Primrose had declared that women over thirty-five weren’t wanted anywhere.
“Especially untrained ones,” she had added — and if the first observation hadn’t been specially meant for her, Valentine knew that the second one had.
She sat silent, waiting for the hands of the clock to reach half-past ten when she would go, shivering, up the stairs and along the passage to Jessica’s room, the fringes of her shawl catching here and there as she moved.
III
The rain had turned to an icy sleet and the temperature dropped many degrees, when Primrose Arbell, two days later, travelled down to Devonshire in a crowded third-class railway carriage.
Everyone in the carriage had gazed at her with a varying degree of attention and Primrose had looked at no one at all, according to her wont.
She endeavoured and expected to attract notice, although not necessarily admiration, for she was under no illusions as to her looks.
Yet she was arresting, aristocratic-looking and, to many men, alluring.
The opinion of women did not interest her.
Primrose was tall, slight and with long and very beautiful lines from shoulder to ankle. She did not always choose her clothes well, but she put them on and carried them, whatever they were, with an insolent, triumphant success. Her face was long and narrow with a long, pointed chin, a high-bridged, arrogant and finely-cut nose and rather large mouth with a curious downward twist at one corner whenever she spoke or — infrequently enough — laughed.
Her most arresting features were her eyes and eyebrows. The brows were dark and thick, in astonishing contrast to her naturally blonde hair, forming arches that suggested a perpetual expression of scornful surprise. The eyes, deeply set, were not large but of a dense, blue-green colour, set in thick black lashes.
She affected a heavy, carefully applied make-up of which the tawny smoothness entirely concealed the natural texture of her skin. The deep, reddish-orange colour of her mouth was painted on sharply and boldly.
The station nearest to Coombe was on a small branch line, and when the train stopped at Exeter, Primrose pulled down her blue suitcase from the rack, pushed her way along the carriage and got out.
She neither joined the jostling crowd of people slowly moving towards the barrier nor did she make her way to the siding where the stopping train was presumably waiting. She stood near the shelter of the bookstall, not appearing to look for anyone, with her suitcase at her feet.
She was wearing a dark-blue wool dress with a coat of which the up-turned collar stood out round her long neck and threw up the pale colour of her uncovered fair hair gummed into elaborate and deliberately artificial-looking small curls, laid flat all round her narrow head like a coronal.
She had pulled on a short camel-hair coat and thrust both hands into the deep pockets.
Gazing downward, apparently at the suitcase, Primrose never raised her eyes until Colonel Lonergan, coming to a standstill directly in front of her, said:
“So there you are. Do you know it’s the purest chance I was able to come and get you?”
Primrose gave him her one-sided smile and he picked up the suitcase and shouldered a way out through the crowd to where a very shabby and mud-bespattered car stood waiting.
“God, it’s cold,” muttered Primrose.
They were the first words she had spoken.
“Are you frozen, poor child? There’s a rug.”
Lonergan threw the case into the back of the car and wrapped the rug round Primrose as she settled down into the seat beside the driver’s.
“Would you like to stop somewhere and have some hot coffee or some brandy or something before we start?”
“The pubs aren’t open yet. We’ll stop on the way, and have a drink. There’s quite a decent pub about twelve miles out. Probably you’ve discovered it: The Two Throstles.”
“I have.”
He got in beside her and started the car.
“Are you glad to see me, darling?”
“Fearfully,” said Primrose. “If you hadn’t turned up I should have had to take a slow train and then telephone from the station for a car.”
Lonergan gave a short laugh that sounded as though it had been unwillingly jerked out of him.
“You aren’t going to turn my head with your flattery, are you, darling? Still in love with me?”
Primrose made no reply.
Lonergan took one hand off the wheel and sought hers.
She pulled off her loose glove with her teeth, keeping her left hand beneath the warmth of the rug, and gave him the right one. Its pressure responded to his touch immediately and electrically.
“That’s my girl,” said Lonergan.
He sounded content.
Primrose, without moving her head, slewed her gaze round so as to see his profile. Rory Lonergan carried his forty-eight years lightly. He was unmistakably an Irishman — not much above medium height, large-boned and heavily-built but without superfluous flesh. His dark, intelligent face had the characteristics of his race: clearly-defined black eyebrows and blue eyes, long, straight, clean-shaven upper lip and protruding under jaw. His voice was an Irish voice, deep and with odd, melancholy cadences, a naturally beautiful voice that betrayed the speaker’s nationality at once by its un-English inflections, as well as by his choice of idiom.
“It’s a sheer miracle that I was able to get away at all. And you didn’t give me much notice, did you?”
“Are you staying at Coombe?”
He nodded.
“Luck’s with us, darling. At least, I suppose it’s luck. I’m moving up there to-night, with a lad called Sedge-wick.”
“You’re moving up there now,” remarked Primrose. “I suppose you’re taking me there. Have you seen my family yet?”
“No. Hadn’t you better give me the dope? I know nothing whatever about them. Young Banks made the arrangements.”
Primrose, in an accentuated drawl, began to speak.
