said Nancy as she poured the coffee. ‘You may well ask.’ She looked dramatically severe. ‘She was – was, mark you – a friend of yours truly. I knew her at the Slade. She was quite a bit older than me but we had digs near one another in Gower Street and we gradually got pally. I thought she was a wonder in those days. I wanted to show her off to Tom. I brought her here – and she just annexed him.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know. She made a set at him: he loved it. After we’d been down once or twice, he invited her but not me. Then she brought down her cousin, Erica, who was looking for a house in these parts. Erica didn’t cut much ice, of course: Tom’s not interested in married girls. But she lives in the village now and she’s always ringing up. She keeps a look-out for Maxine. She lets her know everything. If Tom’s unwell, Maxine’s down like a shot. If she knew you were here, she’d try and winkle you out like a pin. That’s our Maxie.’

  The telephone rang in the hall.

  ‘There!’ said Nancy.

  ‘But why all this? What do they want with Tom? Surely he’s too old . . .’

  ‘Oh yes. Too old
to be a nuisance. It’s just a Beautiful Friendship. Maxine has her eye on the cash.’

  ‘She thinks he’ll leave it to her?’

  ‘He’ll leave it to someone.’

  ‘Why not to you? You’re his niece.’

  Nancy’s colour heightened. She looked down at the carpet, but said only: ‘I’ll never get anything. I can’t go on doing and saying the right thing for long enough.’

  When Tom joined them, Ellie saw him as though a new dimension had been added to him. He was not merely a human being: he was a rich man, aware of the power of his money; generous to those within the area of his power: perhaps less generous to those outside it.

  Fitton added a brandy decanter and liqueurs to the tray by the fire.

  Tom said to Ellie: ‘Well, young lady? Crême de Menthe, I suppose?’

  ‘I prefer green Chartreuse.’

  ‘Indeed!’ Tom raised his brows approvingly.

  ‘It’s a much nicer colour.’

  This entertained him as it might once have entertained Quintin. Ellie felt a little of the elation she had felt with Quintin when he had laughed so much in acknowledgement of her wit, making her feel no commonplace, temporary partner in this game, but a natural player. She had had some opinion of herself in those days. For goodness sake, was she not someone? Where had her brilliance gone?

  As the Chartreuse added to the warmth of the wine, her confidence picked itself up. Couldn’t she defeat a dozen Maxines? She leant towards Tom, smelling about him the scent of cigars and a little sourness of wine: the scent, it seemed to her, of an earlier, richer generation.

  She said: ‘You know, you look like an Edwardian roué.’

  ‘Dear me!’ He smirked into his brandy glass. ‘I suppose to you young things I’m just a period piece?’

  ‘You’re a darling,’ said Ellie.

  She put out her hand and touched the garnet-coloured velvet of his frogged smoking-jacket. As her hand moved away, he caught it and held it a moment, then let it slide from him. His smile surprised her. Disconcerted, she retreated into the depths of her chair and made no further moves that evening.

  6

  Next morning the girls had the little breakfast-room to themselves. Tom took his breakfast in bed. When Nancy was staying there alone, Tom usually spent the morning in his room. With mischievous smiles, Nancy predicted that he would this day make an early appearance.

  The breakfast-room overlooked the great lawn that dropped in a long, slow slope down to a stream. Beyond this rose the boundary woods that tossed, stormy black, against a wet sky. Here and there in the grass a few daffodils were opening. They, too, tossed in the wind, yellow as yellow light in the grey, gusty, bitter brightness of the morning. To one side, hiding most of the Partridges’ cottage, three trees stood dark and stiff-boughed, their foliage lifted about them like iron wings.

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Cedars.’

  Ellie looked out at them as she ate, content that she had added cedars to her experience of the world.

  The fires were alight in the drawing-room. Three french windows, opening on to the lawn, quivered in the uproarious wind. Ellie gazed longingly into the unexplored garden, but Nancy said: ‘Not today. Let’s be comfortable while we have the chance.’

  When, about eleven o’clock, Tom appeared, he said: ‘Have you shown Ellie my roses?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought there was anything to show.’

  ‘Of course there is.’ He turned from Nancy with scornful impatience and called Ellie over to a portfolio-holder. ‘I have a few prints and water-colours of roses here. What do you think of that? “The Celsiana Rose”.’

  She peered into the faded silver-pink of the petals, the faded silver-green of the leaves, then took the drawing over to the light and looked again.

  ‘Shall we go and see them?’

  ‘I’d love to see them.’

  ‘Not me,’ said Nancy, ‘I’ll stay by the fire.’

  When Ellie came downstairs dressed for out-of-doors, she found Tom waiting in the hall. His fur-lined great-coat of Donegal tweed reached to his ankles: his tweed cap had ear-flaps: he carried a shooting-stick.

  Ellie had imagined they were about to visit a hot-house where roses bloomed all the year round. Instead she was taken beyond the cedars to an arrangement of rose-beds, grey-earthed and exposed. Here, standing in a wind that turned as it blew, tugging her clothes this way and that, spattering rain in her face, she wondered why the rose-shoots did not shrink back into the stem.

  Tom, propped by his shooting-stick, ignored the edgy wind, the blae, changing sky, the sting of the rain’s attack, and gazed at his roses with love.

