Doves of Venus

by Olivia Manning

  The car awaited them. At the last moment Nancy ran upstairs to find a book she wanted to borrow. Tom, who had been standing a little aloof in the hall, crossed over to Ellie and took her hand. ‘I shall look forward to seeing you again.’ He turned Ellie’s hand round and pressed the finger-tips of his left hand into her deep, soft, pink palm.

  ‘Girls,’ he said quietly. ‘They are the doves of Venus . . . little soft white doves . . . silver doves that carry our thoughts – where?’ He touched his lower lip with the tip of his tongue, then he looked up smiling, an odd light in his eyes. At least, Ellie thought it odd, but it was gone before she could interpret it and later she believed she had imagined it.

  Nancy appeared on the landing and started, noisily, to run downstairs. Tom, his voice screened from her by the noise of her feet, said: ‘Dear me, Nancy is plain. She’ll never find a husband.’

  Ellie said: ‘People like her. She has her own attraction.’

  They were ready to depart – but, no. Nancy had left a handkerchief in the drawing-room. Tom, standing close to Ellie, looked sideways at her feet. His smile, sardonic yet indulgent, grew as he lifted his eyes to her face. ‘You also have your attraction,’ he said. He took her hand quickly, then dropped it as Nancy returned.

  ‘Well, you young creatures,’ he said, ‘you’ve raised my spirits. When will you come again? Week-ends are so short. Why not come for Easter?’

  They accepted this invitation without a pause. Tom bent and looked into the car and took their hands in a last good-bye. He held to Ellie’s fingers lingeringly, then, as the car moved away, had to let them go.

  8

  When Ellie remembered she had promised to go home for Easter, she did not withdraw her acceptance of Tom’s invitation. There was always time to do that. Somewhere at the back of her mind was the certainty she would go to Clopals. Yet she did not write to her mother. She told herself: ‘If I can save my train-fare to Eastsea, I must go,’ knowing how difficult it would be to save her fare.

  When her mother wrote, ‘Looking forward to seeing you at Easter,’ Ellie would not believe she was looking forward. She told herself: ‘She has Emmy. She does not want me. She never did want me.’

  With a sense of guilt that somehow enhanced the attraction of Clopals, she remembered the smallness and discomfort of her own home. Now it seemed to her scarcely possible that people could live out their lives in rooms as small as that. She thought of Tom’s mahogany dining-table. Nancy had said the table was two hundred years old. For two hundred years people had been polishing it until its surface had a depth like the depth of a pond at night. Once or twice, when she could do it unseen, she had pulled her finger-tips across it. Now, touching it in memory, she felt instead the dry, flawed surface of the table where for years she had eaten every meal.

  Nancy, who had made no promises elsewhere, talked freely of Easter at Clopals. She had spent the previous Easter there while Maxine was making her second visit.

  ‘That’s when she jolly well began patronising me,’ said Nancy, ‘but she won’t do it again.’

  And Clopals at Easter? What was it like? Nancy described the rooms in the long spring twilight, a-glitter with lamps and filled with the scent of lily-of-the-valley. In the garden the double lilacs bloomed – the dark, grapepurple bunches; the white sort like clotted cream. The pink chestnuts carpeted the lawn with pink and the lateflowering double cherries put forth blossoms so tender they wrinkled like Jap silk.

  As they talked, Clopals encompassed them. For Ellie, Eastsea lost all substance: her promise became less than a shadow.

  ‘Why did Tom never marry again?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s too selfish.’

  ‘But he’s terribly kind.’

  ‘Yes, if he wants to be.’

  ‘Well, he does want to be.’

  ‘He likes girls.’

  That was a fact Ellie could appreciate in a region beyond her own advantage. For her, it gave Tom a poetic quality, almost a sort of youth. If he liked girls so much, how could they help but like him in return. Before she eventually spoke of it to Nancy, she thought many times of how he had described girls as the doves of Venus.

