The Flowering Thorn

by Margery Sharp

  “Miss Frewen’s compliments,” replied Lesley promptly, “and she’ll be up in ten minutes. Master Patrick has gone on the canal.”

  As soon as the man was gone she covered up the butter, lidded the marmalade, and ran upstairs to pull out her skating-dress. It was of privileged black, laced down the sides with a white cord: which lacing, she discovered, would now have to be loosened at least an inch. At any more leisured moment Lesley would have been seriously upset, but with the sun bright and the ice waiting she was already rubbing the vaseline from her skates before the original shock had time to stun her. ‘Another inch—blast—thank goodness there’s a slip!’—so ran her thoughts as she crammed on the velvet cap: snatching her scarf, they had changed to, ‘Bulbs—didn’t Sir Philip say I could have some tulips?’ And as she ran out of the door she thought—‘Oranges—one for Pat when he comes in, one for me after supper—must get some more this afternoon.’

  The path across fields was hard as iron: no hunting, thought Lesley. They were by no means a hunting community, but Sir Philip, from sheer force of habit, always kept a wary eye on the weather, and liked to be sympathised with when his sport would have been spoiled. It was a weakness which Lesley, clean against her original humanitarian principles, shamelessly indulged; herself opening the conversation, as often as not, with the remark that this (frost, snow, flood or whatever it was) would put a stopper on the huntin’. It was the only phrase of which she felt at all confident: there was Jorrocks’s ’ard ’igh road, of course—(was it Jorrocks?)—but Sir Philip always liked to get that in himself. And passing through the lower gate, Lesley determined that as soon as opportunity arose she would break new ground with a reference to scent.…

  “There you are!” called Sir Philip, waving to her between the trees.

  She held up her boots in reply and hurried forward. He was already on the ice, light and spidery in an antique skating-costume of tight black frieze, vaguely branden-burged and with collar of astrakhan. On his head was a round cap, also of astrakhan, on his hands a pair of white worsted gloves: and waving back his greeting Lesley suddenly wondered whether her own magpie colouring gave her the same ghostly look.

  “This is splendid!” called Sir Philip, casually executing one more figure before returning to the bank. “I always knew you weren’t a potterer. Now we shall get at least two hours.”

  “But the ice is going to last much longer than that!” exclaimed Lesley. “I can feel it freezing!”

  Sir Philip shook his head.

  “This afternoon,” he exclaimed genially, “cowardice will compel me to throw it open to the mob. So if you can start a few good dangerous cracks, my dear, I shall take it as a favour.”

  “How deep is it?”

  “Deep enough to drown the whole village. But don’t be alarmed. If either you or Pat go through, the gardeners have instructions to fish you out.”

  “That’s the most flattering thing we’ve ever had said to us,” remarked Lesley, sitting down and beginning to put on her skates. Sir Philip watched with interest: his own were the long curly kind, such as are sometimes seen in engravings.

  “You probably skate brilliantly,” he said at last. “So did I, about fifty years ago. Those were the days, my dear, when ponds were frozen solid from November to February. That’s what I call a winter.”

  Lesley looked judicious.

  “It must have put a stopper on the huntin’, though.”

  “You’re right there. And that’s an odd thing,” said Sir Philip, “because I seem to remember huntin’ too. Both of ’em right through the winter.…” He put out a hand and helped her down the bank: her skates bit on ice, and shooting forward alone she cut a whole series of eights in the centre of the ice. The first was tentative, the second neat; but the third and succeeding ones swept faster and faster till she broke away from the centre and finished on her impetus in a flourish of arabesques.

  “Right as usual,” called Sir Philip behind her. “You do skate beautifully. Let’s waltz.”

  She spun to a halt.

  “There’s no music.”

  “Never mind, I’ll hum.” And to the sudden ghost of a waltz tune Lesley felt a thin old hand touch her waist, a thin old hand close on her wrist: and all at once they were flying away together over the dark and ringing ice.

  At first she enjoyed it. Sir Philip waltzed not exactly well, but with a sort of ingrained precision. Each short, jerky movement was perfectly carried out; with no swing or elasticity, there was equally no wavering. Curbing her own speed, shortening her step, Lesley followed obediently, and even after a second time round had breath for compliments.