  ‘Look there! Aren’t they pr’y?’

  Ellie, following his outstretched hand on which the blotched and yellow skin was wrinkled like an old glove, peered down at the spiny wood. Yes, leaves, tightly wrapped but green, their outer edges curling back, had broken forth like little sweet-pokes made of jade.

  ‘The rose,’ said Tom, ‘is white and flat like a gardenia. Here is a red one of the same order, Roseraie de l’Hay. When one of the old poets likened a girl’s lips to a rose, he meant, don’t you know, this sort of rose. Nowadays, girls looking as they do, he’d no doubt mean one of those new hybrid-teas coloured like a boiled lobster.’ He gave Ellie’s lips a swift, critical glance and, seeming satisfied by what he saw, returned to his rose-bed. He moved round it slowly. As he went, he talked of roses – burgundy-coloured, bloomed like velvet; roses grey-mauve like tissue-paper, purple at the heart; the Zepherine Drouhin, the thornless rose, as pink as pink china; the Jaune Desprez coloured like an apricot; blush roses, moss roses, musk roses . . .

  Ellie, catching her breath against the onslaught of the wind, thought of the summer, the mild air of June, the branches weighted with roses. She was filled with longing – but for whom? There was only one name in her mind. She said to herself: ‘I will not think of him,’ but of whom else could she think?

  Tom straightened himself uneasily: ‘Ah! Um!’ he said, ‘My lumbago putting me through the hoops.’ He pressed a hand into his back and, looking at her wind-whipped cheeks, said:

  ‘You are like a rose yourself.’

  She protested, rather crossly: ‘Oh no. I’m ugly.’

  ‘Silly!’ He drew out a silk handkerchief and wiped his eyes and blew his nose. ‘You’re quite a little beauty, you know.’

  She did not believe it. She would have chosen another face. She said: ‘No one at Eastsea ever thought so.’

  Tom laughed. He raised his face to the sky: ‘Bit dicky overhead. Still, care to risk a stroll?’

  He took her arm. They went down through a shrubbery sheltered by a wall of laurel. Ellie burnt with the remembrance that she had been called a beauty. Though she could not believe it, she could not resist asking: ‘When you said I was quite a beauty, did you mean it? Or were you pulling my leg?’

  Tom squeezed her arm tightly. ‘Don’t you have any doubts about yourself, my dear. I still have an eye for beauty even though I’m only an old materialist with one foot in the grave.’

  ‘Really a materialist? Do you mean you don’t believe in any sort of a next world?’

  ‘Not in any sort. We’re just machines. When we’re worn out, we’re done for: thrown away: finished: kaput.’ He made a gesture of finality, but Ellie was too concerned to leave matters there.

  She said: ‘Don’t you ever feel immortal?’

  She glanced askance at him, seeing at the same time his age and his unbelief. Because he thought himself mortal, he seemed to her a clay man, the dust of mortality lying in the folds of his skin. It was almost as though he had about him an aura of decay. Repelled, she would have moved from him if he had not held her arm: yet she felt compassion.

  ‘But haven’t you ever been in love?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course.’ He was slightly impatient of the question. ‘You must surely know that a man of my age has been in love many times.’ He sighed, and after a long pause
added: ‘Many, many times.’

  ‘And even then you did not feel immortal?’

  He laughed: ‘Even less than usual.’

  She wanted to ask if he were not afraid to die, but the question seemed too cruel. After reflecting for some moments, she said simply: ‘I am sure I am immortal.’

  ‘I envy your conviction. I am afraid I cannot emulate it.’

  The dry remoteness of his voice silenced Ellie for so long that he started to speak, as though to make amends: ‘As you grow old, don’t you know, your ideas change. When I was young, I used to plot against death – how I might live to be a hundred or more. Or I used to think that, with all the scientific discoveries, the world progressing as it seemed to be, some means of defeating age and death would be found long before I became old. My father often said: “Ah, my boy, we’re on the brink of great discoveries. There will be wondrous changes. I won’t live to see them, but you will.” I used to think how fortunate I was. Now I realise life changes: it doesn’t improve.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know!’ said Ellie. ‘Rationing stopped.’

  ‘Rationing!’ Tom threw back his head and gave a bark of laughter. ‘That didn’t last long.’

  ‘Long enough. I didn’t remember not having it. When mother said “Sweets weren’t rationed before the war!” I could scarcely believe her. But then, I didn’t believe in “before the war” either. I thought the war was permanent, like the Government or the town council or the rates, or one of the other things people grumble about.’

  ‘What a baby!’ Tom’s arm weighed heavily on Ellie as they walked down the slope between the trees. He moved stiffly, trying to hide his age and keep his shoulders square. ‘We all grow old,’ he said. ‘I’ve grown old, just as my father did. Indeed, at my age, he looked a lot younger than I do. There’s no need to envy the young. It’s all over too quickly. Ah!’ He shook his head. ‘You’re eighteen? Nineteen? When I was eighteen it seemed we were reaching the Golden Age. Horror, cruelty, injustice – all those things were being left behind.’ He turned his head and looked directly into Ellie’s face: ‘Was it a great shock to you to discover the present is no better than the past?’