  She thought of all the girls she had known – some too fat, some too thin, some plain and bespectacled like Nancy, some stupid, some dishonest, some mean, some cruel: all given, at times, to giggling, sniggering, sniffling, smelling of their under-arm smell – and yet, somehow, they were all transmuted by Tom’s admiration into unearthly creatures, silver-white doves, delicate, diaphanous, lovely as female gods.

  At last she had to tell Nancy what Tom had said.

  ‘Doves!’ said Nancy. ‘It’s true doves are sacred to Venus, but so are lots of other birds. Sparrows, for instance.’ She started to giggle. ‘He might have said we were sparrows flying to Clopals for crumbs.’ Later, having reflected on Tom’s remark, she said: ‘I sometimes think he’s a naughty old thing.’

  ‘I think,’ said Ellie, as one in a position to judge, ‘he’s really terribly innocent.’

  When these conversations had been going on day after day until the days became weeks, Denis said: ‘Chatter, chatter, chatter. I suppose you girls do do some work?’

  ‘We never stop working,’ said Nancy.

  Ellie said: ‘Oh, Denis, will Easter never come?’

  ‘It will come. It will come and go and be forgotten. One day you’ll say: “Why, it’s forty years since that Easter I longed for so much. Then I was a girl and now I’m an old, old woman”.’

  Ellie said: ‘How silly you are!’

  ‘You think you’ll never grow old,’ said Denis, ‘but you will. We can’t be sure of much, but that we can be sure of. We grow old.’

  Bertie crossly asked: ‘What is the matter with you, Denis?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m just wasting my life here. What would be the matter?’

  ‘You could fill up the time-sheets,’ said Bertie, who, each evening when his own work was done, filled the time-sheets with the speed and competence of extreme irritation.

  9

  Easter was late that year. The light grew tender, the air warm. The sun did not set until nearly seven o’clock. In the new sweetness, the new brilliance, the girls were like prisoners released from winter confinement. They could not bear to return to their rooms. They would walk together to the river or the park, moving quickly, their spirits seeming about to rush from their bodies.

  One evening Ellie persuaded Nancy to go to St James’s Park. They took the bus to the end of Victoria Street, and there Ellie manoeuvred their direction so that they must pass Quintin’s house to reach the park. The sun had set before they arrived. Through the clear twilight the lofty, languid plane trees with their mottled trunks shook from their buds leaf tassels delicate as flowers.

  When they turned into Quintin’s road Ellie became faint with excitement. Nancy, unaware this place had significance for Ellie, talked as before. Always at the back of Ellie’s mind had been a sort of dream-belief that, were she to pass Quintin’s door, he would come from it. It was a magical certainty, but she had not dared test it alone. Nancy was her shield and talisman.

  They reached the house. Ellie was near collapse – yet nothing happened. No one came from the door. There was no face at the window. She saw nothing and she passed, no doubt, unseen.

  In reaction she felt a wretched emptiness. Nancy, aware of none of this, talked on about Maxine and Tom – Maxine’s guile, Tom’s money and the power it gave him. Ellie suddenly found this talk unendurable. She was repelled by the thought of Tom’s money. She felt she could scarcely bear to hear another word about it.

  She despaired now of ever seeing Quintin again. Only the portfolio remained. Surely the time had come to make use of it? As soon as she returned to her lodging she rang Quintin’s number. A woman’s voice answered. Ellie could not reply. The voice, speaking to silence, called urgently: ‘Hello, hello, hello.’ Ellie said at last: ‘Is Mr Bellot there?’

  ‘He’s out at the moment,’ said
the voice. ‘Who’s speaking? Can I give him a message?’

  Ellie had recognised the woman’s anxious jealousy. ‘It’s not important.’ She put down the receiver before further questions could be asked. She went to her room with a pain in her breast. She said: ‘I must forget him.’

  10

  Easter was nearly upon them when Maxine rang Nancy from Clopals. Tom had had a slight stroke a fortnight before; nothing very serious: he was recovering, but in a day or two he was flying to Menton, where he would spend the summer. She was afraid the girls would be disappointed.

  They were stunned.