“I get pretty bloody-minded, I must say, on the subject of my family. That’s why I never talk about them if I can avoid it. However, if you’re going to be billeted there; all concealment is at an end, as they say. To begin with, Coombe is about the most uncomfortable house on God’s earth — rather large, with big rooms for the family and dog-holes for the servants, no heating and the absolute minimum of electric light, one bathroom and never anything like enough hot water. It’s idiotically run — feeble, incompetent little village girls taught to do a lot of useless, silly jobs that mean nothing, and cursed at when they want their evenings to themselves like other human beings.”
“Who curses them?”
“Mostly my uncle, who lives with us, but my mama does the actual transmitting of the curses and doesn’t even do that properly. She’s afraid of servants.”
The corner of Primrose’s mouth twisted downwards contemptuously and her voice was coldly savage.
“Why do you hate your mother?” demanded Lonergan abruptly.
She took the question calmly.
“I’m not sure that I do hate her, though I despise her pretty thoroughly. If I hate her at all, it’s reaction from having adored her as a small child. I was the only one for six years, and she used me as an emotional outlet, I suppose. It makes me sick to think of it. I had the guts to kick loose when I was, mercifully, sent to school.”
“I thought girls of your class never did go to school.”
“They do nowadays. I wish you wouldn’t talk about class. It’s a bloody word, denoting a bloody state of affairs that we’re out to abolish.”
“No one’ll ever do that. Privilege may be abolished. Class distinctions won’t, in England. They’re ingrain.”
“I couldn’t disagree with you more than I do,” said Primrose vehemently.
“Only the intensely class-conscious — like yourself, darling — would become so frantic on the subject. Go on about your relations. What did your mother do when you kicked loose?”
“What her kind always d
oes. Looked more and more wistful and tried having heart-to-hearts that never came off because I wouldn’t, and then got afraid of me. She’s actually terrified of me.”
“Of what you can do to hurt her,” suggested Lonergan.
“I suppose so. Honestly, Rory, I don’t set out to give her hell or anything like that, but I just come over utterly unnatural whenever we’re within a mile of one another, and I hear myself saying the most brutal things and just can’t stop. She embarrasses me so frightfully that I’m simply incapable of even looking at her, quite often.”
“How is she embarrassing?”
“I don’t know. She shows her feelings, for one thing. Or at least, she makes one know they’re there. And she’s so utterly incompetent — even more so than most of the women who were brought up the way she was. My grandfather was in the Diplomatic Service and she lived abroad till she married. I suppose that’s helped to make her the dim kind of person she is — that and having a certain amount of French blood. Her name was Levallois. Mercifully both my sister and I take completely after the Arbell side of the family.”
Lonergan kept silence.
After a minute Primrose said sharply:
“What is it?”
He gave her a look of appraisement.
“You’re quick, aren’t you. I was only thinking that I’d heard that name — your mother’s name — Levallois — years and years ago, when I was an art student in Rome.”
“That’s right. They were there. Did you ever know them?”
Her voice sounded incredulous.
“Embassies weren’t precisely up my street — even less so then than they are now. But one remembers the name.”
“It was before the last war. You must have been frightfully young.”
“Twenty — as a very simple calculation ought to show you, since you know perfectly well that I’m twenty-four years older than you are.”
“You’re terribly age-conscious, aren’t you? I think it’s silly, especially in a man,” Primrose observed coldly.
“I agree. I wasn’t thinking of my age, particularly, especially as I seem much younger to myself than I doubtless do to you.”
“What were you thinking of then?”
“Temporarily viewing the situation through your eyes: that a lover of yours should have been a young man, already twenty years old, when your mother was a girl. It’s an odd, unflattering sort of link with the past.”
“The past doesn’t mean a thing to me. Why should it? My mother, of course, lives in it. That’d be enough, in itself, to put me off.”
“How vicious you are, about her.”
“I don’t think so. I just happen to dislike everything she stands for. Though I’ve got personal grievances against her, too. She made a complete mess of me, with the best intentions. Apparently most mothers do that.”
“Did she do it to your sister, too?”
“I’m not sure about that. On the whole I think not. Jess is terribly normal and rather stupid, and as she was only born six years after I was, the first force of this awful maternal egotism had all been spent on me.”
“You’re sure it was egotism?”
“Rory, don’t be such a fool. Nine women out of ten compensate themselves for the emotional disappointments of marriage by concentrating on their wretched children.”
“But there must be other forms of compensation. Taking a lover, for instance.”
“For some women, of course. I don’t think mummie was that sort, even when she was younger. Otherwise why didn’t she marry again? She wasn’t much over thirty when my father died.”
“Was she very young when she married him? She must have been.”
“Nineteen. An idiotic age, but it was during the last war when people seem to have lost their heads pretty badly. It made a hash of her life, I imagine.”
“Weren’t they happy?”
“I shouldn’t think so. I remember him perfectly, and he was very dull and completely inarticulate. He couldn’t have suited the sentimentalist that mummie is. She’s the kind of woman who’d always think of herself as a femme incomprise.”