  “You waltz like a professional,” she said.

  But Sir Philip did not answer: and sideways-glancing she saw that his lined old face was set in a mask of concentration. In the necessity of making certain movements with his feet, of continuing to make them long after he wanted to stop, all else had been forgotten. A partner he had, of course—one couldn’t dance without a partner—but she had ceased to be Lesley Frewen. She was any young woman who could follow him, and who must be made to tire first.…

  And beginning to tire, Lesley ceased to enjoy. An odd thought took her mind, and refused to be expelled: she remembered the water. It was there all the time, deep and dark beneath a brittle three inches of dance-floor; and at the edge, where the ducks were, the floor was broken away. Lesley shivered. The glow of swift movement had suddenly left her; she was numb all over, even to her feet, and through their two gloves, her own and his, Sir Philip’s fingers felt cold as ice. As though there were nothing inside the worsted but thin cold bones with no flesh or blood to keep them warm.… The ice rang in her brain, on the veins at her wrist the bony fingers closed tighter and tighter: but still the neat, jerky movements never faltered. It was like dancing with a marionette, it was like dancing with Death.…

  2

  “My dear, I’ve made you dizzy!” said Sir Philip.

  Lesley opened her eyes. The lake lay quiet beneath her feet, the trees stood moveless and in ordered rows. But at the nape of her neck there was still a numbness, as though an icy pressure had just been removed.

  She tried to laugh.

  “You have indeed. It must be years since I skated.” They were moving towards the bank, Lesley leaning like any novice. She thought, ‘I won’t go into the house, I must go straight home’; and surreptitiously, while Sir Philip unlaced her boots, she pinched her cheeks to restore their colour. The ruse worked: his anxiety allayed, Sir Philip passed in one breath from remorse to reminiscence. For he had unlaced, in his time, more things than skating-boots, and in the plenitude of his relief was soon on the verge of a very wrong story indeed. But he stopped in time, and with the offer of the Rolls regained his equilibrium.

  Lesley shook her head. She had got over her fright as quickly and completely as Pat got over a surfeit, but the impulse to be gone was still alive, and with the composite excuse of Mrs. Pomfret and a pudding, refusing even a glass of wine, she squeezed Sir Philip’s hand, gathered up her belongings, and hurried back home by the way she had come.

  3

  The rest of the daylight she spent teaching Pat on the canal, which by two o’clock was almost as deserted as the lake that morning. The ice was just as good, the area far greater, but there was a sense of privilege about going up to the Hall which the Village as a whole found impossible to resist. The young Pomfrets stayed, however, watched Lesley do a drop-three, and thereafter followed at her heel like gulls after a ship. They were all four good natural skaters, and if only the frost held had every hope of being able to cut eights by the end of another day. There might be a special prayer for it, said Alec hopefully, like the ones for rain.

  “No, there isn’t,” panted his sister, wobbling unsteadily round on an outside edge. “I looked all through this morning. But there’s no reason why we shouldn’t pray on our own. Is there, Miss Frewen?”

  “None at all,” said Lesley cheerfully; and indeed her agnostici
sm had always been of the mild, non-proselytising variety, a mere absence of taste, as it were, for anything to do with religion. What she was concerned with at the moment was the deplorable angle of Pat’s left boot.

  “Try and keep on the flat of the blade!” she called. “You’ll never learn to skate like that!”

  “But I can skate!” boasted Pat, precariously balancing on splayed-out ankles. “I can skate! Look at me!”

  Without further waste of breath Lesley shot to his side and grasped him firmly by the back of the jacket.

  “Now lift your feet up, Pat, as though you were walking through mud. Don’t try to slide yet.”

  “But the others aren’t walking!” protested Pat. “I want to slide!”

  “The others began by walking, and you’ll have to too,” said Lesley patiently. And to herself, she thought, ‘How much do they get at the Ice Club? Seven-and-six, isn’t it, for half-an-hour? And dirt cheap at the price!’

  The employment was not, indeed, one to which she was temperamentally inclined: requiring as it did more sympathy than skill and more patience than either. But she was desperately anxious that Pat should hold his own, and the sight of him so outshone lent her qualities she hardly recognised. With incredible persistence she forced him to plod up and down out of the way of the others, herself plodding likewise for his better encouragement. By the end of the afternoon an improvement was visible, and when at last she let him slide he slid evenly on both feet. Lesley watched him with triumph: he was nothing if not dogged, and if only the frost held, Alec would soon have a rival.