  They walked slowly to the river, no longer fearing their spirits’ escape, and tried to concoct for themselves some compensating occupation. They were already sufficiently Londoners to dread bank holidays in London. Ellie had not saved any money for her ticket to Eastsea. She was not likely to save it now. Added to that, she had sent her mother a letter of apology and explanation, not to be retracted.

  The next day word came from Tom. He enclosed railway-tickets and suggested they should spend Easter Monday at Clopals. The Fittons would be away and the house shut up, but Mrs Partridge would open up the drawing-room for them and make them luncheon and high tea.

  ‘That’s not bad,’ said Nancy. ‘We’ll have some fun.’

  Suddenly expansive, she invited Ellie to take tea in her room on Good Friday. That was the first time Ellie had been invited to Nancy’s room. Nancy always spoke of it as somewhere mysteriously private, as though accessible only to herself. When the front door of the house was opened to her, Ellie was surprised that the caretaker permitted her to go alone to the first floor and find Miss Claypole’s room number.

  Nancy opened to Ellie’s knock, grinning not so much, it seemed, in welcome as in anticipation of Ellie’s wonder at the room. Ellie’s wonder was all that could have been expected. With lips parted she looked at the vast bay window which formed an area itself not much smaller than Ellie’s own room. There were two arm-chairs, a sofa, books in a white-painted book-case, a writing-desk, some early flower paintings framed in white, linen chair and bed covers which Nancy had hand-blocked, and a white Indian carpet she had brought from her bedroom at home.

  It was the carpet, its size and whiteness, that made Ellie realise how Nancy’s home must differ from her own.

  Nancy said: ‘The room’s a bit expensive, of course, but it will pay for itself. When I’m settled in, I’ll be able to work here. I’m doing some book jackets now.’

  Ellie said: ‘This is not just a room of one’s own – it’s a world.’

  Below the rear window there was a small acacia tree. ‘A poor thing,’ said Nancy, ‘but a tree.’

  Nancy made tea on a gas-ring. Ellie wanted to help. ‘Shall I make toast? I’m good at that.’

  No, Nancy did not want her to do anything: ‘It’s all organised. Sit down.’ She went to a cupboard. Inside were small quantities of provisions put into pots, tins and boxes, labelled and set out in alphabetical order. On the lowest shelf was an oven that could be placed over the gas-ring.

  Seeing Nancy organised in this small organised world, surrounded by so much that was her own, Ellie felt subdued. She had supposed she and Nancy knew all there was to know about one another: each knew what the other knew: and much of their knowledge they had discovered together. Now it seemed to her that Nancy had a whole life unknown to her, sorted away into containers, placed in some private cupboard that Nancy kept beyond Ellie’s reach.

  She remained subdued throughout the visit. For the first time in their relationship a hint of boredom floated in the air. Ellie was not invited to the room again.

  Somehow, meeting and taking walks, eating their midday meals in small snack bars, they lived through the desolate row of Sundays that was Easter in London and came to the holiday Monday when they were expected at Clopals. It was a brilliant morning. The train was crowded. Partridge, at the station with the car, carried them out of the uncertain straggle of picnickers to the spacious seclusion of Clopals that, during the weeks of their absence, had come into flower.

  A certain loftiness of manner had come upon Nancy during this transition. She became hostess and leader. At moments in the past Ellie had caught in her face and movements recondite resemblances to Tom. Now, as she talked to Mrs Partridge, she talked in imitation of Tom.

  Mrs Partridge asked when they would like luncheon.

  ‘Oh!’ Nancy raised her eyebrows, drawing out the word in enquiry, ‘I think one-thirty would do excellently, Mrs Partridge. We’ll go for a walk first, just to get an appetite. Eh? What do you think, Ellie?’

  They walked up into the beech-wood where the Venetian red glow of the leaf carpet was broken by new spikes of green. Now the leaves were large enough to form a shade: they dappled the air, a waxen green transparency.

  ‘It’s not the same without Tom,’ said Ellie.

  Nancy said: ‘I’m not sure it isn’t better.’