She paused for a minute.
“Rory, I believe I’m shocking you.”
“I think you are,” he agreed dispassionately.
“My God, don’t tell me you’ve got a mother-fixation. Did you like yours?”
“Oh yes. But then the middle classes almost always do. It’s part of their tradition.”
“Shut up about classes. It makes me sick.”
“You’ll feel better when you’ve had a drink,” said Lonergan smoothly.
“That’s another thing I’d better warn you about at Coombe. You’ll never get a drink, unless you can provide your own.”
“I probably can. What about the uncle?”
“He’s given up whiskey for the duration, and I don’t think there’s anything in the cellar worth speaking of. A bottle of port or sherry is brought up about once a year, and there’s supposed to be some champagne waiting to celebrate the peace. Uncle Reggie’s called General Levallois. He was invalided out of the Army and he’s practically a cripple. Arthritis. He hasn’t got a bean, except for some semi-invisible pension, and he’s lived with us since I was twelve.”
“Anybody else?”
“Only Jess. She’s volunteered for the WAAF and is waiting to be called up. There are some evacuee kids from London, but I need hardly tell you that, in our democratic way, we make them use the top floor, and the kitchen stairs, and the back entrance. One practically doesn’t know they’re there at all.”
“Then who looks after them?”
“The housemaid, I suppose,” said Primrose indifferently. “I shouldn’t know. I’m practically never at Coombe. I shouldn’t be coming now if it wasn’t for you.”
“Angel,” said Lonergan, in a voice as uninflected and meaningless as her own had been.
He had loosed her hand in order to replace his on the wheel but presently he sought it again, and when he next spoke his voice was warmer and more eager.
“You haven’t yet told me if you’re still in love with me.”
“I haven’t fallen for anybody else. Have you?”
“No.”
They both laughed.
“Primrose — about this business of being at Coombe together. Is it going to work?”
“Of course it is. Otherwise I shouldn’t have suggested it. I needn’t have taken my leave now. I only decided to when I knew you’d been sent here and it seemed obvious that you’d be billeted at Coombe. Personally, I think it’s an absolutely Heaven-sent chance.”
“I know, darling. Of course it is. Only — in your own home — and with your family there—”
“It’s a largish house,” Primrose observed coolly. “You won’t have to behave like the lover in a French farce, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
“Thank God for that, anyway. Do they know already — of course they do — that I’m a friend of yours?”
“Yes. I told Jess on the telephone. What I did say,” Primrose elaborated, in a tone of careful candour, “was that we’d met in London at a sherry-party — which is true — and that you quite frequently took me out to dinner. What I, naturally, didn’t say, was that I’d only known you a fortnight.”
“Then, officially, how long are we supposed to have known one another?”
“Better make it a few months. But as a matter of fact, they probably won’t ask. I’ve trained them not to ask me questions.”
“It doesn’t follow that they won’t ask me any.”
“You can cope with them, if they do. Don’t pretend you haven’t had practice enough, Rory. And mummie’s not at all a difficult person to side-track.”
Lonergan drove on in silence until he presently enquired:
“Are we stopping at The Two Throstles?”
“Aren’t we?”
He laughed and turned the car into the gravelled sweep before the white stucco building, low and long, with fumed oak doors and
window frames.
Little plaques above the doors on either side of the entrance bore respectively the words “Lounge” and “Drawing-room” but a painted board leaning against the wall pointed the way: To American Cocktail Bar.
Primrose walked straight to it, her long, flexible fingers pinching and pressing at the flat curls of her hair.
Rory Lonergan hung up his cap and overcoat and followed her.
The place was hot, crowded and thick with smoke. Every high stool at the bar was occupied, but a man and a girl, both in Air Force uniform, were just leaving a table and Primrose, pushing her way past two women who also were evidently making for it, flung herself into one of the vacant chairs and threw her bag on the other.
Lonergan said to the defeated ladies, neither of whom was either young or smart:
“I’m so sorry. Won’t you take the other chair?”
They looked confused and abashed, murmuring thanks and disclaimers, and at that moment a party of young officers moved away from the bar.
“Ah, that’s better. Will I get you two of the stools?” said Lonergan, and he allowed an exaggeratedly Irish intonation to sound in the words, knowing that this would somehow reassure them and cause them to think of him, not as a strange man who had spoken to them without an introduction, but merely as “an Irish officer”.
As he had expected, they smiled and looked happier, and he pulled out two of the vacated stools and saw them perched, one on each, like elderly and rather battered birds on over-small gate-posts.
Then he joined Primrose.
“What the hell——?”
“You were damned rude, as you always are. We could have waited. The poor old girls had spotted these chairs before you did.”
“I hate waiting.”
“And I hate bad manners.”
“In that case, I don’t really see why you ever took up with me.”
Lonergan looked her up and down.
“As I’ve told you before, I liked your looks. You’ve got the most marvellous line I’ve ever seen.”
“Is that all?”
“Not quite all — though nearly,” said Lonergan. “What are you going to drink?”
“Gin and vermouth.”
Late and Soon Page 4