  About four o’clock, just as they were tiring, Mrs. Pomfret appeared with a whole newly-baked cake, ready cut into slices for distribution among the hungry. They ate as they skated, for the sun was gone, and Lesley by special request gave a last exhibition. This time she waltzed alone, in a pattern as free as a gull’s swooping: the ice rang under her skates, the good food crumbled in her mouth; never before—tingling with warmth, intoxicated with rhythm—had she felt so wholly alive.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Hurrying down Pig Lane with a suitcase in her hand, Lesley was accosted by Mr. Walpole.

  “Went skatin’ up at the Hall, Miss Frewen?”

  “On the canal, mostly. I was up at the Hall in the morning.”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Walpole, almost with animation, “you haven’t heard, then. Sir Philip, he’s been through the ice and got a proper wetting.”

  Lesley expressed her concern and hastened on. ‘Dear me!’ she thought, ‘one thing after another!’ The other thing, in this case, and the reason for her baggage—being the serious illness of Mrs. Pomfret’s aunt. She was no ordinary aunt, but a second mother, having reared the childish Clara (as Mrs. Pomfret then was) from the age of three; and late the previous evening, as they all lay about exhausted after the day’s exercise, a telegram had arrived referring briefly to pneumonia and requesting the niece’s immediate presence. The ensuing flutter was considerable, for to even so placid a parent as Mrs. Pomfret the thought of leaving, at one night’s notice, a home and four children, could not be other than highly disturbing; and she was at least approaching her wits’ end when Lesley received a sudden inspiration and invited herself to stay.

  “My dear! would you really?” exclaimed Mrs. Pomfret joyfully.

  “Of course I will, and Pat can go in with the boys. He’ll adore it. And I’ll see they all change their stockings after rain and go to bed at the right times.”

  “— Seven, eight, and a quarter to nine,” murmured Mrs. Pomfret. “My dear, you’re a blessing in disguise—no, I don’t mean that, do I?—and I’ll go with an easy mind.”

  As swiftly and simply as that, all was arranged; and as swiftly and simply, Mrs. Pomfret having departed, did Lesley settle herself in. The ways of the Vicarage, indeed, were almost as well known to her as the ways of the cottage, though she had certainly not realised quite how enormous was the body of work its absent mistress had daily to get through. The darning alone was occupation for a nurserymaid, the making of puddings proceeded almost continuously, and it was not till the end of the third afternoon—for Mrs. Pomfret’s absence was eventually prolonged for a fortnight—that Lesley found time to go up to the Hall, where Sir Philip received her in the library from a sort of cocoon of eiderdowns. He was taking his chill very seriously, with hot bottles, hot whisky, and a carriage foot-warmer.

  2

  “You are enjoying yourself,” said Lesley.

  Sir Philip grunted.

  “The modern woman,” he said. “Your grandmother, my dear, would at once have flown to my pillows. Take some sherry.”

  “But your pillows are beautiful,” protested Lesley, doing as she was told. “Why should I come and disarrange them?”

  “Because I should like you to. Because every man, when feeling a trifle uneasy, likes to believe that his women are feeling even more so. It panders to our sense of superiority.”

  Without a word Lesley set down her glass and went over to his chair. Causing as little discomfort as possible, she plumped up one or two cushions, fiddled about with the bolster, and drew a travelling rug tighter about the whole.

  “Thank you,” said Sir Philip. “And now confess. Didn’t you get some slight satisfaction too?”

  “Out of giving you pleasure I did,” admitted Lesley honestly. “Not out of the fussing itself. But then”—she paused, and looked at him with humour—“I don’t really come into the category of your women.”

  “You don’t feel it, then?” said Sir Philip placidly. “Now, I do. Perhaps because you’re living in my cottage. I feel as though there were possibly a relationship between us—nothing obligatory, you know, but one of those curious, underground connections that make English history so fascinating.” He reached out deliberately and lifted his glass. “I feel, for instance, that if you were had up for exceeding the speed limit, I should have to come and bail you out.”

  Lesley regarded him whimsically.