  In a hollow of the hillside the bluebells had opened and their colour flowed like water between the trees. The girls stopped to admire. Nancy’s admiration had about it a slight air of survey and satisfaction such as Tom might have worn. Ellie, watching her, suddenly knew that in one of the hidden containers of Nancy’s nature was belief that Clopals would one day be hers.

  There was a sense of division between them for which Ellie could not account. The visit, so long looked forward to, seemed empty of all excitement. Nancy was unusually silent. It was as though she had retreated into a world of private hopes. As for Ellie, her hope had almost gone: she did not know where to look for its renewal.

  Before luncheon, the bright day clouded over. The rain started: it chilled the air. When they had eaten, the girls sat before the empty fireplace and read Tom’s books, saying little. Perhaps Nancy realised how bored Ellie was with the talk about Maxine and Tom. Now it seemed that, if she could not talk about them, she could talk about nothing.

  In the early evening, when it seemed there was nothing to do but return to London, a glow of sunset appeared. The rain came slowly to a stop.

  The girls hurried out, their mood changing. A pink light, strained through thinning cloud, washed the garden with a supernatural sheen. Dazzled, as though some spell had come upon them, they linked fingers and ran down the lawn. Their lifted faces were rosy from the sky. The sodden beds of lily-of-the-valley filled the air with scent.

  By the time the girls had reached the stream, the colour had gone from the air. In the milky sheen of evening the trunks of the apple trees were luminous, bloomed over with copper-green. Among the trees the water flickered, the links of a silver chain.

  Ellie, pulling her hand from Nancy’s hand, ran ahead, suddenly aware of her own separateness, wanting to move alone. It seemed now her problem imposed solitude. No companionship in the world could solve it, not even the companionship of Quintin. During the months when she had thought only of London, then only of Quintin, the problem had been forgotten. Now it assailed her, possessing her mind with a bitter-sweet force like the scent of the young larch – a problem that a year before she would have called the foremost in the world.

  How could she, in the instant of its changing, catch this light, this damp and leafy evening – not as a dried leaf or a pressed flower or a glimmer in the density of paint, but moist with life, moist-smelling of wild mint and earth, with the water glinting, the trees a cloudy darkness upon the mist and silver of the air?

  She brushed through the riverside trees, paused on the bridge and gazed into the green-black lustre of the water. When Nancy reached her, she said: ‘What will become of us? Will we ever do anything?’

  ‘We’ve already done things. We’ve come to London.’

  ‘But that’s only a beginning. There are so many other places.’ She felt the compass of the earth and its wonders. ‘I want to go everywhere. I want to see everything.’

  ‘You want too much.’

  Ellie broke away again, this time harshly, with impatience: ‘You can’t
want too much. I want everything. I want the whole world.’

  She flung herself with a violent effort up the lawn, tripping and regaining herself, flinging herself forward and away from the limitations of herself, until she came to the terrace. She stood there trembling and panting until she heard Nancy’s approach, then she entered the empty house.

  11

  That spring in London there was neither sun nor rain. The parks were hung with a green gloom of leaves. Ellie and Nancy no longer left the studio together to walk in the sad, pearl-grey twilight. Nancy had fallen in love.

  Ellie never knew when this happened. She was not told at once. She wondered if it had been the cause of Nancy’s preoccupation at Clopals. Several times Nancy was not free to meet Ellie on Saturday evenings, then at last she explained: ‘I have to meet my man-friend.’

  ‘You have a man-friend?’

  ‘Of course.’ Nancy spoke as though only Ellie could be so foolish as not to guess that.

  ‘But . . . but where did you meet him? How long have you known him?’

  Nancy giggled: ‘Oh, some time now. He has a room in my house. We met one evening coming in the door. He asked me to go to the pictures.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Nancy shrugged her shoulders, her eyes mocking, as though she had reason to keep this matter from Ellie.

  After that Nancy would make casual mention of the young man, whose name was Terry. If Ellie tried to question her, Nancy, with the most provocative glances and murmurs, refused to tell her anything. Unquestioned, she made such revelations as: ‘Terry wears spectacles, too. It’s terribly funny to see the two pairs cohabiting on the mantelshelf.’