  “You almost tempt me to buy a car,” she said; and they fell into a sudden deep silence, as though the conversation could now be carried on without the impediment of words. The fire crackled, a stable-dog barked: far across the park Lesley could hear a faint hymn-tune being tried over on five bells. Raising a long sallow hand, as though to shield his eyes from the flame, Sir Philip said abruptly,

  “My son was born in that cottage.”

  Involuntarily her eyes flew to the great Sargent, glowing and sumptuous even in the dusk. Sir Philip shook his head.

  “No. I have no heir. And he died at Gallipoli, of enteric.”

  On the other side of the hearth Lesley sat very still. Behind that wrinkled hand, behind those wrinkled lids, a vision was moving: she must not disturb it. And looking again at the Sargent, she suddenly thought, ‘And you—what was your story?’ But the portrait kept its counsel.

  “So you will understand,” said Sir Philip, lowering his hand, “that it seemed very natural for me to see a woman and child there again.”

  She said softly,

  “Was that why you let it to me?”

  “No. No.” For a moment, half sadly, half humorously, he had tried to give himself the benefit of the doubt. “To tell the truth, I had almost forgotten. It’s you, my dear, who have brought her back.”

  Simple as the first dairy-maid, Lesley raised incredulous eyes.

  “She died, you see, more than thirty years ago,” said Sir Philip. “You think it strange? Wrong in a man, perhaps, but I assure you, Lesley, not in the least strange. What is strange is that now, ever since you came here, I think of her almost constantly.”

  “You had never really forgotten at all,” said Lesley.

  The fire crackled, the dog barked: they would soon be sitting in darkness, with only a red fire to light the crystals, and Lady Kerr’s portrait no more than a deeper shadow on the dim walls. The dog barked: the fire crackled: had bell-practice finished, or was the wind blowing another way?

  “She had a laugh like a black
bird’s,” said Sir Philip.

  3

  Soon after, Lesley went away: she did not wish to mar, by their usual wit, an impression of such deep and tender intimacy. ‘A laugh like a black-bird’s!’ What a phrase to end on! She said softly,

  “I’ll come again soon. To-morrow, perhaps, or at any rate the day after.”

  He looked at her with great kindness.

  “When you can, my dear. But there are other things more important for you than I am.”

  The statement, from so confessed an egoist, made her open her eyes. The Pomfrets? The Pomfrets were certainly keeping her busy, but since when had Sir Philip thought of anyone but himself?

  “You must be worse than I thought,” said Lesley, and went away laughing.

  She was not able to return on the morrow, however, nor for many days after, for Alec and Pat caught coughs, and she promptly sent them to bed. The measure was a drastic one, but other people’s children are like other people’s china; and with a fire in the boys’ room already it seemed a waste not to put Pat in bed too. It all made more work, of course, but safety came first; as to the sufferers, they rather enjoyed themselves, for Lesley read aloud a good deal, out of an expurgated edition of the Arabian Nights, and they also invented the new occupation of trying to suck up the sugar off Turkish delight like lemonade through a straw. Neither made any progress, but Alec gave up first. With three other children in action the rest of the day’s routine naturally proceeded as usual, while nine o’clock at night, when the last had gone to bed, opened a long and oddly domestic evening in the company of the Vicar. Sometimes they listened to the gramophone—Lesley with her darning, Mr. Pomfret with his pipe; but chiefly Mr. Pomfret talked. He did not, of course, actually prefer her company to his wife’s, because he was a Vicar, but there was no doubt he enjoyed it. Lesley, on the other hand, after about the third session, became conscious of a slight disillusionment: his conversation was always good, but he had a preacher’s wind, and she now first began to attribute to something other than pure unselfishness the unfailing good humour with which his wife saw him depart to spend an evening at the Hall. With the same good humour Lesley would have seen him off herself; but this resource was no longer available, for Sir Philip’s chill seemed to have settled in his temper, and he had asked neither of them to dinner since Lesley’s last visit. This sudden moroseness, explained the Vicar, was but the normal accompaniment of any slight indisposition, and his own parochial calls now took place in the morning and lasted about ten minutes. He went every day, however, returning occasionally with a message for Lesley, once with a hothouse bloom or two, but in general with no more to report than crabbedness and a tendency to swear.